So, here we are: the fourth anniversary of the Trash City web site is also (by dint of careful planning) our first day on www.trashcity.org – the first time updates will be published only to this address. trshcity.demon is now a dead duck, floating in the Internet like a…like a…like a dead duck. Update your bookmarks accordingly, though what’s left of Demon will be around for a little while (the bunch of incompetents in their accounts department still haven’t told me until when).

No particular reason why it’s taken so long to move here. The domain has been “ours” for a good few years now, and we’ve had mail-forwarding going on for almost as long. This was particularly handy during the move, when I knew that messages sent me at trashcity.org, would get to me regardless of the state of my email accounts. The forwarding still works and I prefer it, since it means I can have @trashcity.org rather than the doubtful street-cred of…er, well, actually we use AOL, which has so little street-cred, I’d need a scanning electron microscope to determine the precise quantity.

[Brief pause to save this file; there’s an electrician out back fiddling with the pool motor and we’ve already had the lights in the kitchen turned out on us. At first, I mistook him for a vagrant when he came to the front door, but – save for the confusion over the fuse-box – he seems to know his stuff…or at least, we hope so, anyway. The pool motor was fried during an electrical storm, and the lack of circulation means the water was starting to resemble some kind of biological warfare experiment.]

As .org officially becomes part of the Trash City empire, looking back, I have to laugh. Did Wendy James, lead singer of Transvision Vamp, have any idea, that one of their songs would lend their name to first a magazine, then a bead company, and now two prime pieces of Internet real-estate? I suspect not – if for no other reason than, I certainly couldn’t have predicted such a future, when I began my obscure 32-page, photocopied-at-work (in the dead of night) ‘zine back in the days when the Internet, DVDs and Tony Blair were all equally inconceivable.

Equally amazing is the thought that nine months have gone by since I moved out to Arizona – I think I’ve finally grown into the place, and the prospect of going back to London (or even worse, permanent employment) fills me with unquenchable dread. I now feel like I have settled in here, and my decade-plus in the tentacles of HSBC feels like a bad dream. It did take me a while to shake off the feeling of dread every time I was spotted writing a personal email during business hours, but I think I’m over that now…

This is why I am loathe to make any predictions about where TC is going to be four years down the line, given how laughably inaccurate they would have been, if I’d made them back in 1997. I was thinking about such things yesterday at the dinner-table, when Emily said she’d buy us a hovercar when she was a rich and famous actress. Hang on, weren’t we supposed to have these already? Them, and those little pills which were entire meals in a single capsule. I certainly don’t recall any “Life in the 21st century” articles which said it’d be pretty much the same, just faster, noisier and infinitely more wired…

But anyway: here’s to the next four, wherever they may take TC!