Writers' group meeting #1

And it's all about me. Too self absorbed to write fiction it seems.

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Once I was new. Tiny and beloved and I slept and ate at the right times. Later I was medium sized with long blonde hair in a neat ponytail. I read the books at school and learnt my words whncih were kept in a red and gold tobacco tin.

Later still I wrote stories which I never finished which had something to do with me starting far too many minutes after everyone else and something to do with endings being difficult.

Then I got to be a big kid, with periods and acne and books a window out of small town, small home. Poetry was useful at school because you didn't need endings for it. Once I wrote a poem about women bitching on the telephone and they put it in the school magazine. Dad was horrified . How could I do that to/about my mother? My German tetacher really liked it. But then my German teacher left his wife and hooked up with the psych teacher. Whereas Dad stuck with Mum and even took up Catholicism.

I went to university and wrote essays. A lot of them. I hung round and wrote longer and longer ones. That's why I can write MA after my name. Although I don't because I think it could just as easily stand for Middle Aged.

I got a real job and then a longest ever boyfriend and then a ring on my finger and then we went to London and went travelling. And that is my best ever memory of writing. While husband went up hills like Heidi, I sat near the bar and drank red wine and wrote. The campsite owners thought I was a real writer. Of course I never finished anything. Two chapters of a novel imagining how my great great grandparents met across the Canterbury plains. I'd been building up a starring role for the Catholic priest.

Then I had children. I became some kind of housewife. The children are still thriving and have no suspicious bruises. What I have become spectacularly bad at is housework. I have raised it to an art form. Even the mice have scarpered. I suppose there is a neighbouring cat to be thanked somewhere.

I do something else for money. I supress children's talents. When I have tired of supressing their talents, I repress their personalities. It's called education and I don't recommend any of it.

Another thing about me is that I've let myself go. It;s one of the many things my mother warned me about when I was still her financial responsibility. Fat tummy and dowdy clothes and half dyed hair. And no war paint.

So this is me, Sandra. Fat bad housewife with a tiny glimmering residual memory that I used to write once.