Four photographs
On my desk at home, I have four small photographs. All four are of me.
No, it’s not vanity. Despite a few years’ stint as a newsreader and hosting two seasons of a TV show, I remain convinced I have a face and physique far more suited to radio that posing in front of a camera. The photographs are of me aged two, sitting on the sands of Eastern Beach in Gibraltar with my father, there’s one of me at eighteen looking pretty grim and just marking time to leave home and finally become an independent adult, there’s one of me on my way home from a work conference when I was all about pursuing a career as well as motherhood - that 90s superwoman thing that managed to cage women in angst instead of free them as it was meant to. The last one is of my ten years ago winning a poetry competition.
They’re not great photographs but the reason I have them just by the side of my computer console is to remind me of that little girl, fresh faced and innocent and not knowing the obstacles that the world would throw at her, and of the teenager impatient to set aside the shackles of family and charge out into the world where she thought she would become a published, and lauded, author, and of the young woman just entering her full strength who thought there was still time to achieve everything and that writing the novel might just have to wait a year or two while the career settled, kids grew up…
The last photographs remind me that I do have some writing skill that is still bursting to emerge fully.
Now and again I glance over at them and reassure those three versions of me that some things take time in coming but are worth it, that there were other things that had to be done. I know I have tarried and delayed and procrastinated and found a million and one excuses for not getting started, or starting and not finishing (there are four semi-drafted, half-finished, partly scribbled novels, perhaps more, in various pen drives and notebooks), and that I have felt many versions of the frustration of not doing what I always dreamt of doing. These days I accept those years of distraction as essential learning; there is much more knowledge and experience to be written into my work now. I so admire the young authors who are so dedicated to their work and talent. It didn’t turn out that way for me but it doesn’t matter; it’s ok to be old and an aspiring novelist.
I look at those versions of me and they keep me focused. It is time, they are all saying, and we are right behind you. That’s all I need. I don’t need validation from anyone else other than me and all the versions of me that have already been. I owe it to younger me to get that novel written.
I wrote the first few lines yesterday and can feel the floodgates creaking open…
Going full on analogue for writing this time - fountain pen in book!