Toxic commentators

I woke this morning to find a particularly toxic comment on the blog. I don’t get that many & usually I just hit reject as they are always from our dear friend Anonymous. I figure why give them the oxygen if they don’t have the balls to leave their vitriol attached to an actual identity?

But this comment was hilarious. According to my new un-friend this blog comes straight from the realm of my imagination. An imagination, apparently, that aspires to a particular fantasy lifestyle it could never achieve as an ‘unemployed hack’.

I didn't really want to respond, but it occurred to me that other people might be laboring under the misapprehension that this blog is fiction. So this seems a good point at which to make it clear to you all, for the record, that this blog, which started out as my letters home to England, is a work of non-fiction in its entirety.

And that’s quite apart from the fact that I am far too lazy to invent & document an entire life. That’s for novel writing, not for a blog. Everything about which I write I have done. But, equally, I am no Dooce. Not everything I have done I write about: my sex life, my family’s problems, a few well-known friends, some private events all remain off record.

This also seems the place to make it clear that whilst I have been lucky enough to do some amazing things in my private life, as a style writer & editor in the real world for some ten years or more, I do get offered complimentary experiences, some of which I write about on here. But I’d like to make it clear that I use the same parameters on the blog that I do in real life: if I'm comped & I like it, well & good, but if I'm comped & I don’t, then expect me to say so.

Anonymous also picks up on a typo and uses it to try to crucify me (&, by extension, the entire fashion industry). May I point out that this is a blog? I don’t have the benefit of sub-editors or production people to hone my copy for me. I type straight onto the screen, often late at night; spelling mistakes & errors happen occasionally. And, please, readers, I absolutely want to be told (politely) when I make them, so that I can correct them immediately.

All I have left to say to Anonymous is that aspiring to be ‘a genuinely cool cruiser’ is so far from my list of ambitions as to be risible. Off you go Anonymous and cruise elsewhere. You are not wanted on here. (Or anywhere else I suspect.)


The comment below: (with its own typing errors faithfully recorded)

ah dear Liberty Girl,
if only it were all true and not the fantasy of an unemployed hack. A genuinely cool cruiser would KNOW that C. Still is spelled with a Y (Clyfford)- but then again, standards are pretty low in the fashion business.
keep on dreamin' > London Spy


Me in the Ritz Carlton San Francisco bathroom in case anyone doubts I was there!