Peas and Prose

""Perhaps what will be the biggest challenge of all in our lives is not putting words on paper, but selecting the collection we want to share. It is the greatest challenge I face, I know, and I am willing to make mistakes to learn which parts I feel most 'me' sharing. Words and sentences write themselves, and we can be tempted to change and edit them until they are unrecognisable, or recognisable as the work of another. But we are both the art and the artists, and we cannot copy authenticity. And maybe that is where I went wrong at the beginning - I had this blind faith that the books in my hands had value to me but I see now I had left my 'science brain' at the door. I didn't question their authority, or influence, or popularity, which is odd because challenging power has become something of a pastime of mine. And I let others tell me what was good, what was art and what perhaps could only be improved by its use as kindling. And I have to be willing to let this prose be part of that too. That the masses may one day decide to 'Marie Kondo', thank and throw into the pits of hell. And I remind myself why I'm doing this - for me. Which is perhaps selfish and narcissistic but I like to read my words and I want to read more of them, only to do that I have to write them. And maybe it is, again, the ugly head of perfectionism rearing to tell me that we can only relate to deep and well-described or specific experiences and that we will not enjoy broader horizons. So, I thought I would try to document the way I'm inching back towards a full life, from the shell of a person I met last year. But maybe I just like the sound of my own words in my head too much, I can't stop writing long sentences, I like starting them with 'and' too much and I'm writing before I've even lived enough to read enough, but that's me for now. So that's what's in this collection. There is a historian inside me too, and I want our descendants to have more than just videos to bring the early 2020s to life.""