1000th post!

Slightly Intrepid commenced with my first post on 4 January 2007 just before my return to England, and with this post reaches the mighty four digits. That's nine years of blogging. I had the initial intention it would be my travel journal, but later it broadened its focus and became less of a personal diary. There was a definite increase in the rate of posting after I retired the Very Friday Blog (2005-12) and started including those sorts of fun found posts. More recently I've not had the time or energy to write the lengthy travel reports I used to, and have focused more on shorter pieces on New Zealand history, music or film clips, Wellington photographs, and extracts from whatever book I've been reading lately.

The top 10 Slightly Intrepid posts are still a decent mix, with the clear leader remaining the highly informative and not-at-all-amateurish Cook Strait tunnel blog. Obviously there's a great untapped market for sci-fi engineering blogs out there, so I really must get round to writing that piece about a new rail tunnel connecting Waterloo in Lower Hutt with Wainuiomata and a new commuter town built on the western side of Lake Wairarapa. The other blogs on the list are a mix of film trivia (The midgets of Casablanca, the LOTR set on Miramar peninsula), London ephemera (Mr Tibbet the Putney highwayman, a Buckingham Palace visit for a royal garden party), my first and so far only visit to Portugal (Obrigado Lisboa), and random TV and gaming fare.

Slightly Intrepid top 10 blogs by date and pageviews

A Cook Strait tunnel? 16 Apr 2008

9124

The midgets of Casablanca 6 Sep 2009

2305

The mysterious Mr Tibbet 27 Apr 2009

2189

A royal garden party 9 Jul 2008

1621

Obrigado Lisboa 16 Feb 2011

1483

The Australian election under proportional represe... 8 Sep 2013

1296

A great day for flying 27 Jan 2013

1165

Later with Jools Holland: Series 38, Episode 5 5 May 2011

1048

Sim City 4 1 Jan 2010

978

TV flashback 1981 19 Oct 2013

961

The long list of post categories shows that the top five themes for blog posts have been New Zealand generally (174 posts), Wellington specifically (162), history (154), music (153) and comedy (122) - closely followed by the all-important movies tag (108 posts). The top five source countries for pageviews have been the US, UK, Germany, New Zealand and France. Total recorded pageviews across the blog currently stands at 370,577.

I don't have a firm plan for the blog, so I guess I'll just keep posting as long as it stays interesting. Probably there won't be as many posts as I put out in 2013-14, when there were an average of 17.4 posts per month. I'm a far lazier blogger than that now! As always, any blog comments or feedback on Facebook or Twitter is very welcome, and thanks for visiting. And to close, here's a sample from the remarkably small field of 'thousand'-referencing songs - sorry Vanessa Carlton, Street Chant, Patti Smith and Snooks Eaglin, the title's been snaffled by Tenpole Tudor with their April 1981 UK no.6 hit, Swords Of A Thousand Men: