When I finally managed to shift myself and publish a new post recently I think I was fair enough to apportion blame. Which is to say that I claimed it wasn’t all my fault.

In particular, I railed against the absence of sufficiently inspiring daily prompts from WordPress – and it was while doing so that I got the idea for this post. Not an entirely (or even remotely?) original idea, to be sure, but by now I’m grateful for anything that comes along.

Anyway, the ‘big idea’ was to have a go at what I described as the ‘egregiously daft’ diet of recent prompts. Then I recalled that I actually cut my blog-posting teeth on giving brusque answers to pretty silly questions.

In fact, when I checked back I found that the first five posts that ever appeared on this blog – back in September 2012 – were pithy responses to daily prompts provided on the Plinky website (acquired and subsequently mothballed by the parent company of WordPress). I’ve checked the statistics, so don’t try and tell me you’ve seen them before. Don’t bother going looking for them either; here they are in their entirety:

• What kind of e-mail annoys you?

I really hate those emails, usually containing some appallingly simpering feel-good message, that urge me to forward them immediately to seven friends, on pain of eternal damnation or being held personally responsible for the extermination of the entire human race. Apart from anything else, I don’t have seven friends.

• Would money sway you into doing something you wouldn’t normally do?

What, you mean like work?

• The last time you were on a ‘plane, did you speak to the person next to you?

Yes, but only because I’ve been married to her for thirty seven* years (*forty one now).

• Which public holiday would you skip, and why?

I’m retired: what difference does it make?

• What I really ought to stop doing

Answering these damn’ silly questions.

That last one effectively brought down the curtain on that particular thread, although I have returned to it occasionally since then, usually – as now – faut de mieux. So, as what you could think of as a quick round-up, here are another five, more recent, Daily Prompts asked and answered:

• Do you hold grudges or do you believe in forgive and forget?

Yes and No, in that order, If by ‘forgive’ you mean move on and pretend it never happened then maybe. But it will be ‘pretend’. Forget? No way. I still remember that bastard from school who gave me a sly kick in the kidneys at the bottom of a ruck. Not to mention the cretin who ‘advised me’ of my redundancy in 2001. Or the guy who jumped in with his drinks order at the pub quiz when it was my turn. At least that one apologised – although another of my more bilious tenets is that if you have to apologise then it’s already too late, You get the message: forgiveness is patently not my best quality.

Which leads me naturally to:

• What is your worst quality?

False modesty. Obviously.

• What’s the one guilty pleasure you have that’s so good you no longer feel guilty about it?

One? Only one?

• Tell us about a time when you had to choose between two options, and you picked the unpopular choice

I’ve had to pick plenty that were unpopular – with me.

And finally, just to put this whole thing to bed for at least another few years, there’s this catch-all Prompt:

• A Pulitzer-winning reporter is writing an in-depth piece — about you. What are the three questions you really hope she doesn’t ask you?

1. Professionally, did you actually know what you were doing, or were you just lucky? Pass (although I prefer to think that the correct answer would be ‘both’).

2. Is it true that you once gave serious thought to buying a Rubettes cap? You can’t prove it. Next thing, you’ll be accusing me of once owning a Stylistics album.

Last of all, the real killer for anyone with a Y chromosome:

3. What are you thinking about right now? Uh….oh….er….nothing.