Letters to the Editor

What do I do in my waking hours? Well, I try to earn a living,  course, but I can’t say I get much of a kick out of that these days. There’s the garden, of course, but I’d rather not talk about that if you don’t mind…

I occasionally try my hand from time to time at writing a Letter to the Editor, in my case the Editor of the International Herald Tribune. Not in any cantankerous or obsessive spirit, just when something in an article attracts my attention. Surprisingly enough, I am sometimes published.

My latest effort dates from yesterday and concerns an article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft about the Colony Room Club in Soho, much frequented by the artist Francis Bacon and others in earlier times. On one occasion, when Bacon was rather the worse for drink, Wheatcroft was asked to get him [Bacon] out of the Colony, which he did “by taking him down the road to a casino where, since he could scarcely tell rouge from noir by then, he lost an enormous sum”. In my letter I asked whether the ability to tell rouge from noir would have made any difference to the amount of money he lost. I somehow doubt that I will be published this time round…

And then there’s my blog. Whatever else you can say about it, at least it’s still here a few years down the line. Did you know that only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati  have been updated in the past 120 days (2008 figures)? In other words, 95% of blogs have to all intents and purposes been abandoned.