scrapheapstuart3

For the last 15 years or so I have been blogging. In other words I have been writing down my thoughts about various subjects on the internet and, incredibly, people from all over the world have read them. I say “incredibly” because for over half my life the internet didn’t exist. The thought of exchanging views with a stranger in America, Italy or Singapore would have seemed like something out of the wildest realms of science fiction. Even H G Wells didn’t think up that one. I never became a “vlogger” or an “influencer”, but I’m very happy expressing myself through blogs.

I am now 75 years old and have a birthday in only a few weeks time. Most people would describe me as “elderly.” The internet has been a pretty steep leaning curve for me. I used to be a school teacher, retiring in 2006 when I was approaching 57. Computer skills were fast becoming a necessity in the teaching profession , and, towards the end, I was starting to struggle. The chalk and talk days of the blackboard were fading into distant memory and I missed them. In other words I was becoming a bit of a dinosaur. In my last job at a tough, little middle school in Blyth, Northumberland, most classrooms had been adapted to have interactive whiteboards. They looked pretty incongruous in what was still an old, red-brick Victorian building. I was issued with a laptop and was encouraged to type my lesson plans on there. Stuff like: headings, diagrams, maps and pictures would then magically appear on the whiteboard in the classroom, to stimulate the interest of the pupils. In the past, I used to draw them in different coloured chalks. I taught history and geography and used to pride myself on being able to draw a map of the British Isles in 30 seconds or one of the whole world in 2 minutes. Together with another “stick in the mud” geography teacher, I continued to write on the board, but by now it was a white board and I wrote with pungent smelling felt pens. Some kids used to sit on the front row just to get a whiff of them. If the room had an interactive white board, I had to rely on help from the pupils to do my “virtual” writing with a pretend pen. They loved helping me but it was all a bit embarrassing.

Anyway I retired. I managed to cling on for the last few of my 35 years in schools without becoming fully computer literate. I also remarried and one of the first things my new wife and I purchased together was a desk-top computer, advised by the IT teacher at my old school. It sat there in the spare room and I circled it warily, trying to pluck up courage to learn how to use it. Gradually I got into emails and word-processing. Then I learnt how to Google to find out things.( My encyclopaedias became obsolete overnight.) At the time in 2006-7 this was all new to me. It was almost as if I had regressed into being a little child again.

My next foray was into social media which I know has become a hot topic of conversation today. Back in the noughties Facebook was the big thing. People left behind “Friends Reunited” and migrated to Facebook to get in touch with friends and acquaintances on a more regular basis. The adverts exhorted us to stay connected. ( they still do).Today it’s regarded as mostly an old people’s thing but back then it was very popular with all ages. The spur came when my wife’s daughter had a holiday in New Zealand and then told us all the photos were on Facebook. At first this meant we couldn’t see them. We were locked out. So I decided to enter this brave new world and join the party. One day I took the big step and registered and started to find my way around the site. We eventually saw the NZ photos and congratulated ourselves that we had caught up with the latest trend and we weren’t missing out.

I enjoyed being on Facebook and still do to a certain extent. It keeps me in touch with a whole range of people. I have swapped photos, news, ideas and recommendations. However, after a while I started to get fed with all the trivia on there — the selfies and photos of people’s breakfasts. Thus it was that after a visit to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, I decided to raise the level of discourse a bit by putting up a review of a William Blake exhibition I had just enjoyed. I thought it would make a change from looking at someone’s new haircut or what they had just eaten for dinner. Of course it went down like a lead balloon! Nobody seemed to care whether I liked William Blake or not. However, against the odds, it did lead to something significant. My daughter, Catherine saw it and suggested that I might like writing a blog. She suggested WordPress.com and a friend of hers kindly helped me set up my site. All I needed was a good name.

The idea came when I was walking with a friend F and his wife, M. It was only a couple of months since I had retired and M asked me if I had been back to the school to see my former colleagues. I said I hadn’t and then commented that it had often been awkward when people came back and I didn’t have any time to talk to them. M then came out with the classic sentence: ” I know, and who wants to speak to somebody on the scrapheap anyway?” I was taken aback! Considering I had just retired myself, I thought it unbearably crass and rude to refer to people in that way. Needless to say, the conversation didn’t continue. But every cloud has a silver lining. Out of this moment of acute embarrassment came my blogging name : scrapheapstuart . I decided to call my blog — “Tales from the Scrapheap.” Also, I decided I wanted the blog to show that life doesn’t end when one retires. Unlike M, I didn’t define my life through my job. In fact, retirement is not just an end; it is also a new beginning. Corny I know, but true.

Therefore my blogging journey began, somewhere back in 2007. I chose a username and password and I was off. I planned to write essays about my life — my thoughts on current affairs, looking back on my past through memoir pieces and describing my travels and interests. My first blog was basically introducing myself. It was an exciting moment when it first went out “live” into the world, and even more exciting when someone actually read it. The site told me how many hits I had had and what countries they came from. I had always been in the top 3 for English at school and got an A grade at GCE A Level so I was pretty confident that I could string a few sentences together in a coherent manner. However, my blogging career almost ground to a halt before it began..

When I tried to get on to the wordpress site to write my second essay, I was confronted with the dreaded words: “incorrect password.” I thought I had written it down carefully but the wordpress algorithm wouldn’t let me back in. It was immensely frustrating. In the end I joined wordpress again calling myself scrapheapstuart2. I had to open a new email account in order to do this as the computer kept telling me there was already a site connected to my normal email address. At this moment, please imagine me screaming at the machine and trying to tear my hair out! Once I got in under my new name and password, I wrote a furious piece — “Who’s in Charge – Them or Us?” By “them” I was referring to machines. Today the answer to the question is easy — it’s them, the machines that are ruling our world. Artificial Intelligence is invading most aspects of life and stopping us humans from doing our own thinking. I have friends who rely on Alexa to do all sorts of things, from answering questions, to playing music, to switching on and dimming the lights. But I won’t go on.

I later figured out why the machine was right and I was wrong, which is always the case of course. In my original blog name I had accidently missed out the “r” and ended up calling myself “scapheapstuart.” Somewhere out there in the ether there is a sole blog in that name. It’s weird to think it will outlive me but I cannot even remember how to get into it.

Thus began an important new part of my life. All my holidays now had 5 parts — 1. Planning. 2 Going on the actual holiday. 3. Taking photos. 4. Compiling a picture book. 5. Researching and writing a blog. After taking advice from my journalist step-daughter, I always tried to give my blogs an angle rather than merely describing or explaining something. As I suggested to my English students at school, rhetorical questions are always a good ploy to draw readers in. Another way of attracting readers is to have a good title. One of my early travel blogs about a trip to Albania was titled “Don’t gulp you raki.” On arriving at a hotel after an exciting trip through the mountains on the border with Greece, the hotel owner gave the taxi driver and us a glass of raki, the local firewater. Stupidly I started to gulp mine down but was quickly put right by the Albanians who told me in sign language that it should be slowly sipped and savoured.

Another popular blog which had scores of hits in my scrapheapstuart2 days was “Lovely Little Dirty Darren.” This shows the value of a good title. It was actually about a visit to Darwen, the old East Lancs mill town which Chris ( my wife) and I included on our “Hills and Mills” bus -pass trip. Darren is actually the local pronunciation of Darwen. In the church there I spotted an affectionate poem to the town on a stained glass window. Thinking back to its industrial revolution hey day, the poem finished with the line : “Lovely Little Dirty Darren.” There might be lots of people out there who are interested in Darwen but I think the real reason for this blog’s popularity is because some people were expecting a smutty tale along the lines of “Confessions of a Window Cleaner.” I wonder how many read on beyond the first paragraph.

All went well for 15 years. I attracted readers from all 5 continents and got some kind, encouraging comments. I picked up 91 followers along the way, including a couple from the USA . I only have ever got one negative comment. I had been criticising soap operas and reality TV programmes. The comment was : ” Some people watch rubbish, while some people write rubbish.” One fault of mine is that I can get quite judgemental and opinionated so this feedback was perhaps deserved. On the other hand, it was my blog and nobody can categorically say my opinion is wrong. On a few occasions I wrote eulogies for lost loved ones including my own mum and dad. The writing gave me an important emotional outlet.

So I blogged quite happily for the best part of 15 years. Every time I went on to my free WordPress site it kindly put in my username and password automatically. It was easy. Until, that is, a morning in August, 2025, only a few weeks ago. After checking my emails I decided to quickly look at my wordpress stats to see if I had had any readers or comments. Unusually the site asked for my password. When I put in what I was sure the password was, it told me, in red lettering “incorrect password.” I did this a few times and then decided to go through the forgotten password procedure. I was sent an email , which included a link to reset my password. I followed the instructions and chose another secret word, but when I went back into the wordpress site , I was told that my newly approved password was still incorrect. This happened 5 times with the same frustrating result. I was locked out of my own blogging site by an algorithm!

I tried emailing the help section of WordPress about the problem. Someone introduced themselves and said a member of their “Happiness Team” would get back to me in 24 hours. Well it took 48 hours to get a response and then I just got sent on the same fruitless forgotten password loop. I tried all sorts — going into settings and security but I got nowhere. I found out that if you have a free wordpress site ( paid for by adverts) then the only help available is from an AI bot!

Then, as if my situation wasn’t bad enough, a truly bizarre thing happened. WordPress A I changed my user name from scrapheapstuart2 to — wait for it — joyfuldonutf881a2b165-kitwe.wordpress.com Such a strange name could only be made up by a bot. So I left the scrapheap after 15 years and turned into a happy donut. You couldn’t make it up! I kept on trying and trying to retrieve my old site but now I was doubly locked out. Both my username and password were different to what I had thought they should be.

I thought about starting up writing with another free blogging site, but the joining process was a bit drawn out and I lost heart. Then I had the idea to give up blogging altogether and draw a line under the whole sorry saga. I would look back on it as just a phase I went through. I felt really down though as I had really enjoyed expressing myself in writing and getting stuff off my chest. As a last resort I decided to try and create a password for the new joyfuldonut site. To my great surprise, it actually let me do this. The machine had at last taken pity on me. I got a welcome from wordpress as if I was a new member. It invited me to write my first piece. I went along with this and wrote about a recent city break in Oxford with a mate. It felt good to be tapping the keys on the laptop again after all that frustration. When I had finished I published it and it went “live”! What an exciting moment it was for me although I don’t know if anyone out there in the world at large even noticed. By another small miracle I managed to share the blog on to my facebook page. I was up and running.

I sent my new convoluted blogging address to a couple of close friends, asking them to try it out. The first to respond said the link had not worked, so I was thrown back into the dumps again. However, to my great surprise and delight, the second friend said it had worked and he actually went on to read the Oxford piece. It turns out I had carelessly given the first friend an incorrect link. I had missed out a number. I then tried again and missed out a letter! Why is it such a long, stupid address? I had a little rant again! But 3rd time lucky, my friend at last succeeded in accessing the blog at his 3rd attempt. He had been very patient with me. This episode taught me how priceless real friends are — they help you when you are in trouble.

This is my second full blog under the new donut address. Thanks for reading it. Soon, following advice from one of my more IT savvy friends, I will attempt to link my new blogging site with my old one. Wish me luck. Then finally the happy donut can sit proudly on top of the scrapheap and I can hold my head up high and describe myself once again as an “international blogger.”

NB To locate my old blogs, go to :https://scrapheapstuart2.wordpress.com