Dear Friends - an extract
Introduction
On New Year's Day 2005, Zoë and I were walking across a field when I finally gave voice to my grand plan. One of our friends had 'borrowed' the boys for long enough for us to go and have lunch in one of our favourite pubs, the Bridgewater Arms in Little Gaddesden. We were early, so we walked around some of the trails around the village first, and naturally we talked about the future, and our plans for moving to Canada. At that stage, we had a general concept, and a reasonable amount of confidence that we could pull it off, but not having been to the places we were talking about, it did still seem somewhat remote, and a lot of the detail was scarily vague.
The plan always was for Zoë to work, and for me to take more of an active role in looking after the boys, and generally not doing the crazy hours and travelling which I had become accustomed to. There was also a vague idea that I would 'do some writing'. This was an acknowledgement by me that I had not pursued the one thing which I really wanted to do back when I had more options and more time. Having reached 40, and having spent some small amounts of time writing things for my own amusement, I was surprised to discover that I was capable of writing things which other people would read, and I enjoyed the process.
What I lacked was the time to put it into practice, so I had the unformed idea that I'd be able to in my new surroundings. And slowly, this vague plan became a more concrete idea, one which I kept to myself for some time, a way in which I could at least start the process of becoming a writer; of having the discipline to actually sit down on a daily basis and just write until something worked.
Now, as we trudged up towards the church, all the while wondering why it was so far away from the rest of the village, and whether it was time for lunch yet, I finally came out with it: "I thought it might be an idea to write something about us moving, and send it to the local paper; see if they might be interested". Zoe didn't laugh, which I took as a good sign. As the months passed, the plan stayed in the back of my mind. I became heavily involved in project work, which involved a great deal of travelling, and my free time, short to begin with, became pretty much non-existent. We visited Canada and Prince George, and we finally decided that if we didn't do it, we'd always regret it, and so we told everyone, put the house on the market, and started filling in forms, a process which we still haven't really got to the end of.
One day in February, with only a few weeks to go before we were due to depart, and with the house (more or less) sold, I thought it was time to call my own bluff, and see if anything could be made of the idea. I wrote a piece of around 1,000 words, and emailed it off. It bounced back, and I actually spent the better part of a week just trying to make contact with the Prince George Citizen. Eventually, I got through, and I got a cautiously positive response. I sent some more, and got an enthusiastic response. In the general chaos of the time, I don't think that the impact of what I had done really sank in; my vague, seat-of-the-pants plan had actually come to fruition, and on top of all the other things I now had to do, I needed to work out how to pass myself off as a newspaper columnist.
I now have a small but significant pile of newspapers in a cupboard in our house in Prince George. In each of them is a piece of my writing, under my byline, and each time I add another one to the pile, I shake my head in wonderment. If a vague dream can turn into something so concrete, what else could I do?
Well, how about turning them into a book?