A catchy, and to-the-point title. As we watch the final hours of 2009 dwindle away, it is time for me to look back over the past 12 months, and recap on what has, quite literally been the worst year of my life. I have achieved nothing, in fact, I am in exactly the same position I was a year ago, but feeling even more depressed for it. I am now 30 years old, there has been no holiday, very little communication with fellow human beings, and I’ve finally experienced what a panic attack is.

The sooner 2009 ends, the sooner I can get on with life, and start afresh…

JANUARY 2009

The first proper post saw me killing off the video blogs. They were unpopular and embarrassing. I took the first of a handful of walks throughout the year, and documented it with photos. Work continued to get me down, for reasons I can’t think of, and I survived the great Google outage. The first death of 2009 came in the form of my 4Gb memory stick, which succombed to a shorted out USB port…

FEBRUARY 2009

It snowed a little, more than once. JT moved onto the other rotation, and I started blethering on about creating backups using Clonezilla. Unfortunately, this was not going to be the last long-winded post about my computer experimentations. In fact, this seemed to be the whole theme of the year. Work started on building houses on the vacant land on Warren Road, despite it being heavily landscaped only a few years before, no doubt at great cost to the Hartlepudlian taxpayer.

Dick Brown, webmaster of www.dick-brown.com (the w’s stand for wankstain) received an insanely full bottle of orange squash.

MARCH 2009

An entirely forgettable month, if I’m honest. I worked overtime for only the second time in my life, and I went to Durham with Chris at some point, to give my camera its first test. I ended up misjudging a step and twatting my knee off the floor. The cooler on the sarnie machine also malfunctioned, casuing it to display “HEALTH CONTROL” on its VFD display.

APRIL 2009

April 1st consisted of vast amounts of kitchen cleaning. April 4th consisted of my Grand National faux pas, and mercuryvapour.co.uk once again moved servers.

A bird took residence in Mercuryvapour Towers, and it became apparent that nobody reads this blog anymore.

MAY 2009

Unperturbed about the bad news regarding the blog “statistics”, I still continued to write. On May 7th, Andy The Iridium Fan donated the second mercury lantern into my streetlighting collection, in the form of an unused Revo Prefect.

The biggest overhaul came towards the end of this particular month wne I took delivery of a new dartboard.

A lot of spare time was taken with this particular hobby from this moment on.

Dick Brown received some money from MS, on May 13th. I have no idea what for, but I was on-hand with cameraphone, to record the historic event…

JUNE 2009

So, everyone will be asking, where were you when he died? Yes, surely, the biggest, most famously untimely death of 2009, according to the mercuryvapour.co.uk super-statistic website generator, is…

Yes, sod Michael Jackson. This was the most untimely death for me anyway

Apart from death, June consisted of record breaking sunburn, after climbing Christchurch, and spending about an hour up there.

It really was crustier than it looked.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a sunburned scalp was to be the least of my worries, as July rearerd its ugly head… stay tuned for Part 2

Following on from the previous posting I made last night (or early this morning if you really want to be pedantic), I thought I’d share a video featuring the afore metioned song. And then I’ll stop talking about Xmas.

Enjoy. I did!

So this is Christmas, and what have you done? I’ll tell you exactly what I’ve done. I’ve copied and pasted an introduction to a post I first used back in 2003. And, in fact, those previous two sentences are an exact copy and paste from last years’ blog. Now who said I wasn’t one of the laziest people on the planet?

I, once again, would like to wish both of my readers a very merry Xmas, I shall post something I wrote in August, but never actually finished. In fact, it never really got started, it’s just been sat in my drafts list for 4 months, and I’m sick of the sight of it…

You’ll probably find the following odd. I’m typing this in August, and here you are, reading this, some time near Xmas. Yes, I’ve got back into my old habit of stockpiling posts for later publication. this time I’m typing about Xmas records that aren’t really that bad.

The reason the idea of this post stuck into my head is that I’m currently listening to “Saviours’ Day” by Cliff Richard. It’s one of those songs which I secretly like (oh, OK, it’s not much of a secret anymore) for a number of reasons. The first was because it reminds of my Primary School days. At one of those pointless assemblies, one of the teachers plugged in the record player that was in one of the little seldom-used rooms off the assembly hall.Unfortunately, the speakers were either pathetic, or they didn’t reach across the room and into the main hall, as it was barely audible.

That actually sums up the effort I’ve put into the blog this year. Absolutely none. 2009 has been a pathetic year, and I shall close 2009 with the traditional 2-part review. I bet you can’t wait.

As promised, here’s the continuation of the previous post. As 2008 draws to a close, I wipe a small tear from my eye. mainly because while I’m typing this blog with one hand, I’m chopping onions with the other.

Sooo, where was I… Ah yes, I think we were up to June. And if we weren’t, then we bloody well are now.

JUNE

This was another month which featured some of my famously long walks around the local area. It was also the month where I last received a nettle sting. I hate those little bastards. Itch, itch, itch. Aaaargh. On the plus side, I did watch the sun come up whilst sat on a bale of hay. Which was nice.

My record collecting continued, and Steetley Chimney, once again, had smoke billowing from the top of it. Firefox 3 got released, and I had a plate of chips made from homegrown potatoes.

I’m actually struggling to think of things majorly exciting for June.

JULY

Well, July was, as you can probably predict, the month where I left the country for 1 whole week. Remember that nettle I mentioned earlier? well, that was nothing compared to the sunburn I suffered at the hands of the Parisienne sun. Doesn’t look bad in the pic, but the back of my neck and the top of my head were like glowing, peeling beacons, which could only be extinguished with the help of a hotel room shower.

Of course, going to Paris wasn’t the only thing I did in July. The week following it, I blogged about it in every spare moment of my time. Oh, I did also catch a bird whilst on a nightshift at Employment Palace.

AUGUST

The hard drive issues which had plagued by system for a good couple of months once again raised their ugly head. And, not only that, I couldn’t even do anything else to take my mind off it, because the weather, for the whole summer was beyond atrocious

Thankfully, it held out long enough for Andrew D to show me his new camera, and for me to have a play with it.

I also attended Eddie’s leaving do at some point, which also got rained on, but thankfully not rained off, even though the disco never actually materialised…

SEPTEMBER

It wasn’t long after seeing Andrew’s camera that I acquired my own, of the very same model. Only difference is that mine had a later firmware revision. This meant that the majority of the month was spent taking crap photos, and standing in the freezing cold, at 2AM in the morning, taking long exposures.

My first real trip out with the camera involved a walk around the Marina witha group of people I met on Flickr. I must admit the weather was shocking on the day, therefore the photos didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped. I was planning to use them as a set of photos I could practise my fine tuning on, but I never got round to it. Therefore, they shall remain on flickr’s servers for eternity looking grainy and washed out.

The summer had one last trick up its sleeve, however, and on Saturday 27th September, I went to York with Coatesy on what must have been one of the hottest days of the year. Some of the photos were nothing short of spectacular

OCTOBER

It’s hard to find words to describe October. “Slipped under the radar” is one phrase that springs to mind straight away. It’s as if nothing happened. I have a feeling this was because most of the time I was trying to ignore the (really quite nasty) infection in my finger. Turns out, however, I could “stands it no more”, and after trying to drain the infection with a drawing pin, followed by being almost in tears because of the pain, I took only my 2nd trip to the doctors. Annoyingly, I got fleeced out of money via the prescription charge, and I spent a pre-booked week off work completely sober. Sassen, fassen, and indeed, rassen.

A trip to Redcar to pick up some records went entirely well, meaning I came back with considerably more than what I went for. Including the little pot dog which I have since lost. Oh well.

NOVEMBER

The beginning of november saw me recovering from the afore-mentioned finger infection (and a hangover which I will never speak of again), but that was the last thing on my mind, as I headed off down to London to spend a couple of hours in the company of Clarkson, May and Hammond. I won’t link to any of the photos, as I will be the first to admit my photography on that day was complete and utter anus.

Again, this was another month that went entirely un-noticed until later on in the month, when on a journey down the shops, I got handed a piece of paper telling me that the streetlights were going to be replaced. Golly! I reported it in the only way I know how… take a photo.

To top it all off, we had a brief flurry of snow towards the end of the month, making everything look nice for just a few hours. And if there’s anything better than snow for cleaning dog shite off your shoe, I’ve yet to see it…

The month was concluded with an indian with 11 people from work in order to celebrate my 29th birthday a few days later.

DECEMBER

What a month. I barely had time to sit still. I had another week off work to start off with, as it coincided with my birthday. It also coincided with “something else” work related, which shall not be mentioned.

Many functions took place in December, including things I really should have blogged about. I had a great night at Sunderland dogs a few weeks ago, which didn’t even get a mention on here. In fact the only mention I gave it on here or flickr was a photo of a rebooting gambley…

That was just one of the many nights out I attended, and never blogged about, including a Saturday night “discussing” politics with a former schoolteacher of mine. I even missed a few other nights out, thanks to a shitty little cold I caught a few weeks ago, and still haven’t been able to fully shake off. Grrrrrrr.

So, that, in a rather large 1000+ word essay, wraps the whole of last year up. It is gone. Confined to history. The only sign of its very existence appears in the form of a calendar I received from a chinese takeaway. Oh, and my bletherings in here, I suppose.

If I were to sum up 2008 in one word, the answer to that is quite simply “wet”. I’ll be hard pressed to beat taking as many photos this year as I did last, but I’ll no doubt give it a go.

2009 is sure to bring more photos. Whether these are good or bad, I’ll find out in the remaining 363 days.

Starfish crackers!