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Very rarely, I get a notification from my webstats app informing me that my “website traffic is booming!” Last night, my stats were seemingly booming so much, that I received two notifications yesterday, one which came an hour or so after Springwatch, and another that came a couple of hours later. Normally I get numbers in the low hundreds, but yesterday, it was over a thousand. I’m quite surprised by how many people clicked onto my website, baring in mind I only spoke a couple of sentences, one of which I stuttered, and the other you couldn’t really hear.
Granted, a lot of those extra views were due to people Googling things like ‘The Young’uns blind,’ or ‘is one of the young’uns blind?’ So it’s likely that most of these new visiters will simply click on my website, find the answer about whether I’m blind or not, and then click off, never to return again. But there might be a few new people who click onto my site in order to find out whether I can see or not, and end up getting sucked into the amazing drama and comedic brilliance that Dollop regulars have come to no and love. For the benefit of anyone Googling to find out whether I am blind, the answer is: well, not really, but I pretend to be in order to garner more interest from people and lure them to my website; it’s basically a clever marketing ploy.
Of course, there is a chance that the number of views is due to Michaela Strachan. I assumed she was just humouring me when I drunkenly told her about the Daily Dollops, and she said she would check them out. Maybe she enjoyed our conversation a lot more than I thought. I thought that in the main, it was just small talk, but perhaps I was much more interesting than I remember being. I suppose the problem could be that I am just so naturally gifted at being interesting and entertaining, that I don’t appreciate the fact that even my small talk is highly illuminating and riveting. Perhaps, the first thing she did when she got home that night was to visit my website and start reading or listening to the Dollops. Maybe that was the reason why she promptly left the pub after our conversation. I assumed she was just desperate to get away from me, as I drunkenly blabbered on about my Dollops, but perhaps it was actually because she just couldn’t contain her excitement and wanted to start reading and listening to my genius creations straight away. Maybe, Michaela has decided to spend the weekend having a binge Dollop listening/reading session, perhaps going through every Dollop from episode 1 to 155. If you see her on Springwatch on Monday, and she’s cracking jokes about her kettle, or talking about her encounters with supermarket staff, then we’ll know that she’s obviously been inspired by my Dollops.
On the way back from Suffolk last night, we decided to post a status on Facebook immediately affter our Springwatch broadcast, including the links to the programme, and attach a few photos. We decided that we should incorporate as many wildlife puns as we could into the post.
Sean was using Michael’s phone to make the post, because Sean’s phone doesn’t let him atttach photoes, and Michael was driving so couldn’t do it himself. But it soon became very clearly that Sean had no idea about how to use Michael’s phone, and the post ended up taking about three hours to write. We more or less spent the entire journey back from Suffolk writing the Facebook post, meaning that by the time we eventually published it, we’d completely lost the immediacy aspect, as the programme had finished over three hours ago. It was taking ages for Sean to type on the phone, plus one of us would keep thinking of another pun, which meant that Sean would then have to try and make edits, delete certain bits, and change the order of things to make it fit.
When we first started writing the punning post, we were having a great time, but as the minutes turned to hours, we began to regret trying to do such a long and involved post on a phone. The phone also kept trying to predict what Sean was typing, and correct things that were puns, because they weren’t real words but wildlife-based modifications of words. At one point we needed to paste a link into the post, so Sean switched to the Internet app, only to realise, upon trying to return to Facebook, that he’d accidentally closed the Facebook app, meaning that our post was lost. We then spent another 90 minutes trying to joylessly remember all our puns, in the order we’d done them. But Sean would get halfway through, before one of us would remember that we’d missed one, causing Sean to have to try and re-jiggle everything around time and time again, which was proving very stressful for Sean. Then there came a point where the whole thing became massively hysterical, as the realisation dawned on us that we’d spent three hours trying to write one Facebook post, which we’d wanted to publish immediately after the Springwatch broadcast, but had still not posted over three hours after the show had been aired, because we’d spent all the time trying to write loads of puns.
There was a heart stopping moment when we eventually hit publish, and breathed a sigh of relief, only to see an error flash up on the screen telling us that the post could not be published due to no Internet connection. Fortunately, there was a retry button, and the post sent on the second attempt.
Here is the result of our three hours’ work: “I know we’ve been chirping on about this but just in case you haven’t yet bird the news we’ve just been on Springwatch Unsprung. We dunnock know how it happened maybe it’s because we’re very cheep and we wouldn’t eat into their budgiet. What a real badger of honour although let’s just hope we didn’t make tits of ourselves. You can watch the whole thing here And watch the full version of our song Lapwings (featuring Frank Gardiner) here
Hope you pike it. The whole thing has been a bream come true (sorry the last two puns were a bit fishy).”
I’m sure you’ll agree, it was well worth the effort, and you new readers of these Dollops will be coming back for more, time and time again.
David’s Daily Digital Dollop is available as an audio podcast. You can subscribe with Itunes here
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