The best bit?  MY BLOODY HORRIBLE KNEES ARE COVERED.

More to come.  This is just me doodling.

(if you don’t know what this is about, pls read this previous post)

It’s the time of year that we normal-sized, post-children, post-forty, living-life-beyond-rice-cakes types can embrace proper shoes and tights again, no more trying to cope with flimsy sundresses or shorts and be constantly worrying about shaved legs and a mild case of the bingo-wings.  We can get back to proper dresses, with sleeves, cardigans, feeling comfortable because we don’t have to expose most of our flesh because of the heat.

I look at my wardrobe and despair.

I have dresses, of course. Most of them are getting on a bit because they are such rare finds that I have to treasure them. Some are very specifically “going to weddings and dos” dresses.  I need more dresses.  I really can’t spend another winter in trousers because I look horrible in most trousers (funny legs, square arse) and I don’t have nearly enough dresses to cope with the daily demands of making me look civilized, clean, powerful, sexy, artistic, respectable and interesting (which is the secondary objective of clothes, the primary, obviously, being to give us pockets to keep our phones in, no… wait, that’s what bras are for…).

So, I need to go shopping.  I have finally learnt my lesson about dress shopping in Portugal, so I haven’t actually left the house yet. Dress shopping in Portugal is a pointless exercise if you’re my size (in all directions) and you don’t like nasty frilly sparkly shit and looking really overdressed, so online shopping it is.  I spent a couple of hours yesterday trawling the sea of rubbish that is clothes shopping online and what did I catch?

• A gamtrillion tarty, above-the-knee dresses for knitting needle shaped pre-adolescents.
• Horrible polka dotted shirt dresses in polyester for old ladies.
• Outrageously expensive, very beautiful, elegant clothes for “real” women, undoubtably helped to look beautiful by an insanely beautiful six foot tall amazonian, who is not particularly “real”.  I need “real” clothes for “real” day to day living, that don’t cost a “real” shitload of money.
• Mary Portas’ horrible clothes (part of her crusade to make over forties look good) are good, for anyone over forty who is as thin as Mary Portas, and wants to look exactly like Mary Portas. I DON’T WANT THAT HORRIBLE ORANGE BOB, MARY.
• Vintage dress shops that regard the eighties (and all the nasty crap they entailed) as vintage.
• A shitload of leopard skin.
• Websites for euphemistically “curvy” ladies full of photographs of positively un-curvy ladies modelling ugly flowery dresses, or enormous sweater dresses and those shapeless bin bag shaped dresses… and one hell of a lot of BLOUSY.
• Dresses touted as “vintage style”, ie. 30s, 40s, 50s…. which are as vintage as my breakfast…. they are almost all ABOVE THE KNEE.  I’d like to remind them that knees were significantly well covered until the 60s, and it’s not just a pathetic attempt at an old fashioned neckline that makes a dress “vintage”.
• Jersey and knitwear dresses for big women, we, the big women who need holding up and holding in bit being sold a stretchy bag to chuck ourselves into.

I could go on for hours hating all the crap I found.  But I’ll sum it up here:

• If you can afford to spend £250 on a day dress, you’ll probably be fine. Carry on.
• If you are a size between “stick” and “perfect”, carry on.
• If you are a bit chunky (by which I mean, you have boobs, curves, a tummy, an arse or any combination of these perfectly normal body parts of a normal woman who doesn’t have the time nor the excess vanity to dedicate most of her time to getting rid of them) you will find plenty, as long as you want to look tacky, frumpy, fatter than you are, shorter than you are or blousy. Carry On.
• If you have good taste, need to look reasonably smart but different (for god’s sake, please, different), but have a few bits of your body that really need to be covered up and/or held in, because we cannot help but be judged unfairly when we are surrounded by images of models who have all recently died of starvation…. THEN YOU CONTINUED TO BE UTTERLY SCREWED.

The reason for this state of  affairs lies in part with us laydees with racks and botts and thighs and tummies, who don’t want to look like curvy blousy tarts or baked potatoes in a sack, for not shouting loud enough.   But we have our real lives to be getting on with, and it’s not exactly “chain yourself to the railings/throw yourself under a horse” important, and we have other priorities, like keeping everyone fed, clothed and getting some work done.

The bigger fault lies with the retailers, the advertisers, and of course, the designers, who, it seems, are all conspiring to make you and me look like shit.

I’m going to let you into a little secret.

Fashion designers aren’t ALL woman hating shitheads (though, I’m seeking some statistics to prove that), they just aren’t very good at drawing.  Nor are they very good at puzzles.  If you have a modicum of artistic talent, it is extraordinarily easy to draw a stylized thin doll-like thing, far easier than it is to draw a normal shaped woman.  It is easier than that, even, to draw stylized clothes onto that skinny stick creature…. and for those clothes to look “good”.

Here, i’ll prove it, with a drawing that took me about twenty three seconds to do.  I could smear a streak of poo across one of these “models” and it would look “good” as an outfit.

Now, try drawing something onto this following model (very VERY loosely based on me).  It would take more than twenty-three seconds to do something interesting, elegant, artistic, edgy, different or fun, wouldn’t it?

I’ve threatened this a dozen times, but now, I’m going to get on and try to do it this time.  I’m going to design a set of dresses for proper shapeful women, i.e. me,  that won’t make them, i.e. me, look shit.  I’ll make the clothes (yes, I do know how), then get them properly photographed (already booked!) and if anyone else likes them, I’ll sell you the pattern… or even the clothes. Let’s see.  This may be a bit of a pipe dream, but, goddamit, I’m fed up with being made to feel like a worthless member of the world, when actually, I’m not, I’m brilliant. This will all take a while, because I’m up to my ears, but I hope that by next autumn, I can stop complaining about having nothing to wear.

read also:

http://lucypepper.com/wpr/2009/09/fashion-designers-are-vacuous-idiots/

http://lucypepper.com/wpr/2010/10/banging-on/

(sadly without their comments, which were lost in the latest move)

(for a Portuguese foundation’s annual report).

http://TROLLOLOGIST.com

because I like the way it sounds and they needed  their own space.

Let’s hope that we forget to feed them.

Come back here, to (http://lucypepper.com, OBV) for all you non-troll needs (coming soon “The British Abroad”)

Hell, just stick the both of them in your RSS feeds.

I put him straight. There are no more stupid people than there ever were… the difference is that we can HEAR them now that the internet has given them a bloody voice. You find them in the comment boxes of the newspapers and the “anything to do with the telly” sites mostly, and some of them manage to bash their keys in an infinite-monkeys-plus-infinite-time manner and come up with a blog or a facebook account of their own or manage to join a forum. The stupids are more vocal. But you can ignore them, because they are so stupid.

Harder to ignore are the trolls. Spend more than a little time on anywhere but the froufrouest twee-est sweetest sites and you’re going to come across a troll from time to time. Generally, trolls aren’t AS stupid as the stupids. They have other problems. They are bitter and sad little people. They look for the weaknesses of others and try hard to undermine them for their own entertainment and, I imagine, the entertainment of other trolls, though they are probably just as afraid of other trolls as they are of reasonable people, daylight and women. Trolls can be found everywhere, all over the world, but they come from a small base of archetypes, archetypes that I am going to catalogue right here, because I’m sick of the snivelling little sods and this is CATHARTIC, DAMMIT!

Troll Catalogue

Troll #1 “Storm Trooper”

He is by far the commonest form of troll. We all recognise him. His trollness extends outside the internet and into his “real life” where he works in IT or in a book store or as a lab tech or an underground train driver, where he is always happy to tell everyone around him that they are wrong. He is the walking Star Wars Fan cliché and spends hours of every evening after a couple of joyless hours in a pub or bar trawling the forums for innaccuracies regarding Darth Vader or Gollum or Hitch Hikers. When he tires of that he goes to find a few blogs where he leaves shitty little messages trying to undermine the author of each blog. He finishes off his evening with a bit of free porn or as his Second Life avatar, Glenda, the warrior princess. He has two friends, dead eyes and is a virgin.

Troll #2 “Defender”

Man, he’s angry.

He is in his second year at university. Therefore, he is now the world’s authority on whatever it is he is studying; maths, physics, computer science, political science, etc. No-one, but no-one, can possibly have an opinion on his subject other than he, his fellow students (although all idiots) and his professors (only slightly above idiots except the one that he hero worships). He looks fairly normal, so began university by making a few friends, but soon pissed everyone off with his negativity and unbending ideals. Girls who thought him quite cute now think him decidedly odd after he couldn’t look them in the eye and scrubbed his hands and face clean after a hurried and disastrous fumble in his room. It is easier for him to commune with “Bloody Road Death and Car Thievery IV” than girls.

He’s borderline OCD and, though he lives at the university, he still sends his laundry home: it is only his mother who can get his t-shirts brilliant white and ironed with a touch of starch, three of them per day.

On-line he googles for blog posts and forum messages by ANYONE that mention his specialist subject and flames them in the comment boxes and message threads for their stupidity (and fatness and filthiness, when he’s having a peculiarly bad OCD day).

He belongs to a couple of forums of like-minded pedants who are similarly under-educated in their subjects, and they get along most of the time, apart from the odd flare up when they get their knickers in a twist about worm-holes, Hitler’s economic policy or string theory.

He’s the kind of kid you’d worry might instigate a campus shooting.

Troll #3 “Catwoman”

She is a rare one, but once you’ve got her, she’s hard to shake off. She is a clinically insane cat lady. She lives with her cats since her husband left her, 18 years ago after six weeks of marriage in a house the housing assoc can’t evict her from. She believes she is fighting for truth and freedom, but instead harasses anyone she happens to think is wrong with 1000 word long rants in their comment boxes, on every post, that have nothing to do with the text of the post and that barely make sense. She does this for months on end. She’ll be running six or seven hate campaigns at a time and in her paranoia, believes that the police are after her. They actually are now, after she started to leave unveiled death threats. She is in hiding, spending her days skitting furtively between the library and the café on the corner drinking tea and looking suspicious, muttering to herself. She only goes home at night… well, the cats need feeding.

Troll #4 “Revolutionary Guard”

The troll hereaboveforewith illustrated is the particularly Portuguese version of the archetype, but the archetype is an international one. He is a late-middle-aged man, in this case a just-taken-early-retirement secondary school teacher who spends his now empty days with reading biographies of left wing politicians, spending too much time in the bars and cafés pontificating and postulating and proselytising about the evils of fascism and/or capitalism (the Portuguese version above is prone to saying “FashSEEEEESSHTA” too often) and reading and quickly responding to the online newspaper opinion columns. The Portuguese version here is a member of the communist party which is inexplicably still regarded as not a joke. In Britain, for example, he would be a member of the Labour Party, firmly OLD Labour.

He has his own blog which has no readers where he writes dismal tracts about poetry and socialism. He spends his afternoons and evenings (while his wife gets home from work and puts the dinner and laundry on) online, looking for “so-called academics” so he can call them “so-called academics” and fascists and idiots for questioning ANYTHING that isn’t covered by his very own version of socialist doctrine. He writes huge comments in overly complicated language, thinking he’s being clever, and gets into arguments with his fellow trolls about particularly uninteresting points barely mentioned in the original blog post or newspaper article. He has quite high blood pressure. He is a git.

Troll #5 “Manga Mama”

She recently had her first baby, and though the father is around, he’s even more passive agressive than she is. This leads her to spend much of her time online, alone, with the baby slung over her shoulder or clamped to her breast.

The baby, Porphyrea, is much loved, but has in no small way disrupted her life… she barely gets time to disinfect her belly piercing, (the nipple ones have had to go), so feels quite resentful that she isn’t 24 hours with the perfect hair and makeup for her rôle in life, that of manga-pixie-suicide-girl-cutie-pie. She takes her resentment out online, forging deep friendships in mothering forums and blogs by like-dressing girls, only to dash those friendships on the virtual rocks by willfully taking offense from not particularly offensive remarks that aren’t made at her anyway. It is not unknown for her to suggest that she is about to commit troll suicide in very vague terms, leading to a huge upsurge in traffic involving HER.

Troll #6 “Caged Crusader”

On the outside, this troll would not seem to be the prime candidate for being a troll. He has a decent job, is quite well educated, is reasonably paid, is not a virgin, might even have a wife and family. However, he is a very bitter man. So bitter that he is seething with rage… not about things that might matter, let’s say hunger in the third world or unjustified violence, no. He seethes with jealousy…. and the best place for him to express that is the internet, where he can be anonymous (he thinks he is quite technically capable, but barely understands the power of the I.P. address). He HATES anyone he perceives as more talented than him. Or who has attained more than him. Or is a woman with any kind of talent. Or is a foreigner who has something to say about their adopted country. Worst is a foreign woman with some talent who has something to say about her adopted country (you MIGHT guess that I have a problem with this arsehole).

His vitriol knows no limits and leaves nasty snipey comments in blog posts, sometimes in a half jokey manner, trying to be clever with his nasty arsey thoughts.

He will end up alone after he alienates everyone in the real world. His only friend will be a bottle of whiskey.

Troll #7 “Girl Next Door”

This is one troll who ISN’T anonymous and is really an accidental troll. She is your next door neighbour, or your cousin, or you work colleague, or someone you met once and unthinkingly gave your blog address. She is a bit difficult, a bit humourless and a bit thick. She is also extremely politically correct. She doesn’t understand that your blog is not entirely real and leaves comments on your blog saying things like “but you don’t really look like that” and “that didn’t exactly happen like that, did it” not understanding that your blog persona is a big fat show off and the big fat show off is surpressed in day to day life. For a while she becomes your most assiduous reader – she’s fact checking – but after a while she just gives up, realizing that she just doesn’t understand the whole blogging thing.

Troll #8 “Totenkopf”

By day, he is a mild-mannered social worker. Gentle and kind, he works with under-privileged children or in a drug rehab unit. He is committed to using the correct terminology for every minority condition, and gently and oh so quietly corrects people if they say the wrong thing, like “midget” (little person) or “crackhead fucker” (person of high addictive propensity). He is shy and stutters when ordering even coffee over the counter, especially if it is a girl serving the coffee.

By night, he is “Totenkopf – the Destroyer”. It gives him a sharp thrill to bombard the internet with insane bilious abuse, conjuring images in his comments of violent acts on “sub-humans”, inciting jihad on the jihadists, and willfully seeking to insult (violently and disgustingly, with more shit, blood, bile and piss than you might generally be comfortable with) by saying the unsayable. In one evening of hellfire, he will loudly defend — in separate places — gulags, Guantanamo, lynchings, pogroms, gas chambers, shock and awe, with no affiliations to anything except the unspeakable.

It’s not that he actually believes or desires any of the shit that exudes from his skinny little fingers onto the keyboard — he couldn’t, he contradicts himself with every paragraph — he just craves like a drug the exhilaration that it brings.

Troll #9 “Athena”

In the real world, she is just a bit lost up her own arse. At least two divorces behind her, she used to beguile, but soon bored her husbands with her insane demands for attention on her terms. She lives expensively on the alimony and buys expensive clothes from special ladies’ boutiques, the kind you might find in Bath.

On-line she strikes the the unwary forum dweller and blog owner, first with compliments and agreement, but soon she cannot contain herself and it’s all “oh, DARLING, why didn’t you ask ME? I could have told you THAT!” and “AS an artist, I know only too well that….” and “I’M a PROFESSIONAL designer, and I have a strategy with my clients which…” and “Of course, as a novelist, I discovered that…”. Everything you say, SHE already knew it, ten years ago, twenty years ago, when she was an actress, when she was a TV producer, when she was a famous photographer. If you write about mothering, SHE’ll give you advice, although she has never HAD children, only step-grandchildren from one of her failed marriages. If you write about living in Greenland, SHE lived there for several years in the sixties (or rather, she didn’t). No one has ever heard of her, of course, but as she goes anonymously under the name of “Athena”, she assumes that YOU will assume that she is a genuine middlingly famous novelist photographer artist designer adventurer who doesn’t need to trade on her fame to have friends on the internet. She is not.

Troll #10 “Tokyo Dreamer”

He is an Emo-Hipster who spends half of each day getting ready to go out and the other half walking up and down the high street looking lanky. His hair his so straightened that it always looks greasy, his skin as pale as the glow from his laptop. He is an unfathomably enthusiastic fan of some band or other, like U2 or Tokyo Hotel… the kind of band that for some reason garners that kind of extreme fanship, when, as we all know, they’re not that good.

Online, he exists as a more flamboyant version of himself with accounts on all the social networking sites; facebook, bebo, myspace, deviantart (where he prowls around, appreciating emo-manga-crap-art) and several that you’ve never heard of, to keep the world up to date with his day to day thoughts on his existence and the odd photo of him vomiting into the gutter.

A large part of this online life is his band fan-dom, running various fanclub pages in various places and he scours the net for the merest mention of his FAVE band oh. my. god. they SPEAK to my SOUL, whoever they might be and rains down insults, abuse and sometimes even death threats on any unsuspecting blogger or twitterer who might have, in passing, denegrated the [frankly shoddy] work of his BEST BAND EVAH!

Troll #11 “Hope Charity Faith”

This is one of the keyboard bashers you’ll find commenting on [lowest common denominator] sites like the Daily Mail and Sky News. She spends a LOT of time at home, watching daytime TV and she attracts biscuits. She reads those cheap magazines full of tragic stories of women whose husbands cheat on them with their sister while suffering a nervous breakdown and dealing with the growth of an extra arm.

She seeks out the stories online where people have died or suffered some hideous disease and leaves heartfelt [idiotic] messages like “let the precious angel sleep in the arms of jesus now RIP petal” and “I know how you feel [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON NAME HERE] I once found a lump too although it was a biscuit get well soon love” as if [INSERT FAMOUS PERSON NAME HERE] will be reading this unpunctuated drivel. She seeks to feel their pain and commiserate with every story she can find that is in anyway a little bit sad.

She is the same person who goes straight to the “LOOK! Katy Perry/Cameron Diaz/Etc. was spotted OUT without MAKEUP! What a hideous BITCH!” articles in the Daily Mail Online and writes things like “Not so stuck up now is she? i never got what anyone sees in her”.

Pass the biscuits.

Troll #12 “Angel”

Mild, mousey and quiet, this one. She works as a secretary to an overbearing boss and never speaks up, and finds him wildly attractive. She is plain to look at, and dresses in what she thinks is understated sexiness. It is just understated. She has had relationships with the other sex but never satisfactorily and they last no longer than a couple of weeks. She lives in a small flat with her predictable cat and quite a few pill bottles.

She came late to the internet, didn’t see the point in it for a long time. She was happy with her soap operas, but after getting into the soap operas’ websites with all the fascinating gossip about the cast and crew she slowly crept beyond their safety into the blogosphere… where she found the SEXBLOGS. It didn’t take her long to start leaving comments under various monikers, writing “WHORE!”, “You should be ashamed of yourself!”, “Whore… WHORE!”, “You need help, you BITCH!” to the authors.

We can’t be entirely sure what she is doing UNDER the table while she is typing her comments with the one hand.

Troll #13 “Twatty the robot”

The lurking spambot who writes drivel, copied and pasted from wikipedia, he infiltrates our happy fluffy comment boxes and forums so he can sell us his knock off handbags, shoes and viagra. He must die.

Troll #14 “Wiseman”

He is as wise as only a seventeen year old can be. He spends a LOT of time in his bedroom, acne-ridden, terribly shy and unpopular at school. He reads books and listens to music, though neither is the kind that his schoolmates read or listen to. He is expecting to get into a decent university. His parents are very proud of him and give him FAR too much attention when he explains what he did at school this week, and what he has been reading recently. He spurns the fripperies of the social networking and music sites. Instead he reads the more political sites on line, the journalist blogs and opinion pages where he seeks out left wingers, mentions of inclusive social policies, protectionist practices, welfare states, kindness, woolly minded liberalness and bashes out in capital letters “HAVEN’T YOU READ ANY AYN RAND, YOU BUFFOON???”.

(He later gets into Cambridge and after a couple of years has joined the Footlights…. and writes an amusing sketch about Atlas shrugging)

Troll #15 “AAAAARRRRGGHHHHHHH”

So, imagine there’s this bloke and once, when he was a foul drip of a seventeen year old, some guy (for the sake of argument let’s call him Rogério) called him a name that he didn’t like (the name wasn’t THAT bad).

Roll forward twenty years and Mr “AAAAARRRGGGGGHHHH” has been stewing away on what “Rogério” called him, spending all his energy on persuading himself that “Rogério” was wrong, trying to climb whatever ladder he is on, marrying the first girl that would have him (he has since lived to regret THAT decision) and being generally unfulfilled in life…. until one day and he finds “Rogério” authoring a blog or heading a forum… and all his unfulfilled dreams, frustrations and pain come out in bilious, confused messages of HATE to this “Rogério”, such as “GET BACK UP THE ARSE THAT YOU FELL FROM, IF YOU EVER FALL OUT OF IT!!” or “YOU ARE FOPWASSOCK, LEARN TO WRITE, ASS, YOU CAN’T WRITE, YOU WRITE SHIT, WRITE UP YOUR ARSE!”

Sure, this “Rogério” has a different surname to the one he had twenty years ago, and today he is a liberal leftie pinko commie but back then he was the BIGGEST fan that Mr. Salazar EVER had, but Mr “AAAAARRRGGGGGHHHH” holds onto his mis-recognised nemesis and follows him round the net for YEARS until his horrible harpie of a wife has him checked into a special place with soft walls.

Troll #16 “Rectifyer”

It’s not his fault he was born without a scrap of a sense of humour.

It is enough for you to write four words on the internet for him to find you and write a thesis long comment in your blog about why you are wrong, that you have missed all the salient points, that what you refer to has been mythologized since the dawn of civilization and in an entirely different sense from the one you are using, that scientifically you must bear certain facts in mind and disease and crop devastation must be put into the equation, that you should really be careful before making such pronouncements as they are likely to cause wrong thinking in other, more impressionable, less educated visitors to your blog.

All you said was “I love fluffy bunnies”.

Troll #17 “Free Esprit”

She regards herself as supremely open-minded and free-spirited. This she reflects in her outward appearance with her wardrobe, gaudy jewellery, retro make-up and short hair. She lives in an extremely chintzy flat, that suffers from an excessive attention to detail… she has a lot of time on her hands at weekends. She thinks she is somewhat of an intellectual. Her bookshelves are full of Paulo Coelho and Saramago translations, and all the Dan Browns are scattered around her sofa.

On the internet, she meanders open-mindedly and free-spiritedly round the “literary” blogs and websites, absolutely NOTHING else appeals to her… and she goes about the place nodding in agreement, silently to herself.

Occasionally, though, she leaves her literary safe zone, purely by accident, and finds herself in a blog whose author also believes themselves to be open-minded and free-spirited and writes thus…. and writes a few things that “Free Esprit” doesn’t agree with.

Instead of thinking, “hum, there is someone there who is open-minded and free-spirited like me, and they think differently to me. How interesting”, she writes a ludicrous, longwinded, patronising comment, in the most closed-minded imprisoned-spirited way. She stews over it all weekend and goes back regularly to her comment to re-read what she has written.

She concludes that she really ought to write a book, she is THAT good.

Troll #18 “Messenger”

This is the comment box evangelist we all run away from. The illustrated version is, of course, the christian evangelist, but internet evangelism is a very inclusive religion, from Christianity to Islam, from Hummer drivers to Prius drivers, from Mac users to PC users, from Michael Jackson lovers to Michael Jackson joke makers, dreary bastards all of them trying to persuade you that theirs is the only way and your way is the wrong way….You haven’t seen the light yet, you poor lamb, YOU will thank me when you find the love of Jesus/the hybrid/the Mac/Michael Jackson.

Generally, they are not nasty, just BORING and overly sincere and repetitive, one trick ponies, and it is really hard to tell them to just fuck right off, just in case the only way to heaven IS via the hybrid car. When it comes to the Mac/PC wars, however, things can get just stupidly heated, when opposing evangelists clash in the same box. It is best to close comments on that page and WALK AWAY.

And here concludes this Troll Catalogue…. for now. I may well have missed some out. If there’s a specific Troll-type that I’ve missed, that isn’t a combo of these repugnant dullards above, dump it unceremoniously here in my comment box and if and when I get back to the Trolls, I’ll try to include it.

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New Trolls
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Troll #19 “The Love Bug”

She has been looking for love for as long as the internet has been switched on. Living under a crust of perma-mascara, the black line that delineates each eye has been spreading for the last twenty years, so that now all that can be seen from beneath her Ramones-ish hair, which she has sported since forever, are two black splodges  Her fuel is wine and rage.

She joins mating dating websites and chooses her victim with simple criteria: He has nice eyes.  He doesn’t live in her town.

She sparks up a conversation, initially friendly and chatty with —  let’s call him — Dave Clown, and for a couple of weeks the conversation continues, becoming a little flirtier all the time.  After a little while she drops in a bit more information about herself: she is in her thirties (well, she WAS in her thirties once upon a time), she runs a successful art gallery (she does Saturday mornings in her ex-husband’s wife’s sister’s craft shop and lives on a mixture of pitiful alimony and whatever the lodger remembers to pay her) and she loves life (she hates it).

She decides he is “the one”.

She starts ramping it up.  Meeting up somewhere in the near future is mentioned:  Dave is keeping it vague, she is already planning the wedding night.  She finds Dave in facebook, befriends him, “likes” everything he posts, whether she has read it or not.  She subscribes, sometimes as herself, sometimes anonymously, to his tumblr, his flickr, his posterous, his delicious, his google+, his twitter, so she can monitor Dave.

Dave starts backing off… at first just a bit annoyed that after just a few weeks she has sent him blurry e-polaroids of herself in a state of grimy undress and made fleeting mentions on facebook of a “new mystery boyf”.  He understands what he’s got himself into when she starts to leave comments on all his blog posts, facebook statuses, photographes, @s all his tweets, obliquely suggesting that she loves him, that they’re destined to be together, that she is already calling herself “Mrs Clown” when she is alone. She stalks the chat rooms and forums that Dave belongs to, obsessively waiting to talk.

Dave tells her, thank you, but no, and by the way, he’s met someone…

She continues.

Dave blocks her, even changes his username where he can, thinking he can hide from her.  He is wrong.  Using one of her anonymous personae, she tricks Dave into revealing who he is and that he has a nutter stalking him…. and with that, she goes off the rails, finally and completely.  She announces everywhere she can that she had a huge (made up) romance with Dave Clown, lists all the sexual acts he performed on her (or rather, didn’t) and that in all the phone/email sex they had (they didn’t) she was faking it (she wasn’t), and explains word for word the cruelty with which he treated her and how he broke up with her the night before they were to travel to Las Vegas to be married by Elvis.

Two weeks later, she has fallen for her next victim and Dave Clown leaves the internet forever, joining a silent monastic order in the Alps.

(this troll inspired by “Sacred Clown” in my comment box)

Troll #20 “Sage Green”

He is a real-ale-drinking-green-vegan-crusading-anti-fascist-naked-anti-capitalist-on-a-bicycle, and he doesn’t want to be your friend.

He lives alone in a housing association flat in West London. The housing association has long since given up trying to kick him out, since he chained himself, naked, to the kitchen plumbing, after his decision to stop paying the rent.  The house is condemned, so it’s only a matter of time before it falls on top of him and the problem will be solved.  He has worked in various jobs, usually council jobs, road-sweeping, park-keeping or grave-digging; jobs that enable him to keep himself to himself.

He loudly proclaims to anyone who will listen that he doesn’t care if no-one likes him (which is lucky) and, these days, most people in his dank local ignore him.  When he was in his twenties he had a couple of girlfriends, but after a while they got tired of being told they were foul, one-dimensional products of a post-industrial consumerist society… that, and the smell.

In his online life, he trawls the comment boxes of all the online broadsheets (he knows there’s no point trying to shame the tabloid comment boxers – they’re beyond shame), looking for people who might think they have a reasonable response or opinion about articles on pretty much anything (pretty much everything except articles about Cheryl Cole… he fancies her something rotten so steers clear of the those comment boxes).  In the snidest, most self-assured, patronising manner, he will attack commenters who have any opinion, pro or contra, on: cars, guns, recycling, capitalism, socialism, fascism, bigotry (he is incapable of recognising that he is the greatest bigot of all), climate change, bicycles, zoos, pets, roads, airports, healthcare, taxes, fashion…

Faced with his great wisdom, everyone, but EVERYONE, is wrong.  Even if someone writes that petrol should be banned, supermarkets burned to the ground, and that we should all be living on mushrooms grown in our own baths (seemingly his greatest desire for the human race), they will be wrong (and, depending on mood and subject, also an idiot/moron/fascist/capitalist pig/racist/sexist/climate denier/holocaust denier) because they didn’t mention the fact that anyone who makes a profit of any kind should be shot on sight and that women should stop wearing makeup as the world population needs to be slashed in two and wearing makeup and high heels are the biggest cause of breeding (except when Cheryl Cole does it).

Troll #21 “Genghis Khan”

This is your mild-mannered uncle Bernard, married to your aunt Miriam, retired and living in Kettering.  He reads the Telegraph, deadheads his roses, and quietly thanks the Lord he and Miriam never had children, for that would have meant grandchildren and he really doesn’t have the time for those.   Bernard and Miriam are quite self sufficient and don’t need friends; they have a caravan.

Having seen to the garden, and while Miriam tends to lunch, Bernard retires to his computer, scans through the financial pages of the online broadsheets, and logs in, becoming Genghis Khan.  He slashes his way through the comments boxes with his doom-mongering.  He LOLs at lesser mortals’ knowledge of the debt crisis, putting them right, getting into huge arguments with “The Statinator” and “DOOOMSDay”.

He reminds his readers daily that he has been in various banking institutions for many years and knows and understands all the ins and outs of the world economy.

He reminds them daily that YES, the END IS NIGH, all the banks in the west will collapse, we will be living in a 1930s-style dustbowl and all western money will be worthless, and we all have to start using the yuan and speaking Mandarin, and if the rest of the fools (us) don’t know it, then we haven’t been paying attention, because we’re too stupid, and we will die, soon, in extreme poverty.

He reminds them daily that he doesn’t care if the bottom falls out of the world, as he has prepared for the worst and knows how to survive economic armageddon (he has an allotment).

Until two years ago, Bernard was the accountant for a cleaning company that supplied cleaners to all the big name banks.

Troll #22 “Mummy Knows Best”

Get yourself knocked up for the first time, go looking for some info and reassurance online on “Preggo-board” or “MumsyWeb” and you will attract the attentions of this delightful troll.

She watches your first tentative steps on the forum, asking about other mothers’ opinions on nappies, breast vs bottle, husbands, parents and in-laws, childcare and all the other dozens of things that you just require a little guidance about, a friendly word or two, because you’re totally out of your comfort zone. She sums up quite quickly that you’re her kind of target, that you need HER kind of guidance and friendly words, and comes in for the kill.

She lures you in, joining in the conversation as an open minded sharing, modern, fun kind of a girl, making you feel comfortable in baring your soul and all your “ideas”…

She really is trying to help…. but it’s not you that she’s trying to help; it’s your unborn child, future generations, the whole planet itself. You cannot be trusted to bring a healthy, balanced child into this fragile world.

For the nappy debate, she is the first to drop into in the discussion the “if Shakespeare had used disposable nappies, those nappies would still be here” argument (in 16th century landfills, presumably). She, of course, uses the modern reusable nappies, which she had to get her mum to buy for her because they are so expensive, and spends so much of her time cleaning the things that she is now prone to leaving the baby naked on the lino, which is good for his “resistance” (to lino and insane women, probably).

If you merely mention considering the possibility that you might have to bottle feed, you are criticised in the roundest terms as “what’s wrong with this world” and a “baby harmer”, as, according to her, no baby who was ever bottle fed has ever gone on to be a “good person” (she doesn’t mention in any of these diatribes that she went through months of therapy to resolve her issues with the baby “violating her space and breasts”).

According to her, all in-laws can sod off, as can husbands and boyfriends (as if she’d even consider having another one of those since she kicked the “baby-father” out because he ate a Big Mac in front of her when she was pregnant), childcare is just wrong and a symptom of the patriarchal society screwing with the wimmins, and if you’re not naked at all possible times with your baby you are depriving him of a valuable future (in therapy).

Her baby, of course, will be vegan and left handed… and in therapy by the time he is school age, although he will be homeschooled. He will leave home at 14.

Your baby will the first of many, and you will be a glorious, happy, relaxed mother who has the good sense to ignore that fuckwit on the forum.

Dedicated to all my pregnant friends online: Carla, Anna and Ann (who is in labour as I write this).

N.B. I’m not anti- or pro- any nappy-boob-bottle-anything…. I AM anti- proselytizing bigotted bores who think it’s their right and duty to tell you off.

N.B. 2.  I apologize to Lee Mack, because she inadvertently looks like him.

________________________________________________________________

After my site was hacked, I lost access to my site, but luckily, I had my trusty backups.  These were the pre-hackery comments, starting from when I first published the trolls, on September 18th, 2010:

I have now reopened comments, using Disqus this time.

written by Lucy M , September 18, 2010

1. oh gawd, I ‘share’ a house with this one!
   Do you know him personally?!
   How did you manage to describe EVERY aspect of his life so accurately?
   uncanny

   (why did I ever move back to London??!! help………)

   0
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   written by lucyp , September 18, 2010

   ooh, bad luck, Lucy… kick him in the nuts from time to time… just to make you feel better.

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   written by Lucy M , September 18, 2010

   he occupies the room above me and torments my life, 16 stone 35-year-old virgin, rolling backwards and forwards on his office chair, giggling like Beavis to internet sci-fi porn at 2am….

   0
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   written by Lucy M , September 18, 2010

   and war games….

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   written by stephen_mc , September 18, 2010

   Brilliant. (Secretly hoping I don’t recognise any of my own character traits in these…)

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   written by guyana gyal , September 19, 2010

   I see some traits of Troll # 2 in a chap one of my cousins was married to.

   Some trolls use emails to terrorise friends[?] and family.

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   written by Luke , September 20, 2010

   I thought I was just one sort of troll… but now I see I successfully straddle numerous types of trolling.

   Expect a longwinded comment complaining how it’s unfair that these sexist facists won’t let me be every kind of troll because I don’t have a uterus.

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   written by Lo,TG , September 20, 2010

   @stephen_mc: *Brilliant. (Secretly hoping I don’t recognise any of my own character traits in these…)*

   Can’t put it better than that – so I won’t.

   0
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   written by Matt Heath , September 20, 2010

   Sadly, I think most Totenköpfe really are Totenköpfe all the time. When I was a student I ended up house-sharing with a bloke like that (the landlord moved him in). He was a seething mass of incoherent calls for violence. Having a head full of aggression makes it easy for someone to miss their own contradictions, I think.

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   written by Daddy Papersurfer , September 22, 2010

   I wish you hadn’t mentioned biscuits young Pepperoni ……. *looks worried* Troll#11

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   written by Damian , September 24, 2010

   Thankyou @annapickard for sending me here. Lucy, you have made my day. I now realise that I work with at least six types of troll and some hybrids. How did you get the pics so right? The likeness of The Defender is uncanny.

   0
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   written by Daddy Papersurfer , September 25, 2010

   I’m still waiting for Dr Know-it-all [select any sex] – you know the type, no sense of humour and insists on leaving comments that are longer than the posts …..

   0
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   written by DCveR , September 26, 2010

   you’re evil!
   reading your catalog brought back memories carefully erased from my mind… smilies/wink.gif
   I wonder if #18 is the evangelist troll

   0
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   written by nils boray , September 26, 2010

   Brilliant

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   written by Alison Craig , September 26, 2010

   Yes. Genius.

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   written by lucyp , September 26, 2010

   thank you all, you lovely people.

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   written by Adam , September 27, 2010

   Oh crap, I think I may be the caged crusader. What do I do?

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   written by Ian , September 27, 2010

   Sustained genius, and your illustrations totally nail us. Er, I mean “them”, obviously.

   0
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   written by troll magnifique , September 27, 2010

   this is fantastic!
   (not so good as i would possibly make it, but it’s acceptable – ok, plain truth? this is good, yes that kind of good. humpf. i’d do it better, if i wanted to, see? yeah. it’s ok. pfff.)

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   written by lucyp , September 27, 2010

   troll magnifique, smilies/smiley.gif obrigada.

   Adam, if you think this is you, counselling may help. with a big fluffy bunny.

   Ian, thank you… I always appreciate comments that involve the word genius.

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   written by Susan Lopes , September 28, 2010

   Thanks for the heads up on trolls. Although I I’ve come across a couple of them over the years I can now see I was totally ignorant of just how many different breeds are around. I am feeling 100% able to recognize any and all of them at any given moment. And then run the other way smilies/smiley.gif)

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   written by Georgina , October 03, 2010

   That was thoroughly enjoyable, I loved the illustrations, and I’ve met them all!

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   written by Simon , October 03, 2010

   Brilliant, I’ve met a few No 3′s too many

   Though they were minus the cats and ex hubbys

   Still nutters

   Lucky I was never the aim of their rants

   0
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   written by Pirate , October 03, 2010

   Brilliant Thought of a few I have come across over the years. They probably fit into one the above catergories but thought I would throw traits in the mix

   On the fence troll

   A member of a forum who doesn’t have an opinion on a subject until someone who they dislike posts their opinion then it’s an all out, guns blazing disagreement. Not so much what is being said but who is saying it. If anyone then comes to original poster’s defense then they are accused of being playground bullies

   Offended troll

   Those that read anything into the most innocuous comments and start a vitrol of posts that rage and veer wildly off tangent

   Drama queen troll

   A bit like Athena in that anything you have done hasn’t been as big/small/better/worse etc than they have done but it’s usually the mundane everyday things that are blown out of all proportion. They blog/post for advice but never want it and have no intentions of taking it because if they did their lives would be ‘normal’

   My snippets are mainly experienced on forums…..odd, strange peculiar people lurk out there…

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   written by Jenn , October 13, 2010

   Very funny! But don’t we all to a greater or lesser extent fall into one (or more) of those troll categories??

   Who is isn’t a troll – the ‘non-troll’? Someone who does not partake in social networking sites or forums?

   (Thinking of becoming a ‘non-troll’)

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   written by Chuckles , October 14, 2010

   Brilliant. Truly, your descriptions are even better than the paintings, which I am sure are photo-perfect representations of these morons. I especially have suffered through #1 and #3, and have run across almost all the others as well.

   Well done, you have provided humanity a service we shall never be able to replay.

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   written by Peter_S , October 18, 2010

   Holy cow, this simply cracked me up. I work for a university and oversee the affiliated social networking sites for the school; so for 8 hrs a day I get to digest the everlasting threads of comments and these trolls all have homes.

   A couple trolls (who definitely share traits in the ones above) I wanted point out are:

   The Grammar Police – these bastards are quick (and I mean Flash like quick); as soon as an article is posted or update is made, BAM! First comment: “you forgot an apostrophe! It is truly a major pet peeve of mine when people don’t use apostrophes correctly…” and then the thread is totally taken away from the actual content of the article and into a dark hole of people ranting about things like “your vs you’re” or the usage of thx instead of Thanks.

   The Save-the-World person: when ever something is posted like “X-person won x-contest and was awarded x-number-of-dollars to continue her research…” this troll will chime in with, “Really? what this person should do is give that money to charity…” or “this person should sell her prize and give the money to Greenpeace…” A lot of the work I deals with philanthropy updates, so something like “X-donor helps name building” or “x-donor gives money to x-department” and sure enough, this troll chimes in about how the money should go to something with a way more important cause. We can never win with this one.

   It’s an interesting world, this internet.

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   written by 5tubby , October 20, 2010

   Fabulous illustrations and characterisations. Pretty sure I’ve ‘met’ some of these on-line and they look just as I imagined them.

   Keep up the good work.

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   written by lucyp , October 20, 2010

   thank you for all your lovely comments. I haven’t been trolled at all for DAYS, which is super. smilies/smiley.gif

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   written by Suzanne , October 25, 2010

   Here is the U.S. we have the tea bagging troll – one that has to comment about how horrible the President is, on an article that has nothing to do with politics! “A storm knocked out the power to 10,000 residents. Must be Obama’s fault!”

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   written by jerry bakewell , October 26, 2010

   didn’t see my mum in your list. she found my twitter stream via google buzz and has started responding to my 140 char tweets with 1400 word essays on the inanity of the internet. had to block her.

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   written by Alexoutside , October 26, 2010

   Fantastic. So true!
   (#19 The Sycophant)

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   written by Brendan , November 04, 2010

   All these people are annoying Internet personalities, but most of these aren’t trolls. In answer to future questions, yes, I see the irony of me posting here. Have a read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

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   written by Not a Troll , November 04, 2010

   A political website, Conservative Home has many examples of #3 and #6.

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   written by Teresa de Barros , November 14, 2010

   So, so true..lol….You are very good ………keep it up!…love your art and analytical creativity!

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   written by mooseburger , December 01, 2010

   I don’t get it, then what is a good response to a post? A short, pleasant statement? Your description’s all suggest that disagreeing is wrong no matter what, though of course it’s true that these sorts of people sound like they’re venting most of the time, instead of actually contributing something.

   0
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   written by perfesserbear , December 27, 2010

   Lucy–

   I love the piece. While I’d like to say I’m glad you took the time to catalog these creeps, it’s sad you had to do it.

   Perhaps I missed him while reading this truly genius piece, but the Drive-By Vandal seems to be missing. This is a Toad of a Troll who barely glances at your life’s work (selflessly left on display; your heart on your sleeve for daws to peck at — indeed, Iago would be a DBV).

   He writes as few words as he can muster (the sorry bastard can’t type, after all; nor can he write a simple declarative sentence) and he couches it in the most obscene, frequently disgusting language possible. “You SUCK!!!” he scribbles in the web-based equivalent of spray paint, crayon, Magic Marker or finger paint, “You’re Momma sux 2!!!” He will never explain why he disagrees with your position. He has nothing to offer the conversation in question or the World at large, but feels he must violate those who do. He is something like the ‘Caged Crusader’ without an education, a wit or a clue.

   I frequently encounter this fool on Flickr, where he can be banned from one’s photostream with a few clicks, but I wonder why he takes the time at all?

   –Perfesser

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   written by Weshty , December 31, 2010

   Lucy,

   Love it! All the paintings are very good but Athena really nails it. Like a female Micheal Winner but without the talent.
   Trolls are an absolute scourge, cowardly, petty little crapwads that can create total havoc on a forum. Though I do know of one particular troll
   who at an associated real event gathering was in no short manner corrected as to the manner of his ways. His cough is much softer now…
   The Trolls that get my goat on the most regular basis ar those commenters on Youtube that just have to sling the shit for a reaction.
   Though at least there comments are automatically hidden if enough readers click “disapprove”.

2. PedroB wrote:

   July 12, 2011 at 12:22 pm

   Type #4 and #6 are typical frustrated portuguese machos, seeing the world pass them by and leaving them behind.

3. Women of Google+ : Lucy Pepper | Women of Google+ wrote:

   July 23, 2011 at 6:57 pm

   [...] website The troll catalogue (invaluable knowledge for life on the web) Filed Under: Women of Google+ · Tagged With: author, illustrator /* [...]

4. mimi wrote:

   September 14, 2011 at 11:54 am

   Fake sympathy is my bete noir especially on medical sites when you are just trying to get info or help on a serious subject.
   Troll 11

   P.S. some cat lovers are really nice

5. Chris wrote:

   September 14, 2011 at 4:23 pm

   I got here via the Guardian article and can I just say what a refreshing, amusing and depressingly realistic piece this is. Genius. I love your work.

   • lucy wrote:

     September 14, 2011 at 4:25 pm

     Thank you, Chris

6. Julie wrote:

   September 15, 2011 at 12:07 am

   I’ve noticed what seems to be a legion of Chinese nationalists poised to strike in the comments section of any article about China that contains a hint of criticism. My fave China trolls employ nonsensical, free-form obscenities and insults that are directed at uncomprehending enemies of the Great Ascension, especially regarding Tibet. U.S. “conservative” trolls are the most persistent and creepy — stalkers that assign themselves to news sites for the sole purpose of causing a wavering moderate or progressive to doubt themselves and eventually convert. The new Stasi agents…

7. Tim wrote:

   May I suggest two more trolls to add to your collection:

   The Conspiracy Theorist: Late 20s jobless and bitter, spends half his time editing together youtube videos ‘proving’ the reptilians/illuminati/yeti/whoever the hell control everything to awaken the ‘sheeple’. The other half is spent finding intelligent reasonable people to call ‘sheeple’.

   The /b/tard: These cretins will have you believe they are from all walks of life, however they are pale sunlight starved IT employees and porn-addicted, smelly teenage boys. They frequent 4chan mostly to fap over girls of questionable legality and only venture out to other parts of the internet to deliberately troll as a kind of sport for ‘lulz’. Asa a result many of the others in the troll catalogue could sometimes be a /b/tard in disguise. Reasoning with a /b/tard is impossible, just close the page and move on.

I’m taking advantage of having been hacked and locked out of my site by some drug selling morons to update my site AGAIN, because, you know, it’s time to do it AGAIN…. don’t you feel sorry for people who never ever upgrade their website’s templates, ever?

I’m going back through the 800 and something posts, fixing them to work…  you may see some funny character in the texts… because it’s been a right sod getting the texts out and back in again.  I’ve said it before, but I shall say it again… GRRRRRR.

Ooh, also, I have changed the commenting system to Disqus….

That is all.  Back to what you were doing….

For you, poor unfortunates, I will quickly explain. “The Archers” is a radio soap opera, 13 minutes broadcast six days a week at 7:02pm precisely, after the hourly news bulletin. It began 60 years ago as a gently dramatic vehicle for propaganda and information for rural folk (when there were a lot more who worked in the country and didn’t just treat it as a dormitory), and although it still tries to be didactic about rural and agricultural matters, it is fundamentally a soap opera about a village called Ambridge in a fictitious county called Borsetshire, meant loosely to be somewhere Dorsetty, Wiltshiry, Oxfordshirish, Northantsy (hinted at by the strange mix of anything-from-mummersettish-to-midland accents exhibited by the lowlier inhabitants).

I have listened to it for forty-one of its sixty years and probably heard it before that for a while in the womb. I missed a few years in the nineties, but that was due to youth and mistakenly imagining that getting drunk after work was more fun than standing by the kitchen radio, cooking and listening to Ambridge goings-on.

Soap operas are pretty stupid affairs, escapist rubbish, and the “The Archers” is no exception, but it grips normally sensible people (I’m pretending for the moment that R4 listeners are normally sensible people. Of course, they’re not, but do tend to be reasonably intelligent) who will drop everything (well, some things) to get near the radio for evening show, for the lunchtime repeat, for the Sunday morning omnibus or allow the six updates a week to clog up their (my) ipod’s podcast shelf.

Why are we sucked in? Why are the mundane goings on in a made-up rural English village so enthralling? Why do we (wildly intelligent and interesting people) talk about it on the net (well, on twitter… those who discuss it in the Archers forum on the beeb website are just plain mental)? Why do we exclaim that so-and-so would never do that or that the storyline is barking or that Mr Thing or Mrs That is an awful person? Why, when we all know it’s all just 13 minutes of our day filled with gentle drivel that means nothing?

I think I know.

We all have a few irritating people in our lives, profoundly annoying give-you-high-blood-pressure types who unknowingly shorten our lives … and Ambridge is full of people like them. Actually, every single person in Ambridge is irritating and we can enjoy them irritating us, knowing that they’re not going to kill us with the stress of knowing them, knowing that they only exist for 13 minutes a day, or an hour and a bit on Sundays and that the poor buggers who play them probably get paid quite well for the task and get to play less irritating people on other days of the week.

Everything I have written above this line (see below) is for you who do not spend your lives in the thrall of the ghastly people of Ambridge. You may now leave as the rest will mean nothing to you. Nothing.

____________________________

Everything I write under this line (see above) is for you who DO spend 13 minutes a day, six days a week, listening to the Archers, the Pargetters, the Tuckers, the Grundies, the Aldridges, and the fabulous silent Horrobins, to explain why you find them irritating, because I know you do.

Peggy Woolley is a humourless dry old stick…. all nervy and embarrassed about talking to Ted (the sexy septuagenarian enamelling hobbyist husband of Jack’s old people home friend, probably with benefits, Violet), judgmental about everyone’s lives, convinced she is the font of all wisdom. Jill Archer is overly keen on homemade jam and cake, and surprised by everything (count up her “ooh”s) and most irritatingly gave birth to her daughter, Elizabeth, forty odd years ago. Elizabeth Pargetter is a pretentious, moany, aspirant showoff, who blames everyone else for everything (don’t need to mention Nigel fatally falling off the roof being David’s fault…). Her twins, thick whatshisface and clever whatsername: irritating. Nigel Pargetter was always an upper class berk, until he died and then everyone loved him. He fell off a roof, in a gale, which was stupid. His mother, Julia, was a stuck up old bag, and Lewis, his widowed stepfather… FAR too amenable to Elizabeth’s idiotic demands. David Archer is almost the least irritating character, but too interested in revelatory dialogues about the price of fish and how leaving a field fallow is good/bad/terrible/I DON’T CARE, DAVID! He also had plenty of opportunities to shoot Jude dead last year and didn’t take a one. Ruth Archer, geordie wife of David, really should have shaken off some more of her Cherrl Kurls by now. Pip Archer’s a big drip, who went overnight from being a drippy rebel with a twat of a boyfriend to being a drippy agri-showoff with a boring young farmer boyfriend who gets too excited about how fat a cow’s ankles are. She should stop showing off about how many species of dung beetle she can find in a square metre and how clever she is about having googled “how to do marketing on the internet”. Clarrie Grundy is, although the only honourable character in the whole affair that is Borsetshire, still annoying. She seems to like Nic, the wettest drip in the known universe. She puts up with Will-yum and Ed’s constant fighting and it was probably she who spoiled them in the first place. Eddie Grundy rolls too many superfluous R sounds (there is no accent in the UK that puts Rs in where there is none writ) and nefarious sausages. Will-yum Grundy is a conceited gamekeeper bore who thinks being a violent brother hater is worse than having once had a drug habit. Can’t get over the whole Ed-Will-yum-Emma thing. Worse, he likes Nic. Ed Grundy is totally paranoid, Emma Carter Grundy whines too much and doesn’t get off her arse. Harry is a patronizing twat of a wannabe renaissance man. Fallon, for god’s sake, if she would just show Harry her tits. Pat Archer is a sanctimony on legs, Tony Archer is a fuddy old git, Lillian is an old bag, Matt is like too many of my old bosses. Jazzer is a glaswegian who seems to hae luft Glasgae last week, not the twenty years ago he actually dud. also, should hoff died of the syphilis ba noo, the amount of skanky sex he claims to hoff hade.

Hang on… this is taking too long…..

Tom, twat, Brenda, twat, Jennifer, snob, Brian, bastard, Kate, UGH, Debbie, dreadful (although played by goddess Tamsin Grieg), Alice, twat, Chris, twat, Roy, twat, Hayley, twat, Phoebe, ghastly, Kenton & Jolene, slurp, Kathy, yawn, Jamie, twat, Annabelle Schrivener, p-lease, Shula, too goddy, Alisdair, too dull, Usha, ugh, Allan, ugh, Robert, ugh, Linda, ugh, Caroline, snore, Oliver, UGH, ADAM (I HATE ADAM), Ian, stop cooking ridiculous cakes, Bert Fry, thick AS, Joe Grundy, he must be over 200 years old by now, Zofia, tease, Neil, twat, Susan, dreadful twat, Mike, twat, Elona, more sanctimony, and as for the Trollopian cardboard cutouts of James Bellamy and Leonie Snell, well, what more is there to say?

(i missed out Vicky, godawful common twat, and Helen, stuck up organic twat… I loathe both in equal measure. thank you).

So. I have got it out of my system. I could have spent a whole weekend on this. But I’m sure I have better things to do. Like picking my nose.

This is anorakland (work in progress).

left: Brenda wears cagoule from supermarket. (£8, 2011)

right: Barry wears cagoule from supermarket. (£8, 2011)

Rose wears Swedish designer raincoat, bought online from exclusive Swedish designer. (£320, 2006)

left: Hilary wears showerproof thigh length jacket, from her local market town dress shop. (£68, 2005)

right: John wears showerproof waist length jacket, from his local market town dress shop. (£48, 2005)

left: Barbara wears top High Street brand anorak, shower proof and sensible.  (£32, 2003)

right: Dawn wears camping chainstore own-brand cagoule (in bright red to help her stand out).  (£12, 2009)

Being utterly knackered, we opted to go and do virtually nothing.  We spent a day and a half in Hay on Wye, playground for the bookish anorak wearer so my own bookish anorak wearer could spent HOURS in bookshops, bookshops where I can’t breathe because of the book dust. I spent the time admiring all the different kinds of middle-class British that visit Hay… I think I might have to do a little catalogue… then hung out in my parents’ house for the rest of the time, getting used to the 22 wind turbines that have appeared on the skyline since March (they’re the BIG kind, 65m to the top of the trunk, 110m to the top of a sail, a mile away, they’re noisy up close, and a bit sinister, but my ma and pa are getting used to them… slowly), with a quick nip into Cornwall (gosh it has filled up in the last twenty years, hasn’t it?).

I actually read two whole books, which is a bit good, as I haven’t read more than three pages a day of anything for the last year, collapsing into a coma as soon as my feet have warmed up in the bed (1. Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman -  utterly marvellous, very very funny, moving and rallying to the feminist cause in a very undungareey way… plus it’s nice to confirm that there ARE laydees who regard knickers and leg shaving in the same abandoned way as I do, and 2.  Audrey Niffenegger´s The Time Traveller’s Wife, which is kind of lovely and a bit bonkers (this is probably the reason I’ve never been asked to review books… “This book is kind of sweet and a bit hilarious”)).

So, back to it, back to working, back to writing this book, back to blogging, back to the schoolrun, back to the laundry, back to the garden.

and stuff.