This week in Birmingham the sport has been sticking captions on Edgbaston councilor and prospective parliamentary candidate Deirdre Alden.
She runs a fascinating weblog all about the fascinating stuff she does in the community and, critically, includes photos of herself doing it. And she’s always smiling, in stark contrast to the campaigning camcorder councilor Martin Mullaney who, while not an overly serious chap (he runs a comedy club after all) does tend to stress the gravitas a bit.
So it came to pass that some bright spark decided Deidre was crying out to be LOL’ed and set up a Flickr account putting funny captions on a few of her recent shots. No doubt using her journalistic skillz Jo came across it and since then a small cabal of net-savvy freaks have been putting words in her mouth, including, of course, myself. I don’t know who’s running the loldeirdre account – I just got in touch with him/her within Flickr and was given an email address to directly upload my pics.
And then the madness started. I’ve spent most of this afternoon obsessing over Deirdre. I’ve never met her but I’ve built up this complex character in my head, one that I’m starting to care about. This isn’t a parody for me and it’s certainly not an insult. It’s something else. What, I’m not quite sure, but thankfully there’s a whole year of photos in her archives just waiting for the captions.
I wonder what she’ll make of it all?
This is clearly ‘just a laugh’ but where does the legal bit come in? Don’t mean to be a bore but like so many things, it can get out of hand and that would clearly be wrong.