Oh I do like to be beside the seaside ...

... for a few days of creative retreat. Kiama on Australia's south coast - a mere 2 hours easy drive from Sydney, with pit stops and photo opportunities - had near-perfect weather. Although there was not a huge volume of creative product out-putted, I always figure quality is as important as quantity, at least in situations such as this. But who could resist sitting on a sunny veranda with a pot of tea and the daily crossword?

But my evening reading material of choice for this time it was a re-release of Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra (under 10 bucks in my now-favoured book emporium). I'd always found his characters were a bit too 'blokey' for my palette, but I'd forgotten how extraordinarily long his sentences are/were. Almost whole pages, in some cases.

Now I'm thinking that I want to revisit a whole lot of other authors of that period (Ice Station Zebra originally being published in 1963) to see if this is yet another trend that has been creeping up on us largely unnoticed.

Sure, huge numbers of our younger folk do not appear to be capable of concentrating beyond the span of a txt msg, but I'd thought of we older gentle folk as having a greater textual stamina. Maybe I'm wrong? Like, that'd be a first. Not.

(May I be permitted to admit that I do like my constructed phrase, 'textual stamina'? As far as I know, I just coined it. But I am told that sometimes we hear or read such phrases and then later recall them and imagine that they are our own creation. Anyone hear or read this phrase before? Or am I destined to yet again embarrass myself? Feel free to drop me a line on this.)