Sharks Versus Bees

The other day I asked a newspaper columnist how he decided what to write about every week. "I just try not to write about my children too much", he said. Which I thought was the right way round - knowing what not to write about.

But my on-going review of blogs around the world - aka the competition - suggests to me that we are not suitably engaged in this reductive process, and just filling up the web with rubbish about how we are too hungover to write our blog today, how cute our pets look in baby clothes, plaintive descriptions of holidays with people who have obviously (and sensibly) since left us, our favourite Radiohead songs, how to get around restraining orders, and how rattle-snake worshipping is the only real way forward.

Some househusbandnot suggestions about what not to write about on blogs:

1) People telling you anything from beyond the grave
2) Puff/Piff Daddy/Diddy
3) How wasted/stoned/fried you got last night
4) Your girlfriend leaving you (unless you are also prepared to talk about how often she asked you to stop accessing the don'tuwishyourgirlfriendwasawhorelikeme website before she finally left)
5) Your cd collection (unless you are one of John Peel's children)
6) How in 1993 Dan Brown/J K Rowling was taking lots of notes at the next table in Starbucks when you were explaining the plot of your unwritten novel to your girlfriend just before she dumped you
7) Bush/Blair/Brown or Bono in the same sentence
8) Your children going to the loo
9) A poem you have written
10)How you are statistically more likely to get killed by a bumble bee than a Great White Shark (I rest my case)
11)Who you think should stay in Big Brother/Celebrity Love Island/I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here/I'm Deeply Unfamous But I Look Good With My Kit Off
12) Your still unwritten novel
13) How to kill a dog
14) Vegetarian feasts ( A true oxymoron, up there with 'fun run')
or
15) Tom Cruise being normal

A final observation - from my wife - on blog content. After a tense half hour of trying to get ready for work on what was reported to be about to be the hottest day in London since 1603 or something, applying her makeup in the bathroom mirror which is lying on the floor in the bedroom, being disturbed by the decorator turning up an hour early, watching me idly cracking open a frosty diet coke in anticipation of my 'commute' down the hall to have a chat with the decorator about gloss versus satin-wood paint, and before exiting to get broiled on public transport, my wife responded to my query about what I should write about on househusbandnot today with "How about what a w***er you are?"