Friday, 25 December 2009
Saturday, 21 November 2009
My father the policeman
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.
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.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
My Life As The Bowl
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.
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.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher
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]
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
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.
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.
Monday, 28 September 2009
A Case of Honest Theft
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]
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]
Thursday, 17 September 2009
Scampi Fails The Pet Show
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
