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About Me — Stuart Thomas
Most of life’s problems can be solved by stretching
I am a traitor to my younger self. As a teenager, I defined myself by all of the things I didn’t want, namely; marriage, children, a mortgage, a car, and full-time employment. Despite my lack of ambition in these areas, I have since achieved all of the above.
I also didn’t want to be a writer…
I was not raised to be ambitious, as an only child of a lone parent, from a working-class background, I was enrolled in the, “…as long as you’re happy and kind…”, school of parenting. My tentative, ill-founded intention to become a visual artist faltered and faded about three years after I completed a Fine Art degree. A major factor that interfered with my intention to become a painter was my growing love for guitar playing, which originally started as a poorly planned strategy to attract women but by the time I graduated, had begun to seriously infringe on my painting time.
In my mid-twenties I was living in a damp, dilapidated flat, making a half-hearted attempt to be a painter and living a pseudo-bohemian lifestyle, on government benefits, when one of my closest friends offered to get me a job in the guitar shop where he worked. I had been unemployed for some time and the sudden, unexpected offer of a cash-in-hand role, where I’d be with my friend…
