Here be dowagers

19 March 2007
Here be dowagers

I’ve had my first comment! Discounting those from Bill of course, which tend to be verbal only, and are directed mostly at what he calls my extreme verbosity - which itself falls so very far short, he says, of that altogether shorter, sharper, more staccato kind of thing that is generally thought to be the defining characteristic of a blog…. I respond by telling him that he’s under no obligation whatever to read my entries. And in any case, when was it, precisely, that he became an arbiter of what does, or does not constitute a blog? It’s entirely likely of course that he has been blogging clandestinely himself, for months. What could be more natural after all than that, given his present state of health, and trapped in domesticity as he has lately been reduced to become…. he should have taken to haranguing the politicians, or the MOD, or the Foreign Office (or even the Prince of Wales), with vituperative daily or bi-weekly blogs? I shall have to institute what I think is called a profile search, to see if I can locate him…

My online correspondent was altogether more generous. (It’s absurd, really, the degree of pleasure one can derive, simply from knowing that one person at least has visited one’s site! Is it a question of “by the numbers of your comments shall ye be judged”, I wonder? Or is there some other criterion by which a blog’s success is measured? Time will tell, I expect: that, as everything else). My commenter calls herself Ali, anyway ( I’m taking her to be a woman, largely by virtue of her apparent familiarity with sausages..). And she seems to have been interested most of all in what my butcher has had to tell me about local affairs. I do hope he tells me more; since, quite apart from any curiosity of my own, I should like to be able to please and satisfy Ali. Unfortunately, she left no profile footprint, so I am unable to thank her personally. Or better still, to make a link with her site, if she has one…. But, thank you Ali, wherever you are – you have saved me from nil points ignominy, and made my day.

Nothing much else has happened since yesterday – save that Bill did return rather disgruntled from his walk this morning; complaining that picture-postcard-pretty though the district undoubtedly is, and as Pooh-bear as I will ….. he still finds it lacking in some essential ingredient (tanks, probably; or what I think are now more properly called armoured vehicles); and that what he most foresees in prospect for us here is not so much dragons, as deadly dowagers! The place is fairly heaving with them, he said. He counted a dozen of them on the high street, and another six at least, out on the common with their distinctly dowagerial dogs. He seemed genuinely out of humour over it. And cast a wary eye inside my sitting room as he passed, I noticed; as if he quite expected to see it bristling already, with dowagers drinking tea.

It did occur to me to suggest that he might denounce the local women as much as he liked, yet have had the decency to leave the dogs out of it! I was quite on the point of asking him what he thought there could be, about a dog, that could possibly be construed as dowagerial? But I thought better of it. He’s still a bit morose, as I said. His view of everything and its dog is on the jaundiced side, just now. Restored to his customary good spirits he’ll be the first to acknowledge, I’m sure of it, that what he currently sees as a deadly dowager, is in reality nothing worse than a blameless matron going about her usual business on the streets. Much like me, in fact…