Not the Great Kenyan Novel.

My lane is a very slow lane. In this lane, slow is smooth and that's just about it. Speed is discouraged. Actively. Avidly. Emphatically. (My thesaurus is running out of alliterative synonyms.) I usually stick to my lane. There is a certain predictability when in it. When I choose to change lanes, the results are frequently quite mixed. I can't tell how exciting that is sometimes.

I am not alone in my lane, most of the time. Ours is a very small carpool situation. We are united in our distinct patois. When we say "No", consider it a well-reasoned "No." We are very rarely brash; they are yet to write odes to our species. We live in the shadows, adjusting the sails for the great ship of state, keeping everything on an even keel. You will never meet us; I would be surprised if you have even noticed that we exist.

The thing is, good people, if we were crap at our jobs, your lives would be immeasurably harder. You can tell when the powers that be have ignored our considered, well-reasoned and wise counsel for the cacophony of the political salon, barroom and gentlemen's club of dubious repute. In those instances private property becomes the target of an unrestrained constabulary backed by an uncontrollable militia. Lives are endangered. Fundamental rights and freedoms are kicked to the curb. Chaos and confusion reigns until we are called in to restore everything to what it was.

There was  time when we were enamoured of complex and complicated sentences; one of our heroes, parlaying his skills in the insurance sector, managed to prepare a clause that ran to three hundred and fifty words. Without a full-stop. We are considerably less verbose these days. We are required, if I am to believe all that BS about inclusive government, to write in a way that all can read and comprehend without engaging at an extortionate price our colleagues in the Bar.

Keeping to the our lane is frustrating for some of our interlocutors who frequently urge us to "innovate" and be "proactive" without considering the malign effects of innovation and pro-action. We are familiar with the oft-repeated mantra "speed kills" and its cousin "haste leads to waste." We are the necessary speed bump before a calamitous decision is taken. We are the voice of reason, unswayed by emotion or rhetoric. If you ignore our counsel, do so only if the counsel you receive is of a superior nature. But that is unlikely. We are the best at what we do. It is why we prevail when the scales of justice are weighed with our counsel on one side and everyone elses on the other.

We are writers, though the Great Kenyan Novel will not emanate from our sometimes quite creative minds (so much for the exhortation to be "innovative" from the ill-informed!). What we write determines how you behave, though we have little control over those that would seek to rewrite or revise what we have set down in black and white. Ours is an exacting species of writing; simple enough to be read even by a child but sufficiently complex to anticipate the future. When we fail, the whole kit and caboodle goes off the rails. When we succeed, not even the chest-thumpers on the podium notice our hand in the success. We keep this mighty ship pointing into the wind. Without us, without our skilled construction of sentences, the jousting that frequently leads to bloodshed would be commonplace.