I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

As a child I assumed that everybody wrote it was only as I grew older that I realised only some of us write everything down and think in stories.   I believed I was going to write heart-rending and dramatic novels.  My intention was to move my readers to tears – unfortunately in the case of family they were more howls of mirth.   I couldn’t understand how they could be so unfeeling when I read the opening chapter of my first book, Jill’s Stable, to them.   Jill was nine years old, coincidentally the same as I was at the time and she was going to have her own stable and breed a champion horse.   The novel started like this.   ‘Oh Goody’, cried Jill as she came into the kitchen, ‘There’s a letter from South Africa, it must be from Mummy and Daddy.’ She opened the letter.  ‘Oh, sob, sob,’ she cried, ‘Mummy’s dead, sob, sob and so’s Daddy’.  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs McGregor, ‘And what does the rest of the letter say?’.   On mature reflection I can’t help feeling that Mrs Mcgregor was probably not the right person to leave in charge of a child.   For many years afterwards my family would tease me with the words ‘And what does the rest of the letter say?’.   As far as I was concerned the first essential for a novel was to get rid of the parents – who would have prevented their nine year old daughter from opening her own stable!   My second novel, was intended to be a thrilling adventure set during the French Revolution.  If you believe that you should write about what you know then a 12 year old girl from the home counties who had never been to France was not a natural to write this.   My characters were indistinguishable from the people I knew in England apart from a tendency to mutter ‘Zut Alors’ and ‘Sacre Bleu’ at regular intervals and my family managed to contain their mirth until the first scene at the guillotine when heads were rolling all over the place.

I was always writing – mostly poignant (at least in my view) love stories –  and I even managed to get one or two published in obscure publications and won a couple of writing competitions.    And at the same time, I was writing for a trade magazine and doing freelance copy writing for a small advertising agency.   I wrote a campaign for a very old fashioned skin care company that advertised exclusively in The Lady.   The amount I knew about skin care could be written on a postage stamp so using the library I wrote a lot of rubbish about the different lotions and potions that would penetrate the dermis and remove wrinkles and much to my surprise they loved it.   One of their products was vanishing cream but to my disappointment it was the cream that vanished not the person who applied it.   Apparently, it was their most successful campaign and I am sure that the fact that they ceased to trade shortly afterwards was pure coincidence.  

They say a picture paints a thousand words, but sometimes pictures alone are not enough.   A picture of a toothbrush isn’t very interesting until it has the caption ’Hitler’s toothbrush’!  

Over the years I pottered on writing numerous short stories and doing little with them.  I wrote about anything and everything from a brochure for a maths tutorial to a leaflet for frozen stallions’ semen!   Some years later a friend of mine told me that she was going on a writing course in France and persuaded me to go with her.   It was the most amazing fun – the chaotic house was owned by a pair of charming drunks.   The food was inedible so we lived off bread, cheese and fruit and the wine that they bought in a plastic dustbin stained my lips and tongue dark red for weeks but it flowed more freely than water.   Our tutor was the wonderful and amazing Anita (Annie) Burgh.   I thought that we were there to write short stories but it turned out that we were supposed to be learning how to write a novel.   I had my laptop and, like most writers, several discarded but not deleted first chapters so I took the least bad one and I was off.   Annie was fabulous and funny.   We laughed our heads off and drank gallons of the awful wine – I have no idea how we survived the week.   Annie and Billy (her husband) had been before and had taken the precaution of bringing their own wine.  I managed to get a lot written and when we returned to England Annie continued to hound me and forced me to finish it and she also found me a small independent publisher.  As a result of being published I was approached by an agent who said she was keen to see my next book – that was until she read it and complained that it was about old people and of no interest to her.   I can’t help feeling that she never actually read my first book that I had told everyone was a creating a new genre – Old Bag Lit!    However, I managed to put book number two on to Kindle.   I started book 3 with young and old characters but half way through my husband became very ill and while other people may be able to switch off and write amusing stories under those circumstances I got rather bogged down with life.   Some time after my husband died I had a look at the 35,000 words I had written and came to the conclusion that if it bored me it was probably going to do the same for the reader and I abandoned that!  

So, then the blog.   Random thoughts come into my mind and I tell them to my friends and colleagues and if they laugh I will repeat them to another audience maybe honing them a bit.   Making people laugh is addictive and the need for it has got me in to all sort of trouble over the years.   But then I had some, what I considered to be very pertinent and pithy thoughts about the modern world and I decided to start a blog.   The world seemed, and still seems, to be going quite mad or else I was!   I am, like most writers incredibly inquisitive so as language changed and the way people communicated became more and more confusing I was caught between two worlds with my contemporaries writing letters and using a landline and my grandchildren texting and using words I didn’t understand.   My grandson told me he was ‘very hench’ last week, apparently that means he is big, strong and well-shaped!  He also described a girl’s incredibly short skirt as a ‘greyhound skirt’ because it stops just short of the hair!    I am quite tech savvy so I managed to create my blog without much difficulty and once I started there was something that caught my eye every month and five years later I am still finding things to write about, although my admiration for journalists who have to write a weekly, let alone daily, column knows no bounds.   Unfortunately, I haven’t cracked a way to let the world know that I am writing these fantastic witty pieces and I only reach about 200 – 300 people a month.   So, I have now started to write another book and once that becomes a best seller, I am sure people will flock to my blog.