Chapter 2

“Editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.”  Douglas Adams, So Long, And thanks for all the fish, Chap 25. Pan Books, UK. 1984. ISBN 0330287001

If you are after detailed descriptions, glowing and rounded character development in all aspects of the books you read it may be prudent to go and find a heavier tome than this. Here we will mainly focus on relevant incident; indeed word and page counts are secondary and tertiary respectively in terms of the telling of this story, furthermore it is the telling itself that is of utmost concern.

“Life is what you make it”, “You can be anything that you want to be” etc. these are the cliches that career officers in schools and colleges dare to drop in to the laps of unsuspecting students embarking on the next stage of their education or career, unaware of the pressure they are putting on their charges. If I could be anything, I would be nothing, but that just isn’t an option, so I have to be something. I’ve been many things, none of which I’m entirely sure I wanted to be, more as a victim of circumstance rather than a free spirit. Then as you reach the aforementioned age when you realise you don’t in fact know it all and never will, you decide maybe it is time to be and do the things that you want to be and do; that is of course where circumstances allows. In this last regard at least I am fortunate. However, in achieving this, and typically of my spreading eggs amongst numerous baskets approach to life, I’ve decided to follow two avenues of being and doing. The first I have trained for over the last year and embark professionally upon next week; in this case the doing is preserving and conserving the natural world (or at least the bit around me). The being bit is that of a Park Ranger, a long held ambition. The second avenue has required a longer period of training, although much less focused, the doing in this case is writing and the being is that of me as a writer, which has always seemed like a splendid idea. With this second ambition underway for some time now, I feel it is necessary for it to catch up with the first, in terms of monetary reward for the effort put in, so I shall be hawking these words around in an effort to earn a vast and lavish living as a writer; whilst of course actually earning a modest sum for conserving and preserving the planet (or at least the bit around me). With this in mind, we should really get going.