Tales from the crypt

For a self-proclaimed (and obsessed) geek, it came as something of a blow when those vanguards of vanity, Google, announced that I'd reached my peak in 2004. If 'Googling' yourself is considered an ego stroke, then analysing your name via new service, Google Insights, is like checking into a Thai massage parlour. Except, in my case, without the 'happy ending'. The service reported that I was most popular in the United States, followed by India and then the UK. (It seems I'd failed to make an impression on Canada.) It also generated a graph of 'Interest over time' that sloped steadily downwards from 2004 when I was first started blogging, to the present day, as I write to you now, following a four month hiatus.

So, why the silent treatment?

Well, since I last wrote, back in April, I seem to have found myself in love's death-grip. I was already struggling to update the blog when I met Brooky Wook and then embarked on a relationship completely at odds with the legacy of this website: healthy, functional, romantic. For what is essentially a catalogue of my dating failures, is being lucky in love the final nail in what was already the dusty coffin of my personal blog?

Don't worry, dear readers, there's room for one more in this coffin made for two. I won't be cracking open its lid anytime soon and clambering six feet up to a spring meadow of bunny rabbits and love hearts. Being in a relationship brings with it a whole new set of social faux pas, one of which I'm reminded this week, as Brooky Wook prepares to meet my family for the first time.

I was in a similar position last weekend, having been invited to her grandad's 87th birthday lunch in Canterbury. Her dad picked us up from the train station and drove us to the Wook household, where I nervously approached the front door, opened quite suddenly by a man waving what appeared to be a walking stick in the air. This did not calm my nerves. Instead, they rattled with the bag of gifts that Brooky Wook and I had bought her grandad. I pushed them towards the man's free hand like I was popping a flower in the nose of a gun. I smiled, wished him a Happy Birthday and watched as both stick and face dropped.

"It's not my birthday," he said. "I'm [Brooky Wook's] uncle."
"Ah," I said, taking a closer look at the man I'd mistaken for an 87 year old grandfather - tall, fortysomething, with only a hint of grey in his full head of hair. "I know that! ...But it was your birthday recently, right?"
"Yes. In January."
"Well," I said, easing the gifts back from his hand. "Happy... belated birthday!"

I stepped inside and saw Grandfather Wook, behind thick, bottle-top glasses, being helped from his rocking chair by two grandchildren and a walking stick more traditional than that held in his son's hand. Uncle Wook, I learned, had just returned from Kenya, and the stick was a cattle herding staff, used by the Maasai tribe. I imagine he'd thought of using it for a different purpose that day.

But as I left with Brooky-Wook I realised that I hadn't buried social faux pas when I found love. It may be a many splendored thing, lift us up where we belong, be all that we need, but it doesn't free us from the awkwardness that has been the legacy of this blog since 2004. If anything, it makes it worse.