Dinosaur?

When I posted my first entry on this blog in January 2006, there weren't many of us bloggers about.  The first might have been Sue of No Problem fame.  Before we owned a boat we encountered Sue on the Nene while we were delivering our son Richard's boat to him in 2005.  She told us about her blog then.  I'm not sure I knew what a blog was.   The other boat blog I remember from that time was Andrew Denny's Granny Buttons blog. Most of his posts were about boaters joining the blogging community and I remember we got a mention.  I suspect there might have been no more than a dozen boat blogs then.  We were ahead of the game -"early adopters".

Five years later there seemed to be dozens of boat blogs to read and through them we met and made some good friends on the cut.  Richard and Sue on Indigo Dream,  Maffi, Bones, Halfie ,now on Jubilee, Jim and Sarah -what was their boat called before they got Chertsey?, Adam and Adrian, then on Debdale but now on Briar Rose, George and Carol- then on Rock 'n Roll, Oakie on Stronghold, James and Amy on (then) Lucky Duck and no doubt some more that have slipped my mind right now (apologies).  Some blogs were travelogues, some photo montages, some  opinion pieces (notably Maffi, whose opinions I always disagree with although he is a very nice person when you meet him ), some DiY reports and some were diaries "Got up, made breakfast, went to Tesco" etc.  All valid.  For my part the Herbie blog has been a mixture of those things, plus occasionally an attempt to amuse readers and to show how not to do DiY.  For me personally, it's a valuable diary and a nostalgic photo album .

Now in 2022, I see that far from being in the van of web publishing, us bloggers might have to admit to being dinosaurs, for today Vlogging is the thing.  Type "narrowboat" or "canal" into YouTube's search box and you'll be rewarded with a plethora of videos about life aboard.  Like all these things some are better than others.  It's quite handy to watch someone taking their boat somewhere you've never been but might like to, such as the scary crossing of the Ribble on to the Lancaster canal, or the tidal Trent, or crossing the Wash.  In other blogs it's nice to see someone else going down the weed hatch for a change, or trying to cope with things breaking on the boat.  Robbie Cummings is quite good for that.  One I have been following lately is Ben and Emily, a young liveaboard couple going through many of the experiences we had in our first years boating.

Is all this to tell you I am thinking of Vlogging for Herbie?  Nah, actually I don't know how, although I'm sure I could learn.  I imagine it takes an inordinate lot of time if you edit the videos properly.  I generally write my blogs in retrospect, looking back over photos perhaps.  With a video blog , the good ones at least, I suppose you have to film it as it happens, in the moment, speaking to the camera, maybe walking around with your phone in your face as you comment on what's happening.  Hard I imagine.  Then of course I'd have to breath in to minimise my old age paunch, and speak properly for fear of shocking viewers with my Vale of Evesham burr.

I might have a go just to see how you do it, but for now I'll just have to test your patience and persistence in ploughing through this somewhat prosaic text.