Because I should be writing my novel…

…I decided to do some ego-graphing. Different from, and hopefully more accurate than, the creative eco-graphing practised by Andrew Bolt and suchlike Climate Change Denialists, but just as pretty.

So look, here is the graph of TN’s daily readership From The Beginning, circa 2004. It is similar to mean global temperatures from 1880, but has a cheerier subtext. TN has totalled 708,000 unique visitors! Admittedly, some of them were using search terms like “sex with animals” or even “croggon tits naked”, but hell, some of them must have read something!

And here is the graph for the past year, with a total of 222,000 unique visitors, or an average of around 17,000 visitors a month. I know it’s modest compared to the intertube superstars, but I used to distribute – by hand – a quarterly literary magazine that had a global circulation of 300, and so daily visits sometimes even spiking past 1000 seems a lot to me.

Which all proves that glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate, as asserted by my father’s friend Jacka (educated like my father at the famous Camborne School of Mines) who actually goes to visit them.

Here endeth the lesson.

Ms TN prevaricates. Again.

In the two weeks since I returned from the UK, I have been out at the theatre for seven nights. Given that I swore a solemn oath to keep my theatre-going under control, this argues a certain weakness of will on my part. However, the small print of my oath (sub clause 2[a] para iii) is “unless it looks interesting”, which in the past fortnight has made my vow as wobbly as Rudd’s ETS scheme.

This flurry of activity is, like this month’s bizarre tropical weather, unprecedented. It used to be, back in the dark ages of, oh, 2006, that the only things that happened in November were a couple of Malthouse shows, the MTC’s Christmas panto and the Short & Sweet festival, a open mic for theatricals that is, as My Esteemed Colleague Mr Boyd once memorably remarked, theatre for people with the attention span of goldfish. But this year, as if to ram home to this prodigal daughter the diversity and depth of Melbourne’s performance culture, there’s been a veritable festival featuring some of our leading indie artists. However they turn out in practice, these are shows with “don’t miss” written on the package.

Ms TN has, in short, been having a fine time. All fine times have their price, and my price is writing reviews. This is proving harder than I expected, and not only because the four shows I saw last week deserve some serious thought: a persistent lurking yukness keeps hijacking the free progress of my thinking, which is making consciousness less pleasant than it ought to be. But dammit, we must all screw our courage to the sticking point, and I’ve more shows to see this week. So here’s my assurance that behind the scenes, in the intricate clockwork of TN’s inscrutable inner workings, reviews are being written. Slowly, to be sure. But they’re being written all the same.