I have just discovered one reason why work has slowed down so much. I have been using a beta version of Openoffice, out of pure inertia, really, and a love of fiddling, and it turns out that the fucking word count is completely fucking fucked.
That’s what you get by writing a few paragraphs, selecting all, and counting the selected text as well as the whole doc. One of the ways in which it fails is that it doesn’t count any words at all in paragraphs that begin with double quotes. This is only really funny if you’re a journalist, and get paid for writing lots of paragraphs that begin with double quote marks. So I have written about 25% more words this week than I should have done; and most of them will now have to be stripped out. I shall laugh all the way to the recycle bin.