Sorry. Truly. It's probably lack of mental space. It might be reluctance to whinge. Anyway it makes blank pages.
At the moment I am Orpheus descending into deadline hell and there is no prospect of resurfacing much before Bonfire Night. Funny how taking on several strands of work over months can come back to bite you when, despite best efforts, they all need finishing at once.
Profound articles not written recently include: stuff about birthdays (my father in law, my wife and my daughter all share a birthday which passed last week): about mortality, with the death of the second bonsai tree paralleled by the acute physical decline of my father in law: about autumn, with the leaves gently dropping from trees inside and outside the house paralleled neatly by the gentle descent of my hair onto our many tastefully accoutered floors.
I struggled vainly to find the time to share the triumph I felt a couple of weeks ago when I finally got the juicer attachment back off the Magimix. It had got rammed on to the spindle during a particularly enthusiastic juicing session in which Jake converted our entire fruitbowl into an orangey goo, a large percentage of which did stay off the floor and proved delicious. But afterwards the reluctant attachment stayed put and remained as deaf to entreaty as Thatcher, lingering as uselessly as the unwelcome guest who turned up to your party uninvited, drank your drink and went to sleep on your sofa, immovable. Finally, after I had sagely lectured everyone for four days about how violence never solved anything, and during which I did actually try everything except violence, I unstuck it. I sneaked down in the night and hit it with a spanner, after which it came off meekly. I didn't admit this to the chldn, fearing an outbreak of undiscerning spanner wielding at future moments of junior frustration. Right lesson, wrong example.
So is this a blog any more? Probably not. It's become a rolling apology, which may be a new uniquely English art form of my own invention.