Normal Service

I am afraid that I glanced at my archive this morning and was chastened: only 20 posts since Springheel first leapt out of the London fog.

I struggled manfully to produce an average seven (seven!) posts a month and failed even to achieve this undemanding target in April. I can only apologise, raise my (immaculately manicured, alabaster white) hands heavenward and say "mea maxima culpa".

But what can one do? There is the Springheel Estate to manage, the constant demands of public service (to which I have devoted my life, my fortune, and my myriad talents), and of course there is one's creative work, the labour that fills those long dark hours a lesser man would dedicate to sleep. I make no apology for favouring revision of my eighteen volume history of the cravat ("a monumental opus of hubristic scope, staggering panache, and byzantine complexity" - Tailor and Cutter) over the petty demands of the electronic media. Would that it were all that placed demands upon my time. But there are also my fictional works, and of course, my beloved verse... And who can foresee the caprices of one's muse?

And then there is the intellectual hinterland to be irrigated and nourished...Schubert's exquisite string pieces, the complexities of Bach...my studies of the classic Ottoman Ney.... and farther back, the constant demands of cataloguing my enormous collections of renaissance medals, meso-american ceramics, and erotic photogravures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I am (as Frankenstein's monster so memorably said), a man of many parts.