Be Prepared

When I was eight or nine, my parents mistakenly thought it would be a good idea for me to join the cub scouts.

This seemed like a great idea at the time - I largely pictured myself on a flying fox like at the end of the Krypton Factor assault course - but I didn't bank on the fact that the cub scouts are instead just about hierarchies of authority and honouring the queen and god. In fact, I quickly realised that there was utterly nothing to hold my interest each Wednesday evening at all. My dad would drive me down to Farnley Church Hall and all through the journey I'd plead with him to be able to stay at home, but my parents felt it was good for me and so they insisted. Once I'd been dropped off, I iterally looked at the clock every two minutes, counting down to my father's return.

I've always been happier in my own company, and cannot stand official organised fun. The cubs only reinforced that. Each session was attended by three types of people: poncy posh-a-lots with expensive woggles trying to show off, rough toughies with no respect for cubs, and me on my own making no friends. There was a boy called Lloyd there who was very proper and who I assumed - illogically, as I can now see - was an heir to the Lloyd's Bank fortune. He had the irritating habit of only moving his eyes while his eyelids were closed, and so to look over at the window he would have to close his eyes, look in the new direction, and then open again. I think my arch nemesis was there too - Colin Gibbon - a creature for whom I still feel an incredible amount of hate, and who one day I hope to destroy. Maybe I will save him for a separate memory of his own.

Key memories from this period are: having to play French cricket in the field outside the church hall (I hate team games); winning a badge for succesfully poaching an egg (even at 8 years old, this did not strike me as an achievement); dancing around a bonfire at a Halloween party where I wore a Frankenstein mask (a moment still immeditately evoked whenever I smell cheap plastic); the 5p's I was given by my mum under strict cub rules that I always carry a coin in case I needed to make an emergency phonecall, which I always pretended to have lost but which I was actually hoarding for sweets, in what must have struck my mum as a very obvious asset-tunnelling exercise; and wetting myself while pretending to pray because I was too embarrassed to ask to leave the room while Arkala had an open channel to God (this horrifying event in my past was still remembered by my peers five years later as a teenager, but thankfully with the passage of time they mistakenly thought it had been Christopher Burroughs who pissed himself in the prayer circle and so - peversely - I got to taunt him instead).

Matters came to a head with the Cub Scouts when we were sent on a weekend trip to the Yorkshire Dales. There were dozens of us there - all dressed up in our cub-boy fetish gear, woggles askew - trapped in the drabbest farm house you can imagine. Only one of my actual friends had come along too - Adrian Bird I think it was - and I don't really recall how we passed an entire weekend there. Clear memories are:

1. The boys who misbehaved were forced to strip naked and stand in the farmyard. Mr [X] then hosed them down with cold water while the other boys watched. If this homoerotic imagery is insufficient to alert the authorities, I also recall he insisted on supervising the boys in the shower. All boys had to strip naked and he would watch them lather up. Even as an eight year old I knew this was totally wrong (I mean, I bathed myself unsupervised at home) and I absolutely refused to take off my clothes at any point during the weekend. I had no idea what a paedophile was at the time, but I still somehow seemed to understand Mr [X] probably was one.

2. After dinner - which was something drab and grey - we all retired to the horrible great hall, a dirty room overseen by ancient stuffed animals (particularly horrifying to my childhood mind was a stuffed bear's head which oversaw the stairs, its decaying tongue hanging out of its roaring mouth). As a 'treat' we were given cocoa and penguin biscuits, but I'd never had cocoa before and my efforts to drink it were hampered by the fact it tasted like dishwater. I refused, and was told by a moon-faced female supervisor that I couldn't have a penguin biscuit if I didn't drink my cocoa. "Then I don't want a bloody penguin biscuit!" I bellowed, storming from the room, in what was on reflection my first hissy fit.

3. Other entertainments were: walking in the countryside, which I would probably have been doing with my parents anyway; listening to the worst ghost stories ever, including one about the Ghost of the Flying Dutchman, which might have had more impact if it were made clearer whether it was a boat or an aeroplane; sleeping in a real dormitory, which was horrible but was cheered up by one boy who wanted to show off his boner; being the target of attempted bullying, which never worked with me because I was prone to random outbursts of violence when cornered; and playing dusty and old fashioned board games, which I have maintained from a young age are better described as boring games.

And so, while I had previously been banned from quitting the cubs, upon my return my parents heard from the organiser various tales of my cocoa outburst and my general disobedience, while I provided tales of the hosing downs and Mr [X]'s showertime activities, and thus my parents pemamently withdrew me from the group shortly after my return. I never looked back.

[Estimate of date: 1985]

Cuddles the Caterpillar

While on holiday at the Barend Holiday Village near Dumfries in Scotland - with my parents' friends Kath and Alan, and their daughter Helen - we became obsessed with a furry caterpillar named Cuddles, who we'd found crawling on heather during a walk on the moors.

Cuddles soon went everywhere with the three of us, although ultimately he was Helen's pet. Our parents found this a little disgusting, but were presumably happy for us to have a hobby. Alas, Cuddles came to a tragic end when Helen decided it was bath time, and the poor creature was drowned in the kitchen sink. Inspired by the new Robin of Sherwood tv-series (played by Michael Praed, of whom we had a poster in our attic room, from Smash Hits), we went out onto the balcony at the top of the house and threw the corpse of Cuddles in the air. Wherever he landed, was where he would be buried.

It transpired, when we went to bury him, that we would have been better off taking our inspiraton from the Jesus story, as Cuddles had been restored to life and was desperately making a break for it. We did not seem much saddened by his drowning-and-high-impact treatment, as Helen kept him and took him home at the end of the holiday.

We had a strange relationship with animals on these holidays to Barend. Another time we filled the wastepaper bin with water and rocks and captured ten or twenty toads from the loch and kept them in the bin out on our balcony - an idea that backfired when they started jumping around and laying toad-spawn everywhere. One such toad had a graze on his forehead so we named him Little Gash and took him everywhere with us, although Aunt Kath refused our appeal to put some savlon and a plaster on him.

We also captured buckets full of tiny little prawns from what was - on reflection - a pool at the end of a waste water draininge pipe on the beach, and then took them home and made Uncle Alan cook them for us (although we could not bring ourselves to eat them, Alan made short work of the plate).

[Time: Summer of 1984 or 1985]

PEOPLE: Alistair Howtown

Alistair Howtown lived next door to me when we were very young, and later moved up the road into the cul-de-sac about five doors away. Apparently we played happily as infants, but I have no memory of this. I do remember we were best friends throughout middle school (age 8-12).

Alistair almost never came to my house, and so I was always round at his. Looking back at the things we did it's clear we were both gay. We liked playing happy families with the soft toys (Alistair was always the wife, usually heavily pregnant), cooking chocolate crispy cakes and drop scones, staging our own plays and musicals, watching movies like Grease or tv shows like French & Saunders, and singing along to Kylie Minogue.

I used to envy him his mother, who was a lovely friendly woman with a big round face who seemed to radiate love, but thinking back perhaps I preferred my very close knit family. Alistair was left to forage for his own food (usually pre-packaged pancakes microwaved with syrup, or a packet of Hula-Hoops sourced from a drawer stuffed with packets of them in the kitchen) and was offered no protection against his brother, James. Almost every visit to the Howden household ended when James entered the room and started beating Alistair up. Alistair would run and hide in the bathroom, locking the door and screaming and crying, and I - at that time quiet and very uncertain how to act - would finally give up and go home.

From my perspective, James wasn't all bad - he was very into building his muscles (he was very short and trying to compensate), and also very into only wearing very loose boxer shorts around the house. God bless him, while James was crouched over Alistair pummelling his stomach, my thoughts were often focussed on his muscular back, round bottom and - more frequently than seems probable - his balls hanging out of the sides of his boxers. This was probably the source of my earliest real-life sexual feelings and certainly my first real exposure to the post-pubescent ball-sack. I used to make excuses to sit watching tv in their house in the hope James would sit on the sofa, spread-legged and cock out of the henhouse.

Alistair and I were superb friends, and clearly didn't fit in with the rest of the school (indeed, on school trips to Wales and France we were generally in a clique of two), but our friendship deteriortated significantly when we moved to grammar school. I guess I started to distrust him after he told a dumb lie (he said his hamster was pregnant. Believing him, I reported this to my mum, who confirmed via his mum it was a lie, and any trust I had in the boy was destroyed forever), but we fully drifted apart once we went to big school and ended up in different streams, and he started hanging around with the louder, ruder girls and took up smoking.

I saw him little after that. Even in sixth form, he was on BTech while I did A-levels. I last saw him walking his dog when I was about 21, when I was back home from university trying to make enough money to move back to London. He was a good looking man: tall, tan, handsome face. I sighed and thought about getting back into contact, but months later he hanged himself with his dog leash.

I was no longer close enough to him or his family to find out why he hanged himself, and it only saddened me slightly. It was many years later - 2006 perhaps - that his death really hit me. I was lying in bed just thinking about him and suddenly I realised how close we had been, and started crying when I realised everything he had missed in life, and everything he would go on to miss. Worst of all, I realised I was now the only person in the world to remember the things we had done together, which is a weird way to think about something like this.

My favourite memory is when we were playing catch in his living room, and he threw the ball and knocked some little lead soldiers off the mantlepiece and they broke. They had been his grandfather's and so we spent hours finding glue and trying to fix them so his mum wouldn't be angry, but it was no good as the lead wouldn't stick. In the end we had to come clean and - expecting punishment - we were instead praised, as his mum had always hated them. They were stuck in the bin and forgotten.

It's odd that we were two gays in a homophobic northern town, and yet somehow that was never mentioned in our friendship. My other best friend from this time was also a homo, and it was similarly never an issue. Looking back, I wish he'd remained a friend through school and someone to go through the whole realising-I'm-gay thing with. I think we'd both have come out stronger.

Earliest memory

I had for a long time believed that my earliest memory was of drowning in the sea at Newquay. On holiday there with my parents, my Dad had taken me down to the beach to let me trot around on the sand, and for some reason lost focus and let me gallop down to the sea.

Every seventh wave is a big one at Newquay, or so family lore has it. I remember none of this, as my earliest memory was of being swept up by a giant wave, and dragged out to sea face down. All I remember is salt, sand, seaweed and plenty of panic.

The family account is that I had stood at the edge of the sea, was caught in a giant wave and washed out like a log. My dad waded in and pulled me back out, and a group of teenagers pointed and laughed. The pay-off is that the next wave was even bigger, swamped the teens and dragged all of their clothes out to sea. I have no memory of any of this.

My mum reports that she had been back home at the caravan, and the first she knew about it was when my Dad appeared back at the caravan, holding me dripping wet at arms length, and she was like, Oh FFS.

I say I thought this was my earliest memory, but my Mum recently reported that this whole escapade was particularly annoying for her as I'd just had stitches put in the back of my head after splitting my head open, and I wasn't supposed to get the stitches wet. I remember this injury very clearly - my brother was teaching me a game where you jump off a dry stone wall and into the rusting brown wheel barrow. Instead I learned that dry stone walls are very unstable, wheelbarrows are very hard and that a great deal of blood can pump out of the back of your head.

I remember this memory very well as I have to tell if every month, when I get my hair cut and the barber sees the scars on the back of my head.

[Estimated time: Summer 1979]

First, an explanation

The aim of this blog is to accumulate and place into storage all of my significant childhood memories. These memories will be harvested from the period prior to 1998 (that is, birth through to graduation), and placed in tupperware so they will not fade.

One memory - of any length, on any subject, in any time period - will be posted each day.

This may be a large project.