Two nights ago I sat down and started writing about how I’d never intended Sharpe’s Opinion to be ‘a politics blog’. About how I fell into talking about politics really, probably because it’s fairly easy to do and there’s always something new going on. I wanted to get across how frustrated I feel at party politics in general, how predictable the blogosphere seems to have been getting recently, and how really I wish I could go back and recapture exactly what it was about this little space on the web that really made me want to fill it with words.

I was going to explain how the posts on this blog that I consider to be my best, like The Encounter or A Small Victory, were when I was writing something entirely different, and much more personal. I thought I might mention Merlin Mann’s wonderful piece about ‘making the clackity noise’; his assertion that the only way to write well is just to write and keep writing, not worrying about what it is you’re saying exactly, until you’ve finished your story and you’ve said what you meant.

I was going to pull this section out and quote it:

Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, it’s impossible to know what’s in there until you’ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know what’s in there. But you don’t. It’s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, it’s your fingers.

…

Your brain’s a piece-of-shit writer. I know this, because mine is too. So, let me assure you that there’s no point in waiting for your brain to start making the clackity noise for you. It can’t. That’s all on you, and on me, and on each of our extant fingers.

My intention was not to suggest I wouldn’t be writing about politics any more, but just to try and get across how hard it is to stay enthusiastic enough about a subject that is so regularly so frustrating, and ultimately so frivolous. That when I start writing a post I always have a moment where I wince and wish I was one of those creative people who can swap some words round and turn a single thought into a story.

I had all these good intentions, but life got in the way. I didn’t make the clackity noise. I couldn’t tell you now if it was the smell of freshly cooked chilli or the call of my daughter in need of a bedtime cuddle, or even just the allure of an evening spent laid out on the sofa with my wife watching movies, but there was something more important to me at that moment than getting my thoughts written down, and it drew me away.

But between then and now, Blue Eyes apparently came to almost exactly the same viewpoint as I, but he sat down and wrote the words I had failed to put down. Even worse, he summed up the bulk of my sentiment so perfectly, so beautifully, so disarmingly concisely, that my entire planned post was rendered utterly obsolete, because all anybody really needed to say was:

I will write about whatever I damned-well fancy

Thank you Blue Eyes, for a fantastic post. But damn you all the same, for getting there first.