Late to the feast.

I'm naturally late for everything.
At approximately five, I distinctly remember spending a whole afternoon trying to invent a simple way to write music so I could write down the tunes in my head without learning to read music first. Having only just learnt to read books, another language looked like taking another five years…I wanted to write that tune NOW.
At eight, I desperately wanted to write pony stories and poetry but the sheer effort of producing miles of blotted, crossed out, rewritten and virtually illegible pages eventually defeated me. (after some ten stories had been set down lovingly in exercise books. They were awful, but....)
At ten, I learnt piano for a year. Too many hands, eyes and notes required...melody person, me.
Between five and thirty five I did Art...at college, on the walls of various flats, all over the caravan I lived in (when two households merged and I got the short but peaceful straw) and after the children had gone to bed or school.

An odd, solitary child. Not popular with peers, not easy to bring up and deeply frustrated. Also, if I believe my parents, lazy, thoughtless and untruthful. Stupendously untidy!

I took up the fiddle at age 35 and still wonder if I'd done it as a child, would I have loved it as I do now.
I got a computer at about age 40 (hand me down from Adam) because I still wanted to write music (yes I know Mozart did it by hand but I didn't have enough skill in theory or the ability to hear it in my head and write it straight onto the page).
I gradually discovered other uses for the computer (pictures, email, word, stuff like that) and eventually got my very own, all new and fast and shiny. Much faster than me!
I did have a camera when I was 17 or so, an ancient Brownie my Dad gave me. One of those ones that concertinas out and has lovely, tiny levers and buttons to press. A beautiful piece of machinery.
Then I didn't have one for years and had to drag the family one out of Barney's protesting hands to take my "arty farty" pictures before finally getting my Fuji which is very clever (but I do want one which is even more clever) and a bit easier to use than the Brownie!

As has been pointed out to me, all this technology is no substitute for technique, (of which I have very little in any subject) but I know it helps! It's far too late to wish I'd been born in this computer age and maybe I would have been just as frustrated. But I do wonder, if that odd, dreamy child had been able to use the tools I have now, what would she have done with them.


Should anyone be interested in this, my earliest and most lasting artistic inspiration came from my first Rupert Bear Annual, given to me when I was about three. Oh, the purple and orange skies over Nutwood, the glorious yellow and turquoise backgrounds to the paper spill adventure and the wonderful self possession of Rupert's little japanese girlfriend. (whos name I forget).