I have a lot of spare time.

This is due partly to the convenient fact that I live a mere four minutes from my place of work, but mainly to the even more convenient fact that I have no social life whatsoever. In the olden days - before geocaching, before SimonG.org, before PuzzleDonkey - I would while away those long winter evenings writing novels.

Y’see, it was my burning ambition to be a writer. I wrote a light-hearted science fiction novel in which a young Albert Einstein travels back in time and finds himself embroiled in the events of Hamlet, where he’s later joined by William Shakespeare who spends the rest of the book scribbling down the dialogue so he doesn’t have to make it up. It was brilliant, but I seemed to be the only person who realised that, so I had another go. This time I wrote a much more serious story about science and religion and evolution and relativity theory and the death throes of the universe. This one was even more brilliant, but once again, it was far too intellectual for the rest of the world to appreciate. So I did another one, a murder mystery set in Renaissance Florence where a young woman discovers her own corpse lying in an alleyway. It was the most fiendishly clever story ever told, but I was the only one who seemed to notice.

As far as achieving my burning ambition is concerned, I failed. These days I never have time to write, and with the exception of my plan to one day reinterpret the nativity as a bedroom farce, there’s nothing I feel a desperate urge to write. But I realise now that there’s no need - PuzzleDonkey does the same job. I get the same enjoyment from writing puzzles and drawing donkeys as I did from writing novels - or, rather, than I would have done from writing novels had they been a) published and b) popular. I was wrong about my burning ambition - it was broader than I ever realised. All I wanted to do was invent stuff that people enjoyed. And now I do.

It turns out, then, that I didn’t fail at all. I was just mistaken about what I wanted to achieve.