So I run this site off Wordpress, which is an excellent blogging format. Behind the scenes here at lukewright.co.uk I have loads of plug-ins and extras that make maintaining my own website a joy. One of the extras is a little dialogue blog that lists other blogs that are linking to mine. Normally it’s just sites that are listing me for forthcoming gigs and it isn’t very interesting, but occasionally you get another blog with someone commenting on a poem or a gig (someone printed my Channel 4 poem in response to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Christmas speech, which amused me).

One day before Christmas I logged into my site to see a new listing in this dialogue box, from a blog called fiend1981, I clicked through and found a post that seemed to be about John Cooper Clarke. The blogger was waxing lyrical about the bard of Salford’s second album, Snap Crackle and Bop. Ah, a like minded individual I thought and read on.

The blogger concluded that the album had changed his mind about performance poetry, which he had only ever regarded with contempt, adding:

“I shared a William Blake seminar eight years ago with this self-assured cockend - www.lukewright.co.uk”

I never even did a William Blake seminar. And surely eight years is a long time to be carrying that kind of resentment around with you. And he’d clearly googled me to find my website. Is that his hobby: “oh, who’s that guy I hated in my English class eight years ago, best Google him, cos that’s a great use of my time.”

I had no idea who the blogger was, though reading through the blog I managed to find out that he was:

a) working as temp for Norwich Union;
b) had gone back to university part time;
c) had at some point been a teacher but had given it up.

I also discovered that all he talks about is how shit the NME is (it’s for children, stop reading it) and how he likes to listen to music on aac format rather than drm free mp3. I mean, truly it was fascinating stuff. Eventually I managed to find a name (nothing is private). The chap’s called Steve Fiendley. Yes, Fiendley. And he was a teacher. Mr Fiendley! That’s the best teacher name ever.
- Who gave you detention, boy?
- Why sir, it was Mr Fiendley, he caught me with a copy of the NME.

Ahh, Steve Fiendley, you angry man, why did you take against me so much? Why wait till now to tell the world? Oh Steve, we could have had something!

But not now. I’m very sensitive.

So I told John Cooper Clarke about Steve Fiendley the following week at the gig we were doing together. Dismayed at the actions of one of his fans Johnny recorded a short video message to Steve Fiendley.

..

We laughed about it on the night, got drunk and I forgot about it all. That is, until last week when I noticed the blog listed on the dialogue blog again and the deceit of Fiendley and his love of the aac format came back to me.

I went onto his blog and posted the following message:

Dear Steve,

I don’t remember our William Blake seminars but I apologise if my self-assurance ruined them for you. Below is a message from John Cooper Clarke. Best of luck with it all.

Luke.x

Then I imbedded Johnny’s message below.

A few days later I went back and found that he had deleted his entire blog! I feel really bad. Steve, if you’re our there (grinding your teeth and swearing at the monitor) come back. I’m sure there are people out there who want to read about the advantages of the aac format, after all, it occupy less space on your ipod (or other mp3 player). You didn’t have to delete your whole blog and livejournal profile, I was just playing.

And really Steve Fiendly wins, because by turning this episode into a self-congratulatory blog I do come across as a bit of a self-assured cockend. Maybe I’ll podcast it - in aac format, of course.

On 6 September 2007 I was at home in Norwich feeling depressed. I had recently come back from the worst Edinburgh run of my life. I was thousands of pounds in debt and I felt my career was spinning out of control. In desperate need to cheering up and forgetting about work for a while I shunned my wife's suggestion to go out for day and instead logged into my Google Analytics account and checked the statistics for my website. I'm fun like that. Googling oneself is always a great activity when you're depressed. Like opening a drawer stuffed with hate mail. Poorly written and badly spelt hate mail, which somehow makes it all more threatening. When someone says "I want to punch that Luke Wright in the ball's" and erroneously puts and apostrophe between the 'l' and 's' of balls it makes it all the more likely to happen.

So I checked my Google Analytics account and saw that the day before I had had 4,000 visitors to my website. Now that's a lot. That's 8 times what I was getting in a month at that time. In one day. I couldn't believe it. I thought something must have happened. Not just anything: IT. IT had happened. I had made IT. Eight years of plugging away at this, eight years of performing in car parks and toilets; eight years of going to Luton for fifty quid and an audience of six have paid off. People are engaging with my work. I had fans! I checked to see where all the traffic was coming from. The Guardian's website. I had fans, and not just normal fans – left wing, middle class fans. Fans rich enough to afford merchandise and kind enough to buy it. What would I wear for my Channel 4 special? Who would I thank when I won the TS Eliot? How do you address the Queen?

I went further into my stats. The hits were all coming from one page on the Guardian's site. I had already had a feature in the Observer that summer marking me a up and coming writer. That had produced no more than about ten hits on my site. This article must be incredible. I clicked. I went through to the Guardian's sports pages. More precisely the commentary on the England's one day cricket international against India. Luke Wright the cricketer had made his debut the day before and hit a half century. But why were people clicking on my website. Deflated, I figured it was probably some administrative error as I scrolled down the rolling commentary on the match. But it was about to get a lot worse.

You see cricket is a dull game. So dull that during the match the sports writers providing rolling commentary on the Guardian's site had got bored and started Google image searching "luke wright." Which let's face it, is a bit creepy. Googling's one thing, image searching a young sportsmen is another. In doing so they had found me:

"If you search for Luke Wright in Google Images, then you are treated to a picture of possibly the most foppish buffoon I've ever had the misfortune set eyes on." writes Rob Phillipson. "Seriously, luke at the state of him."

The word 'luke' from the weak pun linked to a picture of me on my website. Rather than fans I'd had 4,000 people click onto my website to laugh at me. 4,000 people going 'ha ha, look at that foppish buffoon, what a twat. I'm much cooler I read the cricket commentary on line."

"the most foppish buffoon I've ever had the misfortune set eyes on." The misfortune. My dictionary defines a misfortune as being: "an undesirable or unhappy event or circumstance." My face made a cricket commentator unhappy. It brought great sadness to another human being.

So disturbed by this misfortune the commentator returned the subject of my visage a mere 3 overs later, stating that I looked like:

"an unfortunate stage-school-bred lovechild of Bryan McFadden and Declan Donnelly."

That's not even possible. Two men can't have a lovechild. Am I to deduce that my features were so horrific it lead an educated man to assume that some aberration of nature must have occurred to produce me. The result of two sperm and no egg.

To be fair, the picture they were referring to is this one:

It's the press shot from Poet Laureate. It's ironic. I don't dress like that for fun. I'm sending up the traditional view of a poet. It's a joke. And now 4,000 people were looking at with cold faced mockery, not even a hint of irony in the air.

Luke Wright the cricketer is not the only Luke Wright out there trounching me in the popularity stakes. Below is a video form YouTube of another Luke Wright. The video is called - Luke Wright – Butt Burner. This one has cigars put out on his arse for fun. This video has four times the hits I've got for any of mine. Four times! Now I don't want to denigrate Luke Wright – Butt Burner, after all he's clearly at the top of his field, and butt burning is his art in the same way that poetry is mine, but surely what I do has almost as much worth as what he does.

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