Here, in the UK, the seventh anniversary is usually commemorated with woollen gifts. I’m stealing the U.S. tradition of copper this time, though, with a burnished brown top hat engraved with a seasonal motto. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the copper topper!

As we complete year seven of the Crotchety Man blog, I see that the site statistics continue to rise. When I started this post, we had the appropriately progressive number of 123 followers. That was spoilt some three hours later by follower number 124. Perhaps our popularity has accelerated, moving from an arithmetic to an exponential rise; we’ll have to see what 2022 brings.

Over the last year, this blog has again visited a fairly wide range of data points on the multi-dimensional graph of musical styles. From the modern classical of Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1 through the folk harmonies of The Staves to the straightforward pop/rock of Joe Cocker and on to the progressive rock of Zopp and jazz/rock fusion of Nucleus. Not to mention diversions to the art rock of Black Country, New Road and the post-punk of Dry Cleaning.

Here are the summary tables for 2021.

I hope you have found something to your taste in 2021 and will be listening with Old Man Crotchety for another year of wanderings through the highways and byways of Musicland.

May your vinyl, CD and digital music collections grow fat, may your hi-fi systems continue to faithfully reproduce those recorded sounds and may your ears be sharp, free of wax and undamaged by live bands who turn the volume knobs way too high.