My thing wasn't physical. Now you have no way of checking this but I was the school jock, the sports captain. But I was an incredibly shy, inward-looking teenager, I hated the adulation - totally shallow.
I wanted to be a writer. I was about sixteen when I picked up a library book of my father's, it was "Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac. I was always a reader from when I was a very young child but when I read Kerouac (I would read anything and everything) I was stunned. That stream-of-consciousness writing, the bohemian lifestyle, the hanging out the big jazz names (I was a big modern jazz fan as a teenager), the exotic places and the way he put it all together. I still remember huge swathes of his prose. I wanted to be like Jack. I wanted to live the bohemian life on the road, to write, to get involved in the music scene, to wander around the great cities of the world in a Kerouac-like fasion (see his "Lonesome Traveller").
But what did I do? Join a solidly bureaucratic organisation and made a career out of it. I was in a job that was about as un-hip as it was possible to be
