#oneaday Day 230: Grumpy Frog

I was reading a post from the redoubtable Mr. Wapojif the other day on the subject of curious frog drawings, and I was reminded of one of the many things I'd doodle as a teenager — including, yes, in the Rough Book. I present to you in the accompanying image: a character who never really got a name, he was just known as "Grumpy Frog".

Grumpy Frog, as you may be able to tell from his colour scheme, began life as an attempt to draw Yoshi from Super Mario World. As I recall, it was one of those situations where I started doodling Yoshi, realised that things were going badly as my friends were watching, and thus quickly repurposed him into something else, as I intended to do all along. I don't think I fooled them, but Grumpy Frog became something of a fixture in places where I'd doodle things anyway.

I don't really know anything about Grumpy Frog other than the fact he is perpetually annoyed about something. I never incorporated him into a comic strip or drew him doing anything other than the pose you see above, largely because, as you can probably tell from the drawing, I can't really draw frogs either. But he is still one of those oddly specific fond memories I have from Back In The Day that, for some reason, will never leave me.

I sometimes find myself wondering if the amount of useless garbage I still carry around in my head from my school days is normal. There have been multiple occasions where I've made a reference to something from 30+ years ago to a friend I haven't seen for a while and I get a response somewhere along the lines of "I can't believe you remember that". But, to be fair, people always seem to be pleased to be reminded of these things for the most part — I do at least have enough social awareness not to bring up memories that are likely painful or awkward for the people in question — so, regardless of whether or not it's something that everyone has with their memory, I don't think it's a particular problem as such.

Anyway, that is Grumpy Frog. I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate him for a moment, because I hadn't really thought about him for a good few years, but Mr. Wapojif's post reminded me that yes, Grumpy Frog will always be a part of me, for better or worse, and he deserved a bit of time to shine. So there he is.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 229: Mental shutdown

I'm back from my trip, and I'm absolutely exhausted. A full-day meeting followed by a 3+ hour drive is not my idea of Having A Brilliant Day, so I'm sitting here absolutely frazzled and seriously considering going to bed before it even hits 10pm. In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do as soon as I'm finished with this nonsense.

The meeting itself wasn't a bad thing — it was actually quite worthwhile and productive, but I'm not sure it needed to be the entire day. I won't bore you with the details because they're not very interesting, but they should help me and the rest of the team I work on to do our jobs better. So that's nice.

No, it's the three-hour drive back in the dark that's the real killer, and to make matters worse my phone battery died with about 45 minutes left to go. I was listening to Ed Zitron's excellent(ly cynical) coverage of E3 on his Better Offline podcast and enjoying it a great deal, but I had to suffer with the radio for that last 45 minutes, because balls to driving in silence.

And to be sure, listening to Absolute Radio '90s is… well, not really suffering as such, but it has got markedly worse since Matt Berry's contract clearly expired, because their new idents featuring someone trying (and not doing a brilliant job) to imitate Matt Berry's distinctive cadence are just infuriatingly shit. Whereas Berry's idents were genuinely amusing — and, rather brilliantly, different every time they came on — they've fallen back on that old commercial radio standard, "where real music matters". And they go on and on and on about "real music matters", sometimes for several minutes at a time. There's no humour, no heart, no feeling that "real music" really matters. Just the usual soulless commercial attempts to be "funny" and failing miserably.

At least the music they do play is decent, since as the name suggests, they play a selection of '90s hits (with a "no repeat guarantee!" that unfortunately doesn't extend to "not playing the same songs at the same time each day") — although listening to a few tracks during the vinegar strokes of my journey this evening made me realise that more than a few groups commonly regarded as "good" are actually pretty dull. Like Nirvana. Boring. Always suspected they were when I was younger, but dutifully bought Nevermind because everyone was obliged to in the '90s. But no. Can't even remember the name of the song that I heard on the radio this evening but it was as dull as the piss of an old man with a yeast infection.

Anyway, my tiredness is clearly letting the grump out, so I think it's probably for the best that I put the bin out and go to bed. So I'm going to go do that right now. Don't wake me.

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#oneaday Day 228: Hotel time again

I'm presently away from home for my monthly-ish visit to the office, so I'm in my regular hotel, a reasonably nice (and reasonably affordable) non-chain place in the town centre, approximately two minutes from work.

I like spending time in hotels because it's a chance to live a little bit differently for a brief period. You get to sleep in a different bed, enjoy the amenities and see life from a slightly different perspective, even if it's for just a moment. And that's nice to do every so often.

It's always a slight roll of the dice with this place when I come, mind you; sometimes I'm lucky and get a free "upgrade" of sorts to a double room with a bath; this time, sadly, I was unlucky, and have the single room with a bathroom that was not designed by a human being with a functional physical presence, judging by the absolutely baffling position of the shower and sink in relation to one another. One should not have to squeeze through a narrow gap just to get into the shower, and it's not as if there isn't space in the room for the shower to be somewhere slightly different, either.

But I can't complain too much. The bed, although single, is comfortable and the sheets nice and warm. And tomorrow morning I will enjoy a hearty breakfast before heading in to the office, having a hopefully pleasant work day, and not thinking about the 3 hour drive home at the end of the day.

For now, it's time to enjoy that bed.

#oneaday Day 225: The Secret Diary of Pete Davison, Age 43 3/4

Hello. Sorry about yesterday, I just had a bit of an internal explosion of existential dread and needed to express all that, although I was gratified to note that precisely no-one reached out to me to see if I was all right. Not that I'm particularly surprised or was expecting anyone to reach out and see if I was all right, because I'm under no illusions that anyone other than me is reading this blog, but still, y'know. Sometimes it's nice to know someone is looking out for you, and keeping an eye on the means you've been using to express the things you find difficult to say out loud for nearly 20 years.

But like I say, absolutely not blaming anyone. Really, I honestly mean that, no sarcasm. I posted yesterday's screed not because I particularly needed anyone to tell me things are going to be all right — and not just because I'd know they're lying — but because sometimes it just helps to get negative feelings out of your head and onto a page. It doesn't necessarily help you come to any conclusions about how to deal with them, but sometimes simply expressing them is all you need.

This, honestly, was the reason I kept a diary for much of my teenage years. I've talked a bit about this before, as with most subjects on this blog, but it sprung to mind today as I contemplate precisely why I'm still doing this: why I'm typing words into the virtual void for no-one to read, and why I'm still finding it a worthwhile exercise to do so.

I forget exactly what age I was when I started keeping a diary. I'd estimate maybe around 13 or 14 or so. I had recently read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, which I believe my mother had recommended to me as "worth reading" considering the age I was. I absolutely adored that book and its follow-up The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, and am long overdue a re-read of it all. I recognised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — and this only gets worse in the later installments as he moves into his adult life — but I also recognised parts of myself in him.

So I decided to do as he did, and start a diary. While I forget how old I was when I eventually started, I do remember the circumstances. We had been on a visit to, of all places, the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire, and had gone along with, if I remember rightly, my parents' friends Margaret and Mick. This detail isn't particularly important, but it adds a nugget of context, which was how I was young enough to still go along on visits like that to My Parents' Friends and not just be left at home.

Anyway, the reason I specifically remember that we went to visit the National Stone Centre is because while we were there, I ended up purchasing (or having purchased for me) a lovely hardback journal. It had nice quality paper, it had really nice material on the cover and binding, it was just a lovely book. My parents had encouraged me to use it as a scrapbook of sorts — a book for keepsakes from trips such as the one we'd just been on, as dull as it might have been. And so I did, for a while.

Then, one day, after I had not used it for the above purpose for quite some time (primarily due to having not really done anything worth scrapbooking) I thought that I might start using it to write down… things. I didn't have anything particularly specific in mind when I first started writing in it, I just felt like the experience of writing diary entries had seemed valuable to Adrian Mole in the books I loved so much, and thus I decided to give it a go for myself.

It didn't take long before I started using that diary to express things I found difficult to talk about "out loud", as it were, primarily relating to matters of emotions and feelings towards other people. As noted in my tales of The Rough Book, as a hormonal teenager I fell in love with a lot of girls over the course of my time at secondary school. And I found it difficult enough to admit my feelings about all this to my closest friends at the time, let alone my family. So I told the diary.

I told the diary a lot of things. One of my favourite things to do in the diary was to have "fantasy conversations", where I'd imagine how, in an ideal world, my confessing of my feelings to whatever the object of my affections was that week might go. I'd write these non-existent interactions (because they never actually happened) as a script, because I'd been enjoying looking at plays during English lessons at school, and, later in my school career, had parts in our productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night.

I realise this might sound a bit creepy, and it probably is. But what you have to understand is, as an autistic teenager who didn't know he was autistic, social interactions, particularly with someone for whom you didn't really know where you stood and lacked the self-confidence to ever believe they might be interested in you, were very difficult. I wrote those "conversations" down because I knew I'd never be able to pull them off in reality. They were a comforting fiction, in a way; they allowed me to indulge my imagination and think about something which I believed to be impossible in reality.

There was one exception, as I recall. On one of the numerous occasions I had plucked up the courage to declare to my friends that I fancied a girl named Nikki, my friends practically forced me to tell her how I felt. They got me and her out onto the school field, essentially pushed us together and left me to get onto it. And, to my credit, I successfully managed to confess my feelings to Nikki, who, bless her heart, at least let me down exceedingly gently and pleasantly.

That evening, I decided to "analyse" the situation. I wrote a script based on what had actually happened. I drew diagrams, with a little picture of a lightbulb representing how much I was blushing through the whole experience. I attempted to determine if there was anything I might have been able to do differently and, of course, came up short; no means no, as it were, and that is something I have always respected.

As that lovely little journal started to fill up with my innermost feelings, I started to become uneasy. I'd taken to placing it in a position on the desk in my bedroom where it was inconspicuous and unlikely to be picked up and read by someone coming in, but something in the back of my mind was still gnawing away at me, worrying that my Mum or Dad would pick it up, read it all and… well, take the piss, frankly, because there was a lot in there that one could probably take the piss about.

So one day I snapped. I took the journal and I threw it away. I took care not to throw it away in the kitchen bin, where it might have been noticed, but rather to throw it away in the outside bin, concealed in a bag beneath a large black bag of rubbish: somewhere no-one would even think to consider taking it out and rifling through it.

I regret that, now. I think it would be interesting to go back and look over those journal entries my teenage self made, as embarrassing and weird as some of them might have been. I don't know that it would have been helpful to do so, but thinking back, my school days (or, specifically, my time at secondary school and sixth form) are a time in my life I look back on with great fondness, where I was, retrospectively, very happy and satisfied with my lot in life, even if I had very little in the way of luck with women.

Thinking back on that diary is one of the reasons I've kept this blog around for so long. There's things I look back on that I'm not so proud of having written, and there's things I'm glad I wrote about. The one constant is that this blog is completely, honestly, unabashedly me, and it always will be.

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#oneaday Day 224: Hopeless

It's honestly really hard to feel any hope for the future right now. The world is burning; far-right extremism is on the rise; the Internet has degraded to a point where it's unpleasant to use at best, actively dangerous at worst; Big Tech is continually abusing its users in the name of unsustainable perpetual growth; the odious AI fad won't go away; everything is too expensive; and the people about to take control of one of the most powerful nations on the planet are pure, unabashed evil.

I have no solutions. I have no words. I have no comfort for those who are suffering more than I am. I have little more than a sense of despair about how everything seems to have been getting worse in front of our very eyes for a decade or more, how we could have most certainly done something about it before it got this bad, and how if anything is ever going to improve, it's almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

I've never felt like anyone particularly important who makes a difference, and I've never striven to be such. At times like this I feel particularly helpless, powerless and alone, and I can't even begin to imagine how much worse it must be for people in the direct firing line of everything that is going on.

The only thing I can say is that I, personally, have always striven to not be a shitty person, and that's what I intend to keep doing for as long as I am able to. I'm afraid that's about all I really have the energy to write this evening. Tomorrow will be another day of this shit, but at least it's the weekend, so that's nice I guess.

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#oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

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#oneaday Day 222: Dawn of the Second Day

Second day in a row of successfully getting up at 7.30, getting out of the house and having a little walk down to the shop. It was a little bit harder to successfully achieve this today, but I was expecting this. As outlined yesterday, my dreams were doing their best to pull me back into sleep, but I recognised them as being pointless (I was dreaming about Fire Emblem, and if I want to play Fire Emblem I can just go downstairs) and managed to get myself out of bed.

The fact that I was woken up by my phone ringing at 7.28 also probably helped. I was concerned that the call would be Bad News, as phone calls at vaguely unsociable hours tend to be, but it was, in fact, just a wrong number offering one "Jenny" a supply teaching position.

I have done supply teaching before; having to get up early and wait for a phone call like that is the absolute worst, because if you do get one you inevitably then have to get ready as fast as possible and get to whatever hellhole of a school you've been assigned to before the beginning of the school day. (Of course, one might say if you were reliant on such phone calls for your income, you should probably get up and get ready a little earlier on the assumption that you will get one; the worst that can happen is you don't get one and will have put on your "nice clothes" for nothing.)

I'm hoping this whole little routine will lead to some other incremental improvements in other areas of life. I actually feel like I slept a little better than usual last night, and eventually what I would like to do is start integrating a little more exercise than just a quick walk to the shop into the morning routine. As I have learned in the past, though, making such lifestyle changes is best handled gradually rather than trying to do too much, too soon. So I'm just concentrating on what has historically been the "difficult bit" — getting up — and celebrating my successes in that area first. Everything else can come later.

Anyway, I'm up and about now and there's still a full ten minutes before I actually need to start work. So that's nice. Here's hoping today is at least vaguely stimulating and entertaining. Knowing what's coming later, it should be fun, all being well, though I'm sure the wonder that is social media will find something to piss and moan about, as happens every day. Letting humanity at large comment online was a mistake. But you know this. You've read my posts, and many of them were most certainly a mistake.

Oh, also it's my brother's birthday today, so if you see him about, be sure to wish him happy birthday.

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#oneaday Day 221: Little success

Reader, I did it. My alarm went off at 7.30 and I got up almost immediately. I add the qualifier because I lay there and listened to the radio for about 5 minutes, then got up and had a piss and seriously considered going back to bed for another half an hour on the justification that "the sun wasn't fully up yet" so going outside right then wouldn't be as beneficial as it would be when the day had properly started.

But I pushed through those thoughts, got dressed instead of getting back into bed, then went out to the little Tesco and got myself a coffee and a pastry. Then I came back and enjoyed them both. They both seemed to taste particularly great, perhaps because I wasn't in a rush to enjoy them before starting work, or perhaps because of the light exercise I'd just done, or perhaps simply because I hadn't treated myself to such things for a while. Anyway, they were good.

I have the yawns a little bit because this was, after all, quite a bit earlier than I usually roll out of bed, but like I said yesterday, it supposedly takes about three days to convince your body to fall into a new routine. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get out of bed at 7.30(ish); evidently that time is a good match for my existing circadian rhythms so hopefully that will just get easier.

I'll tell you one big reason I've always had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning: it's because of dreams. For some reason, I always seem to have the most vivid dreams first thing in the morning, almost immediately before I'm supposed to be getting up. And there are occasions where I'll wake up, still have memory of the dream and feel like I "have" to go back and "finish" the dream, even though that's an impossibility.

But there have been multiple occasions where my brain has felt that it is of critical importance that I finish the dream I was having, otherwise… you know what, I don't actually know what it thinks the consequences will be. Because there aren't any. A dream is just a dream; as enjoyable and interesting as they can be, they don't actually exist and they don't have any bearing on your real life, so prioritising them over actually living in the moment is, from a rational perspective, very silly.

As we all know, though, the human brain is prone to fits of irrationality at times, particularly if it's under any sort of stress or not feeling its best for one reason or another. And so, yes, there absolutely have been times where my brain has wanted to prioritise a fun or interesting dream over the drabness of everyday life.

No more, though! I will get up at a sensible hour, giving me enough time to have a nice chilled out morning before work starts, and this will be a Healthy Habit that will lead to other improvements! 2025 is the year.

Probably. Maybe.

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#oneaday Day 220: Morning person

I'm not a morning person. I can get out of bed early when I absolutely have to (to catch a flight, say), but left to my own devices, I will happily just lie comatose in my bed until an embarrassing hour. I will note that it's not quite as bad as during 2010, The Worst Year Of My Life, when I was staying up until 5am on Second Life and then not even waking up until 5pm the next day, but it's still… challenging to get out of bed at a reasonable hour, particularly at weekends.

I've been reading around and watching some YouTube videos in an attempt to fix this, because as nice as staying in bed can be, I do actually want to try and make a bit better use of my day — because if nothing else, I think it will probably make me feel better, too. There are few things worse for feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety than getting up moments before you're supposed to start working… although annoyingly enough, it's often those feelings of perpetual non-specific anxiety that make me want to stay in bed.

Thus far, the chief pieces of advice that seem to recur frequently are as follows:

Get up when your alarm goes off. (This is the difficult bit.)
Get out into natural light as soon as you can. (This assumes you have succeeded at step 1.)
Get some exercise shortly after getting up. (Likewise.)
Try and delay your caffeine intake a bit. (Challenging, but also agreed to not necessarily be essential.)
Get some food into you, preferably something which releases energy gradually.
Get to bed at a reasonable time at night. (Doesn't have to be early, just a sensible time.)

Supposedly it takes about three days to convince your body that you're starting a new routine, which is all to do with your circadian rhythms. The first two days are almost certainly going to be excruciatingly difficult, but it's important to stick with them. And, as time goes on, this (in theory) gets easier.

I've already made a sort of step towards improving my morning routine, in that I've given up using my phone as an alarm and instead got a clock radio. I find it somehow more conducive to waking up without feeling like complete shite, perhaps because it's not just the same sound every day that you eventually come to resent. The actual getting out of bed when it first sounds is still the challenging bit, but that's the "wall" you have to push through in order to achieve anything.

So from tomorrow, I'm going to attempt to push through that wall and make some improvements. I've got my alarm set early (7.30am — I start work at 9) and I'm going to do my absolute damnedest to get up straight away, get dressed and then go straight outside. Not only that, I'm going to walk to the nearby Tesco, get myself some coffee and something nice (but not overly awful for me) for breakfast. That would seem to tick off several of the steps above in one fell swoop. Sure, walking to Tesco isn't exactly a "workout", but most of the stuff I've read and watched over the last couple of days suggests that you don't need your morning exercise to be a full-on workout, just moving a bit. And a walk of about a quarter of a mile each way would, I'd say, qualify as "just moving a bit".

When COVID hit, a lot of us introverts joked about how nice it was to have state approval for staying inside all day. But over the last couple of years in particular, I've started to really appreciate how important it is to just go outside and get some air sometimes. Doesn't have to involve interacting with other people or doing anything adventurous, just, as the kids say, touch some grass.

So that's the plan from tomorrow. Let's see if I'm able to actually stick to it.

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#oneaday Day 218: Memories of Me: Sixth Form

I occasionally find myself pondering when I think the happiest time in my life was, and I always conclude with one of two closely related period: sixth form (for non-British folks, this is the optional "Year 12" and "Year 13" you take if you want to stay on in non-compulsory education after finishing secondary school, typically taken before going to university) and my four years at university (three on my BA in English and Music, one on my PGCE in Music). Today I want to reminisce a bit about the former.

There was absolutely no question as to whether or not I was going to stay on at school after I finished compulsory education. My life has, to date, followed the typical autistic/ADHD trajectory of performing very well in school, then sliding into tepid mediocrity in adult life, so at the point I was finishing my GCSEs, I knew that I wanted to stay on and keep studying. I ended up choosing English Language, English Literature, Sociology and Music as my four subjects; at my school, it was considered unusual to take four A-Levels (five if you count General Studies, but no-one in their right mind does, for reasons that will become apparent), but all my teachers agreed that I could handle it. So I did. (And I did.)

I was excited about sixth form. I had seen my brother pass through sixth form at the same school some ten years earlier, and I knew what a good time he'd had while he was there. He'd made some good friends, he'd had a band, he had a long-term girlfriend, and he'd studied some interesting-sounding stuff that wasn't anything like the boring old National Curriculum gubbins I'd gone through lower down the school. I was looking forward to the whole experience, though I was also nervous about a few things.

One of them was the fact that I'd have more contact with a teacher known as Mr Watts, who was renowned at our school as one of the most terrifying teachers there was. He taught History, had a severe-looking moustache that always make it look like he was furious and, to be fair, he often seemed to be furious — particularly at anyone under the age of 15.

I'd actually had a year of Mr Watts as a History teacher in… Year 9, I think it was? Kids of that age are just on the cusp of what he considered to be actual human beings, so we got a bit of a taste of what he was really like. He could still be terrifying if someone stepped out of line, sure, but he also had a wicked sense of humour, and was a genuinely excellent teacher.

That didn't stop me being nervous about the fact he was head of Sixth Form, though. I don't really know why, because I wasn't the sort of kid who got into trouble particularly regularly (I think I had a grand total of two detentions during my entire time at school, at least one of which I managed to wangle my way out of thanks to music rehearsals) but Mr Watts just had that sort of impressive aura about him that made you want to stay well and truly in line.

Thankfully, we quickly discovered that Head of Sixth Form Mr Watts was a completely different person to History Teacher Mr Watts. He was much more down-to-earth, much more willing to let that sense of humour shine through, and extremely supportive of anyone who came to him with questions or concerns. He was a comforting presence, in other words; it was a surprise to many of us, to be sure, but a welcome one.

Our year was the first to make use of the new sixth form centre that had been built on our school's campus. The Upper School Dining Hall (aka just "Upper Dining") had given its life so that the Sidney Banks Sixth Form Centre may live, and it was great. The building, being new, was in great condition, and it was outfitted with reasonably decent PCs for the period; prior to joining the sixth form, most of our computer-related lessons in school had been on Acorn Archimedes computers, but by the time we reached sixth form, proprietary platforms like the ol' Archie were falling out of favour as Windows 95-equipped PCs became the norm in homes, offices and society in general.

The sixth form centre mostly consisted of computer rooms, in fact. Each of its "classrooms" were in fact just rooms with tables and a bunch of PCs, and the main large room in the middle was split in half between the common room and a study area (with more computers), with a sliding divider door allowing for the rooms to be separated completely when necessary.

In the common room, we didn't have a lot of exciting facilities, but I recall we did have a stereo, and folks tended to bring magazines in and leave them for others once they were done with them. For the most part, though, the common room was a space for chilling out, hanging with friends and making use of any of your own entertainment that you had happened to bring.

As it happened, I ended up spending a lot of my time in sixth form in the Art room. My friends Ed and Woody were both studying Art, so in the times where I wasn't attending my own lessons, I tended to hang with them in there. Since the number of folks studying Art at A-level was relatively small, they had their own little common area in the corner of the art room; again, it wasn't really equipped with anything other than a few chairs, but it was a nice place to just hang out.

One thing we were supposed to do as part of our time at sixth form was attend General Studies lessons. We would, we were told, get another A-level out of these lessons, but after attending just one or two at the start of our time in sixth form, we realised that they were largely worthless, so we just… stopped going. And, as part of the whole "treating us as adults" thing that came along with joining the sixth form, no-one ever pursued us about it or queried us on it.

Well, that's not quite true. One General Studies period we did see Mr Watts out and about, seemingly looking for people, so we hid under the chairs in the Art room common area. But that was just once. We all did the exam at the end of our two years in sixth form; I don't know how anyone else did, but I got an "A" having attended one lesson in two years. That should give you a general idea of what General Studies is all about. (One of the questions on the final exam paper was "In Alice in Wonderland, the text describes the Cheshire Cat as 'disappearing tail first'. Assuming the cat did not simply vanish, which direction must he have moved to disappear in this way?")

I mostly enjoyed my A-level studies. I particularly enjoyed English Language, because we got to write essays about swearing, and English Literature exposed me to a variety of interesting novels and plays that I probably wouldn't otherwise have read. Sociology was a thoroughly interesting subject to study, too, and the overall "vibe" of those classes was quite interesting given I was the only boy present; the rest of the class was all girls, and our teacher, Mrs Lloyd, was, of course, a lady also. I wasn't made to feel out of place or anything, I hasten to add; in fact, throughout my time at secondary school, I'd become good friends with a lot of the girls in that class already, so it was nice to have some time where it was just me and them.

Music was a good time, also. At the time I was doing A-level Music, I was also preparing to take my Advanced Certificate practical exam, and doing so basically exempted me from having to do some of the Music A-level, which was pretty neat. The only bit of the Music course I didn't like was learning about how to do Baroque four-part harmony; it felt like it was frustratingly bound by rules rather than truly creative, and I didn't like the teacher much, either. He wasn't one of the regular Music teachers; he was actually the peripatetic strings teacher.

One of the best things about sixth form was how we weren't obliged to stay on the school campus all day if we didn't have lessons. That meant we often walked into town; it was probably about a mile's walk from the school to the town centre, and being young and (relatively) spry at the time, we could do this in a not-unreasonable amount of time.

Our typical town routine involved wandering down there, getting a steak slice and a Belgian Bun from The Baker's Oven, then visiting the CD shop Barneys and computer shop First Compute. Inevitably, upon a visit to the latter, I would be encouraged by my friends to pick up a new game, which I often did, and then we'd head back to school. The reason I was able to grab so many new games at the time was because I'd done some occasional freelancing for PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, and back in those days you'd get £500 for one article — an absolute fortune to a teenage kid, and, hell, an absolute fortune to anyone involved in freelancing for the games press today.

On one trip to First Compute, I happened to see that a budget rerelease of a piece of software called Klik and Play for PC was on one of the racks. I recalled reading a fun review of this in PC Zone by the one and only Charlie Brooker; a review that had attracted numerous complaints (as did many other pieces Brooker contributed) for using a game in which you knocked a decapitated Frenchman's head around the screen as its demonstration project.

I was attracted to Klik and Play because it promised programming-free game making. I'd previously learned to program in BASIC on Atari 8-bit and STOS on Atari ST, but had never really got into the upper echelons of "knowing how to code", and by this point in the late '90s, "coding" had moved into realms like C and Java, and I didn't really understand those at all. Klik and Play promised to allow creativity without needing to get super-technical, so I was excited to give it a go.

And boy did we love it. Not just me, but my friends Ed and Woody, too, since of course I let them borrow the disc and install it on their own PCs. We made so many stupid games with Klik and Play, many of which remained unfinished, but our crowning achievement was, without a doubt, Pie Eater's Destiny.

This was a game where we'd started with the title, which was intended to take the piss out of our mutual friend Andrew, who was a big lad and enjoyed the game Fighter's Destiny on Nintendo 64. It grew a life of its own after I was demonstrating how to use Klik and Play to Ed and Woody one day, and I imported a scanned image of Andrew's face as an enemy sprite, then added a ripped Contra sprite for the player to move around and shoot at the giant head.

Something about this stupid, humble beginning captured our imagination, and we ended up making a full game with full voice acting, with each level unfolding as a single boss fight against a digitised head of someone we knew, culminating with a battle against the most powerful force in the galaxy: Mr Watts.

Naturally, once Pie Eater's Destiny was completed, we brought it in to school to install on the sixth form computers, and we ended up showing it to Mr Watts. We were initially nervous about this, but the moment he saw that he was the villain, with his introductory line being simply "YOU PATHETIC BASTARDS, YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT ME! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA", he was absolutely delighted with it.

My time at sixth form is full of wonderful memories like these. I don't recall a single moment of being unhappy while I was at sixth form, and dear Lord, I miss living that life and being that person.

But you can't go back, can you? So these memories have to remain just that: memories. Still, I will always have them, and when times get tough I can think back to a time where life just seemed simpler, easier, more full of possibilities. Not everyone has the luxury of good memories like this, so I should treasure them. And you'd better believe that I do, as the preceding 2,000 words has hopefully made clear.

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