by Lisa Fuller

Created on: July 08, 2007

Any Dream Won't do! (Apologies to Andrew Lloyd-Webber.)

What happens when you have a dream to pursue and you can't find a way of making that dream come true? It depends on the dream, of course, and whether it's realistic or not. Winning the lottery is just a shot in the dark, but if it keeps you hoping then that's a good way to escape from the mundane reality of the daily grind.

When I was a hell of a lot younger than I am now, then I wanted to be an author. In fact I was still in my navy-blue school knickers when I started writing my first short stories. At five years old anything seems possible, but then reality kicked in at the tender age of ten when I was approaching the dreaded ordeal of the eleven plus exams.
I passed and went to a Grammar school and somewhere along the way my dreams of being an author were left by the wayside of defeat and broken longings.
In short my new school was already starting to mould me in the shape of the average pupil.
Now I never wanted to be average. It was a choice between becoming appallingly bad or so brilliant that the world was at my feet. An average student, I hovered between the two until it struck me that I could opt out of what was expected of me and do my own thing.
University was out of the question, if I couldn't start to live my own life at sixteen then why wait until I had a degree in English and ended up on the dole queue without a job?
I started work within a few days of registering for work. I had seven good "O-Levels" with distinctions in English Language and Literature.
For the next three decades I was destined to work in several types of government jobs. First I worked for the local Hospital Board and then moved on to British Railways, ( an advance in pay). I wrote several stories and loads of bad poetry while hanging onto my seat on a high-speed train. I think the element of danger suited me, I had three poems accepted in an anthology of verse that was published in the early years of the seventies. All of them were reactions to the war in Vietnam, though looking back I think that if any of the teenagers of those years had ever known what truly went on they would have hung up their pens and pencils right then.

The years passed, as did my marriage and I became a single parent with an eighteen-month old baby to look after. After several poorly paid jobs I became a civil servant, the equivalent of selling your soul to the devil. I used to jot down some interesting stories until I realised that I could only use them

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