Here I am, chugging away at the blog, and all of a sudden, there’s two comments in a couple of days. Someone, nay, two somebodies, are reading what I’ve written!
Now I know this is part of the point of a blog. You can have lovely conversations about the same things – or violently disagree – or deploy increasing amounts of punctuation to form faces, smiles, beards, polar ice caps, that kind of thing.
Probably there’s a sneaking concern about people reading what I write. Yes, this blog is probably meant to read a bit like a newspaper columnist, but really it’s a bit of a diary too. And who wants to have someone reading their diary?
I still have my teenage diaries, and I have to work out whether to keep them for historical purposes (what were people watching on TV 20 years ago?), counselling ones (can this help us work out how our kids might be feeling in the future?), or burn them before those same teenagers find out how much time I spent worrying about boys.
In the case of these two comments, the trick seems to be to write about someone important to the commenter. The only difficulty is, this could get complicated.
My reasons for writing about the people in question were personal, spur of the moment celebration of them. To go round the houses, writing about people you know – yes you, person reading this! – is unlikely to keep working.
I may get completely the wrong take on your auntie you’ve mentioned, your brother I met once, and so on. And having just captured you as a reader, I’m hardly going to want to let you go, let along have you run headlong from these pages.
But write a reply…go on. Even to the naff puns about Wispas. It allows me to keep my little dream that maybe, somehow, one day, someone might even pay to read what I write. And the longer you indulge me in that dream, the cheaper it remains for you, eh?
Alternatively, post your latest photos on Facebook, and I’ll be over there like a shot.