The art of ‘making up your own rules’
One of the great things about the Rust – and it took a while to dawn upon me – is our laissez-faire editorial policy. When I first joined I found it all rather disconcerting. Indeed I found I wasn’t by any means the only correspondent who had initially felt it that represented straightforward sloth and/or a worrying lack of direction as to the purpose of the enterprise and the choice of subjects we were covering, why and how.
It’s taken me a while, but since then I’ve gradually learned the benefits of ‘taking the foot off the accelerator’, stepping back and just generally embarking upon the occasional period of ‘masterly inactivity’, as someone once described it.
As with so many things in life, whatever your current subject of interest, how you see it depends largely upon your perspective on that particular day. When there are no rules to guide you, you end up creating your own – some from personal instinct, others worked out over time and through the grind of logical determination. Now I hold to the view that I’ve never met, written for, or been employed by, such a self-empowering organisation as this and yet simultaneously I have never felt a greater burden of responsibility as that imposed upon me (by myself?) whenever I post something here.
Which brings me to this contribution.
From time to time – most recently with its 75th anniversary being celebrated – Rust columnists have posted about Roy Plumley’s radio show Desert Island Discs broadcast on the BBC’s Radio Four. Today I’m providing a link to the article by Stephen Moss that appears today on the website of The Guardian for no other reason than that it gave me a good quarter of an hour of thought-provoking entertainment when I came across it this morning.
Readers can enjoy it here if they haven’t already come across it elsewhere – THE GUARDIAN
