The blank page, or in this case the blank white box into which I type lines of 'courier' typeface letters.
At school I used to have to write a lot of lines. I made my lines an assembly line; first I turned out 500 x "I" down the page, then 500 x "must", or even just "m", depending on scales of production. Sometimes I'd only get half of the lines finished, or else 500 x "I must never..." Ah, the inanity of school and teachers with their careers to think about.
I did however have some very good teachers. My new theory is that I can only remember the names of teachers that were any good - even if I remember them for all the wrong reasons. I must have had countless teachers who didn't impress me at all. My oldest memory of a teacher is of Mrs Bean, who I remember as being an old woman. Then again, I was only five years old. You can imagine how I later wondered how much fun her husband would be were he a teacher. The second (and last) teacher I remember from that school was Mr Denny. He was a tall man who wore short sleeve shirts which revealed his bony elbows and arms, which seemed to fascinate me. His pride and joy was an old lead-type printing press - which probably wasn't all that far behind the technology of the time - which he kept down the back of his classroom. It was on this extremely manual typewriter that I published my rather embellished story about how one night, to fool my parents, I put a doll in my bed while I hid under the bed. The punchline was, "It worked, they kissed the doll!"
