The Axe To Grind

And because I apparently have a “crazy English accent”….

Here’s a story about timing.

Once upon a time there was a kid with long, blond, curly hair and sun-browned legs. They were often tucked under him, on the middle of a row of airline seats ripped from a scrapped commercial jet. To the left, seat 1 contained a half-opened laminated scroll of map showing the lay of Middle Earth. A glass bottle of Coke, pierced by a straw, rested precariously in the middle of seat 3. Occasionally, the kid’s right hand would blindly feel its way across to the bottle, just managing to catch it before it got knocked over. This feat of dexterity, born of great deal of trial and error, would have been unnecessary if the kid used his eyes and maybe a little common sense – but he couldn’t take his eyes off the book he was reading.

“You’re late!”

“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early – he arrives precisely when he means to!”

When he grew up and left Cyprus, the kid decided, he would become a writer.

Seven years later, those blond curls had turned brown and those legs had gone white. The kid was back in England, at an English school, and having the shit kicked out of him. It was that kind of school.

In Cyprus, the kid’s education was novelty and colour and fun, and the English made sense, but the rest was Greek to him. Back in England, school suddenly became a sullen place filled with repetition, resentment and occasional bouts of violence. Suddenly, being better than everyone else was the way to become a target, and so the kid let his grades lapse from As down to Bs and eventually into uncaring mediocrity – all except for his English scores. He really struggled to keep those down, and after a while, he gave up. After all, he knew that at some point, he’d become a writer. As soon as he got out of school and did something constructive with his time instead.

Now the kid was a teenager, and 5 years of being pushed around had made him bitter and a little misanthropic. School hadn’t changed: it was just a matter of repeating things emptily. It wasn’t about *thinking*. The only thinking he did was at home, his nose buried in books and old copies of National Geographic. School was just something to be endured, and the wait was almost over. A blur of GCSE exams – 2 A-grades for English, a passable mark for Geology and the rest of his scores reflecting his utter disinterest in being taught anything by people who clearly didn’t understand him.

Well, thank god THAT was over.

Now what? It was too early to be a writer, obviously. So…what should he do now?

Now it’s 1993. It’s starting to dawn on this kid-turned-teenager-turned-drifting-20-something that he’s made some serious blunders. There’s a version of himself in his mind, less an ideal than an adequate: a grown-up version of the kid sitting on that airline seat, his legs still brown, his hair still blond, still climbing trees and jumping off low cliffs into the sea and falling off bicycles, and above all, seeing the world. Perhaps National Geographic has given him unrealistic expectations, but he feels that staying in one place, seeing the same things day in, day out, is a pretty poor way to live. Yet that’s what he’s currently doing, drifting from one low-paid job to the next, finding nothing that inspires him enough to engage meaningfully with it, anaesthetizing his despair with junk food and allowing himself to become fat.

Then something happens, inside his head. Some kind of last-ditch emergency klaxon goes off. He goes for long walks, goes rowing on the nearby lake, sits on the beach and throws stones into the sea until his fingertips ache from all the blood pooled in them. He knows he’ll become a writer at some point, but…all this waiting is silly. It’s not going to end well. Something has to change, and it has to change NOW.

He goes home and flicks through some National Geographics. A few hours later, he’s scraped his meagre earnings together for a 2-week walking holiday in Austria. A month later, he’s walking through the South Tyrol with a bunch of crazy English people. Two weeks after that, he’s back home – bags under his eyes from exhaustion, and over a stone lighter. He feels…different. More aware. And this isn’t a pleasant feeling. He looks over his life as it is right now, and sees that ignorance was indeed a kind of bliss. Everything is a mess.

Then, a week later, his father dies of a heart attack.

It’s 2000, and he’s finally at University. After 7 long years of retaking GCSEs, taking A-levels for the first time in his life, failing them because he never learned how to study effectively, learning how to study effectively, retaking his A-levels at a 6th fom college in Hull surrounded by 17 year olds (he’s 29 at this point) and finally being accepted by the University of York on their Archaeology Undergraduate course…he’s here.

Why didn’t he pick English? Well, he knows he will be a writer at *some* point, but in the meantime it would be sensible to pick a career with strong job prospects.

So he picks…..

Archaeology.

*sigh*

Skip forward 4 years. His degree is over, a year later than planned because his mother was diagnosed with cancer and he deferred his course for a year to look after her. Once she was well again, he returned to York and finished up. His grades were pretty good, but not spectacular, as befitting his interest in the subject.

It’s in this year that he starts writing a blog called Fevered Mutterings. It’s an embarassingly self-conscious affair, but he finds that the process of writing a little every day is making strange things happen in his brain.

It’s September the 3th, 2011. He’s sitting in the back garden of the house he rents a room in, at night, tapping into his laptop a summary of the last 30 years of his life. And he’s a little appalled. There’s nothing *new* to him here, but it’s a disturbing thing, to put himself into his own mind, 10, 20, 30 years ago, and to relive those reasons for making those mistakes, reasons that felt rational at the time. He’s so bemused by it all that he distances himself from his story by writing it in the third-person, and curiously it helps him get a grip on it all, to see the shape of it as a narrative. Because it’s not as simple as a misguided waste of a couple of decades, a gradual waking of his true self. There’s an extraordinary amount of life lived in there, a lot of it unconventionally, yes, but…this is who he was, so it’s also who he is.

Where he is now…is extraordinary. He’s working harder than he’s ever worked, connecting with people he’d never dreamed of connecting with, and putting together a lifestyle that will allow him to earn enough from his freelance work to travel indefinitely. His days are packed, and his brain is working overtime.

But there’s no escaping the obvious. The best time for him to become a writer…was 30 years ago.

Never. Ever. Wait. 

Image: aspearing.