Saturday 13th June - listicles

 Listicle

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item. A typical listicle will have a title describing a specific number of items contained within, along with subsequent subheadings within the text for each entry. The word is a portmanteau of list and article.

(Here I started down a rabbit hole... there are novels written entirely in the form of letters, could one write one in the form of listicles?)

Back to the here and now, I reckon my blogs are nearly all listicles; a variety of topic headings and then a few sentences to expand further.

Like this paragraph!

...

My father's flat isn't selling (yet, always add 'yet', to imply that any day now there will be a queue of people aged 55 or over and needing assistance to maintain their independence, all desperateto buy it). We've started to notice flyers from other estate agents appearing on the doormat when we go to check. They make me think of vultures.

I don't know any estate agents socially. It's rather hard to work out what they are doing for the fee... like spiders, spinning a Web and then just waiting to see if anything turns up...

I'm pretty certain that none of these companies are my friends!

The whole 'how can we sell the flat' issue nakes me want to hide... like Archimedes the owl meeting Wart, the boy who will become King Arthur in T H White's 'The Once and Future King'

I shut my eyes and say 'There is no flat'. Of course that doesn't work, and sadly neither does 'There is no me'. Life just isn't the same as fiction!

...

Eating noodles is always a messy business. We gad noodles with teriyaki salmon and various bits of vegetable; the last of the broccoli, the remains of the asparagus, the dregs of the packet of frozen green beans, a few rather dessicated spring onions... tasted a lot better than I've made it sound! We sat opposite each other forking up noodles and slurping the straggly ends, or chomping them off with our teeth. Not a meal for invited guests!

It reminded me of this passage in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell, written in 1850, about how their rigidly correct ladies ate their oranges;

Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.

Maybe we should have taken our dishes to eat our noodles in separate rooms?