Sometimes statistics bring out the inner nerd in me. I can spend hours on Football365 looking at the various ways they slice the data to present Crawley Town’s position in the Conference league, let alone the Hammers’ Premiership performances.

Some of my happiest times at work have been when I was faced with masses of figures and managed to twist them, pull them and produce a graph which showed a previously unsuspected trend.

So you can imagine what fun I have with website statistics. I have already pointed out how they have shown an enormous number of nocturnal visits from a West Sussex County Council IP address. Today there was a sudden influx of 24 page views from an IP address of a company where one of our Tory borough councillors just happens to work. (Again no comments -shame on you. You know I always value your opinion even when I don’t agree with it. You know who you are.)

I’m flattered. They never paid much attention to me when I was in office.

But such local political snooping is not half as amusing as seeing some of the more unlikely routes people take to find my pages when using search engines.

My great name for a band blog obviously gets a lot of traffic from people searching for “how do i find a name for my band?” and variations on that theme, but I do get the odd search for such things as “gerard manley hopkins femininity” or “smug tractors” or “innulus and papilio”.

This blog has had visitors arrive as a result of searching for such diverse terms as “dogging crawley” and “the bishop of horsham”.

I must try to avoid using words like ‘dogging’, ‘orgy’, ‘Britney nude’ if at all possible. Whoops.