With a small amount of shock and upset I realised something last night. Next year marks the tenth anniversary of me deciding I should become a writer. Which is odd considering that in that ten years time I’ve only really been writing for four of them. And only really writing to a passable degree for the last…I dunno, never.
But, it got me thinking. What was the even that triggered me choosing this? Then I remembered, it was a walk, in the Scottish hills.
I was lagging behind as always, my granddad storming ahead, desperate to see birds and ‘the view’. I was more interested in getting back at 3:40 for Digimon and it was already 3:10. Pre-adolescent rage bubbled under my skin and I picked up a stick, trailing it in the dirt track we so dutifully followed.
I swished it around periodically, hoping to sabotage my Grandad’s bird watching. Turns out birds aren’t intimidated by a 12 year old idiot-child waving a stick around. Realising I was defeated and wouldn’t be able to get back in time to watch my favourite show of the year, I sulked even harder.
I looked at my feet and the dirt, as if I was refusing to take in the sheer beauty of the land that surrounded us. I focused on the stick as it left an outline in the path behind me…in my head, it was a sword. A scimitar more precisely, probably because the stick was curved. It was then that my imagination fired off. I stopped sulking...and began to think.
Who was holding this sword? Not me certainly, I could barely hold a kitchen knife without shaking, partially through cowardice and partly thanks being ‘diseased’ with dyspraxia. I imagined a it would be a big creature, thanks to a childhood love of the subject, my head seemed to fill the blank in with a Dinosaur. What kind of Dinosaur you ask? Well a ‘raptor’ of course.
(note…as something of an amateur palaeontologist, I know all too well that ‘raptor’ is NOT what you call that particular kind of extinct reptile and that a raptor is indeed a bird of prey).
I saw this 'raptor' stood upright, tailless and intelligent, like you or I (well, you at least). He held the sword firmly in his left hand, but on his face I imagined an expression of hopelessness.
But why was he like that? I asked myself. In my head I seemed to automatically generate a backstory for him, he was a leader who had won a war and had tried to return to his village. Only to discover it had been razed to the ground by the remainder of his enemy.
On the hillside next to me, I imagined the ashen wreck of what had once been this warriors home. But who had done this? Humans, of course.
By this point I was excited to the point of actually wanting to write it down. I’d never reached that point before in my life. I’d always hated writing, thanks to my dyspraxia I’d always been behind and in pain, not that I use it as a crutch for my own failings of course…
But anyway, I envisioned a name for this up till then nameless character. Tethys Eem.
I imagined what was going through his head, the guilt, the inconsolable rage and the desire to end it all there and then. I dropped the stick as my imaginary companion dropped his sword. I saw him begging a God that I’d never heard of for someone to be alive, some member of his village to have survived…
