The Rules of Retraction

I come to you cap in hand, dressed in sackcloth and with the weals on my back still weeping from their recent flagellation.  Undeserving of forgiveness though I am I most humbly beg pardon for my cruel deceit.  To those who have been hurt by what I now acknowledge to be the most scurrilous of untruths I offer my heart (diseased), lungs (tarry) and kidneys (surprisingly functional according to my doctor) in part compensation for the grievous wrong you have suffered at my reckless hand.  To both my readers out there I offer the most sincere of apologies for I have deceived you.

Yes, strange as this may seem I wrote something in my blog that wasn't true.  Perhaps more to the point I wrote something in my blog which not only wasn't true but was easily provable to be false.  In a blog entry not so many days ago I noted that my parents, as part of their role in their local bushfire brigade, assisted with the defoliating of certain, Christmas tree intensive parts of the landscape.  So far so true.  Unfortunately I also intimated (and by intimated I mean "explicitly stated") that one of the perks of doing so was a free tree for themselves.  Sadly this turns out to not be the case.  My parents were very emphatic that they paid good, hard earned cash for every damn Christmas tree they acquired over the course of the last forty years or so and furthermore they considered it a vile slander against their good name that I should intimate (or indeed explicitly state) otherwise.

This probably wouldn't have been a problem if I had given them time for the incident to slip their minds (they're old, it doesn't take long).  Unfortunately my father inconsiderately had a birthday this weekend and as I went (willingly, let the record show) to perform my filial duty I found myself ambushed by not one but two parents who alternated hysterical weeping with outraged threats to my inheritance if I didn't retract.  I attempted to ease the situation by pointing out that currently my inheritance looked likely to consist of a bunch of travel journals and fifty percent of a rather irritable cat.  Unfortunately this just started two new conversations.

"I thought you liked my travel journals!" wailed one parent.

"I thought you liked the cat!" accused the other.

At this point my brother failed to help by offering to sign over his fifty percent share of the cat to me immediately.  In fact he still did this even after I promised to publish a retraction.  However I have no wish to upset my parents unnecessarily (or at least I prefer to keep my "upsetting the parents" powder dry for a more important occasion) and it is true that I have finally managed to make an error of fact in my blog that somebody actually gives a crap about.

Thus to set the record straight and ward off the possibility of cat bestowing burst blood vessels on the part of my parents I state, for the record, that at no time during their involvement in Blaxland Bushfire Brigade's Christmas tree sale did my parents ever benefit to the tune of a free pine tree to decorate in their home.  Any assertion to the contrary in previous blog entries I acknowledge as false and I humbly apologise for any hurt and suffering (although not to the extent of offering financial compensation) that my parents or anyone else may have undergone as a result of those or any other statements that I may or may not have made over the years.

There you are Mum and Dad, now will you please give the cat to Geofffrey.  I will take some of the travel journals though.