[PETE takes the stage. He walks up to the podium, not looking at the audience, not least because he isn’t really expecting anyone to be out there.]

PETE: (squinting at the bright lights in his face) Good evening everyone. Thank you for coming. It’s a real pleasure to see you all here. Even if the bright lights on the stage mean that I can’t actually see any of you. Regardless, it’s a pleasure to know you’re out there.

[PETE pulls out an old-style white plastic Apple Remote and clicks it at the screen. Nothing happens. He clicks it again.]

PETE: Oh, right. (pulls out iPhone and starts Keynote Remote app) There we go.

[A slide with the big number “150” appears on the screen.]

PETE: One hundred and fifty days ago, I joined a very exclusive club. A small collective of bloggers who made a very simple pledge: to wake up each day and, at some point before they got into bed and fell asleep at the end of the night, to write something on their blogs every day. This “something” didn’t have to be good. It didn’t have to make sense. It didn’t have to be “for” anyone. The purpose of the exercise was twofold.

[PETE taps his iPhone. The next slide appears with a crude stick-figure drawing of him sitting at a writers’ desk, scribbling in a book.]

PETE: One: to prove we could do it. To prove that it was possible to express your creative side at least once every single day, even if the final product was complete garbage.

[PETE taps his iPhone again. A crude drawing of him with a thought-bubble above his head appears.]

PETE: And two, to awaken those otherwise-latent skills that we all possess. Those skills of creativity, and imagination. Those skills to spin a magical tale with words, whether it’s about actual magical things like unicorns and robots and monsters even though robots aren’t really “magical” as such, or about the mundanities of everyday life.

[PETE taps his iPhone, this time with a flourish. Another crude drawing appears, this time showing several faces displaying different emotions.]

PETE: (starting to pace across the stage away from the lectern like a university lecturer) Sometimes these posts are funny. Sometimes they are silly. Sometimes they are nonsensical. Sometimes they are serious. Sometimes they are angry. And sometimes they are very sad. (stops and faces the audience, spreading hands wide, a bit like Jesus but less religious) All of them are valid expressions of something. All of them reflect the essence of that day. Even if they don’t mention anything about what happened.

[PETE taps his iPhone. An image of a calendar appears on the screen.]

PETE: (pacing back towards the lectern) 150 days might not be a huge proportion of your life in the grand scheme of things. But a significant number of things can happen. In the one hundred and fifty days since I started posting on here every day, many things have happened. When I began on the 19th of January 2010, I wasn’t to know it, but I was at a crossroads in my life.

[PETE reaches the lectern and leans on it in a Phoenix Wright style.]

PETE: I wasn’t to know that some one hundred and five days after I began that my whole world would be brought crashing down. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen in quite the way it did. Nor was I prepared for the amount of pain it would cause, and still does.

[PETE slams his hands on the desk, clearly channelling everyone’s favourite Ace Attorney.]

PETE: But I wasn’t about to give up. I felt like shit. I was angry. I wanted to destroy things. (slams fist on desk and hunches over it like Edgeworth when he gets pissy) I wanted people to hurt. I wanted people to hurt as much as I do, and more so, so they’d understand. (pauses, stands, calmer) I still do feel these things, sometimes more than ever. But I was not going to give up, and am not going to give up.

[PETE taps his iPhone, and a crudely-drawn stick figure image of several different people appears on the screen.]

PETE: New people came into my life at just the right time. They helped me understand things, to see some good in myself at a time when all was darkness. They gave me courage, gave me strength, spurred me on to try new things. Other friends proved themselves to be true friends instead of just acquaintances. The disastrous collapse of one relationship led to a new-found closeness in many others.

[PETE taps his iPhone again, and a photograph of PAX East appears.]

PETE: Right as I reached the point of no return at this crossroads – it had one-way streets in all directions – I discovered something. That it’s OK to be me. As I set off down the road I’m still on – which is winding, twisting, turning and regularly plummets into a crevasse – I was a new person. Or rather a person I’d always been. But more aware of it.

[PETE points out into the audience dramatically.]

PETE: One thing you can always be sure of in these last one hundred and fifty days is that it’s been all me, for better or worse.

[PETE slams his fist on the desk again.]

PETE: And one of the things that one of the new people in my life taught me, or should I say reminded me, was that not everyone goes together. Not everyone likes everyone else. If we did, sure, it’d be easier. But that’s not the way the world works, either on a tiny person-to-person scale, or on a huge nation-to-nation, culture-to-culture scale. And acceptance of that fact is what makes living that little bit easier.

[PETE taps his iPhone. A picture of a chav appears on the screen.]

PETE: I don’t like this guy. He’s a twat. He thinks I’m a twat, too, and thinks it’s amusing to insult me in the street even though I’d never seen or spoken to him before in my life.

[PETE taps his iPhone again. The image shatters.]

PETE: But it doesn’t matter. He is long gone. (pauses) Not dead. I didn’t kill him. Though I quite wanted to at the time. No. I have never seen him again since. And if he can’t deal with who I am, then he can go fuck himself.

[PETE emerges from behind the lectern again.]

PETE: Given that the eventual goal for everyone involved in this little experiment is to write something every day for a year, the number one hundred and fifty is actually not all that important. Halfway through day one hundred and eighty-two? That’s important. That’s the halfway mark. But one hundred and fifty? It’s a symbol. A milestone. Perhaps a new beginning, perhaps not. No-one can say. All I can say is: thanks for being there every day.

[PETE pauses for a moment.]

PETE: Also, you can blame Alex Connolly for telling me to make a speech. Good night everybody.