I must confess, friends, I am mildly concerned. And I do not say that lightly, as anyone who’s seen me stand cheerfully under a collapsing greenhouse roof will know.
The reason?
Keith has been… quiet.
Not the good sort of quiet, like a cup of tea under the elder tree or a stoat politely minding its own business. No. The other sort. The sort that suggests THINGS ARE AFOOT.
Apparently, Keith has been “up to his elbows in digital grease” (his words, not mine), building me a new online presence that will “surpass the current blog and supercharge the Virgilverse.” I can’t claim to understand more than about three percent of what he says on a good day, and this is definitely not one of those days.
I mean, I have a blog. A perfectly good one. It does what it’s meant to: stores ramblings, lets Keith add mysterious buttons, and occasionally makes me feel famous when someone in the post office says, “Oh, I saw that thing you wrote about courgettes.”
But Keith… oh, Keith was born a tinkerer. Practically from the moment he drew breath. The nurses on the maternity ward were horrified to find he was dismantling his own crib using a teething ring and what appeared to be a suspicious length of electrical flex he had secreted somewhere.
This most recent frenzy of “upgrades” has seen him holed up for days in his little cubby-hole at the back of the house, behind a door now ominously labelled “DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU ARE THOROUGHLY EARTHED.” I hear strange noises coming from within. Clicks, clatters, the occasional triumphant whoop followed by a deeply worrying silence.
And the smells… oh, the smells. The unmistakable aroma of singed beard hair, melting cable ties, and faintly scorched biscuits keeps wafting out. I swear I caught a whiff of toasted elbow pads just yesterday.
On Tuesday I dared to call gently through the door:
“Are you eating enough, lad?”
His reply came, half-snarled and half-triumphant:
“Virgil, I’ve LEVELLED UP the SEO!”
I don’t know what that means but I took it as a cue to quietly back away and make a pot of tea.
Now, anyone who’s met Keith knows he’s no stranger to creative hazards. More than once I’ve found him with one eyebrow singed clean off thanks to ill-advised experiments with soldering torches and “innovative flux capacitors” (which I later discovered was just a kettle with a fork taped to it).
So I sit here, slightly anxious, watching for smoke signals and hoping that whatever he’s cobbling together isn’t about to launch the potting shed into orbit or sign us all up for something called Virgil Unlimited Platinum Gold Plus Tier.
But I must say this: I have always admired Keith’s spirit. His endless tinkering, his enthusiasm, his complete disregard for the known laws of physics and sensible risk assessments… it’s quite touching really. And if this quiet spell results in a beautiful new digital home for my ramblings, then who am I to complain?
Still, if you notice sudden strange buttons appearing here, or find yourself mysteriously enrolled in something that sounds suspiciously expensive, just remember — THINGS ARE AFOOT.
🧓 Virgil
(currently sitting at the far end of the garden with a flask of tea, keeping an eye on the cubby-hole door and wondering if “futureproofing” involves asbestos gloves)