There can be no excuse for slovenly writing. There is that rude awakening when your e-mails include comments on your careless errors. Some days you get more than others.
One reader was particularly incensed the other day over my rude and inaccurate remarks in discussing the United Kingdom and Brexit. While I admit the mea culpa for not noting that the UK never did accept the Euro, I always thought they should.
And there is a story to that. Back when my bride and I first arrived in London as tourists, the UK was still undergoing the change from shillings and crowns to a decimal pound. I would end up each day with a pocketful of strange mixed coins, fewer five pound notes and the feeling that I was being taken for a patsy. They probably thought we were Americans but we were surprised by the occasional rudeness we encountered. (Mind you, at the time, we had not tested our Ontario French on Parisians.)
As a professional writer, it is obviously ego that gets me to comment on subjects where others fear to tread. It is also the confidence that as a writer, I take pride in being able to research many subjects. I know too much about the Internet and the egregious errors that it can promote to trust any one source there.
But qualifying comments suffers sometimes with the continuing effort to find an interesting daily topic and to reduce the Babel-on-the-Bay word count. We found that our number of regular readers doubled every time we cut another 100 words from our comments. We will never compete with Donald Trump’s dominance of the 140 character Twitterverse, but we are very comfortable today at averaging less than 400 words on any posting. It just does not leave much room for qualifying every comment.
So, yes, we do know the difference between the free movement of labour and immigration in the EU. We erred. There are other (albeit smaller) EU countries not accepting refugees but that is no excuse for bigoted Brits to vote Brexit to avoid doing the humanitarian thing. They deserve shaming.
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Copyright 2017 © Peter Lowry
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