I get a lot of private emails about this site.

A tiny minority are from readers, some of whom I have never even heard of.

I got one, for example from a girl who had been waiting for the ferry at Hollyhead. She had been browsing the Interweb and found this site, and she just wrote to me to thank me, saying that reading the site had really passed the time while she waited for the ferry to arrive, and had given her a laugh when she had been in a dark mood.

That was really nice, but I don’t get many of them.

I get a lot from people and companies asking if they can advertise on the site.  Now I have spent a lot of time building this site up from nothing to little more than nothing, and I don’t see why I should suddenly turn it into a billboard for anyone except me.  I did accept one which has been stuck on my sidebar for the best part of a year, and the only reason that is there is because it adds a splash of colour and movement to the site.  The fact that they paid extremely well might have some additional relevance, but once their year is up I’m not even going to bother asking them if they want to renew.  I’m just going to bin it because it slows the site down.

Most of the mails I get are from people wanting to do “sponsored posts”.  Now if for example I wrote about recipes, then a post suddenly appearing extoling the virtues of a restaurant might not seem out of place, but I don’t.  If I wrote solely about my holidays in France [I wish!] then a sudden blurb about a travel agency could fit in well.  However, with the nature of the site as it stands, anything out of the chaos ordinary would stick out like a sore thumb.

Whenever I get one of those requests, I do one of two things.  I either bin it straight away, or, if I am in an extremely good mood I’ll write to them and tell them to fuck off.

I got one during the week.

It stood out a little from the usual mundane crap requests because it looked like she had actually gone to the bother of reading the fucking site before writing.  [I say ‘she’ incidentally as the name was Diane.  Or maybe it was a bloke whose parents had a great sense of humour?].

I wrote back to Diane with my usual fuck off, but for once I tempered it into a reasonably polite refusal.  And then came the moment that put Diane head and shoulders above all the other dicks who have written – she wrote back a very nice chatty mail, thanking me very much and saying she completely understood.  I think that was the first time anyone went to the bother of writing back.

I almost regret refusing her now.  Damnit, she was nice and polite and that is an extreme rarity.

Also I was quite taken with the name of the business she was trying to promote.

I could nearly identify with a site called HairyBaby.com.

But I can’t break the habit of a lifetime.