I am often asked by some of my millions of followers (is this right? – ed), why is your grammar so bad? Didn’t you learn anything at school? To answer the second question first, which has been asked of me on numerous occasions, the answer is, not much, no. Oddly, no one has asked the first question although I can imagine that plenty of people have thought it over the nine long years this blog has been in existence. I expect they feel sorry for me and don’t want to cause offence by reminding me that I write like a young child who can’t write. And there I go again, mind-reading, as many of my therapists have told me over the years. The big question should be this: how come you write so much when you can’t write properly?
One of the many things I hated at school was when I was trying to learn anything even vaguely technical, whether that was woodwork or constructing coherent written work. At first, I tried hard to learn what I saw as the complicated bits but at some point I must have given up and instead devoted my life to develop methods of avoiding being found out. That continued long beyond school, throughout my working life and it’s still the same today. Working out how bank accounts work, following straightforward recipes (how do you cook pasta, again?) and doing the tricky stuff is the norm. If only ADHD had been invented when I was young. Now it has and I have been diagnosed with it at least I know for sure why my brain is so badly hard-wired, even if I now know there is nothing I can do about it.
Take my first book Corfu, not a scorcher – please. I did it all on my own, my partner proof-read it and corrected some of the worst blunders, but almost entirely it’s my crap book. Not for me the luxury of a helpful professional editor. The words, the story, such as it is, and the incoherence is all mine. It might be crap but at least it’s my crap. I know also that the grammar is often mangled, making it a chore, I should imagine, for anyone reading it, to get some sense of the narrative. Worst of all, it won’t get any better.
My magnificent English teacher at Briz school, Mrs Defonseca, set me free with words. I don’t think she went as far to say that I simply shouldn’t bother to be technically correct all the time – although he must have known that was something I could never do – but she encouraged me to express myself. So, I did, allowing the beautiful English language to wash over me and choose the bits I loved best in whatever I wrote. When my English Language O level came along, the exam paper had various choices. One was to describe the arguments for and against the effects of violence on television, another was ‘describe an orange’. You can guess which one I chose: the orange. Naturally, I can’t remember much of what I wrote, but to me it felt great. I left the exam hall like I was walking on air, knowing in my heart of hearts that I’d get bottom marks for this, just as I did for woodwork, where the feedback suggested I’d managed to achieve the worst result in the history of the school. Whether that was true, or my woodwork keeper, who I shall refer to here as ‘Mr J’ to protect his anonymity, was just trying to make me feel better, I don’t know. Anyway, he absolutely hated me, made me feel I was crap at everything (which in retrospect was quiet an accurate assessment) and when the English O level pass turned up I could not have been more shocked. For all the joy at finally having succeeded at something academic a fat lot of good it did me.
Briz School had ‘career’ events, intended to assist us pupils into the world of work. I knew then I wanted to be a writer and headed for the Bristol Evening Post stand. The journos who turned up couldn’t have been more inviting and kind but I soon twigged that my one O level, albeit at English Language, wouldn’t cut it for me. Once we were on the subject of nouns, adverbs, verbs and all the rest of it, I was not waving but drowning. I didn’t think I had it in me and, crucially, neither did anyone else. At the age of 16, my writing career was over. I’d have to find something else to do. In any event, I had to find something to do that put bread on the table because my mum couldn’t do it forever. A dead end civil service job – it wasn’t a career – was my destiny. The dying of the light had come early, but still I wrote poems and song lyrics (over 300 of the buggers), knowing they would never see the light of day beyond my scribbled attempts at writing in numbered books called Life and Times.
I carried on writing for the office magazine, for the Bristol Rovers’ website and programme and, briefly, unpaid, for the Bristol Post and Bristol’s magazine for luvvies, B24/7. I knew it wasn’t perfect but I knew it represented the best I could do, mangled grammar or not. And I felt that I developed a certain style – God, that sounds grand: it isn’t – that pervades everything I write.
I’m sad I never made it, but in one way I did make it. I’ve managed to write consistently (and I don’t mean in terms of quality) and almost every day since 2014 and occasionally since 1999 and I’ve churned out over 5000 blogs in since 2014, plus all my other writing.
In the end, I know that very few people make it in the world of writing, just super-talented people like Katie Price, Paris Fury and Geri Haliwell. I’m afraid I never possessed the talents of a nude model, the wife of a professional boxer or someone who couldn’t sing. My bad. Still, let’s not be bitter about it. I’m free to write pretty well whatever I want when I want to write it. And when I am asked my profession, I say writer and blogger, which is true. So I did make it after all.
