Life: not what I thought it was

Today’s Much Love Monday is brought to you by the effervescent, ebullient and thoroughly entertaining band, The Wonderstuff, with The Size of a Cow.

Last week was a tetchy week in cyberspace with fallings-out and arguments and people feeling they need to put other people right. Few of these involved me directly. Maybe it’s because it’s been so wet, but it does seem like lots of people felt right nadgy for want of a better phrase. I think it’s the weather and the time of the year, personally. Last Monday was apparently ‘Blue Monday’ when credit card bills appear and people realise winter has been long and wet and snowy and hard. I put snowy in there just to stop it sounding so rude. Words can betray you.

Anyway, like Alanis Morrisette with her Thank You song, I could sarcastically thank everything that made last week particularly nadgy and crappy. Or… I could thank the 7,011,308,391* other people in the world who managed not to piss on my parade.

So, Much Love to the 7,011,308,530 people who DID NOT fall out with anyone on a ladies-only forum I frequent. Or, since it has limited membership, 1,042 women. That 1,042 women manage not to fall out more frequently is quite something. Much Love for their usual good humour, fun, pictures of hot men in kilts and advice about just about everything under the sun.

Much Love to the 7,011,308,844 people who DID NOT send me an anonymous troll email from a disguised ip address to berate someone over whom I have no control, no tie and no link. That anyone would go to the lengths of setting up a fake ip address, a fake email and then sending me comments is tantamount to the fact they are plainly just stealing oxygen from the planet. Talk about finding a way to add ‘NO COMEBACKS’ to your comment. I can’t reason with you, I can’t respond to you. Or… so you thought. But I can call you an oxygen thief and refuse to publish your comment. Who the hell sets up a fake email just to send a nasty comment?

Oh, yeah. A coward who doesn’t want to listen to reason.

Much Love to the 7,011,309,326 people who DID NOT drive in my boot in the snow, in 6 inches of water or in the dark when there’s black ice.

Much Love to the 7,011,309,472 people who DID NOT cause a queue in the supermarket by paying with cheques for three different bags of shopping.

Much Love to the [insert estimate here] English teachers who DID NOT teach their students that they can introduce a quote with a semi-colon and tell them they’d get more marks for it. First, I have to rant about how it’s not right (and it’s not okay) and then I have to admit it’s a moot point because it would gain or lose you exactly zero marks either way.

Much Love to the 7,011,309,887 people (or, French pedants, to narrow the field) who DID NOT phone me 11 times (no kidding) and leave me 3 messages (no kidding) about a hyphen they thought I’d misplaced in a French word. First, having to explain it was a franglais joke, committed with full consciousness of its fault, then having to point out the inherent racism of the fact that they do not ring Le Figaro up to tell them about their errors, when Le Fig, among others, make plenty of them made me very mad indeed. The Telegraph are ALWAYS inserting apostrophes where none are needed, The Guardian was known for many years as The Guradian because of its typos. I don’t reprimand them on their errors. Maybe I should. But I put one hyphen ‘wrong’ and I get 11 phonecalls (from the same pedant) to put me straight. The fact that I’d done it on purpose completely dumbfounded the old battleaxe. The fact that I explained that in England, Spain, Portugal (and perhaps many more countries) only REALLY strange people go to the same lengths eluded her. If the French language dies, that’ll be why. At least English and Spanish don’t have tenses they only use in writing because they sound weird. Now, if only Le Fig can learn to use the Passé Simple correctly, and everyone in the whole of France understand that espérer does not take the subjunctive, but souhaiter does and that croire doesn’t, except in negation. Oh là là. No wonder us bloody foreigners make errors.

If you’re one of the 7,011,311,001 people who managed to be kind and polite, notably to me, or at least not to agitate me like a splinter in a wound, then you are the recipients of my love.

I know it’s not the first Tuesday in February, but maybe there should be a class like this. Here’s the list, if you’re bored.

Also, thanks to the people who DO NOT USE osmosis wrongly when they mean how an idea spreads. It’s diffusion. An idea should spread by diffusion, not osmosis. Osmosis is liquid-based. Scientists should feel more angry about the abuse of the word and the misunderstanding of a very common scientific principle. The Spectator is one culprit. Maybe I should find their journalists, ring them at home 11 times and try to explain the word to them?

*despite the fact I type fast, the world population clock kept changing. It was hard to type fast, even though I was angry.

I need to finish with a little Miles Wonderstuff Wisdom and stop building up my problems to the size of a cow.