Reverse Engineering

You know how this thing works right?  You write the missive for the day and then you try to tag it with anything relevant that might just tempt somebody new to read what you have to say, based on the obvious assumption that anyone who has read you before will either read you again anyway or (probably more likely) poke their own eyes out rather than have to repeat the experience.  Tags mean little to regular readers and, other than when featuring words such as ‘naked’, ‘full-frontal’ or ‘see what my nineteen year old nanny gets up to on her day off’ do little to draw readers towards the boring old tosh that I am apt to serve up.  Nipple.  (Sorry, I just dropped that word into the text so that I can legitimately reference it in my Tags without the WordPress catch-a-cheat bot chasing me.)  For most of us, I think, tags are extraneous unless… Well, I just wondered what would happen if the tags actually came first.

I decided that I would check out my previously used Tags and base an article on, perhaps the most widely used five.  Unfortunately, I found that they are arranged alphabetically and, because I am a little impulsive with these things, just those that begin with ‘A’ run into the hundreds.  ‘A Little Rhyme’, A Little Fiction’, ‘A Little Poem’, ‘A Little Tale’ and a dozen close cousins all show up a little too often.  Scanning down the long, long list of only once-used entries made me realise that I really must try and be a bit more careful with the recycling in the future.  Even more so when I looked at all the listed entries which had never been used – I don’t even know how they got there – but I must conclude that I had at some time or another seriously considered using ‘Standing in the way of the intrusion of painful reality’, ‘Tea, Hobnobs and a tartan blanket’, ‘The Communal’ and ‘What was I thinking?’ and, I presume, to my great credit eventually decided against doing so.  I regret not using ‘Joy and melancholy’ though.  I will use it soon.   What seemed like a great idea at the time – see Tank Tops, Denim Waistcoats and Cork-Heeled Boots – quickly began to seem both vaguely ridiculous and unmanageable – like Tottenham Hotspur.

The first entry on my list, presumably courtesy of the inverted commas, was ‘Burn’, which I remember featured in a post about my funeral, in reference both to a Deep Purple song my wife is insistent I cannot have and the occasion’s inevitable denouement.  The last entry – apart from ‘Zoo’ which featured every week for a year and damn-near bloody killed me – is ‘Zaflora’.  (I’m not sure how widely available this little product is but, in case it has not yet made it into your neck of the woods – borne, perhaps on the wings of Covid19 – I should explain that it is a concentrated disinfectant that, when diluted, smells, as its name suggests, floral and is much revered by British shopkeepers who have to swab out their front doorways –not a euphemism – every morning, as having the great benefit of not smelling like Dettol.)  I cannot recall in which rant this featured, but it is almost certainly best forgotten.  Not surprisingly the various threads, fads and infatuations appear most often, amongst them ‘Dreams’, ‘D.I.Y’ and ‘Diet’, all of which had numerous entries – I had by this stage, as you will guess, reached the letter ‘D’ and the bottom of the glass.

There were however, amongst the zillion little ‘tempters’ on my extremely extensive list, one or two that did stand out as having been used on more than one occasion and together they probably sum up this little diversion better than anything I could deliberately create: the subjects of ‘Old people’, ‘Prostate’, ‘The Creepy Uncle’, ‘Intransigent knees’, ‘Jo Whiley’, ‘Needing to wee’, ‘Navel Gazing’, Okra’, One of those days,’ and ‘Slugs’ collectively go a long way to explaining what ‘Getting On is all about.

And finally a single little gem that caught my eye, nestling unheeded in the almost infinite list, destined to bring a smile to the lips of any UK resident of my vintage, ‘Rod, Jane and Freddy’.  Go on, tell me those four words haven’t cheered-up your day!

N.B. I have just realised that I have got to list some Tags for this little rag-bag now, and I really don’t know where to start.