BOOKS UNWRITTEN

On my sixteenth birthday my father gave me a second-hand portable typewriter, a clunky contraption by today's standards, I suppose, encased in a stout wooden box complete with carrying handle. I have no idea where he got it from, but there was a deal of good sense behind the gift. I had just left school and was about to start my first job, as a cub reporter on a local weekly newspaper in south Lincolnshire. Now I was able to teach myself how to hammer the keys and write something, a skill which - I recall - impressed my new colleagues for a few seconds when I did finally report for duty.
But the old typewriter - manufacturer and model long forgotten - did something else, too. It brought about what some now call a light-bulb moment. I can remember very clearly sitting with the machine perched on a little table, rolling in a sheet of paper, and starting to write. Starting to write a novel, for goodness sake. Something about Paris, an aircraft which crashed in the Himalayas, a hunt for survivors, and about the rediscovery of letters and diaries thought lost forever in the Nepalese snows. And so forth. I think I wrote twenty or thirty pages of text.
Then I stopped because it slowly dawned on me I couldn't do it. I had never been to the Himalayas or even seen mountains - I came from the Fens, remember, and this was a period of Austerity - had never explored Paris or even flown in an aeroplane. In fact, I had never been out of the country. So a few weeks' later I tossed the pages into a waste bin having learned two valuable lessons: that I now knew that above all else I wanted to write; and that if I write then it would need to be about things I knew set in places I had actually visited.
The thrill of the moment sparked by that old typewriter over sixty years' ago, that light-bulb moment,  has never faded or gone away.  Even today the desire remains, for I have loved querty keyboards and books ever since. It is true, of course, that during the subsequent sixty years I have written, quite a lot, for newspapers, mainly, and magazines and books, and more recently, this blog. But I was never able to make a living out of fiction. Couldn't make the breakthrough. Didn't try hard enough. Unable to cut the mustard. Not good enough, I suppose.
The trouble is that whereas the actual desire to physically write something can and sometimes does diminish with age, ideas of what to write do not stop flowing. One consequence is that I have three or four completed novels in MS form waiting in limbo in dusty drawers and tatty folders, along with notes for at least five more.
These, I have no doubt, will remain unwritten. They are simply frozen ideas which will never see the light of day. Thus, a shortening of concentration levels is one thing; the thought and frustration of finishing another novel and then simply shoving it in the drawer is another. 
So here's a toast to the pile of unread books sitting on my bedside table, awaiting their turn, and to all unwritten books, the forlorn piles of ideas and research notes bundled together with elastic bands. And here's to the time spent on fascinating but ultimately wasted research, to half-remembered ideas and to an inability to do them justice.    
Actually, I am beginning to believe that unwritten books are a marvellous resource. There should be a library for them somewhere.