Frustrated Writer

Last year there were about 600 million blogs written. I have no idea what you, my potential readers, will think of blog 600 million and one. I’d like you to like it. To engage with me. Feel free to be infuriated. Touched. Moved. Be engaged. Even if that’s only six of you.

Writing a blog is a leap of faith. So many words out there day and night. Unfortunately, I only have my words.to enchant you and persuade you to stay with me. No free offers no amazing gifts. Only my words. As the Bee Gees put it “…and words are all I have to take your heart away.”

What can you expect from me? Good writing, I hope. I like language. The poet T.S. Eliot put it thus:

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”

My plan is to write some words each week or two. A mixture of reflection and musings about life, the universe and everything. Along with some of the work from my creative writing class, ranging from writing about elephants through to the colour yellow. (I’m nothing if not eclectic!) And so, to blog.

I saw landfall in 1952, in Wycombe General Hospital. Beyond the birth of my parents’ one and only child, nothing of major interest to me happened that day. No comets flashing across the night sky; no major freak weather events. Just one more ordinary child born to an ordinary couple. This blog is one small way of making my mark on time. “I write therefore I am”.

One of the things that I would like this blog to do is to help people join up the dots of their lives. I’ll try to show my working here. A blogger’s equivalent of a Haynes manual. I suspect that it is this quirk that led me to enjoy fantasy writing so much. I’ve never found it difficult to accept that somewhere in a remote valley unicorns roam. As a child I loved “Little Grey Men “a story about the last dwarves in England which was read to us by my class teacher. As an adult I delighted in Tolkien’s masterpiece “Lord of the Rings”. A proper fairy tale for adults. How can anyone not be moved by Bilbo and Frodo. Hobbits of this parish. Not to mention the wizard Gandalf.

This enthusiasm for the magical has stayed. I still read two fantasy novels to every one realist one. Not everyone has been impressed by this taste. My parents came home after an Open Day in which my headmaster complained that “his head is full of nothing” To this day I don’t understand Ohms law or Pythagoras theorem. He taught maths and physics. Two subjects that completely failed to make any sense to me. And still make no sense. To this day it is my wife who does anything “practical” be that baking a cake to programming the dishwasher (Fortunately, she is an Engineer who understands these things and who also likes good books.)

I miss having children to pass on the secret of this world’s magical places. One of the few times in my short teaching career that I enjoyed was reading the story of Patrick Kentigern Keenan “the smartest man in Ireland” to a class of nine-year-olds. I hope one or two of them remember it with as much delight as I do my little grey men. If they do, then I won’t have wasted two years of my life.as a not particularly effective junior schoolteacher. I lasted for two years and was not a good teacher- even though the most feared tutor in our college marked me as “Above average”.

My teaching skills were eventually put to good use when I became a university lecturer teaching nursing. I taught mental health and enjoyed deconstructing many of the myths that surround psychiatry. Hopefully one or two people have had a better admission because they’ve been taught by one of “my” nurses. And that memory of Higher Education opens the door to reminiscing more about my own education, which I’ll cover in my next blog.