Wordsmithery

I quite enjoy this writing lark. I really do. I think it's maybe because I like stories, really. I mean, the world's far too large to see and do everything, makes me sad to think of it sometimes, but there's just not enough space in a human life to try everything, so the best you have to go on sometimes is the accounts of other people.
Now, there's TV. TV is fine, you can see some heavily edited footage that shows you a perfect visual representation of something, but it's lousy at conveying feelings. Get a person who's been there and is REALLY passionate about having done it, sit them down and get them to talk about it for 10 minutes. There's a lot more... eh, I don't like to use such a nebulous term as saying there's more soul to it, but honestly, I rather think there is.
However, through the loss of storytelling, the selling of it to major Hollywood motion picture companies and TV studios, we've also lost the art of something much more noble. The art of exaggeration and outright lies.
When the fisherman comes home to his grandkids and they ask about what he caught, does he say "well, 3 trout. Not much, really" or does he say "3 fish, but the one that got away? It was the size of a B52 bomber! Did I ever tell you about my time in the RAF...". Lies and exaggeration, they're far more exciting, especially when you're a kid. There's an art to it, I think, giving people just enough bull that they don't think it's too far fetched, that they don't ask difficult questions that you can't answer but enough that the story is still fairly fantastic. And honestly, so long as its nothing malicious, so long as the stories aren't going to put any dangerous or hurtful ideas in people's heads, I'm all for it. I know my childhood was a lot more magical for having thought that there was a Santa and that my dad stood one Christmas morning at the front door, saying goodbye to him.
Life's difficult, sometimes. We go through things on a daily basis that test us on so many physical, mental and emotional levels, so sometimes it's important to just have a little outlet, to have this world where the magical, impossible things still happen. It's a shame that my grandparents aren't around, my grandad was always game for a laugh, but my dad's a fair source of some pretty wild stories. I just hope that, in years to come and if I ever have kids, I can be as genuinely interesting to my kids. Maybe I'll inspire as many dreams as my folks did for me when I was little.

I guess that's why I'll never stop being a kid. It's so much more fulfilling than growing up. Nothing's changed, really, except now I can drink booze and coffee and nobody can tell me that I can't have any sweets.
It might also be why all my favourite jokes take about 5 minutes to tell (by which point I think most people have forgotten what I was talking about). Most of it's in the telling, for me. Or why I laugh a lot harder in person than I do online.