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We are just coming up to the annual Garden Media Guild Awards, a jolly beanfeast for the
You are asking me what was so special about this particular flounce? In order to explain to the uninitiated I need to inform you about the different type of flounces.
The Poor Me Flounce
It starts when someone has been a bit nasty or critical of you on the board. You take umbrage and in order to make them look bad you post a "Goodbye cruel messageboard/twitterworld" thread saying how hurt you are but that if people don't like your postings then perhaps the best thing to do is leave. Note the use of the word 'perhaps'. Clearly there is no intention of really leaving but a pretty strong guarantee that all your friends will turn up cooing and aahing over you, telling you how much they enjoy your posts, how you shouldn't let the nasty bullies get to you.. and so on. When you get to say 25 replies begging you to stay, you proclaim how wonderful you, everyone else, the messageboard is and graciously return to posting, leaving the critic looking small and petty. Warning: this may backfire if you don't have any friends.
The Full Flounce with Frills on
This is the most dramatic flounce and relies on the fact that you were bored with the messageboard and were going to leave anyway. You engage with people quite a bit in the preceding weeks attracting plenty of attention to yourself and then you simply disappear! For particular effect you can even do it mid-sentence. If you are reasonably popular posters will start to notice by that evening and there will be a rumble of "Where's Hankthetank?" on the chat threads. By the next day they will be panicking and within two days a dedicated thread actually called "Where's Hankthetank?" will be up and running with people variously wringing their hands and weeping and wailing, the braver of them getting to the nub of the matter by suggesting that as the poster was pretty old it was possible they might actually have carked it. Cue more sobbing and snivelling with no-one bothering to google the member's name to find they are actually happily posting away on another messageboard.
The Boomerang Flounce
This is for the recidivist flouncer forever taking offence - usually down to the lack of attention they are receiving because the reality is they are rather dull. The Boomerang will flounce several times a year leaving a slight whiff of peevishness in their wake. None of the other messageboarders will really care - some will try and jump on the Boomerang's bandwagon by proclaiming their support, the rest will have opened a book betting on number of hours until the Boomerang's return.
The Passive Flounce
This is the one where you discreetly leave 'the room' and sit for hours watching your screen hoping that someone will eventually notice you have not been around for a while. [This can be very hurtful - I speak from experience.] Hopefully, at worst, someone will DM or PM you to ensure you are OK but better still a little flurry of messages will appear being concerned. At this point you turn up again smiling bravely saying things have been tough and you just needed a break.
The Golden Flounce
The Golden Flounce contains elements of all the other flounces in particular the Boomerang.
Don't try this at home readers, if you are not already famous with a lot of twitter followers it just won't work!
First you establish yourself as a sensitive soul with strong opinions but a certain vulnerability and reclusiveness.
Then you piss off the Badger Brigade by not making a strong enough statement against culling and contradicting an earlier tweet you made which someone has tediously dug up from months ago.
Then after a couple of 'brutal' tweets from a badger lover suggesting you should be ashamed of yourself , you scarper, aiming a 'poor me' "Goodbye cruel twitter world" tweet at your followers leaving twitterworld awash with astonishment, guilt, recriminations, ridiculous accusations and confusion.
(Dear departed Diana would have been a Past Master at this.) If you are lucky the tabloids will pick up your story with the labels "hate campaign" and "twitter trolls" and it all keeps you in the public eye at an otherwise fallow time of year.
Oooh.. well I never, as I write it looks like Monty may not have left twitter after all - let's hope we were just on a break!
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*The top Golden Flounce image is one of similar ones that circulates the net and is awarded in various places so for this reason I can't credit it.