What’s something you used to worry about but don’t anymore?
I used to worry about success.
I don’t anymore.
The journey matters more to me now than getting there. Whether I “arrive” is out of my hands. All I can do, all I want to do, is to plug away at the things I love. That, in itself, has become success, because I’m content. Happy, even. At times, full of joy. Elated. Like yesterday spotting a photo of my mum while writing about the summer of 1978. Disney was filming at Alnwick Castle, and we were extras. I was a King’s Guard Special; she was ‘a lady’. As a child, you don’t notice if your mum is good-looking (I was sixteen). She looks great! (No wonder Kenneth More invited her out for dinner). That summer, that Easter, that year. It makes me laugh. I kept a diary. I never missed a day. I fell in and out of love several times a week. It is agony to read. Poor lad! You got there in the end.
I love writing. I love having thousands — perhaps millions — of words to look back on, written across more than fifty-two years. I hoard what I write. I still have ruled manuscripts from when I was thirteen. They’re terrible, but they’re mine.
I’ve recently recovered 1,750 posts from my first blog, written between September 1999 and 2010. What surprised me was how recognisable the person writing them is. I was doing then much of what I do now: recovering and reposting old diary entries, reflecting on the present, and playing around with characters, incidents and plot.
And if I’m not writing, I’m reading — currently Karl Ove Knausgård. If I’m not reading, I’m cooking, watching The Pitt, coaching swimmers, gardening, surveying veteran trees or doing local council work.
Success doesn’t really come into it anymore.
I’m not earning £1 million a month. I’m not watching the box set I wrote and directed. My work isn’t hanging in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. I’m not performing Lear at the National Theatre or leading the singers in a revival of The Rocky Horror Show.
I haven’t gone to the Moon, swum the English Channel entirely submerged, or skied backwards down Everest while performing Monty Python sketches.
There will always be another absurd summit available if success means arriving somewhere impressive enough.
I’d rather keep writing, reading, making, teaching, growing things, noticing things and enjoying the fact that I’m still curious.
That feels like success to me.
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