CONNECT

I have a secret.   I am addicted to google analytics.  I especially like the pretty map in shades of green that tells you, if you have a blog, where your readers are.

I get such a kick out of knowing that someone is reading me in Guam?!  What the hell?!  Isn’t that as they say in my house, cool?  Ghana is another and Panama!  “Come in Panama…”

The details are so precise that I am told that the person reading me in Guam lives in the town of Tamuning – don’t tell me you don’t learn anything from this site - and spent 1 minute and forty three seconds checking me out.  (Okay some info is a little too precise but I like to think that the blog reader from Tamuning connected with me albeit in less than two minutes).  The Yanks like me.  All of North America is dark green even up in the bits that Sarah Palin thought were Russia but the Canadians could be warmer they are just white with a green tinge. There are a few sushi eaters in Japan who log on regularly and Mexico is very keen.

So when the kids are in bed and the night is still I go and look at who has been reading me. I see you Mahape, Kansas, Cape Town and St. Albans!  It’s all very big brother-ish and I should probably keep this to myself as it is purely my ego tapping at the keys but it feels good, the connection feels good and I think we all need to do more of it.

When my last article was published in The Telegraph….bear with me….WHEN MY LAST ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE TELEGRAPH…Okay I’m done, it was, of course, a wonderful confidence booster (what someone pays you to write this stuff?) and the money was nice but do you know what really rang my bell? What gave me a glorious aha moment?  All the emails I received from people all over the world just dropping me a line to say that my article resonated with them.  That was a blast.  To connect at a deeper level with a stranger who happens to live on this planet at the same time but you will never meet, is one of life’s greatest feelings. 

I hate the telephone.  As a writer carving out quiet time during the day is crucial, so when the phone goes I tend to think very unkind thoughts about whoever it is calling me.  All my friends – those I have left - know to email me – I love email.

Mr. Jules, perched in his Ivory Tower above me is a telephone lover and shouter.  (My friend Brian currently in Angola shouts on the telephone but he has spent all his life looking for oil in the remotest parts of the world including, no doubt, Guam using dodgy phone lines so he has an excuse).  Mr. Jules has none.  I was so mad one day I did the unforgiveable. I ran up the stairs and closed his glass door only for him to then bash his head on it when leaving -noone ever closes his door.  I proposed to make amends and buy some of those adhesive birdy stickers but he was not amused.

So here’s my email address julesritter@bluewin.ch

Drop me a line, just tell me who you are in Guam, Ghana, Slough, India, planet earth.

Dear Jules,

This is Graham a quantity surveyor from Hertfordshire

 or

 I’m Reginald from the Kinky Boot Factory in Harrogate

or just Mitsy from Ohio.

Tell me everything or nothing; what you see from your window, what you ate for breakfast.  Anything.

Just connect.

julesritter@bluewin.ch