what today would be labelled ADHD – who knows? If I do have it - I’mundiagnosed - but my wife (a former primary school teacher who attracted truants through me and a former husband) says “all men are on the spectrum”. As a late teenager I would sit by The Thames along from Richmond Bridge with a small, sky-blue Olympus portable typewriter on my lap and slightly self-consciously, I would tap away whilst onlookers glanced in curiosity. I fancied that they’d think I was a ‘famous’ budding author that had won or was about to win The Booker Prize.

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I love writing and still do, just for my own selfish pleasure. I know I have the potential to write a best seller. Why? Because I’m not inhibited. I can write anything, without a second thought about what people will think of me or it. However, my life is like my reading – random, haphazard, driven by need, not desire. I do, by the way know desire in other ways but that’s another story. So much is just that.

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- (Yet) another story.

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I enjoy writing short stories - preferably completely spontaneously, with little or no planning and usually with a twist at the end. I’ve never cared about being published but I can now claim that, technically, I am a published author, as I have one of my short stories (irritatingly a mediocre one) in

a published anthology produced by Hightown Writers (another Bridgnorth group). It’s a pity that it was

a poor one, as I had available many good ones – but as I rarely submitted stories - that was the one

they chose.

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So, here I am amongst a gathering of intelligentsia in the membership of Bridgnorth Writers’ group as

a brown-speckled, but still unripe, avocado, set adrift in a bowl of gorgeous pink-shelled lychees, but

not only will the brown spots blend into indistinguishable dimpled green, but this group of fellow writers is about to nurture me, late in life, with my inner stone being planted in rich soil; watered, fed and as I shoot into unfurling slender pale green leaves, little delicate white flowers spring forth; an allegorical reveal.

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I reject those hurtful words of that Lincolnshire “writer-in-residence” who branded me an impostor as he damned me with the words “you’ll never make a writer if you don’t read.”

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I’m in love with our fine and beautiful, rewarding, savourable English Language: the grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax and the art of it all. How dare I be cast down into an abyss of ridicule, humiliation and dismissal. I beg to differ – what does that pompous oaf know anyway!