Where to begin?

What do you do when you’re flush with money from the sale of four ebooks (total royalties earned £5.12) and you’ve just finished the sixth novel of the TotenUniverse? You write a blog post.

But what about? I have a list of fifteen ideas ranging from who is Helene Fischer to the need for clothes, a WikiHow article on how to become a supervillain and why billionaires are like Himalyan Balsam.

I haven’t written for a while, which is a terrible mistake. I read recently that blog posts improve your standings in search engine rankings, but a: that never helped me when I posted on a regular basis, and b: Toten Herzen are at the top of the search engine rankings anyway because they’re the only thing on the internet called Toten Herzen. And who searches for Toten Herzen apart from me?

In my defense there was a curious barrier to my blogging. WordPress cookies and a conspiracy involving Firefox. In the old days I could accept all the WordPress cookies and then turn off cookie acceptance in Firefox knowing the cookie cache would let me access my dashboard and reader without the need to keep logging in. Not anymore. Now I have to turn cookies on to access WordPress and then turn them off when I go somewhere else.

This may sound like a first world problem, but five minutes on the internet with cookies turned on and look what you’re left with: a radioactive mix of cookies, all of which have the letters a,d and s somewhere in the title. Trackers, beacons, digital bottom feeders, snoopers, spies, the real sordid sweepings-up of the online world.

Ads and cookies caused me to miss the third Lions test against New Zealand, but that’s another story. And I seem to have digressed away from my return to blogging. A quick glance around the posts in my reader suggests nothing much has changed over the months. All the old author advice hogwash is still being rinsed and recycled, WordPress keeps suggesting recipe websites and no one ever mentions heavy metal in any meaningful way.

And as I type this in the garden centre cafe the Cup Stealer roams free. One of the waitresses looking for something to keep herself occupied is too quick at tidying away empty cups and the minute I finish my cappuccino the cup is gone and I’m left looking like one of those vagrants who spends all day in the library to escape the rain. It costs a fortune going back for more coffee in order to look like a respectable customer.

And talking of cafes, an elderly lady sat opposite me a couple of weeks ago and started telling me about various astral layers and how Jesus occupies the one at the top. Once she had finished telling me all this she asked what I was writing. I don’t like lying, but a tale about a vampire witch trying to learn necromancy probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear, so I talked about film collections and Europe. Much safer. The last time I talked about necromancy to the person sat opposite she confused it with necrophilia and I think her opinion of me changed from that point onwards.

The grim reaper on my tee-shirt should have served as a warning.