There are some things in life that are so new that we don’t really have words to describe them. Alcohol, drugs, sex, lying, cheating, stealing, dying, writing, spying, snoring and urinating have been around for decades now and are well stocked with words. But how do you describe the reasons for starting a website? The reality is that there are more websites than there are people and most never get visited by anyone (including the poor sap that set it up). I myself have left a trail of discarded sites in my journey to this one. An MSN group that was a good place to start but extremely limited. Over to Freeserve and a template based system that was less flexible than an Eskimo’s ice lolly. Some good material was born on those two sites (indeed some of it has found its way over here – never let a good idea go to waste (insert good point about it being intellectual recycling and that recycling is a good thing – green credentials might distract them...)) I then drifted to Lycos and set up a free site with them. This was the dimly legendary Private Eye of Harmony. A nice idea – to fuse the twin mights of Private Eye and Dr Who – but ultimately limited. The lack of visitors was only to be expected but when the futility of the concept dawned on me I knew I had to do something else. There is a limit to Dr Who based humour. Really, there is. I reached it. It became a waste ground of not-terribly impressive HTML experimenting which rendered it almost useless as a website and so another one bit the dust.

So with this glorious track record behind me, why did I decide to pay actual cash money and start another new site? Well I think it was down to nothing more complicated than “I wanted to”. The mistake I always made before was to create sites that were too narrow. Either too narrow technically or too narrow in their choice of subjects. In jokes may be terribly funny to three people in the world but there are (apparently) more than three people in the world. And since all three couldn’t be relied upon to ever visit my old site I decided they weren’t the sum total of my target audience. This new baby – thevervoid.com – takes everything I’ve ever done in my life and finds a home for it. Most of it isn’t worth posting. It isn’t worth taking time out of those three people’s days. You don’t want exam certificates or dairy based sit coms that I thought were funny when I was seventeen. But you might like to have the complete Dennis Brent saga in one place (with names changed to protect the innocent but otherwise basically untouched). You might like to witness the completion of my utterly inaccurate Episode Guide. A project which seemed like a good idea when I started it a year and a bit ago but which, were it not for the positive words of a few lovely people (you know who you are), would have fallen by the way side long ago.

It’s also home to stuff like this. Columns. I used to keep a diary – kept it going for almost ten years – but it passed away some time last year. It peters out round about the time an unfortunate romantic entanglement stopped before it could truly start. If anyone were to read it in the future, they’d probably think I topped myself. But I didn’t – ghosts can’t type. I have real fingers and I’m using five of them to produce this self indulgent, almost masturbatory column. Then there’s the Miscellany which will hopefully become a stockpile of trivia, articles that don’t fit anywhere, lists, facts, jokes, pictures and more. It’s like the draw where you put things that you don’t want to throw away because they might be useful one day. Ten years later you go through that draw and find that most of it should’ve been binned when you were three stone lighter and probably less broke, while the other ten percent holds the key to eternal happiness. Or something. The point is not to dismiss it just because there’s almost nothing in there at the moment. There will be one day. And it will be reasonably ok.

Finally we have the News Womb. A throw back to the MSN group I mentioned earlier. The Womb was the result of m’self and a chum watching The Day Today and thinking “Let’s do that”. I know – most people aren’t as honest as that. There is plenty of satire on the internet but very little of it comes from my head. That’s what makes this a bit different. Not necessarily better or even merely worse, but different. I don’t really bother with news so you’re getting ignorance mixed with sarcasm, really. Uninformed pot shots at the world that you lot live in. I don’t live, I skulk. But I’m not dead despite what future historians may believe.

It’s gone midnight and I’m really tired but I felt I wanted to write a second column before going to bed. I have no intention of this becoming what the young people (and Richard Herring) call a “blog” because that implies (a) a fair amount of work and (b) soap opera lives. I don’t have a soap opera life. I don’t even have a sit com life. I have a monologue life and a website and I’ve just accounted for half of that pairing. The other half is for elsewhere.

Good night.

18th October 2003