Over the last nine months I've kept a rather secretive blog - and when I had nothing to say I used to look at other people's blogs and make underwhelmed comments about them.... in particular I found Family Blogs tended to combine offensive levels of perkiness with particularly uninteresting subject matter. Usually they were the blogs of American families and they went something like this
"Hi - I'm Jeanie Hackensack and I live in Dayton Ohio, with my gorgeous, adorable 3 year old princess, Honey, and her little brother Manuel [6 photos]. We also have two of the cutest Samoyed puppies [more photos] Merry and Pippin.
And this handsome hunk [photo] is my darling husband Morgan - who is also my best friend and I just love him......"
Of course, being an anally retentive, stiff upperlipped Brit the only normal human response to this is "Pass the Sick Bag, Alice!" But of course I'm just jealous....
But here's a photo anyway:
This is me in bed with a kitten - in July 2011 - the kitten, Bernard, is now considerably larger.
And this is a picture of our dining room - fillled with 20 people who were mostly strangers - on the first Food Odyssey in January 2010 -we aren't in it, we were busy serving food.
Anyway, every year we send out our sickening Christmas email - telling of the glorious achievements in the HamlynSamuel year... As a branding exercise it is a bit of a disaster - I don't think anyone is particularly aspiring to live like us...but perhaps we're a reliable brand, rather than an aspirational one - more Sainsbury's than Fortnum's. And every year we get complaints that this massive screed decorated with many photos has completely blocked up everyone's in boxes and took 3 hours to download and caused a massive loss of productivity and indeed, the will to live, in many of our friends' households.
So we thought - brevity is the thing - why send everyone an email when we could just send them a link... so in a day or so I will put the Christmas letter up here - and then everyone can see it (or ignore it) without any aggro (unless they are amongst the 20 people who do not seem to use the internet).
Also, the brilliance of this scheme is that we can put in any updates that occur between now and Christmas... for example, at present an agent is considering the WHOLE novel... this is a major breakthrough - the last re-write (putting everything in 3rd person) and re-naming it The Romantic Feminist may have helped... if I am lucky I will know by Christmas whether she will take me on and how many more changes she will advise... or not, as the case may be.. I will also have the results of the uterine biopsy they're doing next week - and the car will be fixed. So - much to look forward to.
If this entry seems a little disjointed, it is probably because Finn is shouting and swearing at me.
"Hi - I'm Jeanie Hackensack and I live in Dayton Ohio, with my gorgeous, adorable 3 year old princess, Honey, and her little brother Manuel [6 photos]. We also have two of the cutest Samoyed puppies [more photos] Merry and Pippin.
And this handsome hunk [photo] is my darling husband Morgan - who is also my best friend and I just love him......"
Of course, being an anally retentive, stiff upperlipped Brit the only normal human response to this is "Pass the Sick Bag, Alice!" But of course I'm just jealous....
But here's a photo anyway:
This is me in bed with a kitten - in July 2011 - the kitten, Bernard, is now considerably larger.
And this is a picture of our dining room - fillled with 20 people who were mostly strangers - on the first Food Odyssey in January 2010 -we aren't in it, we were busy serving food.
Anyway, every year we send out our sickening Christmas email - telling of the glorious achievements in the HamlynSamuel year... As a branding exercise it is a bit of a disaster - I don't think anyone is particularly aspiring to live like us...but perhaps we're a reliable brand, rather than an aspirational one - more Sainsbury's than Fortnum's. And every year we get complaints that this massive screed decorated with many photos has completely blocked up everyone's in boxes and took 3 hours to download and caused a massive loss of productivity and indeed, the will to live, in many of our friends' households.
So we thought - brevity is the thing - why send everyone an email when we could just send them a link... so in a day or so I will put the Christmas letter up here - and then everyone can see it (or ignore it) without any aggro (unless they are amongst the 20 people who do not seem to use the internet).
Also, the brilliance of this scheme is that we can put in any updates that occur between now and Christmas... for example, at present an agent is considering the WHOLE novel... this is a major breakthrough - the last re-write (putting everything in 3rd person) and re-naming it The Romantic Feminist may have helped... if I am lucky I will know by Christmas whether she will take me on and how many more changes she will advise... or not, as the case may be.. I will also have the results of the uterine biopsy they're doing next week - and the car will be fixed. So - much to look forward to.
If this entry seems a little disjointed, it is probably because Finn is shouting and swearing at me.
