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This article was originally published on the 4th June 2009 – and has had to be moved after Google bestowed the title “Lord of the Internet” upon me officially a fortnight later.

Yesterday was one of those days where I went through the soul-mangle and emerged, this morning, feeling inspired despite smelling of whisky and stale cigarettes.

Essentially I have been wrangling with the  seemingly unavoidable truth that I am at something of a fork in the road. Things are starting to kick off majorly, business wise, in a good direction.

We now have some monster websites, which are pulling in visitors into the millions, many of these websites are things which came, entirely, from inside my mind. This has two results: 1) my ego – I start to call myself , only 50% jokingly, “lord of the internet” and 2) I start to wonder if this is what I want to do.

Sounds strange, doesn’t it? That, after a couple of years worth of ridiculously hard effort that – when things start to flourish and do well; when money starts to come in rather than out – I suddenly start to wonder whether it’s what I want to do at all.

And that’s because, deep down, I know what I enjoy doing more i.e. the things I’ve neglected to do for so long due to the major work-benders I’ve been pulling: things like socialising; writing for pleasure; and developing my crude poetry into something which, eventually, is worthy of performance out loud – rather than through the current medium of my internal monologue – to an audience of more than one.

So at the end of all this soul searching, we went out into town on a quest for enlightenment which, as in most cities, was something of a longshot.

What we found was a number of the bars we go to sometimes filled with the usual Friday night crowd: people wearing those thick-rimmed, square spectacles and sporting vaguely arty looks, such as a jaunty beret, or a terrifically styled and much slaved-over messy hairdo. Mock quirkiness, in other words.

I was in my usual semi-ironic Northern chav outfit.

In any case, the ludicrously expensive drinks and pretend wackiness were never going to lift the funk my inner ailing artist had got going, so we started to head home at around midnight with the all too familiar ‘another wasted night’ feeling rising in my craw.

Then we did something dangerously out of character, probably as a direct result of the pseudo-zany people we’d spent our evening in the company of. We did something actually wacky. Maybe even stupid. We went into one of those bars which I describe to all of my friends and any visitors as “a place I would not dare enter for fear of being beaten up” right here, in the mean streets of Leith, Edinburgh.

Very much a Scottish den of iniquity, we actually found more in common with the very drunk workers in there and, when chatting to what seemed to be some local youths, somehow found ourselves partying with a local pipe band. I shit you not. We were with a pipe band, in Scotland, surrounded by the most Scottish people in the world: happy drunks.

Then we started having a sing-song. Phenomenal. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in cities. Well, it did. And it has filled up my depleted reserves of inner energy something chronic.

Now, if I can only shift this hangover, I might be able to get on with the serious business of becoming the first Lord of the Internet. I may actually write a decent poem some time soon, too.