No I'm Not A Girl

I found folk on PB (politicalbetting.com) discussing my sex today. Yes I am male. My blogname tapestry is female sounding, I admit.

I used to blog on ft.com in the 1990's. A bloke called Stephen Saines who lived in Canada awarded the regular contributors to the 'euro' threads names, based on the pieces on a monopoly board. As I was the eurosceptic pro-UK pound contributor, he called me 'top hat'. Up til then I'd used my real name 'henry'.

I found that often my posts would not get through. When I changed my name they suddenly would get through again so I started inventing names that would be recognised by my fellow correspondents ( I don't think we called ourselves bloggers in those days).

'Top Hat' became 'topper' then'tapper' then 'tapestry' then 'teapastry' then 'tapestory' and so on. So when I started blogging in 2006 due to illhealth and having to stop work, I went back and used one of my old ID's.

Some people say that you should blog in your own name. One reason I don't do that, is that when I go on search engines to track things I've written on non-political topics in publications, there can be too many 'whacks' of my name from political blogs, mking search awfully hard work. I keep my real name for my business and other non-political writing.

To complete the story, others often replied to me as 'tap' rather than tapestry. When I started my blog on google, I could use the-tap.blogspot and it sounded OK. I had a lot of strange events on my google blog after writiing against well-known and well-resourced individuals and started a second blog here using Tapestrytalks inspired by Dizzythinks. By copying around a few, it is harder for any blockers or hackers to make trouble.