Monday 12 October 2009

Who is this man?

...and what's his game?

For weeks now my tracker has been telling me that a Mac user whose ISP is based somewhere near Dartford in Kent has been a persistent visitor to Other Men's Flowers.

Most of my visitors have found the site by accident and move on very quickly, never to return, but this one (let us call him Arthur, though of course she may be a Winifred) seems to have been devoting a substantial part of his spare time over the past few weeks to splashing about in its turbid waters. Last Saturday, for example, he was here at mid-day for 16 minutes, at 1.30 for 54 minutes, at 3.22 for 67 minutes and at 5.16 for 60 minutes, having visited a total of 61 pages.

Do I know him? What does he want? Why, after all those hours of reading, has he no desire to make any comments? Did he arrive one day by chance, set himself the challenge of finding something interesting somewhere among its 230,000 words and is now determined not to give up until he does?

One possible explanation is that some sinister agency is paying him to read every post in the hope that he will catch me out publishing sedition, treason, filth, or incitement to murder. If so, then clearly his employers have so far been disappointed; this is nice to know, though slightly worrying, for if his visits suddenly stop I shall suspect that he has reported on something reprehensible I have written and it is only a matter of a day or two before my door is smashed open and heavily armed men burst in, shouting at me to lie down on the floor.

So, Arthur, if you do simply get bored and decide to cheese it, please drop me a line and tell me.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

That you can pinpoint (almost) where your readers live, how many minutes we spend at OMF and what sort of computer we're using, feels quite alarming.

Tony said...

Well, not really; I don't know exactly where they live or who they are. There is no chance that I shall appear on your doorstep with a bunch of flowers and an invitation to lunch at a little place I know of where they do a rather good Boeuf en daube aux pruneaux Henri IV