Occasionally I look at the statistics that Google compiles automatically about this blog, and when I do, I'm always perplexed. I started blogging as a convenient way to inform family and friends scattered around the world about Wendy's condition as motor neurone disease or ALS relentlessly advanced and ultimately took her life. I hope I've emphasized clearly enough that the disease wasn't the terrible, much feared end of life that many try to avoid by physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. It was a painless and gentle ending. The most distressing or frustrating aspect was loss of speech when the muscles Wendy used to speak were knocked out a few weeks before she died. It was surely preferable to a lingering death from disseminated cancer or Alzheimer's disease.
Since her death I've used the blog as a form of therapy for me, posting abridged and edited excerpts of my memoirs, and haphazard comments on many other themes and topics, notably about books I've been reading. I do a great deal of reading and it's fun to share with others my opinions about books I've been reading lately. I'm happy to share with others but I write entirely for my own amusement.
Who are these others? I'm fascinated when I review the statistics, especially the table headed 'Audience' which tabulates the countries from which readers come. The blog is getting about 1000 hits/month now. Readers come from many countries, more from Canada than anywhere else most of the time though there are occasional times when what I've written attracts more readers in the USA or the UK than in Canada. A few people arrive at particular posts when a Google search directs them to it; I assume that's why posts on Sri Lanka, Glenelg, Sympathy and Condolence messages, touring Europe, and Early Childhood attract so many. I assume that a steady small number of readers in Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, as well as some of those in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand are family members, friends, professional colleagues. But I'm perplexed by the steady small following I seem to have in Latvia, Ukraine, Slovenia, where so far as I know I have no family, friends or colleagues. It would be nice if a few of them dropped me a line to let me know who they are and why they bother to read my blog.
What's in store for my faithful followers? I've mentioned a post on recent reading some time soon. There are a few current issues I intend to discuss, including family violence, the perennial problem of guns over which my friends in the USA obsess often; and, most important, a review by Paul and Anne Ehrlich of threats to human communities that was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society in its first issue for 2013. Also, I've been revising and reworking my memoirs, adopting suggestions that have come out of writers' workshops. Instead of a straightforward chronological record from birth onward, I've begun the revision with a chapter on a defining event that set the course of the rest of my life -- picking up a pair of hitch hikers one sunny Sunday morning when I was on my way to play golf. I'm also writing into the memoirs a more detailed description of some of the distinguished people I've had the pleasure and privilege of meeting, interacting and working with in the course of my long and interesting professional life.
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