Paul Collis

Twickenham, near the Thames, West London. As a small child I spent much of my time with my grandparents, Eric and Edie. On work days, Eric cycled off to Teddington Library, where he was the maintenance man. One of his responsibilities was to stoke the furnace of the boiler. Quite often he would bring back books that his employers had culled from the shelves and consigned to the flames. He put a greater value on them, and gave them to me. Even though I couldn't read some of them - an outdated encyclopedia, say - I treasured the pictures. Edie worked at the Twickenham Library, a proud Edwardian building with columns and pediments that, to me, declared the importance of books by housing them in a palace. Three times a week, at 7 a.m., she would unlock the huge double doors and let us in. We had the place to ourselves. While she cleaned the vast expanse of parquet floors and polished the solid oak shelves and desks, I would be assigned a chair and my choice of book. Any book! For an hour and a half the shelves were all mine, and I could climb the rolling ladder and make my own discoveries.
How does this early experience influence my writing today? I find that one of the pleasures of writing anything – books, emails – is conducting the research. I'm always fascinated by it, and always distracted. And that's my excuse for not being as productive as I'd like to be.

My initial attempt at writing for adults was at art school, writing copy for a series of ads for Alcoholics Anonymous. That led to a job in an ad agency, which led to a career of creating TV ads in Europe and the US. Cameras, cars, soup, chocolate, beer, airlines, radios, wine, TVs; people in my business are knowledgeable about many things, but experts in none.