Handwritten Blog Post

When I was at school I corrected my teacher for misspelling ‘onomatopoeia’ on the blackboard. Nobody likes a smart arse. Ever since then I’ve had this feeling that if I tried to write stuff I’d be labelled a smart arse. But the stuff you write is perceived differently I guess depending on who it’s written for. I wrote all my best stuff before the age of 12, when I lived in Devon, in my English classes at Bovey Tracey primary school. Then I was writing only for myself. My teacher, Mr Billington, encouraged us to free our minds and write lucid, imaginative stories. The ultimate seal of approval would arrive the next day after he’d picked to best of the stories to read to the class. He was a brilliant reader, and would do different voices for the characters, so it encouraged me to write with dialogue, create interesting characters, unusual settings. Mr Billington often read my stories, it was always a great day when that happened. A few years ago he died and I went to his funeral where I learned his christian name was Travers. How cool was he?

The teacher I corrected for misspelling ‘onomatopoeia’ was Mr Martin at Godalming College in Surrey, another very admired and inspirational influence in my life. I discovered last year that he lives a few doors up from me. I’ve been meaning to call round and introduce myself, we got on particularly well me and Neil Martin, but recently I nearly ran him over while he was crossing the road as I drove round the corner with one hand on the wheel, a sandwich in the other, and he went mental waving his fist at me as I drove away. Best leave saying hello for a while.

Of course, at school in the 1970s – with no computers – our creative pursuits were entirely analogue, thus writing became my choice of creative expression. And the non-existence of computers meant everything was written by hand. Since getting my first PC in 1994 I have completely lost the ability to hand write anything at all in lower case. I just can’t do it. My handwriting was pretty shoddy as a kid (always trying to write so fast) but now it just consists of badly scrawled capital letters. I predict that in the future handwriting will become an ancient art. Nobody likes a smart arse though, so I retract that immediately.

See, this is what happens when you write for an audience – whether that audience is the world via a blog or whether it’s your clients, lovers, customers, website viewers, employers, you always have that doubt that what you’re writing is shite, transparent, false, rehearsed. A vast majority of what I write now is in the form of an email, and for someone like me who lives on a certain amount of nervous energy, who tends to react with spontaneous emotion to most situations, this is not necessarily a good thing. The amount of times I’ve hovered over the ‘send’ button while thinking “should I really be sending this?...actually no I probably shouldn’t” - then pressing send – is of no odds to nobody. I’ve tried to convince myself that keeping a blog will free my mind and allow me to create some really brilliant works, but the fact is writing this for you, whoever you are, is just as stressful as writing an email to an audience of one. And when I press ‘upload’ there’s no taking it back.

I’m not really enjoying it so far.