Unaccustomed as I am am am to public speaking speaking speaking...

I want to thank Lord Yorkshire Pudding of Pudding Towers, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England (for readers from other planets, that’s in the U.K.) for giving this blog an award that allows me to display the following one-of-a-kind objet d’art:

I think.

I mean, I wouldn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but even as I gratefully and humbly accept this award for Best Blogger in his street in Canton, Georgia I can’t help remembering that just one short year ago, at the end of 2009, Lord Pudding named me Top American Blogger of 2009.

Lo, how the mighty are fallen. Or at least not riding as high as in days of yore.

Still, any award is better than no award, so in the spirit of hands-across-the-sea camaraderie, hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie, and the peace-on-earth-good-will-toward men congeniality currently but only temporarily in vogue, I say a simple, heartfelt “Thank you.”

I now relinquish the microphone phone phone, with one parting shot question estion estion:

Who died and left Pudding in charge of end-of-year gala award banquets?

Yorkshire Pudding has honored me with an award.

And not just any award either. Lord Yorkshire Pudding of Pudding Towers, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, has chosen me as the Top American Blogger of 2009, which recognition is accompanied by this tasteful portrait:


Am I lucky or what?

My absolute delight in having been chosen is tempered somewhat by the deep suspicion that I am quite possibly the only American blogger with whom Mr. Yorkshire Pudding is acquainted, except for Mr. Sam Gerhardstein of Columbus, Ohio, who won the Top Granddad Blogger award. I was also eligible for this award but somehow, inexplicably, was not chosen. Of course, I am much too modest to mention my six magnificent grandchildren over and over and over or show you their photographs repeatedly because, as Belle Watling once said to Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind in an entirely different context, “It wouldn’t be fitten.”

Mr. Pudding was on a roll.

My friend Katherine of The Last Visible Dog shared Top New Zealand Blogger honors with someone I don’t know. Very well done, Katherine!

My friend Ian, a.k.a. Silverback, of Retirement Rocks!, who divides his time between England and Sebring, Florida, received YP’s soon-to-be-coveted Susan Boyle Award and was named the Top Transatlantic Jet Set Blogger. I believe this is somewhat akin to receiving the Gene Hersholt award from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (Oscar to you) chiefly for being very old and decrepit and never having received an award in earlier years when you might actually have deserved one.

And my friend Daphne of Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, whose blog is called My Dad's a Communist because, well, er, her dad (who unfortunately passed away about a year ago) was a communist, was named “Blogger of the Year 2009”. Huzzahs all around! Very well deserved! One difference between Americans and Brits is in the number of “hips” used to precede a “hurrah!” and so I do not know whether the cheer that should be used to congratulate dear Daphne properly is “hip, hip, hurrah:” or “hip, hip, hip, hurrah!” Until this international dispute is settled once and for all, please discuss amongst yourselves.

Since I am as gracious in victory as in defeat, I herewith include this link to Yorkshire Pudding’s blog so that not only can you read Lord Pudding's remarks at the awards ceremony and see a picture of grand-prize-winner Daphne, resplendent in her matching turquoise T-shirt and eyeglasses, but also you can learn who received the rest of the awards.

Happy surfing! Or as we Americans say, knock yourselves out!

’Old Onto Your ’Ats, Blokes

Mr. Yorkshire Pudding of Pudding Towers, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England -- I have yet to learn his real moniker -- has finally lost his mind and created a brand new reason to get up every morning, the Laughing Horse Awards. For 2008, the inaugural year of the awards, he has named 17 recipients in 13 categories.

Oddly, yours truly has been selected, along with two other American bloggers, to share the 2008 Laughing Horse American Blog Award from Mr. Pudding. You can see a list of all the categories and all the recipients at www.beefgravy.blogspot.com/, his blog. [WARNING! WARNING! If you visit YP’s blog, the post entitled “Awards” is rated G, but the post entitled “Hangover” is rated R. Both posts are adorned with a picture of the Laughing Horse. Don’t say you weren’t warned. --RWP]

Here is the acceptance speech I left on his “Awards” post:

“It is a pleasure and an honour [note British spelling. --RWP] to stand here in Pudding Towers tonight, even though it is alarmingly close to the Blackburn Meadows Sewage Treatment Plant.

I accept this awesome, though shared, Laughing Horse American Blog award in the name of all bloggers everywhere who toil daily over their hot keyboards without hope of achieving anything other than emptying their brains of all the accumulated debris and making the ugly voices in their heads go away. Thanks to Mr. Yorkshire Pudding himself, my brain will now be filled for some time with this image of a laughing horse.

I can only hope it is laughing with me and not at me.

God save the Queen, or at least Prince William.”

(end of acceptance speech)

Now that I have had a little time to reflect on things, I feel that I don’t deserve to be in the company of the other recipients. No, really. I don’t deserve to be in the company of the other recipients.