“Five score and one posts ago my father’s son brought forth on this medium a new blog….” I could continue with the topical parody (last Tuesday marked 150 years since the original), but you get the picture, so I won’t.

100 posts is a time for reflection. It was my wife who encouraged me to give it a go in the waning days of 2011 and it is that same wife who never tires of telling me that the posts are too long. “You are an old bore”, she cautions me. “These days people don’ t have patience for that kind of thing, so keep it short”.

Old Bore? The three most enjoyable evenings I have spent in the last five years were, in no specific order: sitting in the front row of a  recording of BBC Radio’s “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue” – average age of cast, 75; seeing Garrison Keillor in a one-man show at a converted church in Kensington – average (and total) age of cast, 67; and attending a  Broadway performance of Jersey Boys – average age of cast unknown but it was about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons whose average age is problematic because one of them is dead. I suppose, my wife has a point.

On the other hand, what is wrong with being an old bore?

Is this blog likely to achieve more hits if I write pithy ten-liners, adding pyrotechnics and grainy pictures of a totally bald me in thick-rimmed, cool spectacles? Methinks, not.

But, if any of you out there in the ether (and I know you are there) think differently, just this once leave a comment.

That was, I think, the length my wife has been getting at. The problem is that I succeeded in writing absolutely ‘nada’. The bigger problem is that it is exactly the same length (270 words) as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, widely considered one of the greatest speeches in history. And you can’t get more Old Borish than having a beard and being dead for 150 years, can you?