25th June 2005
I always wonder how columnists choose what they are going to write about. Presumably for most people, one week is much the same as the preceding one with a few minor characters shifted around (perhaps the person you saw at the bus-stop on Thursday morning is someone you recognise vaguely from a shop in town, rather than a rather eccentrically dressed, previously unknown bloke in his late fifties). Do you open the weekly papers and select a story at random and write about that? Do you think back on all the conversations that you have had in the last week and choose the most unusual, or the most usual? Do you pursue that thought that popped into your mind at 3am this morning and woke you up?
I don't think that any thoughts popped into my head at 3am, and if they did they were so unsuitable for writing about that my brain has very sensibly erased them. I did have a full 10 hours sleep last night (a real luxury), and I wonder how many solutions to the problems of the world winked in and out of existence during that time. Maybe that's why a nap is called "forty winks". Forty chances to solve the problems of world poverty, transport in Greater London and why the cat from next door loves sitting on our doorstep. And why forty, anyway? Surely some people are worth more than that? Does a Nobel prize winner have one hundred winks instead? But then by the law of averages, some would be worth less. Am I only a twenty winks person? Can I justify my sleeping existence on that basis? Should I attend night classes to improve my ratio of winks to hours asleep? Enough. If this is the sort of random thought I come up with when asleep as well as when awake, the world is better off not knowing.
