“Just think about it”, said a fellow freelance copywriter when I was an innocent young newbie. “Everything you read – instructions, the back of the wine bottle, the car manual – was written by somebody. Usually people like us, just sitting in their houses being normal and drinking coffee.”

We were working on my first package copywriting job. This was a professional Damascene moment: the world was full of gaps that needed to be filled with informative text, and I was one of the people that could do that! All that potential…

These days, I never switch off. I proofread menus. I go to a gallery and don’t even notice the paintings because I’m entranced by the language on the label. I will get halfway down a set of assembly instructions then get completely distracted by the text. Writing is everywhere, and all of it was written by somebody.

So here I sit, quietly blogging away before I continue with today’s project. Next time you read the label on some everyday item or other, there’s a chance that it’s written by a freelance copywriter, possibly in their own kitchen, probably wearing clothes they’d never go to the office in, definitely with a cuppa. I’m the anonymous voice of your biscuit pack – funny old life, really.