2024xi4, Monday: Not.

I am not a writer.

Sure, I’ve spent most of my adult life being paid to put words together. (Not just the putting of pen to paper - or far more frequently finger to keyboard or stylus to screen. But the thinking and reading and researching and talking to people and planning and scribbling and crossing out and starting over of it. It’s all in service of the words at the end.)

And the reality is that of all the many and varied skills in the world, I suck at most of them. Certainly the practical, physical ones. With the thankful exception of capoeira, that beautiful Brazilian way of fighting and moving and playing and singing that’s a life in itself, sports have always been someone else’s to shine at. DIY is far cheaper to pay someone else to do that to pay them to clean up my disasters. I couldn’t draw or paint or sculpt to save my life. And so on.

And it’s also true that words are my world. I’ve been lost in books as far back as I can remember. Childhood memories, the few that clearly remain, often involve communion with a printed page. At college when a friend asked me if I’d like to write for a music magazine in exchange for gig tickets, records and a bit of cash, I don’t think it was just the freebies that meant the gap between offer and acceptance was measured in milliseconds. 

And true it is, so true, that ultimately the thread of my working life, so much of my adult existence, has been one long sentence. Millions upon millions of words, shaped and chosen and put together like glorious verbal Lego into constructs of all sizes, for all purposes. And - crucially - with just as much joy in the creation, even when it (so often) was for serious purposes. Even critical ones, for those as whose voice I was privileged to serve.

And yet. And yet, and yet. I’m not a writer. I’d like to be. But I’m not.

I know this. Because every so often I come across words on a page, on a screen, that blow me away. Leave me reeling and stricken - be the emotion that strikes me joy, or pain, or anger, or regret, or love, or peace, or desperate yearning, or deep, dark misery, or any of the infinitude of things that humans feel. And that writers, true writers, can share as if they and the reader inhabit the same skin.

This is one such. (Thanks be to John Naughton, whose wonderful blog - in its old, true sense of a “web log” - linked to it the other day) As is this: spoken word though it was, on the screen it glitters* in the mind just as fully as it did when I heard Ursula le Guin read it out a decade ago. As is this, thanks to that shining moment when a single phrase ignites a spark of connection and comprehension in your mind, lighting an irresistible path to elsewhere; that “elsewhere” itself fed by and filled with other people’s thoughts, osmosed over a lifetime of absorption in the written word. Here, that phrase being “peasant woodland”.

So. No. 

I’m not a writer. Even at 53, after decades of putting one word in front of another. I’m not a writer.

Not yet.

*. “Glitter” is one of those words like “glisten”, “ooze” and “coruscate” which are like visual onomatopoeia. Their sound conjures the image of the thing they represent. Another piece of stunning writing that’s stuck in my mind for a quarter of a century has that word in it. The final speech in a 1999 BBC adaptation of “Eureka Street” by Robert McLiam Wilson. Broadcast in It’s never been reshown, it’s not on streaming; it seems to exist solely in 10-minute chunks somewhere on YouTube (and even those seem mostly to be long gone by now). I don’t know if it’s in the book (I’ve bought it, but haven’t read it yet) or if it’s the inspired creation of the scriptwriter.

Its lead character sits on the roof of his home in Belfast, and considers his city (YouTube link to the audio):

“It is only as the dawn begins to break, if you stand up high, you can see the city as one thing, as a single phenomenon. Ringed by its circles of black mountain, cliff and plateau. The dark sea and the wide bay lapping right up to the foot of the metropolis. Belfast is Rome with more hills. It is Atlantis raised from the sea. From everywhere you look, the streets glitter like jewels, like small streams of stars.

But in the buildings and streets a dark hundred thousand, a million, ten million stories, as vivid and complex as your own, reside. It doesn’t get more divine than that.

I think of my city's conglomerate of bodies, of spines, kidneys, hearts, livers and lungs.

Belfast.

Only a jumble of streets and a few big bumps in the ground.

Only a whisper of God.

But sometimes they glitter, my people here.

Sometimes they shine.”

That’s a writer. Right there. And thank goodness for it.