Old Fart Wannabe Blog

Who is OFW?

Well, here goes. My blog sign off is O.F.W, what does it mean?

The O.F. stands for Old Fart, and that’s honest at least, even if everything else shades or exaggerates the truth. As a new blogger in his ( yes I am male so there we have another truth ) 70^th year what else could I be?

The W stands for Wannabe. Wannabe what? Perhaps here we need a little background. Not too much, I imagine your eyes glazing already.

Background stuff

I retired from working for my daily bread some time ago and took to the idle-life with ease. Against what many people told me would happen I found no difficulty in avoiding the usual retirement trap of switching from full time paid to full time unpaid work. Being unsociable by nature was a great advantage in this.

This of course did not cut any ice with the ‘Trouble and Strife’ and I soon found myself making the transition from Chief Executive to Chief Scullion.

In my days of pot washing and towing the shopping trolley there was, I found, a permanent window; a perpetual holiday from the daily drudge. You see I tend to wake up and peep through bleary eyes at the world at about 5 AM whereas herself sleeps on not only until morning has broken but until it has been swept up and tidied away.

During this blessed time of release from the daily round, this blissful glade in the forest of domestic chores I found time to sit and let my mind wander.

A few years ago I visited the village in the West Country of England where I lived as a young child. In the church I found a pamphlet, a flyer, with some historical facts about the village, and the hill which overshadows it. One of these, concerned a relic, unearthed there which had loomed so large in Anglo-Saxon minds it had become the war cry of the English (and Danish) army at Hastings ( the battle, not the seaside resort), “Halig Rood!!” ( Holy Cross).

One morning, sat in my glade I thought about this; puzzling where this relic, this cross, might have come from and how it ended up buried under a slab in the middle of nowhere. In my mind I wove the beginnings of a story around it. I researched and expanded on it and then I resolved to write it down. I started to write it until it started to write me and I ended up 570 pages later with a novel about the ‘butterfly effect’ of fate.

I understand how pretentious that sounds and would quite understand if you clocked out right now.. What I mean is that somebody can do something daft and unthinking, like me writing this for instance. Someone, somewhere, might read it, and be thinking about how to get a window of peace and quiet in their own life and, not paying attention, get knocked over by the chauffeur driven car of some high mucky-muck. The passenger misses an appointment, something doesn’t happen that should and the whole world changes, probably slightly, perhaps radically; it all depends on the reach of the chain of domino’s toppled, and that depends on the Fates. Or so my story proposes.

So here I sit with this massive thing, 240,000 electronic words on my laptop and that’s where the Wannabe comes from. I’ve written this and now I want to publish it. I wannabe a published writer___ me, and all the others like me out there.

So now I will keep this diary of how I get on with this. If I fail then perhaps someone else can avoid the holes I fall down. If I succeed perhaps it will help someone else to hop up on the hay cart.

I will update this blog as things happen or are expected to and don’t.

Got to go. I’m off to the Quacks this morning. I want him to look into my left eye. I think I might have a cataract coming. My left eye is foggier than my right one. Old age, as they say, is not for sissies.

Take care of yourselves, if there is anyone out there reading this; here be cannibals (or dragons or great fishes, the poison fog, the edge of the world). Remember, even bed with the duvet pulled over is a dangerous place, if the Fates have it in for you.

OFW