Can copywriting be taught?

In the distant past, I trained to be a croupier. A roulette dealer, to be accurate. Roulette is fairly complicated and the dealer must be aware of every aspect of the game in progress - monitoring when the bets go down, who has won, how much to pay out and whether anyone is attempting to cheat. It's a fast moving combination of observation, concentration and mathematics and I was hopeless at it. In spite of a very efficient and forgiving six week course, the first time I worked a shift it was a shambles. I know, because at 5.00am the casino's manager told me so. The resulting altercation ensured my croupier career didn't go much further.

The fact was, no matter how much coaching and practice I undertook, my mental capabilities were just not suited to the job. Whatever a 'natural born croupier' looks like, I was the opposite.

The same goes for sports. My instinctive inability to perform in anything resembling a ball game is quite remarkable. But I could always write.

Upstairs, downstairs

I didn't go to university. I could have. They asked me to read Humanities at South Wales. But I didn't. Instead I ran away and joined the circus. Or at least a club not far from Oxford Circus.

Allow me to explain. At eighteen, with my parents on holiday, I accepted a friend's invitation to fill a sleeping bag with clothes and hitchhike to London with little more than the vague promise of a room in a squat. Simultaneously, the singer in my slightly rubbish Derby-based goth band arrived in the capital with a glamorous new girlfriend and an interest in a tiny West End nightclub. This was fortunate. Having secured a squatted flat just off the Old Kent Road and emptied my sleeping bag on the floor, I didn't have much to do. So, when my erstwhile vocalist suggested I play the records at his venue, I agreed. I was well qualified. Playing records was something in which I had hundreds of hours experience. £5.00 a night, cash-in-hand, was to be my salary.

The rap trap

I found the rise and rise of rap and hip-hop fascinating. Not since punk and the new wave had popular music been so thoroughly and radically re-imagined - and, reggae aside, here was the first authentically black street music to cross into the mainstream. The trouble is, I don't really enjoy many of its records.

But that's okay. Indeed, it's very much as it should be. I'm very English, somewhat middle-class and terribly Anglo Saxon. What's more, I was pretty immersed in indie/post punk bands when hip-hop arrived, couldn't break dance, do graffiti or MC and had the good sense not to try. While I was aware of a whole new youth culture emerging, I was absolutely content for it to belong to someone else.

In the city

I enjoy trashy sci-fi movies. Sometimes I pretend to be a fan of monochrome, French art house movies in a vain attempt to be hip; but in reality, it's the trashy sci-fi I go for. Over the years, I've noticed recurring themes in these pictures. For instance, the rubber monster will always carry the leading lady away with her legs wiggling rather than exterminating her on the spot. The aliens will also take on human form, which has a double benefit - they are able to subvert human society with ease and the special effects budget goes much further.

However, the feature which occurs most often - particularly in the 'invasion' flick - is the montage which demonstrates the warring fleet of flying saucers have landed in every country of the Earth rather than just America, where the action inevitably takes place. And the way this is achieved, is to show the spinning craft hovering over well-known landmarks. The Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and the Pyramids are regular favourites.