​​AS I’ve written about before, my handwriting is terrible, and it’s a good job I don’t handwrite these columns because nobody would ever get to read a word of them.

It all goes back to my time at Low Valley Junior School in Darfield when we were taught to do Italic writing very neatly and (and here’s the crucial word) slowly.

The pages of writing looked very neat but it had taken us a long time to get there. It was as though, in some obscure way, learning was calligraphy.

Then when we got to secondary school we had to take notes on everything the teachers said and we had to take them quickly so that my handwriting got worse and worse but at least I got the ideas down on paper.

This is all in the far-off days before any kind of electronic writing, of course, where your handwriting doesn’t really matter and your spelling is marshalled and cleaned up by predictive text.

I can read my handwriting, of course, even though nobody else can, so that’s okay. Except sometimes even I can’t read it, and that’s not okay.

I’ll let you into a professional secret about how I write these pieces. The main thing, I find, is having the idea for the column. If there are no ideas there is no column.

Once I have the idea I can start thinking about the shape of the sentences and paragraphs that make up the column and I can think about the overall direction of the column itself and I can begin to write it.

And because the idea is the foundation of the column, once I have an idea I have to write it down straight away or I might forget it straight away. I always have my notebook with me, and when I have the idea I write it down straight away. Or should I say I scribble it down straight away in my handwriting.

So when it came to getting down to thinking about and writing this week’s piece I opened my notebook and had a look at my idea, written with a pen I’d taken from a hotel, the words spidering across the page like ancient runes. And let me tell you, Chronicle reader, I couldn’t make it out.

Well, that’s not strictly true: I could decipher some of the words but the crucial one was a mystery. Under the heading BARNSLEY CHRONICLE IDEA I’d written ‘the power of the’ followed by some pen scratchings that looked like webbed footprints in snow.

The power of the what? What was the last word in the sentence? I had no idea. I had a vague memory that at the time I wrote it, a few days before, I’d thought it was a cracking idea. But now: no idea about the idea.

‘The power of the…’ I gazed at that last word, trying my hardest to attach some kind of meaning and understanding to it.

At first glance it looked like ‘the power of the pancake’ but what kind of idea was that.

The power of the pancake? Well, I like pancakes and I sometimes make one for my breakfast and in some ways there’s not all that much difference between a pancake and a Yorkshire pudding but is that enough for a column? Probably not.

I studied that elusive last word: the power of the pilchard.

That could be it, except that I’m not much of a pilchard fan and I can’t think what the power of them could possibly be. Pilchard power! It doesn’t resonate for me, I have to say.

I can’t really see it in the Chronicle’s pages, although I could maybe make something out of the idea that the word ‘pilchard’ had never been written in this newspaper before.

Or has it? I got a magnifying glass out and tried to unlock the word. It wasn’t pancake and it wasn’t pilchard.

Maybe I was wrong in thinking that the first letter was a ‘P’.

Perhaps there were no pilchards or pancakes involved at all. Orange. Was that the word? Maybe the scribble I thought was a ‘P’ was actually an ‘O’?

The power of the orange. Maybe. Maybe so. I do like oranges and maybe there’s enough there for the column.

I’ll give it a go. Ah: too late.