“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” wrote Robert Burns. How right he was, in a very real sense, as they say on Thought For The Day. Certainly here at Hooting Yard a scheme is about to gang very agley indeed.

As you know, this year I set myself the task of bashing out roughly a thousand words a day. Here we are in mid-November and I have astonished myself by very nearly succeeding. Quite honestly, I thought the scheme would collapse in ignominy some time in January. And while it is true that I have occasionally, on days o’ emptiness-between-the-ears, posted pieces resurrected from the past, I have done so rarely. For the most part, 2012 has seen a teeming cascade of words, every single syllable worthy of your rapt attention.

So many words, indeed, that I was able to compile a fat 444-page paperback of pieces selected from the first half of the year. If you have not yet bought a copy of Brute Beauty And Valour And Act, Oh, Air, Pride, Plume, Here Buckle! then you bloody well ought to. You will want to have read it from cover to cover, and reread it, and made scholarly annotations in the margins, and rereread it, before a further volume, selected from the second half of the year, appears in, I hope, the spring of 2013.

What then, you may ask, has gang agley? Well, imminently, Mr Key will be leaving his Barrel of Reclusion for a short while to travel in foreign climes. I shall be gone for more than a week but less than a fortnight. During this time it will be simply impractical to splurge forth daily prose for your edification and moral instruction. Thus there will be a hiatus.

I considered two possible fixes. One was to write sufficient pieces in advance and schedule them for posting while I am away. I am afraid the extra effort was beyond my wit. The second was to schedule selected repostages from the archive to cover the period. But this seemed to me something of a cop-out. Better, I decided, to allow the scheme, in all its glory, to contain a fatal flaw.

So I will be back soon, and in the meantime there may appear bittybobs of bloggy blather, albeit of far fewer than a thousand words, so keep your eyes peeled.