Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

Here is an old building down here in Salamanca that now houses luxury apartments, an art gallery, a gym and a hair salon. I'm not sure that the old crowd of convicts, prostitutes, drunken sailors, scallywags, scoundrels, reprobates, degenerates, ne'er-do-wells, rouges and rotters would be welcome around these parts any more. It’s all three hundred dollar sunglasses and designer pooches these days.

I have been looking at a report that I am currently working on, and pleasantly note that I am trying to do my best to keep the use of lovely words alive and well in the sterile, mundane and (frankly) pitifully constructed word of public policy. That said, I’m not sure what the insipid automatons of the field make of me talking about ameliorating harm, adroit policy shifts, a conflation of interests, diffuse reasoning, ephemeral outcomes, eschewing simplistic solutions or indeed the preponderance of nebulous ideas set before us.

I have a propinquity for beautiful words but this seems an anathema to the blandishments of modern, public communication. Of course, the opportunity to scintillate the dry, dull page with a redolent rhapsody of prose is my own little surreptitious way of easing the day’s labour.

If I can squeeze crepuscular in, I’ll die a happy man. Sadly, the Mercury has choosen not to quote me in this regard.