In the beginning...

 ...was the word. Not too obvious a debut then but I've been meaning to set something like this up for a while so here goes.

It seems that when faced with some of the fundamental absurdities of the modern world and the consequent feelings of powerlessness many people resort to the word as a means of interpreting, analysing, scoffing at and responding to these absurdities. That, in fact, they seek in some way to protect themselves. However, whenever any investigation is done into the lives of the writers who do it full time one thing seems to be clearer than anything else about these people. They are all as mad as a box of frogs. So at least on one level it doesn't work very well.

The fact remains though that I have followed the written word all my life and have gained enormously from it. When I was a child I remember my father saying to anyone who would listen, that if I had a book I only needed two square feet of ground and I was happy which was just as well really since he always had the best bloody chair. In the worst times of my life I have always carried reading material with me as if it had magical properties - not so much a suit of armour as a cloak of invisibility. Usually fiction but also non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, it seemed that hidden in these texts were little nuggets of information that were extremely comforting; gems that were buried within waiting to be dug up and stored away for some future prosperity. As I got older I realised that all these words were put together by people who did it on purpose. Gradually I developed a deep admiration for these individuals who could create worlds from a few randomly agreed marks on a white sheet of paper. In my early twenties I spent three years at polytechnic and so glimpsed some of the intense joy and agonising frustration that sent those who made it into careers up the wall. There was no chance that I would get sucked into that madness at the time, so when I left college I got a job in an inner city dole office. This was the mid eighties. Lucky escape there then.

One thing that has never left me, and has in fact grown stronger over the years, is a desire to have a go at this stuff. I knew I had a talent for it. I had been told as much by people whose opinion I respected. It's surprising, though, how much of the quality that the Spanish describe as 'cojones' is required to actually embark on this sort of enterprise. So here I find myself thirty years on with absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not having a go. I'm hoping that what unfolds here over time will be one person's view of life's goings on and - if you're lucky - when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit!