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.