Sometimes Staring at A Blank Screen Doesn't Produce Anything Remotely Interesting

I thought I might sit here and simply make stuff up as I went along.  Normally I have some idea of what I'm going to write about.  It needn't be particularly clever or profound (let me be clear, I have no problem if it is clever or profound) which is a blessing really.  On this occasion, however, I really have no idea what I'm going to be talking about.  Although as I type this it occurs to me that perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to apologise for my persistent habit of breaking my sentences up with brackets and commas (although I'm never entirely sure as to which is the more appropriate) usually to permit me to insert lame attempts at humour or smart arse remarks.

It isn't that I'm unaware of this (and in case I was unaware of it a friend helpfully pointed it out) or am blind to the fact that it can make sentences choppy and difficult to read.  To stretch the term to breaking point you could say that it is part of my writing style.  If you wanted to be less generous but more accurate you could see it as evidence of the fact that I never really learnt how to write.  No, I'm not actually pleading illiteracy.  The sheer volume of turgid, bracket mangled, comma afflicted rubbish cluttering this blog indicates that I am more or less capable of getting a number of words strung together in something that could (with a certain generosity of spirit) be described as a sentence if you don't look too closely.  However I never learnt how to write essays.  At least I didn't learn it at a time when learning it might have been useful such as before my higher school certificate exams.  Everybody else seemed to know what an essay was when the teachers told us to write one but for some reason I didn't.  When the teacher said "write an essay" I wrote a story instead.  This didn't go down too well and by the time I figured out what an essay was I was running out of time.

I did rather badly in my English exams largely as a result of pique.  I was so annoyed that nobody had told me what an essay was that I didn't really try and improve on them even after I found out what they were.  Instead I got into a quiet (but quite serious) snit about people who insisted on having several thousand words written about somebody else's several thousand words.  For god's sake, just say whether you liked the damn play (or book, or poem or whatever) I honestly don't care what "the author is trying to say" if he says it well (in my opinion) I will like it, frequently without actually having to like, accept or appreciate a single point the author fondly imagines he's making.  Or she of course, I would have put that in but I already had two sets of brackets and a parentheses in the preceding sentence and even by my standards that's starting to get a little ridiculous.

I tend to write as I speak, that is; at length, with frequent self interruptions, circumlocutions and archaisms which I throw in not so much to show off how many big words I know (note I avoided the temptation to use the word Brobdingnagian there) as because I'm rather fond of them.  I also learnt much of my vocabulary at an early age and this form of communication is actually quite natural to me.  I also suspect watching Yes Minister at an impressionable age might have helped.  Of course it does mean that my speech, like my writing, is convoluted, over stretched and frequently incoherent.  This would probably matter more if what I was saying was in anyway profound or useful.  Fortunately this is rarely the case and any time I am actually saying something profound and useful you can probably write it off as a statistical anomaly.  If I am actually speaking in short, easy to understand sentences then something has probably gone horribly wrong.  When it comes to calling the fire brigade or the police I can usually attain a level of concision my writing would kill for.  Speaking of which I should probably just nip out and make sure that the feminine shrieks and moans emanating from next door were the result of an enjoyable interlude and not a terrible home invasion.