Dream a little. Dream of me.

Circumstances have - once again - caused me to sit back and reflect on what I get out of blogging and ask myself who, or what type of person I kid myself reads all this bollocks, other than the elderly and retired with too much time on their hands, or the unemployed/unemployable who are simply bored with daytime T.V. and website porn.

I was off onto what I thought was quite a nice roll, reflecting on the state of European cuisine, by reflecting on it's history as informed by my latest book - 'Seven Hundred Years of English Cooking' by Maxime McKendry. Then someone's dog had the insensitivity to die right in the middle of meal-time, and I had the insensitivity to call it a 'mutt', albeit it in private.

If I was a proper writer, there would be an agent or publisher to form a fire-break between me and my adoring public, who would prevent me from upsetting any of them with a thoughtless (or thoughtful) joke or throw-away comment made on the spur of the moment, and vice versa. I think I mentioned recently that I was so impressed and enamoured with a series of dark comedy radio drama (On Mardle Fen) that I looked up the author - Nick Warburton - on the net, and found someone who appeared to be a friend of his, who had a website devoted to growing potatoes...

Anyway, I wrote to the potato-grower and asked him to pass on my compliments to Nick regarding Mardle Fen then, a week or two later, I received an email from Nick himself, thanking me for my 'kind words'. We had a short conversation about various mutual interests - John Aubrey being one - and he alerted me to forthcoming radio dramas which featured his writing.

At the time I thought that this was a very brave thing for him to do, since he didn't know me at all and I could have been trying to get that £5000 back for a friend who lent it to him 15 years ago. Many beautiful actresses would not have done it, or - if they did - might have been forced to call the police and change their email addresses, knowing (or not knowing) me.

That's the good thing about writing or painting or sculpting - your face is not necessarily known, and your real name is not necessarily known either. Ironically, the owner of the dead dog is the only person to know my real name (besides Cro, but he doesn't count in this context), and the only person to have my day-to-day email address (also besides Cro, but he had plenty of opportunity to insult me 40 years ago), which he used to tell me that I am a 'twat'.

You get to feel like you are a part of a family in this blogging business, and the wider your readership appears to be, the bigger the family. I would imagine that if you were a best-selling author, you would sort of get to 'feel' how well you were going down with the readership, even if they had no direct way of telling you. Also, you would not run the risk of intruding into someone's personal grief because - as it says on the fly-leaf - 'any similarity to persons or situations in this book are entirely coincidental', or words to that effect. It needs a real psycho to take a work of fiction by a stranger as an observation on the secret personal details of a reader's life - or mind.

There is one sort of blog which I follow here in Google land which I will NOT read under any circumstances at all, and that is the ones that people write about writing. Any mention of any ambition to do with writing that is hung up like washing on a line, including technical details to do with editing, etc by a wannabe writer is enough to make me close the page and go to something I might find more interesting - a post on growing vegetables, for instance.

It's the same with 'book clubs'. Who wants to know what other people think about someone else's writing? It should stand up on it's own, even if it's only mentioned in passing - "Did you read that so-and-so's latest book? Good isn't it?" End of story.

Equally, I don't blog for therapy or because I am lonely. If something bad has happened in my life, I will only blog about it if I think it could be useful or just entertaining to others, and the only way it is going to be useful to them is if they have gone - or about to go - through the same experience themselves. I don't need the sympathy of strangers - in fact, I can't use the sympathy of strangers. I can use their jokes, though.

Anyway, this is beginning to sound like a rant, so I'm off to compose some more bollocks about food or candlesticks or something.

(The above photo was taken in a corridor of a Gay/Transvestite Bar I visited in Bremerhaven, btw)