Celebrating 10 years

So, on 3rd August 2023, this blog will be celebrating its 10th anniversary!

It all started way back when I answered a call to take part in being trained as a tour guide, to show people the exciting towns and villages that were associated with the stations on the Great Central Railway.

I spent about 6 months with a number of other people from Charnwood and Leicestershire, learning the ropes, then took a couple of written exams and a practical exam - and managed to pass!!! I then started sharing guided walks with one of the other people from the course, but then happened upon a book called 'Crap Towns'. Well, in truth the book hadn't been published yet, but the publicity it garnered meant that rather than just talk about what the authors considered to be the 50 worst towns in the country, they were able to bring in the next worst 50 too, which included Loughborough.

Now, I know this was not a serious book, rather a bit of an ironic take on the towns of Britain, but, there was no way I wanted Loughborough to appear in it, so I thought about how, other than guided walks, I could promote Loughborough and all it had to offer - showing off the great stuff, and the good stuff! And so, the blog was born!

Initially, I tried to be cool, using words like 'eva', but over the years, I've learned to use my own voice, my real voice, so what you read is written as I would say it if we met in person. Not often eloquent, usually blunt, and to the point. 

For the past 10 years, almost every Sunday evening I have written and shared a blogpost that has something to do with Loughborough. It's either local history, or family history of local people, or connections I've been struck by when being out and about in other towns. Ok, so I haven't quite done 520 posts, after all, I have sometimes been on holiday, or been ill, or too much involved in the day job to blog every Sunday, but have reached  487 posts, and as I look at the admin side of the blog now this minute, I can see that the blog has been read 486,756 times.

It's difficult to always write about something that you, my readers will find interesting! Mostly because I don't know who's reading each post, but also because we all have different interests, and I do sometimes flog some of my topics to death (letter boxes comes to mind!) so I'm sure you get bored with such posts! However, it's pretty much guaranteed that if I spend weeks researching something, few of you find the topic as enthralling as I do, but if I just throw something together, you can bet your bottom dollar that particular post will be really popular!

Anyway, by way of celebration of the blog's 10th birthday, I would like to present you with a month filled with guest blog posts! I've introduced guest blog posters before, and their pieces were really quite popular, so I've literally persuaded friends, family, and acquaintances to write a post for me, in the knowledge that they will bring a different voice to the blog, and will share different stories and interests with you, often things that I actually know little about. 

And so, Sean Dudley of Carduelis Content & HIstorical Research, who has just celebrated his first anniversary as a freelance researcher, will kick off the month-long 10th-anniversary celebratory event for the lynneaboutloughborough blog, tomorrow. 

I will be sharing links to Sean's post and to each of my guest posters' blogs in the usual places, so keep an eye open for them!

Thank you for reading my blog, and for sharing in my anniversary!

These are some of the other 'things' that are also celebrating a milestone birthday:                                                       

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Posted by lynneaboutloughborough      

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

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Dyer, Lynne (2023). Celebrating 10 years. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2023/07/celebrating-10-years.html [Accessed 31 July 2023]

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