EC1 Cruise Control's 1st Birthday!!

Dudes! What with all the drama going on around the globe, and the complete opposite in my corner of it, I've forgotten to mention that EC1 Cruise Control is now officially one year old as of October 13th! Happy birthday to me! My very first post was a preview of last year's European Social Forum, and well, where else can you go from there but up, right?

Things have been a bit slack here of late, but reaching the one-year watershed has given me cause to sit back and reflect (for the last five minutes or so) on the direction this blog should take over the next 12 months. It doesn't take a genius to realise that there is more than a bit of navel gazing involved in the mysterious world of blogging. Some of this is necessary, of course; all new media forms need some kind of chronicling and advertising. Norman Geras's Normblog Profiles are an excellent example of this. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the remarkably unfunny Harry's Place spoof column in the Guardian, which I can only imagine must be reinforcing middle-England's impressions of the Guardian as a cliquey, self-obsessed paper trapped in the champagne bubble of the London media left.

Now, the tagline for this blog pretty much implies that I too am one of the hangers-on to said bubble, with its parties, launches, breakthroughs and scandals. But I wouldn't want you to think that I spend all my spare time at these events, because trust me, I really don't. While I do work as a journalist myself, my connections to the left-wing press are precisely that: connections. I happen to have met (and in one case, dated) a few people who work or who have worked on magazines that are liberal in outlook, and as such I get invited to the odd event, contribute the occasional article. When I first started this blog, I was a wide-eyed recent journalism graduate desperate to make it on to "the scene", whatever the hell that was, and decided that EC1 Cruise Control would be all about my brushes with it. One year later, and I'm now a jaded old bitch who frankly doesn't care whether Christopher Hitchens wipes the floor with George Galloway at a debate, when there are more pressing matters like global warming and dictatorships to attend to.

Of course, there are a zillion blogs out there that deal with these topics far more effectively than I do. But I've realised that I can't restrict this blog to happenings in EC1 when, at the end of the day, it just isn't that important. So fromnow on, possums, you can look forward to The View from EC1: my personal take on world events and, er, what can be done about them (god, am sounding more and more like Polly Filla from Private Eye), in addition to the usual slagging/gossipfest of anything media related that comes my way. Next up: the New Humanist 120th anniversary shindig in Clerkenwell Green. Will you be there?

Hey, what did you expect, this ain't IndyMedia.