WHY I WRITE - DAVID JACKSON

           I’ll write, in the main, about my life, a life often lived out in hotel bedrooms and restaurants, in railway stations and airports, on trains and planes and motorways; in other people’s workplaces.

I’ll write about childhood journeys by train from Southport to Liverpool, with my Russian uncle to see the ships on the Mersey.

I'll write about being young, writing programs in Sweden when we worked in the office all through the night, so we could spend all day lying on the beach in the summer sun.

I’ll describe my study-bedroom at Ibadan University, with bright green geckoes on the ceiling’ I’ll tell of sweltering formal dinners in the dark panelled Senior Common Room at 90 degrees Fahrenheit. How I ate steak and kidney pudding and jam roly-poly with custard, while my Nigerian colleagues reminisced about their student days in England and argued the merits of Manchester United against Liverpool.

I’ll speak about the fear in finding myself in a hotel in a Lagos slum late one night, while gunshots rang out on the street below, and the body of a young black man lay on the pavement outside my window, a dark ominous stain spreading across his white shirt.

I’ll recall what it was like to stand, before breakfast, on the quayside in Stornoway on a bright January morning and watch a seal swimming in the Harbour only ten feet away.

I’ll describe how it felt working for the National Museum of Ireland at the Collins Barracks in Dublin and walking each morning, with the burden of imperial guilt on my shoulders, across the parade ground where my English great-grandfather once marched, whilst at the same time an exhibition in the Galleries depicted Irish women who married British soldiers, as my own great-grandmother did, as little better than whores and traitors. 

I’ll write about Riga, about sitting in the rooftop bar of the Hotel Latvia, 20 storeys up, and gazing out over the city with its defaced Swedish Church and the babushkas begging on the streets. I’ll describe that amazing restaurant (Victor’s) that I went to with Sue and Jeff, that later featured in Michael Palin’s ‘New Europe’.

I’ll tell tales of phosphate mining in Morocco in the early 2000s, and about the day the mine roof fell in on us.

I’ll chronicle the people I met and the things that happened; Clive getting drunk that night on the Malone Road, the girls from Bulgarian State Security visiting the Comedy Store in London, that fraught night in the Hard Rock Cafe, when Pete waited anxiously to see if his new Spanish girlfriend would phone.

I’ll write a farce about trying to control a group of Lithuanian finance staff in Geneva during the European Football Championships.

I’ll speculate about Polish Simon and his ever-changing team of beautiful young female financial magicians.

And sometimes, I’ll take those stories and explore ‘what if’, what if something had been a little different, what might have happened.

I’ll write to recall a world that’s past, and a way of life from which I’m now exiled.

I’ll write to tell what once was, to celebrate what is, and, just sometimes, regret what might have been.