Although You Would Not Know This,

I write every day. I write blog posts every day. I write letters every day. Some days I write poems.
Yesterday I wrote four blog posts.

Yes, yes, I hear you. "Where are they then?"
"They're unpublished", I say, evasively. The thing is, I do my writing whilst driving, or in the bath. Or up a ladder, or whilst hammering at a piece of precision machinery, down in a hole beneath the earth, but always, always, in my head.
In my head.  That's where my novels are, and the plays, the screenplays, the collected works of me.

To steal somebody else's line, "I was born at an early age......." I was indeed. I was born in "The Imperial Nursing Home", in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. (my sister was born in a castle, Hazlewood Castle, I'm not sure, Imperial's pretty cool sounding, but a real life castle? One mentioned in the Domesday Book in 1086 a.d.? Damn. She wins in the cool birthplace stakes).
As soon as I could express myself I was making up stories, inventing invisible friends, creating an extremely detailed back-story for my teddy-bear. Ted Edward was a bit of a tycoon. He was, for the most part, choosing to live with me, a toddler in a small village in Wharfedale, but in his other life he owned a fleet of trawlers that operated out of Grimsby, into the high arctic, sometimes he was out there, skippering in the gales, north of iceland. Other times he was suavely dinner-suited, driving his Rolls Royce to whatever mysterious assignations grown-up teddy bears had.  And he had a big truck. With eight wheels.
Ted Edward would sit with me on the rusty bridge over the wharfe, and point out the great mysterious fish in the dark waters below. Bincontyles, and Boncontyles, they were. To this day, no adult has ever seen one, nor ever will. The bincontyle can grow to over seventy six feet, and could swallow a house if it wanted to. Boncontyles are somewhat similar, only green.
As I grew older, grown-ups ceased to always pretend to believe what I told them.
Ted Edward died, only about ten years back, victim of a flood caused by a burst water pipe. Gnarled old sea-bear, he'd survived so much, we'd been apart for years, I grew up, moved away, lived in other countries, and he, well, I understand he was travelling a lot, building a railway over the Andes, prospecting in the Yukon, I understand he was the first teddy bear to meet the Dalai Lama, and of course, the first bear of any sort to circumnavigate the globe in a steam-powered airship of his own design.
Some time in the early nineties, we were re-united, shared a house in Leeds, I told him of my mundane travels, he told me of the time he sailed Cape Horn in a bathtub, whilst escaping from pirates.
Then, one night, as he was hibernating, in my store-room, a pipe burst. Ted didn't stand a chance. The mould got into his sawdust. His growl disintegrated.
I was there at the end. Brave bear, the last few days he refused pain-killers, but swigged bottles of trawler-rum, raving about the old days, and... the island... with the wreck of an old wooden ship... chests of doubloons, preserved in the dry cold, they dragged them to a cave, covered them with rocks... that was during the war, after they'd drifted for eight days in the liferaft. They were taken off the island by a german ship. He thought it was the Tirpitz, but they were kept below, until it reached port. He escaped, built a boat out of packing cases and bedsheets, sailed home in time to be re-assigned to the pacific, and when he eventually returned home, his old log, with the coded map of the island had been destroyed in the bombing.

He told me "Find the island, my young emperor, on the island are the documents, everything you will need to re-claim your throne."