It wasn’t the first weblog that I had ever seen, but - having been led to it on three separate occasions by various music-related Google searches - Swish Cottage was the first weblog that properly grabbed my attention. I was fascinated by the idea of someone writing on such a regular basis about his life and his interests – but assumed that there must have been a considerable amount of technical skill involved in designing and maintaining such a complex site. I had coded some basic HTML for my rapidly stagnating Geocities homepage, but something like this was clearly way out of my league.

I started visiting Swish Cottage every now and again, to see what this “gay London skinhead” with arty interests and great musical taste was getting up to. After a couple of weeks or so, I spotted a button on the site: “powered by Blogger”. Out of idle curiosity, I clicked on the button. Twenty minutes or so later, I found that - to my surprise and delight - I now appeared to have a weblog of my own; why, it even sported the same design template as Swish Cottage itself. I couldn’t believe how quick and easy it had all been, and was thrilled by the new possibilities of the medium.

The only problem was that I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was going to say. Not that it really mattered; no-one was ever going to find this daft little page anyhow. So I just stuck a few random bits and pieces up, merely for the fun of seeing them magically displayed in a way that made them look like Swish Cottage.

After about ten days of doing this, I excitedly e-mailed my friends: “Look what I’ve done! Isn’t it great? Aren’t I clever?” The reaction ranged from polite cordiality (“That’s nice for you, dear”), to total silence (some of the people I e-mailed have never visited the site to this day), to open mockery (“It’s like Dermot O’Leary does the South Bank Show; are you having a mid-life crisis?”). A couple of people were slightly more encouraging: one simply advised me to be a bit “looser”, and the other said “Aha! Just the sort of thing I’ve been looking for!” and immediately set up his own blog (the sadly-on-hold World Of Chig).

My visits to Swish Cottage had by now become daily; I was steadily reading through all of David’s monthly archives, and building up an ever more detailed picture of the person he was and the life he was leading. It felt weird to be taking such an interest in a complete stranger, and I actually began to feel a bit queasy about it, like I was some kind of deranged bunny-boiler stalker. Nevertheless, David’s site quickly became my primary inspiration for troubled_diva.blogspot.com – everything he had done, I wanted to do as well, Single White Female stylee. I started picking my way through his source code: teaching myself about sidebars, permalinks and archives, working out how to set up my own comments and stats counters, learning a bit of basic CSS, and registering myself for various blogging directories in a bid to build my profile. After a while, I added a link to Swish Cottage from my own site, appended with the words “inspired this”. Two or three days later, I was astonished to find a new posting from David saying “I am delighted to take the credit for inspiring this”, and a link back to Troubled Diva; it had simply never occurred to me that he would ever find my tiny little site. Suddenly, I felt as if I had broken through some sort of invisible cordon.

Having ripped off as much of his source code as I possibly could, I now started working through the “other blogs” links on David’s sidebar. Stumbling across a posting on a US blog called Brucehoax, which was slagging off the new Prince album, I wrote some follow-up comments on Troubled Diva, and quickly received some comments by return from PJ, the writer of Brucehoax. I was beginning to understand how this worked, and how dialogues could be formed between bloggers.

By Christmas 2001, two months after starting Troubled Diva, I had four regular readers/commenters outside of my circle of real-life friends: David of Swish Cottage, PJ of Brucehoax, another US reader called Jeff (from jeffandjanice.com), and a brand new blogger: Elisabeth of I’m Hip To You. Google had just picked up on me, and I was starting to get a slow trickle of search referrals; OK, so the search terms almost always had nothing to do with the contents of the site, but at least it meant that Real People were finding me. My stats counter told me that I was getting about 20 visits a day, whereas my Geocities homepage generally had about 20 visits a week. I was delighted.

As well as Swish Cottage, I had now become equally as hooked on another blog: not.so.soft, written by a self-styled “noomeejahoor” called Meg (now resident at meish.org). Meg had a different style from David, but one which was every bit as engrossing. She was also clearly very popular, as the vast numbers of comments attached to all of her posts indicated. I loved the way that dialogues could be initiated and developed in this way; it made the blog something in which the readers could actively participate. Thus it was that not.so.soft became the second major influence on the direction I was seeking for Troubled Diva.

Some of Meg’s commenters became familiar names to me in their own right, and I started clicking onto their own sites. While David attracted more of an urban gay/arty-trendy/pop culture crowd, Meg’s commenters tended towards a more “writerly” stance, and I started to unearth a loosely connected community of wonderfully engaging and articulate wordsmiths. It was slowly dawning on me that, rather than merely being distinct entities in their own right, weblogs collectively formed a community of voices. This medium was more than I thought it was. I was now reading Francis Strand (How To Learn Swedish In 1000 Difficult Lessons), Tinka (Dust From A Distant Sun), and in particular a new favourite: Vaughan of Wherever You Are. Showing me that it was possible to write about private emotions in a public way, which could communicate - and even entertain - without slipping into maudlin self-indulgence, Vaughan became my third major influence.

Shaped by these influences, and by the comments I was receiving, Troubled Diva was slowly beginning to find its own voice and direction. I was cheerfully mixing up diary-style pieces with bits of pop-cultural commentary and links to anything which took my fancy, and watching my readership grow to a breathtaking 50 or 60 visits a day. Before I even knew what I was doing, I found myself announcing a new writing project: for each of the forty days leading up to my fortieth birthday, I would write about a particular incident from my past, as selected more or less randomly from a master list. The intention was to write a simple paragraph or so on each incident; however, right from the first day’s entry, I realised that I had undertaken a much larger project.

Over the next forty days, the “40 In 40 Days Project” became my passion, and my top priority. As it was vital to me that every single piece was actually written on the day in question, I started pushing sizeable chunks of each day aside to complete the task. The blog was starting to assume a much higher priority in my life than I had ever expected, but I was more than happy to adjust my priorities accordingly. With such a concentrated effort taking place, the quality of the writing started to improve, and I found myself tackling some weighty material: my parents’ divorce, my unhappy adolescence, the struggles I experienced with coming to terms with being gay. This had been intended as a light-hearted project on a light-hearted blog; now, I was getting comments from people telling me how profoundly moved they were by some of the stories I was telling. To this day, the 40 In 40 Days Project remains the best work I have ever produced on this site.

In the same week in early February 2001, two exciting things happened: I had over 100 visitors in a single day (mainly thanks to a “teaser” link on Swish Cottage, but all the same…), and I met a group of other bloggers for the first time, including my mentor himself, and various other luminaries of the London gay blogging mafia. I was constantly thinking about the blog by now, and what I could say on it; the possibilities seemed limitless. Not having written for pleasure since university, I felt as if I was reconnecting with an important part of myself, which had lain dormant for far too long.

In the summer of 2001, I entered an altogether bizarre stage of life; a nine month period of professional inactivity, wherein I was expected to come into the office each day with almost no work to do whatsoever. During this period, while others in the office played games, read books, or went to the gym, I essentially turned into a full-time blogger. I had the space and the freedom to concentrate totally on the site for hours at a time, and started producing vast amounts of content every day. In particular, I developed a taste for lengthy series of related posts (Stations Of The Diva, Vietnam Diary, Nottingham My Nottingham) and interactive stunts, generally in the form of competitions. The most notorious of these was the daily Shirt Off My Back Project, which saw me publicly wearing each shirt in my wardrobe until I ran out, with the final shirt going as a prize to the reader who had correctly guessed the final day. It was freakish to say the least, and almost surreally pointless, and even lost me a few readers in the process – but at the same time, this stunt saw the site rapidly acquiring a whole host of new readers who found the whole caper hilarious. Simply viewed as an audience builder, the Shirt Off My Back Project remains the most successful piece of work on the site.

Yes, I admit it: I was checking my stats obsessively by now, investigating every new link which came my way, and watching my monthly totals creeping upwards. In my own mind, I was chasing David’s figures – but I could never catch him up. By the time I reached the level of readership he was achieving when I first started the blog, he had raced far ahead. It was just one of many ways in which – although this never happened deliberately – I often felt that Troubled Diva was somehow shadowing Swish Cottage by about nine months or so.

However, Troubled Diva meant far more to me than a mere popularity contest; it had come to define a large part of my identity, putting me in touch with a diverse readership which nevertheless shared many of my values and preoccupations. In many ways, blogging had become a way of leading a kind of surrogate social life with like-minded people. I had come to view many of my readers and commenters as friends, even if we had not actually met. Stuck in a quiet office all day, with my weekends spent in an equally quiet country cottage, this began to feel like something of a lifeline.

This nine month period of full-time blogging, which came to an end in the late spring of this year, has always felt to me like Troubled Diva’s Golden Age. Three particular stunts spring to mind. In Guest Week, five other contributors pitched in with uniformly excellent content, making the blog feel like a particularly civilised cocktail party for a while. The Let’s Get More Comments Than Wil Wheaton Project saw me hiding out in a comments box, and refusing to come out until over 230 comments had been added to the same post – after which I would make a £100 donation to the Comic Relief charity. This generated the highest number of visits I have ever had in a single day – 870 in all – and even attracted the attention of the superstar uber-blogger Wil Wheaton himself. Finally, there was the utterly glorious collaborative spectacle that was the Which Decade Is The Tops For Pops? project, in which readers commented and voted on the top ten singles for the same week in 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993 and 2003. Whenever I reflect on everything that has happened on this site, the Which Decade project always emerges as my personal favourite piece of work.

Meanwhile, I attended my first blogmeet (as part of the first of three so-called “Apotheosis Of Blog” weekends), received a comment from an Estonian pop group (the mighty Vanilla Ninja), and managed to get myself stuck inside a Care Bear for a whole week (don’t ask). Crazy times, people! I was also posting a clutch of three or four obscure MP3s every week, as part of the ongoing Troubled Diva Curiosity Box, and building up the music-related side of the blog; some weeks, it seemed as if music was all I wanted to talk about, although this emphasis shifted back again as the year progressed.

Some time in the spring of this year, I also received my first ever sneering reference as an “A-list blogger”, on an ambitious young site that was busily making a name for itself. In just under eighteen months, I had progressed from enfant terrible to ancien regime. I’m not sure that this would have been possible in any other medium. While part of me felt slighted and angered by the sneer, another part of me thought “Ooh, so people think I’m A-list now, do they?”, and felt mightily cheered. The signs had been there; during last year’s massively controversial Guardian Best British Blog contest, a few people had, to my utter amazement and disbelief, tipped me as a possible winner; as it turned out, I wasn’t even shortlisted. During this year’s even more controversial international Bloggies awards, I found myself on the judging panel’s shortlists for three categories (Best European, Best Gay, and Weblog Of The Year) – and this from a competition which I had utterly scorned only a year previously for being elitist and absurd.

With this limited form of success (and let me qualify this by repeating something which I said only recently: having a successful UK weblog is roughly the equivalent of being at #38 in the Albanian singles chart) came a new set of problems. Simply put: Troubled Diva lost its innocence. Aware of its relatively high-profile status, several things happened. Firstly, a certain amount of self-important complacency crept in (meeting a long-standing regular reader for the first time a couple of months ago, I was unflinchingly told that my tone had recently become a bit full of itself). Secondly, I lost my hunger, my drive, my ambition to create a site that was as good as I could possibly make it. In so many ways, I had achieved everything that I could possibly have achieved with the blog; anything further began to feel like mere repetition. In this respect, I think that my fondness for big stunts/events ultimately went against me; I became bogged down with a sense of “Well, how do I beat that?” Thirdly, I suffered the first flushes of a brand new feeling: performance anxiety. For some reason, I had always visualised my readership as a clump of four or five people, clustered behind me as I typed, and straining to look at the screen. Now, the imagined clump had grown to thirty or forty people; it was getting crowded back there. Coupled with this, my period “on the bench” at work came to an end; I had new tasks to perform, and blogging once more became shunted to the sidelines.

Inevitably, the quality started to suffer – most noticeably with my first unqualified failure, the 100 x 100 Project. Conceived as a means of curtailing my tendency towards overly long-winded posts, this was announced as a series of 100 posts, each of which would contain 100 words exactly. Six months previously, with enough time and energy to devote to the self-imposed rigours that this would necessarily entail, I could have had a lot of creative fun with this. As it turned out, the project rapidly turned into an almighty struggle, ending with a marathon weekend session in which I wrote myself out of the commitment by means of an almost stream-of-consciousness posting binge. Referring to this as my “Fat Elvis” period, I resolved to improve.

For a while in the early autumn, as the entire UK blogosphere seemed to be renewed with a kind of “back to school” fervour and energy, the blog came right back on track, in a kind of Indian Summer. Once again, I felt good about the content and the direction. However, I hadn’t reckoned with what was about to happen to me professionally.

In stark contrast to my nine months “on the bench”, I was now plunged into a period of intensive European travel; I have now been working abroad for seven weeks out of the past nine, with trips to Zurich, Milan & Barcelona planned for the next two weeks, and continuing travel scheduled for at least the next six months. This could have been a golden opportunity for the blog; so many observations to make, so many new experiences to document. What I hadn’t bargained for were the levels of stress that this amount of travel would entail; who would have thought that hanging around in airports and on aeroplanes could be so tiring? On my return, I found that I simply couldn’t post with the same energy and ease as before. After obsessively reworking the same three or four sentences for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, I was now abandoning pieces unfinished; something which I had never, ever done previously. It turns out that I need space and mental calm in order to write; stress and pressure are not my muses.

For a while, I was able to paper over the cracks – particularly with an absolutely phenomenal Guest Month, which saw eighteen guests over four weeks producing prodigious amounts of truly excellent content. I even became one of my own guests, inventing a character called Danny in order to write frankly about some sexual episodes from my past. The stories were true; the character was fictitious. Danny was cockily unapologetic in a way that Mike could never have been. Danny spat the story straight out, whereas Mike would have spent hundreds of extra words qualifying and explaining everything to the nth degree. I liked Danny a lot, and was sorry to see him go. Few people twigged; some were even trying to persuade him to start his own blog.

Ratings soared during guest month, before dropping back to a steady 400 to 500 visits a day, weekends excluded. Another stay of execution came in the form of Zena, one of the guest bloggers, who suddenly re-emerged with a jaw-droppingly prolific flurry of posts entitled “All the w@nkers I’ve ever slept with”. (Amusingly, all the men she had ever slept with were called Danny.) A few protested; most lapped up the disarmingly eloquent / sharp / funny / moving / disturbing content for as long as it lasted. Which was not for long, as it turned out; the Internet is never as private as we might wish it to be, despite all our attempts to cover our tracks, and, as quickly as she had emerged, Zena disappeared in a puff of smoke.

This wasn’t another Fat Elvis period; I saw it as more akin to Take That after Robbie left and they all got stupid haircuts, or Graham Norton after he went five nights a week, or Roseanne after she won the lottery. With an ill-advised “Which recreational substance am I on?” stunt, the writing was on the wall. Firstly, and most obviously of all: it was faked. Secondly: the humour was tired and corny. Thirdly: it was a complete misrepresentation of anything which I, or anyone around me, has ever experienced. One commenter described it as the sound of barrel-bottoms being scraped. They weren’t wrong.

Two nights ago, down at the dear old Two Brewers in Clapham, my partner K and my erstwhile mentor David of Swish Cottage met for the very first time. To my considerable surprise, they formed an instant, eager bond, and went into a tight conversational huddle for the next 45 minutes or so. While they talked a few feet away, I danced alone, as I sometimes do in order to clear my thoughts and escape the general messiness around me (it had already been a long and excessive night). As I danced, a new realisation crept up on me and flooded my thoughts. Examining it from every angle, there was no denying that it made perfect, almost poetic sense. Behind me, K was explaining to David that sometimes, my blog felt like The Other Woman, while I imagine David was explaining why he called a halt to Swish Cottage about nine months ago. (It was, as I say, a messy night; afterwards, neither of them could properly remember anything much of the conversation.)

As I say…I have always felt that Troubled Diva has carried something of an echo from Swish Cottage, delayed by about nine months. You all know where this is heading now, don’t you?

I am hereby putting Troubled Diva on indefinite hold, effective immediately. But not for destructive or defeatist reasons; instead, the reasons are all positive. Essentially, I have decided to re-prioritise my life. I am simply not able to continue the blog to the standard which I require, without impacting severely on my working life, my home life, my social life - and most importantly of all, on my relationship. These are the things which I value most of all; blogging comes secondary to all of them. In any case, my journey is in many ways complete; I have done everything with Troubled Diva which is there to be done, said everything which there is to be said. Anything further would be no more than repetition. (Oh, did I say that already? Well, QED then.) Besides, I have no wish to run a blog which has become more of a chore than a pleasure, and no wish to preside over a blog which is in inexorable decline. Instead, I have decided to quit when I’m ahead, to bow out at the top of my game, to leave with happy memories of a fantastically fulfilling and rewarding period of my life. I simply cannot believe what this site has become over the last two years, and can only apologise if much of what I have said just now has come across as self-aggrandising; I simply needed to set it all down.

To everyone who has read, commented, e-mailed, linked and blogrolled: my heartfelt thanks and best wishes. In so many ways, Troubled Diva has been defined by its audience, and I couldn’t have asked for a more appreciative, interested, thoughtful and supportive audience than you lot. In well over 5000 comments since I switched to YACCS 18 months ago, maybe only 4 or 5 have been nasty, and I consider myself extremely lucky to have escaped so lightly.

Finally, I’d like to make one big massive hip-hop-stylee shout-out to all the blogs which I have enjoyed reading over the last couple of years. (After a suitable period of blogging cold turkey, I shall no doubt resume reading some of you – but at least for a while, I am ducking off the radar completely. I’m not very good at half measures, and this is the only way.) A particular shout-out goes to all the bloggers, too numerous to mention, who I have met in real life, many of which I now consider as friends. (Blogging has changed since I started: it’s less aloof, less self-important, less geeky…and friendlier, more community-based, more collaborative, more mutually supportive, and a lot more fun.) More shout-outs to those bloggers which I still haven’t met in person, such as Anna of Little Red Boat, and Zed/Quarsan of the My Life In The Boyfriend’s Bush Of Twats dynasty. Special shout-outs to those of you who have actually been inspired by Troubled Diva to start blogs of your own – there is no greater tribute. And…oh, I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t, but, you know, fuck it…extra-special shout-outs to my absolute favourite bloggers: the ones who, when I see their names on the Updated UK Weblogs list, I absolutely HAVE to check out there and then, with no delay. NOT because they’re “the best”, whatever that’s supposed to mean – but because in each case, there’s a certain indescribable something about their sites which compels me to read them. I’m going to name names: Big Troubled Diva Lurve In Da House to my official Top Five: Marcus of Bboyblues (so funny, so honest), Nigel of Invisible Stranger (so consistently entertaining, so effortlessly readable), noodle vague of The World, Backwards (an unsung genius, even if it’s a harrowing white-knuckle ride at times), London Mark (you’re not telling me this boy isn’t going to win the “best written” section Guardian Compo – he’s a dead cert) and…finally finally finally, my Desert Island Blogger, the closest thing I have to a blog-sister, for all his curmudgeonly ways…the unique, the irrepressible, the frankly fairly scary at times, but I just can’t help loving him anyway…Quickos of Quickos Daily News…darling Peter of Naked Blog.

What of the future? I may be back, but only if situations change and priorities re-arrange. I may resume posting, but much more infrequently. I may start up again as a “favourite postings” linklog – a sort of Linkmachinego for blogs only (this idea actually appeals enormously). Or you might never hear from me again. Sorry to be such a tease, but you can’t predict the future.

If I stay much longer, then I’m going to start sounding like Sally Field or Gwyneth Paltrow at the Oscars, and that would never do. I think that someone needs to start up the orchestra over the top of me, or yank me off the stage with an umbrella handle, or something. It’s just that all of a sudden, I don’t want to go.

Except that, really and truly, I do.

It’s been emotional. I love you all. Fare thee well.

Mike xxx

P.S. K is short for Kevin. So now you know.

P.P.S. Yes, I know that there aren’t any links in any of the above. Fuck off, I’m dead. Now go outside and look at the fucking flowers.