The way I say ‘class’ tells you mine. I am a working class hero. The easiest answer to anyone who asks me why I often write about class is that it’s just who I am – my class is the heart of me. My background shaped my opinions and my nature. It’s what I sound like and look like and identify as. But you could point out, ‘Yeah, but you now live in Crouch End down that there London. You left your hometown of Coalville (a now defunct pit town, rather than a metaphor like Coketown in Dickens’ Hard Times ) decades ago. You have a Smeg fridge. I do. It still makes me laugh. I’m immature as well as common. I was the first in my family to have a flash fridge, the first to have a washing machine, the first to go to University, the first to have a credit card, and the first to date a lord. (I felt like a different species. I couldn’t get my head round how someone didn...
I’d never heard of NaNoWriMo until I started spending more time on social media during the very brief periods of time between working from home and sobbing aerobically from home for the last nine months, which have felt like nine bloody years . To be honest, I’m very new to social media and have learned all sorts of things in the last year – from NaNoWriMo to Writers Lifts and Pile Ons! If you too are new to all this, NaNoWriMo stands for the National Novel Writing Month and during November, the aim is to write every day a minimum of around 1,6000 words so by the end of the month you have 50,000 words towards a novel. I think it started in the States. This is literally all the information I had, gleaned from one single Tweet I saw on November 1st, although I then became aware of writers (often young and bushy tailed) announcing their daily word totals. Being me (knackered, grey droopy tailed, ...
Fifteen years ago, I was medically overweight, and now I’m not. I lost two-and-a-half stone and I’ve kept the weight off ever since, thanks to that miracle cure of eating a bit less and moving a bit more. (It really is that simple and that difficult.) My current body, older and creakier though it is, feels more like me than the younger but chubbier body ever did. But there was a time – quite a long time in fact – after I lost that weight, when I didn’t quite believe I could get into a size 10 or 12 and shopping was— confusing. My hipbones felt weird. I wasn’t too sure of my perimeters. (Note, I didn’t say boundaries, as I’ve never been very sure about them.) I felt more vulnerable. A bit more naked, somehow. That’s what it’s been like for me becoming (cue trumpets and bunting) A PUBLISHED AUTHOR! Authors, to me, are mythical beasts. P...
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