Ancient history
Where and how everything began...
Somewhen early in the 2010s I had the notion that I might write a memoir. It seemed to me that my life to that point had been sufficiently varied and ‘different’ to the norm to warrant recording, though for whom I never really established. I was a writer after all - and I’d had a traumatic childhood, earned a degree, had three children, travelled to most parts of the world (excluding only South America and the poles), taught in West Africa… It was a catalogue augmented come the end of 2015 by being able to say that for a while I’d also lived in Basel and Singapore - and had a nervous breakdown in the latter.
Driven by some of that history, I created a list of all the countries I’d visited (though I only counted them if I’d actually slept there) and was amazed how long the list was. I also made a list of the houses/flats/rooms in which I’d lived in the UK, ‘permanently’ as it were. In both cases the lists contained more than thirty names.
Hardly ‘ordinary’.
And now I’ve written over thirty books of one flavour or another, and am trying to carve out a ‘second career’ doing the only thing I’ve ever really loved doing.
A few days ago I dug out the meagre beginnings of that memoir. I didn’t get very far with it; maybe I find my fictitious characters more interesting than myself. However, after just a little tidying up, I offer the opening section - “Ancient History” - here. It is intended, I suppose, to provide some kind of context to my work, to what drives me on. Perhaps I’m trying to explain where and how ‘the writing light’ was lit.
Maybe I’ll return to the project and try and complete more than the two sections already drafted.
In any event, this is how I came into being…