Up Against It

I really should have got round to writing this piece a while back, but I’m afraid I have been procrastinating. To be fair on myself, I could mention by way of an excuse that I’ve had to post out 1,500 pre-orders for the new Alex book (if you haven’t bought a copy you should do so now and give me an excuse to put off writing next week’s piece). But perhaps the real reason is that I lack a strict, externally-imposed deadline.

I’ve been living on a deadline ever since I used to do my homework on the bus on the way to school in the morning, no doubt like you and 90% of schoolchildren. My thirteen-year-old daughter does the same and I try to stave off the hypocrisy of lecturing her about it. At university I would also defer getting down to doing my assignments. Though I only had to write a couple of essays a fortnight, I would rarely start them till the last minute. If my tutorial was at 11 am I would sit down the evening before with my kettle, a jar of Nescafé Gold Blend and my Remington portable typewriter and work though the night. The next morning I would stumble to the tutorial with just enough focus to read out my essay. Oddly, in those days you had to read out your essay to the tutor. At the time I thought that this was a continuation of the noble oratorial tradition of Cicero and Demosthenes. Now I realise that the tutors were probably just advance sufferers of the modern malaise of people not liking to read (see my columns passim*) but preferring to have stuff read to them (viz* the popularity of podcasts, YouTube, lnstagram reels etc). Or maybe they were just too sloshed to read anything after slugging sherry in their study all day long.