The start.

So this is where I'm going to start, and where it started.

Bed time stories. For some, they're just a part of the furniture of infancy, but not for me. No. Bed time stories were the meeting place of me and one of my greatest passions, words. Thankfully, I'm big enough to read them for myself now-a-days, but there was once a time that I relied on those around me for the gift of language.

Oops. I'm sounding pretentious again. Don't get me wrong, Dad wasn't reading me 'The Twelfth Night'  or Chaucer, but to me they were just as good. My favourite was an anthology of poems for children, which included poems with titles such as "Chocolate cake"- a poem which aimed to teach me that greed would always be discovered and punished, through the metaphor of chocolate cake. Unfortunatly, Michael Rosen's wise words appear to have failed on me - (I've been known to have a slice or two too many since, and appear to have been punished through the medium of an ever-expanding waist-line).

But generally, those precious 20 minutes that my parents gave my brother and I each night were one of the best gifts they could have ever given us. The works of Jeremy Strong (author of the brilliant '100mph Dog') and the occasional treat of some JK Rowling kindled my love of language.

So in short, this page of ramblings can be attributed to my dad, and so can any complaints you wish to make about it.