Flaming Nora

As regular readers will know, I blog about this, that and Coronation Street. Way back in 1995 I started writing Coronation Street Weekly Updates for a fan group online. Word of the updates spread and at its peak, there were 6,000 email subscribers to the updates until the email server collapsed under the strain of the weight and the group moved to the more stable platform of Yahoogroups. The updates featured on all of the Coronation Street fan sites and garnered some great praise over the years. They even have their own website. Fast forward 10 years to 2005 when commercial blogging company Shiny Media launched Corrieblog. Ashley Norris, one of their three Directors at the time, asked me to be editor of this new Coronation Street blog, based on the witty, weekly Corrie updates I’d been writing for 10 years. I edited and wrote for Shiny Media's Corrieblog for two years, all the time continuing to write my Coronation Street Weekly Updates for Corrie fan sites and the email subsc...

Switch on, boot up, log in, open mail. Delete the porn, the spam, the offers to extend my penis and enlarge my septic tank. Delete the emails that want to send me Viagra and Cialis and turn down the offer of £1m from a widow in Nigeria (although I was tempted by this one, oh yes). Right, so that’s the crap cleared out of my inbox, what’s left? Oooh, lovely there’s a message from someone I haven’t seen in four years. Hang on, what’s she saying? She wants me to sign up to be her friend on Facebook? I haven’t seen her for four years and that’s the best she can do? I emailed her straight back, told her I wasn’t into Facebook or Myspace but was over the moon to have heard from her again. I was a bit confused by the Facebook thing but decided to ignore it and plowed on with a gushing reply. I asked her about her life, her son, her business. I recalled things we’d done together in the past, putting memories into the message, encouraging a reply from the other end of the country from someone’s...