Juvenilia, Part 4

Happy chocolate egg-themed spring fertility/rebirth event everyone!

To celebrate the seasonal cycle caused by the tilting of the earth on its axis as it orbits the sun, which our ancestors symbolised as the death and resurrection of the natural world - which in turn has been metaphorically embodied over time in the various figures of Ishtar, Horus, Mithras, Dionysus and of course Attis (who chopped off his own cock and balls) - here is a photo of me when I was five years old, delighted on a trip to the zoo at seeing a seagull.

I don’t want to spend too much of your time poking fun at the self-appointed culture warriors whining about the removal of the word “easter”from egg hunts – which didn’t even happen – but it is particularly ironic that the derivation of the very word in question comes from the pagan festival of Eostre... 

Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that nothing is "pure" and everything is the product of syncretism. Which makes a lot of people either insincere or idiots. 

Anyway, on the subject of idiocy...

Going through my old school books again, I came across this story “The Nutter” – illuminated with the author’s own illustrations, in the manner of William Blake - which I would like to submit for analysis in its entirety.

Are you bored of this yet? Well I don’t care.

“The Nutter” concerns a boy named Terry, who we are told is very “dim and stupid”. The story relates the less-than-hilarious consequences of (i) Terry being given a budgie (ie he loses it) and (ii) Terry buying a model battleship (ie he loses that as well).

The only thing I can really see that Terry does wrong in the story is taking the budgie home on top of his head. His mother’s suggestion – that the correct way to carry a bird is “in a paper bag” – sounds, if anything, worse.

When he buys the battleship and puts it in a bag in his pocket, but nevertheless, loses the bits when they drop out, this just sounds like bad luck. However, his mum decrees “no more pocket money for you”.

I particularly enjoyed the epilogue – “so Terry could not go out and make a mess again”.

On reflection, I think this piece tells us not only about attitudes towards mental health in the early 1980s, but it also leads us astray. We are all Terry. The real “Nutter” is of course Terry’s mum, who thinks birds should be transported in paper bags, which is even for the imagination of a 7-year-old, stupid.

Anyway, the teacher – as you can see – thought it was “very good”.

Juvenilia, Part 3

I was born on January 30^th 1976. This is how the Southend and District News Observer chose to celebrate the auspicious occasion – with ads for exhaust pipes, a “slimming programme that really works” and ...erm....a luxury sauna and massage club. Which is almost certainly NOT a brothel. Probably. If you read the ad closely, you will be delighted to hear that "Penthouse" boasted such facilities as a "colour TV". 

Sadly, my parents did not save copies of any national newspapers from the day of my birth – just this local classified section. However, extensive research (by which I mean a couple of minutes on Google) shows that the only event of global significance occurring on my date of birth was the appointment of George H W Bush as the 11^th director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Working on the Dalai Lama principle for that date, I could have been the reincarnation of EITHER Texan blues musician Mance Lipscomb or Percy Tyson "Plum" Lewis, a South African cricketer, both of whom died on the day I was born - my arrival on this plane thereby providing a suitable vessel for their immortal souls. Whether this would have been a karmic promotion or relegation for either of them, it's hard to say. 

However, when Tibetan monks presented my infant self with items that had belonged to Messrs Lipscomb and Lewis I failed to recognise them, causing me to be disqualified from the succession. One of my earliest memories is the monks’ heartfelt frustration over the wasted journey they had undertaken from Lhasa to Essex.

Speaking of lamas - this works better if you read it out loud, of course - here is a picture of me and my brother (far left) being conveyed around London Zoo by one of the popular South American camelids in 1981 or 1982 #nofilter #swag #llama

Juvenilia, Part 2

It was 1984. Return of the Jedi had come out a year ago. 

A disappointed global public had realised that an apparently great cinematic villain was not only such a poor leader that his army could be trounced by a gang of stone age teddy bears but also that – beneath his iconic helmet – he resembled a cross between Humpty Dumpty and a bruised scrotum.

It may seem incredible today, but with no immediate prospects for further Sith work, Darth Vader was reduced to doing PAs for furniture companies at sports centres in west Suffolk.  

And that’s where I met him. True story. There’s his signature to prove it.

"Never cross near parked cars" - that was his other catchphrase

Now, my parents were quick to assure me that this was indeed the “real” Darth Vader – viz. quondam Green Cross Code Man David “Stop, lookand listen” Prowse. Of course, the helmet remaining firmly in place, it could have been anyone tall.

Oh yes, it’s not all exercise books. I have loads of other peculiar fragments of my childhood to show you. 

“Peculiar fragments” being largely all there is. We have always lived far away from our wider family, and in 1987, me, my mum, dad and brother moved away from Bury St Edmunds to Boston in Lincolnshire. I was 11. I wrote letters to my friends, but that fizzled out by 1990 or so.

As a result, my sense of my early life is composed almost entirely of what I remember – without much third party corroboration at all. Where I live now, there are loads of people who have always lived in the area, who have known the friends they see every day since they were babies and whose parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and so on all live within a mile radius. Their senses of personal history must be pretty well integrated.

That’s not me. I’m not complaining: it is, as they say, what it is. It just means that looking through old stuff I haven’t seen for 30 years or so gives me a very weirdly vertiginous feeling, that the conscious Roger of Sicily is only a part-time tenant of this brain and that the true landlord is somewhere else entirely.  

Enigmatic, eh?

Not as enigmatic as this story about a “family of dwarfs”, who uncovered a plot by spacemen to take over the world – admittedly, while waiting in ambush to murder them with pointed sticks, which takes some of the sheen off their earth-saving heroism.

When the spacemen declare “the time to conquer the world is here”... it ends! 

That’s the last page of the frigging book! 

What was I thinking? I’d give my eight-year-old self a piece of my mind for leaving such a cliffhanger unresolved, if such a thing were even remotely metaphysically possible. 

Juvenilia, Part 1

Every day, I look at the news and wish I hadn’t. I look at social media, and I wish I hadn’t. Then 30 seconds later, I look at social media again. Still wish I hadn’t.

Back in the days when I wrote on this blog regularly, I wrote about a lot of political stuff. I can’t bring myself to do that now. The world is so horrible, so depressing and so embarrassing that I find myself unable to engage with it. I can’t even take the piss out of it. If piss-taking changed anything...well, Trump, Putin, May, Farage, Brexit, James Corden... shall I carry on?

So I’m off on a voyage of inner emigration – talking and thinking about other things, to distract myself from the disintegrating world out there. Ah, for a more innocent time...

Well.

Recently, my mum gave me some boxloads of my old school exercise books, photos, newspaper clippings. And so, I intend to share some of the highlights with you. Consider this a Bildungsroman –a portrait of the arsehole as a young man, if you will.

The picture at the top, for example, is from what appears to be my first ever school book – summer 1981, when I was in Class 1 at Hardwick Primary School. As you can see, I saw some men with bagpipes. "Nice" - I am sure you will agree with my teacher.

If bagpipes are not enough to prove that I – like Tiny Tempah – lived a “very very very wild lifestyle”, what about this? My brother’s third birthday party (he’s now 38) – which was attended by “some frends”. All of whom, it would seem, were dressed as garden gnomes. That was the 80s, young people.  

Let’s move forward in time a little. Here is an account of what I did on a weekend in 1983. If I remember rightly (and it’s entirely possible that I do not), this was the year that I vomited all over Mrs Almond as we lined up to leave the swimming pool. If Mrs Almond is reading this, I am very sorry. The memory of puking on you still haunts me.

If only I could go back to those days, when all I had to worry about was not wanting to go to Needham Market – and then being bored when I did have to go there.

Having said that, I feel that there is a real Joycean quality to the work here. Nothing much happens, but we are relentlessly, inescapably inside the consciousness of the narrator, who may or may not be unreliable. Even at eight years of age, I showed a precocious tendency towards modernism. And utter self-absorption. 

Moving on a few more years, here we are at secondary school in 1987, doing maths under the late Larry Veale. He retired at the end of that year, having started teaching at Boston Grammar in 1952. He was – quite literally – old school. Certainly, culture had changed dramatically between when I went into that school in 1987 and when I came out in 1994. 

While these days, school children occupy themselves with iPads, sexting and deradicalisaton programmes, back in 1987, we drew triangles. Lots and lots and lots of triangles. Big ones, little ones – but all three-sided and covered in angles. 

As you can see, I was shit at it.