Email to Abi

Hello again,
 
I’m so pleased that Marian has friended you – she is really lovely.  Actually, it is Marian’s flat we have recently moved into.  When she told me she was going away, I was all, “Oooh, I’ll miss you…. Does that mean your flat is empty???”  I hope she wasn’t offended.
 
Do keep following her adventures, because I think she’s headed to Australia, NZ, then South America (which is somewhere I’ve never been).
 
Don’t fret too much if I use the odd word you’ve never heard.  I throw “jobbies” and “façade” in there on purpose because it’s always nice to learn new words.  Annoyingly, I have now reached the age where I totally blank on certain words and cannot recall them.  I had to look up the thing you water your garden with on Amazon the other day because I blanked on “watering can”.
 
Aging totally sucks.  The only good part is that you can do massive blow-offs in public and people just think, “Oh the poor soul”.  I’m looking forward to that.
 
So anyway.  That is not what I meant to talk about.  I meant to say that reading and/or listening to authors talk is the best thing you can do for increasing your Word Power.  It’s also just fun to do for no reason at all anyway.  There’s a whole load of stuff online that’s really great.  A favourite of mine is an author called Sarah Vowell who has that whole smart, New Yorker way of writing that I love.  She also podcasts a lot and if you can get past the fact she has
 
As for your grandad’s charm, well no-one can match him really.  But I think there’s just something about being yourself as much as possible that plays a part.  I was thinking back on this because you and I weren’t so different in our teenage years.  I think it’s something about when we’re little we’re taught to conform and behave as much as possible.  So that when you transition over to being a teenager, it’s still an instinct to not step out of line, not attract attention, don’t say anything stupid and DON’T ATTRACT ATTENTION.
 
Lose that instinct.  Lose it now, I say. 
 
You won’t be able to.  I know I haven’t.  But do try.  Because I’ve always found, the more I let inner-Symon out, the more people seem to like me.  I guess it is because it makes people relax.  It’s also a great way of making close friends.  People like Caro or my friend Peter (who is like a brother to me) are the ones I pretend with least of all.  You’ll make friends like that really soon, if you haven’t already.  So let your Freak Flag Fly, Abi.
 
These are the things I would also tell 20 year old Symon, by the way.  He was RUBBISH at being confident.
 
Lisa Brown, you will not find on Google.  But she appears at various points in our story, so keep on reading, you’ll find her.  There are also a couple of emails from her inserted in there too.  You will notice that when she writes, she uses no punctuation other than Really Bad Words and talks like that too.