The last few days I’ve opened my website’s statistics page to find that an unbelievable number of people have viewed some of my posts. I’m not unhappy about it but I am bewildered.

For the first few years that I was writing these posts, I found two or three views once or twice a week and that was okay. The statistics don’t include those people to whom a post is automatically emailed, many of whom I know – members of my extended family, a few friends and several people who were lucky enough(?) to be in my class when I was a teacher, so I knew that those people had seen (and enjoyed?) my posts.

Occasionally, though, I would find that twenty or thirty people, often in faraway countries, had read a certain post all on the same day. I came to the conclusion that, perhaps, a tutor would have set a class full of young people learning to speak and write English, to read one or other of my posts. And that thought made me quite proud, really!

Then there were a few times when loads of people signed up to receive my posts by email, all on the same day. I was really pleased to think that so many people enjoyed my writing so much that they wanted to read more. It turned out that all those people never actually opened those emails and I found this out, by chance, when the statistics started including the number of emails which each person had opened. I went through the list and found that there were quite a few – maybe 40 – who had opened 0% of them! Those who had never opened any were deleted from my email list.

Two days ago I was stunned to find that 37 visitors had viewed 63 of my posts! Who are they, where do they live, why choose to read mine? But, yesterday was incredible! 73 people had viewed 134 of my posts! On both days, there was a large variety of posts read.

Today I eagerly opened my statistics to find that – wait for it! – two people had each viewed one post – a different one each. I’d like to thank each of them and all those others. And, if you were one of those who added to those large groups and read one or two of my posts, perhaps you could send me a message to tell me why you picked that time on that day and if you enjoyed my writing. But, thanks to you all, anyway, from the curious whitehaired woman.