What was it about English homework that gave me writer's block as a child? We had to write 400 word essays. 400 words - that's nothing! A single side of A4 or so. I remember counting the words in a letter I'd written to some girl and being quite impressed that I'd beaten the 400 word mark. But now read any article on backlash and you'll realise that a high word count is no problem - indeed, I wrote a couple of thousand words last night for something I'm working on and I barely even noticed it.

The same can be said for giving a speech - you think that five minutes would be a hard timespan to fill in a debate, especially since you're expected to compose your thoughts on the hoof. However, get up there and try it, and you can sometimes find that it's quite hard to keep it as short as five minutes.

Or perhaps I'm just a verbose son of a *****