Adding up

You will probably have spotted that I have added advertising to these pages once again.

This is because the annual moment is fast approaching when I am obliged to fork out some cash to maintain this site, and once again, I have vaguely resolved that it really jolly well ought to pay for itself. At the very least, like an irritating twenty year old, it ought to contribute something towards its upkeep.

At first I reassured myself that I can justify the expense because it is my Contribution to the Wellbeing Of The World. My diaries, I explained to myself, as a rehearsal for explaining to Mark, are my small widow’s mite of goodwill towards making people feel more cheerful. The world is a troubling place, I reasoned to myself, at the very least we ought not to baulk at offering a few well-chosen and cost-free words every day, to try and make it just a little happier.

That would be fine if contained herein were small but precious pearls of wisdom, or perhaps sallies of precision-honed wit. Maybe some nuggets of dry humour, moments of icy political satire, astute observations or penetrative insights into our twenty-first century way of being.

It dawns on me that none of the above can be found here. There are a handful of grumbles about the idiot who is our MP, one or two drunken remarks about the wonderfulness of life, and a badly-disguised admiration for Boris Johnson which I try to keep secret in order not to alienate my left wing readers, and a lot of anxious whittering about school fees and being flat broke all the time.

Under those circumstances I thought that the argument for writing in order to improve the world’s circumstances was a bit thin.

Therefore I am going to try and make these pages pay for themselves a bit.

I sat down this morning, once Mark had buzzed off to work, to try and persuade Google to add the ads.

This took ages.

I tried and tried, messed about and edited, clicked things and entered code in the widgets, and nothing happened.

Google thanked me for my persistence and assured me that my site was now flooded with commercial interests, and I need go no further.

I looked at these pages.

There was nothing.

It was very much later before I discovered that in a moment of pique, probably related to the last time I had anything to do with Google, I had instructed my computer to block all advertisements from Google. All pop-ups, all vignettes, all add-ons, all sliders. No advertising at all, and it had obeyed with a rigorous thoroughness.

I looked on my flat portable computer and the site was, after all, awash with advertising.

This occupied absolutely ages whilst I tried to persuade Google to put their advertisements somewhere less annoying. Nobody wants to be reading a jolly taxi-driving story only to be interrupted by flashing enticements to purchase a chair lift for their stairs. Even my one-legged readers, yes, I know you are there, are unlikely to be aroused to purchasing frenzy by that.

So, readers, the secret to an uncommercial browsing experience, on this site or on any other, is to tell your computer to block advertising from Google. It is no good asking me how I managed to do it, because it was ages ago and I have entirely forgotten what I did, or even that I had done it at all. Look it up on Google, that might help.

Anyway, the advertisements are here again, and might stay for a while since I can’t actually see them on my computer and therefore they are unlikely to irritate me much. I am sorry if they irritate you, but not that sorry, since if anybody clicks on them they might actually fund the very future of these pages.

Here is a Word Of Warning. Do not click on advertisements unless they actually interest you, unless you wish your Inbox to be permanently cluttered with suggestions for Similar Products You Might Enjoy. I do not know if my website would do anything so rascally, but certainly that is what happens if you are reckless enough to click on anything at all on Facebook. I can’t get rid of the advertisements for corduroy dresses and flowery boots that are left over from my small experiments with creativity just before Christmas. Sooner or later I am going to have to find something else to click on just to get rid of them.

It would be very helpful if you click Share for these pages if you like them. I meant to add a request for you to do that to the main page, but forgot, and now I have had a glass of wine and it is just too difficult. Since I am hoping for some pecuniary advantage now, I would be grateful for my readership to be expanded a bit, and the cheapest possible way for me to do that is for all of my avid readers to click Share to Facebook.

If you have got a Facebook account, obviously. Don’t bother if you haven’t. Facebook will only think you are keen and will try and persuade you to join in the online fun thereafter.

It was very misty today. I got lost coming down from the fell and had to tramp across some very muddy puddles to get back to the footpath and the gate again.

Have a picture.