Creative Choices°. I'm only just learning, at the age of 43, that I can make choices at all, that I can decide what I do next in my work and in my life - and what is more galling actually is that I'm realising that I have been making creative choices all along, I just haven't been making them very consciously.

For the record, here's what I consider to be my creative work - my A-levels are in German, French and Latin, which means I read a lot of stories and translated them into my own language and thought about what they meant and then answered questions about them. My hobby was photography - finding interesting things and exposing light from them onto film for a fraction of a second, passing it through a chemical process and then using it to cast shadow images on a piece of paper which itself required chemical processing - in the dark. I had few friends.

Then I trained as an actor. I had some small initial success in getting work, rep in Cheltenham, crooning in Mayfair piano bars, but I really didn't believe that I could make a proper living in theatre or in music, so I stopped before it hurt too much.

I picked up another creative thread, programming computers. Sitting up all night writing code, hacking away, learning how to make a machine do exactly what you wanted it to do. This got me involved in databases and the joy of crunching and combining large amounts of data to tell a damned good story. I helped tell one big story about what happens when a big company buys up the nations shipyards and then went off to University to learn how to do this stuff properly.

When I came out I used my talents to tell stories about public services. Actually, the big boys and girls told the stories, I was there to create little cameos and interludes, illustrations that would make sure that the readers believed the stories they were being told. As time went by I saw that I could share this talent with others and teach them how to see the stories in the numbers, so I moved on and started helping people inside my organisation to tell each other more stories and find the common points of interest between them.

Since 2002 I've been writing and thinking and working on whatever came along. That's when I started playing with blogs. Later people invented a kind of audio-blog which someone called a podcast and then we added video into the mix, but it all feels like the same stuff to me.

Oh and I've (co-)created two children - that's real magic.

What I write here will be very much flavoured with my own feelings about my own creative life. What are my creative creds? Really - what counts as creativity? What do we call stuff that isn't creativity? What happened to most of us at school that drained creativity from us? And is it better and easier for our kids? Or worse and more difficult? What can we do about it? I mean, what can we do to change the system of education, to the way we all think about art and music and writing and crafts, but also what can each of us do now as adults to rekindle our creative bits. Oh yes, and why are we all so interested in “creativity” all of a sudden anyway? What's happened? And why do some people persist in treating creativity as if it would benefit from a good dose of scientific management thinking - broken up into process steps to be made more efficient and manageable?

Naturally, I'm also very interested in the role of social media in all of this - how the act of keeping a weblog and the sometimes compulsive recording that goes with life in online social networks are affecting my attitudes to my creativity and that of others, how being connected to a bunch of new people seems to be an important factor in making more new stuff. But that should be enough to be going on with.