Excess Month Practical / NaBloPoMo Review

Essentials for #nablopomo2017 knee pads for low-angle photos or elevated views (climbing may be necessary) strong alcohol for warmth, pen and notebook.

A post shared by Matt Tuckey (@matttuckey) on Dec 1, 2017 at 6:17am PST

The world can only be grasped by action, not contemplation... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

-Jacob Bronowski, Polish mathematician and humanist

Well, I did it. 30 posts in 30 days, throughout November, for National Blog Posting Month. I enjoyed searching out content and hammering out text as quickly as I could.

I got nearly 4000 hits in the month, which is a little more than other recent months, but nowhere near the inexplicable successes of 2014 where I was getting a 500-1000 hits a day for most of the year. God knows what I was doing right at that time. Weirdly, my most popular post in the past month was this one about Bowlers' car boot sale. (119 views at the time of writing.) I still haven't tried the recipe book I bought there.

On the 5^th, I decided that I'd up my drinking, in accordance with the theme of 'excess,' to see if that would suppress my appetite and help me to lose weight. A few people suggested that it wouldn't work. They were right: I went from 84kg (13'3) to 82.9kg (13'), not as much as I'd hoped, but it's still the equivalent of 4 pieces of crockery. I still have a bit of a gut, but I'm still skipping breakfast, so we'll see how that affects weight.

In the month of November I got no personal bests in the gym.

I drank, this month. I finished the remnants of bottles of Aberlour, Highland Park, (my favourite), Wild Turkey, and downed a sample bottle of The Arran Malt, and threw out some Baileys chocolates which were about 4 years out of date (typically, I only noticed once I'd bitten into one). There was so little left in each one that I've not really drank that much at all, but it's more than I normally have. And it's cold.

I'm making gains on social media, if not with weights: I passed the 1300 follower mark on Twitter. Speaking of Twitter followers, Stanley Johnson (Boris' dad) is currently in the Australian jungle for I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. I was his 4,999^th follower.

So, hardly the Thompson-esque rollercoaster of drug-fuelled manic reportage I had in mind, but then, of course it wasn't. Fun though.