This curated archive of my selected works – and I promise that’s as pompous as it’s going to get, it’s all downmarket from here – is really just the neatest and safest way I can think of to collect together all the stuff I still want to remember in one place where it isn’t going to crumble into mould, get eaten by mice, or become lost or chucked out during the next house move.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always spent far more time looking back than forward – it’s more comfortable, you can pick and choose, and you know you survived – but the longer I live, the further back into the gloom the yellowing pages march. I thought I might also take the opportunity to add an occasional note about the writing process generally, and reflect on how and why the pieces came to be written the way they are. Some of them are so old now that I can no longer remember the first thing about the circumstances of their composition; then again, others, on rereading, cheered me up and gave me hope that maybe I hadn’t wasted my time completely.
The sole reason anyone writes anything is in order for it to get read – even if it’s only a note to self to buy eggs and a loaf. But there are no shopping lists here, only the pieces I tried my hardest to get right. To inform. To entertain. To get a laugh if I could, or, hardest of all, a tear.
The intention is to keep adding to the archive for as long as I can – not so much because I’m still writing in the volumes I once did, due to the demands of other work, but mainly because I was never a fast typist, and some of those sheets are so faded with age, I now have to peer to make them out. And in the end, it’s easier than writing a whole dedicated autobiography. Who would be interested in that? Besides, if I found something interesting in life, it usually found a way into the writing somehow. But I’ll leave you to decide where the material stops and the invention starts. I wouldn’t want to take all the fun out of it.
