Units of faffage

This month, I have mainly been on holi­bobs. And train­ing for a marathon. And read­ling lots and lots of Rebus, I mean, Rankin, in order to clear my head for the writ­ing marathon ahead. I’ve been care­fully stor­ing away faces and far away places in my head, ready to re-draw them on the page, or maybe screen. Still not in love with my plot, but must try. Fail. Try again. Fail bet­ter. And all that jazz.

Speak­ing of which, pre­cisely how much is ‘all that jazz’? Is there a unit of faffage beyond which things sim­ply become ‘jazz’? Although, in some cases, jazz can be a pos­i­tive — when it means snappy and you know, hep. Which sim­ply proves that the lex­i­cog­ra­phers and the discog­ra­phers rarely meet, as oth­er­wise any fule no that jazz would have more words in it. And less. Stac­cato. Noi.Ses. With _weird_ empha­sis onthenoteyouweren’texpecting. Which sounds not unlike a male cat hav­ing a bowel move­ment. If that cat could read. And what it was read­ing was the Daily Mir­ror. An arti­cle about wild dogs in Tonbridge.

So. Things poo­tle on. I had cause to speak to a pro­fes­sional blogereuse the other day, and I was reminded that one should really write every day, regard­less. Well, I have been blog­ging most days, but it is mainly of the ‘this is the ran­dom pain in my left knee that kicks in after twenty miles’ vari­ety, which I am fairly sure my one reader could do without.

Happy, though. Happy because my favourite word is once again ‘serendip­ity’. For a while ‘mel­liflu­ous’ was nos­ing ahead, but frankly, it’s not a word one can shoe-horn into con­ver­sa­tion all that often. Hmm. I bet there’s a really posh word for shoe-horn. That is, not feel­ing sex­u­ally aroused by shoes, but the spat­ula that inserts the del­i­cately turned heel of the bour­geoisie into on’e hand-made pumps. Although I heard on Radio 4 the other day them describ­ing the process of cre­at­ing ‘Taste the Dif­fer­ence’ cakes as being hand-made. As. If. It was made from hands. Choco­late hands. With frost­ing and hundreds-and-thousands on. Just to con­fuse CSI.

Dr O’Chief is writ­ing. He laid down the chal­lenge. Said he would write 50k words in April or some such non­sense. And because it’s him, he prob­a­bly has. I will have my revenge though. By being fun­nier than him. And remov­ing April from the months in which lit­er­a­ture is allowed to be written.

I’ve never eaten a daisy.

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