Posted on by JonnyB
JonnyB’s Private Secret Diary
would like to wish all
Readers, Commenters, Linkers and Lurkers
a happy Christmas and bearable New Year.

Our Christmas Special will appear in Boxing Day’s Daily Mirror
(subject to any real news happening).
UPDATE – Spiked!!! Bloody Godfathers of Soul, eh?

We will be returning early in 2007.

Should you decide to start your own Internet Web Log in 2007, the following things are likely to happen to you:

A man from Hungary will mow a tribute ‘Save the Post Office’ in large letters into his lawn.

Your work will be studied by generations to come.

You will get involved in a high-speed chase with Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance.

You will receive assistance from readers RE mysterious missing ham.

You will go off at tangents.

You will summarise your entire life in a few short sentences.

Posted on by JonnyB

My building work has finished!!!

In time for the holiday season!!! A different holiday season than envisaged, but that is just picking hairs. I have electrics that do not electrify people, risers that actually rise, and a useful wall for hanging things on where I was originally expecting a dull old window.

Granted, the toilet situation is still causing concern and you’d see better finishing at a Charlton game, but the shower is quite acceptable and the non-working radiator in my bedroom is balanced by the fact that since the plans were drawn up the world has become two degrees warmer.

We drive home from the hospital through the dense fog. The LTLP slumps in the back, her broken leg wedged between the front seats; beside her the Baby dozes, pumped full of Pneumonia-B-Gone. I do not switch on the stereo for fear of ‘Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time’.

It has been an interesting year.

Posted on by JonnyB

My dining room table has arrived!!!

The family heirloom table has been returned to its rightful owners, to be replaced with one that I, and then eventually my children and my grandchildren, will sit and dine at, share stories at, accidentally brick into bedrooms, etc.

It is gigantic.

I attempt to help the Table Delivery Man carry it into the Cottage. It is enormously heavy – as heavy as one of those extreme metal bands, eg def leppard. My arms are built for pleasuring women, not for lifting heavy tables from vans, whereas his only job in the world is lifting heavy tables from vans – he does it several times a day and indeed probably has a degree in it from Thames Valley University. We stagger through the doorway into the kitchen. The walls seem to shake as we rest it with a gentle crash on the brick floor.

As he goes to fetch the legs, I feel a pang of conscience. I have spent several hundred pounds on a dining room table when there are children dying in the Lebinon.

I am a shameful person and will go to hell. Then I realise that without a proper dining room table you cannot have dinner parties discussing things like how bad it is that children are dying in the Lebinon, so I feel a bit better and that I have done my bit. The Table Delivery Man returns with the legs, which are like matchsticks, but on a planet where matchsticks are really really big and thick, and have metal bolts on them to attach them to tabletops.

He fits the legs.

We then attempt to turn the table the right way up, which is a fiasco. Carrying it upright was bad enough, but attempting to both lift and turn it makes me look even weedier by a factor of about seventeen. They probably share stories about this at the Table Delivery Social Club, in between chatting about van capacity and the use (or non-use) of mats. We manoeuvre it into position, which involves my end staying in exactly the same place, and his end manoeuvring.

He gives me a ‘well done’ smile, like a local newsreader reporting on the delivery of a new Sunshine Coach. Eight chairs complete the picture. I resolve to have a dinner party ASAP.

Posted on by JonnyB

Well that was exciting wasn’t it?

A sluggish start, an encouraging mid-match surge, before inspired play at the death sealed an in-the-end comfortable win for the opposition. It was very much like the recent King’s Lynn vs Oldham Athletic FA Cup(TM) fixture, without the footbally bits inc. the booking of defender Charlie Defty.

We are officially the second best internet web log in the UK!!!

Booooo… but only second. And it is being first which counts. After all – everybody knows the name of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. But who can ever recall the second? (It was ‘Buzz Aldrin’).

At which point we proceed with the serious bit – you might want to skip this and come back on Monday when there will be a report about a dining table.

Serious bit begins

Of course, this isn’t the second best internet web log in the UK. It’s an impossible and ludicrous thing to try to judge or measure such a concept, I’d guess that the vast majority of UK sites had no idea whatsoever that nominations were going on (I certainly didn’t), and I’d guess that most of these wouldn’t have cared anyway. The voting system was intriguing, and the smaller sites never had a chance. I’ve always liked to think that this journal might be one of the better in its Ilk, but it’s a fucking tiny Ilk I inhabit, I can tell you. And how do you compare an Ilk with an ilk?

So… why?

Just to remind the people that look at awards to tell them what to read, that there is a huge diversity of blogging in the UK. The ‘personal sites’ aren’t necessarily the ones that need sit at the back like the embarrassing aunt, afraid to mix with the weightier stuff and looked down upon from the heights of punditry (“and some people just write about their cats!”). In fact lots of them are quite good.

So a creditable second can’t be bad.

Those who took my initial words as ‘yuk – political blogs are boring minge’ got it wrong slightly. The point was that there is room enough for everyone. You’ll actually find me at quite a few Places of that Persuasion, although sometimes I am hiding. In fact lots of them are quite good.

Booooo… I am revealed as Judas.

Jonny’s Final Thoughts

I tend to leave the comments box unattended most of the time, but I was uncomfortable with the ‘I’ve just read such-and-such blog!!! It’s shit!!!’ posts, whatever the context in which they were made. And I learnt an interesting lesson there – if I don’t intervene and reply to comments that I’m not comfortable with the tone of, then they become inextricably linked with the voice of the (deep breath) JonnyB community. Shit!!! It is not my web log any more. It is ours. So I will try to be more chatty in future, unless I’m – y’know – really busy.

To the lady that left the (deleted) comment saying that she could cheat the poll: please – it’s my reputation, not yours. Kids – cheating is wrong, and we don’t want it here.

Thanks to my good friend Girlie Onetrack for her heavyweight support, and particularly for agreeing to remain my friend after I asked her to add a disclaimer to her endorsement post. And gratitude to everybody else who got behind an interesting campaign. I’ll find you via the technorati thing and say proper thanks.

FINAL THING – and a non-negotiable. I don’t have time to moderate comments. Please – no ‘we should have won’ sour grapes or muttered dissent etc. in the comments box. That’s not my ‘thing’, and I’d be really pissed off. And we don’t want that, seeing as I’m so important now. This weekend please use the comments box to promote the blogs you think other people might like to read. Cats, politics, political cats an’ all.

Next week we get back to normal, with my important story about the table.