Once you leave school it is really easy to get out of the habit of writing, unless you find yourself in a career as a writer. It is something which people just don’t have any need to do in normal day-to-day life. I’m not talking about writing up reports or analysis, but either creative or contemplative writing.

Its a shame really, as we spend years writing essays and stories, and possibly getting quite good at that, and then having developed a skill we stop using it. I decided to try and get back into the habit in two ways. One of those ways is obvious: starting this blog. The purpose is to get me used to writing and whether anybody ever reads it is neither here nor there. In fact I would rather nobody does read it, unless my life gets exciting and the actual content gets interesting.

The other writing I have been doing is customer reviews on Amazon UK. These actually do get read. As of today I have 47 reviews on the site, with 397 ‘useful votes’. Which means that 347 people have found one of the reviews useful to them and have taken the trouble to click on a button to say so. Some of the reviews are of books, but a lot are of CDs and DVDs, with a couple of hardware reviews thrown in. Right now I am in the top 500 reviewers on the site. (No 124 actually)

The reviewing proces is a bit strange though. You write a review and submit it but it does not appear for a while. I think they get vetted for obscenity and relevance before going online. While this might smack of censorship, its probably a good thing. I have seen some sites with no editorial control and they can degenerate into puerility. The thing is, some reviews just vanish. I reviewed the Tubular Bells DVD-Audio and after weeks it was still not online. There was nothing wrong with it as far as I could see, so I submitted it again. The other day I submitted it for a third time, along with a few others for the second time, and a new one. Today all of them appeared at the same time. Maybe there was a backlog to be cleared or something.

Having now got so close, I don’t know if I should just write a load of reviews in an effort to get into the top 100. I wonder if I should put that on my CV?