Carla Fandango is a 54 year old doyenne of optimistic pessimism. She has pale skin, silver hair with copper streaks, and green eyes. She doesn't really do her black and white photo justice. Her favourite foods are giant chocolate buttons and mini scotch eggs.

Born in a poverty-stricken, back-street neighbourhood, Carla was raised in the incompetent Albanian care system after her mother was sectioned in 1975. Her father remains an eternal enigma.

Such a woeful childhood has sculpted Carla into a fiercely independent and somewhat emotionally detached adult. After arriving in the UK in 1984, she frittered away her best years on a variety of ridiculous men, sacrificing her dreams along the way. She has never been married. Carla currently lives alone in a houseboat on the River Avon and works at a nearby swede farm.

Carla has several step-siblings scattered all across Europe as her mother did a lot of travelling in her hippy days, before the mushrooms finally got the better of her. She only has contact with two of these siblings, although she has recently written to Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell for help with tracking down the other 27.

The step-sister Carla has occasional contact with is Carmen - a former Bulgarian duck herder, who went on to win a Bronze medal in the 2016 Extreme Ironing World Championship. Carmen once told Carla that the secret to her success was learning how to de-crease her expectations, along with the shirts and other items of clothing.

Carla also keeps in touch with her older step-brother Carlos, who was born in Oslo, but was mysteriously discovered just weeks later in an old crisp box under the Stoke Newington railway arches in north-east London. In his heyday, Carlos was the very first editor of the acclaimed music fanzine, Jump Away, which burned brightly for two long halcyon years, between 1985 and 1987. He then went on to become a champion ferret racer, but gave up the sport when he started work as a mannequin in an antiquated men's clothes shop in Walthamstow. It was there that he found the love of his life - the distinguished Mr Wang - with whom he still abides.

George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Kafka, and Nietsche are Carla's literary heroes. Morrissey, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Drake are her musical heroes. Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are her TV drama writing heroes. Since she has a penchant for gritty kitchen sink dramas, Carla dreams of following in Ken and Mike's footsteps and becoming a full-time screenwriter. She is beginning to realise that she may have left it too late, however.

Our heroine prefers to spend most of her waking hours in a dusky fantasy world, rather than face the brutal realities of the dark, dystopian world the rest of us now inhabit - unless we're talking about a Ken Loach film such as I, Daniel Blake, in which case she doesn't mind soaking up all kinds of arms-length abject misery. Unfortunately, this continual lack of presence IRL means she has a tendency to lose track of time. This may explain how she was able to misplace the past 40 years, and why she now finds herself all alone...

THE EPIPHANY

It was one rainy evening last November, as she lay wistfully picking errant swede chunks out of her dready locks, lamenting her mounting ailments and her inability to recall the cat's name, that Carla had her epiphany. (Well, it was more of a barely lit candle moment than a lightbulb moment, if truth be told).

She had always wanted to be a screenwriter, but there was very little chance of actually writing something fantastic enough to be noticed and commissioned for production at this stage. But she could still write something. And, of course, it's easier than ever to put your writing out there in this day and age. All you have to do is start a blog!

As this idea slowly took hold in her foggy thought receptacle, Carla began to form a plan. They say to write what you know, she thought. So, what do I know? (apart from a lifetime of abject misery, existential angst, and disastrous relationships, obviously?). She began to make a mental list of all the things that represented her current lived experience:

1. Searing pain in several joints of her body;

2. Clinical depression and generalised anxiety disorder;

3. Chronic fatigue;

4. Menopausal hell;

5. Breadline living;

6. A job she hated;

7. A leaky boat that would surely sink soon.

OK, admittedly these aren't the most cheery topics in the world, thought Carla, but at least they were real. And surely, if she was experiencing such maladies, there must be others of the same generation who would be able to relate to at least some of them.

Besides, this getting older business is scary, and it's only likely to get more scary as time goes on. Wouldn't it be a good thing to form a community together with others in the same boat? (Not Carla's actual boat, obviously. If even just one other person were to climb aboard that, it would definitely sink).

But how could she define such a potential community? And how would she be able to sell such depressing subject-matter to an audience? Of course, she would need to employ some gently dark humour - that might work! Carla decided she needed to write down some of her ideas before they completely eluded her pathetic brain. Reaching gingerly over the side of the bed, she retrieved her damp biro from the clutches of a snoozing Ziggy (of course! THAT's the bloody cat's name! How could she have forgotten?). And then, almost effortlessly, came the following words:

"Aiming to drive a wedge between Generation X and senility, Never Mind The Bedsocks is for mid-life souls battling existential crises. With left-field absurdist humour, and plenty of rose-tinted nostalgic throwbacks to the 1970s and 80s, the aim is to save our generation from obscurity and encourage aging alternative types to take life less seriously."

Well, thought Carla, that about sums it up.

Now, all that's left to do is think up a title and domain name, find some web hosting, learn WordPress from scratch, build a website from scratch, build an online T-shirt/gift shop to try and cover the expenses of said website, design a logo, set up social media accounts and start to build communities on all the different channels, build an email list, write a decent batch of lengthy, witty blog posts, learn how to draw, design all the graphic imagery for each blog post from scratch, create a lead magnet (in other words, write an e-book, then give it away for free), source a load of content for the social media channels, and then simply launch the damn thing. Easy!

And so, here we are. Carla has finally managed to see something through from conception to reality. I guess she'll just have to see how it goes.

Meanwhile, those pesky swedes aren't going to pick themselves ...