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Is it him, or is it me?
Ted wonders why anyone should want to be featured in Who’s Who. That, of course, is pure sour grapes; after all, many people are interested in the achievements of the wise and famous. But then, frankly that does not apply to him. So if he thinks that setting out selected incidents of his long life in a web site will make anyone think him wise or famous he is seriously fooling himself.
But, secretly, he thinks it will, and has allowed himself to be persuaded to expand his web site – Parkinson’s Law and all that. It’s all his son Peter’s fault; out of the blue, he announced the creation of a brand new web site, and what was father going to do about it? One has to have a grain of sympathy for the poor old chap (18/02/1917).
While on this topic, there seems to be a bit of a convention that in these circumstances stuff relating to the individual whose site it is should be written as though somebody else has taken on the task of picking out all the nice things he/she can think of to say about the person – which, I suppose, is intended to be as much a surprise to the subject as to his audience.
And you have to agree that it is very gratifying to discover what an accomplished person one is (for "one" read "he," "she" or "it" and so on). However, this third-person lark annoyed me when I was writing about music for this site, and from time to time I found I couldn’t fathom which "he" I was referring to: much too complicated. So [writes Ted], having written all of this myself so far, for the rest of this I will continue in the first person. OK?
I am still trying to work out why anyone would be interested in me. If I were a performer, I can quite see why a web site would be ideal for spreading my CV all over the globe, but frankly, that’s not my scene. Then again, I guess somebody might hit on some reference which calls forth an expostulation such as, "Well, I never!" That somebody might then be tempted to get in touch with the subject, and then? The imagination boggles; it’s all the beginning of an epistolary novel. Publishers would be falling over each other to get in first. I might even make enough to buy my first laptop. It's nice to think about.
– Ted
All text by ES Rowlands. © 2004
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