Anonymity can be attractive or enormously irritating. Positive anonymity might be when you're lost in a crowd or you're in transit between places - just another human being in the flow of life, leaving the niggles and stresses of the everyday world behind you. When nobody even knows your name. And being an anonymous giver or hero is also attractive. I enjoy news stories about kind strangers who help old ladies to escape from house fires or pull somebody from a car wreck or pay thousands to prevent a hostel for the homeless from closing. Then of course, there are all those anonymous war heroes buried or lost - for example, where the plains of northern France meet Belgium - the unknown soldiers - entirely deserving of our endless honour.
Bad anonymity is different - the nameless morons who smashed my car window on five occasions to get at the CD/radio - the graffiti sprayers who leave their ugly scrawl for the rest of us to notice - the bureaucrats who don't give you their names when you're on the telephone - and in the world wide web there are those maddening but unnamed spammers and cowardly stalkers who leave "anonymous" messages in blogs - sometimes of an offensive nature.
However, maybe I'm being a little hypocritical about this because of course my parents didn't christen me "Yorkshire Pudding"! I have another name that people outside this cyberworld use and perhaps it's time to come clean. This whole blog has been an invention. I have never been to Yorkshire. My real name is Earl Radsinsky. I live in Baltimore, Maryland and I have been commisioned by the CIA to hunt down "anonymous" contributors to wholesome blogs. May I assure everyone out there that I know who these "anonymous" computer users are. I am gradually closing in on them and in the course of time they will each be, well, let's just say - eliminated!
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