One Year Blog

My blog is one year old today! (Cue cheers!)

It's a year since I moved into Reading (Berks, UK) to work on a Government education website. Moving away from home for a very long time. It's true I had worked in Dundee but that was only for a month. This was a major commitment.

Six months later the project ended, with me under something of a cloud (not all my fault but it felt like it). I scrabbled through a couple of other jobs, had nearly two months of not working over Christmas. Got a short job in Bristol that went well. Then my current job with Paramount Comedy which ends next week, which has also gone very well.

At home the family coped. It's not been easy for them. When I was there I used to do most of the cooking and cleaning. The son changed schools, which was hard, but now he's playing the saxophone which he really enjoys. And though he's not as academic as his sister he's in the top class in every subject. Plus he's been to Norway and France. And he'll shortly be on the CBBC website as an animation, and is shortlisted for appearing in CBBC's Bamzooki TV series.

The wife, everybody else seems to have names for their respective spouses, so I shall call her The Teacher, managed to finally lose the junior that was causing her incredible stress. The assistant's body was never found. Her new Foundation Stage team are brilliant and this year has been much easier. But we miss each other horribly, a couple of days a week is not enough. Once upon a time we worked together, day in, day out for 13 years. It was magic.

The daughter finished her first year college and exams and did pretty well. But she had to give up drama to do English, Chemistry and Biology in the second year. Her acting has stagnated somewhat especially when she failed to get the part she was expecting at the local AmDram for Christmas. She's not the forgiving sort. But she got settled on her alternative career: Zoo Biology, if the acting doesn't work out. She had her audition with Bristol Old Vic on Wednesday - it did not go as well as she'd hoped and she probably won't get in - but the truth is they told her she had brilliant comic timing and that she should try again next year (and that she should not go to an inferior drama college). So it really wasn't that bad.

The less said about our horrible dog the better. Eating us out of house. (No, I haven't forgotten to add something to that sentence.)

Then there has been the writing. The important bit. The bit that this has always been about. Through this blog I have met some brilliant other writers all of us at different stages of development. It's been good.

This year I went from "I can kind of write but I don't know if I'm really any good" to "it's just a matter of time before the commissions start". It's weird, really, but kind of like my elder sister who became a painter at about the same age as I am now.

It took us this long to find out what it is we really want to do. Now we have we really don;t want to do anything else.

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What's on the turntable? "Tubular Bells, Part 1" from "Tubular Bells"