Post 1

Hi
I've been meaning to start a blog for a long time and at last I've arrived.

I will keep this one short because I'm still getting a feel for it. So, with that in mind I think the best thing to do is give you an outline of what I have thought about doing for this blog. But before that, I think I should tell you a little about me.

I am 58 years old, married and live in Stafford, England. I left school with a mediocre education and became a painter and decorator. This however only lasted for 9 months because my father came home from work one night and announced that we were all emigrating to Australia, and that is what we did. I won't go into the details now but I can say it wasn't a success and two years later I pitched up back in good old Blighty.

After re-acclimatising myself to life in our green and pleasant land I had a short stint in a garage and an even shorter stint as a motorcycle mechanic. However, the next job I took on lasted much longer, I toiled away for thirty odd years in a company that manufactured electricity meters.Perhaps toiled isn't the correct word because it gives an impression of slave labour and with hindsight it wasn't nearly that bad.

The work was hard but rewarding. I climbed the promotion ladder and went from being a young man working on the production line to middle aged production manager over a period of thirty years. They say that time flies when you are enjoying yourself, well I must've been having a great time because it all went in a flash and all I have now are the memories.

Good memories they are too, because I worked with a great bunch of people, we all grafted to reach our targets and ensure that the company survived but we always found something to laugh at. It was a shame when it all faded away for me.

Changes in the technology, globalisation and down sizing meant that the odour of redundancy was always in the air, especially during the last decade of my time there. Eventually it was my turn and I guess I had mixed emotions about the end of my career in manufacturing. It was nice to be out of such a stressful environment but it also meant that I lost "the buzz" and contact with my colleagues.

Okay, that's enough of that. After leaving meter production behind I needed to find a new career and I must admit that I was at that time very open minded. Only one thing was for certain, I definitely wouldn't be going back into another factory. It was time for a complete change. I guess the notion of becoming a freelance writer was something that had been in the back of my mind for a while and I decided to lash out some of my redundancy money on a home-study, writing course. All was going well and I was enjoying the self motivation that came with the need to plough through the assignments when disaster struck. The indigestion that I thought I'd been suffering all evening turned out to be a heart attack and I was duly given a clot buster by some lovely paramedics and whisked off to hospital.

Anyway I survived the night and a week later had a couple of stents put into my clogged up arteries. I'd love to say that I'm now better than ever and taking part in marathons but that would be a fib. I am taking lots of medication and sometimes my body seems to be in a permanent state of tired, but what the hell I'm still kicking and glad to be alive.

As I recovered from my trauma I completed my course and went about the business of setting myself up as a freelance writer, and my first book is now available on Amazon so I can say that I've achieved another goal.

It wasn't plain sailing by any means and I'll tell you how I got there in my next post, and I might even get back to giving you a list of objectives for this blog.