This Blog is now One Year Old – Thank you for all your Support

The Living in Montserrat Blog is one year old today, and over the last 12 months I have written 120 posts with an aggregate total of 90,000 words. The blog has had 17,000 views and gained 75 subscribers from 10,000 people across 110 countries. There have been 450 likes and 62 comments on WordPress, plus many others on Twitter and Facebook. These are quite staggering statistics, particularly as I live on a tiny island and write badly about my own very niche interests.  Football, human rights and shopping for food are a strange combination but, despite the vast quantities of writing about Montserrat from researchers and tourists, and a seemingly endless stream of consultant’s reports, no one writes regularly about my three favourite nation-building topics. Or about the detours I make from my core subjects whenever the inspiration arises.

The quality of my readership is impressive too. The football writing attracts readers from all over the world, and although Montserrat has only played four games in the past year, I’ve managed to write 30 blog posts about their story.  Even the players read the blog, including the team captain. Every now and then there is a little flurry of views on an older post about a particular player and I always assume a potential suitor is googling them. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes the player has tweeted it himself.

I syndicate some of the football posts, so they have appeared on other websites, including msn.com and Read Sport. I have also provided content for both Montserrat local newspapers and made a few appearances on ZJB. This breadth of coverage has also enabled me to register as a sports journalist with CONCACAF. I am, after all, Montserrat’s only football writer. I had already sorted out my accreditation for the Gold Cup finals in anticipation of Montserrat qualifying before the team’s final game. I am the person who spotted that things were falling into place for a Montserrat qualification, and also the one who spotted that an off-field decision by CONCACAF meant they probably wouldn’t make it, so I’m taking credit for inspiring the various Montserrat stories written in the print media.  The next Nations League season is in the autumn and I’m still trying to find a way of getting to El Salvador for the biggest game in Montserrat’s group.

I’ve written 25 blog posts on human (and civil) rights issues in Montserrat. My writing on disability has been published by the British Parliament and is referred to in the annual report on Montserrat submitted by the UN Secretariat to its Decolonisation Committee.  On human rights issues, I am usually reporting what other agencies have said about Montserrat, rather than pushing my own views, particularly UNICEF, the UN, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association,  and the UK ‘s Independent Commission for Aid Impact. I like to think I’m making sure that these critiques and proposals are not forgotten and that the issues stay on the agenda. I know my writing is read by Legislative Assembly Members, including the Premier, so I write in hope.

But there are some issues that I do mention repeatedly, and probably still will continue to do so until someone notices. And there are are a few more to come: Why is welfare paid from a fund met from social security contributions? That’s never going to seriously tackle poverty and means that welfare is not supported by UK aid.  Why are non-nationals illegally denied welfare, particularly as they are not exempt from paying into the fund? Why are we not lobbying for an increase in the 4 specialist NHS places we are allowed each year?  The Falkland Islands has unlimited access. Why is modern slavery tolerated on the island? Why can’t girls under 18 be prescribed contraceptives? Why can’t under 16’s get medical care without parental permission? What percentage of the 50 children born per year in Montserrat are born to teenagers?  Why are people under 21 and civil servants banned from standing in elections?

Why is there no disability legislation? Why have the Government’s ancient General Orders not been updated to reflect the Labour Code and the Public Administration Act? Why did the attempt to set up a Human Rights Commission fail? Why did the attempt to adopt the UN Convention on all Forms of Discrimination Against Women fail? Why were the recommendations for electoral reform made by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association never addressed? I could go on and probably will at some point.

My writing on the environment and disaster risk reduction is also read all over the world, including in Switzerland where the Red Cross is based. One particular post was read by over 100 workers from the British Red Cross alone. These are published on specialist international websites too. The ones on logistics and procurement in emergency situations appeared in Spend Matters and Public Spend Forum. My blogs about the ferry are particularly popular too, and the blog was blocked from Facebook for a while after some mass sharing of one particular ferry piece.

There are only nine posts on shopping and food on the blog, so I’m slipping there. I’m not sure if I’ve got anyone price checking, or reading the food labels and best before dates, but I do know people who have made my low fat, low sugar, and very simple cost-effective meals.  I still don’t understand why the same carton of UHT milk, that arrived from the same source on the same boat,  can have a price variation between shops of over a dollar. I suppose the answer is that not everyone has a car.

I said that people from 110 countries had read the blog and it is interesting that only 20% of views come from Montserrat itself. 65% come from the USA, UK and Antigua and Barbuda, which suggests that I am most widely read among the Montserrat diaspora. The other 15% of readers are global (although there is no interest from China where I suspect I’m blocked).  The tourist eye views of Montserrat, from sailors and other visitors, which I occasionally reblog, are very popular and this suggests that Montserratians abroad are keen to read positive stories about their homeland. No one writes a blog saying “I went to Montserrat and hated it”. It is also surprising how many visitors to the island who read up on the place before arriving read my blog, so the tourist information is for them too.

It has all gone surprisingly well and I will just keep plodding along with it for a while.  The blogging course I went on, run by Nerissa Golden, was called “blogging for business”, but I haven’t quite worked out the “for business” aspect of it yet. Had Montserrat made it to the Gold Cup Finals I suspect that covering the tournament would have cost me a lot more than I could have earned, but it would have been fun. Some of my posts are based on tenders I submitted and didn’t win, and applications for jobs I didn’t get.

So the writing is still the thing. Had I not gone to Nerissa’s blogging course, and had we not followed her instruction to set up our blogs and post something straight away, I may never have got going.  I can’t match the quality of the prose that appears on some other people’s blogs that I follow, but I do seem to have the knack of spotting what’s important. I love it when people recommend the blog to me (not knowing that I write it), tell me that they laugh out loud reading it (when I’m merely pointing out the obvious) or tell me that someone important doesn’t like what I’ve written (because that means my opinions have value).

The human rights element was a late addition to the blog. After the blogging course had finished Nerissa was prompting us to write about social issues, specifically around Emancipation Day and Domestic Abuse Month. When you start listening to the conversations taking place on the island, and reading around, you do quickly get the sense of a matter of fact acceptance of unequal rights, and if you are blogging it is hard not to write about it. Because of the number of overseas agencies encouraging change in Montserrat, there is plenty of source material.

We had a  public enquiry this year too, led by the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee, which covered human rights. The huge amount of evidence submitted by Montserratians provided a wealth of information for those wanting to get under the skin of the different attitudes on the island. The Committee also made recommendations, such as abolishing the cap on specialist NHS treatments, that were never reported in the local media.  But that isn’t what people, on the whole, come to read when they click on the blog. People want to read about tangible things relevant to their lives now.

Here are the top ten posts to date: Three about football, three about the ferry, two food, one tourism and, oddly, one about the UN Decolonisation Committee.

1. The Montserrat Football Team Player Profiles: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/the-montserrat-football-team-player-profiles I think it was the photograph of the Montserrat football players on the beach, rather than my incisive prose, that got the hits on this one. The follow-up articles rarely got more than 100 views. This one had over 1,000 shares.
2. Paying for a Flight and Catching the Ferry: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/paying-for-a-flight-and-catching-the-ferry Something I knocked up when I got back after a long trip abroad (for a medical treatment not available on the island).
3. Ferry Tales (Part Two): https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/ferry-tales-part-2 This is actually more about the airport, but getting here is an experience we all share.
4. Shopping for Food in Montserrat: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/shopping-in-montserrat This is one of the first things I wrote and is still one of the most popular.
5. How much does a tin of baked beans cost in Montserrat?: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/how-much-does-a-tin-of-baked-beans-cost-in-monsterrat Keeping down your shopping bill.
6. Ferry Tales (Part One):https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/ferry-tales-part-one Everyone’s favourite subject.
7. God Save Spencer Weir-Daley: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/god-save-spencer-weir The Montserrat football team’s first-ever win against a mainland country.
8. Donaldson Romero’s UN Dilemma: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/donaldson-romeros-un-dilemma One of four posts I wrote about the Premier’s most recent appearance at the UN’s Decolonisation Committee. Surprisingly popular.
9. Montserrat’s Gold Cup hopes take a hit: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2018/12/12/monserrats-gold-cup-hopes-take-a-hit This was slow burner that picked up a lot of clicks from football fans on Twitter. I was the first to spot the implications of a CONCACAF decision affecting the Montserrat football team.
10. Montserrat: Devastation, Resilience & Beauty: https://livinginmontserrat.wordpress.com/2019/01/06/montserrat-devastation-resilience-beauty This was not written by me, but it’s the most popular tourist-eye view of the island that I reblogged. It’s taken from a blog called Learning the Language.

These 10 posts account for around 40% of all reads on the blog, but the most liked posts are the food ones. If you would like to try some of my recipes the chickpea ones are here:

Learning to Love the Chickpea (Part 2 – My Recipes)

A year ago I joined Facebook so I could join Nerissa’s blogging group.  I now post things there that I feel deserve a wider audience, including the ten posts above.  But I think I’ve reached the point where I have a rough idea of what will get an audience on Facebook and what won’t, and what will grow organically if I don’t actively promote it. Most people are reading about football, food and the ferry, so want to be entertained, not challenged.  That’s what gets shared anyway, and I should say thank you at this point to those who do share.

My presence on Facebook is clearly useful:  More accurately, it is an uncomfortable necessity. But this got me thinking. I had a police officer come to see me the other day who said he’d been trying to find me for months. He told me that no one on the island knew who I was, how to find me, or even how to pronounce my name.  They said they’d never come across anyone with such a low profile before. Apparently, I’m virtually a hermit.  I think I like it that way but it’s still a little disappointing if true.  But maybe it’s not true. I think I feel the subject of another 800 words fermenting inside me. Watch this space.