May cause drowsiness: days 21 — 24

Con­sider this an abridged omni­bus edi­tion. Or con­sider me lazy. Whichever you prefer. In sum­mary, how­ever, this means that I have failed in my grand but pos­sibly fool­hardy inten­tions to pro­duce 31 pieces of writ­ing dur­ing the month of May, and won’t even be sat­is­fy­ing my OCD nature by going back to try and fill in the numer­ical gaps. My only con­sol­a­tion is that, sur­pris­ingly, I did at least man­age to make it as far as twenty entries before feebly throw­ing in the towel. Woe is me, etc.

In defence of my fail­ure, how­ever, I offer you the fol­low­ing. It is hot. Very hot. And I am Brit­ish. Very Brit­ish. Though not Brit­ish enough to join the throng of blokes wan­der­ing the streets and parks in shorts and san­dals (but, sig­ni­fic­antly, no shirts), proudly mod­el­ling the charm­ing raw-skinned lobster-red look that seems to always be in vogue on these shores. Well, I’m not get­ting my flab out for any­one, baby. I am stay­ing indoors, cur­tains drawn and out of the sun­light, top­ping up my unhealth­ily grey Eng­lish com­plex­ion and per­spir­ing a lot.

Also: my words are simply ill-suited to sum­mer. I am an autum­nal writer. At times, I verge on being pos­it­ively wintry. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been read­ing long enough. If I ever make it into print, I don’t fore­see my books being bought in air­ports by Hawaiian-shirted hol­i­day­makers look­ing for some­thing frivol­ous and escap­ist to read while soak­ing up skin can­cer on the beach. “Him? Oh no, dear. Far too maudlin. No sex, either. How about this six-inch thick bonk­buster with the shiny reflect­ing cover?” I don’t see my read­er­ship — that means you (sin­gu­lar, prob­ably) — as the type who reclines on a sun loun­ger in shades, sip­ping a cock­tail. No, in my mind’s eye I see the aver­age Unre­li­able Wit­ness fan as being someone shiv­er­ing in a depress­ing inner-city bed­sit in the depths of darkest Decem­ber, wrapped in a heavy over­coat and hunched over a one-bar elec­tric fire for mea­gre warmth, with their only com­pany provided by a syr­inge, a razor blade, and a bottle of wretchedly cheap gin. It makes me so proud.

If the puddle of sweat doesn’t suck me away forever, I will endeav­our to get back on sched­ule. Not that I’ve been com­pletely indol­ent. Some­where back there, I man­aged to write another piece for the new, eagerly keen and las­ci­vi­ously thrust­ing ‘Other’ magazine. It’s another thought­ful piece about an aspect of lit­er­ary style, but delivered via the sort of bad-tempered rant that I’m becom­ing known for in my advan­cing years. Some­what incred­u­lously, it comes adorned with a pho­to­graph of Brit­ney Spears, so even if you can’t stand my writ­ing, it’s worth going there to find out how America’s faded teen queen and I are inex­tric­ably linked.