I Heard It Through The Penines

First of all, thanks to everyone for their kind and thoughtful messages after yesterday's news about Zuzu. She is as perky as ever, the beauty of all this being she hasn't a clue. We've discussed all the options open to us and are thankfully blessed with a great vets so we know whatever next week brings us, well we will all be supported whatever the outcome, most importantly Zuzu.

Today has been more gloomy still as Gran rang up with her morning dead and dying report. But unlike usual, when it is people I don't know, today it was the sudden death of an old school friend's brother. It appears to have been meningitis and he was just 35 with a family of his own. All deaths are inherently painful but having lost a number of family and friends suddenly at young ages myself, I can truly sympathise with how his nearest and dearest must be suffering and my heart goes out to them.

But of course in the realms of local gossip this is just today's fodder and at first I wasn't even sure Gran had the right person and it may have been his cousin. As I've mentioned before in the blog, truth and validity appears way down the scale of local gossip requirements. I am not being pious or exonerating myself from the gossip mongers as I know I am very easily one myself. I am a hypocrite, but a reasonably honest one at that.

It's not only the stars in the tabloids who hear ridiculous stories about themselves. Here are a few I've heard regarding myself and family over the last few years (even after I moved from Yorkshire eight years ago, local friends kept me updated on what I am supposedly doing). So to clarify

1 - In 1992 at university I got a panicky phone call from an old school friend KateW. Was I alright now I was pregnant? KarenW had phoned her to tell her how I was with child. Firstly KarenW couldn't be bothered to utter 'hello' to KateW in all our school years yet felt the need two years later to track down her phone number to have a full conversation about me.  As it happened I already knew (direct from the horses mouth) that another classmate, also called Rebecca, was expecting but chinese whispers had played their part.

It took me half an hour to convince KateW this was the fact. Somehow the missive of the gossip actually carried more weight than my own protests. I know I'm a bit rotund but trust me, it is not because I've been refusing to give birth for the last 14 years.

2 - I am not in a coma. About ten years ago my grandparents got a phonecall to say how sorry the caller was that I was in intensive care after a car crash. I was a surly teenager at times but they would have noticed if I was in a coma. I have had the good fortune so far in life to never have been in a car crash of any proportion yet still comes no3:

3 - I am not dead. A year after it was reported I had been in a coma, I was then killed off in a car crash. The gossips were determined a vehicle would get me. Not only was I supposedly dead, I had the indignity of being killed in a car crash in a town which is the fart from God's bottom (a place I hadn't been to in, ooh, ten years at least!).

4 - We did not move because Mum only had months to live due to a brain tumour - how the heck they came up with that one?! However, this piece of gossip gladdened Mum as she was flattered they thought she had a brain in the first place.

5 - I am not getting married on television. I have been on Bargain Hunt, but somehow this piece of news travelled the Yorkshire Dales and was represented to Gran in the form that I was having a live wedding on the BBC. I know its disgusting, we pay all that money for a licence fee and still the Beeb can't be bothered to find me a groom and pay for a slap up do, but what can you do about it?

6 - And this myth I am loathe to dispel as it is my favourite to have done the rounds. We didn't move because we won the lottery. Well not unless you count the odd ten pounds.  I do not have a secret stash of millions under my mattress. My numbers have not come up, it wasn't me.  I wish it was though.    

Tech Tags: gossip

Comments

[Attila the Mom]

"Not only was I supposedly dead, I had the indignity of being killed in a car crash in a town which is the fart from God's bottom (a place I hadn't been to in, ooh, ten years at least!)."

Note to self: Put down the coffee before reading Beki's blog.

Too funny!

[Adm. Pooper]

There goes Attila the Mom again: she snorts more coffee out of her nose than she takes in by mouth. She never learns.

What gets me is that when you are reported dead, and someone calls, and YOU tell them that you are in fact NOT dead, they don't BELIEVE you and will even argue the point!

I would leave it at this: "Alright, then, you are correct, I am dead. Toodles!"

[St Jude]

This is too funny by half. LOL

[Cherrypie007]

But at least they're talking about you, Beki - there's no such thing as bad press. x

[Kate]

Sorry to hear about your friend, it must be an awful shock to his family to lose him at such a young age.

About rumours - three years ago my Mum phoned in a flap to tell me of the death of a boy I went to school with. According to her informant he had been involved in a head on collision with a lorry on his way to work and left a wife and two young sons. I was really upset, I had known this lad since nursery school, and he was even in one of my classes at college. Anyway, you can imagine my surpise when about six months ago, he contacted via Friends Reunited. It seems he is alive and well, and living in Germany, and a little puzzled about why everyone he gets in touch with is so shocked to receive an email from him.

[Beki]

KATE: Are you sure he was contacting you from Friends Reunited and not from FriendsUndeparted or perhaps Friends Resurrected ;o)

[Marjory]

I missed this post!

Is the crap town Darlington by any chance?!

As for gossip, have you ever noticed that the bad stuff, made up, exaggerated or otherwise can travel for miles and years?

Talking of which, did you ever hear anything from Lindsay again (not that I wanrt to insult Lindsay...)