Tiny darlings and moderately sized stalkers, welcome to the brand new look for The Demon Gin!

Why, you may ask? Why change the format at all, I don’t like CHANGE, you might wail. Much as I liked the original format, it was always my intention to upgrade it and create something unique for the blog. And when I say create, I mean I paid someone to do it.

All that you see is courtesy of the fantastic designer and my friend (I suppose) Emma Spicer. Links to her work and website are coming soon, but message me if you want to contact her directly to hire/burn her.

Sooooooooooooo, with the new design hot off the canvas and January drawing to a close, now seems like a good time for a round up of all we have been through together in the past month (six weeks really). I plan to do this at the end of each month, let me know if it offends you to your very core.

To begin at the beginning, the most momentous event was, obviously, the launch of the blog itself.

For ever more, 18^th December will be known as Demon Gin day, on which you must drink at least four Bombay Sapphires, eat a vat of whitebait, and go and sit on the stairs and have a cry. I don’t care if it’s your birthday on the same day, this is more important.

It’s been an erotic start to my blogging escapade from Canterbury’s core, and an immensely enjoyable one.

As explained from the start (I think…), I wanted to use these first few weeks to test different material and styles, so thanks for baring with me.

To date, we’ve had more than 4,400 page views in just over six weeks, with most readers based in UK, USA, Canada (thank you relatives, friends and people I don’t know), and Germany…for some reason.

There were rants of all shapes and sizes, from the festive season and the horror of Christmas trees to life without internet and one man’s struggle against his wife’s womanly functions. I also ran into camera related issues.

We ate smoked salmon pate, and read as The Bizarre crossed the border, visited a bank, was stalked by an office infant, and advised on how to make no one want you. Love was in also in the air in the not real advice series, Ten Things Not To Do, where New Year’s Eve put in an appearance too.

While the rest of the UK was busy complaining about a tiny bit of water, two new features launched – Places to Quaff and Quarrel, and Obvious Beauty.

These have been some of most popular posts to date, with my review of The Black Dog micropub in Whitstable notching up more than 600 page views already, and The Black Griffin’s write up gathering a respectable number too.

Obvious Beauty set you up with a list of the beauty basicsthat everyone can ignore, and dipped into a pot of bareMinerals and came out unscathed. There was also an episode or two involving hair…it wasn’t pretty.

There will be many more rants, reviews and ramblings to come – look out for the Lady Luck, Café Des Amis and The Dolphin, and learn more about lemons, pub quizzes, Dermalogica and why you should keep your opinions on diet coke to your God damn self.

Big thanks as ever to all those who shared my posts on Facebook and Twitter – this has made a massive difference to my page views, and I very much appreciate the ongoing support.

Keep reading, sharing and plotting, tiny darlings.