User:Ma'am

My Husband said that if I used a heading "Private" on my user page, that it makes everything after it invisible to everyone else. I do so admire him! He can do everything from competitive carriage driving to commanding a ship, and now he is learning all about computers and this Wikithing and teaching me. Still, when I get back to London, I should ask that nice Ms Reavley, our Webmaster (or should I call her the Webmistress?) about it, just to be certain. I wouldn't want anyone else to read these thoughts. Great-great-granny 'Drina kept a daily journal --even had it published in the bloody newspapers during her younger years-- that she called her Highlands Journal. Great aunt Baby recopied it after her mother's death, leaving out the embarrassing bits. I've never kept much of one, but knowing that I can just wipe this out with a keystroke, and that no one else can read it because I've put the magic Private heading on it, I think I'll try doing one here, but I don't think I'll be able to do it every day.

21/VIII 2005

I made my first edit on the Wikithing today. It was in a silly discussion on putting a family name as part of the initial reference to granny 'Drina! Well, I added to it. I'll keep here a copy for my own reference. My Husband says he thinks that after I do a certain number of these I get a promotion to some higher rank in the Wikithing hierarchy, so this will help me keep count:

We don't value Tompsett's site, but we DO read Wikipedia. We Are Amused. It is a nice diversion from the bloody boredom of spending the summer up here in the Highlands with nothing else to do but try to make sense of the Ghillies' thick accents. How do they understand each other? And Mr Speaker, with his Glaswegian tongue! Some new MPs started to go home, thinking he had adjourned the House one evening when they heard him cry "I'd like a ride, now let's leave" but senior Hon. Members informed them that he was just ordering a Division ("Ayes to the right, Noes to the left"). If the Scots could understand each other and others, they'd know what was really being said and wouldn't be voting Labour all the time. Labour. Now there's a rum lot. Mr "Just Call Me Charlie" is so thick that he says he can't walk backwards down three steps, yet he can ruin the carefully-evolved administration system of justice. We half-expect later this year, instead of handing Us Our Speech with at least a polite nod, he'll just toss it into Our lap and say "There 'ya go ducks, let 'er rip!" The last Henry in my place certainly knew how to deal with an unpleasant Lord Chancellor! Too bad Henry died of that ulcerous leg. His physicians prescribed a mixture of frog slime and snail slime as a poultice. If he lived today, the National Health Service would eventually order the same thing, but he would have to wait three years for the appointment to be seen. If he'd had the National Health back then, he'd not have lived long enough to have all those wives, and Margo and We wouldn't have had all that girlhood gossip to laugh about. Mummy lived to almost 102, but she was a pensioner not on the National Health. Our own Homeopathic physicians. That's what We have always used. Thank God We don't live in Canada -- they'd never allow it.

For One in a certain cultural position, having a family name is like, well, like having Our Right and Trusty Cousin Prince Michael of Kent as a relative: We may be born with it, and it costs Us nothing to keep, but We don't actually make use of it because We have absolutely no real need of it.

To place such emphasis on such an appendage as a family name is absolutely mad! To do what the stubborn of you insist upon would be to make a pig's breakfast of the introduction to an article here of someone to whom I feel especially close, if it contained that level of trivia: "Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor) (born 21 April 1926) is a cousin of Prince Michael of Kent. She is also the Queen regnant of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland..."

And one of you referred to an Order in Council back in the '60s. Forget it. We're not going to do another of those just to solve a silly dispute here. Those meetings are dreadful! We are going to be 80 years old next year, but do you think they even offer Us a chair? They all want Our Assent, but won't give Us an ass-sit. Bloody pompous politicians! The only reason the Privy Council meetings go quickly is that they are closed to the bloody sensationalist scandalmongering fact-fabricating photo-distorting disrespectful hatless press, so the bloody publicity-seeking politicians have no chance to get their pictures into the tabloids, or the silly things they always say quoted in the sheets.

Now Stop It! We are no longer amused. --Ma'am 20:39, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

It feels so good to be able to express what one really feels about something! Because this Wikithing uses just screen names, no one knows it is really me saying it. This is such freedom, like going in cognito out into the real world. It's such fun, I think I'll do it again from time to time!

27/VIII 2005

My eldest -- the one I call "My Heir Apparent" -- was just showing me some more things on this Wikithing. He is so clever! He and I (how hard to break the habits of a lifetime, but I'm consciously trying to always use the single instead of plural personal pronouns in this new-found private journal) share some private jokes, just between the two of us, and it is fun. E.g. when he he enters a room where I am alone, We address him as "H.A." and he, with exaggerated politeness, makes a sweeping bow and addesses me as "Y.M." and we both chuckle and then sit and deal with whatever business is at hand. We usually wind up trashtalking the French before, again with exaggerated gestures, "H.A." takes his leave of "Y.M."

Whenever we are together as the National Anthemn is sung, as H.A. stands next to me he always quietly sings "God save our gracious you..." so that I can hear it. He has gotten quite good at it over the years, doing it with a straight face and a stiff upper lip to disguise it from lip-readers, and I too strain to not smile at the joke. But his sons are sometimes standing on the other side of him and, knowing how around the bend he is on environmental things, they hear him wanting to save the "yew" and think he is trying to preserve another tree somewhere. They know one of his ancestors famously talked to trees, and they are worrying that they too will inherit that malady. But we don't tell them about our little private joke.