ME and Ophelia

THE PERILS OF COMMENTING
Beware of what you are linking to

Hopefully, this is the start of a new daily blogging routine. My new ISP package allows me to access the Internet anytime between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. weekdays but not at all during weekends. On 10 November it will change to 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for seven days a week. An hour or two daily, either side of those hours, could incur charges in excess of £60, if I don't watch it.

Ophelia and I are usually awake by 6 a.m. We get up straight away and head for the kitchen where I open the back door for her to outside. She scuttles off around the corner - leaps up through a 4' high gap in my courtyard wall, lands on a rooftop, jumps down into the ancient grounds of a nearby Norman church surrounded by long, lush soft grass - and disappears.

Brush my teeth and switch on the hot water which takes an hour to heat. Open the curtains and some windows, switch on the lamps, fire and laptop, plump up all my pillows and settle on the couch for an hour to read emails, blogs and stats to see if I recognise anyone who has visited me and Ophelia during the night. We get around 50 unique visitors daily from almost every part of the world.

Same routine after dinner and until bedtime around 10 p.m. Summer is noisy here with tourists and late night music from a nearby theatre. I enjoy the peace and quiet of very early mornings when it's just me and Ophelia and the wide open sea with not a soul in site. It's magical.

The day before yesterday, BLOGGER went haywire and corrupted what I was trying to post. Half of my post disappeared and the other half became jumbled and somehow mixed in with a string of alarming looking RSS type codes and garbled text, from someone's else's blog I presume, containing murderous and hateful words about religion and brides.

BLOGGER's troubles started on the day before. One of their pages, in the place of their usual slogan, was the name, in large capital letters, of a "medicine" which 'speeds' people up. It starts with an A but I am not spelling it out because I've had a few visitors via Google searching for "celebrity females without clothes in mink fur coats" - which led them to posts about Ophelia (hah!).

Sometime during the previous two days, which I spent on trying to get HaloScan working for this blog, I visited a great British blog and left a comment with a link to something which was meant to be humorous (a site which I thought was for a white "404 error page cannot be found" actually).

Not long afterwards, I returned to the blog to check that the link worked. On clicking the link, a dark and heavily coloured page started to unroll, very slowly, onto my screen. A dreadful feeling of unease crept through me. Something sinister and menacing was unfolding. I was sensing evil.

Jittering onto my screen, inch by inch, was the body of a white adult female, totally unclothed, with yards of rope carefully coiled in single layers around her neck - like a gigantic snaking African necklace - ending in a large and heavy hangman's knot and noose. It was a horrible degenerate scene of murder by torture or hanging. An enactment or for real, I just don't know, I was too stunned and didn't hang around to find out.

My mind raced to the link still dangling in the comment box. Swiftly, I submitted another comment, urgently requesting deletion of previous comment and sent an email.

All I could do was wait - with niggling doubts like, what if he doesn't get the message or my email...or is away... what if he is away for two weeks...there'd be nothing I could do about it...

God bless the British blogger, he got my message almost immediately, deleted the post and notified me by email. Phew. What a relief.

It will be a long time before I provide a link within a comment box again. That'll teach me for trying to be funny.

I have not led a sheltered life but it came as a shock because there was no warning and it was one of the weirdest things I have even seen.

There sure are some scary weird people around. I doubt if they look scary weird either. It takes a lot to make this world go around.