I had to unexpectedly write a tender yesterday.

For local government. It took me six hours, excluding time to go to the toilet.

If you are in local government, you can’t just give big contracts to your brother’s mate. They employ special procurement people to get you to write proper documents, which they then check very carefully.

This costs them more, but means they can gauge each response on a totally objective criterion, which is how many long words you have used.

This is very important, as it is taxpayers’ money.

I finished yesterday afternoon and it came to a good twelve pages. I then did a word count, and it came to about thirty-three, which indicated a satisfactory degree of long-wordness.

I’m no good at long words. Economy is my style. That is why this is the Tesco Value of blogs, except I only use fresh local ingredients that weren’t originally meant to be fed to dogs.

Blogs shouldn’t have long words, anyway. That’s not a style point, but an important technical thing. The PCs that the Internet runs on have only a certain amount of space on their hard disc, and if everybody used long words then they would have to buy an extra RAM pack.

Hopefully I won’t have to use long words again for a while. I have sent my document to the people who asked me nicely to write it, and all I need to do now is sit by the telephone waiting for the inevitable ‘what the fuck does this bit mean?’ calls.

Until then I shall resume talking to the rabbits.