It’s gone.

“What’s in it?” said the lady in the post office.

 “Paper” I said. Then I drew myself up. Tall and confident and author-like. “A book manuscript.”

 Cheapest postage at £3.80, and if it goes AWOL, will it be a sign?

At school we did music practice in tiny rooms that had once been nuns meditation rooms. There was room for a piano and a person. They weren’t very soundproof and walking down the cloister outside one could hear a cacophony of piano, violin, cello, flute, oboe, etc.

But not from my cell.  I used that time to scribble romantic stories -mainly fantasy – in little notebooks and on scrap paper.  I never got caught.

That is why I scribble and am not a concert pianist.

Regret. It ought to be banned.

It comes together with waste.  Waste of time, waste of potential, waste of knowledge, waste of life.

Here I am at 70 and I regret my life’s lack of self confidence, that I didn’t train as a teacher, that I accepted how the world was – a place where  the highest I could achieve was  Personal Assistant!   And certainly not ‘the boss’.  Why ever not? Why did I accept the mores of our time, the gender gap, the not good enough for university. Why did no-one challenge me?  I realise now that I am not stupid .

How little my education gave me, how little I made the effort to use what it did give me.  How I regret that I was not kicked and pushed and thrust to achieve. I regret that no-one knew I scribbled my stories – a secret because I didn’t think they were ‘good enough’!  Only now I begin to explore the world of writing, the blogs, the help that’s out there, waiting to be picked up and used.  Of course it’s not completely too late, but I regret I didn’t find it sooner.

The tagline of my one and only story, Dolphin Days, creeping towards publication is “If you don’t experience failure, you’ll never learn to handle success.”  My protagonist is quite like me, really.