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]
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Southwestern Sales Camp
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]
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]
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Be Prepared
When I was eight or nine, my parents mistakenly thought it would be a good idea for me to join the cub scouts.
This seemed like a great idea at the time - I largely pictured myself on a flying fox like at the end of the Krypton Factor assault course - but I didn't bank on the fact that the cub scouts are instead just about hierarchies of authority and honouring the queen and god. In fact, I quickly realised that there was utterly nothing to hold my interest each Wednesday evening at all. My dad would drive me down to Farnley Church Hall and all through the journey I'd plead with him to be able to stay at home, but my parents felt it was good for me and so they insisted. Once I'd been dropped off, I iterally looked at the clock every two minutes, counting down to my father's return.
I've always been happier in my own company, and cannot stand official organised fun. The cubs only reinforced that. Each session was attended by three types of people: poncy posh-a-lots with expensive woggles trying to show off, rough toughies with no respect for cubs, and me on my own making no friends. There was a boy called Lloyd there who was very proper and who I assumed - illogically, as I can now see - was an heir to the Lloyd's Bank fortune. He had the irritating habit of only moving his eyes while his eyelids were closed, and so to look over at the window he would have to close his eyes, look in the new direction, and then open again. I think my arch nemesis was there too - Colin Gibbon - a creature for whom I still feel an incredible amount of hate, and who one day I hope to destroy. Maybe I will save him for a separate memory of his own.
Key memories from this period are: having to play French cricket in the field outside the church hall (I hate team games); winning a badge for succesfully poaching an egg (even at 8 years old, this did not strike me as an achievement); dancing around a bonfire at a Halloween party where I wore a Frankenstein mask (a moment still immeditately evoked whenever I smell cheap plastic); the 5p's I was given by my mum under strict cub rules that I always carry a coin in case I needed to make an emergency phonecall, which I always pretended to have lost but which I was actually hoarding for sweets, in what must have struck my mum as a very obvious asset-tunnelling exercise; and wetting myself while pretending to pray because I was too embarrassed to ask to leave the room while Arkala had an open channel to God (this horrifying event in my past was still remembered by my peers five years later as a teenager, but thankfully with the passage of time they mistakenly thought it had been Christopher Burroughs who pissed himself in the prayer circle and so - peversely - I got to taunt him instead).
Matters came to a head with the Cub Scouts when we were sent on a weekend trip to the Yorkshire Dales. There were dozens of us there - all dressed up in our cub-boy fetish gear, woggles askew - trapped in the drabbest farm house you can imagine. Only one of my actual friends had come along too - Adrian Bird I think it was - and I don't really recall how we passed an entire weekend there. Clear memories are:
1. The boys who misbehaved were forced to strip naked and stand in the farmyard. Mr [X] then hosed them down with cold water while the other boys watched. If this homoerotic imagery is insufficient to alert the authorities, I also recall he insisted on supervising the boys in the shower. All boys had to strip naked and he would watch them lather up. Even as an eight year old I knew this was totally wrong (I mean, I bathed myself unsupervised at home) and I absolutely refused to take off my clothes at any point during the weekend. I had no idea what a paedophile was at the time, but I still somehow seemed to understand Mr [X] probably was one.
2. After dinner - which was something drab and grey - we all retired to the horrible great hall, a dirty room overseen by ancient stuffed animals (particularly horrifying to my childhood mind was a stuffed bear's head which oversaw the stairs, its decaying tongue hanging out of its roaring mouth). As a 'treat' we were given cocoa and penguin biscuits, but I'd never had cocoa before and my efforts to drink it were hampered by the fact it tasted like dishwater. I refused, and was told by a moon-faced female supervisor that I couldn't have a penguin biscuit if I didn't drink my cocoa. "Then I don't want a bloody penguin biscuit!" I bellowed, storming from the room, in what was on reflection my first hissy fit.
3. Other entertainments were: walking in the countryside, which I would probably have been doing with my parents anyway; listening to the worst ghost stories ever, including one about the Ghost of the Flying Dutchman, which might have had more impact if it were made clearer whether it was a boat or an aeroplane; sleeping in a real dormitory, which was horrible but was cheered up by one boy who wanted to show off his boner; being the target of attempted bullying, which never worked with me because I was prone to random outbursts of violence when cornered; and playing dusty and old fashioned board games, which I have maintained from a young age are better described as boring games.
And so, while I had previously been banned from quitting the cubs, upon my return my parents heard from the organiser various tales of my cocoa outburst and my general disobedience, while I provided tales of the hosing downs and Mr [X]'s showertime activities, and thus my parents pemamently withdrew me from the group shortly after my return. I never looked back.
[Estimate of date: 1985]
This seemed like a great idea at the time - I largely pictured myself on a flying fox like at the end of the Krypton Factor assault course - but I didn't bank on the fact that the cub scouts are instead just about hierarchies of authority and honouring the queen and god. In fact, I quickly realised that there was utterly nothing to hold my interest each Wednesday evening at all. My dad would drive me down to Farnley Church Hall and all through the journey I'd plead with him to be able to stay at home, but my parents felt it was good for me and so they insisted. Once I'd been dropped off, I iterally looked at the clock every two minutes, counting down to my father's return.
I've always been happier in my own company, and cannot stand official organised fun. The cubs only reinforced that. Each session was attended by three types of people: poncy posh-a-lots with expensive woggles trying to show off, rough toughies with no respect for cubs, and me on my own making no friends. There was a boy called Lloyd there who was very proper and who I assumed - illogically, as I can now see - was an heir to the Lloyd's Bank fortune. He had the irritating habit of only moving his eyes while his eyelids were closed, and so to look over at the window he would have to close his eyes, look in the new direction, and then open again. I think my arch nemesis was there too - Colin Gibbon - a creature for whom I still feel an incredible amount of hate, and who one day I hope to destroy. Maybe I will save him for a separate memory of his own.
Key memories from this period are: having to play French cricket in the field outside the church hall (I hate team games); winning a badge for succesfully poaching an egg (even at 8 years old, this did not strike me as an achievement); dancing around a bonfire at a Halloween party where I wore a Frankenstein mask (a moment still immeditately evoked whenever I smell cheap plastic); the 5p's I was given by my mum under strict cub rules that I always carry a coin in case I needed to make an emergency phonecall, which I always pretended to have lost but which I was actually hoarding for sweets, in what must have struck my mum as a very obvious asset-tunnelling exercise; and wetting myself while pretending to pray because I was too embarrassed to ask to leave the room while Arkala had an open channel to God (this horrifying event in my past was still remembered by my peers five years later as a teenager, but thankfully with the passage of time they mistakenly thought it had been Christopher Burroughs who pissed himself in the prayer circle and so - peversely - I got to taunt him instead).
Matters came to a head with the Cub Scouts when we were sent on a weekend trip to the Yorkshire Dales. There were dozens of us there - all dressed up in our cub-boy fetish gear, woggles askew - trapped in the drabbest farm house you can imagine. Only one of my actual friends had come along too - Adrian Bird I think it was - and I don't really recall how we passed an entire weekend there. Clear memories are:
1. The boys who misbehaved were forced to strip naked and stand in the farmyard. Mr [X] then hosed them down with cold water while the other boys watched. If this homoerotic imagery is insufficient to alert the authorities, I also recall he insisted on supervising the boys in the shower. All boys had to strip naked and he would watch them lather up. Even as an eight year old I knew this was totally wrong (I mean, I bathed myself unsupervised at home) and I absolutely refused to take off my clothes at any point during the weekend. I had no idea what a paedophile was at the time, but I still somehow seemed to understand Mr [X] probably was one.
2. After dinner - which was something drab and grey - we all retired to the horrible great hall, a dirty room overseen by ancient stuffed animals (particularly horrifying to my childhood mind was a stuffed bear's head which oversaw the stairs, its decaying tongue hanging out of its roaring mouth). As a 'treat' we were given cocoa and penguin biscuits, but I'd never had cocoa before and my efforts to drink it were hampered by the fact it tasted like dishwater. I refused, and was told by a moon-faced female supervisor that I couldn't have a penguin biscuit if I didn't drink my cocoa. "Then I don't want a bloody penguin biscuit!" I bellowed, storming from the room, in what was on reflection my first hissy fit.
3. Other entertainments were: walking in the countryside, which I would probably have been doing with my parents anyway; listening to the worst ghost stories ever, including one about the Ghost of the Flying Dutchman, which might have had more impact if it were made clearer whether it was a boat or an aeroplane; sleeping in a real dormitory, which was horrible but was cheered up by one boy who wanted to show off his boner; being the target of attempted bullying, which never worked with me because I was prone to random outbursts of violence when cornered; and playing dusty and old fashioned board games, which I have maintained from a young age are better described as boring games.
And so, while I had previously been banned from quitting the cubs, upon my return my parents heard from the organiser various tales of my cocoa outburst and my general disobedience, while I provided tales of the hosing downs and Mr [X]'s showertime activities, and thus my parents pemamently withdrew me from the group shortly after my return. I never looked back.
[Estimate of date: 1985]
Friday, 15 May 2009
Cuddles the Caterpillar
While on holiday at the Barend Holiday Village near Dumfries in Scotland - with my parents' friends Kath and Alan, and their daughter Helen - we became obsessed with a furry caterpillar named Cuddles, who we'd found crawling on heather during a walk on the moors.
Cuddles soon went everywhere with the three of us, although ultimately he was Helen's pet. Our parents found this a little disgusting, but were presumably happy for us to have a hobby. Alas, Cuddles came to a tragic end when Helen decided it was bath time, and the poor creature was drowned in the kitchen sink. Inspired by the new Robin of Sherwood tv-series (played by Michael Praed, of whom we had a poster in our attic room, from Smash Hits), we went out onto the balcony at the top of the house and threw the corpse of Cuddles in the air. Wherever he landed, was where he would be buried.
It transpired, when we went to bury him, that we would have been better off taking our inspiraton from the Jesus story, as Cuddles had been restored to life and was desperately making a break for it. We did not seem much saddened by his drowning-and-high-impact treatment, as Helen kept him and took him home at the end of the holiday.
We had a strange relationship with animals on these holidays to Barend. Another time we filled the wastepaper bin with water and rocks and captured ten or twenty toads from the loch and kept them in the bin out on our balcony - an idea that backfired when they started jumping around and laying toad-spawn everywhere. One such toad had a graze on his forehead so we named him Little Gash and took him everywhere with us, although Aunt Kath refused our appeal to put some savlon and a plaster on him.
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]Thursday, 14 May 2009
PEOPLE: Alistair Howtown
Alistair Howtown lived next door to me when we were very young, and later moved up the road into the cul-de-sac about five doors away. Apparently we played happily as infants, but I have no memory of this. I do remember we were best friends throughout middle school (age 8-12).
Alistair almost never came to my house, and so I was always round at his. Looking back at the things we did it's clear we were both gay. We liked playing happy families with the soft toys (Alistair was always the wife, usually heavily pregnant), cooking chocolate crispy cakes and drop scones, staging our own plays and musicals, watching movies like Grease or tv shows like French & Saunders, and singing along to Kylie Minogue.
I used to envy him his mother, who was a lovely friendly woman with a big round face who seemed to radiate love, but thinking back perhaps I preferred my very close knit family. Alistair was left to forage for his own food (usually pre-packaged pancakes microwaved with syrup, or a packet of Hula-Hoops sourced from a drawer stuffed with packets of them in the kitchen) and was offered no protection against his brother, James. Almost every visit to the Howden household ended when James entered the room and started beating Alistair up. Alistair would run and hide in the bathroom, locking the door and screaming and crying, and I - at that time quiet and very uncertain how to act - would finally give up and go home.
From my perspective, James wasn't all bad - he was very into building his muscles (he was very short and trying to compensate), and also very into only wearing very loose boxer shorts around the house. God bless him, while James was crouched over Alistair pummelling his stomach, my thoughts were often focussed on his muscular back, round bottom and - more frequently than seems probable - his balls hanging out of the sides of his boxers. This was probably the source of my earliest real-life sexual feelings and certainly my first real exposure to the post-pubescent ball-sack. I used to make excuses to sit watching tv in their house in the hope James would sit on the sofa, spread-legged and cock out of the henhouse.
Alistair and I were superb friends, and clearly didn't fit in with the rest of the school (indeed, on school trips to Wales and France we were generally in a clique of two), but our friendship deteriortated significantly when we moved to grammar school. I guess I started to distrust him after he told a dumb lie (he said his hamster was pregnant. Believing him, I reported this to my mum, who confirmed via his mum it was a lie, and any trust I had in the boy was destroyed forever), but we fully drifted apart once we went to big school and ended up in different streams, and he started hanging around with the louder, ruder girls and took up smoking.
I saw him little after that. Even in sixth form, he was on BTech while I did A-levels. I last saw him walking his dog when I was about 21, when I was back home from university trying to make enough money to move back to London. He was a good looking man: tall, tan, handsome face. I sighed and thought about getting back into contact, but months later he hanged himself with his dog leash.
I was no longer close enough to him or his family to find out why he hanged himself, and it only saddened me slightly. It was many years later - 2006 perhaps - that his death really hit me. I was lying in bed just thinking about him and suddenly I realised how close we had been, and started crying when I realised everything he had missed in life, and everything he would go on to miss. Worst of all, I realised I was now the only person in the world to remember the things we had done together, which is a weird way to think about something like this.
My favourite memory is when we were playing catch in his living room, and he threw the ball and knocked some little lead soldiers off the mantlepiece and they broke. They had been his grandfather's and so we spent hours finding glue and trying to fix them so his mum wouldn't be angry, but it was no good as the lead wouldn't stick. In the end we had to come clean and - expecting punishment - we were instead praised, as his mum had always hated them. They were stuck in the bin and forgotten.
It's odd that we were two gays in a homophobic northern town, and yet somehow that was never mentioned in our friendship. My other best friend from this time was also a homo, and it was similarly never an issue. Looking back, I wish he'd remained a friend through school and someone to go through the whole realising-I'm-gay thing with. I think we'd both have come out stronger.
Alistair almost never came to my house, and so I was always round at his. Looking back at the things we did it's clear we were both gay. We liked playing happy families with the soft toys (Alistair was always the wife, usually heavily pregnant), cooking chocolate crispy cakes and drop scones, staging our own plays and musicals, watching movies like Grease or tv shows like French & Saunders, and singing along to Kylie Minogue.
I used to envy him his mother, who was a lovely friendly woman with a big round face who seemed to radiate love, but thinking back perhaps I preferred my very close knit family. Alistair was left to forage for his own food (usually pre-packaged pancakes microwaved with syrup, or a packet of Hula-Hoops sourced from a drawer stuffed with packets of them in the kitchen) and was offered no protection against his brother, James. Almost every visit to the Howden household ended when James entered the room and started beating Alistair up. Alistair would run and hide in the bathroom, locking the door and screaming and crying, and I - at that time quiet and very uncertain how to act - would finally give up and go home.
From my perspective, James wasn't all bad - he was very into building his muscles (he was very short and trying to compensate), and also very into only wearing very loose boxer shorts around the house. God bless him, while James was crouched over Alistair pummelling his stomach, my thoughts were often focussed on his muscular back, round bottom and - more frequently than seems probable - his balls hanging out of the sides of his boxers. This was probably the source of my earliest real-life sexual feelings and certainly my first real exposure to the post-pubescent ball-sack. I used to make excuses to sit watching tv in their house in the hope James would sit on the sofa, spread-legged and cock out of the henhouse.
Alistair and I were superb friends, and clearly didn't fit in with the rest of the school (indeed, on school trips to Wales and France we were generally in a clique of two), but our friendship deteriortated significantly when we moved to grammar school. I guess I started to distrust him after he told a dumb lie (he said his hamster was pregnant. Believing him, I reported this to my mum, who confirmed via his mum it was a lie, and any trust I had in the boy was destroyed forever), but we fully drifted apart once we went to big school and ended up in different streams, and he started hanging around with the louder, ruder girls and took up smoking.
I saw him little after that. Even in sixth form, he was on BTech while I did A-levels. I last saw him walking his dog when I was about 21, when I was back home from university trying to make enough money to move back to London. He was a good looking man: tall, tan, handsome face. I sighed and thought about getting back into contact, but months later he hanged himself with his dog leash.
I was no longer close enough to him or his family to find out why he hanged himself, and it only saddened me slightly. It was many years later - 2006 perhaps - that his death really hit me. I was lying in bed just thinking about him and suddenly I realised how close we had been, and started crying when I realised everything he had missed in life, and everything he would go on to miss. Worst of all, I realised I was now the only person in the world to remember the things we had done together, which is a weird way to think about something like this.
My favourite memory is when we were playing catch in his living room, and he threw the ball and knocked some little lead soldiers off the mantlepiece and they broke. They had been his grandfather's and so we spent hours finding glue and trying to fix them so his mum wouldn't be angry, but it was no good as the lead wouldn't stick. In the end we had to come clean and - expecting punishment - we were instead praised, as his mum had always hated them. They were stuck in the bin and forgotten.
It's odd that we were two gays in a homophobic northern town, and yet somehow that was never mentioned in our friendship. My other best friend from this time was also a homo, and it was similarly never an issue. Looking back, I wish he'd remained a friend through school and someone to go through the whole realising-I'm-gay thing with. I think we'd both have come out stronger.
Earliest memory
I had for a long time believed that my earliest memory was of drowning in the sea at Newquay. On holiday there with my parents, my Dad had taken me down to the beach to let me trot around on the sand, and for some reason lost focus and let me gallop down to the sea.
Every seventh wave is a big one at Newquay, or so family lore has it. I remember none of this, as my earliest memory was of being swept up by a giant wave, and dragged out to sea face down. All I remember is salt, sand, seaweed and plenty of panic.
The family account is that I had stood at the edge of the sea, was caught in a giant wave and washed out like a log. My dad waded in and pulled me back out, and a group of teenagers pointed and laughed. The pay-off is that the next wave was even bigger, swamped the teens and dragged all of their clothes out to sea. I have no memory of any of this.
My mum reports that she had been back home at the caravan, and the first she knew about it was when my Dad appeared back at the caravan, holding me dripping wet at arms length, and she was like, Oh FFS.
I say I thought this was my earliest memory, but my Mum recently reported that this whole escapade was particularly annoying for her as I'd just had stitches put in the back of my head after splitting my head open, and I wasn't supposed to get the stitches wet. I remember this injury very clearly - my brother was teaching me a game where you jump off a dry stone wall and into the rusting brown wheel barrow. Instead I learned that dry stone walls are very unstable, wheelbarrows are very hard and that a great deal of blood can pump out of the back of your head.
I remember this memory very well as I have to tell if every month, when I get my hair cut and the barber sees the scars on the back of my head.
[Estimated time: Summer 1979]
Every seventh wave is a big one at Newquay, or so family lore has it. I remember none of this, as my earliest memory was of being swept up by a giant wave, and dragged out to sea face down. All I remember is salt, sand, seaweed and plenty of panic.
The family account is that I had stood at the edge of the sea, was caught in a giant wave and washed out like a log. My dad waded in and pulled me back out, and a group of teenagers pointed and laughed. The pay-off is that the next wave was even bigger, swamped the teens and dragged all of their clothes out to sea. I have no memory of any of this.
My mum reports that she had been back home at the caravan, and the first she knew about it was when my Dad appeared back at the caravan, holding me dripping wet at arms length, and she was like, Oh FFS.
I say I thought this was my earliest memory, but my Mum recently reported that this whole escapade was particularly annoying for her as I'd just had stitches put in the back of my head after splitting my head open, and I wasn't supposed to get the stitches wet. I remember this injury very clearly - my brother was teaching me a game where you jump off a dry stone wall and into the rusting brown wheel barrow. Instead I learned that dry stone walls are very unstable, wheelbarrows are very hard and that a great deal of blood can pump out of the back of your head.
I remember this memory very well as I have to tell if every month, when I get my hair cut and the barber sees the scars on the back of my head.
[Estimated time: Summer 1979]
First, an explanation
The aim of this blog is to accumulate and place into storage all of my significant childhood memories. These memories will be harvested from the period prior to 1998 (that is, birth through to graduation), and placed in tupperware so they will not fade.
One memory - of any length, on any subject, in any time period - will be posted each day.
This may be a large project.
One memory - of any length, on any subject, in any time period - will be posted each day.
This may be a large project.
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