Hi, and welcome to my personal blog. Here I’m just going to give you the back story (if you’re interested) of what this blog is going to be about, and how it’s developed up until now.

At the time of writing, the blog is still very much under development, using Hugo, which is SERIOUSLY cool once you get the hang of it, but which also takes quite a lot of learning. It’s currently a very incomplete setup, adapted from the other Hugo site that I’ve been developing over the last few months: The Middle East Film Festival. MEFF was itself a learning project in which I caught up with the last fifteen years of CSS and taught myself to use Hugo, by essentially moving a blog over from Blogger (which I had very very quickly started to hate within weeks of starting up on there).

Since the Middle East obsession took over my life for about half a year after 7/10/23, it became the principal (that is, rather, the *only) subject of that blog. Go and read all about it on there. It seemed logical, then, to separate that project out from the rest of my life and interests, once I eventually got back to those. If you do go and look at MEFF, you’ll notice that I haven’t written a new post on there for nearly a year. That’s mainly because the web development project took over, but also I must admit that I got completely saturated with watching Middle Eastern films, and with thinking about how sad the whole thing is. It’s of course not going to get any better in the next four years at least (first reference to Big Fat Donald “King John II” Trump on this blog, and certainly not the last unless Jesus is coming soon). Of course I will write again on MEFF at some point this year. I do in fact have several posts which have been queued up for a long time. They will be published once I get everything else done here.

OK, that’s the background, and if you’re reading this post in the very early days of this blog, you’re likely to see a lot of stylistic similarities between the two sites. It’s going to take at least a couple of months to give this blog its own character. It’ll take a lot of work, but it’s a very very enjoyable feeling when you get things working, so please be assured that it WILL be done.

The subject matter of this blog will be Everything Else. That is to say, everything other than films from and about the Middle East. So that will include all the things that I do in my life. There will be (hopefully already are by the time you read this) links to standalone sites for these interests, activities and SERVICES (!!!) which I offer (in no particular order of priority):

• Epoxy resin design
• Tech/Web design
• Teaching
• Proofreading
• Linguistics
• History
• Podcasting

Yes, ALL OF THE ABOVE. I’m a busy boy these days. The essence of it is to try and tie together all the things that I’ve done in my life, and to try to move forward in a constructive and sustainable manner, against all the odds of a world which Elon and the DOGE bags are bent on destroying.