Guess who's back. Back again.

Dear reader,

It was very nearly two years ago, on 17 May 2011, that the (unintentionally) final post on my former blog, World Of Chig, slipped forth unnoticed into the world. Posted as a final 'mopping up' exercise, just after I had driven myself back home from my solo drive to Düsseldorf (via Brussels) for Eurovision (and a stag weekend), it was never supposed to be the end of my blog, especially as it was just six months away from celebrating its tenth anniversary.

Little did I know then that the usual period of the well-documented PED (post-Eurovision depression) would evolve into apathy, get complicated by unemployment and illness into something approaching real depression, and then be fatally scuppered by complications involving the closure of my old Freeserve/Orange e-mail account. In short, I no longer have access to the editing function on my own blog, so World Of Chig is officially finished. It is an ex-blog. It has ceased to be.

And there I've left it for 24 months. I've been happy to exist in cyberspace on facebook (to a lesser and lesser extent) and increasingly on twitter. (Especially on Thursdays and Saturdays, for televisual reasons.) I have also tried existing in the real world. Sometimes, this can be socially rewarding too, I have reminded myself.

But, recently, particularly with twitter itself and the hardly-noticed death of Thatcher both re-energising my enthusiasm for political debate and with last Monday (6 May) seeing the unique convergence of my birthday, a Bank Holiday, glorious weather and the start of Eurovision rehearsals in Malmö, I was thinking it might be time to start blogging again.  Throw into the mix two significant Eurovision anniversaries for the UK which have occurred in the last week, including tonight's 15th anniversary of Eurovision happening here in Birmingham... and here we are. I was posting some of my memories of Eurovision 1998 on facebook this evening and thinking to myself, 'these should be on my blog, but I don't have a blog any more'. So, I've done it. Let's start again. 

World of Chig is dead.

Long live Chigworld!

(Almost whole seconds have gone into thinking about this new title, as you can tell. However, if you think it's a bit poor, please bear in mind that World of Chig's REAL title, which I had to look at each time I was on the Blogger edit page, was 'Chig's Life and Thoughts', due to a very hurried decision in 2001. Chigworld is a move forward, as far as I'm concerned.)

So, let's start by reposting the stuff I was putting on facebook earlier, to celebrate today's 15th anniversary of Eurovision in Birmingham.