Decades ago I was OSA (Overseas and Aimless) and living in Barnsley, the town at the centre of the miners' strikes under the Thatcher government.
Being young, dumb and full of self importance, I started going to the library because you could only derive so much joy from signing on once a fortnight or hitch hiking in the approximate area between John O'Groats and Land's End (inc. Anglesey) begging for work.
One of the more esoteric spin-offs of this thing I decided to call reading was that I taught myself to draw natal charts both for western astrology and Chinese astrology (Four Pillars and Zi Wei or some such names).
Of course I renounced it all, together with all religions (moral fascination and ways by which to best live from the likes of Lao Tze, Confucius, Mencius, Mo Tzu and the Zen crowd not withstanding, if that's some small compensation) by my mid-twenties.
But I've diverged from the rutted lane of sorrow I was trying to take you down.
You see, it was the cardinal sin of doing my own Chinese binomial chart that leads to this little useless feuille... It clearly stated that as I grew older, as long as I learned to curb my more base instincts, I would be acknowledged as a writer par excellence.
All of the above is true. Not the writer par excellence bit, but certainly the foretelling thereof.
Now, self-aggrandising delusion aside, I think I have managed to curb about seventy percent of my more base instincts. Well, maybe fifty percent...
My absolute bottom offer is thirty percent and be done with the damned thing!
The point is I tried.
And what do I get for it?
Easily a thousand or more blank pages for novels, screenplays, poems, short stories, lyrics, librettos, usw.
And too few filled ones.
Even less the ones worth reading, after you take the cheap sleight of hand stuff away.
Anyone want to lend a hand stacking the natal charts, acceleration tables, ephemerides and abaci on the bonfire to ward off this middle aged chill?
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