It's five years!

Five years ago, on a warm January day, I started a blog. I tend to forget detail easily, but I somehow vividly remember sitting at my desk, squeezed into a bedroom that was also a living room and home office space, and watching a hawk land on the small balcony. They say you have to write about what you see, so that is how I started my first post. It's five years later. Life is different. Helanya and I have moved twice since that day. We've travelled. I've graduated my first (soon to be two) student(s). But we've been fortunate, too, in that many things have not changed at all. We've attended many baby showers and few funerals. We've gained wonderful new friends through travelling. My students keep on inspiring me. And my colleagues and co-authors continue to have too much patience. My blog has remained, too, although a long-time reader would recognise some change. As with most new things, I was productive initially, writing 10 posts in my first month. I soon realised I couldn't keep up the pace, and the frequency declined to average between four and six posts. I blogged about many things that interested me, but Economics-related topics seemed to take precedence. At the beginning of last year, I was offered a contract to write a bi-weekly column for Finweek magazine. Due to time and (more importantly) idea constraints, I began to post my columns as posts instead of writing altogether new posts. The result has been that the length of my posts has increased, but that the frequency has declined. It also means that the average number of visitors per day has declined somewhat. I would like to think that there is a quality-quantity trade-off, though. There is some evidence to support this claim: the number of permanently registered readers has continued to increase. It's strange to reread some of the posts that I wrote several years ago. They are recognisably me, but they are also different from how I would write about the same topic now. I guess that means that I'm learning. Or unlearning. Or just growing older. Blogging is a difficult business these days. What I had hoped to do when I started was to debate, to challenge, to offer a different, sometimes unpopular, perspective. But I have become less eager to do this, probably because I have lost some of my youthful big-eyed optimism, but mostly because of the uncritical social media platforms that now dominate public debate.

I would like to think the blog has had some impact, though. My 258 (this will the the 259th) posts have attracted 295 659 visitors to my site, who've read my posts 417 095 times. That is an unfathomable number, and much more than I could have hoped for. The large number is largely the result of one post I wrote - Why and what to study in South Africa - which I wrote in May 2013 and has since received more than 156 000 views. It also has 251 comments. The most views in one day actually come from a book review about Ken Follett's Century trilogy. He retweeted the blog post, and I was swamped by visitors. Most of them were there for the images of the characters, which I had borrowed from someone else (with due credit, fortunately.) My favourite post? There are many that I like (of course), but I think the one that stands out is my response to Zuma's remarks at the beginning of 2015.

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This morning the Stellenbosch heavens finally opened up for some much-needed rain. I hear doves cooing, playing in the temporary ponds in our new flower bed. Perhaps they are descendants of the chicks that hatched five summers ago... (but then this will likely be the third or even fourth generation, as Google tells me that doves only have a 1.5-year lifespan in the wild.) It's the start of a new year, a time when we tend to look to the future. And I wonder: Where will we be in another five years' time?