Kev QuirkModify

2026-09-15 18:21:00

Last weekend my wife called me over to show me something on her phone. She was going through her old emails and came across some emails we had passed back and forth, from when we first met.

She and I met in a club and went on a couple of dates, but then I deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. We continued to converse via email mostly, and phone where possible - this was before the days of FaceTime etc. - and the rest is history. That was in 2006, and 20 years later we're still very happily married with a couple kids.

Anyway, upon reading the emails I immediately wanted the ground to swallow me up. Not because they were overly mushy or lovey dovey (they were), but because the spelling and grammar were horrendous. I was never a particularly academic kid - in fact, I was mostly disengaged in school and really didn't try. I was clever, but I never applied myself. I was too busy being a stupid teenager. As a result, my written English was awful (it's still not great now, but it's better).

For example, I didn't know the difference between "there", "they're", and "their". And you can forget about "your" versus "you're". "Too" vs "to"? Not a chance. Where, were, and we're baffled me. I had no idea where a comma was supposed to go in a sentence, and I'd never even heard of an Oxford comma.

You get the idea.

Fixing the problem

During my time in the Army, written English wasn't really needed, so I wasn't too concerned. But after getting out and finding a job in IT, it quickly became apparent that my lack of basic English knowledge would hold me back. So I decided to fix it, and enrolled in a night school course.

To my surprise I really enjoyed it. It turned out that writing and learning are a lot of fun, and I was constantly looking for ways to practice my new found writing skills. I think that's part of why I still love typing - I just find creating words on a screen a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm weird. I know.

So I completed the night school course and came away with much improved grammar and a desire to write all the things. But replying to emails and writing reports in work wasn't scratching the creative itch for me.

Discovering blogging

One of the services the IT company I worked for offered was web hosting. I'd never really got involved in any of that, so learning about DNS, web servers, MySQL etc. was really interesting. I'd done a bit of basic web design during my college IT course, but never anything more.

"College" in the UK is different to college in the US. We call that university here. In college we do our A-levels, which are intermediate qualifications between high school and university. I don't have a degree.

A few of our customers had WordPress sites, and it blew my mind. Here is a web application that I can host myself, on my own server, with my own domain name. Furthermore, I can write what I want and publish it on the web for anyone to read. This was the creative outlet I'd been looking for!

So in 2010 I registered kevquirk.com, set up WordPress on a shared host, and started writing. Sixteen years later I'm still here, and still thoroughly enjoying writing on the web. Albeit no longer on WordPress.

Final thoughts

It's funny how these seemingly unrelated things connect together in retrospect and take us down a road we never thought we'd walk. Back in 2000, when I was leaving high school, if you'd have asked my high school English teacher (hi Mrs Daniels!) if she thought I'd be producing creative writing on the web for 16 years, she'd have laughed in your face. Hard.

But I am. And it's all thanks to a basic written English course that I attended for a couple of months, just to improve my writing to help me with work.

I'm not really sure how to wrap this one up. I suppose my final thought is that it's never too late to learn. And you never know where it will take you. A simple thing like a basic English night course could end up forming the longest running, most enjoyable hobby you have in your life.

2026-09-13 17:35:00

Nelly the pup absolutely loving life in the field! 🤣

2026-09-11 22:02:00

Because a basic sitemap would be boring!

https://kevquirk.com/sitemap

2026-09-10 20:49:00

The constant outrage on #Mastodon (and maybe other social sites?) for [bad thing of the day] is so tiring.

2026-09-08 03:39:00

Do you know what the hardest thing to do on earth is?

Quantum physics? No.
Solving world hunger? Nope.
Getting Trump impeached? Nah.

It's climbing the stairs on leg day! 🦵🏼

2026-09-05 00:19:00

I decided I was bored with the previous design, but wanted something that was in keeping with the previous design (brutalist and using a monospace font) yet different.

I abandoned the yellow accent and went back to blue, my favourite colour. I also changed the font to Victor Mono.

I like how the new design draws from different versions of the site's history - lots of neo-brutalist design, clean colours and font, plus a bit of whimsy. If you're reading this via RSS, here's what the new design of the site looks like (although I'd recommend you head to the site and experience it properly):

I love how Pure Blog makes it so easy to change things like this. All I really did was pick a new colour palette, then add some custom CSS. The rest is all default Pure Blog, pretty much.

Hope you like the new lick of paint!