TWO FOR TWO

Well, maybe now it could even be called three for three, if you count these words as I’m writing them. Time, you see, is an odd cove to have as your master; The situation remains at two posts in two days (possibly written for two people), but the very process of stringing these words together here actually starts to build the third, and, by the time I actually publish – or choose not to publish - this piece it will be (future tense) the freshest, newest thing to be found here (present tense), and will as be old and as raddled as yesterday’s mayfly (past tense) by the time you happy few cast your eyeballs over it in contempt.

Anyway, setting all that aside, I suppose that I should clarify whatever it is that I’m talking, no, writing about, which is of course, fairly recursive given that this is precisely what I am writing about.

The point is, as those of you who are aware of such things might have actually noticed, after a fairly barren year here in Lesser Blogfordshire, suddenly there’s been a minor glut, and some brand new, frankly bonkers, outpourings of nonsense have suddenly appeared for your delectation and delight, and on two (possibly three - if I can ever be bothered to getting around to finishing this) consecutive days, despite my obvious reluctance to continue with such follies.

Still, don’t get used to it.

I’m still not convinced that this is an appropriate use of my time, and I’m even less convinced that the universe isn’t likely to shrug in a mildly Gallic “couldn’t care less” kind of a way, and turn back to getting on with absolutely anything else, the merest insignificant morsel of which would have to be more engaging, relevant, and worthy of its attention.

Which brings us to the point, really, in a haphazard, crazy, round about kind of a way. A point that I’ve been making to myself for much of the year; If I can’t really write, surely it’s better to leave it to those who can, and to those who might actually have a point of view or an opinion that actually matters to someone. Speaking (or writing) as someone who has found themselves occupying an increasingly irrelevant corner of the cosmos has led me to finally understand that the only time that I’m wasting is my own and even I, antisocial and lazy as I am, could find far better things to occupy my time.

Meanwhile, I keep on asking myself whether I care about such matters, whilst endlessly demonstrating that I clearly, most obviously do, otherwise I wouldn’t keep on fretting, obsessing, and going on about it, even in my own mind when I’m clearly not doing it, my mind keeps on getting back to why I am not doing it, and whether anyone actually cares about whether I am.

As to whether I should care, of course, well, that’s a completely different matter. There is, after all, a lot of things that I ought to be caring about in this big, brutal world where, much as our own country did in what we like to call less civilized times, people can still be burned, butchered or beheaded simply for having a different belief system, sexual preference, drawing pictures, or writing a few words online that someone else happens to disagree with.

In the end, the fact that writing blogs is something that’s getting people murdered in other parts of the world should either make you more determined than ever to write one, or make you cower away in fear at the very prospect, even if your own outpourings are little more than a bit of relatively harmless fun.

However, and in the spirit of full disclosure, coupled with a slight sense of embarrassment about the whole thing, if I’m being honest, I am still very uncomfortable with the culture of “Meeeeee-ism” in society, culture, and (it sometimes seems) the whole ruddy world, of which, hypocritically, this must be considered a part, and so sometimes it felt as if the very best thing I could do was to run away from that, stop contributing to the general mish-mash of screaming self-obsession that currently stains our world, and that, too, has contributed to this almost schizophrenic relationship that I have developed with the online world.

Meanwhile, it has been suggested to me that, as I seem to have been drawn to the “dark side” of what we once called “microblogging”, I might wish to share some of that ephemeral chatter with you from time to time, but I’m still not very sure of the wisdom of that given that, by its very nature, the whole point of Twitter is that, like the mayfly, it’s there and then it’s gone, but maybe I’ll rethink that another day.

It has, at least, finally kindled something of an interest in the dark arts of poetry, for which I should, I think, be grateful, so that’s an optimistic side-effect few could have predicted. Anyway, anyone who wants to can sign up to Twitter, join “the conversation” and, if they really, really want to ruin their mornings, follow my nonsense via @MAW_H (I suspect usually to be found under the hashtag “WhyDon’tYouKeepYourBigMouthShut?).

After all my efforts over those past two mornings, however, it does still seem as if my little theory that the more I write, the less attention is paid to these pages, and vice versa, has indeed come to pass, as yesterday’s little offering triggered the least number of clicks on that jolly old number counter that these pages have seen in quite some time, which was, I’ll grant you, the very topic of that minor offering, even if nobody could have known that without actually reading it, which they didn’t, forming a classic paradox of a “Catch 22” kind.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to believe that my own wordsmithery has been infected by some form of mental “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”, not that I’d ever want to call it that, or be flippant about a condition that debilitates the lives of many people, a few of whom are actually known to me. It’s merely that the symptoms I’ve been describing in terms of my writing did seem be rather similar.

Anyway, “on that bombshell” as it were, for the moment, at least, it is at least nice to find myself able to string a few words together again, even if only for a day or two, after so many months of not being able to, or even being able to pluck an idea from the ether to then not feel able to explain properly…

And so, with that in mind, Lesser Blogfordshire still lives on with its tiny life of quiet desperation, so, until the next time…

I know I'm no poet

(These words tend to show it)

Yet I spend so much time

Producing bad rhyme.

Just look at the sort of guff that you’ve (really not) been missing out on (!!!)

ZERO SUM

I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a while now but somehow we’ve never quite got there.

“What” I hear you wonder “Is the old fool blathering on about now?”

Well, bear with me and I’ll tell you.

I’ve been waiting, relatively patiently I feel, and for quite some considerable time I might add, for the counter that counts the page views to this blog to have a “Zero Day” on which it fails to shift one single digit, so that I could officially declare the whole thing dead and buried and finally get to move on to those trickily abstract “other things” that lurk so naggingly in the back of my mind.

Life, of course, is never that simple, and, of course, when you’ve got over a thousand bits of nonsense rattling around in the archives, I suppose it’s fairly likely that some random thought or other that you once had will draw the attention of some passing online searcher-bot at some point during the average day, no matter how briefly.

Such robots have always been drawn to the word “post” I’ve found, and they seem to have an extraordinary obsession with the idea of Penguin Biscuit jokes, so unless I go back and erase whichever of my musings once contained those words in their titles, I suspect that the Zero Sum Game is still unlikely to occur for a while at least which is, I suppose, quietly gratifying in some small way.

That said, it’s also rather interesting (well, I say “interesting” but you know what I mean) for me to discover that, give or take a couple of hundred viewings or so, these humble pages are almost equally as popular when I write nothing as they ever were when I was slogging my heart out trying to add some of my nonsenses on an almost daily basis.

There’s something, I feel, to be learned there…

So, in a last ditch attempt to finally frighten the last of the search-bots away, I thought that, given that I found myself with the opportunity for a day or two, I might as well write something for a couple of mornings, if only to bing the numbers down.

So far, it seems to be working quite well.

So, I’ll dredge another dull little anecdote from the dark recesses of my day, and see if I can finally put it all out of our collective misery.

Yesterday evening, I suddenly found myself with an extra hour to spare before making the trek to the station for my nightly rendezvous, and, as is sometimes my way, instead of leaping towards the keyboard in a whirlpool of creative frenzy, I found myself idly perusing the DVD shelves where, to my surprise, I found an old “Best of ITC” collection that I must have ordered once upon a long ago and never actually got around to watching.

Well, to be honest, at least three of the episodes were already likely to be in other sets I already had, so I probably unwrapped it one lunchtime when I was working from home, watched most of the groovy title sequences, put it on the shelf to gather dust, and almost completely forgot that it was there.

Anyway, almost at random, I picked out the episode of “Department S” and what a crackingly entertaining forty-odd minutes of television it turned out to be. Honestly, despite expecting it to be a whole load of cheesy nonsense, I found that I really, really enjoyed it. Heck, it even had Anthony Hopkins in it as the guest star of the week and that was jolly unexpected, I can tell you.

It was kind of like “The ‘X’ Files” but twenty years ahead of its time and with kipper ties, and, I imagine (because I’m really NOT going to buy the entire series) that having three leads did mean that they could alternate the storylines around one or other of them as each episode required. Naturally, this being made in the sixties, the female lead got to wear miniskirts and do rather a lot of filing, but it was quite remarkable for having a black character as the head of this mysterious government department (I presume that the “S” stood for “Strange”) that handled all of the weird cases and kooky stuff that the CIA, Special Branch and Interpol found far too baffling.

Back in the sixties, “Department S” only lasted one year and, because he became the “break out” star and (believe it or not) something of a “sex symbol” the character of Jason King, played by Peter Wyngarde, got an eponymous spin-off series which was much the same format only less so, and was eventually consigned to the dustbin of TV legends, and the groovy theme tune added to a hundred compilation CDs.

Sometimes you happen upon a format for a TV show and think “What on earth were they thinking making that?” but I reckon, in my own weird and wonderful kind of a way, that “Department S” might be one of those shows very worth looking at for a bit of a resurrection.

It had a great theme tune, too, by the way.

THE RHETORIC OF FAILURE

On the whole, I can’t say that this feels as if it’s turning out to be a particularly successful year for me as we head towards the halfway point. Not least, of course, because we are heading towards that halfway point and I really don’t feel as if I’ve achieved all that much. Granted, we had the builders in and had both the kitchen and the living room upgraded, and that did, of course, involve us successfully clearing those rooms in anticipation. After this, we were then living a slightly bizarre troglodyte-like existence for the duration and being relieved of several mugs and knives during the daily tidying up process. Since then, however, somehow everything seems to have stalled again as we fail to return the plethora of things from the boxes to their rooms. Instead the boxes remain stubbornly “there” and “in the way” and, once again, we tiptoe around them as we come to terms with the fact that the work itself seems to have completed to a more disappointing degree than the relief at getting the house back first suggested.

Of course, one of my bigger failures this year has been in my writing. Not only have I almost completely neglected to add to this blog – for the very good reasons (I felt) that it was becoming increasingly irrelevant and nobody cared all that much any more whether I continued or didn’t or what I “reckoned” about anything very much – but I have also failed, for the first time in about a decade, to complete (or even begin) anything for the latest Bruntwood Playwriting Competition on the simple grounds that I really cannot see the point any more as I have proven, quite conclusively, that I cannot write for toffee, at least in that medium. Strangely, though, my writing output has continued in the increasingly pointless world of Twitter where my daily contributions to word games have managed to consume hours of my time without, in any real terms, achieving any noticeable responses at all. I fear that, like everything else that I briefly obsess about, this too shall pass.

Other notable failures include my continuing lack of ability to want to engage with the world in general, preferring instead to cultivate my “hermit-like” existence and avoid any contact with “people” as much as is possible. Oh, I know that I still go to work every day and find new ways, I’m sure, of being as annoying as possible to everyone I meet, but apart from necessary retail exchanges, and the odd encounter with the Beloved’s family, my social interactions have reduced to virtually nil, and I find that this bothers me both far less and far more than it ought to. Far less because I really can’t be bothered. Far more because, in my mind, it appears that nobody else who’s ever known me is all that bothered either.

There has been one positive result of such a process, though, and that is that I have learned to avoid the knee-jerk response when someone irritates me online, which they have been known to do, of course, all the time. Instead of raging about the rampant sycophancy or self-obsessed “me-me” brigade, I simply choose not to respond and leave the raging to my inner self. This has had the added benefit that I no longer write long responses answering every point made in idiotic articles that people post (I may still compose them mentally, but I then discard them), and don’t respond to messages that appear from out of the blue and cause emotional earthquakes when bits of my (admittedly less than colourful) past rear up and try to bite me. Again, I could have answered at length, but the stupidity of doing so struck me far harder once I’d realised just how stupid opening that particular box might prove to be.

I have, of course, successfully managed to get “Frozen Shoulder” (hurrah!) which, as I’m reminded by my physiotherapist, is just down to sheer bad luck, but that doesn’t stop the endless pain, the sleepless nights, and the slight fact that I now have to have things like “procedures” and do things like “physical therapy” – neither of which come easily to someone who’d quite possibly avoid all human interaction if he possibly could.

Once again I failed to pick the winner of the latest election which, to an old-fashioned socialist like me, (I know! Who’d have thought it?) did prove to be a very disappointing stain upon this year. That said, I know that I should never discuss politics in public simply because it just gets everyone irritated, but I did feel very motivated and analytical for about eight days afterwards, before forgetting all about that sort of thing and knuckling down to getting used to the next five years of living amongst a nation of self-centred fools. I comfort myself with the small sense of satisfaction that at least we didn’t go too Nazi this time around, and the cathartic process of spending a hateful Saturday morning in the M&S near to Poshtown watching the words “Tory” and “UKIP” popping up above people’s heads like the whole world had become some slightly bizarre version of an episode of “Sherlock”.

I have also squandered – perhaps “wasted” – far too many hours listening to England play cricket which, whilst I still find it entertaining to a certain extent, does seem to be perfectly in tune with my own need to have my hopes dashed and to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory. That said, events over the past few days have even managed to mess around with that particular theory, with that team going against the (average) trends of the past thirty years, and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This, of course, only serves to add a glimmer of hope to what was very likely to be a devastatingly disappointing summer and sucks me right in again. Last time Australia toured, however, the most over-confident of pundits were pointing out that the then-struggling Australia could lose both back-to-back series “ten-nil” (and look how that turned out), so maybe (just maybe) all this talk of them winning “five-nil” might also turn out to be so much balderdash. Time, of course, will tell, but I’ll still be spending far, far too many hours this summer getting far too worked up about something that is simply a game.

“Failure” is, of course, a relative term. There are those who believe that simply by being born where I was I must, by definition, be “successful”, but such things are difficult to quantify. Little of what I might have hoped for has ever come to pass, but this is mostly due to my own lack of self-belief and an inherent laziness coupled with a strange sense that I really do not “get” people at all, and probably never did, and perhaps, just perhaps, some of us really were never meant to “grow up” because so-called “adult” life basically sucks.

Nevertheless, and despite every fibre of my being telling me that it is a complete and utter waste of time, I find myself this morning failing in my conviction to discontinue with this blogging malarkey. (Wow! Double negatives are truly “me” in a nutshell!) This may simply be because I didn’t want this year’s Eurovision Scorecard to be the thing that sat there unloved for the next few months. Still, there may be more of this sort of thing in the fullness of time (perhaps) but for now (and again) I think that the well has been drained again. See you.

TREADING WATER

I think that I'm just treading water with this blog now, ticking off the days as we head towards the end of another year…

Ever since I noticed that there was still an outside chance of actually making it to the 365 postings ("A Blog A Day") mark for this year after all (and despite my many lapses), I've suddenly found myself with nothing much to write about, so it's become something of (yet another) stick to beat myself with, made doubly troubling ("Doubly Troubling" - I like that… could be the name of a character in something…) by the number of postings that I know that I've done where there were hardly any words at all, which means that they hardly even count as "blogs", and the sure-fire knowledge that this whole process really, really, ought not to be too difficult.

And yet, sometimes, it is...

After all, a couple of paragraphs about what's going on really ought not to be beyond me, even if I try not to talk about work (for obvious professional reasons) and my Beloved does not like me to talk about her, and I have little in the way of friends and family to get me into all sorts of scrapes.

But, you know, I do still just about have a pulse, and I do venture out of my door in the morning, and things do actually happen around me as I plod my way along and through this great big shiny world. Conversations… Events… Really, really annoying items on the radio… but often I know that they've either been better said already, or they are just far too tedious for even me to bother with putting finger to keyboard and expound upon.

So, instead I drearily talk on and on at great (or perhaps not so great) length about the inner me (a dark and frightening place), or things that trouble me when I listen to the news, or just - if I'm getting really desperate - stuff that I've bought, or stuff that I have that I've rediscovered, or stuff that I just enjoy.

Hence the stupid amount of telly talk, or sad, desperate mornings like these when I might feel that I may yet have to resort to admitting to having played virtually all of the "Queen" back catalogue in the car during my commute in recent weeks for some bizarre reason which now utterly escapes me, or those terrible, terrible mornings when the Blog starts to eat itself and I merely ramble on about the process of Blogging or, perhaps, Not Blogging.

Like today…

Because we've come to that point of the year where the (almost) inevitable internal debates begin; Should I really bother with trying to stagger through yet another year of trying to come up with some daily thoughts about nothing in particular, especially when "nothing in particular" appears to be mostly what I do?

Not only that, but the nothings in particular that I do tend to burble on about seem to have less and less to do with the lives of everyone else with whom I fail to engage, and those very nothings appear, perhaps without any irony, appear to be appealing to nobody in particular.

My "most read" (or at least "most clicked on") pieces remain those two posts which strangely have little in common other than having the word "post" in their post titles, with an observation about Penguin biscuits coming in a distant third… and everything else that I have bothered to churn out has been all but proven to be utterly irrelevant, except to a very choice of a few very special people.

You know who you are…

So here I sit, trying my best to think until my forehead bleeds of another eight or nine things to rattle out a few words about to fill those last few notches on the calendar's quota board as the year as almost arbitrarily designed as a human construct in response to making some sort of order from the motions of our little blue planet meanders to its inevitable conclusion, and somehow, as that final hurdle looms, the mental well seems to have frozen over, and the tiny bucket that I plunge into it from time to time is merely bouncing off the surface and not bringing me the fresh, clear spring water to my stream of consciousness that I want it to, and that well water is not so much being trodden as skated over, slipped on, and smashed into as the smooth-bottomed shoe of time leads to the Accident and Emergency Department of destiny.

Possibly...

Could I really stand putting myself through another year of such torture…?

I guess we'll all find out soon enough, eh…?

IN THE WORDS...

…of the late, great Mr Kenny Everett…

In other woods… it's that time of the year when I like to head up to the Lake District for a couple of days to breathe some air, and gawp at some autumn colours between the rain showers…

Updates will, of course, no doubt follow upon my return… or maybe even earlier if I can muster up a Wi-Fi connection and corral a picture or two into the correct place.

HAPPY 4TH BIRTHDAY, LESSER B

Well, here we are… We've finally staggered our way to Lesser Blogfordshire's fourth birthday [Alarums, Loud huzzahs! Toots on cardboard trumpets, etc] as this blog arrives at the point where four entire years of my life have been barely catalogued in the pursuit of something so trivial and pointless that it was hardly worth mentioning… although an awful lot of mentioning is what I appear to have done to little avail.

Although, technically we haven't reached that particular landmark at all, or rather we have, but it wasn't on this day that it all happened. The first fumblings in the dark happened about a week earlier but were deleted (or at least moved elsewhere) out of sheer embarrassment, but given that post number one bears today's date, in some small way it has become, by default, the "official birthday" of this most trivial of nonsenses.

So… what have we learned as we have travelled this rocky path over the last four years, or a full eight percent of my time squatting upon this miserable little planet?

Turning on the television early this morning I discovered that the game of stickball seems to garner far more interest than I could ever imagined possible, and the latest bout of it appears to have made some people very happy, and some others less so, a situation that will no doubt either change around or be repeated the next time they all gather to do exactly the same thing.

I also learned that contrary to popular opinion, volcanoes are very, very dangerous and unpredictable things which any sensible human being should steer well clear of, but seldom do. On a more personal level, during my commute to work this morning, I discovered that tw*ts in BMWs who have an arbitrary attitude to lane markings seldom have to pay the penalty for their utter, utter tw*ttishness.

Over the weekend I decided to try my hand at "proper" writing again, only to find that, after four solid(ish) years of regular practice here in Lesser Blogfordshire, I can no longer write for toffee, and my pathetic attempt to knock out something vaguely original about dinosaurs was the biggest waste of a Sunday afternoon since the game of stickball (for which the boots of BMWs seem to have been particularly designed to convey the various sticks), was invented.

You see? Everything IS connected after all...

So… four years, eh…?

Four years…

Four years in which to discover that I'm really not all that interested in bloody people and the comings and goings and doings of their wretched extended families; Four years during which I found out that I used to write far much more about my mother than seems reasonable, and the void that she has left has left me struggling to find anything else to talk about; Four years in which I have discovered much about myself that is unpleasant and which probably explains quite why I have been abandoned by pretty much everyone who I ever spent any time with; Four years of self-examination which has finally revealed to me that I am lazier, angrier, more annoyed and far, far unhappier about just about everything than I could ever have imagined when I first sat down and thought "Oh, the website says that it's a free service… maybe I could try some of this blogging lark…"

Happy birthday…

And, as the unshot ending of "Withnail and I" might have put it…

"Chin. chin…!"

BAH!!!

I'm feeling just too damned miserable about absolutely everything to be bothered with any more blogging at the moment… so here's a picture of yesterday's sunrise over the Sett Valley taken at about 7.15am during a short pause in my journey to work to fill the gap…

There was a chap on the High Street as I drove past doing a "proper" job of photographing this, by the way, who'd obviously been there a while.

Then again, there was a chap sitting in the exact same spot yesterday evening sipping wine from a stem glass as darkness fell, so that's obviously the place to be at the moment to indulge in a bit of contemplation...

CONTROVERSY (OR NOT)

You know, I fretted buckets that a weekend blog posting that I wrote last weekend might prove to be ever so slightly "controversial" amongst my chums. I worried for days beforehand about whether or not it was appropriate or not, only to find that no bugger actually read the bloody thing...

Generally speaking, I don’t often go out of my way to be deliberately controversial as such. Sometimes it just sort of “happens” when I’m trying to be whimsical in that way that only I seem to understand.

And sometimes it simply doesn’t work anyway, given that I generally flitter through life being much ignored, overlooked, and unloved.

Sometimes I make a quite innocent remark, only for it to be massively misinterpreted and get me into a whole heap of trouble, and, on occasions, I just suffer from an almost impossible to predict crassness and tactlessness that I maintain was more about unfortunate timing and unlucky coincidences than anything deliberate.

After all, I ought to know better.

For example, I know that the England (and Wales) Cricket Team have been making a spectacularly poor show of playing the recent one-day series against India, but the commentary on Test Match Special that I have enjoyed for years has been significantly tainted by the occasional presence on the team of a recently added summarizer who is, quite frankly, spoiling it for me with his jibes and comments and generally irritating manner.

Being a creature of the modern era, at least in some ways, I have been onto several social media platforms to express my irritation at his continued presence, albeit in a slightly abstract and whimsical manner, only to have all of my opinions ignored by just about everyone.

And then an innocent enough exchange – or at least I thought it was – about fund-raising opportunities got me into a whole heap of trouble when the easily offended brigade chose to point out a particular unfortunate coincidence (about which I had been previously unaware) over something I wrote in a failed effort to amuse someone…* 

Maybe you could sell one of your players...?

Well… you wouldn’t have to sell off ALL of him or her, obviously… I mean, presumably most of them have viable organs…? Obviously the livers probably aren’t much of an option, but there must be a spare kidney or two knocking about…? ;-)

Ironically, when a friend of mine had a similar sounding experience recently, I sent him a personal message which included the following…

Here’s one of those timely reminders that you can write what you like (whatever it was), but you can never predict how it’s going to be interpreted… and the possibilities of people taking offence about something that comes completely out of left-field are extraordinary…

Perhaps sometimes I should listen to myself a bit more.

Of course, we are living in times where people will keep on “reckon-ing” in public, and so we all probably need to be a little more careful about the things we say and write, but, equally, we can’t all predict what everyone’s personal circumstances might be at any given moment, or how anyone might react to something that everyone else might see as being utterly harmless.

We do, from time-to-time, need to be careful about the things we say, of course we do, but should that mean that we all have to walk on eggshells all of the time, just in case we upset someone, however unexpectedly or unintentionally…?

In the end, it seems, it might be better if we all just shut up about everything I suppose, but I suspect that’s precisely what the “joy vampires” would prefer…

* This never actually happened, of course (because almost nobody actually gives a damn

* about anything I might have to say), but I'm using it as an example of the kind of thing

* that does happen from time-to-time...

AIR HEAD

The cupboard is bare… Again.

I’ve got nothing in the tank… Again.

There’s nada, nichts, nothing in my head and the usual regular stream of waffle that springs from Lesser Blogfordshire seems to have run dry… Again.

My head currently contains little other than fresh air, and sentences and paragraphs seem to be not coagulating in any meaningful way, hence the recent run of fallow mornings in our mutual quest for enlightenment, self-pity, self-loathing, or whatever else we usually manage to squeeze out of the damp sponge our daily ritual of metaphor-mangling.

Actually, there seems to be precious little danger of anything managing to coagulate, to be frank, because even the individual words don’t seem to want to pop in and say “hi” before going off and finding a partner to dance with, with a view towards persuading the rest of the wallflower words to join the not-so-jolly conga line.

Instead I lie there, bereft of all ideas, feeling as if I’ve reluctantly turned up at the dance hall, but arrived on the wrong evening.

Anyway, this is a round and round and roundabout, coming on down, and round and round, with a dosey-doe, a twirl and a shimmy to the left, and another to the right, and bow to your partner way of trying to explain to you that there may be few contributions to the world of wordsmithery emanating from these here parts over the next few days unless there’s a sudden significant “click” of the “on” switch in my mind.

However, do not despair…!

(Despair is, after all, usually my contribution to this particular relationship…)

There’s plenty of old, unfinished and unpublished stuff bubbling away in my files, and I may yet dust some of these off and let you have a peek at them instead. After all, I’ve threatened to do this time and time again, and, let’s be honest, if I didn’t actually tell you how ancient most of them were, I don’t imagine you’d even notice, and, furthermore, if I’m only holding back because I’m either ashamed of the content or ashamed of the quality of the writing, well, you’re hardly likely to notice that, either.