#oneaday Day 215: Memories of Me: The Rough Book

Life changed for me and my friend Ed in secondary school when we discovered that the school library would sell you a new, blank exercise book in the colour of your choice for something like 30p. Ostensibly the option was there for those who had lost their exercise books and were replacing them at their own expense (the school would provide new ones for free when old ones were full, they weren't that stingy) but the librarian, Mrs Miller, didn't ask too many questions.

Mrs Miller was an interesting character, actually. As is often the case for school librarians, she developed something of a reputation for being a stickler for the rules and wanting to ensure everyone was silent at all times in the library. Of course, much of this was exaggerated by playground gossip, and Mrs Miller was, in fact, a thoroughly lovely person with a fun, dry sense of humour, and she was much more willing to demonstrate this side of herself to those who were further up the school.

But I digress. The important thing is that Mrs Miller would sell you a new exercise book for pocket change, and this meant you could use that book for whatever you pleased. Ed and I took to branding these quasi-illicit exercise books our "Rough Books", and they were used for all manner of things — primarily doodling, playing silly games and comic strips. It was in Rough Books that we established several fixtures of our teenage sense of humour, including:

• The German Stickmen. A four-frame comic in which two German stickmen would get into an argument over something stupid, culminating in them going "Nein!" "Ja!" repeatedly at one another until one of them bellowed "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, you know) and inflicted some form of horrible (usually explosive) violence on the other. My favourite ran "Ich bin Fred." "Nein, du bist James." "Nein!" "Ja!" "Nein!" "Ja!" "ACHTUNG!" (nuclear explosion).
• The X-35 Plasma Gun. Actually a creation of our mutual friend Daniel, the X-35 Plasma Gun didn't have a fixed form, but there was one constant in all its depictions: it was a gun one would hold with a pistol grip, but which carried a comedically large variety of attachments atop it, including not just additional weaponry such as bazookas and '50s-style laser guns, but also practical functions such as a washing machine and full-size bath. I will have to draw one of these again someday to truly get across what I mean, because I feel that description doesn't really do the X-35 Plasma Gun justice.
• Adverts for games that we were making with Klik and Play. One day I acquired the budget release of Clickteam's Klik and Play, and thus began a new obsession of us trying to make our own games. We only ever finished one — Pie Eater's Destiny, a game that featured idealised versions of me and my friends (actually ripped and recoloured Contra III sprites) battling giant digitised heads of our classmates in space. But that didn't stop us from drawing fake adverts for the many, many half-finished games we made that are now, sadly, almost definitely lost to time.
• Edlock Holmes and Watson. I talked about this in my video on The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, but the gist is this: Ed and I were obsessed with The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, so we made a comic that cast us in the role of "Holmes and Watson", and sent our virtual selves on various comedic adventures. There's probably an entire post of Edlock Holmes lore in me at some point, but that will have to do for now.

One of the most significant features of multiple Rough Books, though, was My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters. I feel the title for this is probably self-explanatory, but let me elaborate.

At school, I fell in love with a lot of girls, often for the most mundane reasons, like them acknowledging my existence, holding a conversation with me or allowing me to work in a group with them in class without being physically repulsed by my presence. I was too much of a socially awkward (retrospectively: autistic) teen to ever be able to express my feelings adequately to any of these girls, mind you, and thus most of my teenage years were spent feeling like a doomed poet, forever to suffer unrequited love from afar.

I secretly quite enjoyed the feeling of "being in love", though, regardless of whether or not anything actually happened. There was something about that teenage "butterflies in the stomach" feeling which was oddly… addictive, almost, and so, over time, I would flit from girl to girl, deciding that this time, she was absolutely the one for me, despite in most cases me not actually knowing that much about her at all, because that would involve talking to her and not making a complete idiot of myself, which my brain successfully convinced me on a daily basis was a complete impossibility.

Any time I fancied someone new, I would keep it quiet for a while, but after some time the feelings inside me would "boil over" to such a point that I had to admit it to one of my friends, even though I knew they would almost certainly take the piss out of me for it. And one of the ways they took the piss was getting hold of my Rough Book, then performing the sacred art of My Friends Hijack the Middle Pages and Write The Name of the Girl I Fancied That Week in Giant Letters.

The ornateness of how the name would be written varied from one occasion to another. Sometimes it would be in beautifully crafted, pencilled block letters. Sometimes it would be scrawled in multiple colours of felt-tipped pens. On one particularly memorable occasion, my Rough Book was returned to me with the name "NIKKI" (my affections returned to Nikki on multiple occasions; she was, to my teenage eyes and hormones, feminine perfection and, retrospectively, possibly the source of a mild tights fetish) beautifully painted in watercolours, which I feel was rather more grandiosity than the situation warranted, but such was the nature of my curious little friendship group.

I say they did this to take the piss. In their own way, I think they were showing a funny kind of "support" for my feelings. They knew that I was extremely unlikely to ever actually go up to any of these girls and ask them out, so they did what they could to make my feelings feel… "special". Sometimes they even went out of their way to try and put me in a situation with the girl in question — situations I would tend to squander due to my social ineptitude — and I don't think every one of those was an attempt to embarrass me in a malicious way.

Some of them absolutely were, mind. I have vivid memories of our class having been studying Romeo and Juliet in class, learning the expression "taking one's maidenhead" and numerous puns surrounding that phrase as euphemisms for taking a young lady's virginity. One lunchtime, one member of our class — Luke, a peripheral member of our friendship group at best — bellowed at the top of his voice "PETE WANTS TO CHOP DANIELLE'S HEAD OFF" while the Danielle in question (who I was, of course, exceedingly attracted to at the time and would have concurred privately with Luke's assessment had I not considered it a little disrespectful to contemplate the status of others' maidenheads) was most certainly well within earshot.

Thankfully, Danielle was cool, and someone I counted as an actual friend as well as someone I fancied, so on that occasion I actually successfully plucked up the courage to talk to her about it, apologise for Luke's outburst and successfully block myself off from ever being able to really admit I liked her by, in effect, friendzoning myself. (I also knew that she was, at the time, already going out with someone a bit older than her, and that fact intimidated me somewhat, as I did not want to end up on the receiving end of a beating from "Carmine", I believe his name was. Why do I remember this shit?)

Anyway. I got off the point there a bit, but I hope you enjoyed my memories of the Rough Book. I wish I still had some of them. I have a few bits of miscellanea from my teenage years, but sadly the Rough Books are not among them. By their nature, they were a transient form of media, doomed to end up in the bin so my parents and teachers didn't find them. But while they lasted they were a wonderful part of my secondary school days, and, as odd as it may sound, a big reason why I mostly look back on those days with fondness.

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