November marks the first anniversary of this blogging lark. It’s been an exciting and interesting year, and while the economic backdrop to my new working life has been fairly turbulent, my own year has been busy, challenging and much more fun than I’d ever expected.

Over the last twelve months, I have:


• Tweeted 1,305 times
• Attracted 421 twitter followers
• Had 3,298 visitors to my website (Including one regular visitor from Kenya. Hello!)
• Built up 895 SuperQuinn points and placed around 500 unexpected items in the bagging area
• Written twelve blog posts
• Uploaded around 300 photos to my flickr account
• Had 18,992 views of my photos (Nobody from Kenya though)
• Attended 105 meetings
• Attended fourteen networking events (the earliest began at 6.30am. The latest finished at 2.30am)
• Drank around 1,200 pints (Thanks to Emma for working that out) of which approximately 500 were Guinness and the remainder were Carlsberg
• Doodled my way through four spiral bound notebooks during the course of meetings and drafting reports
• Lost €59m worth of Dublin Bus refund tickets and three Hodges Figgis loyalty cards.
• Pretended to be a customer of the Shelbourne Hotel in order to use their toilets three times
• Bought one iPhone
• Became an iPhone bore
• Spoke at seven conferences
• Been interviewed on radio three times and in the papers four times
• Been called “a cheaper David McWilliams” once (I wonder if Mr McWilliams is ever called “an expensive Peter Stafford”).
• Written nine posts for myrecession.ie website
• Written nine “The Professionals” columns in the Irish Construction Industry Magazine
• Been called “The man who can save the construction industry” once (Take that, Mr McWilliams)
• Lied frequently about my profession to taxi drivers (I tell them I work in the taxi regulator’s office)
• Had great fun.

Thanks everyone for making the last year so fun and interesting and here’s to more change in the next twelve months.