“Ooh, you are awful, but I like you.”
Older readers will remember Dick Emery and his character Mandy, who would respond to an innocently made double entendre with the phrase and a hefty shove.
For younger readers, there is YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkLRZzukcJc
Yes, this really was hilarious in the 1970s.
I was trying to bring the phrase into a piece commenting on the rather underwhelming statement from Grant Shapps detailing the countries that the UK can visit after May (2021).
Try as I might, I just can’t work “Ooh, you are awful…” into the post. He is awful, but there is no double entendre in his statement and I don’t particularly like him.
Never mind. Thomas Edison once said. “I haven’t failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Not all ideas work when it comes to blogging. Sometimes we just have to try something out, even a weak idea, and see what comes out. We can abandon the idea for now, but file it away for when we next need to write fresh content.
But back to Grant Shapps and his statement.
He will allow us a couple of countries that might accept us in the near future, a handful of countries that definitely won’t, and…
The South Sandwich Islands? Ooh, Grant, you’re such a tease (hence the attempted allusion to Dick Emery). The South Sandwich Islands are a group of uninhabited islands in the South Atlantic, so uninviting that not even Argentina wants them. If we want crowds, we can visit the 30 people who live in South Georgia, but as holiday destinations go, it is quite a hard sell for travel agents and businesses starved of customers for 18 months.
Unless of course Grant really is teasing us, and he means the original Sandwich Islands, discovered by Captain Cook in 1778. He named them after the Earl of Sandwich, who also inspired the bread and meat combination we now know so well. The islands were renamed the Hawaiian Islands in 1840, and that really would be a destination worth visiting.
It can be difficult to create fresh and original content. Is there anything that has not already been said, recorded, filmed a hundred times before? So how do we come up with new content that people are going to want to read and that we want to write?
One technique is to combine a series of ideas, not necessarily connected, and rearrange them like shaking a kaleidoscope of ideas, pushing them into new colours and shapes. Sometimes we like the new patterns created. Sometimes we don’t and we have to shake that kaleidoscope again.
If we want to adopt this approach, we must make sure that we have a ready source of ideas to put in to the mix. In his book Copywriting Made Simple, Tom Albrighton makes the point that when we are stuck on output, when we can’t think what to write about, we should consider our input, what we have consumed, what has struck a chord with us. There may have been ideas we had previously which did not work at the time, a phrase or situation which caught our attention. We will often find new and unexpected connections between ideas, and which provide us with a fresh approach to particular problem or bring about a new train of thought. There may not be anything new, but there are always new ways of looking at things.
And that is how I have combined those unlikely bedfellows Dick Emery, Thomas Edison and failure, sandwiches and Grant Shapps into a post. It can be surprising what can be put together when you are trying to find and write better fresh content for your blog. Try it and see where you end up. I would love to see what stream of consciousness comes flowing out.
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