Hello, good morning and welcome

... to Newhaven Town. Yes, to those already familiar with nb Warrior, I have finally succumbed. On my narrowboat blog, I sometimes mention my home town, on the pretext that as a river runs through it it has boating connections. But there are all sorts of other things I'd like to say about Newhaven that maybe don't fit there, and I've long toyed with the idea of starting a separate blog to talk about the town. It may be the first, it may not - I don't know, but I hope I'll soon find out.

I was finally prompted to get on with it yesterday, when I was at the celebration of NCDA's tenth anniversary. I met Jackie Blackwell, who has set up the Our Newhaven website for people to share photos and memories of the town. Amazingly, I'd already discovered this relatively new site whilst Googling to try to find out what the pub used to be called that is now Philip Mann estate agents (answer, the Riverside Inn, and formerly the Crown, but that was thanks to Sean next door). I suppose another inspiration is Diamond Geezer, who translates his life in London into such an interesting and informative blog.

This blog will be very much my own take on Newhaven, looking at the things that interest me and expressing my (no doubt often uninformed) opinions, but I hope that people will read it, and post comments, and maybe even get some debates going. And I hope people will bring things to my attention, and if there are other blogs and sites out there, that we can link to each other and make Newhaven a town that punches above its weight in cyberspace as in so many other things (as we were constantly reminded in the interminable speeches yesterday).

So what are my credentials for starting a Newhaven blog? Well, the first thing of course is that blogging requires no credentials ... but... I've lived here since 1986 and genuinely like the place; I served on the Town Council for two terms (1991-99) and was one of the founding members and original company secretary of NCDA... but really I just like blogging and musing and ranting and (more often, I hope), raving about the town.

I have to go and make my Christmas cake now, but I post again soon with links to the Newhaven-related posts that I've already done over on nb Warrior, and I will tweak the site a bit, hopefully to include a link where people can email me. I'll try to update at least once a week (I try to do Warrior at least every other day!) but it won't be every day so it might be as well to subscribe via Atom (no, I have no idea how that works, but fully understand it to be a Good Thing).

Keep reading, I'll be back soon.