My Piece About Blogging, Written Last Week When I Was Moody And Thinking Too Much About Carrots

I have to ask you to indulge me with the following post. I scribbled it last week in a blatant attempt to pen myself out of a bad mood brought about by an unpleasant incident in Manchester whereby I was reduced to tears by a lactose intolerant leisure consultant and the work of proto-impressionist painter Adolphe Valette. You will find me, at the beginning of last week, doubting the value of blogging, though by Wednesday, I had moved on to doubt the value of dogging. By Friday, I was taking pot shots at logging and then the whole timber industry. Happily, I can now report that I’ve now changed my mind about all these things, except dogging, which still seems like a reasonable way to make new friends but I’m not so sure that it’s the most fuel efficient way of having a good time up a country lane late at night.

Change the sheets and polish that porcelain! I’ve decided that old Madeley is coming to stay with you.

But I don’t want you to worry or prepare anything special. I’ll only be with you for two weeks and I expect you to work me until I collapse. You want a pool digging? Just tell me how deep. Want the house repainting? A man hasn’t been born that can beat me around a Dulux colour chart. Work me hard, pay me nothing: that’ s how I like to be treated. It will feel just like being back at Channel 4. Damn their devious, back-stabbing, ‘O’Grady is more popular among the post-menopausal demographic than you’ hides.

But by now, you’re probably wondered if I’ve finally lost it. I too sometimes suspect that I’m walking east when my sanity is going west. Only, in this case, I don’t really think that I'm losing it is in the sense of walking though crowded markets whilst combing the hair of a heavily rouged coconut I like to call Molly. I just mean: how much longer can I go on like this?

Browsing the web, I stumbled across a group of my fellow bloggers talking about their monthly hits. Now, I know that you think you know what I’m about to say before I say it: that I’m about to wail on about how some other blog has forty times the hits that I have and that the most interesting thing they’ve ever written is the word ‘chiaroscuro’. And if you thought that’s what I was going to say, then you just take a merit badge and go stand at the front of the class. Bless the inordinate amount of soft fibrous fluff on your lovely cottony socks, for you are indeed right.

Blogging is an activity that most of us take up for purely narcissistic reasons. Those of us that don’t work professionally as journalists, will probably be writing in the vague hope that we can find work as journalists or writers or cartoonists or porn magnates. (I originally wrote ‘porn magnets’ but Judy won’t allow me to keep them on the fridge door. [Originally, I typed ‘porn midgets’ but that’s a story I’ve promised to keep under my hat. (I originally wrote ‘under my cat’ but that’s where I’m hiding the gloriously ribald account of my affair with a one-eyed Bulgarian vegetable seller called Molly who also happened to sell coconuts)]).

Anyway, to get back to my point: there can’t be many people who don’t open up their first Blogger account without thinking that they’re going to make a difference. The truth is that very few of us make a difference. There are ways to blog successfully and I consistently refuse to take those routes. I won’t post any videos of tap dancing dogs. I shirk porn (I originally typed ‘shake porn’ but... Oh, never mind...) I also won’t repost gags ripped from 'The Onion'. This blog is all me and is undoubtedly weaker for that. And, in a sense, every blog is about ‘me’. And ‘me’ isn’t very interesting. Have you read Iain Dale this week? Me, me, me, me, me. And Tories. Shudder, as Fry would say. Shudder.

The unhappy truth is that blogging is the poor relative to other social networking schemes that require far less effort and bring far more in terms of reward. Blogging also requires effort when a service like Twitter asks that you only write 120 characters a post. Facebook doesn’t even require that you write at all. You just send your friends vampiric bites to acknowledge their existence. ‘Dick Madeley has poked you with a carrot. Do you want to poke him back? Choose you vegetable of choice...’ Hardly the best advertisement for 'user created content'. After all: who likes being poked with a carrot? Not me. Not even Bill Oddie and I should know. I've poked him with plenty of carrots in my time.

Which brings all the way back to my offer. I’ve worked out the figures and I’ve calculated that the effort it takes me to do all my blogging is as profitable as if I came to work for each of you, my regular readers, for a fortnight every year. So long as you’ll pay my travel expenses, I won’t be out of pocket. For that, you’ll get at least forty hours of work out of me. Laying paths, decorating, fixing computer problems, teaching, or general administration: I can do the lot, possibly concurrently. And yes, if you want to, I’ll even let you poke me with a carrot.

Which reminds me of this story I keep under my cat...

The Real Blogger

It's eight in the morning and a blogger sits down at his keyboard and begins to type:

Jeez Louise! I got up late and nearly fed the dog to the kids. Oh the kids! What trouble! And me at that time in the month and Him getting ready for work! Sometimes I could just hug the love out of the little blighters. I really could. Can't say the same about Him. And then the dog threw up on Nigel’s shoes. He wasn’t happy about it. Who would be! They’re suede. I blame Pedigree Chum for having those big lumpy bits of meat. Why can’t they chop it up, I don’t know! It’s not as though horse meat is that hard to get right. Right?

So, I got the kids to school before the bell and then it was My Time. I got home, poured myself a nice big steaming cup of coffee, climbed beneath the duvet and watched Quincy on UK Gold. I love that Jack Klugman. He’s such a wrinkle faced doll!

Before I know it, I’m looking at the clock and I realise that I have to pick up the kids again. But then I think to myself: why not leave them at school? They’re warm and have lots of things to do with the cleaners and that strange man who they hire as a caretaker down there.

But, of course, you conscience begins to prick. I eventually reach for the car keys and I’m off to pick up the kids. And ain’t that the thing about having them? They might get on your nerves but you wouldn’t want to leave them with a stranger who has named his mop George and calls his bucket Mildred. Not even for a million Quincies!!!!!!

Thirty seven seconds later, this bad and bitter old man sits back, chuckling with spite. His blog is written for the day and now he waits to receive 59 comments before lunch and to know that he truly is the voice of the people.

Life is that simple.

The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society Reviews The Guardian

‘Brace yourself, Richard.’

I looked up from hammering another nail into my showbiz career. I’d been penning my ninth letter to the people at X Factor complaining yet again about their constant attempts to misrepresent it as a ‘musical talent show’.

‘What’s wrong, Jude?’ I asked as I carefully crossed the ‘f’ and spelled Louis Walsh’s name the way I think it was always meant to be spelt. ‘You’ve not been eating eggs again? You know they don’t agree with you…’

My darling wife tapped her piece of toast on The Guardian. ‘Have you read this?’ she asked.

‘Not yet,’ I replied. ‘I was going to leave Stephen Fry’s latest article of technowangliness for my morning ablution. Though, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know why I’m bothering. I go out of my way to pen him a poem and he hasn’t got the politeness to drop by and read it. You do know that a real poet reviewed me? And she compared me favourably with Lord Byron.’

Judy gave me a lightly buttered scowl. ‘You sure she wasn't recommending another session with Tanya Byron?’ she asked, as quick as that. If she'd been as witty as quick on the show, we might never have got cancelled. ‘Tanya did a bang up job with you,' she continued. 'I never thought she’d help you get rid of that habit of randomly shouting out the names of Kaisers whenever you got stressed.’

‘You were saying about the paper,’ I prompted.

‘Oh, yes. It’s about your blog...’

I paused, pen in mid air, wondering what was coming. I had a nervous uncle to whom it was wise to avoid mentioning Libya. Just the mention Tripoli and he'd start singing like Vera Lynne. Judy has a similar response at the merest mention of my blog. Which made it odd that she'd brought it up and was not singing about the White Cliffs of Dover. ‘They’ve reviewed it quite favourably,’ she said.

I dropped my pen. ‘Prince Frederick William Albert Victor of Prussia!’ I screamed.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, giving me a withering look.

‘What did they say? They mentioned my poetry, right?’

‘Not exactly,’ she answered and went about reading out the little blurb they’d written about you-know-who.

I listened carefully, as one does when hearing about oneself, occasionally humbly nodding my head or punctuating the reading with a round of applause. But by the time Judy reached the final full stop, she discovered me still sitting in my chair with a quizzical look besmirching my fine manly features.

‘Well, what do you think about that?’ she asked.

‘Fine’ I replied, ‘but what was that bit about “this blog may not be all his own work”. Whose work might it be?’

She shrugged as she turned the page over to the DVD reviews. ‘Can there be another man in this nation with such a strange set of preoccupations? If there is, I’d like to meet him, shake him by the hand, and then have him experimented upon. I would have thought you were quite unique, Richard. A bit like Les Dennis but without the humour.’

I snatched The Guide away from her and thumbed back to the blog reviews to read it for myself.

‘I don’t know... I seem to be below a website disapproving of rabbits. I don’t mind that at all. I thoroughly disapprove of rabbits. And I also have strong opinions on both hares and conies.’

‘Conies? I thought they were testicles,’ said Judy.

‘Well I disapprove of those too. Especially when they dig up our lawn.’

I finished reading the review a second time and glanced my eyes over the rest of the page. ‘All in all, I'm quite pleased with that. I’m in some fine company. I should prepare for a flood of traffic, eager to see the man newly liberated from Channel 4. I can now say and do what I like. You know, Jude, I could quite get used to this independence. I might write a little treatise on Fern Britain. I’ve always wanted to say a few things about the way she ruined This Morning.’

‘Poor Fred,’ tutted Judy, as she always does when she thinks of Liverpool. ‘We must remember to send him another care package this Christmas. Or perhaps we should ask him to come and stay with us. What do you say, Richard? Richard?’

The pencil snapped in my fingers and Judy cowered as the name of Frederick William Nicholas Charles of Prussia echoed through the house.