Chancery Stone

How can you tell a story in a paragraph ?
How do you tell a life in a paragraph?
Do I give you bare facts? Born - none of your business. Place of origin - East Kilbride. Parents - yes, two.
Or maybe the creative version. Didn't read my first book till about the age of eleven/twelve (don't know exactly, because I can't remember much childhood). First two books, The Genie Hottabych and The Rose and the Ring. Also read every fairy tale I could get hold of and was lucky enough to read Victorian versions, not bowdlerised modern versions. Loved all those evil parents and threatening places. Loved the melodramatic orphan stories in The Judy. (Now, I have got to be a rarity here. I actually wanted to be an orphan.) Wasn't allowed to read The Jackie or teen/women's magazines as these were "Capitalist Pornography". Once unwittingly bought a copy of OZ in the street in Glasgow when I was a teenager which my mother made me dispose of "before my father saw it". Deeply ironic as it was destined to become a very valuable rare edition, and my mother did have that greedy little materialistic edge.
Fell into The Citizen's Theatre and its obsession with subversive drama. Saw a lot of nude men and learned about the Marquis de Sade whose works cost me a fortune, bought from abroad, like illicit pornography.
Do I need to go on through detective fiction, horror, magic realism, the classics, Jacobean drama, far too much bad theatre.......?
I could list my jobs. Although I tried to avoid them, I worked randomly when it couldn't be helped. Selling radar spares, running restaurants, a sweet shop, a newsagents, debt collecting, nude modelling, dancing, bar tending, filing clerk, cleaning.... You get the picture.
Or my lifestyle. Over 17 different houses. Lived in Glasgow, London, Cumbria, Aberdeen, Orkney, Fraserburgh, Manchester, Morecambe. Never married, never had children (always swore as a child I wouldn't and everybody said, "Ah, you're saying that now, but you'll change your tune." Well, they were WRONG). Kept cats (hell, now I sound like a lesbian), went walking, danced, was a party animal, lived in seclusion, never did drugs, once got stoned on tranquilisers and sexually assaulted a priest, don't smoke, had my first cigarette on stage, don't drink, once sat outside in the most exquisite rain I ever saw so drunk I couldn't stand, eat too much and never diet.
Does any of this tell you anything? Does all of it tell you something ?
I always feel people's work tells you all you need to know about them, even if it's only that they are very convincing liars.
So... my biography.
Read DANNY and know me.....