Rickbot Memory Project

Women I have spurned

2010-04-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

It’s been quiet here at the Memory Project HQ thanks a recent three month trip around Australasia, however now that I’m back and my friends have harassed me at length I’ve finally got round to writing a new entry. So, as the evil twin of my tale of growing up gay in the Yorkshire countryside, here are my memories of those girls who’ve tried to be more than just friends:

My first girlfriend was a creature called Cathy McCoy, whose name is wholly unobfuscated here as I’d dearly love to be reunited with her. Cathy and I were best friends the moment we left the womb and – as I’ve noticed is common practice – our parents insisted we were sweethearts and would one day marry. For some reason we accepted this conceit and a happy few years were had living the dream: holding hands, frolicking in the garden ... actually, this is about as much as I can recall, although I do remember that we were utterly inseperable until we were about four years old and her parents moved to Darlington and I didn’t see her ever again.

That isn’t quite true. I think about a year or three later we went to visit the McCoys in Darlington, and it turned out we had nothing much in common anymore. They also lived in quite a grim house, and I sense that Mrs McCoy wasn’t married to Cathy’s father anymore. I suppose in this sense I didn’t ever see the Cathy I knew again, since instead I saw a paupered and broken version of her. Maybe I will obfuscate that name after all.

I stuck to boy friends after that – the variously queer John How and Alistair Howtown, as reported elsewhere in this blog – until I must have been about eight years old, and for some reason Alistair decided I needed a girlfriend. The relationship was formed as all relationships were back then: my friends convened with Sarah Barkur’s friends behind a curtain at the youth club disco to strike up negotiations (I seem to recall I was checking out Nicholas Cheetam’s naked body in the Home Economics room at the time – I suppose I’d forgiven him since Tiggergate), and then later the union was announced to Sarah and I without our participation.

“Okay”, I said, curious to see where this would lead. Sarah was after all a perfectly pleasant looking girl with strawberry blonde hair, and it couldn’t hurt to at least try having a girlfriend.

Regular readers might predict this wouldn’t work out well. Sarah and I had an awkward goodnight kiss, then the following morning at school (Youth Club was on a Thursday, this was all before alcohol was even invented) we acted awkwardly around each other for the first two classes, and then at breaktime Sarah sent an ambassador to my usual hanging out spot among the rocks at the back of the playground.

“Sarah is calling it off,” the diplomat explained. “Sorry, kid. Sometimes love ain’t easy.”

No indeed. That was probably my shortest ever relationship.

A few years later, when I was more comfortable with my sexuality and yet more certain of my lack of interest in the ladies, Sheila Polhammer invited me round to her house to assist with her math homework. She took me up to her room where we could concentrate on the math without disturbance from her insane Austrian father, but when we entered I was surprised to discover we would also be working without disturbance from our math homework. It was a tiny room, filled mostly with a bed.

“Sit down,” Sheila demanded, so I sat sharply down on the floor and got my math books out of my bag. “No, on the bed,” she insisted, packing my books away again.

We sat on the bed for a while, making awkward conversation. She asked me whether I was a good kisser, and I turned the question round on her by asking whether that was her four inch black and white television she had on her bedside table. This evasion tactic did not last long and Sheila moved in for a kiss. I moved about three feet back and asked quietly whether the portable television was battery operated or needed to be plugged into the wall. This was a limited coping mechanism as the room was only six feet wide and I didn’t have many more questions to ask about the specifications of her portable television. And so it continued, and so I grabbed my bag and ran out the door.

I was particularly popular during the second year at university, when Darien brought an extremely inebriated Penny Porter to my room and explained patiently and with only a hint of romance that “If you want her, you can have her.” I didn’t want her.

The same year Ted, Olivia and I went on a party cruise to Ely in a long boat which powered along the Cam. We’d been invited by the indomitable Rotsy, who’d taken the starring role in our recent production of Jeeves & Wooster. On the seemingly innocent pretext of going out to see the stars, she took me out onto the front deck and planted a long kiss on my lips.

Stunned, I didn’t know what to say. So I said the first thing to come into my head.

“You taste like pasta,” I said, meaning bland and wet.

“A good thing I like pasta!” she responded, meaning rich and spicy.

We spent a long time out there, her kissing me and me using diversionary tactics such as pointing out how quickly the trees went past, and how clever it was they used parallex scrolling to create the illusion this was all happening in real life.

At the end of that term I went to Denmark and unwittingly became husband to the pig-fearing Eleanor, as previously documented.

After graduation, Zack and I went off to America for a few months to sell books door-to-door. While living in Hershey our next-door-neighbour Michelle developed something of a crush on me. Michelle was not frightened about being forward, as demonstrated by her decision to write “I want to drink your hot cum” in permanent marker on the dashboard of our car. Early one morning the three of us went to the pub because it was raining and we didn’t feel like getting wet selling books door-to-door (in Southwestern terms, going to the pub just because it was raining was second only to child sacrifice in terms of evil). As the weather cleared up in the afternoon, Michelle suggested I should go selling in Anneville, and offered to come along and give me a hand. Being too drunk to walk straight, this seemed like a very good idea.

Well, would you believe it but turning up excessively drunk to try to sell books to middle class parents in a heavily religious town in which the sale of alcohol is forbidden transpired to be a really bad idea. Halfway through one demonstration Michelle decided to grope me, pulling open my flies, and to distract my potential customers I babbled too much about their fabulous fishtank. We were kicked out of the house, but if the owners thought that was the last they’d seen of us then they were very disappointed. They discovered us about five minutes later in the middle of their lawn: me virtually passed out from drunkeness, Michelle straddled over my inert body trying to pull my clothes off and screaming at me to fuck her.

It didn’t happen, thank goodness. I suggested we go back to the pub for more booze and – after about an hour of her screaming at me to go home and fuck her in her fucking water bed – Zack finally arrived to drive me home.

We moved away from Hershey the following morning.

Please see alternative travel blog

2009-12-25T08:30:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the lack of service, Rick is away.

My father the policeman

2009-11-21T02:34:00.001-08:00

Lying in bed the other day, I remembered a strange occasion when my father decided that six months imprisonment and a £5,000 penalty was insufficient deterrant to prevent him from impersonating a police officer. As I recall it, he pulled his car across the front of a double decker bus to force it to stop, leapt out of the car shouting at the bus driver to stay where he was under orders of the police, stormed the bus and up the stairs and then attempted to arrest two young teenage boys.

I was a young teenage boy myself, and my embarassment at his behaviour was matched in magnitude by the boys' absolute terror at being confronted by Gene Hunt. Thankfully, the arrest did not proceed, although he did march the boys off the bus to take their details before permitting it to continue.

My dad later claimed that the boys had been throwing bricks out of the top window down onto his car. As a passenger who was sitting in the backseat, who understands something about the momentum of buses and the sealed nature of top deck front windows, I cannot now confirm this is likely.

My dad was always prone to a little road rage, although of course this was before the term 'road rage' was invented. A few years later we were in Ireland, driving from Dublin to Tipperary, and a motocyclist overtook us. My dad took this as a personal slight and accelerated, overtaking the motorcyclist in turn. He of course then did the same, until the two drivers were trapped in an insane battle of speed, accelerating through the country lanes in a determined battle to beat the other, the cyclist waving his fingers in fury and my dad consumed with anger and bellowing abuse at the wheel.

It could only have a disastrous end. As we reached the Tipperary city limits and the speed limit felt to 30mph, my dad hit the brakes and the cyclist went flying into the back of the car.

My dad pulled over, but this time did not impersonate a police officer. The rest of the family was petrified as of course a fist fight would be the only way to settle this, but in fact things were suddenly incredibly amicable. I think probably because it turned out they were both English, and it isn't very English to argue in public. My dad apologised if his bumper got in the cyclist's way, and the cyclist - peeling himself off the tarmac - apologised if he'd done any damage to my dad's car. They shook hands and went on their way.

The closest my dad ever got to driving a police car was after we'd had a long boozy dinner up at the Spite with Kath, Alan and Helen, when he was too drunk to realise the car alarm was still on (but not, it seems, too drunk to drive). Motoring home, the car lights started flashing and the alarm blaring at full volume, in a satisfying imitation of a police panda car. Fortunately we did not attract the attention of any real officers, otherwise he might have got to ride in a police car for real.

My Life As The Bowl

2009-11-05T07:30:00.000-08:00

My first experience of the theatre came in 1979, aged 3, when I featured in the Rainbow Play Group's full-length adaptation of a series of nursey rhymes. I was cast as The Bowl, to Cathy McCoy's The Spoon, and it was my task to run away with her once The Cow had jumped over The Moon. I recall having been desperate to play The Moon, and so it was with bitter resentment that I portrayed some eloping crockery.

I didn't much know what to make of the show while we were rehearsing. Growing up in rural Yorkshire I'd had no cause to visit a theatre before, so the entire concept was alien to me: the stage, the curtains, a large room full of people including my parents. It was hard to imagine what it was all for, and yet still I played my role with panache and as the crowd roared I knew I'd found my calling.

It was some years later - at primary school - that I was next invited to act, in a somewhat confused adaptation of Winnie the Pooh which included a series of non-canon characters like Snow White. I was (along with the rest of the school) desperate to play Tigger, and I recall the night before the cast was announced standing naked in front of my father during bathtime and demonstrating that I was born to the role of Tigger by jumping up and drown frenetically until he pleaded with me to stop. My only anxiety was that the part came with a skin-tight costume, including orange tights decorated with black marker, and I wasn't certain I had the legs for it.

Alas, I was eventually cast as one of the Seven Dwarves and thus relegated to a stupid costume with a bobble hat, with my only job being to stomp around bellowing 'Hi-Ho!' while all of the other characters had fun. My one time friend Nicholas Cheetam was selected to play Tigger, a role he portrayed poorly, and his betrayal drove a wedge between us. We were never friends again .

Come Middle School (aged 10), I was selected to play the much-overlooked role of 'Newspaper Delivery Boy' in an all new adaptation of the Bible's Christ Story. Mrs Rees, the director, otherwise took authenticity seriously and insisted we all black-up with dark brown foundation so we'd look more middle eastern. My task was to hide at the back of the hall and then - halfway through the second scene - stride down the middle of the aisle bellowing "Read all about it! Read all about it! Census called in Bethlehem!" before handing newspapers out to the main characters on stage, thus seamlessly providing their motivation for Scene 3.

I don't recall much more about this production than that a tall blonde girl called Samantha was required to wear a miniskirt and gossip like a harlot, a task so suited to her that she adopted the role permanently in adulthood.

I became much more shy in my later years, and carefully avoided participating in any productions at secondary school. Pelinore Says and South Pacific thus passed me by, until in the sixth form (aged 17) Timothy Brabham and I were invited to write and direct the school pantomime. We'd never written a show before - indeed, had only written some pretty dreadful comedy sketches - so we had no real idea how to tackle the task. Things were not made easier by the furry-man-mountain that was Mr Dickinson, who handed us a vague concept which effectively comprised the weak play on words that is Sleepless Beauty, and we took it from there simply by dividing the scenes up and each writing completely different plots and characters for alternate scenes.

The plot and dialogue was extremely weak to start with, but then during rehearsals Mr Dickinson insisted on inserting his own scene towards the end in which he played a fat hairy priest quoting from the Bible ("Jacob answered his mother Rebekah, 'Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man and I am a smooth man."), which I vaguely suspect was a direct rip-off from Beyond the Fringe. The show was - ultimately - a great success, with one particularly heart-stopping scene in which the depressed jester was supposed to hang himself, and the teacher selected to play the role embraced it with such authenticity that he almost throttled himself to death with a rope hanging off the lighting rig. That got a terrific laugh.

I sat in the audience during the pantomime and had just one line to deliver during the entire performance, right at the end when Sleepless Beauty was due to marry her prince. The preist, shortly after some smooth-man/hairy-man bonus material, asked whether anyone in the audience had cause to object to the union. I was then required to bellow out, "I object. I object on the grounds that marriage is an outdated institution governed on lines which are both paternalistic and misogynistic!" (this was, you can see, comedy gold). Well, I was utterly terrified of doing any such thing, and sitting in the audience I didn't have the benefit of the adulation and adrenaline that fuelled the other performers. I thus found courage in a bottle of 'Rescue Remedy' which my mother had given me, which I sipped quietly through earlier scenes. Rescure Remedy claims to be a herbal solution to anxiety but really - in the quantities I consumed - offered its main support in the form of 70% proof industrial alcohol.

Later, while studying in Cambridge (aged 18), I entertained ideas of joining a comedy troupe such as Footlights, but the presence of such multi-skilled performers as David Mitchell and Robert Webb - combined with my own utter horror of performing - caused me to abandon this impulse. Finally, at the end of my first year, I spent a quiet weekend indoors writing a comedy play which was called, on the basis of three words chosen at random from the dictionary, Hooligan's Cows Dream.

I was quite pleased with the script, and in the second year Timothy Brabham and I formed the theatrical society JESSICA (Jolly Entertaining Show Staged In Cambridge Auditoria) in order to attract sufficient funding to put the show on at the Cambridge Play Room. This was a terrific decision as it was ultimately through this show that I made most of the university friends I now think most fondly of, most notably Olivia (who played Bob), Ted (Art Producer) and Darien (Director).

The plot concerned two people waiting in purgatory to hear whether they could enter Heaven, but who didn't realise they had already been judged and that their waiting was in fact Hell (the plot came to me while watching Satre's Huis Clos, which we sensibly flagged up in the programme in an attempt to wrong-foot the critics). It was a comedy of course, so Darien came up with the rather natty tagline of "A comedy about pain, suffering and death." He also shortened the title to Hooligan's Dream, and removed the worse excesses from the dialogue.

The show was a total hit, with most nights sold out and a substantial profit made. I was too self-conscious to watch the performance myself so I lurked in the cellar below the theatre like the Phantom of the Opera, listening to the audience laugh and clap and trying to guess which bits were so popular. When the first show concluded with cheering and applause I was so thrilled by the success that I ran out into the street whooping and raced all the way up to the Senate House, where a homeless man asked me for change and I was on such a high I gave him a full pound sterling. My mood soon fell on the Friday however when - on the way to a lecture - I picked up a copy of Varsity to read our reviews. The entire review was a direct and personal attack on me, which I considered rather unfair.

We only did one more show at Cambridge. Darien cobbled together some sketches he and some school pals had written, and we served the package as Twelve Moths (the name was chosen only after Ted had painted a poster of twelve moths). We persuaded Matt Benares to fund the entire venture on the basis of guaranteed return of 15% over one month. Of course, the show was an utter box office disaster and we lost it all.

"We didn't mean that sort of guaranteed return," we had to explain to Matt when he asked for his money. He was such a penny-pincher.

Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher

2009-10-08T05:44:00.000-07:00

I loved sucking my thumb as a toddler, and had a fabulous yellow wool comfort blanket with satin trim which I would push under my nose while I sucked. To this day I still have an indentation permanently embossed into my skin where the thumb rested on my incisor. I suppose my parents realised this was going too far when I started waving goodbye to my friends with four fingers while the thumb remained resolutely in my mouth. It was clearly time to wean me off the thumb.

My mum first decided to get rid of my blanket, and took the short-sharp-shock approach: I was simply told I was too old for it now and it had been thrown away. I was utterly devastated and declared myself unable to sleep at night without it. Since no blanket was returned to me I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and I waited until my mum's back was turned and crept into the kitchen drawer to steal some scissors, retiring to my bedroom and cut a blankie-sized piece of terry towelling out of the undersheet on my bed.

I'm not sure how I thought my crime would go undetected. I suppose my infant mind imagined that the beds made themselves and that my mother never had call to go near them. Anyway, the destruction was quickly discovered and I was severely punished. As this was the 1970s, when one didn't go throwing things out simply because they'd been slashed by an infant with scissors, my mum sewed my new blankie back into the undersheet and there it remained until way into my late teens, an uncomfortable ridge under my heel when the 16-year-old me was trying to sleep.

Once I had finally grown used to the absence of the blanket, my mum exposed me to the horror that is Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, the terrible tale from Shockheaded Peter in which a young boy is told not to suck his thumb while his mother goes to the shops. I recall identifying with the boy in the story very well, and even feeling slightly cheered to see him finally submitting to his addiction and sucking his thumb, so it struck me with an extraordinary level of horror when a skinny old man with a giant pair of scissors broke into the house and snipped off both thumbs as a punishment (for some reason, my brain believes this story was told on Rainbow, but that seems unlikely).

I went to bed that night utterly horrified, convinced against all reason that a man would break into my room and cut my thumbs off with scissors. My dad came back from work late that evening and went to kiss me goodnight, surprised to find me still awake, and I pleaded with him to leave the lights on in case the scissor man came in and tried to amputate my thumbs.

I remeber quite clearly the confused look on his face, and my mum's shrug as she stood at the bedroom door trying not to look sheepish. I don't think I heard any more Shockheaded Peter stories after that.

[Time: 1980]

PEOPLE: Stuart Colefaks

2009-10-08T02:17:00.000-07:00

In the third year of Middle School, when I would be around 10, a school trip to Wales was announced. Our math teacher Mr Nicholson was to work out the sleeping arrangements and asked us to write down the name of the person we most wanted to share with, and the name of the person we least wanted to share with. An optimal solution could thus be calculated.

It took me no time at all to work out who to put as my friend, Alistair Howtown. It was also no trouble working out who I least wanted to share with: the poisonous dwarf Stuart Colefaks. I had known Stuart since primary school and he had always been a vile and filthy creature (for those unacquainted with him, you need only think of Golem from the Peter Jackson movies). He also had a huge patch of scabby baldness on one side of his head, where some horrible accident had burned off his hair - the unpleasant, violent and essentially stupid nature of his personality meant this was not a cause hatred, not pity.

Anyway, long story short Mr Nicholson got the names on my piece of paper muddled up, and so while Alistair Howtown and everyone else got to sleep in dorms with their friends, I was the only one out of sixty kids who appeared to have put Stuart at the top of my list and so we ended sharing a set of bunk beds in a tiny room together. I still wonder to this day if Mr Nicholson was being purposefully vindictive.

A cautious friendship was formed with Stuart during those four days, in which I learned to almost trust him. It seemed Stuart put on a facade of obnoxiousness in order to disguise his insecurities, and once he realised I wouldn't judge him for that he began to act more like a human. Things were going really well until one night when he wet the bed, a fact which Mr Nicholson swore me to secrecy and which I have faithfully kept a secret until this very day (to be fair, Mr Nicholson said "Don't tell your friends", not "Don't publish this in your blog in 23 years time").

For some reason, Stuart was convinced I would betray him and entertain my friends with tales of his noctural emissions (nothing was further from my mind. It wasn't entertaining, it was disgusting. I'd been in the bunk below). Stuart decided the best way to deflect the entirely absent accusations against him was by launching allegations against me, claiming I had wet my bed. This was an extraordinary way to behave and only drew attention to the truth, and I told him in no uncertain terms that if he kept talking like that I'd tell everyone he'd pissed on the mattress. This silenced him for the remainder of the holiday.

Back at school, we had an uneasy acquaintance and I don't recall much of significance passing between us. I have a vague memory of playing a game with him in sewing class, where there was a huge set of tiny drawers each with a different type of thread in them. The game he came up with was to select two drawers at random and see if the colours matched. Given the drawers existed solely to separate the different colours out I could see this was a futile game, but he was an extraordinarily stupid child who was regularly driven to violence and so it was just pleasing to find something peaceful to occupy him.

One day we had to bring in photographs of ourselves when we were younger for some sort of memory project. I had a typical photo of an apple-cheeked child happy at play, and was naturally fascinated to see what sort of beastly infant Stuart had mutated out of. To my great surprise the photo he presented was of Stuart with clean blond hair and an undamaged scalp, engaged in a scene of beatific joy building a sandcastle on the beach. I looked at the collection of urine-soaked bones holding out this photo for my inspection and saw for the first time that he had trouble at home: Stuart was not this way because this is what he chose to be, but because this was the best he could manage in horrible circumstances. The photo was the last remnant of a happier childhood he could only vaguely remember.

I expressed my suspicions to my mum, who had worked as a dinner lady at the primary school while we were there and had gathered enough gossip to fill three Memory Projects. She told Stuart's background as the story of a happy family torn apart by child abuse, violence, extreme poverty and all-pervading neglect. He was the Baby P of his generation. He was a bed wetter for a reason.

If I felt a pang of pity for Stuart then, this quickly evaporated in secondary school where he formed a gang with a number of other miscreants and set about abusing everyone and everything. He even tried bullying me, something I tended to ignore as I was a quiet teen, but I recall eventually snapping. One day outside the science block I was so pissed off with his petty slander that I grabbed him by the shoulders and bellowed a stream of abuse at him. I was five feet ten with a solid build, and he was the same tiny, dirty little shit he had always been. He ran away and never bothered me again.

Ultimately, while I was at university, Stuart was jailed for his involvement in drugs, and in around 2001 a rumour started circulating that he had killed himself in prison. The people I discussed this with seemed almost pleased that such a poisonous creature had removed itself from the world, but alas it turned out to be nothing more than a rumour.

That said, if you run his (non-obfuscated) name through the internet, there is no record of his existence.

A Case of Honest Theft

2009-09-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

Eating in a restaurant in Dublin at the weekend, I was delighted to be served After Eight mints. I remembered fondly how sophisticated these chocolates seemed when I was a child.

So expensive and exclusive was the After Eight that most middle class families always seemed to have a half-empty box squirreled away in the sideboard somewhere, alongside the china and cutlery which were also reserved for special occasions. The box would come out only when honoured guests were visiting, and each diner would consume a single mint before the box was retired to the sideboard for the season. In those days a box would never - as now - be devoured in its entirety, the table deluged in a pile of spent paper wrappers.

I remember on one occasion we were visiting my parents' friends Peter and Margaret in Abingdon, and my brother and I were left in the company of their children, Katherine and Steven. After the usual tiresome day of discovering that none of us liked the same ball games and that computers still sucked, the four of us got to chatting about pulling off an elaborate After Eight heist which - in our heads - was about as daring as the Thomas Crown Affair. We drew diagrams on paper and worked out elaborate ways of sneaking past our mothers in the kitchen - crouching behind the armchair, taking it in turns to run from hiding spot to hiding spot - so that we could break into the dining room and help ourselves to the treasure chest of delicious mints that waited inside.

It was clear to us that our subtefuge would not go unnoticed for long, and for each mint we ate we insured our risks by placing a single penny piece in the empty black envelope and returning it to the box, in part payment for what we had consumed.

The weeks passed and the theft was only discovered the next time we were visiting, months later, when we children were awoken from our slumber upstairs by the roaring laughter of our drunken parents. We had, of course, wholly forgotten about the prank.

I recall on another occasion - when Margaret and Peter were visiting us - that Steven told me that tonic water tasted just like lemonade, and he encouraged me to steal some from the pantry. An impressionable wee dolt, I duly trotted into the kitchen, opened up the bottle and started pouring it directly into my mouth. I was not quite prepared for how effervescent tonic water can be, and the fluid erupted like a minature Vesuvious in my mouth and out in all directions across the kitchen.

The theft was on this occasion difficult to disguise, as my mum came racing into the room upon hearing the sound of her son's head being blown off, and found me standing drenched in the middle of the kitchen, an empty bottle in one hand and a dozen g&ts worth of tonic soaking into the carpet.

[Time: around 1986]

Scampi Fails The Pet Show

2009-09-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

We were not allowed pets when I was very young - my father claimed that caging or domesticating animals was intensely cruel (although I suspect he just felt they were smelly) - but when I was around eight or nine, after many years of cajoling, I finally persuaded my parents to let me have a hamster. I guess my Dad reasoned it wouldn't take up too much space, or last for very long.

My mum took me to the Otley pet shop on Kirkgate where I selected a handsome, sand-coloured hamster. I named it after my favourite food at the time, Scampi, and carried it home in a small cardboard box. Scampi was a vivacious wee beastie and immediately set to work gnawing her way out through one of the airholes. By the time we'd reached the playpark opposite the Yew Tree she had her entire head through the hole, and my mum and I were forced into a clumsy gallop to get the hamster home before it made a full break for freedom.

Although hamsters are solitary creatures, after about a week we realised that Scampi had Known The Touch Of A Gentleman, as she suddenly gave birth to five babies. I suppose this explains why her body had been too fat to fit through the hole she'd gnawed in the cardboard box. Pet shops may look like prisons to us, but to hamsters its the equivalent of booze-fuelled week in Ibiza.

So, much to my father's dismay, I had in one year gone from having no pets at all to having six hamsters. Although they were all very cute bundled up together in their little nest, my mum learned from a piece of paper in the library (this was before the internet) that there comes a point in a Mother Hamster's life when she switches from feeding milk to her young, to feeding upon her young. This helps to explain why they are solitary creatures (indeed, I remember reading as a child that the hamster was for a long time presumed extinct, and that all domesticated hamsters descend from a single extant family which was found in a burrow in Syria. Superb timing - if the explorers had come a week later they might only have found a single, very fat hamster and the species would be lost).

We immediately launched a programme to rehouse the babies. My brother took one called Chips, Peter Jackson accepted Sherry and my arch-nemesis Sarah Parkar bought one for 50p which she mysteriously named Captain Scampi (the nautical theme still baffles me). Alistair Howtown bought the nicest one, but I cannot recall its name (as previously recorded, it was his white lie about this hamster's pregnancy which drove a wedge between us). The fifth we sold to a stranger recruited through a postcard placed in the newsagent's window (again, this was before the internet), and deep down inside me somewhere I can still feel the loss, and wonder what ever happened to that hamster (Solution: probably dead within 18 months). Each time I delved into Scampi's cage to steal another of her young to sell I felt like a Nazi raiding a Jewess's crib; however, I knew of course it was a necessary evil if she was not to make a meal of them herself.

Hamsters are relatively dull things so it's hard to dredge up many memories of what it was like to have Scampi in the year that followed. She crawled around on my arm of course, and occasionally ran up the sleeve of my jumper. She also ate sunflower seeds and drank water, and kept me awake at night by running on her wheel (as pets go, choosing a nocturnal rodent for a child who sleeps lightly is a bad choice).

Anyway, skip to the end: about a year and a half after Scampi gave birth, our Headmaster announced at assembly that there was to be a pet show on the Chevin. I was thrilled at the prospect of showing off my hamster and, as my parents were very indulgent, on the Saturday I found myself being driven up the Chevin, with Scampi in her cage on my lap. The Chevin is a huge valley wall which rises up on one side of Otley and utterly dominates the horizon. It's covered in forest, rocks and meadows and so was not the ideal place for a nine year old to be trotting in a hurry with an elderly hamster in a cage.

Sure enough, I tripped over a tree root and the whole cage went flying, crashing down in the dirt. I fished Scampi's body out of the remains. She was drenched from the explosion of her water bottle, and was breathing very heavily.

An organiser kindly loaned me a towel, and although I tried to dry Scampi out she still looked like a drowned rat. I took my place in the Pet Show barn, and watched as the judges went about their business inspecting vibrant and excitable animals of all sorts. Finally, a kindly judge came to me. "What have you got here, then?" he asked, peering at the drenched hamster which had by this point entered a coma from which she would never recover.

"My hamster, Scampi," I said proudly.

"Quiet little thing, isn't it?" he said archly before moving on, and by quiet I now realise he meant dead.

I went home distraught not to have won anything, but it was only the next day I realised something was seriously wrong with Scampi as she had still not woken up. She never did, and a day later I looked into her cage I saw her breathing had stopped, and a day after that the room was filled with that terrible sweet stench of decay and my mum insisted we bury her.

As is typical of nine year olds, I was utterly devastated and inconsolable until my mum suggested we go buy another one, at which point I was immediately thrilled. The replacement was a tortoisehell hamster called Brandy, who lived a long and happy life (that is for a hamster) until contracting cancer.

Cancer in hamsters is particularly unpleasant. The cells which make up a human are the same size as those which make up a hamster, so when hamster cells go cancerous the growth is just a voracious and yet relatively speaking far more destructive. Brandy grew a growth on his back half the size of his own body, a vile and crusty thing which leaked blood. My parents were incredibly indulgent about this too - the logical response would be stamp on it with your boot and toss it in the trash, but instead they indulged me with two trips to the vet for morphine injections to help him cope with the pain, before finally accepting the inevitable and allowing them to put the poor creature down.

We buried Brandy next to Scampi and Chips, followed by a good seasoning of cat pepper, and I haven't had the strength to buy another pet since.

Blood In The Streets

2009-09-17T01:49:00.000-07:00

Until I joined the sixth form, I used to walk home for lunch every day and then walk back in for my afternoon lessons. This meant I could eat a much more pleasant sandwich than was available in the school canteen, as well as watch Puddle Lane on the television. The walk home was quite a slog, however, as my parents live at the top of an extremely long and steep hill. By the time I got to the top, I was in desperate need of that sandwich.

Walking back down the hill to school in 1989, I heard a bunch of teenage cyclists laughing as they free-wheeled down the hill on the neighbouring A-road at high-speed. The road runs parallel to my parent's street, and through a tree-lined snicket I could see them as they whizzed past me. "Look, no hands!" one was shouting proudly, with his hands in the air.

"I hope he fucking crashes and dies," I whispered hoarsely to myself (the observant reader might correctly deduct that I was a misanthope in my teens).

Well, the funny thing is that there was then a very loud bang, a portentous silence and lots of screaming and shouting. I ambled down to the bottom of the hill and turned the corner to see that this poor cyclist had ridden straight into a parked car at the bottom of the hill, and huge amounts of blood were pumping out of what remained of his face.

This was the first time I'd watched a person die. I arrived late at school that afternoon feeling a little shell-shocked. I could sense something had changed inside me, and looking back I realise that this was probably the day when I first gained a genuine insight into my own mortality. I'd learned that death comes suddenly and unannounced, and that one day I too would die. Although this was not a lesson I was likely to forget, I was reminded of it every day as I walked to school: for several weeks after his body had been cleared away, the spot where he had died was marked by the stain of his blood on the asphalt.

I swore off bicycling there and then, and didn't return to the saddle until six years later when I was a student in Cambridge, and even then I stayed off the main roads. I didn't return to cycling properly until my mid-20s, cycling to work from Peckham. That too came to an abrupt halt when an extremely old and frail woman was disoriented by my passing bicycle, and put a hand on my shoulder to steady herself. The above-mentioned observant reader will recall that a moving bicyclist is not a steady object and the poor woman tumbled into the road and started bleeding over her cardigan. I called an ambulance, cycled to work and that evening took my bicycle home on the train. And that was that for cycling in central London.

This is the second in a series of memories regarding horrific, fatal or disfiguring accidents which I wished for seconds before they occured. See also The Tar Pits of Otley.

[Time: around 1989]

The Night I Was Eaten By a Pig

2009-09-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

Just before the summer holidays of 1996 I was told I urgently needed to make up course credit before Michaelmas. I was required to do six weeks of fieldwork in order to enroll in my third year at Cambridge, which was a bother as I had by that point done fully none. Fortunately, one of my supervisors kindly agreed to let me join an archaeological field project in Denmark for four weeks, followed by two weeks of data inputting back in Cambridge.

The first I knew of this project was when I arrived back in Otley after a 36-hour coach journey home from Prague, only to find a telephone message waiting for me that I was due to be picked up in a mini-bus the following morning and shipped off to Denmark. I brushed my teeth, repacked my bag and after a brief nap was back out through the door on a 36-hour journey to Scandinavia.

It transpired the dig was being held on the small pig-farming island of Als, a rather desolate and isolated place that smelled, quite naturally, of pig shit. The dig was a cross-venture of the Universities of Durham and Southampton, and Jason Freeman was the only other person to come along from Cambridge. From Day 1 there was an obvious schism between the two main camps: Southampton archaeologists were crustys, who liked drinking cider and rolling their own cigarettes; while Durham archaeologists were yah-hoo henrys, who liked drinking wine and talking about their yacht club and ponies. I didn't fall into either group and so tried to be pleasant to everyone, which wasn't easy as they fought like bastards.

We were housed in a small sea-side youth hostel in the tiny hamlet of Hardeshøj, which comprised just two buildings: our hostel and (thank goodness) a pub. I was lucky enough to get a dormitory with only two others: Jason, the ultra-right religious nut I already knew; and Tim, a rather quiet yet dashing ginger gay. Over the course of the trip we together became so impossibly bored that I started holding eating compeitions with my dorm-mates in the middle of the night.

Jason and I would creep down to the kitchen and challenge ourselves to see how much yoghurt we could eat in one sitting. It was a matter of pride that we would together finish every last drop of yoghurt in the fridge, which was a sisyphean task as - seeing how popular yoghurt had been the night before - the trip organisers would order yet more each day. Tim and I would also and separately creep downstairs late at night (Jason hated Tim, unfortunately) for a special Danish fry up. Tim would take charge at the range, heating up a frying pan on each hotplate and then throwing a little bit of absolutely everything into the pans, and then seeing what turned out to be edible. Surprisingly little did, I'm sad to report.

The daytime food was also pretty awful, as the organisers had made the assumption that most of us would be vegetarian, whereas in actual fact only two people in the entire group were. Everyone had to take it in turns to stay home and cook (a great privilege, as it meant you weren't out digging in the dirt), but sadly it transpired that meat eaters in their early 20s are not the best people to ask to prepare dishes based solely around lentils. I recall my own concoction - sausage and lentil casserole - met with particular revulsion.

All this eating was, of course, just a small part of a day which was largely spent toiling in the fields. I spent the first half of the project digging what was believed to be a Bronze Age grave site. They had identified the spot the year before (this was a 30-year project to map the entire archaeology of the island), and the leader was certain that the large flat stones identified were marking graves. It was with some disappointment, then, that our excavation slowly revealed over the fortnight that they were ancient paving slabs with nothing of any consequence beneath them. It was all the more disappointing as this was not a rapid discovery. In archaeology one descends through the dirt a millimetre at a time, often with little more than a sturdy toothbrush to do your work. This was possibly one of the most mind-numbing activities I have ever engaged in.

An even more mind-numbing activity filled the second half of my stay on Als, when we were taught the beautiful art of fieldwalking. Each morning we were driven to a freshly-ploughed field, lined up one metre apart along one boundary and handed a plastic bag. Upon the leaders' instructions, we would then take a single and very dainty step forward every five minutes, spending the intervening time peering at the soil beneath us and trying to determine if we could see anything of much importance.

Fieldwalking was of course tedious when you didn't find anything (it is, after all, just mooching over dirt for 12 hours), but it was even more tedious when you did make a discovery. If you found anything at all, you were required to bag it up and then make a series of notes about its precise location. I could not bear this level of fastidiousness, and so I soon learned that upon finding a flint handaxe or arrow head the easiest possible solution was either to kick it under a convenient sod or - should the opportunity present itself - roll it into my neighbour's patch for them to deal with. The archaeological record of Als probably still show a series of perfectly blank corridors cutting across otherwise artefact-heavy fields.

Thinking back, I recall I did something similar during my excavation work. I had become very trowel-heavy in my frustration, digging through my trench at a centimetre an hour - a fair gallop in archaeological terms - and so was not paying much attention and one day found myself hacking through a piece of ancient pot. I realised that trying to explain the damage I had caused would only lead to a lot of trouble, so I simply hacked the pot into very tiny pieces and threw the lot onto the spoil heap and hoped no one would notice.

We were allowed occasional toilet breaks - the 'facilities' were the far side of the hedge - plus a coffee break in the morning, half an hour for lunch and then a tea break in the afternoon. It was during these periods that we discovered one of the few forms of stimulation during our day: the electric fence. We would take it in turns to hold onto to the wires and giggle as the charge tickled its way through our palms. This is possibly the lowest level to which I have ever stooped.

Naturally, not everyone was as negative as I. Indeed, some of them actually enjoyed archaeology. It was therefore perhaps a shame that of all the days a Danish journalist might visit Hardeshøj to cover our project, they chose to come on a day when I was home on dinner duty. It was up to me and a small Romanian girl from Durham to represent the combined archaeological departments of Cambridge, Durham and Southampton to the world. I still have the clipping, and although it's in Danish I remember very distinctly how angry my supervisor was with what I'd said. "Archaeology is very slow," I recall her translating, "so it's hard to bother doing it properly." Another piece of wisdom was, "I'm not sure what we've found here on Als, but it's certainly not worth talking about in your paper."

We had one day off a week, and it was important we spent it wisely. The youth hostel was next to a small ferry terminal, and we wasted our first day off by taking the ferry back to the mainland and discovering there wasn't a town there either. On future days off we visited the two local towns on the island, the imaginatively named Nordborg in the north and Sonderborg in the south. Sonderborg was by far the most exciting, but was also too distant to be practical. Nordborg had a post office, a bar and a telephone booth, so we spent a lot of time queuing there and taking it in turns to talk to family.

The evenings on a work day were mind-numbing, often spent sitting out in the garden playing stupid games (I recall breaking a game of I Have Never by asking, "Is fucking a dead foal necrophilia, bestiality or paedophilia?", which had the Durham students hooting and the Southampton oiks non-plussed), enjoying massive rows between the two factions, or else going to the tavern next door where a glass of beer could be had for around £4. A girl from Durham - Eleanor - took a particular fancy to me, and declared herself my wife. I generally accepted this, since this meant I had more friends (including the yacht-loving Imogen from the Isle of Wight, and the minor aristocrat Antonia Castor).

Jason left after two weeks to join an altenative dig in Greece, and without my regular yoghurt sessions the constant drag of work soon made me quite depressed. One evening - after field walking in the pouring rain, during which time my boots became caked in so much mud you could have spent four weeks excavating my feet - I found myself again sitting in the miserable bar in Hardeshøj with the Durham crowd, after another huge argument with Southampton, drinking expensive beer and talking crap. I decided I just needed to get away from it all and get some distance, and so I simply walked out of the bar without a word, and walked off down the road and didn't stop until I'd reached Nordborg (only 4.3 miles, according to Google).

I hadn't expected this to cause any trouble at all. I mean, surely it was acceptable to go for a stroll in the evening? Instead, alas, Eleanor became extremely panicked. We had recently learned that a wild boar had escaped from a nearby farm and - while no one had claimed it was dangerous - after an hour of absence Eleanor was convinced the beast had attacked and eaten me. It cannot have taken her more than five minutes to rouse the entire archaeological team and convince them that my mutilated and half-eaten corpse lay somewhere in the dark.

As I returned along the road to Hardeshøj, therefore, I met a large delegation coming the other way. Search parties had been dispatched along the major roads, while others were walking the coast in search of my bloated corpse. I cannot have been gone more that a couple of hours. One of the trip organisers, a kindly and rotund woman, bundled me into her car. "You've caused a lot of trouble," she said. I couldn't help feeling I had caused nothing at all, but I knew it would not help to argue. I returned to Hardeshøj and Eleanor gave me a huge hug.

"I'm glad you weren't eaten by a pig," she said, with greater sincerity than that sentance deserves.

As it happens, the wild boar showed up a few days later. I was washing up dishes in the kitchen, looked out of the window and saw a man apparently pointing a shot gun at me. I screamed, and he aimed and fired. It turned out the pig was on our lawn, and I rushed out to see the poor creature bleeding to death, before a couple of farm hands turned up and together the men bled the creature onto the grass and then cut open its belly and tore out its guts to stop them spoiling the meat. Our lovely lawn - where we had lain chatting in the sun - was turned into a blood-drenched battle field strewn with offal.

We were given free sausages to make up for the trouble.

A few days later I was washing up, looked out of the window and saw three men with machine guns peering at me through the window. I rushed outside to see what was happening and discovered around two dozen fully armed soldiers hiding round the back of the house. I demanded to know what was going on but they weren't allowed to tell me, but they were all rather handsome so I brought out a couple of boxes of wine and a pleasant afternoon was had in the sun. Alas, they were mostly interested in our glamorous Swedish colleague Marika, who specialised in excavating mass graves and had tits like watermelons, so I saw no action that evening.

The field trip seemed to last forever and the Durham crew disappeared home before the final week, so I was left pretty much on my own. During the final week I prayed to Imaginary God every night that time would speed up so I could go home, but alas with so few archaeologists on the team now - and with the Bronze Age graveyard revealed as a patio - the only work to be done was fieldwalking, and so the passing of every day felt like a year.

When I was finally allowed home, I wept with joy. To this day, I cannot pass a freshly ploughed field without wincing.

[Time: Summer 1996]

Fraudulent First Prize At The Otley Show

2009-09-09T02:26:00.000-07:00

When I was aged seven or eight, as with any healthy country boy, I became obsessed with winning a prize in the Women's Institute bakery competition at the Otley Show.

The Otley show was an annual event which had presumably started as an agricultural enterprise - farmers showing off the robustness of their cow's udders, the obesity of their sheep and the sexual prowess of their pigs - but by the early 1980s had become a rather down-at-heel fun fair by the river, with the usual side attractions of hot-dog stands, reconstructions of medieval jousting, collections of rusting steam engines (that no one seemed to have any affection for) and far away in one tight little corner a couple of sad pigs beside a display of rosettes from happier times.

The bakery competition fascinated me, as it seemed so unlikely that people would really take cake so seriously. I set my sights on the 'Edible Animal' competition, which required the competitor to craft a convincing replica of any animal from purely edible items. I could really have chosen anything - a snake might have been easy, or some sort of amoeba - but I was determined from the start that only a biscuit hedgehog could truly triumph in this competition. I'm sure my mum sighed with relief that I didn't fixate on something more complex.

My mother sourced a reliable biscuit recipe from Mrs Gibbon up the road (yes, Colin's mum) and on the Friday night before the competition we made up a huge batch of mixture, turned it out onto the counter and styled it into a rudimentary egg shape, before slashing the rear with scissors to create the illusion of spikes and pushing two raisins in for its eyes.

I don't exagerrate when I say that the hedgehog was a masterpiece when it went into the oven, and it was only when it came that I realised an awful culinary truth: the biscuit is by nature a flat beast. They settle and subside in the oven. My beautiful hedgehog thus came out looking like it had been flattened by a tractor.

My mother came to the rescue and sourced a bread recipe, and we quickly mixed up the ingredients and I again I styled the mixture into the perfect similacrum of a hedgehog before placing it in the oven. Alas, I was to discover yet another culinary truth: bread by its very nature rises in the oven. My beloved creation came out looking like the bloated corpse of a hedgehog drowned in the river.

Being a child, bedtime was early and I could really only afford to have two baking disasters before retiring for the evening. I went to my bed in a state of distress - I had already bragged to my friends that I would see victory at the Women's Institute the following day, and I knew it would be humiliating to turn up with nothing to show for my promises.

Fortunately my mum did not give up easily, and she toiled throughout the night to produce yet a third hedgehog. She used an unleavened scone recipe to style a hedgehog in the precise format of my prototypes, and in the morning I found a perfect bready hedgehog waiting for me in the kitchen. My mood changed instantly, and once I'd knocked up some grass for him to sit on - stirring green food colouring into dessicated cocoanut - the illusion was complete.

As we walked down to the Otley Show, I was convinced that victory would be mine. Alas, we arrived to discover that my arch-nemesis Sarah Parkar had also entered the competition, and her contribution was far and away better than mine. I can no longer recall what her entry was, but for the purposes of the memory project we'll say it was a beautiful model of an elephant carved out of marzipan and icing sugar.

We each placed our entries down on the trellis table and left while the Learned Judges of the Womens Institute did their work. I was extremely tense, but tried to enjoy the entertainments on offer: the dodgem cars which always broke down; the stall where you could win a dying goldfish in a plastic bag; and the joke toy van where I almost bought a model turd with a fly on it on the misunderstanding it was a comedy doughnut (my mind, I fear, was by this point bakery obesessed).

Eventually, my parents tentatively led me back into the cake tent to see how I had done. The trellis table was covered in hundreds of entries and I quickly realised that the odds were against me. I struggled to find my own contribution, but came first upon Sarah Parkar's effort, the fabulous sugar elephant with its trunk raised triuphantly in the air. Unsurprised, I saw that sitting beside it was a judges' card. So she had won. My heart sank.

I turned to leave the tent, but my mum stopped me. The judges' card had actually indicated a disqualification. Apparently, the rules stiuplated that an 'edible animal' could not simply be sculpted from sugar paste, it had to be something one would actually happily eat. I was immensely grateful, but then cursed when I saw that my entry also had a red card placed beside it. I went to collect my hedgehog and take it home to hide my shame, when I realised this was a different card. This was First Prize.

I was thrilled beyond description, and spent the rest of the day on a high. I refused my father's suggestion that we all sit down and eat my hedgehog and defended it absolutely, although I have a very distinct memory of clandestinely chewing on the grim and fibrous cocoanut grass that the hedgehog sat upon.

After a week or two, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided I could not go to the grave without knowing how my winning hedgehog had tasted. I turned him over to take a nibble from beneath - so as not to destroy his beauty - and discovered with horror that his undercarriage had turned mouldy. I tried to disguise this from my mother, however she soon discovered the decay and I was marched outside to pose for photographs with my hedgehog in the garden before it was dumped unceremoniously into the dustbin.

Future generations examining the photograph might forever have assumed I was a master baker had I not today revealed the terrible fraud that my mother and I perpetrated on the Women's Institute that day. For of course, it was really my mother - not I - who had baked that winning hedgehog.

[Time: anywhere between 1982 and 1988, I have no real idea]

George and Mildred and Me

2009-08-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

When two or more gays meet for the first time, the conversation always quickly comes round to two topics: when did you realise you were gay, and what's your coming out story. Only the first of these falls within the remit of the Memory Project:

The question of When did you realise you are gay? is for me more a question of When did you first know what it means to be gay?, as I was demonstrating an interest in the gentlemen long before I either knew what that meant or understood that it was (back then) largely frowned upon. My earliest crush was probably Elliot, the boy from ET, who struck me as the sort of handsome, go-getting young man I'd like to spend my life with, and who also spent a lot of time wearing figure-hugging jammies (It should be noted that I was only six, which is one of the few times it's acceptable to lust after an 11-year-old boy).

Looking back with hindsight, I realise the gayness had been manifesting itself long before the age of six. I remember undressing my action men to see them in their swimming trunks and feeling all warm and happy by doing so (the other boys preferred to play violent war games with them). It simply didn't occur to me that this was a significant difference from the other boys, and of course my best friends around this time were John How (he of the Feelers' Club) and Alistair Howtown, both of whom were benders, and so despite the fact I hated football - and loved dressing up and playing happy families with Alistair and his soft toys - I never really twigged that this was remotely unusual.

When I was around nine years old, I started hearing the word "gay" in school, and understood only that it was a swear word bandied around in the same context as "spazz". I was very confused, then, when sitting on the floor by the fireplace watching an episode of George & Mildred with my family. The story climaxed when Mildred announced she was in love with her new lodger, and the lodger pretended to be gay to avoid her advances (purists may note it was Series 2's The Travelling Man, first aired in November 1977).

I couldn't fathom why someone would pretend to be "gay" when that was something which - to my mind - was as undesirable as being a "spazz".

"Mummy" I asked after mulling this over, "what does gay mean?"

My brother was shocked, and scalded me for using a rude word in front of our mother; however, my mum realised that a senisble approach was required and explained that, "When a man is 'gay', he's suffering from a disorder where he's attracted to other men rather than women. It's a shame and it's wrong, but that's how it is."

I knew instantly that this applied to me, and suddenly a major dichotomy ripped through my world where I hadn't previously known to even look for one. Worse still, I realised that it wasn't just the children in the playground who thought gays were bad news, even my mum had said it was wrong.

I knew then I'd have to keep absolutely quiet about this gay thing, and I got so used to doing it over the years that I didn't even think to come out once I'd got to university.

In fairness to my mom, I should probably note that I recounted this story to her when I was 26 and she had no memory of it, but was horrified and extremely concerned that she might have broken my entire childhood and derailed my adult development. Of course, times have changed and she now has nothing against the gays, and is very fond of Paul.

The Tar Pits of Otley

2009-08-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

This memory is fairly notorious, and is recounted here for posterity.

On one rare occasion in the summer of 1994 - when I would really rather have been watching Wimbledon, or reading PG Wodehouse in the garden - I was holed up in my bedroom revising for my A-Levels.

Revision was not strictly necessary for most of my A-Levels. One could pass Economics with an hour of good preparation as it was mostly a multiple choice exam (and Mr Shutt had kindly given me a stack of former papers to memorise). The rest of was a broad essay question - it was sufficient here just to memorise two fairly general articles from the text book, such as What Is Economics and Why Do We Use Money.

Mathematics also required minimal revision, as there are no facts to learn in maths. It's just the application of a few basic rules which are pretty much intuitive, and they even let you take in a calculator and provide you with a key equations booklet. History was more complex, but we didn't need to learn long lists of names and dates as it was by then more fashionable just to study broad themes, which were so broad you could pretty much make them fit anything you were asked to talk about (for our period, 1871-1939, pretty much any waffle about social unrest or international tension covered all bases). Mr Tarbett also advised we learn a few basic quotes to create the illustion of being well read, and it was for this reason that everyone in my class still knows that Nicholas II was a small man lost in the immensity of his realm.

During this feverish revision, two men were working noisily on the roof of the house next door. One was singing and the other shouting instructions, but given this was summer it was too hot for me to close the window to block them out. When you're disturbed by noise it only ever gets more irritating, and when one started with his singing again I soon found myself thinking: "I wish he'd fall off that fucking roof and shut up".

I got half of my wish. Although the worker promptly fell off the roof, he sadly did not shut up. He had been holding a bucket of hot tar, and the contents went all over his face. Instead of shutting up, therefore, he started screaming. This was even more distracting than the singing.

Defeated, I got up and closed the window so I could concentrate.

A Cunt Called Colin

2009-08-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

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.

How to Make Friends and Exploit People

2009-08-18T07:21:00.001-07:00

This memory is a direct sequel to Southwestern Sales Camp

After a very long and tedious overnight bus journey to Pennsylvania, our Greyhound finally arrived in Carlisle early on the Saturday morning. Our colleagues had other destinations, and so Zack and I stepped out alone onto the deserted streets of the city which would be our home for the foreseeable future.

Arriving unannounced in any city presents certain problems, not least finding somewhere to live. We headed to a local branch of Wendy’s for breakfast and Zack immediately came up with the solution: he’d deploy a ‘Southwestern Tip’, one of many we’d been taught during the previous week’s Sales School. The company had advised us to choose a house we liked the look of, knock on the door and explain our situation, and nine times out of ten they’d invite us in to live with them. It sounds like a long shot now, but back then I guess I was a little brainwashed by the company and it seemed like a really good plan. Zack headed off to find somewhere for us to live while I guarded the bags and drank my coffee. With amazing optimism, he reported that he’d be back in five minutes.

After half an hour he still had not returned, and I began to imagine that perhaps he was enjoying a beer with his new housemates; but after an hour he returned with a very grim face. He had tried every house on the street outside without luck, and so we were still homeless. I was literally flabbergasted that the plan had not worked.

This was in the days before internet-enabled mobile phones, so we were at a certain disadvantage in not having the first clue of where in the city we were, or even how the city was laid out. We thus walked in a random direction until we came across a fire station on a quiet street in the suburbs. After we had introduced ourselves – a lengthy process in Carlisle, as you immediately had to explain why you talked funny and then spend five minutes explaining that, yes, you had indeed on one occasion met the Queen – we explained that we were looking for someone to put us up for a few weeks while we sold books door-to-door.

“That won’t happen in Carlisle,” we were told. “Absolutely no fucking way.”

This was not the news I had been hoping for. I was hot, sweaty and hadn’t slept in 24 hours. I wanted to be told there was a bed out back and a fireman would cool me down with the fire hose before I went to sleep. Utterly disheartened, we resigned ourselves to having to get a hotel (eating into our profit margins, a Southwestern no no) and asked the way to the nearest motel. We trudged there under a dark cloud of defeat, strugging in the summer heat with our horribly heavy bags – operating a relay process, in which each bag would progress ten paces up the street in turn. Our moods soon lifted after we checked in, however, as having a shower and changing my clothing was about the best thing to happen to me all week.

We had hit gold with the Days Inn motel, as they handed out complimentary maps of the city. We stocked up on them and employed Southwestern Tip #2: visit a local gas station to ask for directions, and get the information you need on your sales territory. Somehow believing all of this Company Bullshit, we obediently trekked down the busy turnpike to a distant gas station, where a boy of around 15 sold us a single coke.

“Say,” Zack tried. “Tell me, where do all the children live around here?” The gas attendant looked at Zack – understandably – as though he were a paedophile. Zack did not improve matters by adding, “Not the rich ones, the poor ones. With toys and climbing frames strewn across the garden.”

We may have been taught what we were looking for, but we hadn’t been taught to express it well. The boy pretended to find something else to keep him busy in the back of the store, and we left.

Feeling hungry now, we spied a Bonanza Steakhouse across Walnut Bottom Road, a variant of Ponderosa which looked marginally better than the neighbouring McDonalds or Arby’s, so we went in and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu: the all-you-can-eat buffet. This was another massive Company no no – eating out was a waste of money when you could prepare your own food at home. Alas, we had no home, and so instead we learned two very important lessons about America: first, their salad dressings are so creamy and sweet you’ll confuse them for custard; and second, custard tastes utterly foul on salad. The waitress serving us was amused we found the idea of All You Can Eat Buffets and Ranch Dressings so totally alien, and was so taken with our accents I decided I’d have to learn how to speak like an American if we were to achieve anything efficiently in this city (not realising at this stage that our accents would prove our greatest asset).

We returned to our motel reasoning that Day 1 had not been a complete disaster – no one had died, after all – and decided that Day 2 would surely bring some hope. We then phoned Jerry, our team leader, who was appalled. “You have to get out of that motel tomorrow,” he explained. “You are supposed to be making money, not spending it.”

My thoughts were pretty much “Fuck yourself wrongways, Jerry”, but of course I responded politely and hoped the man would get off our backs. We went to explore the motel and came across the gym, where I had my first (largely unsuccesful) go on a treadmill, which to a country boy like me was akin to finding the battleship galactica behind the wardrobe. America really did seem to be a place where dreams could come true.

We slept soundly that night, and I think Imaginary God must have heard our prayers as I pulled open the curtains early the following morning to reveal – bathed in light across the parking lot – a church. The board outside announced in giant letters that morning communion was at 9pm. Perfect, time to implement Southwestern Tip #3: Americans will trust you if you affect a belief in their god.

As per Southwestern Tip #4, we dressed in our preppiest outfits – chinos, crisply ironed blue shirts, nicely polished shoes (not trainers) – and headed down to the church for 8am hoping to catch the priest or pastor or preacher or whatever the hell they’re called and see if he’d mention our appeal during his service.

After confirming to his apparent satisfaction that we were good god-fearing children, the priest said he would be happy to help us. He also suggested we might like to attend the Sunday school bible study class and - not wishing to offend - we immediately agreed. It didn’t once cross my mind that this might be some sort of test to check our credentials.

It is probably worth at this point noting that as two relatively healthy, slim Cambridge-educated men in their early twenties we looked nothing like the men of a similar age who derived from local Germanic stock, who had been brought up on a diet of cream and sugar. We were thus assumed to be around 16, and we did nothing to challenge this assumption. Similarly, we had the edge in bible class as the average 16 year old in Carlisle has not recently graduated with a degree from Cambridge. It was therefore almost impossible not to shine in bible class, depsite never having read or been taught about the bible before.

The class was effectively a basic comprehension exercise in which a passage was read out and then we were asked what had just been said. There were only two local boys in the class, sullen and near mute creatures which made hopeless guesses at the answers. Zack and I by comparison must have seemed about as knowledgeable of matters biblical as the Pope.

This was swiftly followed by church, which was just like chapel in Cambridge only instead of a glug of port followed by a croissant, communion took the form of grape juice and a ritz cracker. I was heartbroken, as the only thing getting me through the service was the thought of a red-wine shooter. It was later explained that we were at the Church of Christ, a wholly abstinent institution which translated the word ‘wine’ in the bible as ‘fruit of the vine’ – as though Jesus might seriously have been celebrated at the wedding in Cana for turning water into a grape. Anyway, afterwards the preacher made an appeal for god fearing peoples to house us, and much to our surprise an elderly couple volunteered.

We met with Dan and Lucy in the car park outside, and they were absolutely lovely. They set the tenancy terms there and then – a dollar’s rent a week each – and they left to prepare their house. In the meantime, the man who’d led the bible study class offered to take us to his house for Sunday lunch. There’s obviously good money in religion, as their house was absolutely huge. His wife was a charming and funny woman, and as we sat down for Sunday lunch with them we met their daughters, one of whom was the waitress from the Bonanza Steak House the night before. Somehow we had gone from being homeless and friendless to having a surrogate family, all in just one day. Perhaps there was something to the Southwestern Tips after all, or perhaps religious people are just very easy to take advantage of.

After a meal of boiled beef and boiled potatoes (okay, so it wasn’t delicious food, but at least it was wholesome) and a pint of ‘sun tea’ brewed fresh in the garden, the husband and wife drove us to K-Mart to buy a few last minute items. The shop was vast and unlike anything I had ever seen before. I picked up a watch for $5 (which is still one of my favourites), while Zack needed to buy a pair of shorts. As I mentioned above, Zack was not of Germanic stock and was not brought up on cream and sugar, and so he ended up having to buy his shorts from the childrenswear department. They were very cute.

We picked our things up from the motel and then headed on to York Road to meet our new family properly. Lucy and Dan were more welcoming than we had any reason to expect, although they did have their quirks (not least several cats tied on leads to the kitchen door, and a home-made electronic alarm that screamed if anyone or thing passed the kitchen window). We had a quick tour of their house which had been extended in piecemeal fashion over the years to create a strange network of little rooms. My favourite space was at the back – the ‘deck’, a large covered platform filled with comfortable chairs and enclosed by bug screens. The deck served as the main living area, while the three living rooms towards the front of the house were dark and cramped and filled with dusty nick-nacks (including Dan’s favourite: a boat carved from the skull of an American GI, its little sail made from said GI’s skin with tasteful tattoo detail, which Dan had picked up when his battalion was sent to Hiroshima to clean up after the atomic bomb).

My room was formerly their daughter’s, and was a lovely airy space with plenty of room. Zack meanwhile was in a box room, sleeping on a bed so soft you sank down through it and onto the floor.

When we called Jerry that evening he was very proud of what we achieved, and gave us a pep talk. On Day 3 – a Monday – we therefore rose enthusiastically at 7am for our cold shower and meagre breakfast, ready for our first day of actual, real sales. Only as I write this do I realise how much I had really been brainwashed by the company. Despite considering myself a sceptic I still at the point actually believed we could be a success.

And so it was that I walked out into the world with a hefty bookbag over one shoulder, settled on the rather charmingly named Gobin Street as a starting point, and followed the Southwestern guidance: I carefully drew the street into my pad, marked on each of the houses and noted any key features (paddling pools, climbing frames). I steeled myself, marched up to the first door, put on my brightest smile, knocked three times firmly, took two steps back and turned to the side and waited.

The door opened.

“Good morning-“ I started, but already the door had been slammed shut. I burst into tears, and it was then that my enthusiasm for the project began to go down hill.

[Time: Summer of 1997]

A Fish Whose Middle Name Begins With 'J'

2009-08-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

Seamus is disappointed I have not updated my memory project recently, so it is only appropriate I rectify matters by posting my memories of how we first became friends, one blustery September in 1992.

Picture it: Otley, 1992. I had just entered the sixth form, ready to study my A-Levels. While everyone else was allocated to large classes of bright students, I ended up in one which comprised Seamus, Timothy Brabham and around fifteen braying, toothless BTEC students who had somehow stayed in education despite their obvious inability to retain a single fact. There was no question I would avoid the BTECs like the plague, and while I was already good friends with Tim, it was quite apparent I would have to make friends with Seamus or die of boredom.

I had known of Seamus since we first joined the school in 1987, when he was a short and very eccentric smart alec who barked rude questions at the teachers all the time and with whom I thus felt a warm affinity; however, things were never that simple. I had also spent the past five years walking to school with Sheila Polhammer, a somewhat temperamental young girl who was quite enamoured of Seamaus, and who spent half the time singing his praises and the other half - when paranoia (and Seamus's straying libido...) took effect - plotting his torture and eventual death in exquisite detail. I thus had mixed opinions of him.

On Day 1, sitting at our desk in the middle of our form room and twiddling with the gas taps, Seamus idly announced that if we could only conspire to bring to school a handkerchief and a salt cellar, he would show us a magic trick that would blow our minds. Intrigued by the idea, on Day 2 Tim brought in the cruet and I located a handkerchief and Seamus prepared his powers of sorcery.

He wordlessly held up the salt cellar for the audience to inspect, nodding wisely, and then placed it down on the desktop. He then produced the handkerchief and waved it flamboyantly in the air, before carefully stretching it out and laying it across the salt cellar. (I am sure that by this stage, the BTEC crew had as much contempt for us as we did for them). A sudden look of confusion crossed his face, he sneezed and grabbed the handkerchief to blow his nose, knocking the salt cellar to the ground.

"I forgot what I was supposed to do," he said very earnestly, "And then I had to sneeze".

I knew then we could be good friends.

Our friendship developed, as most do, with us sitting on the swings after school discussing the things that made us laugh (things David Harrelson said) and mocking the things we distrusted (David Harrelson). This continued for two years until school ended, and the long vacation before university opened up before us. I suggested that Seamus come up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to stay with my brother and, apparently attracted by the idea, Seamus accepted.

I imagine if I had phrased it differently, Seamus might have declined. If I had said, for example, "Come sit in a coach with me for seven hours and I'll say anything that comes into my stupid cunt head". Or perhaps, "Come visit my brother's small and filthy student flat and sleep on a urine-stained matress on the floor of a psychotic Christian". Well anyway, as it turned out we ended up having a lovely time, eating freshly baked bagels, drinking beer in the Pleasance Bar (somehow, back then, we always got a seat) and watching shows of various types such as Travesties, which was super; Equus, which was dull; and gay American comic Scott Capura (with the subtle opening line, "I'm a dick smoker [pause, audience patiently waits for punchline] ... When I say that in the states it gets quite a reaction, but here I guess you're just thinking 'hey, he's a American, how much worse could it get?").

Of course, all of these activities were secretly just ways of avoiding having to go back to the filth of the flat. It is fortunate we are both early risers, as at 7am each morning - upon waking, when our brains finally allowing the stench of my brother's flat to reach our conscious minds - we had no option but to dress and leave immediately. There was no point having a shower, as the bathroom was layered in so much crud we would have come out filthier. We would stay out as late as we could, and ended every evening with the late-night showing of Kenny Young and the Eggplants at the Pleasance Upstairs, guys we'd enjoyed since first seeing them for free at Fringe Sunday.

At the end of the trip, halfway through the coach ride home, we famously ran out of things to say to one another and we took it in turns to open our mouths as though to speak, only to recall that this particular thought or anecdote had already been shared. Twice. As a sign of how low we had sunk, this point of silence came after we had developed the song about a fish which had become a prostitute*.

We wisely retreated to our own worlds, disappeared into separate folds of Oxbridge and did not seek to make contact again for a full year, by which point thank goodness we had some new anecdotes to share.

* Thus:

SM: "Dikrwu, Dikrwu sing me a song."
RD: "There is a fish whose middle name begins with... C."
SM: "Clarence!"
RD: "Clarence is his name, And he dresses like a dame, And (I have heard from sources close to the subject) he's working on the game."

Recurring Nightmares

2009-07-03T03:08:00.000-07:00

I recall as a very young child having a recurring nightmare in which Jesus would sail down out of the sky in a strange sort of boat which I now recognise was similar to a punt (Jesus even wielded the punt pole himself, although it is probably easier to punt when the boat is flying). Jesus held out his arm and implored me to join him in the boat so he could sail me back to heaven. I would of course refuse, however appealling he made heaven sound, as even then I understood that what Jesus was proposing was my death (the similarity to Charon's role in ferrying souls across the Acheron to Hades was lost on me, however).

I remember on one occasion I dreamt I was playing with friends at my godmother's house on The Whartons, and suddenly the skies darkened and my friends disappeared and Jesus came sailing out of the sky to collect me, the bottom of his boat nudging lightly agains the tops of the trees. I didn't want to go, but his minions were sent after me. Caught in their grasps, I was only able to resist capture by forcing myself to wake up.

I slept in my parents' bed for the rest of the night.

Another recurring nightmare was plane crashes. There was an airport on the other side of the valley from my house, and our house was under a regular flight path. Frolicking in the garden during my childhood, our play was often punctuated by the roar of a jumbo jet flying above or - in later years - the gasping sound of adults spitting out their drinks in surprise as concorde flew over.

Ironically, plane crashes were not actually unusual in Otley either. I remember hearing of one that smashed right into the Chevin (the rocky ridge that formed the other side of the valley wall), while another came down in a farmer's field and made the national papers. In my dreams, though, things were much more extreme. I recall one dream where I had to duck down while walking to school as a huge plane soared overhead and ploughed into Sheila Polhammer's house; while another time I was playing golf with Tim Brabham and a plane simply dropped out of the sky onto the green. The sheer force and heat of the explosion was astonishing in both cases. A third time, I dreamt I'd seen a plane hit the Chevin with a gentle 'poof', and none of the adults I told would believe me.

Another common dream was being crushed under a tonne of bricks. In one extreme example, I was sitting at the dining table at home and was suddenly and inexplicably crushed under the solid weight of a tonne of bricks. I woke up in shock, caught my breath, and was then again crushed under a tonne of bricks. Waking up again, it was breakfast time and I went downstairs to dinner and - yes! - was crushed under a tonne of bricks.

Waking up for real that day, it was with cautious optimism that I ate my breakfast.

The Feelers' Club

2009-06-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

Thinking about John How, I've just recalled that he was a founder member of The Feelers' Club in Middle School.

The Feelers Club was a group of likeminded boys - comprising solely of John How - who granted themselves the unique permission to fondle (through clothing) the genitals of any other boy whenever and wherever they wanted. Why most of the straight boys put up with this I don't know, but I was lucky enough to be 'feeled' on at least one memorable occasion and I recall it being very pleasant indeed.

Not being a member of the club, alas, I did not have the opportunity to return the favour.

[Time: 1985/6]

An Awfully Big Adventure

2009-06-29T04:31:00.000-07:00

During my pre-school years I hung out a lot with a boy from down the street, John How, who would later become the school's most noted homosexual. We tended to play together with our various soft toys and I recall I had a home-made blue frog stuffed with dried beans whose head would regularly split open, and froggy would ride on my ambulance bicycle to John's house where we would play Doctors and Nurses to get it fixed (i.e. his mum would get out a needle and thread).

There was also at this time a boy called Adam Broughton who lived across the street from John. Adam was less emotionally developed than us and was going through what Freud described as the "anal stage", but which might better be described as the "shitting in improbable places" stage. I recall he had a sand pit which he liked shitting in, and also a small push buggy which had a flap opening up into the boot at the back. He loved shitting into that, and he loved being watched while he did it. God knows why his mum didn't kill him. He would also wee in improbable places, but that was less disgusting. He smelled precisely as one would imagine.

The three of us enjoyed collecting snails. John's parents had an old aquarium which they put in the backyard, and we filled it with leaves and then collected dozens of snails to live in it. The snails often escaped, and there would be countless snails climbing up the walls of the house. I recall that Adam's anal fascination stretched to the snails. He would peer with horror at those snails which had pooed themselves - a sort of black thread leading out of their invertebrate asses - and his solution would be to lick the snails' bottoms clean. Even as a very young child, I sensed this was very wrong.

However - this particular memory relates to the Sunday night before John and I were due to start primary school. We decided that we were clearly grown up boys now, as we were about to start school, and so now was as good a time as any to explore the town. I was strictly forbidden from going further than the cul-de-sacs on either side of the house, but I felt that my new maturity was sufficiently evident that I would not on this occasion need to ask permission.

We thus wandered down into the valley to visit the playpark, where there were a couple of older girls that John knew. They were very surprised we were allowed out on our own, but we explained we were mature now. We played on the swings and slide, and then decided it would be good to visit the Rainbow Play Group one last time before school. This was quite a trek, and I cannot recall if we made it. I do vaguely remember the dark, overgrown passageway one had to walk down to get there, and the harsh stench of the creosote used to protect the fence, but I made this journey so often with so many people I can't recall if I really did manage to go there with John or not.

We were just walking home up the main road leading to the bottom of The Gills when a man on a motorbike stopped next to us. I was a bit concerned with talking to strangers, but it turned out this stranger had been sent out to find us. We were next to a phone booth, so he phoned for my parents and my dad came down immediately to pick us up. It turned out we had been gone much longer than we had realised, and that we certainly did not have their permission to go on walkabout. While we were waiting, the man told us how naughty we had been and how worried everyone was. I couldn't help but dislike him, and a niggling thought in my head suggests that it may have been Mr Stacey from the cub scouts anecdote - the peeping tom in the showers - but I cannot be certain.

My dad dropped John off at his house and I was taken home, and the moment I entered the kitchen I could sense the adults' relief turn almost instantaneously into anger. My grandparents were down, and my grandfather - usually one of the gentlest creatures on the planet - was furious with me. I've since discussed this with my mum, and apparently my granddad had been absolutely frantic with worry while I was missing. She also tells me the whole street had been roused and sent out on the search mission. Even now I feel a bit guilty for causing so much trouble, and when I think how I would feel if one of my nieces did the same thing it is entirely unbearable.

Once we'd joined primary school John and I grew apart and I never really hung out with him as friends again. He became very popular at middle school, adopting the cute-yet-succinct nickname 'Hommo', and then at grammar school he was streamed in the lower classes and he became a distant figure in my life, spotted occasionally having a smoke behind the swimming pool or hanging out with the rougher kids. I have no idea what happened to him after that.

[Time: September 1980]

The Child Entrepreneur

2009-06-26T04:15:00.000-07:00

One summer when I was eight years old, I came up with a fool-proof money making idea that even Alan Sugar could not criticise: collecting up lots of old newspapers and turning them into cash. It was a perfect business model. Everyone had unwanted newspapers, no one minded giving them to kids and they were easy to pick up and store. We were quids in. I don't really remember who did this with me, but for the sake of the Memory Project let's say it was my brother and Adrian Conor.

The three of us went from door to door asking for left-over newspapers, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive we soon accumulated a big stack of papers. We had set quite a wide collection radius for our age, trekking along the Whartons, down The Gills and even up to the scary big houses up towards The Spite, where a lovely old woman was delighted to help and even offered us lemonade.

I also recall one particularly risque moment, when we barged into a back garden on The Gills asking for newspaper and discovered a middle aged woman bathing topless. I remember she had an exotic looking drink of some kind too - a cocktail maybe - and this struck me as just about the most decadent and sorid thing I had ever seen. Otley, a small town? Nah.

I don't think she gave us any newspapers.

Following an afternoon's gathering, it occurred to us we could make even more money by seeking sponsorship for our activities. We considered ourselves fully aware of how sponsorship worked - people gave you money for doing something - and this time we could make it work for us. If everyone in the street pledged us 1p for each newspaper we gathered, we'd be rich beyond our wildest dreams.

I grabbed a blank piece of paper, wrote "SPONSERSHIP FORM" across the top and then crudely drew a table in below in which the neighbours could declare their spoils.

"Is that how you spell sponsorship?" asked Adrian.

"Uh, I dunno," I said.

And so I went to my mom asking her how to spell sponsoship, and she asked why we were asking, and I explained our amazing money making scam, and she revealed that the reason no one else was making money being sponsored to do relatively mundane tasks is because sponsorship is for charities. It isn't usual to ask for people to sponsor you money just for - you know - buying sweets with.

Oh, we said.

My mother then enquired what we proposed to be sponsored to do. We explained in broad terms about the newspapers, leaving out the bit about the topless lady with the dry martini. Fortunately, my mother has the insight of the superior class of business analyst, and asked almost immediately, "And what will you do with all the newspapers afterwards?"

When we explained we would turn them into cash, she turned the question on us with the cunning of a barrister: "But how?"

And that was when we realised our plan to collect huge numbers of old newspapers and convert them into cash had not been thought through to the final stage. The sheer logistics of gathering and storing so much waste paper had been such a challenge in itself, we hadn't bothered to work out how to monetise our project. And thus my first business venture ended with my dad driving us down to the chip shop to see if they would pay pennies for old newspapers to wrap chips in, and we learned that health and safety regulations now required takeways to use fresh, food-grade paper for their wrappers, and we ended up chucking the lot in a newspaper recylcling skip in the middle of town and making fully no money whatsoever.

Our only profit was the fish and chips my dad bought to console us with.

[Time: Summer 1984]

My Life in Mathematics

2009-06-24T09:07:00.001-07:00

I wasn't very good at mathematics at the start of my life.

When I was seven years old I had to sit a single short exam which trotted through all of my school subjects. I was a superb student and most of the questions were a breeze, but I remember the Maths question completely stumped me: "How is the number One Hundred written in digits?".

I spent more time thinking about that question than on the rest of the test put together, and when the headmaster finally announced the end of the exam I hurriedly wrote down my best and most logical guess. Never before having heard of the number 'One Hundred', I came up with the reasonable logic that if 'hundred' was written '100', then 'one hundred' was logically the same thing only with an extra 1 at the start. I wrote down my answer: 1100.

With literally a single stroke, I completely failed my maths exam.

When I was eight years old we were supposed to learn our times tables, however Mrs Fox - a golden-haired woman who all the boys idolised - was off on maternity leave and the temporary teachers had no idea what we were supposed to be learning. I remember there was a stack of flash cards you could use with a partner if you wanted to teach it to yourself, but lessons were generally very unstructured that year, so much so that I was able to focus on woodwork for most of the time. I thus spent a lot of that year making myself model boats, which was not as impressive as it sounds as it largely comprised nailing two or three pieces of scrap wood together.

I ended primary school with a collection of pretty awful wooden boats and absolutely no knowledge of the times tables. When the headmaster realised the problem was endemic, he instructed my entire year to learn the multiplication tables during the summer holidays before joining middle school, but somehow I forgot all about it and frolicking in the sun and eating ice cream took over.

Joining middle school, aged nine, it turned out that most of the other decent students had learned their tables during the holidays, and as it was immediately spotted that I didn't know how to multiply at all it was naturally assumed I was a dunce. I was immediately streamed into the remedial maths class, which was a bit of a shock for someone who was otherwise streamed in the top class for all of the other subjects. For one thing, remedial mathematics was taught by the art teacher, Mrs Rees, and there was therefore no chance I would ever learn anything.

The one vital lesson I did learn was: always check the back of the book to see if the answers are printed there. With this single skill, I went in one year from mathematical retard to mathematical genius, scoring maximum points in every test. At the end of the year I was promoted to the top set, and I imagine Mrs Rees earned herself great respect in the staff room. As I left the class, I whispered my secret to Stuart Colefaks in the clandestine hope he too might wield my hidden talent to reveal his hidden potential, but alas he was such an extraordinary idiot I doubt he was even able to find the back of the book.

And so I turned ten, and was in the top class for maths where they didn't print the answers in the same book as the questions. This wasn't just tragic because I still hadn't learned my times tables, but also because everyone else in top set had been taught long division, while I was effectively being taught how to drool over a protractor. I had literally no idea what I was doing. I was able to scrape by without knowing how to multiply - mathematics finally started getting theoretical, and so we spent a lot of time drawing triangles and then cutting them up to prove the angles added up to a straight line - but I recall one particularly painful test of our long division.

It was an oral exam, and the teacher would read out a division puzzle and we'd have a minute or two to work out the answer. "135 divided by 5", the teacher would announce. David Harrelson - who sat beside me - would immediately put the first number in a little box, the second number to its left and then suddenly and mysteriously the answer would start writing itself across the top of the box. I was fasincated by this black magic, but wholly unable to emulate it.

Instead, I would turn to the back of my exercise book and mark five dots - well-spaced out - and then add another round of dots, counting to ten, and then more and more until I'd counted up to 135. I'd then have 5 groups containing 135 dots in total, and could work out the answer to the question simply by counting the number of dots in one group (in this case, 27). Simple, if time consuming.

I got through most of the test this way, but towards the end the numbers started getting so high I was taking too long to draw out all of the dots and was missing questions out. I recall David Harrelson saw what I was doing and started mocking me, but fortunately he was not remotely cool and so no-one else joined in.

By age eleven I was moved to Mr Nicholson's class, still in the top set by some fluke of chance. My lack of knowledge of multiplication tables was no problem here as there was a chart of them up on the wall, and 50% of the time Mr Nicholson forgot to take them down during tests. The chart was also helpful as I found mathematics so boring I sought entertainment elsewhere, and found it in memorising the numbers on the wall and - as I have both a strong numerical brain and a superb visual memory, or at least I did before I started drinking - finally I started to understand the structure of numbers, and to realise that division is really just the times tables in reverse. This was a realisation I should have had three years earlier.

Twelve was a breeze with this new information, and I think by then my dad had also explained long division (however, looking back, long division makes no real sense anymore). At thirteen I transferred to big school, where calculators were allowed, and suddenly numbers were not remotely important anymore. You literally didn't even need to be able to count, so I started doing extremely well.

I remember scoring 98% on a GCSE mock paper in 1991, and getting the highest score in my class (58%) on an 'A' Level mock paper in 1993 (despite being the only one in the room not to have realised there were two sides to the exam paper). Of course, by this stage the real geniuses were in the Advanced Math class, preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams. I decided I was lucky enough to be doing this well without pushing it any further, which somewhat upset the teacher who'd hoped I would go on to be a rising star on the math stage. Seeing how much trouble Olivia had with Cambridge-level mathematics (you really had to be either autistic or truly devoted) I am quite glad I allowed my life in mathematics to end there.

And now I work for an accountancy firm. Go figure.

My First Job

2009-06-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

My first job lasted about eight minutes, after which I was obliged to resign. It was the Summer of 1995 and my Dad pulled in a favour through his office, scoring me a role at Irwins the construction contractors in Leeds. My parents handed me the address as they left for a holiday in Egypt, and I was on my own.

Turning up at 9am in what I imagined might be work gear - polished shoes, old school trousers, an almost ironed shirt and tie - I enquired at reception and was instructured to go round the back of the building and talk to Jeff.

Jeff, it turned out, was an obese old man living in a portakabin filled only with cigarette smoke. He decided that I should be a lorry driver, handed me a pair of keys and instructed me to put some diesel into one of the articulated lorries and drive it to Pontefract.

I had been expecting an easy role in a comfortable office, but as this was my very first job I didn't really want to cause a fuss. It seemed rude somehow to point out that I didn't have a license to drive an articulated lorry, nor indeed that the largest thing I'd ever driven in my life was my mum's mini metro (having gained my license only the year before). To show willing, I took the keys, climbed into the cabin and tried to work out how to start the thing.

The cabin of an articulated lorry is very different to that of a mini metro. For one thing, everything is so much larger: the driving wheel is like that on the deck of a ship, the pedals like steps on an escalator and the gearstick the size of a gentleman's umbrella. I felt like one of the Numbskulls from The Beano, operating comically giant machinery inside the human head.

The engine started easily, I pressed down the accelarator and ten or more tonnes of metal lurched at speed towards the building housing the typing pool. Turning the wheel in panic, the back of the lorry seemed to sweep across the car park and risked crushing a row of directors' cars. I then managed to manoeuvre the vehicle close enough to the diesel pumps to attempt to fill it up.

I'd not tried to put fuel inside anything before, not even a mini-metro, and so I took hold of the nozzle with some trepidation. I squeezed the trigger lightly to see what might occur, and diesel sprayed all up the side of the lorry and then onto my shoes. I hunted for what might be a petrol cap but without much luck, and so stuck the nozzle in the nearest likely-sized hole. It didn't fit, and I was wise enough not to pull the trigger a second time.

I decided that I probably had enough fuel to get to Pontefract anyway (not that I had any idea where the hell on god's earth that might be), so rationalised that I should speed things up by driving there first and then filling up on fuel. I climbed back into the lorry, reversed slightly, realised there was a row of cars directly behind the lorry, edged forward a bit and realised there was now a wall directly in front of me, and then - after repeating this three or four times - realised the lorry was now effectively trapped lengthways between the typing pool and a row of incredibly expensive directors' cars.

I did not, by choice, wish to crush either of them. I searched inside my soul and found it empty of enthusiasm for this new task, and so it was that eight minutes into my first job I found myself resigning. And reeking of diesel.

I took the rest of the week off, and when my dad got home from Cairo he got onto the phone to Irwins and discovered the whole thing had been a mistake. I should have been given an office job. How mistakes like that happen I don't know, but I was very grateful for a clandestine week of sunny freedom before the doom of office work clouded my days.

[Time: Summer of 1995]

May Angels Watch Me While I Sleep

2009-06-16T06:24:00.001-07:00

I've always thought that I didn't have much of a religious upbringing, but lying in bed the other day 'Praying to Imaginary God' for the sake of a friend's unborn baby (status: critical) I suddenly realised I knew two prayers off by heart, which I was tought to say each night in my pyjamas before going to bed. The first we were taught was clearly designed to reinforce the protestant work ethic:

Jesus grant me every day,
That I might work as well as play.
Help me to learn and understand.
Please guide my mind and guide my hand.
Amen.

I think that poem may even have come with a picture book, but even as a child I seemed to instinctively have less interest in religious picture books than ones about happy dogs called Scamp. A later addition - with a less overt message, although possibly more redolent of a world filled with vampires - came this prayer:

Lord keep me safe this night,
Secure from all my fears,
May angels watch me while I sleep,
'til morning light appears.
Amen.

It occurs to me, the more I probe my mind for religious material, that my mother would spend every morning reading from the Bible while drying her hair, although there was never indication that the same was expected of me.

A number of church trips also spring to mind. I was christened in All Saints Parish Church on Kirkgate, and I recall at least three trips there on a Sunday for a service. These were unbearably mundane affairs: sitting on hard wooden seats (why the hell are the cushions always on the floor?), listening to complex parables intended for adults, and singing drab songs to which no-one knows the tune.

I was not a patient child, and I suspect my fidgeting and open expressions of boredom during these early trips would have quickly put paid to the idea of taking me to church again. I remember during my last trip there as a child - perhaps aged five - I was shown a numbered plastic token hanging on a hook on a wooden board, which I was supposed to turn over when I attended services in future so that the vicar could keep track of attendance. It is no exagerration to say that I do not recall ever turning that token over.

My father is a devout atheist, so I suspect there was pressure at home to stop taking me to church too (he certainly never came along). Still, my mum was not defeated and one year decided to take us to an evangelical church in a school hall near our house. Her reasoning was that there would be less droning and more singing and clapping, which would really engage the children.

Alas, the 'church' comprised us standing in a circle in a school hall and a man screaming "Can you feel it? Can you feel god's love?" and the more regular members of the grouping swooning and screaming about how yes, indeed, they could feel God's love. My mum is a very polite woman and would not typically wish to offend, but even her faith has limits and after about 20 minutes she grabbed my brother and I by the hand and marched out before things got any more extreme. This was probably a good thing, as I was quite getting into it.

At the back of my head is a memory which claims that during the evangelical service someone daubed their hands in red and started talking in tongues. I cannot vouch for this, but I cannot rule it out.

And since then, I've had no religious influences on me. Attending a Comprehensive School my R.E. lessons were of course strictly pantheist, and so we spent much more time learning about Omega Point (a mystical place in the outer realms of the galaxy where all the positive thoughts go and, when we've all been sufficiently positive, a rainbow space-bridge will open up and suck us all into heaven) as we did the Church of England (a mystical place in middle England with fully no mystical rainbow space-bridges). We also watched Lord of the Flies and Amadeus during R.E., and the only lesson to stick with me was learning not to say "My pen has run out" (if you did, the teacher would open the door and urge you to chase after it. Ho fucking ho).

And that is my life in religion. And yet somehow, when I attended a small Bible Study class at the Carlisle chapter of the Church of Christ in Pennsylvania during the Summer of 1997, I was able to convince the Minister I was a good and devout Christian and thus secure myself lodgings for the summer. But as I've said before, that's an entirely different story.

[Time: Passim]

Southwestern Sales Camp

2009-06-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

1997. A bus pulls up on the side of the freeway in Nashville, Tennessee. Four men step out into the dusty hard shoulder and look around them. It did not take long for me to realise I had no idea what the hell I was doing there.

The four of us had travelled down together on a Greyhound bus from New York city, a hideous journey which had taken a full 24 hours. It was the middle of summer, the Greyhound's aircon had broken and its toilet was blocked up, all of which had fermented into a very unpleasant combination. I'd had one book to pass the time - a rather dry guide to writing screenplays - and we'd had just three stops en route for milling around. The bus stations had all looked identical: grey concrete affairs filled with the dregs of American society. Through these halls wandered us four young Cambridge graduates out to make their fortune (or, in my case, out to get drunk and have an adventure).

Heading to Nashvile had felt like the biggest mistake ever. This was my first time in the US and I'd only got to spend a day in New York. Unlike Nashville, Manhattan was beautiful, and full of people who seemed to have their fingers on the pulse. We'd eaten frozen yoghurt and gone to the top of the Empire State Building - a breathtaking view which gave the start of our adventure a magical quality, and which hasn't lost its impact on repeated viewings - and slept in a dorm at Columbia University, less magically in four beds to a room as though we were immigrants fresh off the boat. Two days before that I'd had my graduation ceremony back in Cambridge. My parents smiling in the rain, drinking beers, and crouched in the darkness blasting at my friends' parents with laser guns.

So, we stood in the dust in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. We'd been booked by the Company into the Residence Inn, on the farside of the freeway, and so our Great American Adventure began with us dodging cars across six lanes of traffic, climbing over a fence, rolling through gorse bushes down a grassy embankment and then walking (or hobbling, in the case of the obeser member of our group, who'd we'd picked up at the airport and couldn't seem to shake off) through a remote car park in search of our motel. It turned out we'd been booked eight to a room: two to each of the double beds, and four on the floor. As we'd arrived late we were on the floor by default, so I found a quiet corner beside the fridge and staked out my territory with the single blanket left for my enjoyment. The hotel was very basic, with free lemon squash and popcorn, which comprised my main diet over the week.

I had planned to have a shower, maybe a cocktail and then check out the Waffle House up the road. Jeremy, our leader, had different ideas however. He caught us in the lobby and marched us off to sales camp, the filth of three days' travel still smeared across our faces. We crossed the turnpike and headed up a long, long road to Landers Plaza, the home of the Southwestern Sales School.

There were perhaps 300 other students at sales school, crammed in a rather drab glass and concrete building. We were each handed our bookbag for the season - a cheap turquoise satchel containing five book samples, a credit card machine and various bits of paperwork. The lot weighed an absolute tonne. As we left the room we were also handed a piece of paper, which proved to be our first company invoice. We were charged omething like $250 for the bag and contents, which was indicative of the mindset that made Southwestern their money. In this case, they charged their sales team retail prices on all samples. It was also why I was losing money before I'd even started selling, which made me slightly uneasy.

We were then led into a meeting room where our fellow pupils were being lectured by The Great Mort Utley ... from beyond the grave. Apparently, this motivational speaker was so great he could build just as much rapport when dead (in video form) as he could when alive. I am not a fan of motivational speaking. It is at best drab bullshit, and at worse a manipulative confidence trick. I feel that people taken in by a witty and uplifting story could really be made to believe anything. Alas, this was to be our life for the full five days of sales camp.

The routine was mind-numbing: we woke up at the motel absurdly early, dragged our impossibly expensive and heavy book bags up Atrium Way to Landers Plaza, were lectured for five hours by motivational speakers (some living, some dead), and spent the remaining time practising our sales pitch on each other. Over and over again ("Hi, Mrs Jones, you've probably heard about me. I'm the guy who's going round town spouting out bullshit...") We were taught about opening lines, building rapport, dealing with objections (the first objection, ignore. The second, use a standard line. The third, use a standard line. The fourth, get the hell out of there ... I now always deal with unwanted salesmen by barking four clear objections right at the beginning). All of this was learned off a script which had apparently been written by Charlie Brown in the 1950s. Scripted sayings like "Aw gee whiz, Mrs Jones ..." hardly rolled off my English tongue.

Lunch was served in the expensive canteen, which was again clearly intended to wring every last penny from the student sales force. There was no where else to eat and certainly no time to go to a supermarket in the evenings, and while most other places in the US Iwould feed you like a king for $2, here I could barely afford one slice of cheese and tomato pizza consumed from a plastic plate in the unlit canteen.

In the evenings we had our "execs" - short, I think, for "executive exercises" - which were intended to bond us and build confidence and enthusiasm, but which only left me drained, aloof and miserable. We were also supposed to do these with our team every single morning once we were selling in the field. I couldn't recall the execs in full, but this website thankfully jogged my memory.

Execs were to be conducted every day, first thing in the morning after breakfast and ideally in front of members of the public (say, in the parking lot of a diner or in front of a shopping mall. This was fine at sales school, but in the field it was just Zack and me and we kinda losed enthusiasm). First, someone would spontaneously hold their hand in the air and run around ina circle bellowing "Ohhhhhh!" at the top of their voice. The other salesmen would then join in until the circle is complete, whereupon you can put your arm down and start singing the following song:

It's a great day to be a bookman.
It's a great day I know.
It's a great day to be a bookman everywhere I go.
Goodbye no-nevers, goodbye doubts and fears
It's a great day to be a bookman. Be of good cheer.
I feel happy.
I feel terrific.
I feel GREAT!

Make no mistake - we had to sing this at least four times while clapping our hands and shouting beastly noises inbetween. Someone - presumably sick of this asinine song - would then leap into the centre of the circle and scream, "Now let me see that funky chicken!" Pretending deafness, we would ask him to repeat himself three times. It wouldn't always be a funky chicken, but that one was inexplicably popular. You could ask for anything. After three repeats, the cirle is broken and everyone is left screaming and jumping around pretending to be a funky chicken, or whatever else had been requested.

I hated this. More than that, I hated the people who took inspiration from this.

We were also one time divided up by gender. It later transpired the women were having their 'How Not To Be Raped' talk indoors, while the men were taken outside into the baking heat of the carpark and told to strip to their underpants. We did this without question, knowing that putting up resistance was futile in Sales Camp. We also did it despite the fact the car park was overlooked by residential housing. We were again made to form a circle, and started with a lifetime's worth of Maori war chants. We then had to turn to out right and put our hands around the waist of the person in front of us, and run in a circle chanting that stupid fucking bookman song again.

Ritual and the deferral of pleasure was also central to their lectures to us. We were told of the need to avoid enjoyment and instead do what would make us succesful. Some found this inspirational and declared themselves devotees to the deferral of pleasure, but I found it a disappointment. Who wants to be a success if it means having a rotten time? This may explain why I was not quick to take up the daily routine we were instructed to follow while selling in the field: we were required to get up at one minute to six in the morning, to take a cold shower precisely one minute long, and to leave the house and start selling in the field all day long until nine o'clock in the evening. We were then to phone in our performance figures to Jerry - number of doors knocked on, number of demonstrations performed and number of sales generated in dollars - and retire to bed. This was to be our routine every day except Sundays, which was officially our day off but which in fact we had to spend at a team meeting with our managers, discussing relative progress, awarding the most succesful, conducting longer versions of the daily execs and having one-on-one mentoring, which I suppose amounted to individual brainwashing according to necessity.

Looking back, I'm shocked I didn't walk out during Sales School (actually an obscure memory is telling me now that I did threaten to resign, if I was placed in the field with strangers rather than best friend Zack). The brief research I've undertaken to put together these memories in some semblence of order has identified a number of sites which accuse Southwestern of being a cult. While I think this is putting it a bit strongly, by the end of the Sales School training week I did definitely feel like the only one not to have been brainwashed. Everyone was wholly sold on the idea of sales and on the inante goodness of the company, and no one - not even Zack - would tolerate questions asked about its methods. I have always preferred my own company to that or organised groups, and I have always resisted authority. Those days in Sales School made me realise what it must have been like to be a lone voice of sanity speaking out against the worst excesses of the Nazis in Germany. Another cause of my inability to feel kinship to my fellow salesmen from Cambridge was the name they had assigned themselves: The Dog's Bollocks. Chosen, it seemed, on the mistaken assumption American people didn't know what bollocks were.

There were some fun times in Sales School - most of them spent making the most of a bad situation. I remember I'd stolen a bottle of wine at Trinity May Ball and taken it with us to Nashville, so Zack and I had fun drinking that one evening, although we felt less good about it at six the following morning. We also went to a Waffle House which was an extraorindary introduction to a dreadful American institution, and of course we mocked the people we were training with. In particular, a Chinese girl called Wee-Wee (when she told Zack her name his response was a laugh, and then ask "But seriously, what is your name?") who was serious beyond all measure; a boy and his girlfriend who were opposite ends of the body size spectrum (of whom Zack commented - after hearing them have sex in the bed next to his - "it's like a pencil having sex with an orange"); and a serious and incredibly motivated girl whose eyelashes we imagined to be the size of palm fronds, blowing us down the street as she batted her self-important eyes at us.

At the end of our five days of sales school, we met with our regional leader who assigned The Dogs Bollocks to Pennsylvania, which was subdivided and Zack and I were given our own territory in Carlise. We boarded another Greyhound bus, waved Nashville goodbye for eight weeks and set off north on our summer of adventure.

I didn't really expect to sell anything. I absolutely knew I couldn't keep to the official schedule. I'm not built like that. But, hey, that's a story for another time.

Skip to Part II

[Time: Summer 1997]

Be Prepared

2009-05-27T05:10:00.000-07:00

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 Stacey 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 Stacey 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 Stacey'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

2009-05-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T07:20:00.000-07:00

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.