Setting the Scene

It all started more than a year ago over the Christmas of 2017 when Tony’s sister, Jan introduced me to setting up a group on Facebook. FB had slowly been growing on me, knowing what and when I was advertising myself to the world or when I could just engage my friends in a single click, gave me confidence to do more. So with this new group thingy, it dawned on me that I could reach many people with a communal interest into a single sharing network of input, ideas and comments with likes, loves, tears and angry responses. So, on 1st Jan 2018 I started up a Hurston FB Group as a trial and invited Tony as my sole subscriber. As expected then, he never liked anything, he never commented, he never got round to even telling me he had seen/read my post, so it just became a fairly (ir)regular posting to myself about Hurston. Nevertheless, the thought of turning my ramblings into a blog just lay dormant in my mind.

One day I mentioned it to a friend, Jane who often blogs about her textile artwork. She assured me it was not at all tecky and I didn’t need to set up a website and all that malarkey. It sounded promising but the whole concept still remained suppressed in abeyance. Then one fine day an email from Jane popped up which pointed me to some specific websites for blogging free of charge. Always an incentive, but it still didn’t drive me into action. It was summer and Tony had just retired, so we were out doing stuff – the usual frenzy of planting and digging and weeding and chopping - things you do outdoors when you have daylight hours to play with.

As the autumn came and the nights were drawing in, my indoor hobbies started emerging again. The log burner started up earlier and the red wine would miraculously appear. My thoughts returned to blogging. I dug out Jane’s email from July 2018 that I had flagged up for attention one day, and started scratching around on the internet. I somehow zoned into BlogLovin’ and registered, but didn’t get any further. In fact it was quite an effort a few months later when I again felt the urge to rekindle that initial blogging flame, to remember my username and password. Being fairly organised though, I had filed it in my file marked "Passwords" – where else would the burglars look when they want to hack into my computer?? And so that's exactly where I discovered the key to get back on-line.

I grunted and growled a bit as the website wouldn’t accept a PDF attachment and it took several goes to click on the right buttons and tags. Nevertheless, I somehow posted a test blog, just scraping into the very last day of the year so I was able to tick it off my nagging 2018 to-do list. I even managed to get a link into FaceBook to let people know about it. Hey presto, and there begins my blogging career!! It wasn’t long before I got Jane’s thumbs up plus an encouraging comment and then more friends joined my clan of interested parties - how nice to get such support and now I have what one can call a Bloggers following!!! And here I am all set to go.

I hope it will be a long journey together with Tony and myself over many years, where you can join in and experience all of what is on offer. It’s all about Hurston Mill, our home since July 2011, the ever-changing habitats we create, our would-be Hurston Nature Reserve as well as the Hurston Industrial Archaeology, being the site of a watermill since 1042. Let’s see how it all goes, hey……….! Meander with me through my Hurston days and if it all gets a bit boring, do let me know too!