Twickenham Fine Ales - an apology

Regular visitors to this site will be aware that I like to see the best in people. In this world of multi-national corporations and increasingly powerful agro-businesses, of fat cats and downsizing, I like to see a more natural, human scale encouraged in commerce and production. It's a big guys' world out there so, as many of you know from previous postings, I like to try to give the little guy a hand. That's why on my blog, you'll often see links to new businesses every now and then - I try to pick one at random from recently established business and website lists I get sent, if I have the time. It's an occasional service, informal and just one of those happy coincidentals of living in the global village that I can sit here in DC and help someone back in the old country. So, I was pleased to receive the following comment from the D.M. of Twickenham Fine Ales, one such company whose link has appeared recently on this site:

Bob,

Very off-subject I'm afraid.I just found your link to Twickenham Fine Ales on your main page. I'd like to thank you as I'm the MD of the company and we need all the publicity we can get. We hope to be brewing very shortly.

Cheers,[name witheld for legal reasons]

PS send me an email if you'd like to know more.


OK. Nice to have some feedback, thanks for the thanks and, in short, a good deed done and everyone happy. So you'd think. Now, this communication was fresh in my mind when I started to post yesterday, and as you may have read in that posting, I thought perhaps I could do a little bit more for the company - here I refer you to the words "and we need all the publicity we can get" and I'm quoting from the above communication from the company's D.M. So, in a spirit of gentle fun, I thought that anyone who'd read the above comment (as anyone reading this site would have been able to - I don't hide your comments away, this is an open page, God Bless America, land of the free etc.) would see the humour in the "we need any publicity we can get" followed by the immediate response in my blog, spuriously linking a site which anyone with a modem and a PC can click on, anywhere in the world without the need for a corporate sponsor, even one as omnipresent as TFA. I'm sure most of you stateside would have gotten the joke, n'est pas? Not very funny? Perhaps not. Maliciously motivated and desirous of impeding the development of a fledgling company? Most certainly not. Yet this is the response to yesterday's posting I've just gotten from TFA:

Please be aware the Twickenham Fine Ales does not sponsor this site or have any connections with www.TartyDoris.com

Please cease and desist from making these suggestions.



So, there you have it. I am and I will.

I would just like, for legal reasons, to reiterate the view expressed in the previous quotation by the D.M. of Twickenham Fine Ales and apologise for any misunderstanding which has been caused by my postings. It has crossed my mind to remove the link to TFA from my site altogether in order to completely avoid any further embarrassment falling upon the company through my well-intentioned, though seemingly misguided attempts to give them a little helping hand. This may still be the outcome - pending legal discussions - as I have no intention of wasting valuable posting time fighting a long and acrimonious courtroom battle over the respective rights to free speech and freedom to link which would obviously lie at the heart of any case. If it comes to that, I'll just delete it and act like the whole thing never happened - I have no pride, even when I am persecuted for acting decently and thinking of others. However, I feel that if we can return to the status quo anti, normal relations between this blog and TFA may resume. I would like to think that the interests of the large volume of my readers who would enjoy that company's products should be paramount. To this end, the link remains and this apology is tendered. The rest, TFA, is in your hands. As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed.

One last point on this post. I'm getting pretty stirred up by the ingratitude of some of my readers. I mean, do you think it's easy coming up with this stuff? I'm just a regular guy, who works for his pay check like most of you guys out there. I do this to try and bring a little bit of fun and laughter into the world after a hard day's slog working for the man. And what do I get? Shit from you guys is what. "Ooh, not as funny as Wednesday's Bob"...."Hey, Bob...what's with all the Brit T.V. in-jokes and sexism shit?" "Oooh, I think you've gone a bit too far there Bob"....Like, Oooh, I'm real scared of offending people. Not. Do you think this stuff just magics up here? You know, I mean there's all this crazy stuff happening in the world and like our phones are getting tapped and we've got a genocidal nazi in the White House who's letting the National Guard take their truncheons to young women in NYC and you guys are like ..."Hey, Bob, what's the bitch about Lady Di...she was pretty cool" And I'm like - "Getthe****outtahere!"

So, you bunch of pathetic losers - f*** you! No more favours, no more leg ups, no more Mr. Nice Guy. F*** your petty middle class morals. You try to do the right thing and it get thrown back in your face. Well, not anymore...........