Week 37 - Poop Poop

Today I said goodbye to an old friend.

When I say old, he was only two years old; and when I say friend, I really mean a car.

Our two year old Land Rover has been replaced - a victim of ever increasing road prices, tax and repair bills. Not, I concede, the greatest tragedy in human history, but slightly sad all the same, because I didn’t want to change the car.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the new car - in fact it’s a car many people would probably prefer to a Land Rover: sleeker, nippier and more stylish.

But that’s my point.

While the new car is the kind of car people would expect people of my wife and mine’s age to own, the Land Rover always said: my job is what I do, but this is where my heart lies...the great outdoors.

Yes, it’s only a car; but it made me think about the whole writing process (bear with me, the link’s not as tenuous as it first seems).

I am now almost half way through my second draft and as I sit here in Starbucks, it occurs to me how we are often not what we appear to be. Not I grant you, the most original thought ever produced by a cognitive being, but then it is 7.30 in the morning.

From all the emails I get (ignoring the rather dubious ones I get from a Spanish woman who suggests I send money as she knows a publisher in Spain) most people who are doing what I am doing - writing a novel - are not full time writers. They work in banks, council offices, travel agents and so on.

When people they work with see them on a day to day basis, do they have any idea what they’re thinking about? If they wonder at all, perhaps they would guess they’re thinking what to have for dinner or what they would do if they won the lottery.

Would they ever imagine that they are trying to figure out how to strangle someone with piano wire; or how high a cliff can be for you to survive being pushed over; or how your boss’s recent vapid comment could provide a clue to his identity as a murderer...

Would they be surprised? Would they care?

Possibly; possibly not. But that’s not the point. The point is that as writers we live in a largely internalised world and one of the things this (hopefully) teaches us, is that the least likely person may be penning some serial killer classic or diabolical crime (have you ever seen anyone look less like the kind of person who can think these things up than Agatha Christie?).

We know that how we look does not relate to what we do or write. It seems like an obvious lesson, but one that many people seem to have forgotten in our homogeneous times.

We are not what we do to pay the rent, we are what we want to do to pay it; just as we are not the car we drive, but where we want that car to take us.

Which is why I’m sorry to see the car go.

Just like when people find out that you’re a writer, the car surprised people and upset their expectations.

And it was great for driving through puddles.