All I wanted was a short bio to insert in the front cover of the next print of Random. Nothing complicated. Surely not too hard a task for someone supposedly good with words?

It was a tortuous process. I stopped and started, fed the dogs, fed the birds, went to Tai Chi….surely that would calm me and give space for simple words to fill. But no, when I returned to my keyboard, nothing would come that didn’t sound like a conversation between Mrs Thatcher and the Queen.

Tea, that’s the answer. Then write it as if it’s about a stranger, in the third person. That didn’t work either. It emerged as a strange strangled paragraph. Even more so when transposed into first person.

I couldn’t creep up on the words by distracting myself with a bit of light dusting, nor could I force them out with a spell of mindless digging in the veg patch. Nothing came. Nothing at all.

So I dragged in a photo and underneath it reads in small text,

‘Sally J Blackmore – I write poetry….but not biographies, thumbnail or otherwise.’