Hello, China

“Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com!” read my recent notification. “You registered on WordPress.com 14 years ago. Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging.”

These days, I’m not doing much flying or blogging.

I’m trying to remember why I started this blog in 2011. I’m pretty sure it was because of meeting Ian Pindar, a poet, at the Bridport Poetry Festival in 2010 when one of my poems was given a prize (runner-up) by Michael Laskey and was published in that year’s anthology. Ian was the person who recommended having some sort of online ‘home’, although I can’t remember the exact reasons for this recommendation – perhaps to create an online presence and a means of showcasing work. Anyway, with my one published poem and a desire to engage with other writers online, I set about creating my own blog. WordPress’ interface seemed delightful to use in those days.

(Do I mean ‘interface’ or should it be ‘software?’ Is that the correct tech term? Don’t ask me, I was already thirty when the internet was invented. Everything I do and have ever done online is a mishmash of trial and error while rampaging through all the search engines for advice – with more than occasional consulting with my younger husband and our two, now grown-up, children).

Them was the old days, folks. Blogging was fun and interactive. I shared posts on social media and people read my posts and chatted to me about what I’d written. Social media was sociable in those days, and more than a means to promote a book, reading or workshop. But most of us know the adage about all good things coming to an end – and I’m probably only peering at the past through rose-tinted specs, in any case. Eventually, I ran out of blogging steam. And now I’m once again trying to write prose, rather than poetry, and I’ve become older. Time is running out! I’m trying to put my writing energy into something other than blogposts.

So, why this post?

For the past year, this blog is receiving many, many, MANY visitors, even though my blogging days have more or less ceased to be. By far the biggest number of hits to this blog this year have come from China, followed by US, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong, UAE, and Nigeria. Hits from the United Kingdom are few and far between. What to make of this? Who in China is reading my blog? I’d love to think it’s other middle-aged people, or people of all ages dabbling with poetry writing and reading, or people juggling family, paid work and writing, or people with a growing family – all topics I’ve written about over the years. I have no way of knowing *who* my visitors are because nobody leaves any ‘likes’ or comments. The most probable visitors, of course, are AI ghosts haunting this blog with their invisible spookiness and (I assume) sucking up my posts with vampire-like enthusiasm. Are my posts part of their AI training programme? This seems likely. Maybe I should do a test-run on the AI chatbots with the search term ‘please write me a long-winded, not entirely grammatically correct blog post about …..’ and see if anything looks familiar.

Anyway, Hello China, hello Chatbots, hello you ghostly suckers up of my hours of work.

And Hello to you if you’re actually human. Who knows what the future holds, eh?