Writers Write.

It's there in capital letters in my notes... WRITERS WRITE ... The brilliant Ian Marchant (you can Google him and get results. Google me and you get nothing) wrote this on the whiteboard in our first Life Writing class last week. He was modest enough to say it was someone else's insight but as insights go I have to say it's brilliant. I'm 49 and I've privately thought of myself as a writer since my mid-teens. But here's the rub, I haven't written anything of note , ever. There are some legal agreements which mattered to the clients but not to anyone else. There are diaries kept during painful passages of my life (somehow it never seems to matter when I am well in the head) but those are for me and me alone. There are scraps of fiction and poetry in never filled notebooks. Basically sod-all.

I am a retired lawyer (it retired me rather than the other way round) now happily enmeshed in my second degree thirty years after I took my first. Then it was Law at the world's 22nd best university (my alumni magazine trumpeted this so it has to be true) and now it is English Literature With Creative Writing at a theoretically far less august institution. Half way through my second year I have already done far more work than I did in three years of reading Law. This is not some idle boast. No that's wrong - this is a boast about being idle first time round. Mind you I got what I deserved that first time so maybe there is a moral to the tale.

I have no idea what to blog about yet so I'm going to stop now and have a think. What I have done is exercise my mind and my fingers getting even this far. I doubt there will be any photos because I'm not photogenic and don't know how to download them anyway. Come to think of it I don't own a camera. There is one built into my phone but it is programmed only to take pictures of my feet when I am pissed.