First and Last and Always (23/1/14)

Today is my last day off.

Not ever, obviously. That would be ridiculous and thoroughly untrue as from the middle of next week I have a lot of days off. Nothing but days off for the foreseeable future.

I probably do need to look for an actual, real, honest to goodness, grown up, proper job at some point but the idea is that by the time that becomes a necessity I'll have cracked some kind of foothold in this writing lark.

I was talking to a customer in the store last week. She wanted some Tom Waits and some John Coltrane for her son but wasn't sure what she was looking for, though she did have a note of the two Tom Waits albums that he owned so far. Waits? Trane? I'm seriously so much your man on this one. Early melodic work of both or the later, much more 'out there' stuff. We settled on a bit of both. 'Asylum Years' and 'Raindogs' for Tom, 'My Favourite Things' and 'A Love Supreme' for John.

(An aside; currently listening to The Walkabouts' very fine 'Satisfied Mind' on Spotify - I expect to be using Spotify quite a bit going forward - and I've hit a track that's vocally reminiscent of both The Triffids and The Go Betweens, both frankly excellent and both much missed)

The lady asked me what I intended to do now. So I told her. 'I'm going to write.'

'Oh' she said, 'my husband was a writer.'

Her husband had been in the Navy when she met him, left to become a teacher and at 50 decided that he was going to take early retirement and become a writer. So he attended classes and workshops and learnt his trade and submitted a short two hander to a competition at the Playhouse. This script sat on the shelf at the Playhouse for a while until, needing a Merseyside based piece for their (Granada Television sponsored) reopening, they contacted him to commission the play. A follow up call from Granada ensued. They wanted to turn the short play into a full series, expand it, open it up, make it into a sitcom.

The lady's husband wrote 'Watching' which was huge in the (late 80s? early 90s?) and ran for about ten years.

Right place, right time, ready for it to happen to you. It's the key to everything.

And in that spirit; at 1pm I'm meeting J for lunch in town. I have to. It's part of the synchronicity that I'm attempting to engineer (I'm sure that you can't actually engineer synchronicity, it kind of has to be accidental I think), part of the circular nature of closing off part of my life.

On my very first day off (I've already told you this, you know what's coming) I, a ridiculously shy individual - shy to an almost Morrissey-esque level - plucked up the courage to ring this girl that I'd met a couple of weeks earlier and ask her out.

It only seems right that I should spend the lunch hour of my last day off (for this part of my life) with her.

Your life changes in a second, seize every single opportunity that presents itself.

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