[dearieme] and the quest for a decent sized font

Blogger Deogolwulf once wrote:

Liverpool is to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. One must charitably suppose that it is culture in the anthropological sense...

to which Dearieme asked:

European Hubcapital of Culture?...

Who on earth is this Dearieme? Once, at Freedom and Whisky, the ubiquitous one opined:

Without the Scottish seats for Labour, an English Tory government might just seize the chance to declare that Scotland is the successor nation and that England has thereby left the EU.

Who on earth is this Dearieme? At Stumbling and Mumbling, he maintained:

Equality of opportunity': why must the left always talk in extreme, often belligerent, terms? Why must we have equality, why must this be maximised, that eliminated and t'other never happen again? How about just trying to move in a desired direction, with this improved, that ameliorated and t'other reduced in frequency?

Recently, DM complained that my font size was too small to decipher and I notice he has just left this at Deogolwulf's:

The font size on your post below was easier on my eyes.

Deogolwulf addressed the mystery commenter thusly:

By the way, dearieme, when retirement hits you, do you think you would consider turning your hand to blogging -- or would you have better things to do?

Dearieme answered ...

I have retired. Mostly. As for blogging - I suspect that it's more fun and less work just to drop in on a few of the best blogs. (Though I am excluded from a few by their using painfully small fonts. Silly asses.)

He almost let the cat out of the bag here:

"It struck Tocqueville that the men who stormed the National Assembly in 1848 were like actors": exactly the same thing struck me about the evenements of 1968 - I was a student too at the time, and the inauthenticity was obvious ...

... and gave himself away completely on his blogger profile.

From all this, Sherlock Higham concludes that Dearieme is most probably a retired academic, much given to research and other jolly activities and possibly inhabiting the Cambridge region to boot. Of course I might be wrong and this BookCrossing seems to underline that:

G'day! I'm a vegetarian, scorpio, Buddhist, 40ish librarian. When I'm not reading (which is not a lot of the time) I watch the cricket on telly, go bushwalking, play on the computer, go to work, and write a word or two of my novel. Am planning the biggest adventure of my life (second only to emigrating to Australia by boat as a kid) - a trek in Nepal! Tres tres excitement!

Of course, this might just be the man's alta-ego but it does seem to be supported by the photo album. Is it the same man? One aside is that DM favours the use of the inverted commas, sometimes unclosed - a speciality of his. Some other Deariemeisms:

* Was feminism "The Revolt of the Misses"?

* "in the long run we are all dead": and in some cases, sooner.

* Don't use anti-climax in poetry" we were taught at school.

* "Liam Byrne": whose brilliant idea was it to have Britishness advocated by a bloke with an Irish name?

* “the likes of Oxford and Cambridge universities - world-leaders in scientific research for four centuries”: oh come off it. You can’t know much about their history if you think that.

* Actually, I'll just give you my own view of why the NHS was adopted as the State Religion in Britain. Sheer fluke: the NHS was set up coincidentally with the first time in history when physicians could cure you of much - the age of the arrival of antibiotics. All other arguments are so much bumfluff - it was mere chance.

Finally, all appears to be revealed at Pootergeek's, where Dearieme even gets a little hot under the collar:

It’s the hopeless, defeatist “Don’t try because you might not succeed”, combined with the refusal to analyse and learn from any failure and instead just to blame it on “them”. It’s the life-denying, joy-hating, fearful, self-abasing, sodding negativity of it all: drives me up the wall. Tossers!

One thing is for certain - the storehouse of his mind must be indeed vast:

Do you know the story of the poor sod that penicillin was tried on? His condition improved enormously but they were running out of penicillin so they desperately recovered it from his urine and kept recycling it in dwindling amounts until eventually the bacteria won and he relapsed and died.

The measure of a blog, so it seems, is if Dearieme deigns to grace it with a comment and like F Scott Fitzgerald finding himself a duck out of water in his screenwriting and novelistic ventures, perhaps the honourable DM wisely restricts himself to commenting, at least in this current persona.

[Yes, I know I promised Neil Clark next but I couldn't be fagged doing it.]