Colorado pictures are still coming, just as soon as I muster up the strength to deal with Blogger and its resistance to me laying out my post as I want to. In the meantime though I thought I'd tell you about my recent conversation with a celebrity. I know, you read that right.
Well, I say celebrity. You might disagree but he has a weekly television show and a Wikipedia page so that must prove it. And I said conversation, which so long as we're counting twenty-first century social networking interactions then it counts.
I've mentioned Twitter before. I love it. It's a really good way to keep up to date with things you're interested it and points you in the direction of things you might not come across. One of the people I follow is Dan Walker, presenter of Football Focus on BBC1. Yes, he is the aforementioned celebrity. My friend Ruth told me I should follow him during the World Cup because he was quite funny and well, interesting. At that time he was on a bus touring South Africa and would tweet a lot about that. "Fair enough, interesting, I'll give him a follow" I thought. Once the World Cup ended he kept tweeting about golf (of which I have very little interest) and then the football season started so was all into that. Now, truth be told, I don't watch Football Focus, I don't watch MotD, I don't have a team that I follow, and I have what can only be described as a passing interest in the beautiful game. But he's funny and he seems to have a certain thing to tweet each day. Like Friday's lunch news and the Thursday quiz. One of the things that also emerged from his tweets was that he goes to church. Although you can also read about that on his Wikipedia page.
Anyway, now you know the background, I'll get to the story. So there I was on Sunday evening reading my Twitter timeline. He'd just tweeted something and so to relieve the boredom of waiting for Dancing on Ice to start (or maybe it was already on, who knows?) I click to read all his tweets (Non-Tweeters: only his general tweets and ones to people I also follow show up in my feed but I can read all his tweets by looking at his profile. Tweets that start with @name are directed to that person specifically). He was saying some kind of strange things to people, like:
@name Well that's very nice of you. Plenty would disagree but that means a lot. Thanks.
Someone had said something nice to him about Football Focus and he was replying. Good stuff. A scroll through some more of his tweets revealed that some tweets he gets weren't always as nice. He responded with a courteous kind of 'thanks for the feedback'. But there was one exchange which got me. It went something like this:
Everyone tune into BBC1 at 12.15 to experience @DanWalkerBBC 's shit patter.
Nice. Dan was tagged in this so he'd definitely intended him know this chap's (I've changed his Twitter ID to PoliteJoe) thoughts on him but how did Dan respond? Would he ignore him? No, otherwise that's a crap story. Would he bad mouth him back? No, instead Dan said this:
@PoliteJoe I might get the continuity announcer to use that intro next week!!
He totally un-zinged him. He took the heat out of what he said and made a reasonably funny joke out of it. But was our Joe done? Was he heck:
@DanWalkerBBC Wooooo! Bellend.
A charming response there from Joe. But once again, Dan replied not in the way you might think would be deserving of someone like Joe:
@PoliteJoe You seem like a lovely fella. May I politely direct you to the unfollow button if you find me so distasteful? See you soon.
Now, maybe Dan, with BBC in his twitter name, couldn't call him the names he wanted, but he could have just said nothing. He didn't do that though. He was polite back to someone who had just rude to him. I thought that was fairly classy. So I told him so:
@DanWalkerBBC You sir, are a class act.
I know people who write to celebrities all the time. I don't. Mostly because it seems very few write back. Would Dan? Of course he would:
@Tinarena22 Why thank you good lady
Dan called me good lady! Sure, I had to call him sir, but still!! But then I thought he might wonder why I had tweeted him and surely the sort of behaviour he demonstrated should be commended. So I said:
@DanWalkerBBC :) Was reading some responses you made to people's criticisms. Like I said, a class act. Keep up the good work!
Dan, or Super Dan as I now like to call him, replied again:
@Tinaarena22 Ta
So there you have it, Dan Walker said thanks to me. Twice.
We're practically mates.
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