The past is a room we can no longer enter, a city we can no longer visit.
There is a line in one of my favourite songs, Sol, by Blanco White: If I need no forgivenessI’m all but forgottenLost in the changing of the tides How very true this is.
So why do I write? I don’t really know. For pleasure? Yes, I suppose so. Because I have something to say? Well maybe. Good enough reasons for an amateur, perhaps, whose books will only ever be seen by me. Artists, painters, photographers… all of these seem content to hang their art on their own walls …
You finish the book, and then a mountain of doubts smash you against the wall… Why did you decide to tell that story… Why did you write those characters… Who were you to invest in those lives… How dare you write those characters… Are you even a good writer? Who will even read that book? …
It is okay to be an amateur. It is acceptable to engage in amateur dramatics. Likewise, it is okay to be an amateur writer. It is okay to devote your time to something you love, even if it is only a hobby. If you love writing, then devote yourself to that. It is okay to …
Then there is the reality check, in which I recall what caused my withdrawal on my last (very brief) attempt to publish in 2013…
I used to write with a pen. Now I write with scissors, no longer afraid to eliminate long passages or whole chapters I once invested days or months in. Gone is the sentiment which used to demand those words remain. No, we see what we wrote in earlier years for what it is.
Who ever would have known that decades of xenophobic and racist stories in national newspapers targeting ‘foreign’ workers, followed by an actual political movement to physically close the doors on said ‘foreigners’ would result in a recruitment crisis of epic proportions, right across health, social care, social services, logistics and agriculture? We only have ourselves …
If only I had had ambition, petitions my inner voice, as I wander up my street of rundown terraces. Wandering, wandering, after a boring day of work.
I work in a mental health setting. I support those working with children and adolescents in particular.
Deal with the religious bullies that deploy ancient texts to browbeat the young and vulnerable into actions they would shun if they were older or more mature.
If you’re going to interview someone like that, leave it to a journalist, not the TV equivalent of a newspaper columnist. Give us facts. Give us analysis. Give us probing research, investigative journalism. Not verbal diarrhoea and a tabloid opinion piece. Comment is free, but facts are sacred. What a wasted opportunity.
Mark Zuckerberg conducted an experiment, where they gathered all the idiots in a web app and studied how long it would take for them to start explaining human psychology on the basis of rodent behaviour observed in a flawed 1960s research paper.
The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York twenty years ago was a crime against humanity. An act of unimaginable and unforgivable barbarity. The events of that day will forever remain etched in the psyche of a generation.
O self, what are you wittering on about now? You have always been destined for a life on the periphery, so why start grumbling now? I thought you had reconciled yourself to your station.
