Monday 28 January 2008

The name on the world's second finest blade

14st 12lb; 4.0 units of alcohol; 1,468; Irish Sea.

In the four years that I have been writing for the local paper, I have only once received a personal letter from a reader. I’d written as a joke that the organizers of late-night motor rallies through the Northumberland countryside should be strung up from lampposts and have rotten fruit hurled at their decaying corpses. Someone dropped me a line warmly agreeing with the proposition, and suggesting an ideal lamppost for the purpose.

So imagine my excitement today when I received my second letter. I eagerly sliced it open, and out dropped a clipping from Private Eye. The It’s Grim Up North London strip containing the following quote: "Blogs are sooo depressing. Look at all this inane drivel ... total nobodies droning on about every nuance of their empty lives ... and then wanting to share their banal musings with the entire planet!"

Nothing else. In a typed envelope with a second class stamp and a Tyneside postmark. I suppose I should think myself lucky that it wasn’t accompanied by razor blades, anthrax spores or Polonium-210.

I can’t disagree too strongly with the anonymous writer. I’d only read one blog before I started writing this one, and I wouldn’t have bothered if the one I read hadn’t got ever so slightly up my nose. Not so much for its content as the fact that it quickly established a huge readership and allegedly secured its author a “six figure book deal” (admittedly probably including the pence). The bleak emptiness of my life is what it’s all about, don’t you see? Pointlessness is the point.

Still, if you don’t like it, I feel that it would be a lot less effort simply not to read the bloody thing. And if you are going to send razor blades next time, I use Gillette Mach 3. Thanking you in anticipation, as my father always used to write. Though the one time I used the phrase, in my letter to Jim’ll Fix It 30 years ago asking if he could fix it for me to shag Felicity Kendal, it completely failed to produce the desired response.

1 comment:

Oofy said...

Are you also of the opinion that the blade that comes with the Mach 3 is of infinitely superior quality to the quickly degraded ones you have to buy after that?