Those of you who know me really well are probably as astonished as I am to realise that today’s post is my 52^nd, and that, according to the Hebrew calendar, I reached my first blog birthday on 20 Marcheshvan, 2 days before the day I am writing this. Both when I started, and this week, we read in synagogue Pareshat (the weekly Torah portion) Chayei Sarah.  I tell you all this to justify this week’s topic, even though the Gregorian anniversary of my first post will actually only be on 12 November, in a couple of days.

Either way, my thoughts have been turning to the, for me, astounding fact that I have stuck at this blog for an entire year. I’m not sure I’ve ever stuck at anything voluntarily for that long, and certainly not anything that required effort (so my marriage doesn’t count…all the effort there has been on Bernice’s part).

In my childhood, I took up trainspotting, which, before it was the title of a novel and film, was a schoolboy hobby. My friend Peter and I would regularly meet up, each armed with a Bic ballpoint pen, a 6-inch wooden ruler and our copy of Ian Allen’s ABC Guide, which provided a list, arranged numerically by serial number, of all railway engines in service in the Eastern Region. We would buy a platform ticket at Ilford station, or, if we could afford it, take the train to Stratford, and sometimes even Liverpool Street, to spend hours on the platform, usually in a light but persistent drizzle.

If I close my eyes, I can still smell the unique cocktail made up of the heady and exotic scent of a steam train engine, all coal dust and steam, mingled with the dank odour of a soggy duffle coat.

I only bring up the whole topic in order to tell you that, despite the considerable up-front expense of buying the ABC Guide, I only stuck at it for a short while, until the task of filling pages and pages like this seemed just too daunting.

And that pattern seems to have repeated itself many times. The phrase nine-day wonder seems not entirely inappropriate.

And yet, here I am, coming to the end of an entire year, without having missed a week, and feeling that I can maybe contemplate another year. The fact is that, a couple of weeks ago, when I wrestled for two days over a post, I confided to Bernice that I was considering cutting down to a fortnightly post (that’s every two weeks for any Americans who don’t know the word – and it would be invidious of me to point out that we Brits have one word to do the job of 3 of yours). However, reaching this milestone has pumped oxygen back into my muscles, and I’m not ready to compromise just yet.

Seeking inspiration, I turned to a book that I bought second hand for 40p (so it can’t have been more than 49 years ago). My mother z”l, despite being a very intelligent woman, had no intellectual or high-cultural pretensions. She read the Daily Mirror without fail, every morning (the Sunday Mirror once a week). The daily press in Britain at the time was firmly divided into highbrow broadsheet papers and lowbrow tabloid papers, and the Mirror was definitely in the second category. Mum always maintained that, if you only had half an hour to read a paper, you would be better informed reading the Mirror than any other paper.

In the era when she read it, I think she was right. Since then, of course, much of the ‘quality’ press in Britain has been Murdoched down and the old tabloid papers now have little if anything to do with genuine news stories. In the 1950s and 60s, however, the Mirror was vigorous and succinct in its exploration and presentation of the news, and in its comment columns.

The most famous Mirror columnist was William Neil Connor, who contributed 500 words, two or three times a week, every week for over 30 years, from 1935 until shortly before his early death in 1967. I am, frankly, in awe. I know he was being paid for doing this, but even so, I greatly admire his ability to maintain so consistently high a level of writing over all this time, and not to run out of subjects, particularly since he didn’t have a second home in Portugal.

In fairness, this spell was broken by his war service from 1940 to 1945. To give you a tiny taste of his style: he began his first column after returning in 1945:

As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all of the people all of the time….

Connor wrote under the pseudonym Cassandra. His columns were a mix of political comment, personal reminiscence, musings and comic entertainments. I remembered reading and enjoying Cassandra’s column very much, in the paper and in book form. When I revisited the book as today’s post was starting to take shape in my mind, I was surprised to discover how fresh his pieces still are. His no-nonsense, down-to-earth style has aged very gracefully.

As he became a well-known and well-respected columnist, Cassandra took on more serious assignments. He attended, and wrote about: the trials of Eichmann, and Jack Ruby (who shot J. F. Kennedy’s assassin); the enthronement of Pope John; Churchill’s funeral; the Korean War. He interviewed, among many others, President Kennedy, Senator McCarthy, Billy Graham, Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson, David Ben Gurion, Archbishop Makarios, and Marilyn Monroe.

All of these more serious pieces were interspersed with short columns telling appalling jokes based on wordplay. As he himself put it:

Forward into the abyss of unspeakable puns.

For example: there was the miserly theatrical agent who caught his assistant making an expensive international phone call in an attempt to book a pair of Persian acrobats, rather than sending a much cheaper letter. Challenged to explain his action, the assistant explained:

I was only trying to bill two Kurds with one phone.

It is at about this point that I realized this column was heading towards a second newspaper columnist. Once the penny dropped, writing the rest of it was easy.

Exhibit B is a columnist (and television personality) who I always thought I used to look like (when I had hair), and who I certainly would have loved to emulate: Bernard Levin.

He first came to prominence while working a theatre critic. He had a regular slot conducting a serious interview, or leading a discussion, on the ground-breaking satirical BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was. He showed no mercy when savaging the interviewees, and often launched into lengthy diatribes, leaving little time for the ‘victim’ to respond.

When he turned to being a newspaper columnist, he matched or bettered Cassandra’s 32-year run (with a 5-year interruption). Levin wrote five columns a week for the Daily Mail, from 1965 to 1970. Then the paper’s owner attempted to censor Levin’s support for the Labour Party, in breach of Levin’s contract, which guaranteed him political freedom in his column. He almost immediately joined The Times, where he wrote two or three columns a week for the next 27 years.

His topics were as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board. His editor on The Times commented that ‘he made being opinionated, which he always was, accessible to people’, which seems to me a fine working definition of what an opinion column should be.

In his first published collection of his columns from The Times, Levin acknowledged his readers with a modesty and goodwill that somehow lived with his intellectual arrogance, air of moral superiority, and ruthless destruction of those he saw as evil, whether Peter Rachman the slum landlord or Charles Forte the hotelier and restauranteur. Levin wrote: [My readers’] letters in response to what they read under my name have always astonished me by their quantity and astounded me by their generosity”.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m not sure what I envisaged when I started this blog a year ago. What I certainly didn’t expect was that, wherever my seat-of-the-pants flight of fancy took me, there would always (and I do mean always) be one or two readers out there who enjoyed the trip enough to write and tell me so.

I am immensely grateful to my groupie, who unfailingly thanks me and comments privately on each post; I can never quite decide whether it is genuine gratitude or old-world manners, but I’ll gladly take it, whatever it is, and every week I hold my breath after going live until I receive that email. Because every week I launch my little paper aeroplane, with no real idea whether it will plummet to the ground, land in a puddle, and be revealed as a soggy mess, or catch a fortuitous air current and soar triumphantly. (The truth, as is usual, appears to be more or less equidistant from those two extremes.)

It’s particularly rewarding when my memories chime with those of others, or spark in some of you memories of your own, which you then share with us. We’ve even had one or two rolling discussions in the comments, which is very exciting.

WordPress, the software I use to create my blog, also provides me with some statistical data. For example, I can see how many people view a new post, and how long they spend reading it. (Some of you must have taken that speed-reading course, I think…I hope.) I can also see in which countries my site is being viewed. For the most part, this is as expected: I know that my core readership is largely in Israel, UK, US and Canada. I also know who my readership in Portugal is, and who my one reader in Australia is, and I have a good idea about the one reader in each of France, Spain and Sweden.

However, every so often I get a surprise. I was being read in United Arab Emirates before the Abraham Accords were signed: once only, but nevertheless. I have also been surprised, and intrigued, to see readers in Finland, China and, most perplexingly, Uganda. If any of you reading this can throw light on any of these locations, I would be most grateful. (Of course, I suspect they may simply represent the locations of VPNs.)

I reached an all-time early high of just over 100 distinct readers. This was obviously because I sent out invitations to everyone I thought might conceivably be interested, and most people gave it a try. My readership has now settled down to around 65 or 70. A friend suggested to me that I might want to explore locating the blog on a more high-profile platform. To be honest, I very much like the idea that I am among friends. This way, I avoid unpleasant surprises when moderating the comments, or at least hope to!

One last observation. I regard myself as a pretty private person. I don’t ordinarily feel comfortable baring my soul, or even discussing my shortcomings, with anyone who is not a close blood relative. Curiously, the distance that the blog constructs beween me and you, dear reader, has made it easier for me to open up. Have no fear: I’m not going to go all touchy-feely on you. I have, however, surprised myself more than once in what I am prepared to put out there in the ether.

And that is quite enough navel-gazing for this week. Let’s cut to what is, for some of you, and for me, the chase: Tao. This week we find him chasing off to the shops. Rest assured: off-camera, he is being accompanied by a responsible adult, although by the looks of it that may only be necessary for the next week or two.