Happy New Year

You know, I’ve always been secretly rather proud when other people have observed that I take quizzes too seriously. Yes! – I would say to myself – that’s the point!- And for many years, including the 7 or so years since I started LAM this is something which has made my life richer in many ways.

I don’t wish to burden anyone by rehashing things which happened over the last 12 months, but hey, you’re all highly intelligent people, and it won’t have escaped your notice that the last LAM post was back in October. This was the second hiatus in the same year. When I first stopped posting in 2015, I won’t lie, I was in a bad place. Counselling, help and understanding from friends, family and colleagues got me through that, and I will always love every one of you who’s helped me over the last 12 months or so.  Throughout the summer, and the early Autumn, I was determined not to slip back into that place, and in October, when the feeling of stress started building up again, I stopped doing a lot of things which were contributing towards making me feel stressed out. Obviously, cutting out work, while desirable, was a bit of a non-starter. So I cut down to two quizzes a week, and also, I’m afraid, I stopped worrying about getting posts up on LAM.

I’ve never before looked on LAM as a chore. But, the thing is I did find I was stressing myself out on a Saturday trying to get all of the reviews and the posts done. You might remember that I used to post throughout the week, but for the last few years I’ve only really been posting at the weekends – usually on Saturday. And I found that I was starting to begrudge the amount of time that it was taking to write the reviews, post the reviews, type out the news questions, post the news questions and so on and so forth. And I don’t want to feel like that. I don’t want to begrudge the time I spend on LAM. I don’t like myself for saying this, but I’d rather not post than begrudge doing it.

So, anyway, I stopped posting in October. I never made a conscious decision – right, that’s it, no more posts on LAM for the next x number of months. I just didn’t make the decision to post anything the next weekend. And when the ground didn’t cave in beneath my feet, and the sky didn’t crumble and fall, then I didn’t make the decision to post anything the next week. Nor the week after that. Come Christmas, when I actually had some time, I had a terrible attack of the can’t-be-arseds, and this despite the fact that quite a number of you wonderful people had taken the time and trouble to enquire whether all was well, and say how much you were missing LAM.

So, anyway, here we are again. I’m not going to make any promises – not to myself anyway – but I want to give it a go again. For all I know this might be the first and last post of 2016. For all I know it might be the first of a couple of hundred. But we’ll give it a go. I’m not promising to faithfully review every edition of the quizzes I love, as I have done over the years – and I do feel bad about those of you who have appeared on Mastermind , UC or OC in the interim, and were disappointed (or relieved) that you didn’t get to read my take on your appearances, but I’m afraid that an apology is all that I can give you.

Enough said, my man. Happy New Year.