Mary Jackson (don't look - she's rude)

Whiling away the hours of a Monday between 7pm and 9pm, as many soap widowers must do, I thought I'd trawl the web in case anybody had anything constructive and thoughtful to say about the hymnal Mission Praise, some of whose oleaginous effusions I was forced to endure yesterday.  I was hoping to find something along the lines of "Godawful crap - who writes this tripe - Vera Lynn?", or something equally c&t.  A hopeless endeavour, of course, since people who sit for hours in front of their computing engines probably think Mission Praise resembles in all respects the knees of the bee, but trawling more or less randomly often brings unexpected rewards, and so it was this evening, for I stumbled across the writings of one Mary Jackson and immediately lost interest in that dismal volume of pimply teenage Jee-zuz mush.

She is a "senior editor" of an online journal called the New English Review - an admirable title, you would think, until you learn that it emanates from Nashville, Tennessee, which I believe is in America.

Now unquirky is not an adjective you would first think of when attempting to describe this lustrous organ (from Nashville, Tennessee, I emphasize), but that would be very unfair to Mary Jackson, who is not only c&t but delightfully rude (in the sense of saucy) and a reely reely witty writer who had me bursting out in laughter seventeen times in as many minutes.

Her biog reads:

Mary Jackson lives in London. Her career to date has been somewhat varied. Having been told at a young age that fine words butter no parsnips, she determined to put this theory to the test. To this end she worked in a greengrocer's, speaking fine words to parsnips and truth to power. Other duties included adding apples to pears and insult to injury. Fired for correcting a misplaced apostrophe, she began helping out on a whelk stall in the East End, but was fired again for stealing bits of Cockney rhyming slang and selling them on the black market. Her current employment is unknown, but she aspires to work as a metaphor mixer in a large bakery, where she hopes to have her cake and eat her words.   Ms. Jackson blogs at The Iconoclast and her articles for New English Review are archived [at the New English Review website.]

Here she is on limericks,

and here on men and children

(from a different site.)

They were enough to whet my appetite, so if you will excuse me I will now spend another half-hour or three in her company.

Bye-ee.