Comment is free - but check your facts first

I try hard to keep off commenting or answering comments on my blog.

Maybe I’m daft and maybe I am missing a golden opportunity to do what a blogger should be there to do—engage with the readers. Maybe I’m too old for this new stuff and need to get updated in all things hip and immediate and modern. But when I get a comment like this my hair—if I had any—would stand on end: “The French did not invent fries. Think before you write!” This was in answer to the opening comment of my last blog about political ennui: “The French—those silly sods whose greatest gift to us were the fries—call it, I think, ennui.”

Let’s get this straight: I love the French, I adore frogs and I love French fries. I also never seriously thought that French fries were invented or patented by the French. Neither did I ever think such a delicacy played any part in the French revolution. I was kidding about it—and couldn’t care much whether the fries were first launched by Ronnie Mciver or the King of Burgundy.

What, however, impressed me—or deeply saddened me—in the comment was that the reader who wrote it worried quite a bit about the fries but didn’t tell me anything about the sodding—and sodden—French. I slandered a whole nation of friendly, nice people and he worried about my lack of knowledge about fries. Does that make any sense? I fully accept my comment to have been ultra-racist. But mine was a pure silly joke. The French—Mon Dieu they deserve better treatment and respect.

Next time I write anything about French letters or French kissing I will do a proper fact-finding exercise before I say that such naughty stuff all hails from the land which is detested profoundly by all poor frogs.

Does anyone who reads me really think I am so ruthless and that I mean it literally when I, obviously metaphorically, fry all the inhabitants of the land that might not have given us the unhealthy fries but gave us Voltaire, Manet, Monet, delicious wine and the Louvre?

I might have missed—oh damned am I if I did—his humour but then part-time clowns are like that. They might crack jokes aplenty but when the joke’s on them they crack up and get all serious and silly. If it wasn’t because we are so deep in the silly season I’d just tell the guy who commented about my fries to sod off.

But I’m in a good mood so I’ll just tell him thanks for reading my blog. And excusez-moi for the lack of research.