Follow Your Instincts

I was always good at writing, and I realised that from the age of about 9 when I was at St Andrew’s Primary School. My creative writing was definitely a cut above and I was able to blend it with my fascination for history. One task we had was to write a newspaper article about a historical event. I chose Nelson and his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, writing it in a journalistic style – as near as a 9 year old could get anyway – but I needed something else to make it stand out. So, I added adverts and reports of a very long bare knuckle boxing match in London! Looking back, the amount of imagination that went into it was high level for my age and it showed me a path that I was eager, at the time, to follow. I was going to become a journalist. Then secondary school happened, the haven for bullies commonly known as Rochester Maths School.

I kept writing creatively while I could, but only one teacher encouraged me to believe that what I wrote was good. Independent of school I tried writing match reports on what I watched on Match of the Day and did so with a good eye for detail and atmosphere. I kept thinking that I should try for a junior position at a local paper but little by little that idea seeped away along with the last of my creative self confidence. I hated the Maths School at the time because it was such a bad experience, but I hate it more now when I realise that it stopped me following a path I could have made a success of. The only huge positive of course is that I found a path in life that led to meeting my wife, so I suppose I should cut it some slack. Actually, no I shouldn’t! It was about as pleasurable an experience as the Borstal young offenders prison just up the road would have been.

So, there you have it. I wish I had learned the lesson that my writing was actually really good much earlier. If I had who knows what I could have achieved?