Today it is ten years since I shuffled onto this ledge. Perhaps I should have a word with my slighter younger self. Are you sure you want to spend a whole decade writing a blog read by a handful of people?

To which my slightly older self might reply – Yeah, well, shows how little you know about life, matey.

All those words. Possibly as many as 300,000 by now, as 28,000 were written last year. But I am too lazy to count.

Why I started is easy to explain. I’d been made redundant after 27 years on one newspaper. That was shocking, the worst of days, but people are made redundant all the time. Especially if they are foolish enough to work on newspapers.

Time offers perspective, distance. Oh, that’s when that happened. It was awful. But other things have occurred since. Good things, bad things; near misses, scratches on the paintwork.

I spent that first post-redundancy year as a freelance feature writer, only to conclude my elbows were not nearly sharp enough. It would have been sensible to have saved the redundancy money and tried any old job. But I stuck at journalism, all I knew.

You do what you do.

All those words.

The first blogs were written to make sense of my changed life. And then I just kept going. Early on I wondered if someone might notice and offer me a column, to follow up the one I wrote for 25 years. A foolish notion, but life is full of those. Anyway, writing this blog has kept me saner than if I did not have those words to file.

Much can happen in ten years. A much-loved granddaughter was born. My father died, alongside other older relatives, and a cousin my own age. I had that heart attack, and could have died myself, but that gave me another topic, words tapped out as my bruised heart sought to recapture its rhythm. Personal catastrophes can be helpful like that.

Before writing this, I skimmed over some of my first efforts, wondering what to write – or even whether to mark the anniversary at all. In the end I sat down and wrote this one. Because words. Because, oh, you have to keep going.

Books, literature, films and music have been addressed. As has baking my own bread – a subject on which I rarely remain silent for long, as those dearest to me may testify with a sigh.

But all too often, all too easily, it’s been about politics. Some of my political blogs hope to amuse, while others are just pebbles dropped into the deep sour well.

Sometimes I wonder why anyone should care what I think about politics or anything else. An unhelpful doubt to harbour if pontification is your game.

I return to politics because it’s there, a ready scab to pick at. Lately I have sworn more than once not to write about the idiot cruel vanities of Donald Trump, a pledge broken almost as soon as it was made. The world would be a better and kinder place if everyone ignored all the stupid spite spilling from that man’s tight puckered mouth.

Is it time instead to now address the inconsequentialities of life? Writing about politics can stir opinions stronger than your own, hurled back like rocks. Or indeed the scone we ate in a café while on a family holiday this week in Withernsea.

That scone was long past fresh, but then so am I. The holiday was lovely, by the way, three generations in one house near the sea in a tired town with a lovely long beach, and a favourite new bar.

By some quirk of time, I was the oldest family member on that holiday. It happens eventually.

Away from this blog, newspaper features have been written, mostly for the Yorkshire Post Magazine, almost 80 in ten years, with two appearing last Saturday. A sort of validation, suggesting I can still pull off what might be called my craft.

I still enjoy meeting people to hear their stories; their stories told in my words, a good union. Some of those I interview email to say how much they liked a feature; others offer only silence.

Alongside the blogs have been the novels, either now forgotten or never yet published, but still being written, on and off, alongside a memoir.

Some days I feel like I have survived a lot, without ever getting going properly. But that’s just what life is like.

After my year as a freelance feature writer, I had other jobs in journalism. Two editing spells at PA Media, alongside two side hustles as a journalism lecturer, weaving lessons from the frayed fabric of my working life. Given another go, I’d have done the lecturing for longer, but my time at the whiteboard ran out.

Now I am mostly retired, mostly happy, buoyed by family and friends. As for this ledge, I plan to hang around, agitating away at this and that.

If you have been reading, thank you. What a fine, if select, bunch you are.