Some were brilliant in and of themselves, some blew me away with their style but I felt sure there was better to come. Some of them were novels, others short story collections. Books that I absolutely loved writers with real style and something to say. Going there self-indulgently, yes, but somewhere nonetheless.ĭuring that time, I came across a number of books by new writers that I was convinced were going to be BIG. And then I'd walk the three miles to work with my nose between the covers and sneakily read whenever I could during the day.Īt the same time, I'd pilgrim over to Waterstone's for anything that caught my eye in the Sunday Times Books section (now part of the Culture section, sob) or the Saturday Guardian Review. I bought whatever took my fancy, because it was cheap: classics, authors I'd never heard of but liked the first line, books with covers that took my fancy. Every fortnight I would wander around the stalls of secondhand booksellers who travelled from different parts of London, and spend twenty (or about five hours of work) on ten books, carrying them out in old Sainsbury's and M&S bags that had been stashed by the booksellers. Even better, the local church had a book sale every two weeks in a portacabin around the back. I lived in a shared house near Ealing in West London and Ealing was brilliant - it had a Waterstone's and a big library (note to anybody who works at Ealing Library: I am a better person now I am sincerely sorry that I never returned the Rachel Ingalls books, but honestly, according to the borrowing slip stuck in the cover, I was the only one who borrowed them in years, and they have a good home with me.). I wonder at the state those scans must be in but I doubt anyone has ever looked at them since. Whilst scanning in blueprints, I would feed paper, press a button and then return to my book as the paper whirred through the feeder. The reason I stayed so long was that no one bothered me - and in all that empty time I usually managed to read sneakily. Any normal person would have run a mile me, I was the longest serving temporary worker there. For a whole year I was given the job of scanning in old engineering blueprints. Thus they gave me jobs that they thought would take me weeks which in fact only took days and then kept me on regardless. (These days I toss books aside if they don't grab me within a chapter or tell me anything new or interesting - I'm halfway to being a septuagenarian this year, after all!) In my early twenties, I had a temp job which had long periods of doing pretty much nothing, mainly because my employers were of an older generation and had no idea how long it took to do basic administrative tasks on MS Excel or Access. That's what got us would-be writers (if you are actually a real writer please don't boast here) going in the first place.

Like most of the readers of this forum/blog, I read a lot.

Scepticism Inc by Bo Fowler