Walking The Dog

"Bear with" as Miranda's posh friend Tilly is fond of saying in the sitcom Miranda - bear with and prepare your mind for a flight into fantasy. Actually, if I succeed it will be a flight into the deeper recesses of your imagination, but as this is dependant on my summoning up of the necessary descriptive skills and recent forays into literary exploration have been much hampered by extreme lack of sleep, it will probably fail and instead you will be left looking at a few paragraphs of gibberish. On the other hand, if you suffer from aphantasia and are not in possession of a 'seeing' mind's eye my words will be gibberish anyway, so best to stop reading now. Or not. Aphantasia is a most unfortunate affliction (search for 'aphantasia- Professor Zeman - Exeter University blog') - words have meaning but lack colour, shape and pictoral form. In aphantasia the mind's eye can't create pictures. I see every book I read; better than any film. I listen...

"It is hard to fail but worse having never tried to succeed." These words of Theodore Roosevelt are written in red pen across the top of the white board that sits on my desk. Along with several password reminders, a Quentin Blake postcard, some smiley faces drawn by a trespassing child, flyer cards advertising my favourite a cappella group and more words "Scribo ergo sum immortalis." It probably doesn't take a genius to ascertain that the something in which I wish to succeed may involve words, specifically the magical distillation of words into patterns that create stories. But       but            but the easy part is telling the story; harder is finding the good words to write the story; harder still is reading the story aloud; hardest of all is sharing it. I really want to do this. I really don't want to fail. But years of 'never trying' are horrible. Teddy puts forward 'trying to succeed' as the only sensible option. The...