Maybe I really do believe that, as an author, you should should embrace Buddhist simplicity and ‘walk through your professional life with a vague, goofy smile, like Prince Charles visiting an organic farm.’  Certainly the idea of setting light to a bonfire of trivialities (publishers, publicity, reviews etc etc) seems a touch drastic.

Too late to take it back now, so here it is:

*

You may not have noticed, but things have become a little blustery out there recently. Authors are having to work for nothing, or not at all. A mean-spirited government is reducing the microscopic amount they receive from libraries and copying by “rationalising”  PLR and the ALCS. Publishers are in such a state of terminal funk that many of them have actually stopped going out to lunch.

What were midges of annoyance and distraction for authors during easier days CAN become mighty hornets during the bad times. Many of US have contemplated  extreme measures  – drinking, hiding under the duvet,  teaching creative writing –  until the storm passes.

Here, though, is an alternative strategy. Simplify. Downsize spiritually.  Walk through your professional life with a vague, goofy smile, like Prince Charles visiting an organic farm.

The process is not as difficult as it may seem. Once you realise that various aspects of being an author  -  things we have come to assume have to be part of our lives  -   are nothing more than lumber, they can be discarded. Life will be soon be simpler, sunnier, happier.

First on the bonfire of trivialities will be endorsements from other authors. I had not realised, until I recently helped judge a literary award, how feverish, and how pointless, the once-innocent practice of helping  other authors has become. Every book by a newish writer, it seems, is now published with the help of a warm puff from a more experienced colleague on the cover.

There is nothing new in the practice  -  years ago, Auberon Waugh used to respond to requests for quotes  by going wildly over the top, describing  a rather ordinary work in such hilariously effusive terms –  “the best book on this, and possibly any other, subject” – that no sensible person could fail to see the joke.

Today the whole thing is taken more seriously. The familiar, shop-worn  compliments, plucked from the critic’s thesaurus ( “sparkling debut”, “gripping yarn”, “an exciting new voice” and so on) are so ubiquitous that they have ceased to mean anything to writer or reader. Rather than wearily churning out  ‘Step aside, Dan Brown!’, the endorser might just as well write, “I met this person at a dinner-party”, “We share an agent” or “Getting my name on the cover of other people’s books is free publicity”, and have done.

Now that you have started down-sizing, you can go one can go one step further, and recognise that the vast majority of reviews are a waste of an experienced author’s time. After  a few years of writing, you will know what has worked in a book, and what has failed. An opinion expressed on a books page, whether it comes from an exhausted hack or an ambitious literary psycho, may affect sales but there is nothing you can do about that. Reading the review will be a waste of time: compliments are meaningless and insults are either irritatingly unfair or depressingly accurate.

The truly pure in spirit will continue their professional spring cleaning by removing  from their lives any activity undertaken only for reasons of publicity. Now that publishing is largely managed by those with a background in marketing, the ruling myth of PR – that it is an essential part of any author’s success  -  has  become accepted as a sort of holy writ. To suggest that talking to a magazine about your pets or favourite films, appearing on a radio or TV chat shows or trying, like some crazed cult leader, to win “followers” on Twitter will achieve little or nothing in terms of sales, and may eat into the soul of a writer, might be deemed eccentric within publishing, but the wise author will know it is true.

 Some people are born promotable – they emanate mysterious spoors which, for reasons no one truly understands, catch the curiosity of strangers.  Why Jeremy Clarkson? Why Martin Amis? Why Joey Barton? There are other people who are more interesting than them, but who simply lack the publicity gene. Most of us could appear on the Graham Norton Show for three consecutive weeks and still never be recognised, let alone sell books.

The mature author will realise that this is a blessing. A realisation that publicity is a mystical process beyond the understanding of normal people is a huge relief, removing many humiliations and wasted hours.

For those worried that by taking a brisk, grown-up attitude to promotional silliness they might alienate their publishers, the identity of next irrelevance to be dumped will come as good news. It is the publishing industry.

Authors can go mad, worrying about “the trade”, what is up and what is down, forgetting that the way the business works, or fails to work,  is irrelevant to them. It is, metaphorically if not actually, below their pay grade. Publishers march to the beat of a different drum. Trying to become one of their team, earnestly getting yourself introduced to people in production or contracts department, flirting with reps and/or receptionists, sending out Christmas cards on an industrial scale, is actually unhelpful to your career. It will quickly erode what makes you attractive to publishers:  you are not like them.

The very things that embarrass us – tatty clothes, a tendency to express impolitic opinions, a general vagueness about management or the new media   – are what earn us respect within the books industry. We are authors, not would-be entrepreneurs or fame-hungry competitors in a TV reality show.

Without these trivial concerns buzzing  around your head, you will be left with a clutter-free life of direction and clarity. In a state of smiling spiritual calm, you will know that for an author, the world of generalities   -   PR, image, company politics   -  counts for little beside the specific and the personal.

It is the individual which matters: a good editor, a good reader, and, of course, your good self.

My other Endpaper articles for The Author, a comprehensive source of caring advice for those who write – or would like to write – for a living, is to be found in my Writer’s Shed  here.

Here is the problem. As a service to the community (and a pleasure to myself), I have taken to starting the day by posting a couple of “writers’ rules”   similar to those on my Tip of the Day on the home page of this website  –  on Twitter. Brief thoughts on the process and business of writing from authors, past and present, they have been extracted from a great database of writerly wisdom and eccentricity which I have compiled over the years.

The rules reveal one thing above all else. Writers disagree about virtually everything.

This very week, for example,  Louis de Bernières told the Independent:

‘Whatever research I do will give me better ideas than anything I could make up on my own.’

Do other authors agree? I turned to the first letter in my fascinating and comprehensive compendium of quotes (Wake up, publishers!) and find these words from Martin Amis:

‘I keep meaning to research things, to go to prisons and child-abuse centres, but in the end I just make it up. You take a bit of experience and pass it through your psyche.’

This kind of disagreement echoes around the writers’ rules archive. Remarks made with the prescriptive confidence – this is the way to do it, kids  -  which few of those quoted probably felt, the tips and thoughts, taken together, seem less like a lesson than a row.

Research, working methods, thought, language, money, sex, health: there is not the slightest hint of a writerly consensus on any of these subjects.

My problem is that, because Twitter is by its nature chatty and interactive, people become annoyed by what I have posted and take issue with some of the rules. I find myself explaining, sometimes even defending, something which Iris Murdoch, or Lee Child, or Philip Larkin once said.

Perhaps the number one rule for all writers, professional and aspiring, should be that of  William Goldman when considering  Hollywood, in his great book Adventures in the Screen Trade:

‘Nobody knows anything.’

Here, thrown together in a hopelessly anarchic fashion, are just a few of the writers’ rules which have appeared on Twitter over the past few weeks.

Just don’t expect consistency.

*

John  Fowles: ‘I went through all the publicity… as in a bad dream. The people unreal and myself “John Fowles” most unreal of all.’

Nick Hornby: ‘I do construct an ideal reader or listener. I think I’m addressing some quite smart woman in her thirties.’

AL Kennedy: ‘Let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave.’

Ford Madox Ford: ‘I have always had the greatest contempt for novels written with a purpose.’

Don DeLillo: ‘I don’t have a career, I have a typewriter. I’ve never planned anything.’

Anthony Burgess: ‘There is no agony like the agony of writing badly.’

T. Coraghessan Boyle: ‘You learn to write through practice, through writing, over and over, again and again.’

Ernest Hemingway: ‘The farther you go into writing, the more alone you are.’

Garrison Keillor: ‘That’s the thing: to keep on working, to be engrossed in the work, not the outcome.’

David Foster Wallace: ‘Fun is still the whole point, somehow, no? Fun on both sides of the writer/reader exchange?’

Philip Larkin: ‘If I were a “proper writer” I would be a novelist rather than a poet.’

William Wharton: ‘Not thinking of myself as a writer gives me the freedom to be one.’

Hilary Mantel: ‘Sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being.’

David Lodge: ‘You’re always aware of the league table … If you’re not competing, you’re not going to be very good.’

Jack London: ‘I’d rather win a water-fight in a swimming pool …than write the great American novel.’

Doris Lessing: ”Writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself.’

Stephen King: ‘Fear is at the root of most bad writing.’

Randy Newman: ‘It doesn’t have to be that arduous but it always has been for me. Writing is goddam hard.’

Eugene O’Neill: ‘Writing is my vacation from living.’

Ian McEwan: ‘You cannot underestimate the spite of a certain section of the English middle class.’

David Malouf:  ‘The only thing that’s going to be interesting in the book is what you don’t yet know.’

Iris Murdoch: ‘Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.’

Philip Roth: It is the distance between the writer’s life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination

VS Pritchett: ‘Write every day. Keep office hours. Inspiration comes from the grindstone, not from heaven.’

Will Self: ‘No great book is created by thought power -  it has to be felt.’

Philip Pullman: ‘Make the story itself so interesting that the teller just disappears.’

Virginia Woolf: ‘We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.’

Jules Renard: ‘I read what I write as though I were my mortal enemy.’

Maggie Gee: ‘It is very easy to fall off the tightrope that writers walk; no one is there to catch you.’

Henry Green: ‘If you can make the reader laugh, he is apt to get careless and go on reading.’

Annie Dillard: ‘A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.’

Cyril Connolly: ‘If…a man who is not married is only half a man,  so a man who is very much married is only half a writer.’

Angela Carter: ‘The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an.. urgent deadline in the offing.’

Leonard Cohen: My tiny trouble is that, before I can discard a verse, I have to write it. I can’t discard it before it’s finished.

Zoe Heller: I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘You write best about yourself. It may even be that it’s impossible to write well about anything else.’

Thomas Mann: ‘A writer is someone who finds writing difficult.’

Jack Kerouac: ‘The first thought is the best thought.’

WH Auden: ‘The innocent eye sees nothing.’

Stephen King: ‘I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.’

Annie Dillard: ‘Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard

Zadie Smith: ‘The most painful thing in the world is an author explaining their own novel.’

*

My address on Twitter is @TerenceBlacker. The hash-tag is #writersrules.

To appreciate the depth of the husband crisis, it is helpful to put aside a few inconvenient facts . We should forget for a moment that men are still paid quite a lot more on average than women for one example , and also that the vast majority of the directors of our large companies happen to be male.

Further down the food-chain, apparently, it is all very different. More women than men are graduating from universities, and are then doing better at work during their twenties. The problem is that when, in their thirties, they look around for someone to share their lives – that “traditional husband” – they discover that men are trailing hopelessly behind them.

The Pew Research Center in America has tracked the relative incomes of men and women over the past 40 years. In 1970, a mere four per cent of women earned more than their husbands. By 2007, the figure was 22 per cent, and has kept on rising.

“A lot of the men I meet aren’t really of the right calibre,” a financial manager called Claire Davis confided to the Sunday Times. Heartbreakingly, Claire has resorted to using an introduction agency in order to raise the quality of her dates. On one occasion, she actually went out with a trainee stuntman and had to pay for their dinner.

“A new cohort of highly ambitious, educated women… are redefining marriage and what they expect from it,” an expert on these things has pronounced. It is “the toy-boy effect,” says David Willetts. “These highly qualified women are marrying hunks or supportive types.”

There are two ways to respond to these reports, the first of which is: “Don’t be so bloody rude”. If a government minister airily referred to “the bimbo effect” and spoke with approval of how men are now looking for babes or housewife types, there would quite rightly be something of a fuss.

It is also an odd business that women who have at last achieved career superiority are now complaining that the men they date earn less than them. One would think, with their much-vaunted education and intelligence, they might be able to work out that one tends to lead to the other.

As for Claire Davis having to lower her conversation a notch or two when out with her trainee stuntman and then pick up the tab, some might say that she is only doing what many men have done for generations. It is excellent news that the gender balance is at last being redressed, but slightly undignified for successful women then to whinge about its personal side-effects.

The second response to this report is to congratulate the men. At last, they are free of the grim yoke which once would descend upon their shoulders when they reached their twenties. They no longer have to be, or pretend to be, “of the right calibre” or potentially “traditional husbands”. While the women pursue their careers , get on the property ladder and generally behave in a grown-up manner, they can enjoy an interestingly experimental youth.

That trainee stuntman may have had to put up with martyred sighs as his finance manager date reached for her credit card at the end of the evening but, deep in his manly heart, he will know that he is getting the better of the deal.

If you’re happy and you know it, tap your hedonimeter

A small, niggling mystery of modern life is why the busy professional people who use the social network Twitter so often mark their escape into moments of tranquillity by typing a message about it into their smart phone.

This compulsion to authenticate personal experience by sharing it with as many other people as possible has now reached a new level, thanks to a device called the “hedonimeter”. Part of the burgeoning happiness industry, there is a new scheme to map the times when the nation is most contented with the help of an app on mobile phones. The “Mappiness project” involves people recording their emotional state five times a day into a hedonimeter, giving the experience marks out of 100.

The results so far contain few surprises. We are at our happiest while making love, followed by playing sport, going to the theatre, singing and – local councils, please note – going to a library. At the bottom end of the scale is being ill. What strange vision of our world the Mappiness project presents. Even as they enjoy moments of intimacy, the British are busy keeping score. Where there was once a post-coital cigarette, there is now the busy tapping of a happiness update into the hedonimeter.

Independent, 8 November 2011

This week, thanks to Barnardo’s, the media is full of references to children “behaving like animals”, being “angry, violent and abusive” and “becoming feral”. Almost 50 per cent of adults, according to an ICM poll commissioned by the charity, concur with these views of contemporary childhood. “It is depressing that so many people are ready to give up on children, writing them off as ‘animals’ and ‘feral’,” Anne Marie Carrie, head of Barnardo’s, has said.

But, hang on, the words were not actually used by those questioned. People were asked, for example, whether they agreed that children were becoming more feral. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they responded to a tabloid-style question with a tabloid-style response.

There is something distinctly iffy about the way the survey’s data (none of which is available online at the time of writing) has been used. To the question, “When you think about children who behave inappropriately… at what age do you think it is too late to change them for the better?”, 44 per cent answered that it was never too late, while another 28 per cent opted for between 11 and 16.

How was the story spun? “A quarter of all adults think children’s lives can be thrown away at the age of 10,” Anne Marie Carrie told the Today programme.

Barnardo’s does excellent work, but this ladling out of generalised guilt is more about generating easy publicity than helping children.

Portraying adults as heartless is as wrong-headed and counter-productive as demonising children. Both put a barrier of resentment between generations. Beside the cuddly French and the twinkly-eyed Spaniards, the British have never been great with children but, away from a few benighted parts of society, general standards of parenting are improving.

If we want hope for the future a bit less nagging of the general public and a bit more taking to task of central and local government is in order. Libraries, those windows of hope and information for children, are being closed and boarded up. Youth services are among the first to go in budget cuts.

Barnardo’s is right to point out that Britain is not doing as well by its children as it should, but it should concentrate on changing policy decisions rather than on telling the rest of us, with dubious evidence, how terrible we all are.

Independent, 4 November 2011

Everything bad about the modern world is pretty much their fault: unemployment, global warming, traffic, housing problems, the recession, wars, crime, pension problems, general moral collapse. When, all those years ago, Roger Daltrey of The Who sang that he was t-t-talkin’ about his generation, he can have had little idea that, four decades on, the generation would still be talking about itself, and almost always in whingey, self-lacerating tones.

The latest woe-monger is Jeremy Paxman, who, to judge by an anguished article in the Mail on Sunday, is going through some kind of late-life freak-out. Ours is “not merely the luckiest but also the most selfish generation in history”, he wailed. Its overwhelming characteristic is “self-absorption”. Our parents “made-do-and-mended through the austerity years” but all the baby-boomers fought for was “the right to wear their hair long and enjoy sex”.

We have not only betrayed our children and grandchildren, says Paxman, but, worst of all, we are still making decisions because we vote in elections while those in their twenties and thirties cannot be bothered. This, mysteriously, is also our fault.

It’s all very emotional, and will no doubt play well in a culture where self-flagellation and guilt have an almost sexual power. Yet, like any sweeping generalisation about millions of people who are dissimilar in every way but happen to be roughly the same age, it is an exercise in silliness and special pleading.

Flailing around, Paxman points out that our parents had as Prime Minister Clement Attlee (hurrah!) while we had Tony Blair (boo!). It is an argument which would embarrass a Lower Sixth Debating Society. One might as well compare The Billy Cotton Band Show and The Old Grey Whistle Test in order to draw plonking conclusions about music, or judge the progress of poetry by reading the ravings of Ezra Pound beside the work of our own saintly poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

The idea that billions of people were uniquely selfish is as idiotic as arguing that everyone of the previous generation was heroic, or that all who have followed are culturally disengaged. Baby-boomers did not accept free university education in order to screw things up decades later; it was not their fault that the NHS was working better, nor that it was easier to get a mortgage.

Even the argument about long hair and enjoying sex is flawed. Seen as part of a general movement of domestic liberation, they were not insignificant advances but have shaped the way we live and argue today in a positive, liberal way.

Perhaps Jeremy Paxman’s attack of guilt and self-loathing reflects some sort of personal turbulence. If so, I rather wish he would not implicate the rest of his generation in his great crisis of conscience.

*

While monarchists enjoy reports of the Queen’s triumphant visit to the royal-obsessed country of Australia, and anticipate the orgy of bunting and grovelling which will be the Diamond Jubilee, a more sombre reminder of royal life has been published in the press.

The BBC, it has been reported, has been training its staff for the sad event of the Queen’s death. Aware of the terrible gaffe which occurred when the Queen Mother died (Peter Sissons wore a burgundy tie and a grey suit), the corporation has been putting the major players through what has been described as “royal funeral training”. Black ties and dark suits are now kept in cupboards at Broadcasting House in case sad news breaks when least expected.

Yet, even at what one hopes is an early stage, there must be concerns. Nicholas Witchell, “The Footman” as he is known in royal circles, has the look of someone who feels he should be doing John Simpson’s job rather than hanging around the gates of Buckingham Palace with the tourists.

Huw Edwards, the BBC’s official Man of Sorrow, will obviously be centre stage. His gentle air of quiet sympathy when reporting tragic news is envied by broadcasters around the world, and it is said that videos of his most famous newscasts are shown by funeral directors to junior staff to help them learn the appropriate tone of voice and facial expression.

All the same, there is something distinctly buttoned-up and male about the corporation’s royal team. Surely, in the early 21st century, at least one presenter should be female and experienced at showing on-screen the emotion which viewers will be feeling, breaking down at strategic moments. Fortunately, Her Majesty is looking well so that there will be ample time to train the chosen presenter for royal caring duty.

My candidates for the job are Rosie Millard, Fern Britton and Esther Rantzen.

Independent, 1 November 2011

In spite of this concern (which most publishers would see as a bonus, anyway), the idea is worth pursuing. To judge by the few details of his private life which he has teasingly revealed in the new book, Livingstone might have quite a lot to say about sexual evolution.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while he was an MP, he was quite busy in that area, being – depending upon your point of view – a public-spirited sperm-donor, a generous friend, or a randy bastard who went to bed with women other than his long-term partner.

Quite a lot of fathering went on during that time. Ken’s friend Philippa Need “was very keen to have children, although she had failed to find the right partner”; he volunteered his services, and two children were born in 1990 and 1992. A newer pal, Jan Woolf, had a similar problem, and once again the MP was able to help out. Jan bore a son in 1992.

Although, somewhat ungallantly, Livingstone presents these arrangements as if he was going around doing good work of the selfless Geldofian kind, he has declined to confirm or deny that conception was managed in the traditional manner, as have the women involved.

There will be, of course, the usual silly fuss. The old “Red Ken” tag will be reactivated; uncharitable jokes will be made about his unlikely success with women. More seriously, he will be portrayed as representing in his private life the anti-family agenda of the Left. His multiple fathering activities reflect the morally slack approach to parenthood of “broken Britain”, it will be said.

Here is the problem: Ken Livingstone’s unconventional way of doing things has worked rather well. In spite of the best efforts of the Right-wing press, no evidence has been found that making himself available for breeding purposes has done any harm to those involved.

Soon after his second and third children were born within a few weeks of each other, the MP was taking all his children on outings to the zoo. When, later, he married and had two children within wedlock, the three families took to holidaying together.

It is a rather touching scene, Ken, the three women he impregnated, surrounded by their growing extended family. It may not be the kind of arrangement which would suit everyone, but it seems to have worked rather well for them. In his own quiet way, Ken Livingstone and his friends have shown that family life can be more flexible and grown-up than many would have us believe.

If next year’s election for Mayor of London is dominated, as seems highly likely, by the private lives of the two main contenders, we might well have another Mayor Ken in power. This time, we will at least know the reason for that slightly smug little smile that he so often wears.

*

What on earth is happening? Hardly a week goes by without a film or theatrical company reviving a work which caused shock and outrage several decades ago. It as if we have suddenly been transported back 40 years.

A re-make of the film Straw Dogs (rape among the country bumpkins) is just to be released. A new production of Edward Bond’s Saved (violence and baby-stoning in the urban underclass) has opened at the Lyric, Hammersmith. At Stratford, the Royal Shakespeare Company is staging Marat/Sade (dildos, simulated rape, erotomania, perversion etc etc) as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations.

The coverage has been quite like the old days, too. There have been scandalised reports in the newspapers. At the Marat/Sade, audiences are walking out, declaring it to be “the worst kind of filth dressed up as quality theatre”. One almost expects Mary Whitehouse or Lord Longford to loom up balefully on Newsnight.

If drama still has the power to offend, the battle-lines between those in favour of permissiveness and those scandalised by it are altogether less clear. If anything, it seems that we are more easily offended today – or perhaps less embarrassed about admitting it – than they were back in the Sixties and Seventies. Producers, meanwhile, have learned a useful lesson. Sex and violence have nostalgia-value. The shockwaves of outrage that greeted the first appearance of a play or film have one great advantage: they ensure that the work is remembered down the years.

It can surely only be a matter of time before a loving remake of A Clockwork Orange is before us.

 Independenmt, 25 October 2011

Will there be a respectable turn-out?  Will the quality of the congregation be up to snuff? Too often, funerals are cluttered up by the sort of compassion junkies and drama queens who get a small ghoulish  thrill out of the grief of others. Would it be unseemly to leave a last wish banning the insincere from one’s last gig?

As for the event itself, there are tricky question of taste to consider. A Christian service for a non-believer adds a touch of bogusness  at the very moment when it is least welcome. Secular efforts tend either to be leaden and bathetic or fey and hippyish.

Who to give the address? Another nightmare. The kind of person who pushes himself forward on these occasions (‘Trust me, I know how to do these things’) is likely to provide an irritating parody of one’s life  – more raffish, dutiful, silly, sane, ordered, shambolic, sexy, sexless, successful or disappointing than the real thing.

As for the music, where does one start? Recognising the fact that choosing funeral tunes is, like preparing for Desert Island Discs, a lifetime’s work, a website called My Last Song now invites people to have an early stab at it, listing five songs by which they would like to be remembered.

Of course, the list changes every week. Contributing my own list recently to My Last Song, I was startled to find that there was no place for Ry Cooder, Willie Nelson or Doc Watson. I also wanted to include Victoria Hart’s astonishing version of my song ‘It’s Only Love’, only to be warned off on grounds of egotism .

And who wants to be thought self-centred at their own funeral?

They reply to criticism, put counter-arguments, soon to be followed by counter-counter-counter-arguments. They either rise above the insults or – a terrible mistake in my view – respond in kind.

How do they do that? Where do they find the time, the patience?  When I write my Independent  column, I feel I have been given enough space to make my case. If I have failed to convince, then that is my problem. Engaging with readers in a further debate or – more likely – slanging match is, I think, unlikely to change anything.

Besides, what could I say to the man who called me a “wispy-haired twat”, to the previously friendly reader who suddenly turned on me and told me I was a “pussy whipped silver spoon prat”? Some accusations are simply too complex to unravel -  if indeed they are accusations.  “Come off it, Blacker,” one reader wrote. “Stop plying your cuntish opinions with panache”?  Wha-wha-what?

When a reader – anonymous, of course – accused me of cutting him dead while filling up my car, a  large, gold 4 x 4, at petrol station in Bury St Edmunds, I suppose I could pointed out that he was wrong in every detail, that he had been grinning at a stranger with a vulgar car in Bury St Edmunds, but, in the end, life is too short for such conversations.

On the other hand, not replying to any messages seems rude. Now and then, I would like to use this blog to reply to some of the general points made to me on the message-boards.

*

Reiner Torheit  Tell us again how we all ought to be in awe of you Oxbridge graduates, Terence.  And swallow your words of wisdom reverentially, and thank you afterwards for sharing them with us proles.

Thank you for this thought, Reiner. Personally I agree that education is neither here nor there when it comes to writing. I don’t think of you as a prole although, between you and me,  I do wonder whether you have one or two self-esteem issues that might need attention.

*

Sylva-MD-Poetry  I could not understand the language you used …Make it simple… make it easy… don’t pull  us crazy…

Apologies, Sylva-MD-Poetry, if this column didn’t work for you. I try to write as clearly as I can, and, if what I have written is difficult to understand, I would normally see that as a failure. I had absolutely no intention to pull you crazy and will make things simpler in the future.

* 

grumpy_old_ben   This is simply a testimony to the extent to which the self-hating, anti-white liberal-left establishment,  have become disconnected from the public as a whole.

You may be right, grumpy_old_ben, I probably am disconnected from the public as a whole. Luckily, I’m a writer not a politician, and disconnection is not necessarily a terrible thing.  When I last checked, I only mildly hated myself and had no particular antipathy to people of my own colour.

*

Jorge Fernandez    As a Hispanic man in the Pornography business in Los Angeles California USA, I make love to a lot of White women pornographic actresses that borders on obsession… US Hispanic men are a TIGER when it comes to making LOVE because WE will make love to a women for hours & hours on end. 

Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Jorge, and apologies for editing your comments. Like your love-making, your writing does tend to hammer on a touch relentlessly. Please keep writing in. Your regular contributions, while they are rather along the same lines, add variety to the message-board.

*

lakevostok   Arrr, oi reckon at be abewt toim too an arl that there wurra stop tawl them there tewenfolk patting us dowen.

That’s terrifically amusing, lakevostok. You noticed that I was writing about the countryside and responded, quick as a flash,  with this pitch-perfect parody. Have you ever considered writing for a living?

 *

tonbo0422   What on God’s green earth was this article about? I swear, I must have read it six times. It LOOKS like English; when read aloud it SOUNDS like English; yet it seems to actually mean nothing at all.

Oh dear, here we go again.  Tonboo42, could I introduce you to Sylva-MD-Poetry?

At least we now know how, if you are a comedian whose career is becalmed, you can make yourself the centre of attention. You deploy one of the new swearwords. “Spaz” and “retard” are favourites and, as this week has, shown, “mong” can do the trick pretty well, too.

There has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been scant sympathy for the professional jockeys who have objected to new rules and penalties for excessive use of the whip. The right of small men to hit sensitive animals for human profit and sport is hardly a case for the European Court of Human Rights.