For about 18 months there was incredibly disruptive construction going on next door to me. It drove me mad. Like verging-on-a-nervous-breakdown mad. I became obsessed with the history of construction-related legislation in Philadelphia and pitched one of my editors a 10,000-word piece on planning permission and party walls. They looked at me kindly and said “no”.
All of which to say: sometimes you need an editor to rein you in. Sometimes you need an editor to tell you that while it’s OK for you to be weirdly obsessed about something, it might be best if you didn’t go down a rabbit hole on the opinion pages of a national newspaper.
