I'm in a flurry of fuzzy technology. Can I write WAV files as audio CD tracks? Can I download a software mixer for my professional sound card? Dare I?

It's table clearing time, prior to the next push forward.

Mainly these days I write in sound. It's so sensuous. My last play, BARNES AND MOLLY, was recorded first, then I edited the sound into shape.

Bread and butter (neither of which I eat, come to think of it) work is making free-lance features for Radio 4. The pay is pathetic - but over the years I've learned to live on little. I make radio because: a: it gets me out of the house; b: a microphone gives you carte blanche to approach anyone and ask them anything; c: cutting seven or eight hours of recorded interviews and FX to fourteen minutes has me goggle-eyed and high as a kite.

Mixing sound is breathtaking. Reliving the experience you recorded, creating tiny, tight bright sound images, cross fading, making sound beds, polishing and finding the story in it all, then writing links, drawing on our luscious language, with all its tricks and devices, to say as much as you can in as few words as possible

And then, love of my life, …is normal! So far this year we've performed this mixed media dramadoc in The Crucible Studio, Sheffield, The Alhambra Studio, Bradford, and the Hockney Gallery at Saltaire (set modified to incorporate a massive Hockney original!).

…is normal! - 'a play by Ray Brown about his friends in former-Jugoslavia'. As writer, director and co-producer - I get to appear in it!

Bloody Nora. Who said be careful what you wish for - you're sure to get it?

At school I was a clown - a working class kid picked-up and fucked-up by a lower middle-class grammar school. I hated it and the disordered teachers who took sticks to me and failed dismally in any attempt at empathy. That charismatic adult who recognises talent, and repeatedly pops up in Desert Island Disks, never showed at Tadcaster Grammer School. Took me years to get over it (and my partner, Rose, yawns, looks skywards: 'as if you ever did.').

I became an academic psychologist who, after a long and winding road, stumbled into writing fiction. And at long last I was at home. I knew what I wanted to do!

And, one way or another I've been doing it ever since.

Of course I went on the dole in the mid-Eighties and tried to overthrow the government.

And, of course, I spent years discovering that it isn't enough to sit and write all the time.

And years discovering that early, easy ambitions are not so early and easy to realise (Yes, that's right - the novels were never published).

Then one day you wake up and Bingo!

It was just under a year ago for me. I was off my head with pleasure: whacking out a series of BBC Radio 4 features on those who, like me, are obsessed by flight (DOWN TO EARTH); a Radio 4 play just commissioned; odds and sods of prose and readings floating around. And bookings for …is normal! I was saying exactly what I want to say in exactly the way I want to say it.

Early one morning Rose and I are heading south, strung out with tension, the set stuffed around us. She is stage manager and tec, this time we are working with super thesps, Fine Time Fontayne and Sandra Hunt (drawn from of a pool of actors who have made wonderful contributions to the development of the show). I peer at a pink mackerel sky, remind Rose that fools like us have been doing this for ever and a day. She indicates somewhat acerbically that she wouldn't be sodding well doing it if that wasn't the case.

So I drive in silence and try not to follow the thought that three thousand years ago there were no sound tracks to go wrong. And after all our wheezing '69 VW Transporter must be as reliable as an unshod mule on a stony mountain track…. in a thunder storm…

There you go then - a poor, romantic writer, doing his thing!