Before setting out into this world of bloggery I made a silent promise to myself not to turn this or any other blog into one of those "Diary of a Beginner" type affairs. You know the sort of thing where you might read: "Struggled until one o'clock this morning trying to upload my wasname into the thingie, so I rang my mate Ron and he said...".

But; I did struggle last night, fiddling with my template (sounds rude) and wondering whether to ring my mate Ron - funny I do have a mate called Ron, though what he knows about Internet related matters and the phenomenon of blogging you could probably etch onto an ant's testicle. He probably thinks blogging is a posh pronunciation of blagging so "to blog" would be to acquire something through a kind of cutesy guile -"blag" actually means "steal" but it's seldom used in that context. I digress. I cut and I pasted, and twiddled and fussed, and with a migraine that would have turned a bison into a fragile, eye weeping wimp, (these are the beasts that crunch heads together for fun), logged-out with more victories than losses. So some success, but someway to go.

Dipping my toe into the creative, chaotic world of webloggery seems a bit like trying to jump onto a playground roundabout as a child whilst it's being pumped into ever more improbable speeds by the freakish kid, big for his/her years. First you need to be brave - danger lurks in the shape of the segmenting bars - get your timing wrong, and pain and embarrassment are guaranteed. You calculate the speed of the contraption, you factor in the danger areas and workout with a nature-given sense of precision timing when to jump on. And you make it. Once on, further challenges lie ahead. The spin-hardened faces of those who jumped on ages ago look at you and know you are in pain. Their stomachs, impervious to the sickly confused messages yours is getting, are hardened. One day, after time has woven its magic, yours might be too.