In the 1960s, when I was a teenager, I was a DJ on pirate radio ships (London, Noordzee & Veronica) for a while, and a buddy of mine, Alfred Lagarde, became the most famous DJ Holland has ever known. One of the programs we did on the radio (me as a mere side-kick) was Countdown Café, and after Alfred died on January 1st, 1998, I borrowed the name for a special blog on the website of De Volkskrant, a national, liberal, left-wing newspaper.
With all the lonely people in mind, all the souls surfing the internet until deep into the night, because they’ve got nothing better to do, I founded Countdown Café, the very first virtual pub on the internet in the form of a blog, where people could drop in, order a virtual drink, “meet” other pubgoers, dump their shit, or just have a chat. Most blogs have a certain topic, but Countdown Café was a typical off-topic blog, where the “client” decides what the topic is, just like in a real pub, and where you can listen to good music.
And also, just like in a real pub, I remembered what my “clients” were “drinking”, wishful thinking or not, I remembered what they “talked” about the other day, so I could show my interest in them, as you expect when you visit a Cheers kinda pub, where everybody knows your name.
Countdown Café proved to be a phenomenal succes at the end of December 2006, during Xmas until way after New Year’s Day. Then I realised that there are so many people who live on their own, who don’t have friends and family, who are divorced, and who actually are terribly lonely during the holidays, because they have no-one to go to, while they don’t want anyone to know that. And I was one of them. I realised that their computers were their best friends, and that I, with my virtual Countdown Café, could make a difference, could make them feel part of a “family”.
During the 2006/2007 Holidays I kept Countdown Café running, almost 24 hours per day, and I was elected Blogger of the Year because of it, and never in the history of De Volkskrant did any blog have more visitors than Countdown Café. Countdown Café it was, literally, on New Year’s Eve, and this year, 2011, there’s another countdown. De Volkskrant has decided to close their blogspace as part of the cuts the paper has to make, which means that a lot of valuable blogs (and all the valuable replies) will be deleted. And history repeats itself: once our pirate radio stations were shut down, for whatever reasons, probably just because some people want to control other people.
So I decided to rescue ten of the most popular Countdown Café blogs, which you will find here on WordPress, unedited and in their pure form. Remember, it’s only ten blogs I reproduced here. In reality there are over a hundred, a huge archive, because Countdown Café was active day in, day out, for many months.
Five years ago it was a great thing to do, and people loved it. I couldn’t do it again, because you have to excel yourself, and it takes a lot of time. Five years ago I was in between relationships, and it was very functional for me to have a project during the winter holiday season. It kept me off the street and I really enjoyed doing it. But times have changed, and once again I’m part of a family, and that family wouldn’t be able to understand why I would be “chatting” on the computer for almost 24 hours a day between Xmas and New Year, and having a great time doing it.
Also, I wonder if the people who were with me on the CDC blog during those days, and believe me, we were close, are — like me — in a different position now. Maybe they are, just like me, in a meaningful relationship, and maybe they’re looking back on these days, only five years ago, with a smile on their face. I hope they do. I do.
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