By The Numbers

According to the devices that record such things Noi and I covered over 19,000 steps yesterday. That sounds and feels about right. My feet were aching having walked me through a couple of floors of the Rijksmuseum in the morning and then along and around and up and down the reasonably quiet streets of Haarlem in the afternoon, followed by further lounging around the bustling centre of Amsterdam in the evening.

But a figure I can't quite bring myself to believe relates to the number of readers (or 'hits', or 'views', or whatever) that are supposed to have visited (or punched, or glanced at, or whatever) this very blog in the month of June. At roughly the halfway point of the month this stands, according to the tab marked 'Stats' that lurks in the background hereabouts, at more than twice the all-time record for any month (which, coincidentally, was established last month.) Now this just doesn't add up. I'm pretty sure I've maintained my usual standard of dullish randomness in June and written nothing out of the ordinary. No clickbait here, as far as I can tell. No one banging on the door and asking me to 'monetize' proceedings. (This did happen once, long ago, but they didn't actually bang since there's no door.)

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm only writing for one pair of eyes (those are yours, Gentle Reader) and have no intention of engendering anything in the way of the horrifying idea of a wide readership. The notion that several thousand folks might have cast more than a glance in this direction in June 2023 is a touch debilitating. But I'm pretty sure that's not what's going on. I'm guessing that some kind of machine-induced artificial monitoring is responsible for the supposed increase and that I'm writing for the same happily highly limited audience I've always had in mind. It's just you and me, after all.