I was ambling through my site statistics, which I keep a vague eye on, and thought I’d share with you some of the things people are searching for before they end up at ThePickards…

1. +absinthe pissing +blood — I rather feel that someone who has been drinking so much absinthe that they are now pissing blood would be better off seeking advice from a qualified medical practicioner, rather than reading my omnivore’s 100 post were I separately talk about having had so much beetroot I thought I was pissing blood and, on an entirely separate occasion, drinking some absinthe. So this is maybe a little disturbing…
2. Pirate — if you search for pirate images on Google (at least in the UK), you will find ThePickards top of the list, for my post talk like a pirate 2007, which features a pirate image by J.J. McCullough which he released into the public domain and is hosted on Wikipedia. How on earth my site achieved a higher ranking for it than Wikipedia, I’m not entirely sure.
3. Find Madeleine — there are still a couple of people, every day, finding my site by searching for “Find Madeleine”, in relation to my I can’t help find Madeleine, so stop asking post which many people thought (probably correctly) was insensitive, although I still feel it raised some valid points. However, I was disturbed to see that my site now appears on the first page of search results for ‘Find Madeleine’, which was never my intention (the intention was to express my opinions to readers of this blog, rather than to get traffic). I have therefore updated my robots.txt exclusion protocol to ask search engines no longer to spider this page.
4. Thanatophobia — a phobia of death. This all stems from my initial post living with thanatophobia which has accumulated over 250 comments. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who has an abnormal fear of death (I still defy anyone to describe it as ‘unreasonable’). Indeed, it appears for many of the commenters, knowing they are not alone in this fear helps.
5. Disabled Sex also has been cropping up regularly since my march post Disabled Sex, although I do wonder whether the people finding the site were interested in disability issues and politics, or whether they were hoping to find a site with some “specialist interest” pictures.
6. porn.uk — if I thought the last one might relate to, as Viz would put it, “Gentleman’s relaxation”, then I think this one definitely does. I’ll put my hands on the table here (given the subject matter, you probably want to see where they are anyway) — this was in relation to the Jacqui Smith’s husband watching porn thing, and the post was titled man watches porn:uk politics melts down so I can maybe see why I am cropping up in those searches, although again I feel I am maybe not the site they are looking for.
7. Ben Murray wiggles — Ben Murray is one of the dancers with the kids australian mega-success The Wiggles. If you’ve not heard of them, you’ve probably not got pre-school kids. They are huge. Yet I’m surprised I’m the top result for mentioning one of their dancers by name because of my 2007 post Wiggle Dancing: Why I’m A Wiggles Fan.
8. Harry Patch obituary — Harry Patch, also known as the last fighting tommy is a veteran of World War One. He is 110 years old, and, to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing, still alive.

But however you’ve got here, and whether or not you’ve found exactly what you were looking for, hello and welcome…