Now and then I ask myself why I write this blog, and I never really come up with a satisfactory answer. So few people read it that it cannot be for an audience, and even I don't often look back at older entries. When I was a kid, I hated writing. I remember being made to write letters to people to thank them for whatever, and then there was writing at school with terrible scratchy ink pens that we dipped into the ink wells on our desks, filled every week by the ink monitor. We'd have to copy great chances of stuff from the blackboard and the mess was examined and criticised on a regular basis.
Then we moved on to grammar school and graduated to fountain pens. Biros were not allowed, and cheap fountain pens were pretty messy, at least in my hands. My handwriting was poor and this had a knock on effect in the quality and quantity of what I wrote. Each day seemed an endless round of filling exercise books with my spidery scrawl. My handwriting remained pretty dreadful until I went to college, and I suppose, like the rest of me it began the painful process of growing up. We were expected to write of course and essays were frequent, if not brilliantly conceived they were done, and of course there were letters home to be dutifully constructed and sent. I even managed to write a little for the college magazine and found that I liked to produce short fictional tales.
As a schoolteacher I found myself having to write all sorts of things and my handwriting gradually improved through necessity, and then later I found out necessary to join the Open University, which involved a large number of essays and assignments.
Gradually I have learned to enjoy writing, and now in my self imposed quasi solitude, writing gives me an outlet for my feelings. I have written a number of short stories and like so many people, would love too write a novel, but I don't think that I have one in me.
Perhaps I have a vain hope that someone is listening, but in the end it really doesn't matter. I rarely plan what I am going to say, and so each entry is rather like an entry into a journal and if anyone has got this far then welcome.
Then we moved on to grammar school and graduated to fountain pens. Biros were not allowed, and cheap fountain pens were pretty messy, at least in my hands. My handwriting was poor and this had a knock on effect in the quality and quantity of what I wrote. Each day seemed an endless round of filling exercise books with my spidery scrawl. My handwriting remained pretty dreadful until I went to college, and I suppose, like the rest of me it began the painful process of growing up. We were expected to write of course and essays were frequent, if not brilliantly conceived they were done, and of course there were letters home to be dutifully constructed and sent. I even managed to write a little for the college magazine and found that I liked to produce short fictional tales.
As a schoolteacher I found myself having to write all sorts of things and my handwriting gradually improved through necessity, and then later I found out necessary to join the Open University, which involved a large number of essays and assignments.
Gradually I have learned to enjoy writing, and now in my self imposed quasi solitude, writing gives me an outlet for my feelings. I have written a number of short stories and like so many people, would love too write a novel, but I don't think that I have one in me.
Perhaps I have a vain hope that someone is listening, but in the end it really doesn't matter. I rarely plan what I am going to say, and so each entry is rather like an entry into a journal and if anyone has got this far then welcome.
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