Writing

I started a blog post this morning around 0710.  It's now 1145 and it's hardly progressed at all.  I have, however, read lots of blogs, got the washing out, researched the internet for information on the subjects of some of my photos and have indexed and titled some as well.   I've written the odd email or two and a birthday card.  I've done two crosswords and had breakfast and drunk my morning coffee.  All in all it's been a thoroughly enjoyable and lazy morning.  All because I can't go and play croquet or, for that matter, do anything which involves moving my body other than slowly and carefully.  However what sprung to mind was SP's comment that her posts were just done off the cuff and rarely took more than 10 minutes.  It takes me longer than that to decide what the post is going to be about!  And then I came across the following which I'd drafted back in April last year but never posted.

How long does it take you to write your average blog post?  Or your average email?  Or a letter?  Or, indeed, anything.   Of course there isn't really an answer to that question other than responding by asking 'How long is a piece of string?'.  I've just written a post which has taken nearly two hours but that's not the whole story.  I had to download the photos from my camera and my phone.  I was, sort of, watching the TV News and making dinner too and in true AAADD fashion I managed to do (and not do) a number of other things as well.

I was thinking of the time it's taken because in a recent post, Terminology, on her blog, Katherine remarked quoted, in context, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” It would appear that Mark Twain made the comment.   Apparently, however, nothing is ever truly original because Blaise Pascal (French mathematician and physicist 1623 - 1662), in his "Lettres provinciales", letter 16, 1657 said "I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short (Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte)".

The point of all that rambling is that I spent my career making sure that letters, cases, reports, legal documents, the words spoken by politicians (but written by their civil servants) etc were always clear, precise and, hopefully, open only to the interpretation (or in some cases interpretations!) that were desired.

In many ways I would have to agree with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in the 1891 novel ‘A Case of Identity’  when he said “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”

However now that I am supposed to be writing more entertaining prose where, let's face it, no one really cares whether I have crossed the is and dotted the ts (er that doesn't sound quite right correct does it?), I find it very hard to break old habits.