This numbers game is what drove me obsessively to blog between 1999 and 2003/4. Back then being the first to have blogged every day for a year, then two then three. To be the first to blog 1000 words a day for a month and so on, we all thought, meant something. Most potty of all was the 24 hour blogathon I initiated in 2002 where participants had to post 1000 freshly written words an hour for 24 hours. An interesting exercise.

What makes any diarist do it?

There is, after many years, great personal pleasure in looking back: I kept a diary for some twenty years between the age of 13 1/2 and into my early thirties ... with a significant fizzle out I should add when I got engaged and married, only revising the format when the children were planned and born - that not gives me a record of their first actions and words.

As a learning tool it is great too - putting your first ideas here, then building on them means that you can watch how an essay that got a 53 moves to a 63, 73, 83 and beyond.