Scott Davies: English Writer

I’m Scott, a 30-ish year old English writer living in Bolton, England.

But to get a real understanding we have to go back to where it all started.

My mothers womb.

Wigan, 1986.

A very young child screamed into life. That child: Me.

It didn’t take long for me, a child with an intellect so high that he was once described as “promising” by a teacher at a public Primary school, to realise that Wigan was a town so dull that the annual pie eating competition was the main, and only, highlight for its residents. I knew whilst still wheeling around in my pram I simply had to get out of there.

But how?

At this stage in my infancy I was unable to walk or even control my own bowel. These days of course, I can almost always control my own bowel.

Fast forward twenty-ish years and I am a long-haired University student studying Sociology (with English Language as a minor). I have had exactly one girlfriend who moved to Newcastle and eventually left me. I was a young, moderately attractive, single alpha male, striding around campus with a rucksack slung across my shoulder and a big fringe slung across my forehead.

I was living every twenty-something man’s dream.

Freshers weeks, fancy dress parties, smoking funny cigarettes and commuting from my mothers home in Wigan so as to avoid crippling student debts and unsanitary living conditions.

I’d finally made it.

Or so I thought.

Depression. Anxiety. Two girlfriends dumping me. It all became too much and I dropped out of University well into my second year a drunk, unkempt and broken shell of a man.

Fast forward again some more years and change the tense of the writing and you find me now sitting, present tense, at an Ikea Påhl desk in my Bolton-based home (see: not Wigan) on which I have a large mortgage that I am comfortably repaying in monthly instalments.

I have an amazing daughter. In fact, I have two daughters, but the other one I’m still on the fence about. I live with them and my third girlfriend beautiful wife, and I have done for ages. My wife doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, either. I don’t even wake up at night worried that she might be considering leaving me to move to a more Metropolitan part of England.

I’ve hit the jackpot.

I also write what I, and literally other people, have described as “funny” short stories, sketches for television and radio, and on the occasions where my mood strikes even the odd haiku.

(The haiku’s tend not to be funny, and are often about wasps. A creature which I simply cannot abide.)

I love writing.

It lets me get away from the boring monotony of life and imagine some of those monotonous things to instead be absurd. It gives me the opportunity to work through my feelings by taking a painful memory (i.e. the loss of my virginity to a woman who then left me for a City in the North East of England) and turn those feelings into something positive (i.e. a potential seven-figure book deal).

But what I love more than all of that, is the sound of laughter. Which ironically, I never hear on account of me being a writer. This means the readers prefer to read my work in a place that isn’t where I am. The idea of me watching them read the witty observational piece I recently wrote for The Guardian* would undoubtedly be unnerving to them.

* I have not yet written for The Guardian.