Aye, the years are fair drawing in; I’ve been thinking about dying, and how it could come all too soon. Really, I have pondered on the fact that my family are not long-lived and I might only have a very small amount of time left to do the things I want to do. Hopefully I will be the exception and will bang on ‘til I’m a centurion. Mostly, I want to see my grandchildren grow up but the fact is, that the longer I live the more likely it’ll be that I’ll lose a child and I definitely don’t want that.
So, to be that selfish I will have to be tough enough to keep going through the loss of my friends and writing buddies, and whatever the barmy politicians drag us into – the way they’re going the western world could be wiped out this decade!
Someone recently asked, why do you write? I said I wanted to entertain my future progeny with true stories, and strangers with my fiction and poetry. It’s so easy, these days, to communicate and spread our personal history; we can tell the stories that would have died with us.
When I was a child I loved to sit and listen to the adults talking, gossiping and telling tales of old childhoods; my children had only a little time to spend on that because technology was interfering; my grandchildren won’t have a minute to allow old tales to sink into their memory. I hope there will be at least one amongst those future grandchildren, however great, who will be a reader and perhaps a writer, but interested in what has gone before.
I have experienced a lot in my life, and the horror is hysterical in its own way – I will make it attractive and someone will read it, I’m sure. But, I’m having fun learning how to show them how it was for me…of course, I’ll fictionalise the sexy bits so they won’t know what’s true to me or someone else. Ordinary life will be straight and true.
