Theirs’ know buisness...

The most dispiriting moments in editorial work come when you’ve just spent a couple of hours ploughing through some turgid prose, attempting to suck some sense out the mangled syntax and comedy typos and unintentional non sequiturs and the only thing that stops you from putting a foot or some other extremity through the monitor (apart from the money) is the awareness that the writer does not have English as a first language and when you remember that, it’s really a pretty good effort, and then you happen to glance at the byline for the first time and you realise, no, actually he does notionally have English as a first language and that’s when you just want to curl up in the corner and whimper.