CLOGBLOGGER

Once upon a time, there lived a small blogger called Epicurienne, who enjoyed blogging so much that she joined a bloggers’ meetup group. This group held competitions from time to time and even though she never thought she’d win anything, a little voice inside Epic’s head said “you can’t win if you don’t enter!”.

One such competition had a wonderful prize so Epic did her best to explain why she wanted to win it. “What was this fabulous prize?” you ask, and well you might. The prize making Epic so excited was a ticket to Blog08 in Amsterdam with flights and travel insurance from the friendly bunch at Essential Travel. There was only one obstacle in the way of Epic being able to achieve her dream of travelling to Blog08: the competition question.

I am a blogger and I deserve to win the free ticket to Blog08 because…?

‘Oh dear,’ thought Epic. ‘Why on earth do I deserve to win this wonderful prize?’ She frowned as her brain searched its drives for a response. Nothing came; just one big blankety blank. Not giving up, Epic made a list of things relating to Amsterdam, in the hope that it would help. There were windmills and Rembrandt and gouda cheese and the legal smoking of grass. Well, grass smoking could make an entertaining response:

I am a blogger and I deserve to win the free ticket to Blog08 because… I want to go to one of those bars where they have menus of all the different grass varieties and you can get high in public.

Hmmm. Epic wasn’t convinced that this was an answer that would appeal to the family values of (most of)the bloggers group, so Epic returned to her Amsterdam Things list. There was Van Gogh, an artist who could have written a book on how to create masterpieces that won’t earn you any money until you’re six feet under. There were the canals and something called a pizza cruise on a boat, but that sounded more Italian than Dutch. Epic loves tulips but couldn’t think of any way to link them to blogging. Then there was Going Dutch, Double Dutch and Dutch Courage, not to mention Amsterdam’s famous red light district where going window shopping takes on a whole new meaning. Still the bloggers’ muse eluded poor, inspirationless Epicurienne.

Then Epic heard a huge DING and the lightbulb in her head came on. Clogs. Of course! Epic could blog about blogging in clogs! She wrote some notes, found some pretty pictures of Dutch wooden shoes and put them all together in a Powerpoint presentation. Ah, but more obstacles were yet to come. First, Epic had to work out how to add music, then how to convert the file to something that YouTube could read. Lastly, she had to learn how to upload the file to YouTube. Epic was not yet a fully qualified geek, so all of this took some time.

At long last, Epic had a YouTube video worthy of entering into the competition. She was nervous, because the other entrants had submitted some seriously cool stuff. The hours passed, becoming days (well, only three days to be accurate, but it seemed an awfully long time), and thoughts of clogs clomped around in her head until Andy Bargery announced the competition winner. Ta Da! It was Epicurienne. It was official. Epic was about to become The Clogblogger. But first, she had to create a new blog…