grumpyf1

It’s the age of self-publicity. With easy access to the web, we can all get our scribblings read by a potentially enormous audience. But does that make us all ‘writers’? It has been my honour to pen (if you can call it that when it involves fat fingers and a keyboard) this newspaper column for almost two years now. By my calculations, that means you’ve had to endure the alarming experience of more than 50,000 of our language’s finest words being haphazardly assembled into sentences, before appearing in your newspaper underneath a frightening picture of me, seemingly sternly watching you to make sure you read it. Read it! I can only apologise. Whilst I accept that that makes me a Columnist, I’m still embarrassed when anyone suggests that I am therefore, by extension, also a Writer. Awkward, that. Whilst Douglas Adams’ genius certainly classes him as “An artist of the written word” (as one definition has it), and Bill Shakespeare “Contributes significantly to the cultural cont...