An apologetic opening note doesn't entice many readers. If the blessed stoics out there dismiss enticement as mere frippery and plough on, their interest may well be dashed on the rocks of outrage when they realise what I am. Yes, I am yet another putative scribbler, a wannabe paperback writer currently lacking the tempo and mop-top zest of Lennon & McCartney's creation.

I'm sure the ruts are worn deep on this road, but I'm trying to reanimate and rejuvenate my writing in a very specific way. I used to enjoy playing with words and ideas in my free time, enrolled on a course, increased my output and had some modest published success resulting in not quite four figure earnings (not quite six if you include the pennies). Then I began to detest my day job in earnest and look for an exit strategy. Writing soon became a grinding chore, with every session at the keyboard a prolonged job interview before the most scathing critic I know.

At this point, I was beset by the biggest possible calamity for a workshy wannabe: I found myself with an unexpected glut of time off work, adrift on an ocean of leisure with no funnels of industry steaming my way. I shouldn't be too hard on myself as I'd had a nearly fatal and nearly crippling road accident which left me with a fractured spine and right wrist. Time spent recovering from debilitating injury can hardly be deemed a total loss.

Nor is it the case that I spent the months picking lice from a soup-matted beard, periodically scraping the scurf off my dressing gown and gawping at the b-list bedlam of daytime television. It's not that I did nothing, more that I did nothing useful. I worked as hard on my fitness as my pain would allow (I'm the first patient in my consultant's experience to snap a titanium spinal rod, but that's another story). I blitzed through Open University courses in genetics, astronomy and cosmology to correct the arts bias in my education. I kept on top of the laundry, reorganised the finances, ensured our CD's were alphabetically ordered within their sub-categories, and conquered Iberia, Northern Europe and Jerusalem to become the dominant late-medieval power, as modelled on my PC.

I'll admit I'm being fluid with the meaning of useful, but the point is I seized upon any kind of activity that would displace writing to the safe territories of Manana, Eventually and Really Very Soon. I've just had another month off following my final round of spinal surgery. Coinciding with Christmas, this spate of leisure entailed acute idleness and over-consumption unabated by any labour more taxing than pulling a cracker or scraping a win at Triv. All of which does, in a roundabout way, bring me to my point: there's been quite enough loafing, prevaricating and lallygagging and it's time I put finger to plastic and got on with a bit of writing.

Is blogging a vain and solipsistic pursuit? Is it a way of bruiting to the world the kind of banalities that should be drowned in beer or mumbled into the sofa? Perhaps, but I hope not. I'm looking for a playground in which relearn the strange joy of playing with words and ideas. Whether I have rapturous ideas or not, I simply have to get on with it. Even if my only readers are GCHQ, the NSA and hellbound purveyors of spam, I simply have to get on with it. For pity's sake, my writing can only get better.

I promise that next time, I'll write about something other than writing.