600 words? It’s a doddle
IT IS 11 years almost to the day since my first Swannell on Wednesday column was published by The Chronicle. A relatively new editor, Steve Etwell, had been daft enough to ask me if I would like to write “a couple of columns”.
His charm and the couple of drinks we had shared over lunch prompted me to say yes. The only specified conditions were that I should not libel anyone and that the length of each column must be 625 words “not counting the title”.
So far, so good! Nobody (as yet) has sued me and I have produced the required number of words each Wednesday since then, except for one Wednesday when I was feeling especially crook. That’s about 570 columns, using more than 356,000 words. That’s a lot of words!
Thankfully, most of the words are fairly short and very few would get an English language teacher particularly excited! At least I have thought of most of them myself which is a reasonably good effort for an engineer who traditionally reads very little and is much better at maths.
I think I am better at writing words than reading them, partly because I have always been boss-eyed. Reading words that somebody else has written is not half as easy as writing my own! It’s not as much fun either.
That is probably because I have read so few things that other people have written and I, long ago, decided that what other people write is not half as much fun as I could write myself ! How conceited is that!
I like writing rubbish most of the time, especially when there are small and occasional moments of almost believable truth hidden away in the text. It is sometimes fun to have people come up to me, tell me what I had written and ask me if what I had written was true! I am often at a loss as to what they are talking about, which is very rude and ungrateful of me.
The simple truth is that I often cannot remember from one week to the next what I was writing about and I am very flattered that they have remembered. I have noticed over the years of writing my columns that the most difficult weekly challenge is to think of what I should pontificate on in the up-coming week.
Once I have decided that, then thinking of the other 600 or so words is a doddle! It all comes from a working lifetime spent giving lectures and finding a way to “fill in” the allocated lecture time.. It’s a gift really!
The photographs in this week’s story show what age does to people. The two young lads in one of the pics were nine years of age at the time. It’s my twin brother and me. He’s the one in the goalie’s jersey and carrying a cap in his right hand. He always took a cap with him in case a passing stranger asked him to be the goalkeeper in a local match. It was the view in those days that you had to wear a cap for that task!
He eventually grew up and played soccer for the England amateur team a record 67 times and rarely bothered about the cap...
I never wore a cap but made up for that by wearing our school’s football shirt and over-size shorts.
The two blokes in the other picture were nearly 70 years older than those same lads in the first picture! My brother was still wearing shorts but both of us now needed to wear glasses in order to see the wood from the trees…