I wanna be a pilot!

 "I never thought I would be a writer"

"I wanna be a pilot!" That was always my dream as a kid, well I think it was originally astronaut, and then I wanted to sail an aircraft carrier, but the dream eventually became Pilot, it was so much easier to visualise the dreams that you had as a boy when they were beamed into your living room through television.

I really liked the TV when I was a kid, watched it a lot, but I sat to close, I used to sit at the edge of the fireplace on a fire seat, actually it was a coal and log box, but it was surprisingly comfy and presented me with the best view of the TV without anyone being able to stand in my way, although the drawback was that it was only 2 foot from the screen.

The TV was a wooden cased cathode ray tubed television, it was a black and white and probably the hardest thing to watch the snooker on, you could fiddle about with the contrast until you were blue in the face, but it was always whispering Ted Lowe that would make life easier "for those of you watching in black and white the pink is next to the green."
I always remember the picture used to roll upwards every so often, and it would always do it during one of 'mums programs', much to her annoyance. She would have to get up and slap the top or the side with a flat palm, we were expressly forbidden from doing this, so if it did it while we were watching one of our programs, we'd have to call out "Mummmmm". The slapping would either make the rolling worse or it would stop it completely, but the more that the TV got slapped the more petulant it became until the day that no amount of slapping would ever stop the roll. I remember coming home from school a few days later and finding a new slightly bigger screened all black plastic cased colour TV in place, and this thing had a remote control!

However, I still retained my fireside TV seating.

Anyway, It would seem that the TV ultimately robbed me of my dream to become a pilot, well that is what my the eye doctors and to a lesser extent my parents decided was the cause of me first needing eye surgery and then being told that I had a very severe astigmatism and that I would be wearing spectacles for the rest of my life, in my day that mean't ghastly NHS frames, the type of frames that have suddenly become fashionable and that people will pay huge amounts of money for nowadays...funny how things change!

The day my dreams were shot down in flames was when I was 9, during an eye test at an appointment at the local opticians. I remember the office was in a stuffy low ceiling oak beamed building in a small village. A well spoken ophthalmologist with a tweed waistcoat, pale blue, or maybe it was white shirt and maroon bow-tie, but terrible smelling breath and a nondescript accent told me "sorry, you can't ever be a pilot, oh no no no no no, with your severe astigmatism, you won't be allowed to fly" and then he proceeded to finish my eye test, leaving me sitting in that opticians chair, feeling upset and empty having just had my dream taken away by someone who obviously didn't have any kids of his own.

There was nothing I really wanted to be, or there was nothing that I could think of that I wanted to be, and unlike my brothers and sisters who are all extremely accomplished engineers, I sort of just drifted from job to job, cement factory, lifeguard, catering manger, law enforcement, to name a few but never really finding myself in those roles.
 I did have other passions when I was younger, drawing and writing, although I never considered the arts as one those avenues of pursuit. Even though I used to write extremely disturbing short horror stories, in fact they were so disturbing that I remember the school calling my parents in to speak to my teachers, because they were concerned that the stories I was writing were a reflection to something terrible that might have happened to me. What can I say I have a very dark twisted and over active imagination, and I still do.

So after a good dose of life, here I am trying to make it as a writer.

I still haven't finished, let alone published my first work, and yes that is frustrating, but I keep chipping away at it, like a sculptor turning a block of stone into a figure that only they can see in their imagination. I have a part work that I have put to one side, (to take up at a later date) several short stories, a couple of journals full of some light and some very dark thoughts, this new-ish blog and my current work in progress, and though sometimes I think that I have been writing for quite a while, if I subtract the distractions, the need to make money in a less glamorous profession, writers block, and twitter, I really haven't been writing for any length of time at all.