Indulging...

I’ve been very self indulgent over the last couple of hours. It didn’t involve food either, but I don’t rule out a cuppa and a biscuit now that I’ve mentioned food! There’s a bit of momentum gathering over the 600th edition of What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday this week and so I’ve done some looking back. It has, for eleven years been a weekly story of how messy my desk can be. And, it seems to me, a lot of words about how I might improve in the tidy stakes. Well, we know by now that it isn’t ever going to happen!

Still mastering the decoy photos!

Back in the day, I used to routinely post at about 9am. Now that has changed.  There was a period when I had to schedule every WOYWW post because I was always out on a Wednesday. I can’t put my finger on when, but that stopped. There have been times when I’ve posted a picture of whatever I was helping with in the joinery, because my desk was (still untidy) empty of anything crafty. Each year at about this time, the posts become filled with ‘to do’ panics because as we all know, the days between November 10th and Christmas Day seem to compress into something close to a week. Of course, there was the few months that Jan did all the Wednesdays whilst I went through and recovered from that surgery; we’re all still grateful to her for that, huh. In the first couple of years, the participating numbers were huge, some weeks over 100 desks to visit. Better bloggers warned me to make the most, enjoy the attention because it would wane and eventually contributors would stop. Others advised differently...make it a membership thing, offer editorial spots, offer to review products...all sorts of things. It’s not that I took it all in my stride and continued because I had a focus and knew what I wanted out of it. It’s been a very evolving thing, WOYWW. I’m not good at rules, firmly believing that nice people do the decent thing. Membership is a given..if you link up on a Wednesday, you’ve joined, and it doesn’t matter if you link every week, once a month or three times a year. We get to know you. If you stop linking, that’s OK. Its been lovely to find some previous Deskers on social media, it’s just nice to know you! Life changes and causes change, it’s natural to dip in and out, isn’t it. Consistently, the only thing I’ve asked and gently policed is that bloggers who join in don’t blatantly promote their own or their sponsor’s products..the odd link here and there is interesting. A link every line is irritating and my blog isn’t the place. A good post and some stunning samples on your own blog is the place to do that. Because actually, the WOYWW section of my blog is about you. Your desk tells a story about you, your words add to that picture and we who read your posts get to know you. And that’s it, plain and simple. About two years after it all got going, I found these words from Elizabeth Jane Howard, novelist:

‘Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one’.