Although my current weekly requirement is simply to produce sufficient ‘material’ for three posts, I generally write far more and for that I can only apologise. Some of these excess posts are consigned immediately to the bin – even with a bar set as low as mine, certain things are irredeemable – whilst others are set aside for cut and paste rescues, providing I can find sufficient parts that do not make me physically cringe. Others come to rest intact in The Holiday File, where they idle away their hours, waiting for me not to be there, at which point they come out to play. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to discern when this period starts, when it ends and – if possible – why? Answers on a postcard please.
Somehow these pieces do not fit in with the normal scheme of things even though I like them. You will easily spot them. They are inclined to be a little bit odd; like me they tend to sit outside the fence and somehow they make my holiday posts a little less ordinary, slightly less predictable. My problem arises when I am about to desert you, Dear Reader, for a week or two and I find I do not have enough ‘waifs’ in the Holiday Folder to see me through, because I cannot deliberately write them: they just come along willy-nilly. They are my supermarket ‘Wonky’ strawberries; like buying a shirt from the fleamarket; like a slow off-spinner on a council cricket pitch; like not balling your socks and picking them, at random, from the drawer in the dark – things are not always what you might expect.
Holiday File posts tend to be stand-alone episodes: they do not need to relate to what precedes or succeeds them as they fail to make sense all on their very own, thank you very much. Although I have the kind of brain that generally wants things to ‘fit’, I have to remind myself from time to time that it really doesn’t matter. Things don’t always have to end logically. Sometimes they don’t have to end at all. I once worked for an editor who told me that as long as a joke was funny, I didn’t need to explain it. I promised to bear it in mind if ever I wrote one.
I think my posts have grown decidedly less bonkers over the years and I am far from certain that it is a good thing. I am very fond of barmy. Making sense is very overrated. Never-the-less, the fact that things don’t seem to make sense to me is still the number one reason I occasionally ‘pull’ posts. Most of them end up getting published in the fullness of time – usually without any great rewriting, which must say something about me – Lord alone knows what, but it must have something to do with sloth. My favourite posts are almost always the ones that I rediscover long after I have forgotten ever writing them, although it always worries me that they might just have been written by somebody else – almost certainly somebody who didn’t want to admit to it – and passed on to me from beyond the grave (Cleethorpes) via the medium of alcohol. The pixies are very active in this house.
In any case, nobody else has ever claimed the ‘writing credits’ and I really can’t say that I blame them.
Perhaps they’re on holiday.
Getting On 