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A prisoner breaks out of jail. He runs down the street shouting “I’m free! I’m free!”. A small boy is unimpressed. “So what?” he calls, “I’m four”.
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The Crotchety Man blog is (very nearly) three years old now and, like the boy in the photo, I like to think it has developed a charming veneer of sophistication. Underneath, of course, there is still an immature personality, nicely exemplified here by a three-year-old’s sense of humour.
In 2017 this blog has taken second fiddle to the guitar. The gnarled fingers of old Crotchety Man have been contorted into strange shapes, stretched over the fretboard and pressed onto hard metal strings for up to an hour at a time most days in a partially successful attempt to create pleasing sounds. I have also spent many long hours playing with a musical score editor called MuseScore, creating and editing scores for the local U3A orchestra.
Those times have been ‘borrowed’ from the research budget for Band/Artist of the Year blog posts, which have been notable these last twelve months for their complete absence. I know I should be managing my time more effectively but there are so many other distractions these days.
The Track of the Week and Album of the Month counts were also slightly below target in 2017 but the blame for that rests squarely with a (probably viral) infection that struck poor old Crotchety Man shortly before Christmas. It didn’t help that the central heating boiler chose that very moment to give up the ghost. The maintenance company made us wait a week before fixing the boiler and two days later, like a crotchety 3-year old, it threw another tantrum leaving us with cold radiators over the two days of Christmas itself. For too long it seemed that bad luck and trouble were my only friend.
On a more positive note the site’s follower count has risen to 56, although some of those were fleeting visitors and others were disguised attempts to sell pills and other medications.
Some highlights of 2017 were given in the recent New Year Honours post and the annual summary tables can be found here as a PDF document (with all the links).
Finally, let me wish all my readers a Happy New Year. 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.
