Remember when you were a small child and water was always colder? Well, it was if you were a small child in the UK. Swimming pools weren’t heated then and the sea was always cold. Come to think of it, swimming pools didn’t always have a roof. And sun was something that, apart from one week in summer, only foreigners had.

Anyway, the best way of entering the water was always to throw yourself in and get it over with. You might gasp a bit, but at least it was done.

Well, I’m feeling that way about posting tonight. I’ve tried several starts, and nothing good has come from it, so this is the modern writing equivalent of that leap into cold water.

Currently I have done half the unofficial target of 250 words I set myself, and I have managed to do it without actually having anything to say. If I carry on at this rate I may end up with a career in politics.

I’ve noticed a growing tendency in politicians to give longer answers as the epidemic has progressed (that’s Covid, not the epidemic of political lying and ineptitude that has been such a noticeable bi-product of the Covid epidemic).

Julia mentioned it recently while we were watching the news. It’s a good tactic. Instead of avoiding, or evading, you look like you are honestly trying to answer the question, and because you take so long doing it, you run out of time and they can’t ask you more difficult questions.

It’s a brilliant system and, a bit like tonight, you end up filling the time without actually doing anything useful.

And that, I think you will find, is my target of 250 words done, and nothing useful has been said.

In fact, at 292 words, my target is rapidly fading into the dust behind me, and 300 is rapidly coming into view. And has been passed…

It’s amazing what you can do when you get your head down and start throwing words onto a page.

A photograph of a pen, some tags, and that’s me done.