It Must Be Karma

You’ll never guess what, my darling little scallops! Today we are going to review the blog of an earnest young Indian woman! An utterly new experience for us all! I can’t tell you how excited I am. I have even had Fanny loosen my truss. This site does attract a great deal of variations on a theme, and we must get almost as many earnest young Indian women as we do self-proclaimed ‘mad’ mommies and sexually-unheimlich humourists.

It was hard to review this blog. I would sit down to read it and five minutes later find that I had wandered without realising into the pantry and had consumed a pound of cheese. Or I would discover that I had been staring for untold hours at the dead wasp on the windowsill, or was consumed with the need to cut my toenails right now. Once when I thought I was making headway I woke up three days later in a burger bar in Penge dressed as Penelope Keith with three new and unsettling tattoos.

The first problem is that Live on Impulse is not overly keen on the paragraph break but does enjoy the exclamation mark, leaving me feeling as though I had been buttonholed by a particularly enthusiastic head girl. I’m sure she makes some good points here, for example, but such a relentless slab of text is as insurmountable to me as a pile of Fanny’s notoriously dense flapjacks. It gives me a headache all over.

This blog was so uncomfortable to read that I found myself not caring a jot about the content. However, because I am a brave soldier I forced myself to concentrate, and after several pots of tea, trips to the W.C. and a twenty-four-hour rum-and-Sanatogen bender, I managed to read some posts. I wasn’t much impressed. Fair play to Live on Impulse, she is a socially-aware young woman who wants the world to be a better place, but we all care about injustice, even me (well, I care about whether I get away with it or not). I’m sure she’s a charming young women with a winning outlook on life, I just found her rather exhausting.

Live on Impulse claims that she is compelled to write, but she doesn’t seem to put much effort into it. Look at this. This is just a series of mentions, it gives me nothing. There’s no thought in it, no detail, it feels rushed and unloved. She worries that she doesn’t produce enough meaningful stuff, but I think she could if she just shut up and thought about it for a while. I looked in vain to find a post actually describing her wedding. And those blasted smiley faces make her look childish and far less intelligent than she actually is.

Liveonimpulse, here are some words of advice. Get out your English grammar book and refresh your memory. Read your posts back carefully. Put spaces after full stops. Using two exclamation marks after every sentence makes you look like an idiot. Paragraphs and punctuation make your work easier to read and less likely to induce a fit of the vapours in rickety old reviewers. Most importantly, remember the old chestnut and show, don’t tell.

I do try to find the good in things, I really do, but sometimes one is faced with something that one just outright doesn’t enjoy and this is one of those times. To be honest, I found Live on Impulse boring and a little tedious. I did not enjoy reading it and I did not enjoy reviewing it, and to top it all off there’s a lot of really buttock-clenchingly awful poetry.

Live on Impulse gets a Meh, and I am going to wrap myself up in a blanket and sit in the airing cupboard.