Altered ego

Readers with obsessively keen memories might just possibly recall that back near the start of this year I gave a brief shout out to MaxRally, a new website devoted - primarily - to the sport of rallying, which one of my old university buddies had had a hand in setting up.  Readers with outright stalkerish tendencies may recall that No. 5 of my 8 Resolutions for this year was to find myself a paid writing gig this year.

No??!!  Surely not?

Well, no, not really.  Remuneration has only been discussed in the sketchiest of terms, and is, I fear, likely to take the form of alcoholic beverages rather than hard cash.... the next time I manage to get myself over to Blighty.  Moreover, I'm not convinced that the fledgeling MaxRally has substantially more readers than my humble blog here, so even the 'boosting the portfolio' argument seems a little limp.  Never mind - it's been good fun.

I have been contributing - with erratic frequency - a number of short columns under the byline of 'Giles Wade' (an alias I'd long been hoping to foist on somebody; the realisation of this frivolous ambition was for me recompense enough for the minutes of hard labour at the keyboard).  

I rather liked the idea of trying to write about rallying.... or, more generally, motorsport.... or, even more generally, driving in China when I know next to bugger-all about any of these things, and am not in fact a car owner or even [cough] a car driver myself.  One of my inspirations was Richard Ingrams, one of the founders and (I think) the longest-serving editor of the UK's leading satirical magazine Private Eye.  During my childhood back in the '70s I was a devotee of the (mostly) amusingly right-wing magazine The Spectator, in which Ingrams was at that time writing the TV column.  He professed a profound distaste for the medium, and, if I recall correctly, claimed not even to own a television himself, insisting that he experienced only occasional bits and pieces when he went home to visit his mum.  The only programme he would admit to liking was The Muppet Show.  Thus his column was rather more about his perception of how other people perceived the world of television - very post-modern, and all that.  I haven't yet begun to scale such heights of whimsy myself in my 'Giles' columns, but I aspire to one day, I aspire.

Anyhow, for those of you who don't get enough of my burbling in these parts, there are more truffles (possibly?) to be found over here.