There is an English game called “Aunt Sally”.\u00a0 The object is to knock the head off a dummy with a ball or stick. The version I recall most clearly was at a school fete. Good-natured teachers would dress in a ridiculous costume and sit immobile in a chair,\u00a0while the public (including many pupils) would pay sixpence to throw sponges dripping with coloured goo at them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For an author, listing\u00a0a book on Amazon is a literary version of Aunt Sally. The public pay their sixpence and they can throw anything at you. It doesn’t even have to be a wet sponge\u00a0\u2014 bricks, breezeblocks, poisoned barbs \u2014 all are acceptable. It would be churlish to respond; that is not how Aunt Sally works. Nevertheless, having one’s spiritual condition diagnosed and deprecated in public by a complete stranger is an odd experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is an English game called “Aunt Sally”.\u00a0 The object is to knock the head off a dummy with a ball or stick. The version I recall most clearly was at a school fete. Good-natured teachers would dress in a ridiculous costume and sit immobile in a chair,\u00a0while the public (including many pupils) would pay […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"single-with-sidebar","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-personal"],"yoast_head":"\n