A Cunt Called Colin

I am a relatively temperate person in nature, however this is a story about a boy who remains a figure of intense hatred in my heart.

When I was ten or eleven my mother job-shared at the hospital with another housewife who lived up the road. This woman had a son one year older than me, a curious specimen called Colin Gibbon. Colin and I had nothing in common and regarded each other suspiciously, and yet as fate would have it our mothers decided we should spend every day after school together, under my mother’s care when Colin’s mum was working, and vice versa. This is one of the crueller situations to be forced upon me.

The precise origin of our mutual hatred of each other is long forgotten, but can be summed up in adult terms as follows: he was a total cunt. I remember for example that he would abandon me in his bedroom when he was supposed to be entertaining me, and go outside to play football with his real friends. I was not an innocent child, and revenge was easily had in stealing his pocket money or casually breaking things he liked. Now I think about it, I do hope he wasn’t doing the same things to me.

Colin was an arrogant, rude little man (an only child indeed, which makes sense) and he rubbed me up the wrong way all the time, to the point where I pleaded with my mother to find an alternative arrangement. She refused, as we had little money at the time. Things came to a head one day when the two of us were in the playroom with my brother and Pez, playing a computer game. Colin did something twattish like switch the computer off just as I was doing well, and I stormed from the room. I wasn't just angry at that, but at everything this boy had done to me. I was filled to the very brim with hatred.

My response, looking back, was far from usual for an eleven year old: I decided to write down on a piece of paper precisely how I felt about Colin (indeed, on yellow paper from a large batch stolen from his room). As I say, I was not an innocent child and the letter used every profanity I knew (whether I used them in the correct context I cannot say). The original letter is of course lost in the mists of time, but my best reconstruction would be along the lines of:

Dear Colin,

I wish you would not come to my house. You are a shit and I fucking hate you. And yes, this letter is written on paper I stole from you, you cunt.

Fuck you,
Andrew


Charming stuff, I know. I trotted back down to the playroom and delivered the letter to its intended recipient. Being a cunt, Colin immediately went to my mother and showed her what I had written. If he was expecting any sympathy, he was quite mistaken. My mother had seen her sweet young boy transformed into a Glaswegian drunk by this evil creature before her, and Colin was forever banished from the house and my life. Alternative arrangements were found immediately, and I never spoke to Colin again.

My only regret is that my Godmother, a wonderful Christian woman who I adored, was also visiting and so read the letter, and her eyebrows almost went through the roof. I felt almost as terrible as the time when I was three years old, and pooed all over the sofa while she was cuddling me. The transformation in her emotions on that occasion was just as painful.

There is one last anecdote relating to Colin Gibbon, or to his step-father at least. My mother had occasion to go round to their house one day, and the step-father answered the door. My mother made rapid excuses and left. As she reported it at the time, “he was wearing only a short silk dressing gown, and nothing down below.”
“How do you know he had no underpants on?” my Dad asked innocently. The look on my mother’s face was confirmation that she’d had more than sufficient proof.