The Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

You join us on a sunny June day in the early 1950s.

Unremarkable English Village, just inside the commuter belt at a gathering full of wealthy professionals,

the kind who change into tweed at weekends, and older villages who tucked quietly to themselves,

as the village is new and somewhat controversial writer Writers Centre is about to be opened.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowd fund the books they

really want to read.

And I'm Andy Miller, author of the year of reading dangerously.

Joining us today is Dickon Edwards. Hello Dickon Edwards. Hello,

you invite me. Thank you for coming in. Dickon is a London-based writer,

dandy, occasional DJ, an erstwhile musician.

In the 1990s and 2000s he toured and released albums with the bands Orlando and Foska.

He has kept an online diary, the diary at the center of the earth since 1997, and in

2017 it was recognised as the longest running of its kind by the Center for Life Writing Research at King's College London.

Well done. Do you call it a blog or do you prefer not to call it a blog? I think a blog is interactive.

It predates blogs. In fact, the word block was coined after I started the diary.

That's amazing. Yeah. And what's changed if you can say in a, it's a silly question really,

but when you started doing it, presumably nobody else was...

No, I had to write it in raw

external code.

I had to learn how to write it with all the tags and so on

927.

...