Waiting for the white smoke on my column ideas

HERE we are, column number three hundred and forty six on your hymn sheets. This column (or rather its predecessors) stretch back to March 2020 a time when I still had my own two natural knees.

- Peter Mortimer

Can you have been scribbling away on this column for five years plus, you ask and the answer is yes. I am occasionally stopped in the street or a local Cullercoats café (in which places I am world famous) where people enquire: “Mortimer, do you have a spare column tucked away on the laptop for that inevitable rainy day when the cupboard is bare and the well of inspiration has run dry?”

At such moments I hold up my hand and tell them to cease with the tired old metaphors as I am more than capable of supplying such items myself. But the honest truth is I am incapable of storing up spare columns like I might stack tins of baked beans in the food cupboard.

The timetable and deadline for writing a weekly column are both cruel and incessant. They demand each week's offering be despatched by Thursday afternoon at the latest.

Which means the small weekly honeymoon period is brief.