A time come around again
This particular piece is getting to be a habit as the years go around, writes Brian Byrne. Six of them now since I first began this bit of cyberjournalism rooted in the town where I grew up and stayed to make my life.
At the time I didn't have any idea how long it might last. That wasn't an issue, because the whole thing was an experiment. Even that's too big a word. A tryout, maybe. A curiosity. To see if anyone might be interested. Also to do what I used to when I began contributing to The Bridge almost four decades ago, a staggered and unplanned start into an eventual career in journalism. Writing about my town and its doings, and its people.
Was anyone interested? Well that they were is now part of the Diary's history. From less than a couple of dozen readers a week, by the end of the first year, the pages of the Diary had been accessed no less than 35,000 times.
And it just keeps going on ... and growing on. In that first year we used about a thousand photographs. Today there are close to 10,000 pictures connected to the Diary, and they have been viewed around a quarter of a million times between them. With almost 200 sets of slideshows each now typically gets played between 800-2,000 times within a week of uploading.
There are more than 3,700 stories posted since the beginning, and our readership is now some 14,000 pages a month. Sometimes I jokingly tell people that I created a monster which has to be fed every day. Truth is, though, I only do it because I enjoy it. And, more importantly, because all of you out there are reading it. If you weren't there, it wouldn't be.
As I read back on my roundup of the Diary's first year, I see that we reported then on pretty much the same things that exercise our community today, but moved on. Life is like that, a large number of small journeys on a train that stops at many stations.
Looking back on that first year, we can see many highlights, and hopes and endeavours of many individuals and groups, some of which came to fruition, others which didn't. And there were lows too. The most difficult story I ever wrote was that year, recording the death of my younger brother Des. It was also the year I had to write about the passing of Pat Dunlea, and Paddy Mitchell, among others who had been part of the fabric of the town from as long as I could remember.
Recording the passing of Kilcullen people is just a small part of what the Diary does. We don't catch them all, of course, but over the last six years we've marked about 130 such departures of people from or related to the community.
And so, to finish this little annual musing about what is at one level a hobby for me, and at another an important part of my identity and my life, let me write again the names of the people who passed on from our community in 2010. They include John McGrath, Carmel St Leger, Brigid Clifford, Don Charlton, Maisie Bolger, Josie English, Joe Fagan, Ann Brennan, Mary Kelly, Isobella Urquhart, Iain Scott, Lilian Healy, Andrew Durney, Margaret Keogh, Mary Pender, Tom Bermingham, and Sheila Dowling.
May they rest in peace, and may we not forget that they were each in their own time an integral part of what each of us in Kilcullen collectively are today. Our community.
