One person wrote a good profile of herself in which she actually gave some scope for an interesting question. Among other things, she said that Raymond Carver was her favourite author. I sent her a question: what was her favourite RC story?
No reply.
A few days later I tried again (how many RC fans are out there?): maybe she didn’t have one?
No reply.
At that stage I had a conversation with a nice woman (who wasn’t interested but at least was human) about improving my ‘profile’. Any help will do! That gave me an idea.
I went back to the RC fan and wrote: you must be really rude to not even type ‘no thanks‘ when a man takes the trouble to write an interesting question.
(I mean, why bother to mention RC if you didn’t want to talk about him?)
Whereupon she wrote: no thanks!
And I wrote to her: mine is Cathedral!
My new watchword: 19 steps forward, 18 steps back…
Stroke of luck 