Mark Holland is wrong.

Says Mr Holland:

Squander Two has a couple of excellent posts up.

Why, thank you. No, that's not what he's wrong about. Well, not according to me, anyway.

When reading a Squander Two post you can actually observe his thought process in action. You won't see that occur at this blog because, well, there isn't a really thought process to see.

Squander Two did, I believe, come over from the dark side .... Becoming an apostate takes a great deal of thought and this, I suspect, is why S2's thinking is so obvious. For a while, at least, everything must pass through his Damascene converter.

Mr Holland is clearly a very perceptive man. In this case, however, he's dead wrong.

I've always been like this: insanely analytical. When I was a small child — and I mean small, like four or five years old — one of my very favourite things was solving mathematical and logical puzzles. My mother would buy me those logic puzzle magazines you see in newsagents (haven't tried one of them in years; they're just far too easy for me now). My father has been telling me since I first learnt to talk (yes, really that early), "Don't be so bloody literal minded." I would carefully work out incredibly cynical but statistically effective strategies at cards, including a way of playing German Whist that causes my opponents to scream at me in frustration even when they win. When learning foreign languages, I actually liked the grammar. During maths GCSE, I got fed up with the slow pace of the class, taught myself to do quadratic equations, then, when our teacher finally got around to it, taught half the rest of the class behind his back because they found my method better and easier than his. I was one of those freaks that does two maths A-levels for the fun of it and finds them very, very easy, I love integral calculus, and I studied maths and philosophy and logic at university. As a musician, I would sit down and painstakingly calculate bizarre chord substitutions.

All while I was still a Socialist.

If I'd never changed my mind about anything political, I'd still be blogging in exactly the same style from the other side.