Why do you have your own website?

A quite reasonable question I’m often asked is; ‘Why do you have a website?’ It’s something I’ve never been able to answer particularly adequately. Personal websites as a rule, habit the realms of obscene narcissism and a strange twitterish belief that other people might actually be interested in meandering ramblings punctuated only by slightly blurry pictures.

So it’s with no small amount of pleasure that I’m proud to reveal why it is in the last 9 months of 2010, that people end up on BenAston.com. Putting aside the slight oddity that some people are actually Googling me, according to the stats, visits seem to fall into 6 key articles which I’ve helpfully summarised below:

• Billie Piper and Baby Winston – possibly one of the greatest tabloid stories to come from the stable in 2008. I revealed that Billie Piper named her child after our fish, Winston.
• Mongol Centre Explosion – Documenting the phenomenal rise of Mongol Centres on a particular road in West Kensington.
• Pizza Express finger – A slightly cheap SEM game to hop on the back of Pizza Express and their perpetual 2 for 1 offers, whilst also shedding some light on why their knives are so bad.
• The ipad and manbags – A timely article exposing how nouveau homme will probably need a manbag to house his new ipad.
• What is structure and agency? How does this framework help us in political analysis? –  Interestingly, the only non-blog content to feature in the top 30 items is a link to a particularly helpful politics essay exploring, as the title would lead you to believe; structure and agency. Riveting reading.
• Beginners guide to riding a Shetland pony – A real highlight for me was seeing that my beginners guide to riding Shetland ponies was obviously of real use to visitors. Bonus. Must write more of these.

Poor excuse.