"Stuff happens". It also gets written and published. Occasionally readers express appreciation of what appears on this OpEd page. We all enjoy the page 10 letters to the editor (unless they make the same dogmatic points repeatedly). Those who write them are the paper's occasional visitors. We page 11 regulars are more like resident houseguests.

Sometimes we feel like family members but then remember that we have no tenure. After 18 years only Claire Hoy and Eric Dowd remain this column's contemporaries. One remembers Drew Brown, Iain Richmond, Gordon Kirkland and Eric Nagler, all men of infinite wit. But, as Omar Khayyam said, "The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on". They all they did so.

Like Uriah Heap in David Copperfield, and sporadic evidence to the contrary, we are humble men who would neither expect nor solicit a kind word from anyone. One is pleasantly surprised that so many people mention in daily intercourse (a word used in too narrow a context nowadays) that they enjoyed and passed along something published here, that has also entered cyberspace and will live eternally on film in the local archives.

None of us is as egocentric as was Mark Twain, the old humourist, who by invitation of Governor-General Lord Lorne attended in the viceregal party the opening of Parliament in May, 1883. Upon his return home he wrote, "Your Excellency, I have had other compliments paid me but none equal to the recent one in Ottawa. I have never before had a twenty-one gun salute fired in my honour". In our case, we know, as did Marshall McLuhan, that readership is our ultimate reward. "It is easy", he said in a Maclean's interview, "to produce writers but a public is harder to come by".

Most people have no idea the agony that can attend the ecstasy of writing. It is most exquisite in the creation of a novel that consists of many thousands of words. One author said that that enterprise involved staring at a blank sheet until drops of blood formed on the forehead. His advice to those with frequent writer's block was to sit down and force oneself to write something every day, even if it be a suicide note. Oscar Wilde said that some days he simply took out a comma from yesterday's manuscript, then the next day put it back again.

The chief compensation of a columnist is that while either a novelist or a scholar must devote months to the development of a work in progress, someone who has only a few words to write each week can flit about like a humming bird, sampling whatever delights him or her at the moment. But some sympathy is due to those who eke out their Tim Hortons coffee money by the production of so many columns a year for a local paper. Well, for any paper. A daily or hebdomadal (now, there's a word!) deadline can produce the anxietyunder pressure that must have been felt by George Gershwin when he sat backstage writing the final movements of "Rhapsody in Blue", the earlier part of which the Whiteman orchestra was already practising out front.

Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist, was a model of discipline. He had a day job in the British Post Office, wrote sports and political articles for magazines and was one of the moist popular novelists of the 19th Century. "I was at my table every morning at 5.30 a.m. and with the help of coffee completed my literary work before I dressed for breakfast". He aimed at 250 words every quarter of an hour during that three-hour period. In that way, he says in his autobiography, he produced ten pages of a novel daily and three novels annually.

On this side of the Atlantic [I took out an initial comma here] Herman Melville farmed in Berkshire County, Massachusetts while he wrote Moby Dick. "I rise at 8 and go to my barn, say good morning to the horse and give him his breakfast. Then I pay a visit to my cow. My own breakfast over, I go to my work room and light my fire, spread my manuscript on the table and fall to it with a will. At 2.5 p.m. I hear knock on my door which serves to wean me from my writing. My dinner over, I rig my carriage or sleigh and start for the village. My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmeric state in my room". Lamplight and poor eyesight made that necessary.

The New York short story writer, O,Henry (in reality William S. Porter) was an impecunious newspaper reporter who at one point had faced charges of embezzlement of funds from a bank and had fled the country. Returning to the U.S.A. upon hearing of his wife's illness, he found her dying of tuberculosis. He spent three years in prison where he began to write short stories that were published and well received. Upon his release he found himself to be famous under his pen name. His muse, it is said, was aided by as many as two bottles of Scotch a day. That would be beyond the competence of a weekly columnist, perhaps of a reporter.

O.Henry's Christmas tale, "The Gift of the Magi", tells of two young 'marrieds' each of whom, unknown to the other, sells a cherished possession in order to buy a present for the other. At the first of December his publisher pressed him for the manuscript. The illustrator had to know what to draw. "Just draw a picture of a poorly furnished flat", said O.Henry, "A young man and woman are sitting side by side talking about Christmas. The girl's principal feature is her beautiful long hair. The man has a watch fob in his hand. That's all I can think of now but the story will come". It is a seasonal 'should-read'.

As for newspapers, there is a 'todayness' or "this weekness" about what is written and published. But a community paper is a community talking to itself. Those who either condone or criticise what they read are an important part of the dialogue.