A tradition of fine writing is on the way out – and that may not be a bad thing

I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.

So I will not pretend that receiving the Best Columnist award at the Society of Editors Press Awards dinner at the Savoy last week was anything less than heavenly. But there are other things there’s no point pretending. I’m not actually the best columnist: there are plenty, not least on my own paper, to equal or surpass me; and a few in Fleet Street who are indisputably better. Simon Jenkins on the Sunday Times and Guardian is the best — has been for years. Still, I’m not going to dispute the judges’ decision.

The Tube home from the Savoy, however, was a time for sobering up and reflecting. Public transport has a levelling effect; and no other District Line passenger appeared to notice me, ostentatiously clutching my framed award. I fell to thinking about the judges’ citation, which I seem to remember being about elegantly crafted prose, or ‘classy’ prose, or something like that.

Crafted? Classy? Well, maybe (I thought) sometimes — on a good day. This is what I aim for. I can spend hours trying to get a paragraph right, swapping words around, searching for the right adjective, avoiding repetition, thinking of fresh or felicitous ways of expressing things. In the previous paragraph as first drafted, ‘seem’ or ‘seemed’ occurred three times and it took me a while to eliminate one instance and replace another with ‘appeared’; while in the sentence of which this is still part I was going to say ‘appeared three times’ but, finding this would repeat the ‘appeared’ I’d just substituted for a ‘seemed’, plumped for ‘occurred’ in this second instance.