Ambrosia and its Opposites

When I was a mere dot and home from the School for hols, Nanny used to try and force me to eat rice pudding. Now there are not many things I will not eat. I am a gastronaut of the highest order – William Buckland can’t hold a candle to me (although I will own to never having nibbled the mummified heart of a king, I have eaten a kebab in Cleckheaton). However, I know what I like and I simply cannot bear rice pudding. It’s something to do with the skin. Nanny would cajole and threaten and great Scenes would be caused, but as soon as I saw rice pudding at the table I would clap shut my mouth and fold my arms and that, much to Nanny’s disgust, was that.

When I saw that I had to review a blog entitled ‘Single Mom Says’, written by the fragrant Mindy, my first though was rice pudding. My second thought was ‘Good lord, I had no idea that there were actually real people called Mindy’. My heart sank further when I read her header. It reads ‘A single mom’s thoughts and observations on life as a single parent, dating, relationships, kids & women’s issues’. I can tell you know, Mindy, that they way you mean the term ‘women’s issues’ in no way reflects the lives of any of the women I have ever known. My Fanny’s issues revolve largely around the unclogging of the traps and Mother, when I saw her, was preoccupied with the bejewelling of her vast cast of land crabs.

None of this endeared me to Mindy, and to top it all off, her ridiculous stalker widget thinks I come from Derby! Derby! I haven’t been back to that godforsaken place since the Unpleasantness and do not intend to do so ever again. However, now I am an old clown I must be brave and eat up my rice pudding. As Nanny used to say, if you just try it, you might like it. Poor Nanny. She had to leave us in the end, when all my teeth came in. Anyway, I held my nose and opened my mouth and dug in to our Mindy’s ‘about’ bit, thinking it best to get the skin off first. In this section Mindy provides us with a helpful list of dramatis personae and links to what she considers the pertinent posts. They make for grim reading, my tiny friends. Mindy has fair been through t’mill, as they say around here. Her best friend stole her husband and they are stirring up all kinds of trouble. She is raising four daughters on her own. Neither of the fathers sounds like much cop. She is desperate to find a good man but internet dating is proving unsatisfactory. All in all, poor Mindy has been having a miserable time of it.

I do hate it when reviewees have Sad Stories. It makes me feel as though I should make allowances and then I have to do all kinds of wrestling with myself and I get all flustered and Fanny has to mop up and then she sulks. Besides, sad stories are fun to read for a while, but then the schadenfreude wears thin and it’s just depressing. The problem I have with personal blogs is that they are often far too personal, just a relentless grind of self-obsession. But we must look beyond all this, though, to the real proof of the pudding, the writing. I suppose.

When Mindy started her blog, she wrote long, self-help style essays. They were breezy, relatively well put together pieces that have that ‘Sassy Mom’ tone we have encountered in so many other pink-hued places. Very chummy and reassuring and most helpful, I would imagine, to similar women in similar situations, although they are a touch shiny-eyed, as though she is just enthusiastically regurgitating the last book she read. It’s very much not for me (it’s those around me who need help, not I) but I can see that it has some merits, despite the crashing generalisations and the sneaking suggestion that all men will inevitably turn out to be massive cunts.

However, the recent posts suggest - and I hope this is true – that our Minds has found something better to do than blogging, because they are scanty at best. At times she resorts to the unspeakable crime of just listing things she did, like a child’s back-to-school essay. I did this and then I did this and then and then and then. Look at this, for example;

My weekend was a busy one, marked with a few highs and a few lows. Here’s a peek at some of what’s been going on lately:

I caught a cold. Maybe strep throat. Ow. Throat pain SUCKS.

Got in a minor car accident. No one was hurt but can’t say the same for the cars. Or my insurance premium.

Came to the conclusion that Karma is a slow-ass bitch. Or she’s drinking on the job. Whatever the case, she is obviously VERY confused.

Had date #2 with the single dad from the bowling alley. He needs a name for the blog because he may be mentioned here again. (and it can’t be Bowling Alley Dude or Dad because that would be BAD).

What, pray, is the point of this tripe? Sweet Felicity Kendal, why did you bother? It’s all very well and good if you just want to give your chums a quick update on what you’re up to, but when you submit to this site, you must know we are going to want something more. Your stories aren’t stories, they are merely hints. I know you can do it, you just need to be more consistent in the quality of your output. You could make lovely little pieces out of your dating adventures with a few judicious descriptions, a bit more dialogue and some actual effort, but you seem to have stopped bothering and if you can’t be bothered, Mindy, neither can I.

So, having gagged my way through as much rice pudding as I can handle, all I can say is that I hope Mindy manages to find a way to live, and thereby write, outside her problems. I hope she finds a man (although she would be wise to remember that Buttons is often a better bet than Prince Charming). I also hope that she finds her missing knickers, although I do wonder about the coincidental nature of her fancy frillies going missing just before her daughter goes out to celebrate her sixteenth birthday with her boyfriend. And I hope that she either gives up blogging or decides to do it properly.

Mindy, you get a Meh.

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.

Grass Stains

We are not amused. It’s August now and the sky is sulking like a petulant little bitch, her windy runt of a lapdog cocking its quivering leg and pissing down on poor Fanny and I as we are forced to abort yet another ruddy picnic and stagger back home through the mud and the filth to seek shelter by the three-bar fire and comfort in cocoa and gin. I swear on Fanny’s deep fat fryer that if I ever make it to heaven I will seek out St Swithin and punch him in the face.

When I was a whelp we had proper summers, endless ice-cream days of adventure. Fish bobbed and birds sang, bluebirds fastened our braces and lemonade tasted of lemons. And oh, the girls, the summer girls! All salt and skinned knees and little sunburnt snouts. That’s what I need, you know, to cure me of this malaise. I need a summer girl with feathers in her hair and frogs in her pockets to come and hold my parasol and put the Tabasco back in my Pimms.

And lo! What have we here? It’s Geo, who might be familiar to you from her comments on this very site. Not that her commenting here will make a difference to my review, you understand – if anything I will have to be particularly harsh to avoid accusations of favouritism. I do not believe in favourites. Just ask my Fanny.

Before we go any further, I must warn you that there is poetry ahead. Of course, whenever one attempts to inject a little poetry into proceedings one runs the risk of being called pretentious. Poetry can be dreadfully embarrassing. It is the kind of thing one keeps under one’s bed, along with the evidence and the books one reads with the hand. But we have known each other long enough not to have to rehash old material. You know my feelings on this. Poetry is bread and salt to me, the fodder and the savour, and I read it because it makes me better.

Geo is a poet, and by that I do not just mean that she writes poems – I mean she takes the world and boils it down to stock, serves it back up as a clean and elegant soup seasoned with her own special ingredients. She is delicious, and she nourishes me. Besides the poems she serves up delicate little parings of prose, juicy toothfuls that capture the fleeting moments of poetry and passion and the glory of the mundane. She has a trousseaux of treasured things, images, words and ideas that she takes out from time to time and holds up to the light and she, like Moomintroll, understands that sometimes gold looks better when seen through dirty water.

Of course, things are never perfect. I have a few minor quibbles that I feel I should raise. Some are of the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ variety – Geo is a little boy-crazy at times, but I suppose that goes along with the territory. I would probably be boy-crazy too, if I was young and beautiful and the sun was shining and Fanny was looking the other way. I would also like to never again have to read a recounted dream. ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader’, as someone who might have been Henry James once said. I skip over anything that begins ‘Last night I dreamt...’ unless it’s Daphne du Maurier. If you must recount a dream, just do it without telling me it was a dream.

There is a sense throughout Geo’s blog that she is sometimes doodling, that this is a sketchbook in which she records ideas for development later on. I would recommend that she keeps them in her pocket for a little bit longer and fingers them to a brighter sheen. Speaking of doodles, Geo has another blog where she keeps her artwork. Her pictures pleased me terribly and I would hang some of them on my walls. This would look lovely in the oubliette. I wish Geo did not separate her art and her words. I think her drawings would go very well accompanied by poems, vignettes, strange little stories. They each feed the other.

However, none of this really matters (well, some of it does), because what Geo does well, what she does far, far better than any other blogger I have reviewed here is hold up her world to me in the palms of her hands so I can have a right old sniff at every last bit. There may well be dissention in the ranks on this, but I think that when she is good, she is very bloody good.

I had a good hard think about the rating I would award Geo. Of course, there were things I would like to change, but is it fair to expect perfection where it is not intended? In the end, one has to follow one’s heart on these things (if one can find it), and I am a bit in love with Geo. If I were several decades younger I wouldn’t leave her alone. She makes me want to get more fresh air.

I fucking love you.

And Now For Something Completely Different

The other day, my Fanny and I went out for the annual Inspection of the Grounds. We like to make a day of it – after we have checked the traps and upped the swans, counted the water horses and lobbed a few eggs at the Hermit, we like to take a light luncheon in the Mausoleum before making our way home through the tunnels, happy and satisfied and slung about with whatever critters Fanny has bagged for the pot. That girl is an absolute demon with a slingshot.

We hold the Inspection in August because we are Very British Masochists and we get a twisted kick out of crushed hopes and rain-soaked sandwiches. This year Fanny and I waddled out swaddled in so many layers that the first cloudburst rendered us immobile, two waterlogged zeppelins pinned prostrate by the weight of sopping wool. We were stuck there for several hours but we minded not; we are British, and weather was occurring, and so we had plenty to complain about. Nothing passes the time better than a good old moan.

Eventually, Fanny chewed her way out of her argyle gaol and dragged me home, where we sat clad in towelling togas before the three-bar fire, sipping on dripping-tea and soaking our feet in Epsom salts. I must own that I was nodding off, lulled away to dreamland by the gassy heat and the steam from drying long-johns, when Fanny poked me rather cruelly with the back-scratcher and reminded me that we had to write a review. She booted up the damnable machine and, with the crossness of a nap-denied old clown, I started to read.

Immediately, I suffered an acute attack of weather-envy. The blog at hand is written by a man who lives in Arctic Bay. Arctic Bay is very cold indeed, and I realised with some degree of peeve that I could no longer complain about English summers. Arctic Bay is the kind of place where one doesn’t see the sun for months at a time and England doesn’t have it quite that bad, no matter what those who have holidayed in Skegness may lead you to believe.

So, who is this man who lives so far away in such a stark and beautiful land? He is Clare Kines, a retired Mountie who moved to Arctic Bay, met his lovely second wife Leah, adopted two almost unbearably charming children and made a thoroughly pleasant life for himself. He has been blogging for a very, very long time, totting up well over a thousand posts. Clare’s blog is mostly concerned with the cataloguing of flora and fauna . He photographs and describes a huge number of species, and it is most touching to see his children joining in his passion.

I found it all terribly soothing. There is an inevitable poetry in nature writing, in the Purple Saxifrage and the Arctic Dryads, the Snow Buntings and Horned Larks, the Cackling Geese and the Red-Throated Loons and the wolves and the ravens and the sundogs in the sky. Nature makes the plainest writing bloom, hothouses lines like ‘a bumblebee amongst the wealth of River Beauty’. Clare is no Dave Attenborough -his writing can be a tad workmanlike and sometimes the passion is subsumed beneath a trainspottery recitation of fact – but I could read this stuff for hours. I like learning things, even though I am neither a gentleman nor a scholar.

Elsewhere, Clare writes about the construction of his house, what he gets up to with his family and what life is like in Arctic Bay. There are some posts that could do with a bit more detail and some that could do with a good deal less. He has some good lines (I could sworn this dog had a penis when she was a puppy) and he writes movingly about subjects that mean a lot to him. He can write very well, although he is guilty of the sinful ‘I’m tired’ post, when he just flings up some photos or a few hasty sentences. Nice as his pictures are, they would be nicer if he kept them to one side until he had the strength to write something pretty to go with them.

All in all, it would be hard to strip such a fascinating way of life of all interest. After all, as Clare says, this is a place where you can look out of your front door and see Killer Whales and narwhal, where seal hunts are social events and where Gyrfalcons wheel overhead. It is a place where one has one’s shopping delivered once a year. Just for titters, Fanny and I tried to work out what we’d have to order were we to stock the larder just once in a twelvemonth. We should need a fleet of juggernauts for the gin alone.

As you all know, certain diplomatic sore spots have prevented my Fanny and I leaving these shores for many a moon. It wasn’t always that way - in days of yore we would think nothing of chartering a biplane to Bruges for a spot of brekker – and I am sure that one day we will be free to roam again. When that day comes we will head north, to Arctic Bay and beyond, and we will build ourselves a cold palace and sit on whalebone thrones, swathed in fur and sucking blubber in the blue ice-light. Fanny can feed me on gull eggs and blueberry wine and then harnessed to my sled she’ll haul me on into the unsetting sun.

Pardon me, I’m getting carried away. Must have Fanny get a man out to look at this gas fire. So, to come, reluctant as always, to what passes for a point, I would like to thank Clare for adding to my vocabulary and providing me with frigid fantasies enough to see me through the damp drear of an English August. I rather enjoyed dipping a toe into his world. There were no thrills and/or spills, nothing shocking or outrageous, just the gentle pottering of a man who, after sad and hard times, has found a measure of peace.

I give Clare two stars, and am off to dress Fanny as a narwhal.

Clown Wars

We’re going to dive straight in this time, my loves. We have a lot to discuss and the air here is curdling. A storm is coming and I must send Fanny out for emergency supplies. We are all out of Ovaltine and the goose fat dwindles. So.

This week’s lucky sausage calls himself the Counter Culture Clown (his name is Bob) and promises us ‘Seltzer Water, Flying Pies, and Social Resentment’. He’s a cheeky stripling from Minneapolis who would dearly like to become a stand-up comedian. His shtick is something called ‘Rant Therapy’, a reasonably self-explanatory pastime that involves what in my neck of the woods we would call ‘going off on one’ about various gripes in an ostensibly hilarious manner. He has a photo of himself sporting beard and cap and wry half-smile. So far, so eminently punchable.

Received wisdom has it that blogs purporting to be humorous seldom are, in much the same way as a man wearing a T-shirt proclaiming himself to be the ‘World’s Greatest Lover’ will be a let-down between the sheets and a ‘Family Fun Night’ will be as much fun as an impacted bowel. The statement of intent inherent in a blog title such as ‘Funny in Shadows’ gets my hackles up straight away. You should never say you are funny, just as you should never say you are pretty. It is tacky.

Normally, when I review a blog, I start at the first post and read backwards until either it ends or Fanny has to fetch the defibrillator. With Bob, I took a different approach and started with what he terms his ‘best of’. I read on and on and I am afraid to say that I did not laugh. This kind of comedy is not for me. It is observational humour of the ‘hey, have you ever noticed that microwave dinners are kind of gross?’ variety, with lots of smutty language and sixth-form iconoclasm and very little in the way of original ideas.

But comedy is subjective, to spank a tired donkey. And Bob has an audience who, although small, are appreciative. And he came in the top 25 in the ‘Funniest People in the Twin Cities’ competition. And he is only twenty-two (just as well – if he were thirty-two, I may well have wept, and my tear ducts have lain dormant for several decades now). He is just practising, picking topics seemingly at random and ‘riffing’ on them, usually at great and trying length. I have no doubt that he will get better and that he will get his own ideas and that my opinion matters not a jot to the tastemakers of Minneapolis. I still found him to be an objectionable little bugger, though.

Now, my usual rule of thumb here is to review the blog that was submitted and ignore all subsidiary works. However, I could not help but notice that Mr Bob keeps another blog, called ‘Disassemble the Universe’, on which he posts his poems and short stories. I couldn’t resist taking a quick squizz. I wish he had submitted that blog instead of the comedy one. Not that I think he is Saki reincarnate or anything, but he can tell a tale. If Bob were here with me now, tucked up on the love seat with a gin-and-Bovril in hand and my Fanny curled about his feet, I might give him some highly presumptuous advice. I might say Bob, why not combine your ranty style of comedy, your scatological surrealism and your talent for story-telling and push things as far as you can to write some truly deranged stories? I believe there is a genre called Bizarro that you might find quite droll. Fiction could be the key to transforming your comedy, injecting it with some much-needed originality. Everyone has already observed your observations. I think it might also be larks to explore the clown motif a little more. A spot of research into sacred and ceremonial clowning might prove particularly fruitful. Your blog hints at something dark, but to me you are as sinister as a bright May morn.

Now the sky sounds like my stomach after a night on the clams and it is time to go. In summation I would suggest that Bob is a far better story-teller than he is a gag-man, and I would dearly love to see him striving for bleeding-edge ideas. I would like to go back to Bob’s blog in a year and find him with a list of publishing credits as long as Fanny’s arm (she does have preternaturally long arms. We always thought the rest of her would catch up, but we were so very wrong) and a reputation for clever as clogs live shows that leave his audience in stitches both metaphorical and not.

Overall, however, I’m afraid it’s a finger.

Howzat

And so, my little coddled eggs, we are off to India! It’s all very exciting, especially when certain delicate matters have prevented one leaving the island for longer than one cares to remember. I have taken the liberty of providing you all with a packed lunch, as it’s going to be an interminably long journey. My Fanny has filled the thermos and I believe we are ready to go.

Of course, at the moment one could fly to the barefaced moon and still find someone talking about the football, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that the first post I read on the blog of today’s little chum concerned the World Cup. Bit of a tender topic for an Englishman at the moment. Not that I was particularly invested – more of a petanque man myself – but Fanny was near suicidal. I had to stop her doing herself a mischief with her crocheted Bobby Robson. There’s a lot a cricket talk on this blog as well. I would like to suggest that Rohan just go ahead and marry Sachin Tendulkar. I have always suspected cricket to be a physical version of Mornington Crescent; they make it up as they go along and everybody apart from me is in on the joke. But we’ll ignore the sport and press on.

I would imagine that the first thing most people will think when they click over to Rohan’s blog is, ‘bugger me, these posts are long’. It would be appalling hypocritical of me to criticise verbosity - I have written postscripts that would put Proust to shame – but to the casual reader, Rohan’s vast scads of text might be a trifle off-putting. I would wager that, if polled, eight out of ten cats would as like as not advise Rohan to at least halve the length of his posts.

As I read on, though, I found myself growing increasingly fond of Rohan. I first had a feeling I was in good company when I read this. That tickled me, especially the bit about Grand Guignol violence and torrents of hot blood. It tickled me even further that he sympathises with Salieri and manages to reference Brian de Palma, Kimi Raikkonen and P.G. Wodehouse in the same post. I knew for certain that he was a good egg when I read his description of things he likes in films,

Noir. Mood pieces. Vivid colours and grand camera movements. Humour. Decadence. Amorality. Snappy dialogue. Candles flickering in old mansions. Sex and violence.

And realised it tallied pretty much exactly with what I want in life.

This raises an interesting question. Do we really give two hoots for the casual reader? Should we cut ourselves off mid-flow to satisfy those with such short attention spans that they find anything longer than 200 words intimidating? Do we want to appeal to those who do not find us appealing in our honest, natural state? Admittedly, the last person who saw me in my honest, natural state is still on some serious medication, but it’s only Fanny and so you can’t really tell the difference.

For every clowder of kitties sashaying away from Rohan’s writings with their tails in the air and their little bottoms pursed like disapproving mouths, there will be two throbbing felines eeling round his legs in appreciation. I think I will have to stop this cat metaphor right now. Cats make me uneasy. They have lizard eyes and would kill you in your sleep as soon as look at you.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is should we really give a tinker’s cuss how long his posts are, if he is an interesting man with a wide and eclectic frame of reference who can turn a phrase and likes to have a good old think about things? I have paddled in a lot of pap while wearing my reviewer’s cap (it’s a little feathered number – simply cunning) and I have to say that I would rather read 2,000 words of something that’s at least trying to be thoughtful and entertaining and chunkily nourishing than 200 words of some self-promoting mooncalf mooing about her tits (and I have read enough of that to be referring to nobody specific).

But Rohan has been through all this before. He knows who he is but the ether-flesh is weak and it bothers him that he doesn’t have more readers. Perhaps, Rohan old stick, you should try and vary things a little. I understand that sometimes nothing but a dissertation will do, but the elegant ramble is a tricky thing to pull off and can sometimes err towards the tedious, as I well know. People don’t always want to sit down to a twelve course meal. Sometimes we are equally as satisfied by a small yet perfect mouthful. Actually, that’s a terrible analogy, because if Fanny served me with a mere twelve courses I would send her back to the kitchen with a flea in her ear, or something considerably more uncomfortable, but you get the general idea. Maybe it would be more appropriate, given your love of films, to remind you that a short can be just as powerful as a feature.

You might also consider varying your style a little. You have an amusing, self-deprecating voice, but it can become a little monotonous over extended periods of time – it might be interesting if you stepped back a little, cut down on the gags and really showed me something. Remember, editing is your friend. It is my Moriarty, but it is your friend.

So, now that I have finished clarifying the colour of the kettle, I will leave this place of hot dust and head back to my cool and clammy native climes. If I must be forced to a conclusion, it would be that variety is the spice and conclusions are for the unimaginative.

Three stars, Rohan, and a firm handshake.

Lessons Learned

Come, my little chitterlings, put your tiny paws in mine. We are going on a journey, and we may be some time.

Now, you know that when it comes to blogs I am a drool-sopped old gourmet, continually ravening for succulent mouthfuls and nourishing treats. I am on a lifelong quest (and have been for some months) to find the ortolan of weblogs, the site so rare and so delectable that I would needs must eat it hooded to hide my pleasure from the gods. You know that each week I am largely thwarted in my search for satiety, albeit with hilarious consequences. But you also know, and I know as well, that I cannot keep dismissing blogs on the grounds that they do not live up to some gilded ideal I have declared master, because that is not what they are for. Most blogs do not intend to be literature, and the sooner I come to terms with that, the less likely I will be to spork out my eyes.

It’s an inanity to say that we all blog for different reasons, but it is something of which I have had cause to remind myself in the course of my reviewing escapades. Some people do it for comments and adverts and the tacky baubles of internet fame. These people are dangerous and should never be approached unarmed. Some people (mentioning no names) appear to be doing it because their neighbour’s dog suggested it might be a good idea. I would imagine that most people do it because telling stories is such jolly good fun. My favourite bloggers, as I am sure you all are now grindingly aware, are the ones who do it to create something beautiful.

'T' does it for another reason. She is on a journey of self-discovery, ‘a quest to find out Who I Really Am amongst the chaos/order and drama/perfection of being a single mom’. T writes about herself and her life in a very frank way. She writes about her children, the long-distance relationship she is having with an old school friend, her divorce, the lives of her friends and family and her general day-to-day existence. She is mostly likeable, readable and friendly. Naturally, I hated it. I can’t help myself. I am a terrible old clown. I was calling for my spork after the first page, but thankfully Fanny had the foresight to hide it in the downstairs cistern, bless her little sacking socks.

First there was the style, instantly recognisable from a hundred thousand other blogs by mommies who describe themselves as ‘a little crazy’ and ‘painfully honest’. Then there was the Bon Jovi video. The merest mention of that ghastly, ghastly man and his dream-defiling bouffant makes me come over all killy. Then there was a sex scene that used the phrase ‘throbbing moistness’. Then there was the ‘spirituality’ business, the belief in something called A Course in Miracles. Very easy to mock, especially for a jaded old beast like my vast and seeping self. I get all my spiritual guidance from my Fanny.

But then I caught myself and I said no, Sir! I decided that with my petty bile I had delighted myself long enough and resolved to look beyond my knee-jerk contempt and embrace T for who she really is. When Fanny had revived me, I read on. I realised that if I were a blogger like T, if I were one of her ethereal peers and in a similar situation to her, I would probably find things like this and this rather helpful. I might take comfort in knowing that someone else had been through it and come out of the other side relatively happy and able to form a nauseatingly demonstrative new relationship. I might be amused, enlightened or inspired to read someone talking so unabashedly about sex. I can see how T could be a great friend to her many readers.

However, I need no emotional succour. Of course I would like to see T brush up on her story-telling skills. Here and here she writes about a school reunion but it feels dead to me, an exercise in self-aggrandizement as opposed to an interesting tale. There are rather a lot of posts like these, in which T says ‘I am very attractive and popular and everybody fancies my boyfriend’, and although T might be aiming for sassy, she veers rather toward the smug. Personally, I find all this boasting and shouting about being ‘awesome’ terribly infra dig, but perhaps that’s just a cultural difference. All I will say is that it is possible to write a story about oneself without writing only about oneself.

And so, as we stagger exhausted towards the finish line, knackered as my Fanny after a night at the bath house, I will try, finally, to sum things up. T is a decent person, a good mother and, by all accounts, a generous and tender lover. She has spent a long time thinking about things, has profited on it and uses that profit to try and help others. There are some clunks and bumps, but I don’t suppose it matters.

I have learned a lesson today. I must be good and fair and look for more than beauty. I do despise learning lessons. Even through I make a habit of forgetting them immediately, they discombobulate me something chronic. To quote T, ‘I don’t know whether to meditate or masturbate’. I don’t know which I will choose, but ye gods, I could murder an ortolan.

I really don’t know how to rate T. She’s rather like the Church of England; I have no personal use for it, but I am sure it serves a purpose. I suppose she can have a star for making an old clown feel chastened, however temporarily, and for being a very brave soldier.




P.S. The winner of last week’s thrilling ‘giveaway’ is Ellie, for ‘Tranny whores are all the rage these days’. That’s what my Fanny keeps trying to tell me, but I still maintain that three at a time is excessive. Why not drop me a line, Ellie, and you can give me your address and claim your ‘prize’. I promise I won’t let Fanny know where you live.

...and don’t even get me started on the hors d’oeuvres...

As a general rule, my Fanny and I keep ourselves to ourselves. Don’t get me wrong - in my youth I was a prominent frequenter of the most exclusive gaming hells and a member of several highly specialised dining clubs, but these days I prefer a quiet life, largely because I find people en masse rather nauseating. It’s the lack of control that bothers me. I would much prefer to cloister myself with my Fanny and a family-size tub of Germoline than haul my old bones to a cocktail party where I might find myself forced to exchange pleasantries with a man in slip-on shoes, or the kind of woman who touches one’s arm while she talks.

This reviewing lark is rather like a cocktail party. You never know who is going to buttonhole you next, although you can usually tell within a few moments whether or not you are going to enjoy the experience. We all make snap judgements based on our own set of social markers and we are usually right. Personally, I avoid visible swastikas, t-shirts with comedy slogans and readers of the Daily Mail, but it’s different for everyone.

Of course, the most frightening words one can hear from a new acquaintance, the words guaranteed to put the kibosh on any kind of social connection, are any variation on the theme of, “I’m mad, me! Completely insane! All my friends say I’m just totally bonkers!” In my experience, this sentiment usually translates as, “I am a deeply conservative person who, out of the desperate desire for a personality, occasionally wears stripy tights,” and has me edging towards the door every time, no matter how divine the hors d’oeuvres.

Imagine my delight, then, when I saw the title of today’s blog. For a brief moment, I fancied that maybe I was judging too soon and that Mind of a Madwoman was going to be a stunning piece of online outsider art that would forever change the way we understand madness and sanity. For a brief moment, I was a fool. The Madwoman was Maggie, and when I saw her over the metaphorical punchbowl my first thought was that she had better be serving some pretty bloody extraordinary hors d’oeuvres.

This will not be a particularly link-laden review, best beloveds. If you pop over to Maggie’s blog you will soon see that it is a Möbius strip of repeating content. Maggie likes 'memes', you see, Random Thoughts Tuesdays and Self-Obsession Saturdays and all of that sorry business. She seems to have a particular soft-spot for lengthy lists of arse-clenchingly inane questions, real Paxmanesque posers like, “do you recycle?” and “do you prefer coffee or tea?” Maggie and her cronies swap these penetrating puzzlers, think up smart answers and then post them in reel after reel of arrogant banality. For the love of Princess Anne, why would anyone be interested in your favourite ‘BBQ’ food?

This post was the nadir, especially the part where she has the sheer lack of class to beg for corporate sponsorship. It was at this juncture that I was forced to have Fanny break out my emergency poultice and perform the Special Manoeuvres. I suppose it’s the kind of sassy ‘telling it like it is’ malarkey that is so prevalent in the milk-clogged world of ‘mommy’ blogging and I know there’s an audience for it, but I state for the record here and now that if I ever meet a member of that audience face-to-face, I will slap them until we are both weeping.

It’s all just laziness, and although I fully condone sloth as a lifestyle choice, it should have no place in your work. It’s a shame as well, because Maggie has her charms. She has a readable style, she can be funny and irreverent. If I were going to give Maggie any advice, which it would appear I am, I would say Maggie, stop pissing about and submit some articles to some magazines or something. You might not get published, but you’ll have to concentrate and you’ll have to stop relying on borrowed ideas, and that will make you a better writer. I think you can do better. You’re wasting yourself on this froth. If anyone ever asks you again if you prefer a shower or a bath, you just walk away my duck, just walk away.

I appreciate that I may come across a touch harsh, but I do feel strongly about this (Fanny’s heard it all before. She’s rolling her eye at me). There’s something about a blog that seems to make people think it’s better to post lazy content than nothing at all, and that makes me a sad, sad clown. And now I am a sad clown whose dreams will be haunted by a parade of self-proclaimed ‘madwomen’ waggling their ‘boobs’ at me and shrieking at the top of their lungs about their husbands’ toilet habits and exactly why they prefer foolscap to A4.

So I try to subtly shuffle closer to the cloakroom, pouring my drink in a potted plant and avoiding eye-contact with the hostess, my only comfort the thought that Fanny is waiting outside in the rickshaw. It’s going to take a long time and a lot of unguents for the poor thing to settle me tonight, and so on my Fanny’s behalf I feel I should make an example of Maggie. Consider her a casualty in the war against banality.

Two flaming fingers for you, Meggers. Feel free to return them when you’ve stopped squandering yourself on all this.

In Which a Clown Is Made to Feel Old

Ahoy there, my little loin chops! Seem to have skipped a week or so, I’m afraid. Eurovision happened and the larks spread somewhat. We came last, of course. Terribly cunning. We’ve already saddled ourselves with the Olympics – we’d have to mortgage Wales to host Eurovision as well. I lost my poor Fanny in all the excitement, and I didn’t find her yesterday morning. She had somehow managed to get herself buried neck-deep in the antirrhinums. I have no recollection of the incident, but I will own that my fingernails seemed muddier than usual.

In my current state of advanced toxicity it seems unjust that I should have to review the blog of a fresh-faced young woman who is years away from the legal drinking age. Of course, there are a great many people who would say that I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any fourteen-year-olds, under any circumstances, and they are probably right, but Andrea has submitted herself for review and I must do right by her. I fear this may be a lengthy endeavour. Refill your glasses now.

Andrea writes a blog called Another Amphigory. She describes herself as “Just another fourteen year old girl writing about Vonnegut, knitting, grammar and the stuff under my bed”. She has only been blogging since the beginning of this year, and it did not take me long to read every last one of her entries.

Andrea, cherub, I know you are only fourteen, but I’m not going to pull any punches here. If you are big enough to read this site, you are big enough to be treated like everybody else. I will have to admit that the first page of your blog is not very appealing. There are some photos of you, a couple of brief snippets and - my personal bugbear - a list of things that you did but are too tired to write about. The last post on the first page talks about how you are struggling for content, how you want to go back to writing little vignettes about your life, as that is when you feel your writing is strongest. Yet after that, you seem to decide to start publishing daily pictures of yourself, and then you stop doing that, too, and then you stop posting altogether.

Looking back through your archives, your content is markedly uneven. You post song lyrics and recipes and the kind of guff I could find under any internet rock I cared to pick up. It is as though you are just hurling content at your blog in the hopes that it will become more than the sum of its parts, and this is a shame, because I think you are far, far better than that.

Andrea, I believe you have a lot of nascent talent. I have been waiting to read a blog that contained a line that made me stop to savour, and your line about unpicking the embroidery on your pillow said so much in such an elegant manner that I did just that. I agree that your writing is strongest when you are writing your little snapshots. You have a way of pinning a moment to cork that is lacking in a lot of the ‘adult’ writers I read online. However, don’t be afraid of expanding on these little toothfuls. There is more to be said, and relish to be had in the saying of it.

You talk about your blog as though it was a journal, but it isn’t one, not really. Keep a journal under your mattress to vent to, by all means, but put only your very best work online. Think long and hard about what you are going to write and then write it as well as you possibly can. It may seem private at times, like there’s nobody reading, but there are still standards that you should try and retain. Especially now you’ve gone and shown your ‘journal’ to all these big, bad people.

Throughout your blog you mention being worried that people you know are reading your work, and this makes you feel unable to write honestly about certain matters. I would suggest that if you think this for one moment you should immediately up sticks and start writing somewhere you are sure you are anonymous. It is sometimes pleasant to think of people we know reading our work and being astonished by our brilliance, but it is much, much more important to both your readers and yourself that you feel you can be honest.

I understand that it’s hard to think of things to say, especially when one feels like one is shouting into a void. Sometimes, in my own personal writings, I look at the blank page in front of me and feel as though every thought I have ever had has been sucked out of my head like my Fanny hoovers out a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. When I get stuck like this I sometimes find it helpful to pick a thing at random and just try to write about it in the best way I can. You can make a magnum opus out of a tin of Spam if you put your mind to it, especially if, like you, you have a cunning eye for detail and a pretty way with words.

Sometimes, though, nothing helps. The muse professes a headache and goes to bed early with Danielle Steele and you need to find inspiration in another source. So, take that post you wrote when you were too tired to write anything properly. There were ten items on it. Take each of those and sum them up in two hundred words or so. Et voila! Your first ten posts. Or show me New York – I cannot comprehend what it must be like to be a fourteen-year old with easy access to New York City. My, what carnage I could have caused. The School was ten miles from the nearest sweet shop and the penalties for escape were harsh.

In conclusion, Andrea, I think you should treat Another Amphigory as a practise run. Kill it dead and plunder its corpse, take away all the juiciest organs and leave the rest for the dogs. Then set yourself up in a plush new home and write like I believe you can. You should treat your blog as though it were a strange baby you birthed through your brain. Feed it well and keep it safe from banality.

And Andrea, if you do relocate, I would be very pleased if you would email me with your new address. I would like to keep track of you, in the least upsetting way I know how.

I am going to give you two and a half stars, for now, but I think that in the future, you could come back and bag a few more.

A Mess of Pottage

The weather has finally changed, comrades. It is sticky, the heat like a man on your back. Today my Fanny and I ventured out onto the battlements with a picnic and a pitcher of Benylin on ice. I managed to insinuate myself into a deckchair, a knotted kerchief atop my head, my pyjama bottoms rolled to the knee. Fanny got the paddling pool out and sprawled in the tepid water, columnar limbs akimbo, fanning herself with a copy of The Radio Times. A ratking of extension leads connected us to the ether and, as the sun flogged down and the sweat seasoned my Scotch egg, we poked our shiny snouts into the life of the fragrant Jennifer.

Jennifer is a thirty-something mother-of-three who lives in Kansas in the U. S. of A. She likes photography and god and organising things. I am a ravaged old clown who should never be permitted to breed. I like overindulgence and toads and other people’s prescriptions. This was never going to be my flagon of eggnog. However, I believe in giving people chances (if it weren’t for me, my Fanny would still be languishing in that Indonesian gaol) and so I bravely soldiered on.

I looked at photos of her children. I looked at photos of other people’s weddings. I looked at more photographs of wheat in one afternoon than I have ever seen in my life. I looked at photos of her kitchen being renovated. I read posts about her hair, posts about her bosom, more posts about her dislike of clutter, posts about things she likes that begin with the letter ‘C’, posts where she accidentally goes out wearing mismatched shoes, posts where she uses the word ‘vury’ instead of ‘very’. And then I reached calmly into the picnic basket, pulled out my emergency pistol and inserted it into my eager mouth. It was only the piteous mewling of my Fanny that prevented me from finding sweet relief. I stayed my hand, thinking she was distraught at the idea of losing her beloved Master. Turned out she had inadvertently swallowed a bee.

It was this post that broke me. “I have SO MANY THINGS TO BLOG ABOUT”, darling Jennifer begins, and then proceeds to discuss, in soul-rending detail, her purchase of some new bed linen. This blog is the most gratingly banal thing I have ever read. Everyone has the right to keep an interweb log if they so desire, and it’s probably quite nice for Jen’s chums to be kept up to date. I am just annoyed that I had to spend a goodly portion of my afternoon wading through this pablum.

I do like to try and temper my scorn with some positive comments. It would be churlish of me not to highlight the fact that sometimes our Jennifer tells mildly diverting anecdotes about her children, or says something a bit poignant. She writes reasonably well when she’s on a roll but overall, this is not writing, it is wittering. To write well you need to marry a unique, readable style with interesting, original content, or at the very least permit them to live together in sin. If you don’t care about writing well, if your blog is just for the personal amusement of you and your cronies, then for the love of Christmas, do not submit it for review.

Oh where are they, the bloggers who can satiate my soul? Where are the people who can turn bread and water into Trimalchio’s feast? Why must I soil myself with this prattle? Jennifer, my darling, I am sorry to have to vent my spleen on you. You seem like a decent woman. You work hard and keep clean and say your prayers (not that I have any truck with religion - I decided a long time ago that I was the only god it was worth my while to worship). I just don’t care about anything you have to say. I don’t care what your hair looks like or what colour your bedclothes are or whether or not you like scrapbooking. In the grand chronicling of the internet, your blog is mere bagatelle.

The clouds have come now, wandering in like grubby sheep, and no doubt it will soon rain. The hottest day of the year so far and I have spent it paddling in this mess of pottage. I suppose I should offer advice of some kind, but the only advice that springs to mind is ‘shut up and leave me alone’. I feel so weary and my head is so full of fripperies that I am going to have to spend the evening doing diabolical things to my Fanny just to cheer myself up.

Jennifer, take this flaming finger and tidy it away.

An Idiot In Your Inbox

What ho, kiddiwinks! I must own to being in a superlative mood this afternoon. The weather is still absolutely filthy (there has been snow up in the Lakes and Fanny has taken to sporting an old beaver muff she found in the south attic), but I feel in such fine fettle that the sleet just don’t signify. You must forgive my repeated weather reports.

I know it does get tiresome, but I am an Englishman, and I can no more avoid it than I can deny my penchant for Spotted Dick and spanking. I don’t know if it’s down to last night’s productive session on the commode, the fact that Fanny says the traps are filling up or just the reassuring scent of my own inexorable death, but I am fit to burst with friskiness. I woke up in such excellent humour that I was moved to play a little prank on poor Fanny. It involved a rather elaborate system of pulleys and a clandestine trip to the Eel Ponds, but it was worth it to see the look on her funny old face. Most unusual-looking thing, my Fanny. Manages to look like an egg chicken at the same time.

I am all for japery – back at the School I was crowned Shenanigan King three terms running – and I wholeheartedly believe that a little mischief is good for the soul. I have a soft spot for bizarre and pointless naughtiness and I must confess that my sense of humour can err towards the juvenile. Which brings us to the subject of this week’s review – Ned Wingfield: taxidermist, amateur D.J. and ‘master negotiator’.

The conceit here is that our Nedders trawls the classifieds and responds to the advertisements of innocent people who want nothing more than to sell their iron, rent a room or hire a babysitter. Ned then embroils them in a series of increasingly bizarre emails, ostensibly to practice his ‘negotiation skills’, but really just for shits and giggles.

Now, I have seen this kind of thing done before. If Mr Wingfield doesn’t have a copy of The Timewaster Letters by Robert Popper writing as Robin Cooper, I suggest he invest post haste. Perhaps I was predisposed to find Ned amusing because I enjoyed this book (although Ned never reaches the giddy heights of Robin Cooper). Perhaps I am predisposed to find anything that includes jokes about taxidermy amusing. Perhaps it’s just my chipper mood, but I laughed out loud on several occasions whilst reading this blog.

He informs the woman looking for a babysitter that he has trained himself to lactate and once “raised a clutch of baby otters and then harvested their fur and meat”. He tries to interest one poor man in his new business venture; wolves’ teeth dentures for the elderly. When he responds to the advert of the young man looking for a room to rent, he writes “Do you have any experience with brick laying or tarring? Familiarity with deboning primates would also be a plus. Otherwise you’ll have to learn that the hard way”. However, it is sometimes his victims that get the best lines, as said wannabe-lodger proves when he writes, “Yeah but see the thing is it’s precisely the fact that you claim to have a stuffed koala and a ‘weapons cache’ that makes me not want to live with you."

Of course, we all know that humour is subjective, that one man’s meat is another man’s Linda McCartney vegetarian sausage, as I have no doubt proved with that cheap quip. Ned’s shtick will not suit everybody. There were times when I found his jokes a touch basic, the surrealism obvious, his taste questionable, and these moments were only highlighted by the occasional flashes of maleficent brilliance. I like silliness, but I like sophisticated silliness. Overall, however, I found his willful absurdity most chucklesome, and when he ended an email to a man setting up a prayer group with “Ned’s Bible Quote of the Day: 2 Kings 2:24: Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths”, I inhaled a goodly portion of my Gin Rickey, although I have no idea why.

There is, however, an issue of suspension of disbelief. I think this kind of thing works best when the reader cannot quite decide if the person writing the emails is real or not. There are a few lapses in tone, particularly in the introductions and in the fact that Ned has merchandise, which allow a glimpse of the Ned who is writing the Ned who is writing the emails, and I would like to see those disappear. For example, he makes occasional references to himself as a ‘celebrity blogger’ and it might be larks if the ‘Ned Wingfield’ character did consider himself to be a celebrity blogger, but his blog was not the one containing his emails, but another, far more unhinged fiction about his day-to-day life.

Mr Wingfield hasn’t posted anything since January, which is something of a pity – unlike any of the other opuses I have reviewed here, I might consider popping back for more. If old Ned smartened himself up and tightened his conceit, I could see this being published as the kind of book one receives multiple copies of at Christmas, because it was on sale at the counter in the book shop and because one’s aunts have no imagination.

So, despite the baying wind and the hoar frost on the windows, I find my mood is gay. My Fanny has recovered from her eel encounter and I have decided that if Ned gets to have merchandise, I should have merchandise too. So far I’ve managed to confect a little something out of a snorkel and a rubber glove filled with Swarfega, but I haven’t tested it out yet. Fanny is looking worried, and rightly so.

Ned Wingfield, for keeping me amused with your gleeful nonsense I am going to give you three stars, and to encourage you to refine and expand on your particular brand of buffoonery, I refer you to Deuteronomy 23:1.

Butterflies and Bhaona

It is a cold day in England. Fanny has banked up the fire, made me a pint of hot Cheeky Vimto and rubbed Deep Heat into my extremities, but it is as though the grey sky and the needling rain have got inside my very bones. In this part of the world we have a saying, ‘Ne’er cast a clout ‘til May be out’, which, roughly translated, means “Don’t take your vest off ‘til June”. Or your longjohns, balaclava, earmuffs and mittens. When I discovered that today’s blogger comes all the way from India, I did not know whether the contrast in climate would be a torture or a tonic.

Quirky Mon (which I cannot help but think in a Jamaican accent) is a young medical student from Assam, and I am glad of this – when I first saw the title of her blog I didn’t think I would have the strength to continue. It is called “Quirky Alone....and Happy!” and as I have a pathological hatred of exclamation marks and am highly prejudiced against the word ‘quirky’, this was not a good start. I was terrified that it would be the ‘musings’ of a girl who wears jewellery made of vintage buttons, carries a lunchbox instead of a handbag and has a cat called Baudelaire. However, I bravely soldiered on, and this is what I found.

To rub salt in my frostbitten wounds, the first post describes a blissful April morning quite unlike the crabbed and pinching month we’ve just weathered. There are cuckoos and roses, jewelled feet in the dew, even a meaningful butterfly. I was, of course, spitting with envy, thinking of my daffodils poleaxed by the wind. My first instinct was to take some form of revenge on Quirky Mon, but I found that it is rather hard to hate her.

Quirky is a thoroughly decent young woman. She is hard-working and self-deprecating, she prizes education, and enjoys learning for its own sake. She is thoughtful and serious and she wants to make herself a better person. She loves her family and her friends and wants to make them proud of her, and yet she retains a mischievous streak, and displays an interesting capacity for ruthlessness. She worries about her appearance and she pines for a true love. I hope she finds him soon, she deserves him.

Her posts are often far too long for the casual reader, and I would advise that she go back through her archives and, at the very least, put in some paragraph breaks. I am aware that my criticising long posts is all rather pot and kettle, but I did find my eyes rebelling somewhere around the final third of Quirky’s longer theses. There’s also rather a lot of angst floating about, a lot of convoluted self-analysis. This is fine for a secret diary, but it can be rather tedious for other people to read, a bit like when my Fanny insists on recounting her dreams each morning. Quirky writes reasonably well though, with an eye for detail and character, and with harsher editing she could be much better. I do enjoy reading a blog that teaches me something I didn’t know before, and I found these posts about Bhaona and Bhogali Bihu fascinating.

Quirky does not swear or smoke or drink, and she comes from a culture where courting is rather difficult, and so her writing might not appeal to those of you with a more Bacchic bent. In fact, she does not seem like the kind of girl who would be a particularly devoted fan of this site and its overall tone at all. I did have to wonder what such a nice girl was doing in a place like this, but then I am often surprised at the differences between the blogs that are reviewed here and those that are the work of the commentators and contributors. It is hard to review the nice writings of nice people. Quirky is to me rather like that convenient butterfly. She is so lovely that I am afraid I will crush her in my meaty paws. I fear I may already have marred her with my smut, just by reading her words.

So what can I say in summation? Keep writing, Quirky; as catharsis if nothing else. If you really do harbour dreams of becoming a writer as well as a doctor, practise writing pieces that do not contain the word ‘I’. I won’t be returning to your blog – niceness can be quite draining for those of us who go bump in the night – but I passed a warming afternoon in your company and I am going to have Fanny make aloo chops for tea.

I am going to give you a star, and, as you are such a pleasant young woman, I am going to pretend that I didn’t see the poetry.

She'll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas When She Comes

I was a latecomer to this whole computer business. I had only a vague notion of the internet as a confusing gallimaufry of misinformation, men pretending to be elves, European anuses and pictures of kittens, all of which I have encountered more than often enough in my long and scurrilous life. I was content with my library and my memories and had no intention of going upline, until my Fanny went on a bender two towns over and came to in something called a cyber cafe. She returned home with a torn petticoat, a skew-whiff wig and the news that people put their diaries on the internet. The very next day I sent her out to obtain this machine, and we set about poking our noses into other people’s lives. It has been something of a tonic. It gets rather lonely in this labyrinthine old house with only my Fanny to entertain me. There are the tableaux in the east wing, of course, but one grows weary of their poses and they are starting to smell.

Sometimes you can form an instant opinion of the people you meet out there. You know immediately if they are friend or foe. Some of them take a bit longer to get the measure of and this, after a long and tedious preamble for which I wholeheartedly do not apologise, brings me to June. I would probably never have encountered anyone in June’s situation had it not been for the internet. She is a young woman who has recently moved from Bombay to Copenhagen to be with her Intended, in a rather sweet little love story that brought a tear to my Fanny’s eye.

It was perhaps a little unfortunate that the first post I read descended into the kind of aren’t-shoes-pretty-wittering that belongs in the drawing room with the ratafia and the pianoforte. I decided to forgive her on the grounds that she has pretty feet (which put Fanny in a sulk, I can tell you. She won’t have feet mentioned any more. I tried to remonstrate but she just pouted and stamped her hoof) and read on. And on, and on.

I couldn’t help myself. I read like I would eat a whole tin of Quality Street; with a numbed, mindless pleasure, drooling into my cravat. I have no idea why. Most of it passed me by in a charming froth of inconsequentiality. After what could have been days, Fanny set about me with a carpet-beater and I came to my senses. When I had restored my equilibrium with a hefty rum-and-Calpol I had another peek at June and I swear I could not fathom what had drawn me in.

That’s not entirely fair. I was curious about this post, on tigers and tribesmen. It is interesting to read about the differences between Bombay and Copenhagen, two places that certain political misunderstandings prevent me from visiting. She’s not afraid to be serious. I was outraged when some despicable rogues tried to steal her beloved dog. All of this, however, is muddled up with far too many posts about socks, lists of things to do in bad weather and photographs of her winter wardrobe for it to be my cup of cocoa.

In her little introduction, June says;

“I am not a professional writer, not even an aspiring one. Grammar and spelling Nazi’s and my dear literary gold diggers, the exit door is at the top to your right. This blog is just so family and friends can stay updated. Okay? O.K.”

Now this might make you wonder why she has chosen to submit her blog for review, particularly to a site notorious for its jackboot-wearing prospectors, but I would imagine she has done what so many of us do; start a blog, get a few encouraging comments, suddenly think we’re Gore Vidal. This is the nature of the ether, and it is forgivable. The above quote also suggested to me that I would not like June’s writing one little bit, and yet I made an absolute pig of myself on it, and have been left feeling confused.

Sometimes, on soggy Sunday afternoons, I drag the tin bath before the fire so I can wallow like a shameless old beast with a pound of coltsfoot rock and a stack of Regency romances. I surface hours later, having read myself into a happy fugue, remembering nothing. As a special treat, Fanny sometimes brings me one of those magazines for bloodthirsty working-class housewives, the ones with the headlines like ‘Is My Vagina Haunted?’, ‘Murdered by my Siamese Twin’ or ‘My Cancer Looks like Jesus’. I like to do the puzzles and cut out the pictures for my scrapbook. These are my guilty pleasures, along with aggravating my Fanny, and it is in this spirit that I approached June.

It would be nice if every blog I read was so beautifully written and so profound that I felt compelled to memorise it, but as this is unlikely, it is sometimes pleasant to spend a couple of hours enveloped in the happy chatter of a young woman who cracks jokes about eating her dog. I wouldn’t recommend her to those of you who are in search of the startling; in fact, I don’t think she would appeal to this audience very much at all. You are a bunch of jaded old Romans who need far rarer delights to tempt your palate.

Did June submit her blog here in search of advice? I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody really wants advice, they just crave affirmation. I could tell June to decide whether she is writing for her friends and family or for a wider audience and, if it’s the latter, to generally buck up when it comes to all the usual stuff (keep your focus, let your story make your point, stop it with the cocking exclamation marks etc), but mainly I would like to advise her to invest in some frilly thermals.

Perhaps it’s just the loneliness. Perhaps it’s that the only vaguely female thing I get to see these days is my Fanny. Perhaps June bewitched me. All I can say is that I found her to be reasonably entertaining, if mainly froth, and that if she ever passes my way, I am sure I could find a place for her in the tableaux.

I award you a puppy.