Man Of Few Words

Chapter 4

I've been promising myself that I'll get around to writing something of worth, of substance, for years now. Decades almost. And now really is my last chance. One shot at glory. Death or glory. Well, death definitely. Glory maybe.

It'll be the first real thing I've written for a very long time, possibly ever. That's what's compelling me, I think. That, and the dreadful fear of going back to doing nothing. If I'm doing something, I'm still alive. If I do nothing, I'm already dead. Right now, this is pretty much all I can do. I think I can do it. I hope so.

Chances are you've read something I've written before and probably asked yourself, or even asked a nearby friend or family member, "Who writes this shit?" and the answer is me. I write it.

That little passage written on a can of beans telling you, in as jovial and chummy a way as possible, the phone number you can call if you're "not entirely satisfied" with the beans therein – I wrote that shit. In fact, it was my idea to add "...or if you just fancy a chat..."

And if my silken prose was enough to persuade you that, yes, ringing baked bean customer service was actually a worthwhile use of your time then you'd be 'greeted' by a machine calling itself 'Jess' and regurgitating a script written by, yes, me and designed to make the menu of button-presses available to you as enticing and as beany – oh yes, as beany – as possible. Apparently there was a real person at the end of one of those lines but, judging by the amount of script I had to write for that job, they really didn't want you wasting their time if at all possible. What 'Jess' was really saying, in as jovial, as chummy and as ever-so-slightly flirtatious a way as possible was, "Go away, we're busy."

Ever wondered why the directions on certain brands of shampoo have been getting more and more sexual over the years? You can kinda blame me for that too. That one wasn't exactly my idea, but I was the first copywriter to make it a reality. It had to be just right. No one reading it could know it was sexual – unless they were really looking for it – but it had to feel sexual. That was not an easy trick to pull off, but I'm "a natural", so I'm frequently told. Plus the few years I had spent writing fake readers' letters and filthy, yet newsagent-friendly, cover lines for such disreputable magazines as Jazzle, Busty! and the short-lived Take My Wife... early in my career helped out a little there.

I wrote a lot of junk mail back in the day too, before I started specialising in product packaging. All of those 'Congratulations! You've won the chance to win a car!', 'Open NOW to claim your free thing!' and 'You have been specially selected...' type letters might seem impersonal, but you can take comfort now in knowing that a real person writes them. And that person, for a while at least, was me. The one bit I didn't write was your name, somewhere near the top, in a gap after 'Dear...' or 'Congratulations...' or 'Hi...', in a different font to the rest of the letter, and not aligned quite properly. That wasn't me. That was some other soulless machine.