Erin Bloody Andrews!

Erin bloody Andrews? Erin bloody Andrews?

Who the hell is she?

OK. I’ve Googled her.

Oh.

Is that all? An American sportscaster on ESPN. Ah. And there’s the “peephole” story. Right. Now it all begins to makes sense...

See, all this began about 2 weeks ago. Due to employing comment moderation I – like many of you, I suspect – get emailed whenever anyone leaves a comment on my blog. A fortnight ago I began to receive anonymous comments – quite lengthy ones – about Erin Andrews. Virtually gobbledygook. Cut and paste jobs with a couple of links to “her peephole” video clumsily thrown in.

The first two I deleted without a second thought. They weren’t even on a new post; they were on one I wrote last year about Torchwood of all things (you can read it here if you are so minded). Not sure why that post should attract the attentions of Mr Peephole Video Salesman but plainly it did.

And then I got the same comment again.

And again.

And again.

So many agains in fact that again must now be capitalized. Again, Again and yet Again.

I’ve lost count of how many I’ve received now. Always the same. Always on the same post. The same text entirely.

Dealing with it is easy enough. Reject. Reject. Reject.

But after the first 12 times it begins to get tiresome. It begins to get annoying. So I leave a comment on the post in question addressed to Mr Anonymous.

Please stop leaving comments on my blog about Erin Andrews. I’m not going to publish any of them so it’s a complete waste of your time and my time trying. Please desist and eff off.

I’ve had 4 more attempts since then. The same comment. On the same post. I can guarantee there’ll be another one tomorrow.

My goat has now well and truly been got. It’s irritating. I check my emails and look – I’ve got mail! A new comment on my blog! Hoorah! My spirits soar. Only it’s not a new comment. It’s the same old one. The same old one that I’m never ever going to publish. Doh!

Who is this guy? He most definitely can’t be working for Erin Andrews, the poor cow. Is he working for Mr Peephole? Is he indeed Mr Peephole in person? I doubt it very much but what the hell then is he getting out of his repeated attempts to sell the whole tawdry little affair on my rather superlative blog?

Up until his comments I’d never even heard of Erin Andrews! If it had been Erin Gray from Buck Rogers' fame he might have piqued my interest a little but a sportscaster from a channel I can’t even get here in the UK and wouldn’t watch anyway because I absolutely hate effing sports programmes?!

It’s hardly a useful public service announcement, is it?

So what do I do about it? Any ideas? Anyone?

P.S. If any of you have any peephole videos that you want to advertize on my blog please ask my permission first.

P.P.S. And please make them of better quality than Mr Peephole’s; his really hurt my eyes.

Toodle-pip.

Proper Winters And Erin Gray

So is this a proper winter?

There’s been considerable debate in our house.

Well. Karen mentioned once that the temperatures this year have actually hit freezing a few times rather than just being “a bit chilly” and I grunted in reply that they still haven’t approximated anywhere near the arctic winters that I remember from my childhood.

But thinking about it I can only really recall one particularly arctic winter from the 18 or so that constituted my pre-adult life...

*(adopts West Country pirate-like accent for no good reason whatsoever)* Aar, it were the winter of ’82 and us young uns had to be carried through the mile high snow drifts like new born lambs in the arms of the bare-chested, ruddy nippled menfolk lest our poor shoeless feet should freeze solid like the last packet of rissoles at the bottom of the meat freezer at Iceland...

I think 1982 sticks in my mind because it was my very first year at Secondary school (the “big school”) and I had to tramp a mile or so there and back on foot which back then seemed akin to some poor African child walking 15 miles to fetch water from a bore hole and slay a gazelle or three on route, skin it and bring it home pre-butchered and ready for the village cooking pot.

Really I had no idea I was even born.

But the winter that year was genuinely very bad. A proper winter in every sense of the word. Snow that was several feet deep and lasted for weeks. Icy winds that froze ponds, streams, canals and rivers solid. Loads of days off school because either the boilers broke down or not enough staff / pupils made it into school to make a normal school day viable. And so bleak and grey outside that it seemed as if the sun had fizzled out completely like Jim Davidson’s telly career.

Going outside was frequently not an option that winter. I can recall in particular having to work hard to bend my parent’s arms to allow me to go for my usual Saturday morning walk to the papershop (we call them newsagents now) on a morning when the overnight snowfall had been extraordinarily heavy. Not going out that day was not an option for me. You see, every Saturday during this period I would religiously go to the papershop in the morning and hand over my hard saved cash – a piddling amount by today’s standards – to purchase a couple of packets of Buck Roger’s In The 25th Century sticker album stickers. I was very close to completing the album but the one sticker that I was most desperate to have and hadn’t yet acquired was the portrait of Colonel Wilma Deering that was to go on the very first page alongside Buck Rogers himself. My 12 year old self was very much taken with Colonel Wilma Deering – played by Erin Gray – and watching re-runs now it seems clear to me I must have had a thing about rather austere looking women with steely blue eyes and a slightly cold manner... though I will say she did look bloody fine in those tight jumpsuit things that they constantly crow-barred her into.

Crow-barred? I do hope not. I’d like to think that perhaps they oiled her up instead in order to facilitate her body’s smooth entry into that 1980’s smooth warm white Lycra... ahem. Oh yes. Where was I?

Well, this particular Saturday I finally got that much sought after sticker and it was fabulous. It was worth battling through snow drifts that were so high they swamped my wellies. It was worth enduring the biting cold that ate through my finger gloves like Kerry Katona eating her way through the last rissole at the bottom of the meat freezer at Iceland. It was worth the whole God damned ice blasted winter.

I still have the sticker album and no, it isn’t complete. I think once I got Wilma my incentive to buy the packets of stickers each week suffered a loss of impetus. I’d got what I wanted: Erin Gray in a tight blue futuristic zipper top smiling sardonically to camera. What a girl. Hard as steel but gorgeous enough to make the coldest of winter snows melt.

Which of course they did. Eventually. Leaving the world a rather grey, limp and drab place in its absence.

*sigh*

Now that folks was a proper winter.