The most visited story on the site by a long way was our front page lead story about Chris Smith, the former Culture Secretary who went public about being HIV positive. It should really be acknowledged that he chose to go public in the Sunday Times, which meant a quick scramble to accommodate the story in our late editions.
All of those fanatical Observer fans who queue up at the printing plant to get the first edition would have been treated to a front page dominated by our fantastic Olympic scoop. London has blown it apparently, and Paris is a shoo-in to host the games in 2012. It's not all that surprising really. Dour defeatism is the capital's sport of choice. But the Observer got the full story.
The writing was surely on the wall once the nation's Ambassador-in-Chief HM Queen let slip during a Buckingham Palace reception that even she didn't fancy the Smoke's chances. One senior editor here depicted the episode thus:
School kid (well vetted by security services): What ho, Ma'am! Aren't you rather looking forward to the Olympics coming to London?
Queen (not vetted by anybody): I wouldn't count yer chickens, mate. Word on the street is they've decided on Paris already. Don't blame 'em miself. Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, all that. London's a dump.
Shame. The Observer vigorously backed the London bid.
Please Mr Blair, can we have some new swimming pools and a transport system that works anyway?
Meanwhile, back with the Observer stats, a shock re-entry into the charts for Stephen Clarke's travel piece from a couple of weeks ago about how to get the better of French service. Have a read.
Also hanging in there is Observer Literary Editor Robert McCrum's list of the top 100 novels of all time. This prompted a bumper mailbag when it ran a million years ago and we still sometimes get frantic emails along the lines of 'who is this McCrum and why does he not recognise that Middlemarch is the best book in history?', which incidentally, it is.
Someone somewhere is clearly still blogging the story, so it regularly blips on our traffic radar. Thank you, whoever you are.
