We said it last night, in fact. John and I are back at lovely Highgreen Manor in Northumberland where last year, in March, we spent two days sitting out in our shirtsleeves beneath a hot sun and strangely bare trees.

Now it’s May. The trees are starting to green, but half an hour ago there was a hailstorm. Cradled in its fold in the hills, the place nevertheless feels protected. It’s a safe place and you need to feel safe if you’re looking for your voice, especially in the company of others.

Creating that feeling of safety is a crucial part of what we do. People who are finding their voices must feel that they are not being judged; that they are free to go where their instincts take them without fear of criticism or ridicule. So we work hard to create an atmosphere where that is possible. Our physical surroundings play their part in that.

But then what happens? What does it actually mean to ‘find your voice’? Well, it’s not literal. We’re not working with singers. So to some extent we’re using the word ‘voice’ metaphorically. But either way, it is still about finding something authentic.

This morning we heard people reading out the opening paragraphs of their autobiographies, an exercise we had set them last night. The voices were unique, of course, but it wasn’t so much the sound and the choice of words, as the way in which the writers had, perhaps unwittingly, expressed so much of what they stood for, that really distinguished them from one anther.

To paraphrase Wordsworth, they were speaking themselves truly. I don’t think it would be over-simplifying things to say that they were doing it by concentrating on what they had to say rather than the manner in which they said it. If language is thought given form, then what we call the ‘voice’ is really a manifestation of the way an individual perceives and responds to the world around them. You could say it’s the text rather than the typesetting.

Finding one’s voice as a writer, therefore – or simply as a human being, is more a matter of becoming clear about what one has to say than how one will say it. And that, of course, means knowing who one is and where one is going. No wonder people need to feel safe before they set about articulating that clearly, sometimes for the very first time.

On a different subject, As I Died Lying, our collective novel, which I wrote about last week, has achieved 33% of its required pledges already – a tremendous result. But we’ve still got 66% to go. So do please visit the Unbound website (click here) and take a minute to read the blurb, watch the movie and help us towards the target with a pledge. A copy of this unique literary endeavour will be yours!

It was a response to the question What next? from some of our more persistent students – although to call them students suggests something that’s very wide of the mark. They’re all skilled, experienced writers and communicators and they have as much to teach us as we them. But they wanted more Dark Angelry and we felt obliged to come up with something. So the collective novel was conceived.

In February we took ourselves off to Inverness-shire, 14 of us, and spent a chilly weekend in a large house figuring out how to write a book together. I’ve previously posted about it here, mainly in amazement at the collaborative spirit that broke out among us. We left at the end of the weekend with a plot outline and a rough notion of which of the 15 characters (one archangel had hit a snag with his weekend flight plan) was due to appear at which points in the story.

Co-ordination was clearly going to be critical, so the next thing was to appoint a project manager. One of our number duly put her hand up (there might just have been an archangel standing behind her at the time) and Claire Falcon-Windsor was appointed. Everyone approved. You don’t argue with someone with a surname like that.

Now it’s May, Claire’s cracking the whip, and the chapters are starting to come in. Very exciting it is, too. Characters are developing, voices are firming up, and the plot’s advancing nicely. The story is loosely (very, very, very loosely) based on As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s southern classic. Our novel, As I Died Lying, also follows the final journey of a dead woman and her family to her chosen resting place. But there all similarities cease – and for the moment I’ll say no more.

I will say, however, that we have a publisher. This is Unbound, founded two years ago by John Mitchinson and friends. John had a distinguished career in publishing before becoming the head of research for QI, where he sets the questions and writes the Quite Interesting books. His new venture, Unbound, relies very effectively on crowd-funding. It’s already had several successes and we’re naturally hoping that As I Died Lying will become another.

So here comes the pitch. For our mad idea to see the light of day, later this year, we need pledges. They can be big or small, but they all count. Once enough people have pledged enough money, Unbound will press the button and we (and hopefully you too) will have a book. If we don’t get enough pledges it will be consigned to the dustbin of publishing history, but we’re not even thinking about that.

There’s everything you need to know about it here – a brilliant short movie, a short sample chapter, a description of how it all came about, and most importantly an invitation to pledge.

So please, Dear Readers, take this in the spirit in which it was intended  – as a brazen plea for you to put your hands in your pockets. In just a few months you could be holding in that same hand a copy of what may be the world’s first collectively written novel. Imagine that.

This view of HR as the corporate version of the Red Caps is one that’s by no means confined to the BBC, and there’s little doubt in my mind that language has a part to play in it.

Of course large organisations – all organisations – have to have rules and where there are rules there need to be people charged with policing them. But HR has many other functions, including that of ensuring that people enjoy agreeable and conducive working conditions. The problem is that the language of authority and discipline seems to spill over into these other areas of activity, where the damage is compounded by the arcane vocabulary – a weird cocktail of psychobabble and management-speak – peculiar to human resources.

In all the years I’ve worked in business, some of the most incomprehensible gibberish I’ve ever heard has emanated from human resources departments, also some of the most toxic language. Having said that, I have to add that there are many caring, well-intentioned people working in HR, and that I believe this is largely a sin of omission, not commission. But it is nevertheless a sin.

The language we hear is part of the environment we work in, like the temperature of the room or the colour of the carpets. If it’s peremptory and impersonal at best, menacing at worst, it creates an atmosphere which, at best, makes it hard for people to feel engaged, at worst makes them feel they’ve been consigned to some kind of gulag.

I ran a writing programme some years ago for a local authority. When asked to show examples of what they considered to be bad writing, people invariably produced material from the HR department, including letters to staff who were on sick leave (often for reasons of stress) that would have been more than enough, it seemed to me, to push someone in an already fragile state over the edge.

People don’t realise quite what an emotional impact this kind of language has. Just this week we asked staff of a large cultural institution to do the same thing – bring along examples of good and bad business writing. ‘I detest this language,’ said one person, her voice shaking, ‘I truly detest it,’ as she held up a communiqué to the entire staff about something or other from the senior leadership team.

The leadership team in question is almost certainly oblivious to the effects of their utterances. These leaders will never have stopped to consider that their staff may ‘detest’ – a very strong word – the language in which they are spoken to, and that if they do, they are very unlikely to follow their leaders with any enthusiasm.

Someone recently suggested to me that when it comes to modern business-speak the MBA has much to answer for. It’s interesting to note that this much sought-after qualification is a Masters in Business Administration, not in Business Creation or Business Leadership, and certainly not in Business Imagination. The language of the MBA is the language of process. From there, alas, it’s often a short step to the language of coercion and control.

Holidays apart, I’ve made a determined effort to write every week since then, however busy or tired I am, and I don’t think I’ve missed more than three weeks in all the nearly four years. Sometimes the regime does feel tyrannical, but I also know that it’s a good exercise in summoning my most present preoccupations and giving voice and form to them without the luxury, or hindrance, of too much forethought.

To my continuing amazement, people seem to find my ruminations entertaining, occasionally even thought-provoking – though, I’m relieved to say, not so much so that anyone takes me to task for going absent without leave, as I did last week.

Last week it was a combination of exhaustion and pressure to prepare for the coming weekend that proved too much. The previous ten days seemed to have involved non-stop workshops and by Thursday evening I knew I didn’t have it in me. I wrestled with myself for a couple of hours, then surrendered, went to the pub and woke up on Friday morning feeling better for it and quite untroubled by any kind of guilt.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that although we need the constraints of deadlines, processes and benchmarks in our working lives, we also benefit greatly from breaking routines and occasionally taking time out to freewheel. The thought was almost immediately underlined by an email from the chairman of one of the organisations for whom I’d run a workshop the previous week. He particularly appreciated that we’d had no objective for the day, he said, adding that perhaps his team would remember it for having captured what they were trying to do without being too prescriptive.

There had, in fact, been an objective, but it was simply to connect the team with the way they felt about what they did, so that the vision and purpose of the organisation could be articulated in a more emotional and less rational way. And there had also been a result which, I’d like to think, was that people had left with a feeling of renewed energy, creativity and engagement. But it had not been a normal day in the office and there had been no great pressure to justify what we were doing by ‘coming up with something’ at the end of it.

There’s a growing body of evidence that we’re at our most creative when we’re removed from the structures, and strictures, of our habitual routines. Problem-solving is harder within familiar tramlines. Leaps of the imagination are much more likely to occur behind the wheel, or in the shower, or on a walk, than at one’s desk.

And so it also proved over the weekend. Eight brave souls took time out to come on a journey with Sarah, my wife, and me. We spent two days exploring aspects of the stories about ourselves and our families that we carry through life with us. It was, as we predicted, a weekend of telling and listening and reflecting, of laughter and some tears, and above all of connecting with one another. Perhaps its most salient feature was the fact that there was, again, no particular objective. We offered people a path and simply walked with them while they decided where they wanted it to take them.

It’s such a different approach to the one we take so much of the time in our working lives, yet it can produce such worthwhile results. It seems that sometimes time out can be more valuable than time on the clock.

Asking people to stop for a while and think about something they do quite instinctively is always instructive, as much for the trainers as the trainees. We all know that telling stories is one of the most natural of human activities, even those of us who don’t think we do it very well. But start to look at how stories work – at the neuroscience and the psychology, start to think about why one is telling them, and suddenly something that seemed as easy as breathing becomes a lot more complicated.

There’s a process of deconstruction, and the first thing to go is spontaneity as it dawns that the story one used to tell about one thing is not really about that at all. For example, the tale of that dreadful moment when there was a fire in the electrical cupboard and the store was evacuated without incident, is not about seamless teamwork; it’s actually about how the teller came through a particularly tricky situation with flying colours.

As my fellow trainer, Julie, and I discussed over dinner, the first night, all stories are really metaphors. Every story we tell stands for something else, whether we realise it or not. And that moment of dawning for the novice storyteller is usually a simultaneous recognition of several things: the unconsciously self-serving nature of many of the stories we tell, the difficulty of telling a story really well, and the power they have if we tell them properly.

Stories allow us to bring meaning to the world around us. They shine light into the darkness. They are, as Julie said, ‘the fire in the cave’. It’s a wonderful image, and one that brings to mind a film I have watched several times recently, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Herzog is granted very limited access to the Chauvet Caves, in the Ardeche. He weaves his own story around the technical difficulties of lighting and filming the interior of the huge cave system, over a very short time, without stepping off the foot-wide metal walkways installed by the French authorities to protect the place. Meanwhile he leads us on a journey to explore the astonishingly beautiful paintings that had remained a secret for more than 30,000 years, until three French scientists stumbled on the cave entrance, just before Christmas 1994.

There are horses snickering in fear at the approach of a pride of cave lions. There are lumbering mammoths and a clash between two woolly rhinos. There’s a strange projection of rock where the head of a bull surmounts human, female genitalia. There are the skulls of huge cave bears. There are soot marks from pine torches on the ceilings, and the sooty handprints of their bearers on the walls. Best of all, in the dust of the cave floor are two sets of prints, the feet of an eight year-old boy and, just behind, the paws of a wolf. Did they travel into the depths of the cave as companions, or as hunter and prey? Or did their journey into the darkness take place thousands of years apart?

Everywhere one looks in the eerily silent chambers there are stories told with breathtaking skill by people taking refuge from the chill of the last ice age, people whose artistry bridges the millennia in an instant. What was their purpose? Of course we don’t really know, but some form of shamanism seems likely, some sense of the porousness of boundaries between human, animal and spirit. And the paintings become more astonishing still when one realises that their creators deliberately used the contours of the rock, along with the flicker of torchlight – the only light available to either painter or viewer in those deep, mysterious places, to give them movement and bring them alive.

A thousand generations ago, those artists lit a flame that burns on in our imaginations to this day. That’s what businesses now want to tap into. The fire in the cave.

The trees are still leafless, and across the water is Eastwood House, where Beatrix Potter stayed as a young woman and wrote the Tale of Peter Rabbit in a letter to the children of a former governess. Every time I look at the walled garden, sprawled along the opposite bank, I think of Mr McGregor chasing Peter out of the lettuces.

But today I had rabbitry of a different kind in mind. I’ll be at Merton College, Oxford this time next week with my partners, John and Stuart, running the third Dark Angels masterclass. One of the tasks we set everyone, including ourselves, in advance of the course, is to read a novel that has an Oxford connection, then write a piece of dry financial services literature in the style of that book. In previous years I’ve drawn Zuleika Dobson and Three Men In A Boat. This year I drew Alice in Wonderland.

It’s a wonderful exercise in rendering absurd the pompous, self-congratulatory waffle that pours forth daily from banks and building societies and other financial institutions the length and breadth of the land. With the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle to hand, the scope for comic surrealism is boundless. I’m looking forward to writing it this weekend before I set off.

Were they not so alarming there would be something almost as comically surreal about the images we’ve been seeing from Pyongyang this week. Watching the grimacing young leader, spluttering newscasters and goose-stepping soldiers is like having disappeared down another rabbit hole, of an altogether more sinister kind. And then, in the very week that the North Korean nuclear sabre is being rattled more loudly than ever, David Cameron chooses to visit Faslane and make his defence of Trident – a deterrent which, at least according to the SNP, the great majority of Scots feel they never asked for and can’t wait to be rid of.

And so, via rabbits and rabbit holes, I seem to have ended up where I started last week – the Independence question, which gives me the opportunity to respond to Steve Rawson who commented on last week’s post. That the economic question is not the right one to be asking, I agree. Independence would be for a long time; economic forecasting is accurate for a few months at best, and whatever the great oil carve-up might produce, Scotland would still be better off than practically any other country that has ever struck out on its own.

But on the question of kinship, I disagree. To paraphrase, Steve suggested that if Scots and English feel they are kin, they should stick together. The theme for this blog, A Few Kind Words, has its roots in that same place, of kindness in its original sense of being kin, or of the same kind. I’m all for the benefits of kinship, and kindness, and hope that sentiment would persist whatever happens in 18 months’ time. But when it comes to it I don’t let my kin determine my life choices.

We had the inevitable conversation, during which he seemed quietly confident that things are not as the pollsters portray them, citing the SNP landslide in 2011 as evidence of the fact that people often don’t reveal, or perhaps even know, their real intentions until polling day. He was certainly in the right place to make such an assertion: on that occasion the SNP took 61 per cent of the vote in our area.

He also spoke with satisfaction of the findings of the Fiscal Commission, the four wise men, including Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who have pronounced that by international standards Scotland is a wealthy and productive country, and that there’s no doubt it has the potential to be a successful independent nation.

Which is all very well if you’re happy to be relegated to the international standing of a country like Denmark, exposed to the vagaries of an economy one-tenth of the size of the UK’s, and susceptible to the internal divisions that may arise once the focus of opposition no longer lies across the Tweed. So run some of the counter-arguments. And so the debate will continue for the next 18 months.

I’m neither a politician nor an economist, and I know that each side will deploy the figures and arguments that best serve its cause. As one of the great uninformed, I tend to be swayed by the last convincing argument I’ve heard. But on this occasion, I find myself reacting on a more visceral level.

Perhaps it’s something hereditary: my great-great-uncle, RB Cunninghame Graham, about whom I’ve written before, was a Scottish laird of ancient lineage who first, along with Keir Hardie, pioneered socialism in Britain and was a founder of the British Labour Party; then became President of the Scottish Home Rule Association, in 1928, and finally Honorary President of the Scottish National Party, when it was formed in 1934.

His views at the time included the notion that Scotland is “a distinctive nation” which suffers from being “a mere appendage to the predominant partner.” “We want a renaissance,” he went on, “a re-birth of Scottish literature, art and sentiment. We can only induce these things by agitating for national self-government.”

Today he might have expressed it slightly differently, using terms such as ‘culture’ and ‘identity’. But this is the level on which I respond and, semantics aside, feel myself drawn by a momentous sense of possibility. While, like most Scots I know, I have absolutely no reason to hold anything against the ‘predominant partner’, I can’t ignore the fact that Scotland is a very different place to England in so many ways – economically, socially, culturally, internationally; and the chance for it to reassert that difference, freely and wholeheartedly, to walk in the world as a fully self-determining, sovereign nation seems to me to represent the greatest and most thrilling opportunity of our lifetimes.

Since returning to Scotland in 1990, I’ve been acutely aware of the bad story that continues to infect the Scottish psyche, the story of military defeat and occupation, of clearance and emigration, of poverty and dependency, of industrial decline and low economic output, of sectarianism, alcoholism, chronic bad health and sporting failure.

Of course, that story is less than half of it, and it’s only about the last 300 years, the period of political union. But for too long it has had a disproportionate hold on people. As someone who’s generally preoccupied with the power of stories, I can’t help thinking that independence would allow us to start telling a new story, in a way that would be profoundly energising, liberating and esteem-giving – with all the material benefits that would consequently flow. Certainly the idea that Scotland, alone of small countries in Europe, should be incapable of managing its own affairs, seems far-fetched.

I have no intention of following my great-great-uncle into politics, but perhaps what I have inherited is his romanticism; as well as being a politician he was also a dreamer, an adventurer and incurable champion of underdogs. As time goes on I realise that this for me is deeply, perhaps even irrationally, a matter of the heart. And I know I’m not alone. According to my dinner companion, even the normally imperturbable Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was ‘in pieces’ at the formal signing of the treaty which sets the referendum date, last week in Edinburgh.

Whatever one may think, this is an extraordinary moment in which to be living in Scotland. The world will be watching us.

Common sense says that, if not actual fisticuffs, there would at least have been irreconcilable differences over the direction of the plot, or the relationships between the characters, or the tone or the setting.

But this was Dark Angels and that isn’t what happened. We spent the weekend in a kind of mounting and largely consensual creative fever, assisted by vast quantities of food, a majestic drinks cupboard, and a number of stags and other unfortunate ungulates egging us on from their observation posts high up on the walls of Balavil, the large Adam house in the Highlands where we were staying.

There was discussion, of course, even disagreement, but by Sunday night we had achieved the near miracle of bringing 14 characters to life and developing the admittedly very rough but workable outline of a plot. With some further tuning of the story, and a little editorial guidance, everyone will soon know more or less what their character needs to do and think, when. Then all they need to do is get writing.

But why should Dark Angels represent such an outbreak of collaboration and harmony when it would have been perfectly reasonable to expect conflict? The answer, I think, is that unlike some purely creative writers, most people who come on our courses, and certainly everyone involved in this particular adventure, have had many years’ experience of the collaborative requirements of the business world. Which is not to say that they’re not creative writers – there are some writers of beautiful fiction and wonderfully elegant non-fiction among them – but they all know how to behave as team players when the need arises. In fact our process was probably not unlike that of the writers’ team for a TV drama. So, they were all prepared to subordinate their egos to the needs of the story – which in itself says a great deal about the power of a good story.

This is also the theme of another adventure I’m embarking on next month, this time with my wife, Sarah. We’re running the first of what we hope may become a series of workshops together, on the subject of personal stories – the ones we tell all the time about the experiences of our lives; and how, if we take time out to think about them, to look at them in a fresh light, they can offer valuable insights into how we connect with ourselves and the world around us.

And why would one want to do that? Because, we both believe, it’s a process that can help people to lead their lives more richly and fully. In our different roles, Sarah as a counsellor, me through Dark Angels and other work, we’ve both seen it happening, we’ve both seen someone experience an unexpected, possibly life-changing moment of understanding or creative expression through the retelling of a story.

Call it personal development, perhaps, though that has a rather earnest ring to it. What we really want is for people to spend a couple of days being thoroughly energised, inspired, entertained and moved by a fresh look at the narrative luggage they’ve carried with them all their lives, and the possibilities of expansion and change that may lie hidden within it.

These stories we tell, there’s no end to the surprises they hold for us …

The Stories We Tell, a two-day workshop, 20 & 21 April, Birnam Arts, Birnam, Perthshire. Click here for details

We obviously won’t get it written over the weekend, but if we’re not too distracted by the views of the Cairngorms and the not-inconsiderable hospitality of our hosts, Allan and Marjorie Macpherson-Fletcher, we should at least leave with a good idea of who does what next. That’s the plan. Though there’s many a slip twixt dram and book.

Two years ago John Simmons and I were involved in a similar, though less ambitious (some would say insane), project. We were writing Room 121 as a weekly exchange of blogs that turned into a book – a collaborative book that maybe contained the germ of the Balavil idea.

For this week of the year our exchange was on the subject of writing and editing, which neatly fits our preoccupations this weekend. This is what I wrote (titled Spit and polish). John plans to post his answering piece from the book in his blog, 26 Fruits, next week.

You’ve mentioned two poetic forms in the last couple of weeks – haiku and sonnets. Both set challenging constraints. Both demand that you think very hard about what you have to say, and choose the words to say it very carefully. It’s most unlikely that you’ll complete either a sonnet or a haiku at the first pass. The sonnet will have an untidy thought that needs polishing, the haiku a word that needs changing to set the syllable count right.

The first draft of anything is seldom the best. If you want what you write to hit the mark and be memorable, you owe it to yourself not to press ‘send’ as soon as you reach the final full stop. Even a trip to the coffee machine or a walk down the corridor can be enough to subtly alter your perception of what you’ve just written when you return. An absence of only a couple of minutes can put the spotlight on that little passage of woolly thinking or throw that awkward phrase into relief. And you’ll notice even more if you’ve been able to leave it overnight.

I’ve always thought of editing as almost the most creative part of the whole process. I wrote my first few novels straight onto the computer, unable to resist the temptation to edit as I went along, always straining for perfection before I moved on. They took forever. Then I changed my approach completely. I started writing the first draft fast, by hand, in notebooks, focusing only on the story, not the language.

Two things happened. First of all, I got to the end in a fifth of the time and there was more urgency and more fluency in the telling. The story read faster and, to my mind, better. Secondly, I began to love the second draft stage when I could polish and fine tune, sculpt, tweak and fiddle, free of the pressure to keep the story moving along at the same time. And although, interestingly, I found that what I’d written tended to need less editing than I would have expected, I always felt that this was the stage at which I was really giving full rein to my craft. It was actually the most satisfying part of the process.

The pressures of business life mean that you won’t have the luxury of several weeks’ polishing time, probably not even several days. But even a few minutes can make the difference between something that merely does the job and something that has a little shine to it.

The difference is that there I simply use it as an alternative way of getting my handwritten first draft into electronic form, whereas here I’m speaking aloud as I think. It seems awkward. I find myself pausing lengthily as I figure what I want to say. And I can’t see it once I’ve said it, because I’m not looking at the screen but – in classic dictator pose – leaning back in my chair and staring out of the window. It feels like a different, almost alien process.

Perhaps just as well that it’s been a quiet week. I’m waiting for a number of projects to come through and I’ve used the time to revisit my website. I do it periodically and it always involves a kind of stocktaking, not only of my business life, but my personal life too. I find it increasingly hard to differentiate between them, and I’m not sure that it’s helpful to try.

This is what I’m looking at. I’m 63 and I have no pension so I’m going to have to keep working for the foreseeable future. By some standards it’s improvident not to have put money aside as I’ve been going along. But I’ve raised four children as a freelance, two of whom have done short stints in private education, and the youngest, Jake, is now a few months short of graduation. So by a different measure I haven’t done too badly, and it’s not surprising that the Jauncey coffers aren’t overflowing with savings.

Given that I’m going to have to work another dozen years or so, I’m lucky that I enjoy what I do. But I also feel pressure to make sure I use what remains of my working life as productively and fulfillingly as I possibly can. Because I do a number of different things, I’ve always found it slightly difficult to describe myself; and re-visiting the website, or as my Dark Angels colleague Stuart Delves so neatly put it, ‘re-calibrating the brand’, highlights the question: where should I focus my energy?

Most of what I do is interconnected. I write books (when I have time), which links to language and storytelling, the two areas of expertise I employ in the business world. I play music, and that links back to what I hear in the rhythm and cadences of the voices, literal and metaphorical, with which I work. I enjoy performing which also crosses the boundaries between music and books, business and teaching, but I’m not particularly good at extemporising – I need a framework, a good solid structure, behind me before I feel confident enough to go off on a riff.

I love the connecting power of language and stories and music, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing other people experience that power for themselves. It makes me feel quite messianic. I want people to understand that the imagination offers the route to stronger and deeper connections with absolutely everything. So I want to help enrich others’ lives.

And I want to keep enriching my own. Although I’m not religious, I’m tempted by alternative views of the world, by the possibility of those things whose existence science can neither prove nor disprove. It simply makes the world a more interesting, a more exciting place, to believe that there might, for example, be ghosts or extraterrestrials than to deny their possibility. I’ve always felt slightly sorry for the super-rationalist, the hardened sceptic.

And there, gentle readers, my ramblings for this week must end (I’ve noticed a direct correlation between how early I post on Friday and how many of you get round to reading the blog). I haven’t answered my own question but maybe, if nothing else, I’ve demonstrated that writing tends to result in a more coherent post than dictating!