The Sunday Roast

This Talented Grand Dame Brings Us Deja View

This week's interview is with Moannie,
who writes the blog The View From This End.

Here's the first of the standard questions. Why do you blog?

When I was about ten years old I went to spend some time with my Aunt Margaret and Unca Harold. He was a lovely man, big and bluff and happy. When he wasn’t smiling he was laughing. His hands were large, the finger tips square, the skin scarred from his work as a tool maker. On the landing at the top of the stairs, in a corner against a wall was a ham radio and, every evening after supper Unca Harold would sit in front of this, to me, massive machine and those large square fingers would turn dials infinitesimally until, emerging from the crackling static would come a voice, from Africa or America or Australia with their call sign and a brief conversation would ensue, fading sometimes so that he had to move the dial a millimetre and the disembodied voice would return in time to say "’til next time Harold, over and out."

He was linking around the world, to people he would never meet, hearing brief snippets of their lives and sharing his own. Linking. This is what we do in the wonderful infinite space of the Blog Abyss. And my own fat fingers tap my way into the lives of so many people around the world and they are welcomed into mine.

What is the story behind your blog name?

I had no name as I wrote my very first post on being reminded, by the death of yet another friend, of the fragility of my own mortality. I ended the piece saying that I had no intention of going just yet and that meanwhile I would ruminate on "the view from this end" of life, and that was it. Moannie is of course short for Mollyanne.

What is the best thing about being a blogger?

I am sure that blogging means different things to each of us-for me it is the fact that whatever I write may touch another person. And every day I am moved, amused and sometimes maddened by posts I read.

What key advice would you give to a newbie blogger?

I am hardly an old hand myself, barely a year has passed since I first ventured a comment, but the advice I read in just about every Sunday Roast is to read as many posts as you can-and comment too, we all love to receive comments. One day you will read a post that inspires you to write one of your own ... and you are off and running. Don’t badger anyone to "come and visit you"; if you have written a comment that is friendly, witty, apt and interesting, the blogger will return the visit.

What is the most significant post you have ever read?

Everyone seems to have trouble with this one, don’t they? There are so many I cannot list them all. Saz at Fat, Frumpy And Fifty of course, as it was she who set me on this path; You, David, are our ferret hound; Suldog who is even better than he thinks he is; Erin who is the Woman In A Window whose writing is a wonder to behold; Halo at Beautiful Spectrum is bitter-sweet, Lime at House Of Lime, well, I "heart" her ... there, you see, I knew I shouldn’t have done that ... I have left out so many.

What is the most significant post you have written?

Papa, Can You Hear Me?, simply because ...? Because I am now quite old and he died seventy two years ago and I cannot think of him, of what I have missed, still miss, without that old familiar lump in my throat.

Thank you David for this honour, it has taken me an age to write.


Today's Sunday Roast with Moannie is the 76th in a weekly series of interviews with bloggers from around the world.