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I have been a blogger for almost three years on my own blog and for about 18 months here at Samizdata. The nicest thing that has happened due to this is that it has allowed me to become connected and to meet a great many people I would not have met otherwise. Not the least of these are of course Perry, Brian, Adriana, Gabriel, David and the rest of the Samizdata team.

And of course links and comments come unexpectedly, from people with in widely dispersed places and from widely dispersed cultures with who one none the less discovers one has a fair bit in common. (When I write a travel article, it is always nice to be commented on and linked to by people native to the place I was writing about. And this often happens.

But being linked to is fun. Take for instance something that happened this evening. Looking at the refers to my personal blog, I discovered that I was listed in a page of links to expatriate blogs, that is blogs written by people living in places other than their native countries. This is fine and indeed good. I am certainly an expatriate. And expatriate blogs do have certain things in common. If you live in a country other than your own you do find that you look at things in a slightly different way than do natives, and you do have this in common with other expatriates, even expatriates from wildly different places and who are living in wildly different places.

And unsurprisingly the compiler of this list is an expatriate blogger himself. Like me, this blogger lives in London. However, whereas I am Australian, he is apparently German. (Actually, I have no idea whether it is a "he" or a "she", but I kind of think the mindset is a male one. And of course he could be Austrian or Swiss). As he is writing in a language I do not understand, I cannot read the blog. But from the pictures, it is none the less obvious to me that the author of this blog is my kind of guy. And possibly also Brian's kind of guy. And perhaps Jackie's kind of guy.