A message from The Dabbler to our beloved readers…
Dearest readers,
Today I almost wept with pride as I looked back on the week’s postings, even with the repeats padding things out a bit during the holiday season. Mahlerman and Susan with their usual weekend wonders; and before them, James Hamilton on football and the Great War; Jonathon Green on Loamshire; Frank Key on Soviet spies Chambers and Hiss. The knowledge is vast; the research is formidable but worn lightly; a whopping dollop of humour and perhaps a dash of lunacy; pitched to surprise and dazzle but not to show off, and ever with the assumption that you, the Dabbler reader, are a sentient being with a brain of your own. Put simply, you just don’t get this stuff anywhere else.
True, said stuff will never deliver us the stats of the Huffington Post – our financial income is as negligible as our cultural output is rich – but we like to think that one Dabbler reader is worth a million googlers of “Pippa Middleton’s bottom”. Merely by being here and reading this, you are part of a select band of exceptional individuals.
But – I hear you ask – what more can I, the exceptional reader, do, to immerse myself in the world of Dabblerism? How, in other words, can you graduate from ‘mere’ Dabbler-reader to the real thing. How, in fact, can you become a Dabbler?
Here are two ways:
1. Join the League of Dabblers. For a trifling thirty quid you will help us in our undying quest to make The Dabbler the best thing on the internet, but even better than that you’ll get a shed-load of goodies, including books, invitations, our love and gratitude, and of course the much sought-after Dabbbler whisky glass. For three tenners it really is a steal. Go here for more details.
2. Become a Dabbler Book Reviewer. At The Dabbler we get offered a lot of free review books, and any we don’t get offered we can ask for. We’re looking to build a crack squad of reviewers to enhance the Dabbler Book Club offering. As a reviewer, you will not need to read anything you don’t want to – we’ll offer you books on an ad hoc basis and you can decide if you’d like to have a go. We won’t pay you for reviews but you’ll have free books, a large audience and a surprising amount of influence in the publishing world. If you’re interested, drop us a line at editorial@thedabbler.co.uk putting “DBC Reviewer” in the subject line. (If you have a blog or have written anywhere else on the web, point us to it.)
Normal service will resume tomorrow. In the meantime, thank you all, and keep Dabbling…
Fraternally yours,
Brit, on behalf of Gaw, Worm and all the Dabblers
As my (first) wife had just popped out to the corner shop to get some lard to put on the cat’s boil, I risked googling the gluteus maximus of little Pippa (I had no idea the poor girl had gone viral – have I been living at the bottom of the sea?), and by the cringe Ed you are right – the twin-orbs are everywhere, and reminded me of Groucho’s famous remark that ‘you could play Pinochle on there’.
It’s to your very great credit that you’re a blogger who had no idea of the importance of Pippa Middleton’s arse to the internet. It’s been keeping the whole thing going on its own, more or less.
liking the meta-googleworthiness of the fact that mentioning “pippa middleton’s bottom” also means that this post will pick up some extra google hits…
And the manifold terms that are used for the poor young woman’s rear…both the words and the pictures make one pause.
But it was ever thus. As George Steiner has pointed out, the name of Henry James’s character Fanny Assingham encompasses ‘three designations of the posterior’ (both Steiner and James are talking American English there, of course).