Ever since school, I've always wanted to be a writer. 

My English teacher, a huge, angry Irishman whose monstrous, precipitous moustache struggled to muzzle the f-ing and blinding, inspired me to write with his joyous love of language.  Unfortunately, on leaving school, I found real life waiting for me outside the back gate, large and fragrant, and dismissive of any of my high-falluting ideas of doing anything that was not utterly practical and sensible.  Timidly, I let it drag me off down the road and hurry me into a job.

However, twenty years later a wise woman said to me, "If you want to be a writer, just sit down and write.  All you need is a pencil and paper." (When I say 'wise woman', it was actually Sandi Toksvig, and when I say 'said to me', she actually said it on the radio while I drove through a foggy Chatham docks.)

Well, anyway, it struck a chord, and that was what I did.  And now, having finally finished what may loosely be described as a first-draft*, I am starting to call myself a writer. 
*(first-draft n, an ugly, ponderous, creeping vine that bears neither fruit nor flower)

But now, it seems, a writer no longer needs only pencil and paper, a writer needs a blog.  A writer needs an audience, the lonely garret must be opened to the public gaze.

And so here I am, riding the high stool, making up a conversation with people I'll never meet, whilst manfully avoiding all contact with the ejits, with the real life, that surrounds me.

 

 

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