h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, that's right, I've left myself 25 minutes to spare to write a journal entry of some sort of merit. And it's my day off today. Well, I had to (sort of had to) slog out in the rain so that Raven and I could visit and elderly ex-neighbour of ours who is now in a residential care home owing to his diabetes and advancing senility. Other than that, I've not been overly pressed for stuff to do.

The trouble is that, like a lot of people, I guard my free time jealously. A day off means a lie-in, a chance to sit and listen to some of radio favourites on i-player, and chance to spend with the animals and a chance to generally relax.

So why I am doing this if I don't want to? Well I do, I love this, I love writing, and if I'm honest I quite like this ridiculous business of writing against the clock. That's why I'm still writing now, rather than having given up two paragraphs ago and called it a day. That's why my hastily typed prose is so littered with typos, I've very little interest in the technicalites in the moment (they will drive me mad later) I just have words floating around in my head that I want to get out. So hear I am, at a quarter to midnight, not so much trying to get a job done as trying to prolong the process of doing it. Trying to think of things to say so that I can keep on talking, stringing the words together and maybe chancing on a neat little turn of phrase that I can be quietly pleased with later.

It's the writing, for me, that is one of the features that makes this place special. The writing, the knowledge and the thought. No coincidence, I guess, since many of us must have been inspired to come here by a very fine writer who's ability to craft simple facts into masterly prose through his deleight of them and his skill with words is so constantly reflected in this site and it's content. I read a Dan Brown novel once. I hated it. Really. I read it because it was a birthday gift from my cousin and I thought I might as well try and read one of the most talked about of modern writers. But he can't write, he has the natural lingustic fluidity of a man who speaks english as a second language. I know many of you guys on this site for whom English *is* a second language, and you all write better than Dan Brown.
So you can keep wikipedia, google and all these other sites that indriminantly churn out facts and pseudo facts without love or joy or skill. I'd sling them all in a skip over a place that does what it does well, because we just can't help it. It's in our DNA.

[Amy P]

{many of us must have been inspired to come here by a very fine writer who's ability to craft simple facts into masterly prose through his deleight of them and his skill with words is so constantly reflected in this site and it's content.}

Oh, don't. You're embarrassing me now

Icy!

Well, English *is a second - or maybe even third (growing up with two languages used intertwined) language for me but I'm not sure that makes me a good writer.