Early writing

I aspired to be a writer when I was younger.

When I was (I think) 7 I won an award for writing. I had written a story for a normal school assignment ⊕ Oddly I can’t remember any of the details of the story. but one of the teachers ⊕ Mrs McCarthey, I believe. really liked the story and submitted it as an entry to the South Wales Writing Association. ⊕ Or something like that. It was some kind of South Wales based writing organisation.

The first thing I knew about it was that I had won first place. We went to the award ceremony, and I was given a book ⊕ It was a midsummers night dream, but rewritten for children and a certificate and a bound copy of all the other entries. I remember reading the second place story, which was about going to London to visit the royal mint. This annoyed me because I knew the royal mint to be in Llantrisant, which was just the next village over. That was probably the peak of my writing career thusfar.

A few weeks later We had another writing project in school. Our teacher decided that she would read my story out loud to the class and duly did so, without reading it first. I had written something about spaceships and plagiarised a whole chunk of the restaurant at the end of the universe. Including the bit that goes like this:

Every time you try and operate these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up in black to let you know you’ve done it.

Except that my handwriting was terrible and my O’s and A’s looked the same. The teacher read out:

Every time you try and operate these weird block controls that are labeled in block on a block background, a little block light lights up block to let you know you’ve done it.

It didn’t make any sense, and my burgeoning reputation as a literary genius was swiftly extinguished. This was my first experience of the concept of “The Difficult Second Album” and I suppose, in retrospect, of blockchain.