Eliminating the widows and orphans

It’s surprising how tedious a job it is getting rid of widows and orphans. It took me ages the other day and required a lot of patience. However, I’m glad to say that no blood was shed, and no tears, nor was any crime against humanity committed.

In this context, a widow is the generally short last line of a paragraph, sitting on its own at the top of a page, isolated from the rest left one page back.

Similarly, an orphan is the generally short first line of a paragraph, alone at the bottom of a book’s page, cut off from the rest which, I suppose one could say, extending the metaphor a bit, is the parent to which it belongs.

In my brief time in publishing, from 1983 to 1985, I was taught to abhor such widows and orphans and do all I could to eliminate them. And last weekend, I engaged in just that tiresome undertaking. Successfully, I believe, in the end, but not without a great deal of exasperation over the time it took.

This means that I carried out some extensive killing of widows and orphans without, however, engaging in war crimes. Which is a relief, given the appalling news that keeps bombarding us (and the munitions that keep bombarding them) these days.

Why was I doing all this? After all, I’m no longer in publishing, and haven’t been for nearly four decades. The answer is that I’m only out of publishing for other people, but have taken, with enthusiasm, to publishing on my own account.

Now about to celebrate its third birthday

Recently I realised, with some surprise, that the first episode in my podcast series, A History of England, went out on 19 November 2020. That means I’m within a month of its third anniversary. I had no idea it had been so long, but I suppose that only confirms the old saw about time flying when you’re having fun. 

It certainly has been fun, though it’s also hard work. I keep an episode to just under fifteen minutes, but scripting, recording and editing each of those mini-episodes takes several hours. I’m reasonably pleased with the results, with 1200 people following the podcast and over 80,000 plays so far. That’s poor, of course, compared with celebrity podcasts, but it’s a lot more than I dared hope for when I got started nearly three years and 165 episodes ago. 

I have to confess that it slightly amazes me to find that so many people are interested in discovering how tracking the development of England down the centuries can show how it got Britain into the state it’s reached today. Which, I add at once for clarification, is in my view by no means where it ought to be. Or, come to that, where it’s happy to be.

‘Not for resale’: the proof copy
Guiding my destruction of widows and orphans

Well, a few people have suggested that it would be helpful to have books accompanying the podcasts, so that followers can check on the page for anything that was perhaps unclear in the spoken version. That struck me as a good idea but, somehow, I kept failing to get it done. At last, however, I have. A Kindle version and, now, a paperback edition, are up on Amazon. 

Kindle and paperback editions on Amazon

And, as far as I know, the paperback no longer contains any widows or orphans.