There has been an explosion of blog awards recently.
The ones that have come my way arrived with no prize money, free foreign travel or promises of eternal life, but are greatly appreciated all the same.
Dumdad, an Englishman in Paris and occasional contributor in various guises to Salut! sites, was kind enough to declare me the recipient of the - his? - Awesome Dude Blogger award.
He also declared an interest. We are not only fellow bloggers but friends. In a spirit of friendship, then, I should add that even though there was already a link from this page to his own very entertaining site, The Other Side of Paris, there is now another, here.
Sarah Hague, with equal kindness, included Salut! among her five nominations for something calling itself the Thinking Blogger Award.
Sarah and I have never met, but she has loyally followed my online exploits since I became one of the Daily Telegraph's earliest bloggers, while I have long carried a link to her own, rightly popular (as in regularly to be found highish up in one of those blogger hit parades) St Bloggie de Riviere.
And Sandy Lancaster, a retired accountant in the Languedoc, announced a few weeks ago that his beloved, Tish, who evidently reads every ex-pat blog (for which she surely deserves some kind of award of her own) had decided to judge them all and had placed mine second.
The winner, "by an old English mile", was Alex Hampshire's admirable site which carries the comprehensive self-description: "Days in the life of country folk, or, the life, loves, hates and ramblings of a man, one baguette short of a pique nique."
So you will see that I commend my own readers to each of the sites mentioned above; you are unlikely to be disappointed. I could go on, and turn this into an awards announcement of my own. But I won't, for two or three reasons.
If I were to include any of those sites, you would rightly wonder whether it was simply an exercise in mutual back-scratching.
If I ignored one or more, it might seem ungrateful.
And what about others omitted from this arbitrary list of mine? I offer signposts from Salut! to all sorts of blogs and sites. What would Petite Anglaise make of being absent from a Salut! Top Five after all the praise I have heaped on her work, and her nice words about me? And would I have to disqualify Salut! Sunderland and Salut! Live! just when they are doing so well?
There's one other thought. Remember those chain letters we all used to get, promising untold fortunes if we did pass them on to x number of other people, dire consequences if we didn't?
I have just a feeling all these blogger awards are in the same mould. Everyone has to be nominated, nominate others and so on until every blogger in all lands can claim that someone, somewhere thought him or her the world's finest. I think I'll settle for the dire consequences.
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