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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,600 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

In my latest blog here, on the subject of Blogger, I can’t help thinking that Google have made their product look nice, but just left the important, simple things out completely.

http://ow.ly/6kDkh

Don’t forget to head over to my new blog site to keep up with the fun.

http://markjdaniels.blogspot.com/2011/08/inapub-blog-video.html

(Actually, that’s not quite true – I started out blogging on a site called Blogit where I was promised I’d be paid millions by people visiting my blog; I earned about 40p. Still, the seed was sewn for my blogging addiction and Blogger was my next site of choice.)

I’ve always promised myself I’d blog more, but it rarely happens, and about a year ago I decided to emigrate to WordPress, where the feature-set seemed much more advanced and the site seemed to be given more attention by WordPress developers.

Sadly, I never managed to keep to my New Year’s resolution of blogging regularly, but am determined to keep trying! With the launch of Google Plus and the developments that have been made to Blogger since I’ve left, plus the proposed further developments of the site as it moves forward, I’ve decided to move back there to try my hand once more at a personal blog.

This time, though, I’m keeping things simple. That Was The Tweet, That Was will be a blog that I use to look back at some of my Twitter and Facebook status updates from the previous seven days, adding a little more substance to the stories that caused them in the first place. And, occasionally, I’ll blog about something that’s caught my attention in the day. Such as the credit card bill I just discovered on my bank account for £31.43, deducted by somebody called Classic Web Cam Services.

Turns out, that was the bill to the Cineworld cinema for our trip to see Transformers 3D last week…!

So, if you’re a subscriber to this blog – or would like to subscribe! – it’s a simple click here to get to the new one, then use one of the subscribe options on the right to pick up right where I’m leaving off…

See you on the other side; and thanks for reading.

Mark Daniels.

How the new site looks...

It was the most frightening car purchase of my life; but I’ll come back to that later.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of owning (I’ll use that term loosely: some, admittedly, were company cars) some very nice vehicles, including Lexus and BMW, and some utterly nutty machines, like the Subaru WRX.

My favourites, however, have always been the American cars. Huge, four-litre behemoths, like the two Jeep Grand Cherokees that graced my driveway and single-handedly drained most of East Anglia’s petrol reserves, or the bus-like Chrysler Grand Voyager that I still own.

I’ve had some utter abominations of vehicles too, like the Renault Vel Satis. That car fit my automotive personality so well, with its obscure looks, Starship Enterprise level of equipment, and the 3.5 litre V6 engine that my children said made it sound like a Formula One car.

Unfortunately, it suffered from dementia and often woke up thinking it was a donkey. Or a wheelbarrow. It rarely actually thought it was meant to be a car, and therefore it rarely actually worked.

But in these austere times, we had to make the decision to buy something cheaper to drive around in. After all, sticking a hundred quid’s worth of fuel in the Voyager each week just to take Malachy and his mates to karate did seem, well, a little ludicrous.

So I set about looking for something small and cheap to potter about in, while keeping the Grand Voyager – and its Captain’s Chair driving seat, multi-zone climate control, so on and so on – for the longer journeys, when comfort is a little more paramount.

I set my sites on that bastion of the second-car family motorist: the Ford Focus. I wasn’t too bothered about spec, all I wanted to ensure was that it had air conditioning, and either a 1.6 petrol or 1.8 diesel engine. The rest, as long as it looked tidy, was irrelevant.

So I headed off to British Car Auctions with a friend-in-the-know and identified four possible candidates.

The first one going through the auction fit the bill nicely, and was in budget. One owner from new, a proper Ford service history, air conditioning and a small petrol engine.

I indicated to my friend that this could be a winner, told him a price I was prepared to go to, then stood in confusion as a man shouted unintelligibly at us for fifteen seconds then tried to hit us with a hammer. Then the car was driven off and another one drove in.

“Congratulations,” my friend said.

“What just happened?” I asked, a little shocked.

“You got the car,” he beamed.

Stunned, I looked at him and said: “well what the hell did I pay?!”

The whole thing was finished quicker than a teenager in a peepshow and I hadn’t understood a second of it. But I’d got my car, and boy does it save me money!

I filled it up last Thursday in Chippenham, Wiltshire, after attending a funeral, then drove home to the other Chippenham, in Cambridgeshire.  Then I pottered around town over the weekend, before heading to Great Yarmouth and back on Tuesday.

I’m beginning to think the low fuel warning light is broken as it still hasn’t come on and I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms for my local Jet fuel station.

I’m fairly sure the Voyager is just sitting in its parking spot, spitefully emptying its tank despite not being used.

I have, however, spotted one flaw with the Focus: I’ve always liked to drive cars that are a little bit different, that aren’t the same as the neighbour’s, but the trouble with driving a Ford Focus is that every other bugger has one. They’re everywhere!

Four of us drove in convoy down the A11 yesterday, while one came in the other direction. The only thing that could tell them apart was the colour.

I’ve discovered I’m doing something I haven’t done since I owned my Vauxhall Cavalier: comparing model types.

The one parked next to mine right now is a Ghia. And apparently that’s better than mine.

Bastard.

Marmite: not good for your sex life

News reaches these shores this morning of Denmark’s decision to ban Marmite, a product whose most successful marketing campaign stems from telling customers they might actually hate it.

The decision seems to have come from the fact that, apparently, Marmite is actually too good for you. The Danes have decided that the product contains so many vitamins it’s actually dangerous and they’re worried that their citizens are wolfing down so much of the tricky tasting black paste that they won’t be able to think for themselves and stop.

This is a shame, as I’ve had quite a lot of fun with Marmite in the past. Not eating it, I must admit, as that’s just wrong, but in my misspent youth I spent some time trying to determine whether girls who liked a bit of yeast extract would also be more partial to a bit of the other than those who don’t.  I have to confess that, after many, many hours of exhaustive research, Marmite will have no discernible impact on your sex life.

Denmark has angered us Brits further by also banning Horlicks (I can sort of agree with that one) and Farleys Rusks (oh, come on, who doesn’t love a rusk?) and now a campaign on Twitter has begun to try and ban some of Denmark’s finest exports.  Namely bacon, Lego, and Carlsberg…

Sadly, this causes me a bit of a dilemma: I quite like bacon, and would be sad to see it go, but of those three that’s the easiest for me to remove from my life. I would miss the rashers my wife slips between two buttered slices of bread with my morning cuppa, but I’m sure I could replace it with something else. A sausage, perhaps.

But Lego is what keeps my children quiet when I’m trying to catch up on The Only Way Is Essex.

And Carlsberg. Well, in the lovely sunny weather we’ve been subjected to in East Anglia for some time now, Carlsberg has been making up more than 50% of my pub’s draught sales. I wouldn’t want to see it go.

Bacon therefore, is good. As are Lego and Carlsberg.

I can only conclude, then, that the Danish have got rid of Marmite for one reason: it’s yuck.

First Past The Post gives you coffee; Alternative Vote gives you beer!

When it comes to politics, I have to say I’m a bit blasé about the whole thing.  Usually, all politicians seem to do is say the same thing as their opponent, only with different words. (It’s usually the same standing listening to an argument in a pub.)

More often than not, their goal is the same, but they just want to try and achieve it differently so they can stand in the Houses of Parliament and thumb their nose at the chap opposite. Or jeer a lot. Or tell somebody to Calm Down, Dear…

But the whole “Alternative Vote” thing has got me in a bit of a muddle. Is it good? Is it bad? Should I vote yes or no next Thursday? Nobody really seems to understand the rules.

Jeremy Clarkson, writing last week in The Sun, had me leaning towards a ‘no’ vote after apparently using the AV rules to choose their family dinner from the choices available. They ended up with Bacon, Nuts and Potato, apparently…

But then a friend sent the below image to me via e-mail and it made me chuckle, so I thought I’d share.  After all, we wouldn’t want our pubs becoming coffee shops, would we…?

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Political note: I still haven’t made my mind up – I just thought this was funny…

PS: the image was sent to me via e-mail and therefore I don’t know who to credit it with.

So, thinking that they probably weren’t enjoying themselves very much, I decided to treat them and went out and spent some money on them.  £1.99, to be exact.  This is the result of my efforts:

It’s amazing what hours of endless fun they’ve managed to get this afternoon while I’ve spent much of it working…

We are the people that others go to to get away from their own troubles; we’re Happiness Engineers!

We're all Proud of Pubs

I’m between “professional blogging contracts” at the moment, following the sad closure of The Publican magazine after its recent purchase by William Reed Business Media, so I thought I’d use this place – my personal blog, a place where I usually write about Formula 1, how annoying my children can be, and unusually inane ideas that I haven’t really thought through properly – to write a blog that I would normally have send to Roland at The Publican to put on my page there.

Wednesday night saw the annual Publican Awards take place at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in London. The event is held each year to celebrate and recognise the great and good of those of us who work in the pub and bar trade, and I’m lucky enough to have been invited along for three years now to take part in the festivities.

This year, though, it felt a little different. Firstly, my wife wasn’t with me so I was able to actually get on the dance floor without fear of her taking photographs of that car crash happening, but secondly – and more importantly – it was a way to say “goodbye” to people who have become friends over the past four years that I have been blogging for the magazine.

The event was presided over by Dara O’Briain, who threw in a great little comedy performance before handing over the awards to those victorious, and a list of them can be found by clicking here. They really should be applauded for their efforts: like many industries, these are difficult times for the pub trade, but what I feel makes us special is that we are the place that everybody goes to in order to relax and get away from their own troubles.

Our trading difficulties aren’t unique, although many can sometimes seem to think that the issues we face only exist here in Pub World and nowhere else, but we are still the place that the rest of the world comes to in order to escape daily life, and that means we’re providing a service that is unique.

A technician at WordPress, the company that hosts this personal blog for me, wrote to me recently to answer a query I’d put to him. His e-mail signature told me that his position within his company was a “Happiness Engineer”. He certainly made me happy by fixing the issue for me, but those of us in the pub trade could truly be described as Happiness Engineers. We make other people happy, that’s what we do for a living, and these people have this year won awards for it. Well done to them!

Wednesday night, then, was one of those special nights, tinged with the bitter sweetness of celebration and the end of an era. So I took some photographs!

Publican Awards 2011

Feel free to have a click around the images, or why not have a look at these videos: For such a Formula 1 fan, I make a monumental cock up with the pit stop challenge on the Red Bull stand and, on his own go, Ed Davies – licensee of Kilverts in Hay-on-Wye – managed to injure his finger. Not that he noticed at first. Thankfully, he didn’t notice I called him Mitch, either…

The Publican magazine has merged with the Morning Advertiser, and a new magazine has been formed called The Publican’s Morning Advertiser. I hope to be able to keep up my pub blogs with them, so watch this space.

Meanwhile, Publican team – Matt Eley, Hamish Champ, James Wilmore, Roland Ellison, Claire Dodd, and the many more that I’ve spoken with or dealt with over the years – thank you very much for having given me the opportunity to write with you since 2008, and for the happy memories. Please keep in touch…