So, this morning as I waited for the vicar, I was wandering around the graveyard of Our Lady of the Beehive in the Fields.  Among the stones whose should I spot but... Grace Poole (think Jane Eyre) and Thomas Hardy... this place is well weird!

Driving back I spotted a cortege coming the other way along the road, so pulled over to allow it to pass unobstructed, well trained minister person that I am.  The drive behind me saw this as their excuse to race past, squeezing between the hearse and parked vehicles.  No manners, no time to live... and I really don't need the work that much!

I hate word limits.  I understand and appreciate why universities use them but they drive me nuts.

I hate absolute word limits absolutely, to plagiarise a well known phrase or saying.

So, I am about to start the third radical edit of a paper with a 6k word absolute limit that is currently still 300 words over.  My mother's (non-serious) suggestion was to delete every 20th word.  As it is I will remove a few not absolutely essential sentences, adopt a different 'grammatical' voice in a few places (not sure what it's called though - the 'radical edit voice' sounds about right) and hope to goodness this does the trick.  And in these days of electronic submission you can't even fiddle the declared word count... not that I would of course!

Ah well, back to the swingeing electronic razor blade!