2 April 2000

This is me in the Lakeland Pedlar cafe (bikes and wholefood) in Keswick yesterday, smirking over an excellent lunch of jalapeno pizza and Earl Grey tea.

Except that, the friend who took the photo said later, 'Don't put that on the Web, it doesn't look like you.' Isn't that a strange notion, that an untouched photograph of you can fail to be your likeness?

I feel something similar about quite a lot of the writing I've done in my life. Not just about soap opera, not just about factory writing, but even about plays and pieces of prose that I thought at the time would be expressions of myself. When I look back at them I find it hard to recognise my voice there, in the shape of the sentences.

I've just finished a draft of a novel, and told the friends who were to read it first that I didn't know about its prospects, but at least I was sure it was me. They didn't know what I meant until they read it. Then they saw.