Irene WignallAs a child I always wanted to make people laugh, make people feel better about themselves. I never knew what I wanted to do for a real job, I still don’t!
I knew I was expected to get my A levels, go to University and then go on from there, but in all honesty if I had gone to University I would have come back a raging alcoholic with no degree.
I left college half way through my A levels and decided the academic life wasn’t for me and I wanted to start earning real money. My first job I earnt £60 a week, it was ‘real’ money, just not much of it.
At twenty three, I was being made redundant, I hated this feeling. Someone else had control over my destiny and worse still my bank balance was in their hands, so I started looking for a job with security.
I remembered as a kid I had played Juliet Bravo a lot which consisted of getting one of my mums old handbags and putting in some plastic handcuffs and walking around the house looking for evidence of a crime. (I must remember to ask my mum why we had handcuffs in our house, when I’m one of three girls). My old dinner lady when I was seven said I suited wearing a uniform and she could see me in a job with a uniform. Who needs a career adviser when you have snippets like this?
That’s it I’ll apply to the police force.
So as a naive twenty three year old I joined the police. I have loved my job, it’s had bad days and good days like most jobs, but it’s been a constant in my life.
However, I always knew I was destined for more but didn’t know what that more was.
Del Boy eat your heart out
After having kids I started dabbling in new ventures, I made tutu’s, I bought forty six pairs of elf slippers from a website called bankrupt stock, my husband said the clue was in the name. I never sold the last ten pairs so I put them in the charity bin at Tesco’s’. I have visions of kids from a third world country, walking their six miles to and from school, wearing elf slippers.
I started selling Aloe Vera but to be honest half of the police force were also selling it so the market was a bit crowded.
When my middle son, Dusty, was born, he was born asleep and as you would expect my head was completely f%*ked. I tried therapy but that wasn’t for me. I started to write with the sole intention of empting my head.
I wrote funny things that had happened in the day with my two sons (aka The Stinks) then I would read them back and they would make me smile. For me smiling is the best form of therapy, it was free and it worked.
I thought about being a comedian, as I said I love to make people laugh but my best one liners usually came after the conversation had ended so that kind of timing didn’t make for a great stand-up routine
There are 168 hours in a week, I work my day job for 40 of those hours,’ ideally’ sleep 56 hours that leaves 72 hours for me to be whoever I wanted to be, not justa detective.
People in the police force used to join up to do their thirty years and then retire, to me that felt like wishing my life away. Thirty years is a long time.
Au contraire (del boy speak for hang on a minute), I’ll go public with my writing, this in the writing world is called blogging but just in case I’m shit I won’t call myself a blogger quite yet.
I gained more confidence with my writing and being honest about how I felt and this turned into writing a book. (Which is basically one big blog) but just in case I’m shit I won’t call myself an author quite yet.
Eric is Banana Man
I write in my married name and police in the maiden name. It is like my alter ego, like when Eric of 29 Acacia Drive eats a banana he becomes Banana man. When I open my laptop I become Irene Wignall, Author women.
I write about my life at home with the Stinks, when I was writing my book I knew it had to feature my day job in there as I had been doing it over twenty years so it was a big part of my makeup.
I obviously didn’t want to get sacked by disclosing restricted information so I chose stories that had happened to me and just sneaked the chapter in there and hoped for the best. That’s generally my philosophy in life.
So far so good, I’ve not been sacked. That may have something to do with the fact that I’m not a world famous author, yet.
Validation
A Superintendent recently told me he’d read my book and loved it.. that’s it, that’s the validation I needed, I wasn’t going to get sacked, yeah!
It may have been a casual remark from him but I have it written down and dated it (joke). There are obviously easier ways to make sure what I wrote was okay but that takes time and I’m not a very patient person.
So far, my transition from plodding to blogging has been a smooth one, but as I intent 2021 to be my(author) year, I’m sure as we all intend 2021 to be ouryear after 2020, things may change, but so far, so good.
Irene Wignall -Author, Blogger, Detective (albeit in another name)
If you’re interested in reading the chapter about my plodding, here’s the link https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B084T2WHQS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_5J9sEb5WP4M0Q
