Irony - in buckets

Perhaps it is too late, and my apparent boasting about my life has turned away 1,000s of blog readers - but for some reason I awoke this morning, anxious that my last few posts had seemed a bit "full of myself".  I grew up in a traditional British household (in some ways) where "showing off" was severely discouraged.  Arguably this may have led to a slightly depressive underestimation of my own abilities and talents during a large part of my adult life.   Now, eventually, I have just about come to admit that much of what I know and think and can do is actually quite interesting (even if occasionally veering to the nutty or solipsistic), however, whenever I allow this confidence to appear on the page after a day or so I feel retrospectively embarrassed that I might be accused of "showing off".

So, whenever I write about what a raging success I am, this is done with irony.  However, as the emoticon has yet to become a convention of English punctuation, I am not inclined to spell this out to the intelligent reader, who I hope is drawing their own conclusions.