What’s it all about, eh?

After 17 weekly newsletters I thought I’d pause and attempt to answer the one question that I’m sure lurks in the back of your mind when you see that I’ve polluted your inbox with another diatribe…..

Why?

Why am I doing this? What’s the purpose of these meandering, fundamentally useless screeds of undirected verbiage? What do I hope to gain from subjecting folk to this nonsense?

Well, I’m glad you asked…..

I’m going to start by taking you back fifty-five years to my old school (Who said, “Not again”?) and a practice that I have come to regard as one of the most perceptive, far thinking and wholly beneficial aspects of the way that place was run. In particular I’m talking about one aspect of the punishment regime. Yes, there were the normal panoply of boring, sadistic and frankly illegal ways that miscreants were taught the error of their ways, but in addition, especially in the boarding houses, there was also one punishment that stood out as a beacon of enlightenment in the otherwise stygian gloom of the 70’s dark ages.

It was called ‘Pages’.

Basically, a monitor (we had monitors, not prefects, no idea why) could punish wrongdoing by awarding up to six pages. The ne’er-do-well would then have to fill six pages of A4 on a topic chosen by the monitor. Of course, there was the inevitable competition to find topics so abstruse or frankly weird that filling a paragraph could be fiendishly difficult. There were subjects that went down in legend for their high degree of obscure, yet original thinking, “The sex life of the ping pong ball” was one that sticks in the mind. It might have been an apocryphal topic and I never knew the poor unfortunate who was awarded it, but you get the gist. This was way before any phone-based aids and the Encyclopaedia Brittanica was as far as any research could reasonably go.

Of course there were further layers of pain associated with Pages. Firstly, you hoped that the awarding monitor had a benevolent side, because difficulty could be layered upon difficulty by allowing a short time period for completion. 24 hours was a minimum but if it stretched into a weekend it would put a real dampener on your Saturday.

And the ultimate pain would come after completion when, upon handing in the pages, you could be subjected to the torture of standing before the monitor as your words were read, occasionally out loud. Sadists would instruct pages to be redone if your efforts were untidy, misspelled, boring, repetitive. Even just a rubbish piece of writing would mean starting again.

But the thing was, as punishments go, it was inconvenient and used up a load of time and it got in the way of things. It could be nerve wracking, but it was also quite stimulating and made you think. It actually improved your brain and in those days that made it a rare and unusual thing.

I remember my first Pages very well. I don’t remember why I got them – it was in my first term so I wouldn’t have been doing anything particularly terrible. There just wasn’t the scope aged 11. Talking after lights out – something appallingly shocking like that. Anyway, I was given four pages on America. America!  In retrospect it was such an easy topic I wonder why the Monitor bothered, to be honest. I like to think he was being kind. Anyway, I set to and 20 minutes later it was done.

And finally, we have arrived at my point. I came to quite enjoy the exercise of writing pages on a topic at the drop of a hat. I got quite good at it (after some non-voluntary practice). I have always thought I remained competent and yet when does one ever get presented with that requirement when you reach, ahem, senior years? This exercise of writing a newsletter, performed weekly is produced under the same conditions, or as near as possible, to those of 55 years ago. (Though I don’t think I’ll carve my name into this particular desk, thank you). I sit down in front of the keyboard, my mind a blank and wait to see what comes into my head. The reason for publishing it is that it means I have to keep my standards up and the exacting deadline puts me under a bit of pressure especially if, like today, it’s the evening before Friday publication.

The next question is how to select topics to write about. This week I was described by a subscriber as obsessed by music. Obsessed? Well, I suppose there just may be something in that and it’s certainly true that I could easily just drone on about music from the last 60 years for week after week, but in the end I think I’d bore myself and you, dear reader, rigid.

Plus, it really isn’t that much of a challenge. Therefore, I’ve allowed myself to write a few more personal pieces which made me think quite hard and became quite a minefield in some respects. I do however love to indulge that deeply British penchant for understatement and cynicism, which means that serious writing isn’t ever really going to be possible. The other thing I’ve attempted to do is to make the newsletters at least a little diverting. I know I have to earn my subscribers.

Finally, what of the future for this…thing? Rather worryingly for you all I have now got into something of a groove, to the point where I look forward to the mental exercise. I’d be slightly less that honest if I didn’t admit that at least some of the point is an experiment to see if I could cobble anything together that might suit a wider audience on a paid basis. I haven’t pursued anything in that vein at all, but well, who knows….. maybe one day, eh?

Meanwhile six pages on the sex life of the ping pong ball coming up…….