So there was this thing, this thing that my English teacher used to make us do when we were thirteen and she grew tired of the vicious noise and thinly stretched boredom in the years before exams or grades just to fill the time we would be made to take our rough books with their grimy orange covers solidly lined in remedial blue and write for ten minutes without stopping, write and write and write without talking your hand off the paper without pause for consideration or correction the first thing that comes into your head and if nothing does repeat the last thing you said over and over until inspiration comes watching the blue ink spread and splinter through the cheap beige paper, years before anyone would know there was a word for it and I would Tippex lines from dark songs around my room where my parents couldn't see and ask the worst of questions, are you okay, and I might not come up with a good answer in time but back then I just wondered if everybody else was actually writing the stories I thought were the point, the kids that would grow up to travel agents and bank tellers and call centre workers and absent fathers scribbling with clumsy fingers and tongue poke tentative fairy tales of love and success when I could write about nothing but how much my hand hurt and why it is I now remember nothing else nothing else about that time but this and my bag stuffed with tapes recorded from the radio and small squares of future dreams cut from the local paper; E Croydon lrg bedsit, nr stn, n/s prof pref, dep/refs reqd, w/m, m/w, & all mod cons, £320 pcm.