Dec. 17, 2015
I am writing a long post that I will either publish as one long post (about five or six thousand words) or as about seven smaller ones each closer to the average post length of about eight hundred words. I have to get it out-of-the-way soon as my mind needs to focus on my health economics essay.
It is hard to write short posts to a timetable, let alone churn out long posts on a regular basis. As a result, this longer post is not likely to become the norm. It’s an idea I had that bloomed into something ever bigger and this time I decided to have a crack at it.
My WordPress dashboard includes a post that I wrote over two months ago in my “recent” posts. The swanky new WordPress.com app has an insights tab in its stats section that shows a heat map of posts by month and mine are looking rather sparse. Hence this little post to keep things going.
I’ve been rather busy. I’m an MSc student again, this time doing an MSc in Health Economics at the University of Surrey part-time. This involves a lot of time on the train and though this involves plenty of staring out of the window, it’s caused me to mull over this long post rather than generate lots of ideas for lots of little ones. Nevertheless I feel that the experience of going to lectures, of learning new things and meeting new people, is very satisfying indeed. It is keeping my mind ticking over.
It’s hard work and at this time of year when you don’t see much daylight it can be a bit tiring. The trains in this part of the world don’t help either. They are never on time and I think it’s getting beyond parody now, they’re that bad. On the other hand, it has been unusually warm this winter. Last year, I was huddled in my flat cursing the broken down boiler. This year I’m still sleeping above my covers like I do in the summer. Anyway, it’s hard work but it’s getting me good marks so I’m happy.
So keep your eyes peeled for a big post in the next week or two.
(2020 UPDATE: Oops, looks like that never happened. Which is a shame, given that the subject matter was pretty predictive of many events that would follow in the next four or five years.)