So, my visitor and page view stats saw a spike on Friday. A big one. The arrival of 15-20 times the usual number of visitors over a twenty-four hour period meant that on the graph friday looks like a skyscraper surrounded by the bungalows of all the other days:

Intrigued by the sudden massive upswing I clicked through to the day’s full stats to see where this traffic was coming from. Turns out that the Guardian dot com featured a Richard Carter penned article concerning a current beard related controversy and, as far as I can tell from my site stats, someone commenting on the article linked to this beard related post of mine from January 2011 featuring reader suggestions for the best writer’s beard.

In a neat piece of internet reciprocation, my January 2011 post on the best writers’ beards was actually the second of two, my first post actually being inspired by a Guardian dot com post on the best beards in literature. Both my writers’ beards posts have featured in the top five most popular pages on the site in the years since they were posted and clearly they will remain top of the heap when WordPress emails me my end of 2013 review.

If you are a new reader of the blog who has found there way here via the Guardian discussion thread, welcome to my tiny corner of the internet. I hope you stick around and please feel free to say hi in the comments. And whoever it was out there who linked to my post, try as I might I have been unable to find the link itself and identify you, but you have my thanks for sending so many eyes to my blog. It would be great if you could make yourself know in the comments too.

Looking at the stats for Saturday things are settling back to pre-beard post related levels. which probably means its time to think up another literary beard related post. Judging by the volume of comments on the Richard Carter article and the volume of traffic pushed this way from them, beards, whether literary or otherwise, are clearly a hot topic.