EARLY LIFE

(Formative Moments of an Author)

I have successfully suppressed the memory of this occasion, but I am clearly in the process of being traumatised. This photograph records the infliction of one of those psychological scars so essential to the serious novelist.

As a result I soon showed literary leanings.

But temptation soon led me astray. An early glimpse of burgeoning criminal tendencies: I attempt to mug my friend Philip in the back garden…

…shortly before toying with a career as a juvenile male model.

Fate decrees that I shall not become a cross-channel swimmer

So I flirt with the ambition of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury instead

Sport (glorious sport) remains important. Here is a rare shot of the coy and almost invisible Taylor pectorals commemorating the occasion when I lead the team to victory in the school sneering competition

University Days Part 1: The Zhivago Phase: surviving on a protein-rich diet of caribou meat and thistles, I search for inspiration in the snowy wilderness of the Fens

University Days Part 2: Fickle as ever, I abandon literature for a time and study the Rock Superstar Module

Still haunted the effects of infant trauma, I found myself once again yearning to be an author. Starving in the Garret, Part 1: Here I investigate whether a beard would help me write like Tolstoy, Dickens and D.H.Lawrence. The experiment was not an immediate success

Starving in the Garret, Part 2: Still bearded, I search for enlightenment, creative inspiration and really good peanut butter in fabled Kathmandu

To be continued