A year of this cringeworthy nonsense...

A brief self-congratulatory interlude: Lemon Drizzle is a year old today, and despite many and varied trials (illness, accidents, hospital visits, redundancy, repeatedly being bested/crushed/shamed at the hands of my wife and daughters) I have somehow managed to keep it updated on a roughly weekly basis throughout year 1. This is in no small part due to the feedback the site has received, which has been overwhelmingly positive, so my thanks to all.
You can now comment on each post (something that was missing for a long time, and then broken for a while after that, but which should be working properly now) and I'd like to extend my further thanks to some regular readers who chose to comment on a frequent basis: Misterimpatient, Pat and KC have been the most prolific. Please feel free to join them in commenting, and also in signing the guest book - I'd love to know who you are...

A few statistics:
In the last year, the site has grown from having a readership of essentially one (my mother) to getting about a thousand visitors a month, many of whom check back each week, and for which I am very grateful - but which also serves to underline that people with an Internet connection and nobody watching them will read almost anything rather than actually do any work...

The single most popular post on the site (by a wide margin) is a very recent one: it's this, which naturally featured my humiliation at the hands of my wife. In fact, any post where I get upstaged/injured/embarrassed tends to earn the most readers and feedback, so my distress is obviously popular - which is just as well, as I see no reason why the humiliation is likely to ease up for 2008...

A gratifyingly large number of people appear to come to the site directly, or to have sought it out - but a brief apology to the readers who came here looking for a lemon drizzle cake recipe, and left feeling a little bit dirty (heh heh, the cake is a lie)...also, every month one of the top search criteria that brings people here is 'stuffed toy tapir' which gets them this post, which is apparently the only time the phrase occurs on the Internet. There is clearly a huge market for stuffed toy tapirs that is ripe for exploitation...

I'll close with a short summary from the sites first reader, who recently commented: "I do like reading your site, especially about the girls - but I'm sure it would be more popular if you could stop mentioning your testicles every other week. It makes me uncomfortable..."

Sorry, Mum...