I’ve chosen to start this blog by writing about writing.

I thought that doing a post about writing would be good because I expect that I will be doing a significant amount of writing whilst I am writing this blog.

The term ‘love-hate relationship’ does not do justice to the way that I feel about writing.

I prefer to use the phrase ‘good-bad relationship’, in which ‘good’ stands for days that are good and ‘bad’ refers to days that are bad.

On the good days, words pour out of me like rain pours from the sky when it is raining.

My mind proceeds to generate the following sequence of thoughts:

Then there are the bad days, when I sit staring at the screen, watching the cursor flashing.

Flashing.

Flashing.

Flashing.

On the bad days, writing comes hand in hand with several other activities, including staring at my hands, staring at the keyboard, staring at the table, staring out of the window, staring into thin air and staring at my sanity as it makes its way out of the room.

When I am writing, I will do anything humanly possible to avoid writing.

Most commonly, I find that I tend to remove myself from my laptop and head to the kitchen where I participate in the consumption of various items of food.

This is not because I am hungry.

It is because I am seeking solace from my lack of creativity in the fact that my mouth has the ability to break down large portions of food into smaller, more digestively palatable fragments.

When I was younger, I was convinced that I would write a series of epic novels.

All of humanity would be simultaneously arrested, captivated by the universal struggles of my characters.

But like all great artists, I knew would have to practice so, when I was eight, I wrote a series of stories, featuring a gang of heroic vegetables.

In a feverish delirium of intense creativity, I entitled the series ‘The Vegetable Saga’.

The Vegetable Saga told the tales of Herbert the Aubergine and his friends, Oliver the Asparagus and Sabine the Butternut Squash.

Together, they formed an extremely middle class gang of vegetables but this did not prevent them from having some pretty badass adventures, like the time when they were taken from their home on the farm and were imprisoned in the supermarket and it was like Orange is the New Black except that, instead of lesbians, there were nutrients.

‘The Vegetable Saga’ remains to this day the most significant body of work that I have ever produced.