A very nice thing

A very nice thing happened yesterday. Ben came round to bring me a thing he and Russell have done.

It was such a nice thing to have happened it felt a bit like This is Your Life. Or at least, This is 23 People Who Blog's Lives or something.

Apart from being a collection of printed tweets, posts and flickr from 2008 it's a lot of other things.

For one it's a thing of eyesmacking beauty.

Look at all Ben's design handiwork!

Quiet type...

...clear type...

...uppity Colman type.

I forgot to take a picture of the tiny tweets that head each page. I love these. What was meant to be fleeting is now permanent in a different way to the interweb. You know, real in a different way. I'll look at them more than once. I'll look at them til I'm 90.

And that goes for the main bit too. Lots of these things I'd read, a good few of them I hadn't. But all of it translated really well into print. The sensation of reading posts in this way is hard to describe. The only similar thing I can think of is premature nostalgia, when you get a sense of how something happening right now is going to echo down the years to come in a precious way. It has something to do with the intention behind the original posts, and the way that's been honoured, but bamboozled at the same time. What a lovely kind of attention.

There's such good writing in there that putting it in print makes it clear what a shame it might have been that it wasn't, if no one had thought of it. And it makes me want to do better blogging.

So I will look back at this when I'm 90. I'll pull it out from the safe place where I've cherished it for all those years and think 'ah, what a great time that was. Blogging and that in London.'