400

Today we reach perhaps the last and least significant of the otherwise arbitrary goals that I set myself here in Lesser Blogfordshire as the entry tally of the number of entries clicks over to the 400 mark. Of those, there are, as a conservative estimate, probably about 200 that qualify as “readable” and perhaps 20 or so that I could honestly defend to the hilt, put my hand on my heart and claim were “pretty good”. I don’t know in terms of a “strike rate” whether that itself is pretty good, average or downright pathetic, but, in terms of just over a year of constant battling, it seems about right.

For whatever arbitrary significant reasons that I might have set for it, 400 seems an emphatic number, a good round solid number. Maybe this is the end…? Maybe it should be… After all, I have promised to stop any number of times before but somehow I’ve dragged myself back here to continue on towards one of those goals, but, now that we’re actually here…

I reckon that those entries could very well add up to the better part of half a million words, give or take, most of which were written at strange or lonely times of the night (which might go a long way towards explaining a hell of a lot...), although as ever with something somebody “reckons” this is based upon no actually research whatsoever, just on a kind of hunch based around the mathematics of an average of just over a thousand words a day multiplied by 400. If you actually delved into it further (go on, I dare you!), you’d probably find that was far, far less.

Of course if you chose to discount all the words like “of course” and “actually” and “however” and excised the ubiquitous and alarmingly self-referential “I” from it all you’d probably be left with about six words in all, which hardly seems worth getting up or sounding the party trumpets for, and barely merits remarking upon at all. “Six words? Six?! Is that all? Even I could write six words and make them sound vaguely interesting. How come it took you so long?” etc...

If I open my “Dimwit’s Dictionary” up at any random page  (Hmmm… Do you think someone was hinting at something there…?) I find many of my own words staring back at me. Unfortunately this is not a good thing as the many, many pages of this fine volume speak of such verbal ineptitudes as the “moribund metaphor”, the “grammatical gimmick”, or the “torpid term” and the “popular prescription”, as well as the damningly termed “infantile phrase” and I find that my pages are chock-full of these torpid terms.

I can see, for example, that the entry for “chock full” offers me abounding; brimful; brimming; bursting; congested; crammed; crowded; dense; filled; full; gorged; jammed; jam-packed; overcrowded; overfilled; overflowing; packed; replete; saturated; stuffed; swarming and teeming as alternatives to that single term alone, (although I suspect that “jam-packed” would still qualify as torpid) but I have rarely consulted its wisdom as I have rattled these words out each day.

Sometimes, as I lie awake in the darkest hours just before the dawn, the words just pop into my head and I can rush towards the keyboard and these pieces have pretty much written themselves, leaving it to me to just actually do the mundane task of transferring them to the page to share with the tiny circle that qualifies as my version of the big wide world. On other, more wretched days it really has been like trying to sieve a mountain using a bucket of treacle, but occasionally the odd nugget has turned up despite my best efforts at failure.

Real writers, of course, who exist in that strangely and enigmatically defined otherworld that I choose to file them in, and, therefore by definition, close myself out of, are able to concoct much of what they produce as they go about doing other things like making coffee, having a bath or walking around the park and flying kites. Whilst the rest of us flounder around trying to think of something to say, or trying to remember what it was that we thought we wanted to say, their bon mots, pithy putdowns and  wicked witticisms can be honed and crafted (and, above all remembered) as they drift around Waitrose carrying a shopping list lovingly crafted in their best handwriting and later donated, along with all their other papers, to the Bodleian Library, and then transcribed into their articles later on, no doubt over a cup of finest ground coffee and a view of the river as it laps lazily by outside the window of the conservatory.

At least, in my head they do, although I suspect that in the “real world” they’re panicking in much the same way that I am, only with more pressure on them. Incidentally, it’s never Aldi, is it, that the literary intelligentsia seem to do their shopping in…? Perhaps there’s something in that…

People like me, on the other hand, can forget what we were going to say almost as soon as it has begun to tiptoe across our synapses. Many is the time that I have awoken full of what I consider to be a fully formed idea rattling around what we still mockingly refer to as my “brain” only for it to have scrambled itself into nonsense before I’ve even parked myself onto the writing chair. Sometimes the dash to reach the keyboard and boot up the venerable old device is done with such haste that it probably seems quite rude, although I haven’t (yet) found myself leaping from the bath and directly to the computer having had my own “Eureka!” moment, surely it was only a matter of time…

“Oh, hello vicar…”

Now there’s an image you didn’t need forming in your head today, did you…?

Instead, I fill notebooks with enigmatic little scribbles that I struggle to make much sense of later, or I run around trying to grab an adhesive note and hopefully also some kind of writing implement to feverishly scribble with before the idea drifts away from me, so that a whole heap of pointless scribblings on a whole rainbow of little squares is now piled around me.

Or else, I might find myself, like today, frantically trying to remember a list of six or seven separate notions that I mentally try to juggle without pushing any of them out into oblivion. Even trying to form a suitable mnemonic can cause me to start thinking about that instead and the main thrust of what  I thought was possibly a good thought can be lost forever.

I was going to say that 400 seemed a good, sturdy and ever-so-round number to finish with this project on, but I’ve found that I’ve been rather enjoying this one today so maybe I’ll find some more reasons to carry on after all.

As ever, stay tuned!




A Dark Corner of Lesser Blogfordshire - some statistics:-
Number of posts: 400*
Number of page views (at time of publishing): 8196 (Mainly, it seems, Eastern Europeans mistakenly seeking porn) 
Unpublished posts: 20 (With a sadly growing tendency towards the spiteful or smug hence "unpublished")

* Actually post number 401 is pretty unavoidable for a date fairly soon, for reasons that will no doubt become obvious, so there will also have be a post number 402 to make sure the numbers remain even. Do you now see the amount of self-justification that keeps the monster in motion despite everything?