RERUM

“Isn’t it all a bit sad, this blogging thing?” Mike asked. “Millions of agoraphobics snuggled up next to their laptops, sending lonely messages to people they’re never going to meet. All somewhat ubernerd, message-in-a-bottle stuff, isn’t it?”

He sipped the top off his pint of Guinness & looked at me over the rim.  I flashed him my dangerous smile – that momentary flicker at the corner of my upper lip - & the pub fell silent.

With the speed of a cobra I drove my forearm into his face, sensing with satisfaction at the moment of impact the crunch of bone & the rending of tissue. Without even a low moan, he tipped over the back of his chair & lay senseless against the foot rail of the bar…

Cruel but fair, I feel.  We are a much-maligned species, despised by so many of the media who see us as importunate arrivistes, untrained & unblooded, & sneered at by the public who see us as chattering nonentities trading domestic minutiae under pictures of our cats & dogs.

Well, Natalie will provide – albeit briefly – a voice from our beleaguered camp. Full details are available at Blaugustine. I shall merely invoke all my UK readers, accidental, casual or dedicated, to tune in at the appropriate time. (And if the BBC slips the programme across the Pond, our American pals can catch it too.)

Meanwhile, just to confound those who perceive us as pebble-lensed losers whose most meaningful relationship is with our keyboards, Natalie & I are to meet this coming Wednesday for the first time in our 3-year e-friendship in order to report back on Bloggers – Real Internet Diaries, playing at the Soho Theatre in London’s West End.

The play – which, as you can read, drew rave reviews at this year’s Edinburgh Festival – was written by Oliver Mann, an ex-student of mine & a guy of prodigious talents for whom great things were predicted from his earliest efforts on & off our stage.

So check in post-Wednesday night & I’ll reveal what happens when bloggers meet for a pint & a packet of crisps.  And I’ll pass on too what pebble-lensed losers Natalie D’Arbeloff & Dick Jones made of Olly Mann’s dramatised panegyric to the likes of you & I.