In a few days time it will be my birthday. I will be 76 if I make it that far. The date will be the 7th of August and my birthday present to myself is that I am going to join the Creative Writing group of our local U3A. To those who don’t know, U3A stands for “University of the Third Age”. It’s basically a multi-interest based club for retired and knackered old people like myself who want to stay active and engaged before we finally drop dead! They do all sorts of other things of course like, for instance rambling and art. I don’t think they do mud wrestling, but then who does??
I’ve always been creative as most of my working life I was a professional photographer. I was a Royal Air Force photographer and trained as a Craft Apprentice at RAF Cosford, just outside of Wolverhampton. This was a great start as we were taught to photograph a whole spectrum of things like VIP visits, engine faults, scenes of crime, public relations, medical, dental……you get the picture, pardon the pun. I’ve also done a lot of wedding photography, family portraits as well as processing and printing people’s films for them. Now in my twilight years I carry a camera with me wherever I go, photographing pretty much anything and everything which takes my fancy. After editing and key wording, my photos get posted on a stock photography site which markets them for me and I have a small and steadily growing residual income as a result. I am fast approaching 4000 images on the site. I aim to keep going until I drop.
Anyway, I love reading which is a good job as I have a naturally curious mind. So I read a lot of non-fiction, mainly history and science with some politics thrown in. I also read a lot of fiction, especially science fiction. This doesn’t always go down well with the love of my life, who has complained that I always have my head in a book. I replied saying, ‘well, that’s why I know things’! That of course was a very unkind thing to say. She does read quite a lot, but keeps it for mainly around bed time. She’s also a creative having an A-Level in art and creates all sorts of weird things with her crochet skills, including octapus hats. My love of reading has sparked in me the urge to write as well. I have a blog called ‘Oblogotary Reading’ with many wonderful posts and few followers. It’s a few years since I wrote anything on it, so I suppose it’s time I breathed new life into it. I like Stephen King’s book, “On Writing” which I found quite inspirational. His style is very direct and the message is a textual kick up the arse to stop thinking about it and just do it. This is a bit like the comment the famous photographer David Bailey once gave in a documentary I saw when the interviewer asked if anyone else could do what he does. His answer was yes, but you had to first get up off your arse.
Many years ago, I enrolled onto a distance (correspondence) writing course. It all went very well at first, but after a while it all became very tedious and too much like hard work. I gave it up, and apart from writing my blog, never bothered any more. We have now come full circle, so to speak, and I have high hopes of what I might be able to achieve at the U3A. This time my tutor will be real and in the flesh, an English teacher and someone who has many published books. I will try and be a good student and it would be nice to leave a legacy of at least one published tome before I conk out.
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