My Pal Satan.

 After getting the bum's rush from Art College, I retreated to my parent's attic in Basingstoke, and started doing the paintings that I should have done at art college. I'd done a foundation year at Winchester which I'd really enjoyed, and found extremely stimulating, but Art College proper hadn't worked out for a number of reasons (my laziness, the fact that I hated it, lack of confidence, depression, alcohol consumption and laziness). My painting's were arguably worse for the experience, and I gave up any pretense of being proper painter, deciding instead to be a cartoonist and illustrator which, ironically, was what my course was supposed to train me for. I specifically wanted to draw cartoons for the NME, Melody Maker and Select magazine, so I set about doing A3 sized paintings of Bjork, P J Harvey and Tori Amos, in the hopes of getting a gig. The fact that the NME never used illustrations next to its album reviews didn't deter me in the slightest. It should have done. 

I sent colour photocopies to all the magazines, using up all of my giro, and kissing the envelopes for luck as I sent them. I heard nothing. 

After pacing a rut in the hall parquet for three days, I summoned the nerve to call the picture editor of Melody Maker, a Scotsman whose surname I pronounced phonetically to his obvious delight. He advised me to come to the office and drop off my portfolio.  

So I put together my best pictures of Brett from Suede and Stuart Staples, and me and my friend Dietch traveled from Basingstoke to London for the portfolio drop. I was advised that I should leave it with reception, and someone would collect it in due course. So I left it, Dietch and I went off to mooch round London with no money for five hours, and when I returned to the office the portfolio was exactly where I'd left it, though the receptionist insisted that it had been looked at. 

I heard nothing. 

What happened next was this: I'd drawn a cartoon about the pop band Suede, and Suede had somehow got hold of it. I have no idea how this could have happened. I would never have sent it directly to the band - it would have been fan art, which was deeply uncool. But they did have it, and when they were interviewed by a magazine called Blow, they gave them the cartoon, and when Blow - an edgy fashion manifesto full of photocopied perfume adverts - were interviewed by The Face, the image The Face used to illustrate it was my drawing of Brett out of Suede.

 I used to read The Face, and that month as I flicked through the pages, there was my drawing advertising a magazine I had never heard of. I had a hot flush. I felt someone had been playing a cruel trick on me. I could hear the furious blood roaring in my ears. The hell? There was a phone number for Blow next to the article and, after a further week of pacing, I rang them and spoke to a very pleasant, very posh man called Michael-with-two-surnames. The upshot of it was that my comic strip, "The Kitchen Sinks", became the only light relief in an arch and arty St Martin's fashion project. The difference was unbridgeable: they were doing collages of Smirnoff bottles after the manner of  John Heartfield, and I was drawing an exercise in whimsy, full of references to obscure Fall lyrics. But they were really nice to me. 

I went to meet them once. Michael was small and camp and black with peroxide hair and a striped mohair sweater. It was like meeting someone from S Express. I was wearing a plastic leather jacket with a button missing and beads. I never felt so Basingstoke-abroad-in-the-big-city in my life. They gave me a press card, and told me I was part of the team, and kept inviting me to parties. And I never went. Why? The overtures came often and kindly, and I rebuffed them all. I sent them the strips they published them, and eventually it all fizzled out. 

The next mysterious phase of my non-career came when somehow I was doing regular work for Dazed and Confused magazine. Did my girlfriend, somehow, sort this out? She was living in London by this time. I did illustrations for D&C in its earliest, coolest incarnation. It could have been a break out moment. I wasn't very good, but I was being published regularly. I should have been all over every magazine, exploiting my sudden, miraculous hipness - all coordinated from my parent's attic in Hampshire. Obviously, I didn't. It fizzled out. I did nothing to stop it fizzling out. I watched it fizzle. I got busy with the fizzle. The girlfriend fizzled out too. 

I sent some cartoons to the comic magazine "Deadline", Jamie Hewlitt's rag, which was huge in the early 90's. I got a very encouraging three page letter back from the editor, Frank Wynne, advising me that I was talented, and he'd definitely like to see more of my stuff. Did I bother to reply? But already you're ahead of me...

By about 1994 it was all over. I'd had all the breaks I was going to get. They might have lead nowhere, of course. But I never gave them a chance to lead anywhere. Cowardice, shyness, not wanting to be uncool - those three impostors did for me. I became more depressed, so depressed I got a job in an office. I wrote and drew three issues of a comic called "Trapped Hair". It got rave reviews in The Comics Journal, and I even sold a few. But I didn't do anything with it. I painted less and less, and I got worse at painting. 

I started writing short stories in my mid thirties but nobody, not even my friends - especially not my friends - wanted to read them. I published an on-line book of short stories in the early teens of the twenty first century. They are embarrassment to me now. I like the stories - they're funny and chock full of genre tropes. I'm getting one of them published, and a couple appeared on my podcast - but they're so poorly written it's embarrassing. I used a semi-colon for everything. I think at certain points it stood in for words or popular letters. There are times it appears to be the only working key on my keyboard. I was in my forties before I even tried to learn grammar. 

In the last decade I've opened up. I try to show my working, and I do the things I'm asked to do. I follow up on unanswered e-mails at the risk of looking uncool or desperate, because, sadly, that's still the job I have to do. That's where I am in my career. 

And every day I'm still fighting that dispassionate dilettante, the guy who let whole careers slip through his fingers, because of his indolence and cowardice. I've always been my own worst enemy, and that fucker is still there, whispering, Wormtongue, in my ear: "Why on earth are you bothering? Oh, I'm sure that sentence is for the ages. Call posterity - we've got a hot one for you." He's still there: in his plastic jacket and beads, thinking he's cool because he liked My Bloody Valentine before you did. 

Get thee behind me Satan. You stink of Body Shop Vanilla Essence, for one thing.