I’m lying on a makeshift bed on the floor with one ear trying to tune out the ladysnores of Girlfriend 1, and the other ear trying to tune in to signs of life from Girlfriend 2, who sleeps disconcertingly like she’s dead. Outside I can hear the sky being unzipped by the trails of planes; the mumblings of a metropolis stretching wake.

It’s Los Angeles, 5am, & though I should be slumbering in readiness for a day full of adventure, I am awake and prodding out my column onto my phone because if I don’t do this I’ll probably lie staring at the ceiling, pretending my plait is my moustache or something.

In the strange lonely privilege of being the only one awake I think of the city outside, a place as unreal as it is real, as legendary as Atlantis, as fictitious as Oz, as normal and real and grubby in places as anywhere.

I was last here half my life ago, a freshly-baked sixteen, brain boggling at the ludicrous fact that I was there at all.The trip was surreal; a nerdy checklist of the fantastical. Hollywood sign: check, Marilyn’s tiny handprints in concrete: check, the stars on an ever-expanding walk of fame: check. Everything came with a mental brochure of where you’d seen it before; which movie, which iconic photo, which tale from the book of American glamour lore. Moreover, I was staying with friends – seeing the real LA and the insides of its real people’s rooms. I sat and watched as real Californians prepared their food and laughed with friends and played their guitars; went about their ordinary lives and pursued their dreams.

I had such a blast that while I was having it I was already glazing it in sepia & double-dipping it in amber, prematurely casting everything into posterity.

Now I’m back here, in a Spanish-ish villa in Silverlake, staying with new friends, thinking of the sixteen years that have passed since I last dipped my toes in the pacific. I realise with a quiet belly shock that I am not a girl anymore, I’m a woman. My toes are the same toes, but they’re not the same toes. They’ve been through a lot these toes. They’ve been driven over by a car and didn’t break, they’ve been painted different colours, they’ve been in some very bad shoes but some excellent boots, they’ve been the first things to have touched down wherever I’ve gone. Toes are quite valiant on our journey through life, really. Like tiny cavalry men testing the ground. If I were to come back to Los Angeles in another sixteen years they, I, will have seen a lot more, and i will have changed a little more. Maybe a lot.

Going away is a great time to take stock of all that’s important. All the irrelevance gets sifted out and you are left with what matters. What matters to me now, a 32 year old woman who finds herself returned to a faraway place she thought was just a trip of a lifetime you took only once? I should take this time to check.

My clock is out of whack, my girlfriends are snoring/potentially dead, and I’m waiting for the day to start. I’ll lie here and think of what matters. Which, in the short term, might just be bacon and maple syrup for breakfast…

” ‘Ave anuvver little look, and when you fink you’ve looked enuff, ‘ave anuvver little look.”, my no-nonsense driving instructor told me repeatedly as I thrust a Rover down the road on my seventeenth birthday. At that nascent stage of my motoring career, I couldn’t envisage ever zipping around nonchalantly like my older DVLA-approved friends. (Turns out you can make it to 32 functioning quite well on a provisional, so that’s fine.)

I’ve never really regretted not pushing myself to pass my test; never had that hankering that most people have to traverse the tarmacked byways of the country. People say driving is ‘independence’, but I’ve felt no less independent getting myself from A to B or even to G by other means. I love walking, I love trains, and taking a few cabs a month when I’m in a hurry is way less than I would ever spend on a car, and I can foist a bit of my carbon footprint onto some other bugger.

Sometimes people look at you strangely when you’re a walker, when you say you’re going to ‘walk’. Some don’t want you to get mugged, which is nice. Some see the time it will take you to ‘get there’ as injudiciously spent. Some think you will die if you dare perambulate further than five roads away. Telling them you don’t mind walking, in fact want to walk, is always met with disbelief, like you’re being a martyr. Having a dog is a good prop in this event. You can explain away your willingness to move your joints as a reluctant necessity for the sake of the dog. “Well, of course I don’t want to stroll slowly along the sea-path looking out at a shimmering horizon and delighting in the natural slowness of a life before its many modern encumberments, but the dog’s not going to pick up his own shit is he?”

The other day, I chose to walk home from somewhere. I was met with disbelief as estimates were made as to how long it would take me. We all reckoned about an hour. Cue wide eyes and gusting inhalations. After insisting that I truly wanted to, I set off – wrapped up, earphones in, dog setting the pace.

I took a straight route down a long main road, feeling my cheeks pulled taut by a teasing chill. Almost every town has a London Road as its main tributary, and I’ve passed along or across parts of my town’s almost every day of my life here. On this day I was further along it than I’d normally find myself. On one particular stretch I realised I was seeing details I’d not been close to before. I’d passed down it many times in a car but I’d never walked it, so I was familiar with its overview but not its specifics.

I wasn’t looking at anything much when my eyes flicked upwards to the side of a building, its smooth expanse of bricks painted white with old-style signage. Gilbert’s Bakers and Confectioners. I smiled. I love faded paint on exposed shop sidings, like the place has been sliced in half to reveal an older life. I half expect to see 1920s ladies in the windows, milliners on their tea-break, dashing off when they see they’ve been discovered still living untouched by time, dazed woodlice from out of a lifted slab.

I attuned my eyes to everything then, drawn out of my music into my surroundings.

Two sad ladies ignoring each other in a launderette, a scrape-faced teen mopping the floor of a cafe with theatrical swirls, a man mixing cement, two stoners smirking, a house I used to think was so big and majestic now looking so small and tired, a spaniel waltzing past with ball-gown ears, broken stained glass in hidden turret windows, a proud Italian waiter in a waistcoat putting out the bins, pansies poking up through beer cans, a dropped tray of ring doughnuts with chocolate sprinkles, doomed to the swipes of passing gulls.

I wouldn’t have seen any of this if I hadn’t walked. If I’d accepted the lift I would have just seen the blurs of a journey I thought I already knew. I realised even in all my walking I had switched off to what was around me. We all shut out so much stuff, the minutiae of other people’s lives, of our own. When really we always have time to have a little look and then another little look on our way.

I was sad to find that I’d had a complaint over a previous column I wrote about a drunken night out. The naughty part of me felt cool for a second. But I am not terribly naughty and certainly not cool, so I mostly wanted to make reparations. The person sounded nice. I like nice people; I don’t mind saying I want them to like me too.

The complainant said that people with profile should not write in a way that could encourage impressionable teenagers to drink unwisely and get in dangerous states. I absolutely agree. I do not encourage that in any way.

However, I feel there is more to say beyond that.

I think columns reflect life in a way that reportage can (and must) not. I think columns have a bit more freedom to be human, and thus imperfect.

Here’s something I don’t think I’ve written about in my columns. I have been co-Head of English in an Alternative Education centre, have taught kids who have been moved out of mainstream education because it does not work for them, nor they for it. I love these kids. I know their lives and I worry for their futures.

Because of who and where and why they are, these ‘kids’ need a different tack to the one you have to take in mainstream schools. They are not curriculum kids, they are more real than that and won’t be lied to, nor hustled in directions they don’t want to go. They like honesty. They may seem rude and unreceptive to outsiders, but they are dying to respect someone. However, role models to these kids are not those attempting to be perfect. These kids would play up, play games if you tried to suggest they learn from someone whiter than white, (and they would win). For those who do not patronise them, who respect them enough to be real in front of them, they’ll turn up, they’ll open doors, more importantly they’ll do their work and understand that what work they do now might impact on their entire lives. They did not do this at school. I feel for school teachers who are not free to get the response they want from the kids they are losing.

Kids see life all around them. Life does not hide itself anymore. They don’t have to go out into the big wide world to see it, the big wide world comes streaming into their lives at indefatigable speeds. It doesn’t need doors or cables anymore. It is glowing in their palms at all times. They could not stop it if they wanted to. Parents cannot stop it, teachers cannot stop it. We would be doing them a disservice to not prepare them for it.

There is a connection I feel between what I do here and what I did there, between ‘influence’ in the press and in education. School is like the reportage; the restrained good examples, the dry facts. Alt-ed is like the columns; a more personal comment on life.

Some of the best teachers I have known have had colourful pasts; drugs, alcohol, violence, even prison. Some of the best adults I have known anywhere are those who occasionally mess up yet who talk about their lives honestly, with humility and remorse, and who pass on any wisdom they have picked up along the way because they have truly learned it, first hand, gloves off, fingers sticky from the mess of life.

No one is perfect. I occasionally do silly things, like get drunk and write about it. I learn new things all the time. But I know that kids learn more from people like this – they find life less daunting if they feel you are with them, and so do most adults.

I was invited to write a guest column for ‘Cracking The Kindle’, a writerly blog by the wonderful Dan Trelfer. Go to http://www.crackingthekindle.com for his word-finery.

One of the things about writing a book is that you don’t want to tell people you’re writing a book because it’s not actually a book yet. Though you feel you should explain your oddness, your sudden receding from social events, the distance that takes over your eyes, you can’t quite bring yourself to say “I am writing a book”. It seems such a ludicrous claim. Not only because presumably a lot of people attempt it and never finish it, or if they do, only end up thrusting it in a drawer, or worse let it languish unprinted in the ether as an email to self or on a reductive memory stick. (People will assume you are one of these at first.) Not only because you feel like a tit saying such a lofty thing, that people will think you’re ‘a bit of a wanker’. But because the word ‘book’ itself is so rife with things that mock you.

It is a noun for a start, implying that what you are doing (requiring a verb; achievable by your own efforts) is instead actually a thing; an object. But where is it? It is a shifting thing on a screen; it is not even there until you open the document and summon the pixelated wisps from the hard drive. Is that a book? It has no pages unless you print it yourself. Is that a book? It’s A4 for Christ’s sake – that’s not a book, it looks crap. It has no spine but for the strength and structure which you attempt, it has no cover but the one you imagine in your most indulgent daydreams. Is it a book if it’s not a book? Do you have a right to hang on the coat-tails of the noun, if you are only really in the verb state; the doing, the trying? It takes a massive hop over the obstacles in your own self-confidence, a blind leap of faith in yourself, over all the hulks of self-loathing you have strewn around your head. What the hell are you doing writing a book, you twit?

One of the other worst things is that once you have ‘finished’ writing the thing (always believed before actually achieved), you have the gargantuan hurdle of trying to get someone to agree with you that it’s worth reading. It is famously hard to get published. You’ve got to get an agent first. That is hard. Then they have to get you a publisher. That is double-hard. The publisher will judge the current tectonics of the industry and see if you fit anywhere in the brusque economics of it all and might reject you even though they ‘love’ your book, even if they think it would be an absolute critical smash. It is really bloody hard. Saying you’ve ‘written a book’ before you’ve even attempted all this extra stuff is like saying you’re a war hero before you’ve even been measured for your uniform.

Despite that…

I am writing a book. There, I’ve said it. I can get that far. I stumble however when I try to explain what it is. (This is where an agent or publisher would dismiss me offhand, straightaway. If you can’t sell it yourself in a compelling line, they certainly can’t be arsed to do it for you.) I shall try here…
Ok, so, it is some true things, some deviations from true things, some made-up things as a necessary escape, some more true things I never realised were true…
There, see; I can’t go much beyond saying I’m trying. I wrote 70 thousand words in one month of madness. That was fifteen months ago. It has been a slow hell of relative sanity since. I’ve written and cut maybe another thirty thousand words and am bobbing around 80 thousand words. It is not what it will be yet. I don’t know if it ever will be. I can see it all, but it’s not there. I yearn to fuck off for a month and ‘get it done’, but what writer doesn’t? Is it a book? I don’t know.

I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that a lot of Actual Authors (oh, what an AA group that would be…in a church hall…all confessional and biscuity) seem to say you must have distance from the work, preferably months not just weeks, before you can do the final touches. I.e., you can’t write a book in a month and consider it ‘done’ without being a total buffoon. This appeases me when I think of all that work I did which every now and then I get out and poke, like an impotent husband who lurches on his wife when his dick becomes randomly charged.

A friend recently had her book published. She had a book launch and everything, and a week after it was published she said she found the whole thing terrifying. That the sales had been great amid all the first flushes of PR but were now trailing off a bit. I said I supposed she must now just ‘let it go’ – let it live the life of a book, let it float like a baby in a moses basket downriver, and run alongside it hoping it’s ok.

Once it’s an actual published printed book, a baby not a glint in the eye, it’s not ours anymore. It is its own thing, with its own fate, not to be guided by our own editorial impulses. Is that what we write it for?

I suppose what we should really concern ourselves with is not what we want to get out of it – a product, money, success, respect, fame, affirmation, reviews, acclaim, nominations, awards – but do we write our books for the love of the act of it? Our lives should be measured in how we choose to spend our time, right? Do you want to spend your time typing alone, splurging, deleting, editing, re-editing, emoting characters who don’t exist, caring for things you created, speaking in voices that aren’t yours, seeing entire worlds and the tiniest subtextual actions when you close your eyes? If you want to give your days up to all this otherworldly stuff, then you are a writer, and whether you have a book of any kind to show for it can become almost irrelevant if you let it; if you embrace the purest driving joy in it all. The writing, not the product. The journey not the destination. The verb and not the noun.