Born during the heatwave of 1976 from solid Yorkshire stock, I developed a love of the written word from an early age. I could spell ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis’ * even before I could hold a spoon to my mouth. Now that’s something.
Although I advanced in English during my Midlands schooling years, I acquired an allergic reaction to the sciences and I would merely wretch at the very thought of Pythagoras’ theorem. Maths teachers would stare at me with such disgust as though I were the black plague personified. It wasn’t so much the Shakespeare or Keats side of English lessons that I loved, but moreso the creative side of English, namely English Language. I had free reign, creatively, to write whatever the heck spilled out of my head. So whilst my peers were ending up in a messy heap outside the local chippy on a Friday night after sinking a bottle of the local Spa’s finest own-branded cider, in the comfort of my own bedroom (surrounded by the ultimate in Eighties’ orange pine furniture and several hundred Bros posters) I would marvel at the very notion of the written word. God, how I really needed to get out more.
Fast forward to the Noughties. Following a neverending pattern of very stop-start ‘careers’, beginning as Girl Friday in an office earning my first crust and ending up in the ‘glamourous’ world of television production encountering one or two colourful characters along the way, the growing voice inside me reached such a pitch that I could not ignore it a minute longer: I had to write. It was a compulsion I had no control over. Rather like hiccupping. Or yelling at the television when England lose. My destiny had been sealed and that, as they say, was that.
So, here I am now, in 2008, with a steadily growing copywriting business. I really can’t complain. I am my own boss. I love what I do. And I still get an allergic reaction when I deal with my accounts.
* For those who really care to know, it is a factitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust’. So now you know. But I just made that bit up to impress you.
