P.Viktor

Five Years of P.VIKTOR.COM

Little did I know when I started blogging in January 2005 that I would still be doing it five years later. I can't even remember what life was like before I started blogging, which seems unthinkable for a person who both loves to write and who's extremely opinionated. For years I have been doggedly writing on www.pviktor.com and though there have been plenty of times when I wanted to give up, I have somehow found the motivation to carry on. I have to remind myself that it is rewarding and enjoyable, even during those times when it seems like NO ONE is reading or someone has left a nasty comment on a blog post or I just feel life is too busy to even get to a computer to write my thoughts down. But here I am, and my site has come on so much since those very early days (when I didn't know very much about design or html - oh how I have learned). I try to post daily and I make sure I give my site a makeover once in a while to keep my readers (and indeed myself) interested. I hope I have been successful!

To celebrate five years of blogging I have given this site a much-needed lick of paint, and I hope you will agree that not only does www.pviktor.com look better, but it is much easier to navigate around (with my nifty little blog index) in order to find older content. That has always been the biggest difficulty with blogging - content slips away into the archives only to be forgotten, but hopefully by better tagging and news ways of organising content it is much easier to find. I have been away from blogging for the whole month of January - namely because I needed a break. I went into blogging-overdrive at the end of 2009 with all those end of decade/year lists and I burnt myself out, but I also wanted to spend time on some other projects too. However,I'm very much back now and it shall be business as usual - there is a lot of new music, films, and books that I want to write about, and I have some new poetry and prose projects in the pipeline. Hopefully I will have enough to say to get me to 2015 for the next big anniversary!

Happy New Year and Hiatus

Happy New year to all my regular readers (you know who you are). No doubt you are feeling much as I do this morning - very hungover and regretting somewhat the excesses of the night before. Not exactly the best start to 2010, but they do say start as you mean to go on. One of the most significant things to happen in the last year has been a dramatic increase in traffic to my website, and as a result I have been attempting to post on my blog every day (well, almost everyday - a boy has to have a life as well). I've really enjoyed focussing on my writing here and producing content that people have really engaged with. The fact is however that maintaining a blog is incredibly hard work and sometimes I've felt that I have had to sacrifice time spent on doing other things in order to keep my site updated.

I have even been thinking whether or not I even want to continue my blog - sometimes it feels like the ratio between effort and reward is hugely stacked against the former than the latter. Ultimately however I don't think I could turn my back on this website, at least not at the moment, because it represents almost five years of hard work and dedication and I don't think I could just turn my back on it. So, the best compromise is to take a break, which is what I am going to do - I plan to take off the whole of January so that I can have some time to myself and concentrate on other writing projects. I may post a blog sporadically, especially if something really interesting comes up, but expect to see fewer posts over the coming weeks. I will return, and I have some big ideas to take this website to the next level. So have a great start to the New Year and see you all at the end of the month.

I will be very much present on my Facebook Page and Twitter, so be sure to keep up-to-date with new developments in the interim.

Looking Back at 2009

I would have to say it’s rather difficult to summarise or define 2009 now we are at the end of it. It has been one of those years in which certain significant events have taken place, but the thing as a whole has been neither unified nor particularly memorable. There is nothing I can look back at and think ‘I have achieved this or that’ – those things happened mostly to people around me in which I shared their experiences. Perhaps the most significant of these events was my sister’s wedding. It’s always a bit of a shock when a younger sibling gets married – my sister has always been six years old to me. I’ll never forget the moment when she descended a case of stairs in an old manor house wearing a veil and white dress. It was at that moment I realised we had grown up and our childhoods seemed irrevocably closed off, eased by the knowledge that we had so much to look forward to as adults. Now happily married, she and her lovely husband have moved to Yorkshire, and all of a sudden we all seem terribly grown up (though silly as ever).

One of the things I am most grateful for this year is moving house, which we did in the summer. We previously lived in an old school conversion which had been developed and turned into flats and had started to become extremely unhappy living there. It was simply too small and we didn’t enjoy living in a large building. In the summer, when our lease ended, we decided to move to a much nicer part of Oxford far less urban and busy (a residential area ten minutes walk from the city centre). We live in a lovely terraced house with our very own garden (such bliss) and have much more space. It is incredible to think what a positive impact this has had on our lives – I guess we just didn’t realise how truly unhappy we had become in the previous apartment. I’m really looking forward to the coming spring and summer when we can enjoy the garden and have barbecues and outside dinner parties with our friends. It’s pretty incredible how quickly we have settled into our new home – it is almost as though we never lived anywhere else.

Christmas | In Pictures

Here are a selection of pictures taken on Christmas Day. As you can see, Christmas is pretty much all about food in my house and I have never enjoyed cooking as much as I have over the last few days. From cooking the turkey and the ham, to making cranberry sauce and turkey curry, and even steaming the pudding we made last year (steeped in rum every month of that year) - it has been a feast of delicious food and drink. Throw in a nice long amble through the countryside to walk dinner off before opening presents and you have the makings of a perfect day. 

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