My Faithful Friend, Who Thinks I'm Crap

Apparently I have got this web lark all wrong. I have a friend who prides himself on Speaking His Mind, and though I occasionally wonder whether this famed candour is not sometimes just a way of making himself feel better at someone else's expense (I shall pay for this later) it can be useful.

When I tell him I am going to start a blog, he heaves a great mock-sorrow sigh. "Not YOU as well," he groans, eyes rolling "there are too many people spouting self-centred drivel and expecting other people to be interested." I tell him I realised it was indulgent but I needed something to stop myself careering into mental vacuity. I tell him it is for ME, not them.

"Read a book" he suggests.

I do read books; these days, I can sometimes reach the end of a page before I fall asleep. I then have to re-read it the next night, and so it continues, nights and nights on the same chapter, with me wondering why I fail to be gripped before I give it all up and go for some inane women's magazine instead and read a pointless article on decluttering, which I finish.

"And anyway," he continues "everyone knows what your blog will be about. It'll be all dictators and recipes." Pause. "And Dutch idioms. And you'll do that wide-eyed thing about it all being massively fascinating, and it won't be. You'll expect people to know random stuff about nothing important and you'll pay no heed to the fact that they might not. SO, no one will read it. And then in a few weeks, it will just be something you do which you think no one appreciates , and that will remind you of all the other unappreciated bits of your life that make you fed up, you'll get p'd off and you'll wish you'd never done it. I'm only saying this, "he adds, in his soft, shoulder-patting tone he uses when he is about to tell you, for your own good, that you dress funny, or that all your best friends have regular meet-ups without you (ok, none of these were to me, but they have been said) "to be helpful. And" - the familiar trump card - "you know no one else will be honest with you".

So, I tell him to have a look, which he says he will do. He rings back almost immediately. His unrestrained sense of glee is unmissable.

"See? You are SO predictable" he chuckles, glowingly proud of his insights into what I find interesting. "It IS all dictators and recipes. And you've got a link to a Dutch blog, which is practically what I said about you blathering on about the glorious Dutch. You're perverse. Think about normal things like everyone else, and they might read it. "

I am offended. And I am now worried. Am I perverse? I do find totalitarian regimes interesting. I do love Dutch. Does this make me odd? Am I now not just a boring Surrey housewife but also one of strangely singular interests? Is this why some mothers don't talk to me in the nursery queue?

I have the presence of mind to stop myself. I will not be led into self-flagellation by a Bad Friend who can't tell the difference being blunt and being beastly.

I ask him what he thought. He pauses.

"Welllllll, " he says "I didn't read any of the girly shit, about you moaning on about being a housewife and how you're so bored, because I've heard it, bla bla bla bla. And that WINOS thing sounds utterly frightful. Unless" he checks himself, thoughtfully "any of your friends are fit. But I was right. You expect people to know random crap, and if they don't, you lose them. For instance, I don't know what the Dergue was. I didn't know who Mengistu was, until you made me google him, which actually I didn't have time to do. And I still don't know what Sky Burial is."


We finish our conversation pretty much here, after he has scored an invitation to supper, "when your Elderflower Champagne is ready."


I have chewed over his response and I, for once, remain unmoved.

However, I feel I do owe him for his ingenuousness. So here it is. This is for you.

ONE
The DERGUE was a communist junta headed by Mengistu which grabbed power in Ethiopia after the ousting of President Haille Selassie in 1974. It is now blamed for directly causing Civil War. It copied the Mao's lamented land reforms by nationalising all tenanted land and put peasants in charge of running the show, resulting in widesperead mismanagement and corruption, and leading to the horrendous famines of the 1980s, which you no doubt remember Bob Geldorf singing about.
Like most power-crazed juntas, the Dergue relied on vicious repression of citizens, and kept them in line with widespread assassination, mass murder, enforced resettlement, torture and plenty of locking people away without trial.
Mengistu, along with about 70 others, has been convicted in absentia for genocide and is safely ensconced in Zimbabwe. He has occasinonally nipped over to South Africa for medical treatments, but the Saffers, bizarrely, have never seen fit to extradite him. He has also apparently abandoned his communist beliefs, which, considering his life on a private estate surrounded by starving millions, couldn't be more convenient.

TWO
Sky Burial is a funerary practice which used to be common in Tibet and surrounding areas, where a body is cut in specific places and left exposed to the elements on the top of a hillside, so it may decompose naturally or be taken by the birds.


See? Now you have something to think about while you do your housework this morning. And when I tell you I'm writing about you, YOU will no doubt read my blog. Ha! Victory!