My Writing Is Now Worn Out

“The students who look like creative types – floaty scarves, dangly earrings – often produce terribly banal work. They express all their artiness through their clothes; there’s nothing left for their writing. Civil servants are usually the best writers. Perhaps it’s because they spend their lives in the most soul-sapping of environments, so everything gets channelled into their fiction.”

There are many reasons why I write less than I used to. Some are significant, some are banal. This piece in the Guardian last weekend struck a chord. While I was never a civil servant, I was definitely a pin-striped corporate drone, stuck in a job that I came to hate with an increasing passion as the years passed. Writing was self-expression and escapism.

Nowadays, I flounce around the arse-end of our Dysunited Kingdom in a green velvet jacket and battered sneakers, like some demented spawn of the Third and Tenth Doctors. Writing seems less important. I’ve put this down to creative collaboration, the urgencies of freelancing and a more relaxed frame of mind less anxious to articulate every passing thought.

However, it seems that it’s nothing to do either with the Lying or the Which. It’s all due to the Wardrobe.