Application process completed.

That was a gargantuan task and nearly took the stuffing out of me.  Let’s hope the hoary institution of academia looks kindly upon my efforts.

Molly here; now that i have permitted the beast of ambition to raise its large unruly head, that head is lolling about on an all too narrow neck, the neck being my confidence which has been pared down to almost nothingness these past few years.  Try setting wheels in motion, when they are attached to a rusty vehicle that has been inert for too long.

Lesson learned recently, don’t tinker with a piece that flows nicely, as I did, and now it’s horrid, choppy and uncertain.  I repeat, NEVER mess with your first draft, finish the damn whole, then go back and edit.

I have reached the near deadline.  I will submit this form in person with the original piece, untainted by edification, and hope they accept my raw potential, for starters.

Also wrangling with gremlins, those little piss colored morons who spit out their bile in the back of my cranium.  Lock ‘em up, throw away the key, and when they start whining and wheedling, and insulting your intelligence go at them with a metal spike. Back! Back ye varmints! Works every time.

I attended Birkbeck open day, to see about this Master’s programme in Creative Writing.  I felt excitement, acknowledging for the first time in a long time, my true ambition, which is to become a published author and make my living doing what I love best, which is writing, more than that, creating, making up characters, giving them speech, hearing them speak, letting them loose, letting rip.

I got to the event at the Royal National Hotel on Bedford Way, Bloomsbury, in good time, (unusually) for me, and snooped out the stall where the tutors would be, stall 17.  The event ran from 4pm until 7.30pm and by 4pm it was packed full.  I looked around at the diverse range of folk who had made it their duty to get there on time, like me.  Young, old, abled, disabled, Asian, Caucasian, Afro-Caribbean, African, all hungry for knowledge, and to get on a course, like me.  Wow. I thought. Wow. As soon as the doors opened we poured in, and despite being amongst the first to arrive, there was a woman already sitting in the seat chatting to the relevant tutor in the Arts and Humanities Section.   So another tutor beckoned me to sit and chat whilst waiting.  This tutor was not representing the course I wanted but one similar.  I recognized his face, then he happened to mention that he was an Arvon Tutor. Bingo, none other than Colin Teevan, Dublin playwright and translator.  Nice guy, open, friendly, approachable, from Ireland yes; but not, let it be said ‘an Irish writer’ no pigeon holing thank you very much. I told him I had applied for the Arvon mentoring scheme but was unsuccessful despite some good recommendations.  He was one of the panel judges, I remembered.

‘So c’mon,’ I said, give me the scoop, why was I turned down?’

‘Nothing to do with me,’ he said, bit shiftily I thought. ‘Romesh (Gunasekera) dealt with the prose, I handled the plays.  Besides there were 200 applicants and we only had a week to decide.’

Typical, I thought, a rush job.

Of course, I understood precisely why he would object to being labeled as ‘an Irish writer,’ first and foremost, particularly as his subject matter is drawn from classical Greek and Oriental myth. I know too well that fear of stereotyping, packaged and boxed, and labeled before you’ve had a chance to say what is on your mind; and yet, ornery beast that I am, I found my tongue running away with me as I started to challenge his seeming reluctance to be culturally associated with Ireland, as an Irish artist.

‘But we are aren’t we.  I mean we have a language all our own don’t we?’

He said well the head of department is Welsh if that’s any good to you, which I thought showed a good Dublin sense of humor.

Remains to be seen whether they’ll let me in or not. To quote Marx, (Groucho, not the other one) I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.  Same goes for me.  Do I really want to go to a University that would let one such as me inside it’s doors?

As my therapist might say, get a life, and stop putting yourself down. Irish writer or not.

True.

Only she’d phrase it differently.

It’s in the nineties today.  I think I’ll go sit in the yard, near the statue of Isis and watch that great blazin ball in the sky, amazing that from all those gazillions of miles away, that great spinning disc of fire can reach down into my little yard in London and heat up my tootsies.  I feel blessed.

Never let it be said that I turned a blind eye to the sun.