And in the cold grey dawn of the New Millennium we Stood To in our beleaguered trenches, gazing red eyed across a ghastly No-man’s land of Web sites, Videos, and CD-ROMS, feeling the cold tickle of a Search Engine’s electronic fingers clamping tighter around our trembling testicles.

No Angels, No Visions of Glory, just a rolling wall of grey and No Hope.

When the numerate barbarians came from the tribe of the Accountii, hired by publishers to enforce their soul-dead ways, we fought back as we always had, ever since man scribbled the first letters on a cave wall.

We Pleaded with Eloquence, Cursed them with Fluency, Parried with Paraphrase, Non-plussed them with Non-sequiters, and Ran Them Through with Intellectual Ripostes.

But still they came, the faceless grey clad hordes.  Men - if such they could be called - for whom any original thought usually resulted in a jail sentence.

Armed with All Rights Contracts, which were anything but Alright, loaded with Clauses, Options, Disclaimers, and all manner of foul and treacherous ammunition.

And now their ranks were further swelled with Litigious Lawyers, Corporate Weapons sharp enough to draw blood from the heart of a Tax Collector.

But still we stood firm, though smaller in number and half mad with grief and poverty.

Defiant in Poetic Glory, wielding Well-loved Clichés and Ringing Phrases, gently nurturing Split Infinitives back to health, we watched as others sacrificed their loved ones, learning to write ream upon ream of Sterile, Politically Correct, Gender Free, Racially Aware, Historically Re-adjusted, Totally Non-original and Non-offensive Pap.

Our Finest Words, the Cream Of Our Language, sacrificed in a futile War of Words.

And so it was, as Foul Lord Lucre hurled his ever-growing grey suited army against us in The Last Battle, each of them sporting a thrall ring of cloth around his neck, we fought to our last Man, Verb, Adjective, Noun, and Adverb, until our Final Full Stop.

And on that bitter day we built a rampart of our English - DEAD!

About the Author:

Gyppo

Gyppo lives in the UK and often spends far too much time in front of his computer. He has two daughters and numerous projects to attend to. His private life is… Well, private. All of them. Professionally he has been writing for more years than he cares to remember,(okay, nearly forty years), and probably selling less than he deserves. He has sold magazine articles, short stories, and one novel. He has twice had a regular column. Bodgers Corner appeared in a motorcycle magazine and forms the basis of the slim e-book The British Bike Bodgers Booklet. John’s Jottings appeared in a computer magazine, a column of advice for would-be writers.

In the eighties he also used to sell a disc based course for writers, based on the magazine articles. (This may be revived for the Windows generation when there is enough spare time. (Wipes brow and looks into the back of his brain to see who prompted that statement.) Other e-books include, A Hamper of Havoc, a memoir of his years spent as a showman, The Flying Ferret, light-hearted tales of poaching and rural mischief in The New Forest, and Running Scared , an e-book ‘reprint’ of his 1970s novel.

He uses a ‘State of the Ark’ computer, but started out with a portable typewriter many years ago. In extremis he has even been known to write on stolen toilet paper using an eyebrow pencil (borrowed he hastens to add) in a tent along somewhere along the wind and rain swept Cornish coast. He is also available for ‘live’ storytelling and ‘how a book gets made’ sessions in schools. He dreams of well-paid obscurity, but is willing to make numerous public appearances en route to this ultimate destination. His motorbike and sidecar can sometimes be spotted in the most unusual places, semi-camouflaged, with a hammock slung between handlebars and a convenient tree or other solid object.