I started off life as a short story writer. Actually, that’s not strictly true. I started as a comic-book writer, drawing stick-men cartoons with speech bubbles. I was about seven or eight, and I’d fold sheets of plain paper until I had a little booklet. Then I’d draw my stick-men. They would appear in strips about football, war, and outer space… until it was pointed out to me that I couldn’t really draw. A potentially glorious career nipped in the bud. It didn’t really bother me. By now I was ten or eleven and starting to listen to music. But being an obsessive sort of kid, it wasn’t enough just to listen – same as I’d never just been happy as a reader of comics. I did what any sensible person would do – started a band. Problem was, none of my friends shared my interest. It didn’t help that I couldn’t read music or play an instrument. I didn’t need to: the music could be stored in my head, the lyrics written down. So I invented a ‘bubblegum’ pop group called The Amoebas, whose roster included Ian Kaput (vocals), Zed ‘Killer’ Macintosh (bass) and Blue Lightning (guitar). I recall the drummer had a double-barrelled name, but forget what it was. By writing lyrics for this band, I found myself writing poetry – doggerel, admittedly, but poetry all the same, in that the lyrics scanned and had a rhyme scheme. It wasn’t such a leap, therefore, to write my first ‘proper’ poem at around the age of sixteen. The Amoebas were still around then, incidentally, but had shifted from pop to progressive rock.

The thing about my poems was, they told stories. They were about people going to places and the consequences of their actions. I think that’s why I started writing short stories. I wrote several while still at school, aided by an English teacher called Mr Gillespie, who seemed to think I had ‘something’.