On the importance of writing. From A.S. Byatt's Possession (an ingenious novel), here is a fair description of myself: ...when I told her of my great desire to write, and the great absence in my daily existence of things of interest, events or passions, which might form the subject matter of poetry of fiction, that it was an essential discipline to write down whatever there was in my life to be noticed, however usual or dull it might seem to me. This daily recording, she said, would have two virtues. It would make my style flexible and my observation exact for when the time came...when something momentous should cry out...to be told. And it would make me see that nothing was in fact dull in itself, nothing was without its own proper interest. So there it is. Validation for this blog. And "jocularly" is a word. I know that because I looked it up.