Ugh, just come to the end of a couple of weeks o’ slow torture. What? I hear you ask, were the natives keeping you in a bamboo enclosure buried up to the neck in the burning tropical sun? Oh no, silly person, of course not. It is winter now, dolt!

No, I speak of the activity I have recently been dragged into by my Greco-New-Yorkian mucker Mr. Danny Itoh. For we have been writing a faux English textbook allegedly to be employed upon the poor unsuspecting gruntlets out in some godforsaken rural backwater who “study” in a two-year grease monkey ‘n’ hairdresser college. So yeah, like it’s dumbed down to “me blue-eyed Aryan god, you slouching disaffected Oriental yoof with a stupid haircut.” Or somefink like that.

Anyways, normally one sets out on the road to publication with a good wadge of time before those nasty little things called deadlines appear. But oh no, not us. Mr. Danny Itoh informs me that the alleged textbooks must be landing on students’ desks by the first week of April. Hmm, wait a sec, so that leaves us with…..what the….?!??

And so it is without pause that I have been connected to sexy MacBook all hours of the day and night, usually in some branch of a well-known caffeine supplier famed for the economic rape of Ethiopia, desperately grappling with the duplicitous and gargantuan problems involved in the pea-brained scheme.

For ’tis not the actual material for said tome that is tricky (nay, as a professional headucator of long standin’ I have of course accrued and sequestrated away an whole bunch of crap wot I can employ in any hestablishment of higher learnin’ at the drop of a mortar board, or was that mortar shell?), no, my friends, it is the translation of said material from the cobwebby collywobbled lobes of your humble narrator to the helectronic page that is the nub of the problem.

See, these here computers look all shiny and nice an’ all, but when it comes do doing anything serious with ‘em, they go all uncooperative and try their hardest to block you in your creative endeavours. The worst offenders, of course, are word-processing softwares. You all remember that nauseating and annoying animated paper clip that would pop up in early versions of Microshaft Weird, right? You know, it would keep offering you suggestions that you didn’t want, and even when you’d actually worked out how to turn the bugger off, he’d secretly start screwing with you from inside the programme, monkeying with your lists, automating this, automating that, preventing you from moving this thing here without all these other carefully aligned bits to disperse throughout your project like startled pigeons.

I’d hoped that Mac’s word processor would be a little better - but oh no, same old shite here too, meaning that more than half of this would-be author’s battle is with the very machinery allegedly designed to help him.

Bah! Mumble-grumble, mumble-grumble….(slopes off into background and kicks something…