Letter to the Editor

I found your overlooked message, asking me to contribute to an issue of Contexts on the theme of Brexit, in a trawl through my overloaded inbox.  I dragged it out of there in what turned out to be the nick of time because later that week my email system had conniptions, losing 9 days’ worth of emails entirely and all emails prior to Feb 9th except those I had flagged as important.  I was unable to retrieve the lost messages from webmail and my server offered no explanation.  People I talk to about this say that it hasn’t ever happened to them but then they probably don’t have several thousand emails in their Inbox.

Of course, I should to attend better to my electronic housekeeping and now with my newly-downsized inbox I’m doing just that – belatedly.  The trouble of course stems largely from the enormous volume of Forum emails so I’d very much favour a different format with messages stored directly on the Cloud and organised in threads.

As you can see, I did not produce an article and the tsunami of Covid19 has entirely overtaken Brexit in the zeitgeist.  Sorry!  I know that a local group analyst, Terry Birchmore, has written for Contexts but I still have not got myself into the way of reading in depth online.  I have been (internally) resistant to doing it, found doing it hard and now, when I try to do it, get eye strain — cataract surgery has restored “monovision” which works for reading but not so well at the computer a metre away from my eyes.

I can write — but I have three outstanding long-term projects (2 articles and an entry for the g.a. dictionary) and I find settling to write difficult.  So I need to say “No” to writing in a journal that I have ceased to read — sorry if my directness offends but I need to be clear about this.  I feel that online magazines ask more of me than I am willing to give.

Sally Mitchison
mitchison@blueyonder.co.uk
4th April 2020