#oneaday Day 129: Current holiday

We’re on holiday! After a three hour drive earlier today — which honestly already feels like a lifetime ago — we are safely ensconced in our accommodation at Center Parcs.

The last few times we’ve been, we’ve stayed in the apartments that are near the main plaza of shops and restaurants, but this year it was only a little extra to get a two-bedroom lodge in the woods, so we’ve gone for that as a little extra added luxury. It’s lovely having lots of space. Indeed, there’s an entire (bed)room we probably won’t use at all; presently, it’s where I dumped my suitcase so it wouldn’t clutter our bedroom.

We haven’t done very much today. It’s been nice to just relax with no worries or commitment to anything, so we’ve been enjoying that today. We had some nice dinner bought from the shop and an amazing cake, then the rest of the evening has been spent lounging, looking at the wildlife while the light was still present, then watching some TV (old school broadcast style!) and playing some video games.

Tomorrow we’re likely going to hit the pool… sorry, the “Subtropical Swimming Paradise”, and from there, who knows? We have some idle intentions of maybe going to the gym, playing some pool and going bowling, but we’re just going to take each day as it comes and decide according to what we feel like.

The Lodge brings back some nice memories. When I came to Center Parcs as a teen with my family and some friends, we always stayed in a lodge (or a “villa” as they were known then) and while some things have changed — the appliances are more up to date and the TV is, of course, a wall-mounted flatscreen instead of a hulking great CRT — but aside from that, the layout feels comfortably familiar.

It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Ed attempting to explain the appeal of Wolfenstein 3-D to my parents over breakfast — as I recall, his 12 year old self arguing that you “just don’t notice” the bloody violence after playing a whole didn’t go down too well.

It’s bringing back fond memories of my friend Craig and I watching MTV and realising that we both liked quite a bit broader a spectrum of music than the indie rock that was fashionable at the time — after that holiday, I remember going out and buying Madonna and Savage Garden albums on the strength of the tunes we liked on the TV.

And it’s bringing back fond memories of a trip when I was young enough for my brother to still be living at home with us, and him bringing his friend Alex along. My enduring memory of that pairing was Alex, who thought he was God’s gift to women, causing two girls to fall off their bikes by saying a distinctly Leslie Phillips-style “hell-O!” as they passed by.

A lot of good memories here, then, from both the recent and distant past. It’ll be good to add a few more to the mix this year.

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.

1251: Bottomless Memory for Irrelevant Nonsense

I have, as the title suggests, a bottomless memory for completely irrelevant nonsense. I’m not sure how or why I have developed this particular characteristic, and it very rarely comes in handy, but there it is.

Occasionally it is a good icebreaker when hanging out with people that I have known for many years, as coming out with something that apparently only I remember often makes people laugh. And, as we all know, making people laugh is a good means of keeping a social situation going. (There are only so many times you can get away with starting a story with “Do you remember when…?” in a single gathering, however.)

I have no idea what causes my brain to remember the things it does, however. Let me give you an example, and you’ll see that there’s really no reason I should remember this particular incident.

When I was at school, a member of my main friendship group was a kid called Daniel. His main distinguishing features were his crooked teeth and his very outgoing, borderline insane nature — the latter of which frequently came to a head in Drama lessons. (An unrelated memory to the one I’m about to recount is the time my friends and I put together a short play called “The Time Trial of Dr. Paradox” in which Daniel played the titular villain, whose crowning moment was when he screamed “I want him tracked down by 2400 hours!” and knocked a small globe onto the floor, causing it to go rolling away and make our mutual friend Andrew almost piss himself with laughter.)

Our drama teacher for one year was actually also our school’s headmaster at the time, one Mr Cragg. Mr Cragg was a pleasant sort of middle-aged man, all beard and jovial nature. He would have made a good Father Christmas if his hair was white. He enjoyed playing theatre games in Drama lessons, and one day we were playing one that involved fruit. I don’t remember the exact game itself, but the bit of the memory I have inexplicably clung on to in the intervening 15+ years is the way in which Mr Cragg said the word “raspberry” (“Razzzberri!”), which my aforementioned friend Daniel found immensely amusing for weeks afterwards. He also found the word “Bilberry” similarly amusing, but that’s fair enough; I found it quite amusing, too, because it sounded a bit like “dildo”.

Well, okay, not really, but we were in our early teens; I’m not even going to pretend we had a particularly sophisticated sense of humour.

What puzzles me is how and why that memory has endured for so long. Why on Earth do I remember the way my old headmaster said the word “raspberry,” and the fact my friend Daniel found it incredibly amusing? I find it difficult to believe that if I ever saw Daniel again — I haven’t seen him since leaving school — that if I walked up to him and went “Razzzberri!” he’d have the slightest fucking clue what I was on about.

Ah well. I suppose it makes for good stories. Or at least confusing ones.

1129: Disc of Memories

For the longest time, I’ve kept a specific CD-R hanging around. Somehow it’s survived all the different house moves I’ve gone through since leaving home and is still intact. I’m more impressed that I haven’t lost it or accidentally thrown it out than by the fact it still works, but I guess that’s pretty cool, too.

The raggedy inlay lists a few bits and pieces on the front, but gives relatively little indication to its contents. “PETE’S STUFF” it proudly announces in green felt-tip pen. “\PIERRE\ (GENERAL), \KNP\ (KLIK GAMES), \FFCOLLECTION\ (FINAL FANT.)” it elaborates, also in green felt-tip pen. The last entry is simply a collection of emulators and ROM files for all the Final Fantasy games up until VI, including a translated Japanese ROM for the NES original version of III. But it’s the other two that are more interesting.

The “Pierre” folder is from my first PC, which was a mighty Pentium 133 that could run Doom and Quake like nobody’s business. It had both a DVD-ROM drive and a CD rewriter, and I also eventually installed a Sound Blaster Audigy into it, which took up another drive bay with a ridiculous front-panel audio interface that looked pretty cool. Said folder contained a wide variety of almost-organised bits and pieces, consisting almost entirely of MIDI files downloaded from CompuServe and the Internet at large — mostly music from Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, with a brief break into Wild Arms, Xenogears and Zelda territory — as well as saved walkthroughs from an early incarnation of GameFAQs. This was the age of dial-up networking, you see, and thus it wasn’t possible to simply “quickly” hop onto GameFAQs to check a walkthrough; it was much more efficient to save it. (If you’re wondering, my saved guides included Alundra, Bust-a-Groove, Rival Schools, Wild Arms and Xenogears.)

Also in this folder is an early form of a tabletop roleplaying game system called “The Returners,” based on Final Fantasy, along with original text files for some of my earliest pieces of freelance writing work — a two-part guide to Final Fantasy VII for PC Zone, a 3,000 word Discworld II guide, a Lands of Lore II guide that was an absolute nightmare to put together, and a walkthrough to Turok 2 using the Official Nintendo Magazine’s curious internal system of markup to include special characters and other layout bits and pieces.

Pleasingly, one thing that I have found among all this crap is a folder containing a bunch of half-finished creative writing works from a long time ago. There’s a sci-fi epic I started working on that was loosely based on Sierra’s excellent spacefaring strategy game Alien Legacy (kudos if you remember that, it was awesome) along with a piece I wrote for my A-Level English Language coursework. I liked it so much when I wrote it that I extended it somewhat. It’s also probably my earliest example of writing creative prose in “stream of consciousness” style — we’d not long covered Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea in English Lit class, and the curiously disjointed method of writing had proven to be quite appealing to me, so I experimented with it. It paid off with a good mark, as I recall, though I’m not sure it holds up quite so well to further inspection some fifteen years later. Still, it’s nice to have it.

(Oh, also, there’s a subfolder in the “Pierre” folder just labelled “ANNA KOURNIKOVA IS FIT”, which I think is fairly self-explanatory.)

The “KNP” folder is an interesting one, as it contains a selection of half-finished (yes, I have a habit of half-finishing things) games made with Clickteam’s excellent software Klik and Play, later superseded by The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion. This folder contains the earliest ever incarnation of the story “Dreamwalker”, which I still fully intend to get out of my head and into some form of creative medium before I die. The original version of Dreamwalker was more an experiment to see if it was possible to make a Zelda-style action-adventure using the rather limited Klik and Play tools, and indeed it was, with a bit of creativity. Once I’d started making it, though, I found myself getting quite attached to the characters involved, even if I’d borrowed the basic concept (if not the setting and characters) from Alundra on PS1, which I’d played around the same time. I also actually composed some music for Dreamwalker, which I still have the MIDI files for, and which are in dire need of mixing properly. Perhaps that can be a project sometime — the tunes themselves are actually pretty solid, in my humble opinion.

The KNP folder also includes the original version of Pie Eater’s Destiny, one of the only four complete video games that I have ever made. (The other three are London Taxi Chase, London Taxi Chase II and… a remake of Pie Eater’s Destiny) Pie Eater’s Destiny holds a fond place in my heart because it was a collaborative project between me and my two best buds in the late stages of school, and it’s a running joke among us that one day we’ll make a sequel. We’ve started several times, but somehow, well over ten years later, we’re yet to get anywhere. Pleasingly, the data files for Pie Eater’s Destiny also include the original .WAV file recordings of us doing voice acting for the game, including the outtakes which we saved. There are also .WAV files of us experimenting with pitch shifting and other special effects, including several alarmingly-convincing “Jabba the Hutt doing things he was never supposed to be depicted doing” files. JABBAWNK.WAV, indeed.

Anyway, I was happy to rediscover some of the useless crap on this disc when I opened it up on a whim today. It’s missing a few things that I hoped I’d find on there, but I’m glad I found the other stuff. Perhaps when I can be bothered I might share some of it here. Those voice acting outtakes are crying out to be edited into some sort of YouTube clip.

#oneaday Day 951: First Love

She was beautiful. He could tell even back then. There was no-one he would rather look at than her. Her long, blonde hair and beautiful, sparkling eyes enraptured him so, even at that young age. He didn’t really know what these feelings meant, but he knew that he loved her; he loved her dearly; he loved her more than anything or anyone else in his life.

He had no idea how she felt about him. He was too young to understand the feelings rattling around inside his head, so how could he expect to make someone else understand them? His love lived purely in his imagination, and he was happy for it to remain that way. In reality, she was his friend; in his mind, every time he closed his eyes, she was so much more.

His imagination had always been powerful, but it seemed to outdo itself every time she entered his thoughts. As he drifted off to sleep at night, he would close his eyes and picture her face; shortly afterwards he would be involved in some grand adventure either with her, or in an attempt to rescue her. He had fought his way through caves, forests, dungeons, castles and surreal landscapes made of warped shapes and bizarre colours; always, she was there waiting for him at the end, or by his side as he struggled.

One day, the bad news came. “She’s moving away,” they said. “And soon.” He didn’t know what to do with this; he didn’t think he could stop it, but he desperately wanted to. He had no idea how to start, though. He was still too young; too young to understand these confused feelings in his head; too young to understand the emotions welling up inside him. He wanted to talk about it to someone but couldn’t muster up the courage. His love for her was locked away in the deepest, darkest, most private part of his soul, and he couldn’t let anyone in, because he feared that he wouldn’t be able to get them out again afterwards. He relished his inner peace, and resented anyone who tried to defile it without an invitation; he was the one in control of his feelings; he was the one who had to deal with them, always alone.

The fateful day approached, and he began to recognize the growing knot in his stomach as a yearning to be by her side; a longing to be the one she would always come home to; a desire to give her one of the few keys to that deep, dark, secret place within his soul. He knew that he had to tell her how he felt, and he knew that he would only get one chance to do it.

The day arrived. One by one, his classmates bade her farewell, and after what seemed like an eternity, it was his turn. He looked up into those sparkling eyes and she smiled at him the way she always did. He smiled back.

Though they had both only spent a few years together out of their own respectively short times on the planet, he knew she had had a profound effect on him, and he knew that he should say something meaningful at this point.

A tense feeling wrapped around his throat, like a noose trying to choke the life out of him. He tried to speak the words he longed to say — I love you, I’ll miss you, please don’t go — but they wouldn’t come. They stuck in his throat, lodged beneath the invisible force that choked him so.

“Bye,” he said quietly.

“Bye,” she said, smiling.

He wanted so badly to embrace her; to kiss her; to tell her how he felt. But he couldn’t. He smiled at her one last time, turned and walked away, knowing that he would probably never see her again.

He was sad for a long time after that. It felt like a piece of his very self had been ripped out and replaced with nothing but inky blackness. There was a void in his soul where she had once been; he had wanted to let her in, not realising that she was already there. And now she was gone.

The pair exchanged letters for a while; his heart raced every time one of those distinctive coloured envelopes plopped through the letterbox — he swore she either used perfumed envelopes or sprayed them with her favourite scents — and he wrote back as soon as he got some time to himself.

As time passed, though, the letters became less frequent and eventually stopped. His own life was moving on by now; moving too fast for him to keep up with, and certain things from his past started to fall by the wayside. He saw it happening and regretted it, but he knew deep down within his heart that she probably felt the same way too. The black void in his soul started to heal, and he focused on trying to enjoy the present rather than gazing into space reflecting on what once was, and what might of been.

New loves — always unconfessed, assumed to be unrequited — came and went, giving him the familiar feeling of butterflies in the stomach for a few fleeting weeks before disappointment set in. But though the gap she had left deep inside him had mostly healed, he still held a place for her, even though he knew it was futile. She was gone, far away by now, carried away by the winds of change to distant climes, well beyond his reach. The fog of forgotten friendship descended, and he no longer knew where to find her. She was gone.

He opened his eyes slowly. The light of the morning sun was streaming into his room through the window, blasting rays of light through the panes of glass and casting a pattern on the bedspread. It looked like a nice day outside, but he knew that this was all he would see of it.

He had lived a good life. If he could do it all over again, there were some things he would have done differently, but for the most part he had no regrets.

Except when it came to her. If he had confessed his love to her when he had had the chance, how might his life have unfolded? Would it have ended the same way? Would all the other trials had endured and good times he had enjoyed have come about? Or would it have been completely different?

There’s no use wondering now, he thought to himself. It’s much too late for anything but one last glimpse.

He closed his eyes again, and there she was, exactly as he remembered her all those years ago. He gazed into her sparkling eyes. which were now wet with tears.

“I love you,” he said. “I always loved you. And I never stopped loving you. Not for one second.”

“I know,” she whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek, but a cheerful smile still playing across her delicate lips. “I know.”

As the flame within him flickered and dimmed, he smiled to himself. It didn’t matter that it was all in his mind. That was where she had always lived for all these years; that was where she belonged. But it was time to say goodbye.

“I love you,” she whispered.

Then he was gone.

#oneaday Day 946: Things I Actually Miss About School

For the most part, I don’t miss my own school days. I spent a lot of them being bullied by douchebags who hopefully haven’t amounted to anything by now, one of whom I rather memorably punched in the face just as the headmaster was coming around the corner. (He sided with me after the fact, noting that my outburst of aggression was quite understandable, given bully in question’s history. I got away with nothing more than a “five minute report”, a piece of paper I had to get signed by teachers every five minutes during break and lunchtime.)

But there were good times too. So I thought I’d share a few.

The Rough Book

Our school library used to sell exercise books for a few pence, just in case you lost yours and wanted to replace it without having to tell your teacher that you’d lost your book. The librarian (Mrs Miller, no! We will not let you go!) asked no questions, though, other than “what colour would you like?”

And so it was that my friend Ed and I brought in the concept of the “Rough Book” — an exercise book ostensibly for quick scribblings, sketching and note-taking but which usually ended up completely covered in graffiti, drawings of cocks and an elaborate middle two pages flamboyantly depicting the name of whichever girl I had made the mistake of telling my friends I fancied that week.

A key part of the Rough Book’s appeal was keeping it secret, and for the most part we managed to do so without it being confiscated or even spotted. It was immensely satisfying but also a bit sad to reach the end of one — while it was possible to look back on all the silly drawings we had done over the course of a few weeks, the book’s “magic” was lost, and it usually found its way into the bin eventually — largely because we didn’t want our parents and/or teachers seeing all the pictures of cocks and swear words we’d scrawled all over every available inch.

Music Concerts

Our school used to do two big concerts a year — one in the summer, one around Christmas time. The weekly rehearsals for the various groups tended to revolve around practicing pieces for these big events, which always enjoyed a strong turnout from parents and friends of the school. Going to music groups was one of my main forms of socialising at school — since I lived seven miles away, it wasn’t always easy to just pop over to a friend’s house for pizza and video games, and music groups gave me a chance to make some new friends and see some of my existing friends in a new context. They were fun.

There was something special about concert night, though — a strange, almost romantic atmosphere in the air. Inevitably, being a horny teenager, I’d interpret this atmosphere as “God, I’d really like to get off with someone” and spend as much of the evening as possible attempting to flirt with the girls from the clarinet section. (Ahh, Nikki. How hot you were.) Being a zitty, socially-incompetent loser with crap hair, I inevitably failed to drum up the confidence to do anything to take advantage of the romance in the air, but all of the girls were good enough to humour me and not just tell me to fuck off, which was nice.

Learning Shit

You know, I actually enjoyed the whole “learning” part of school. (This is probably why I was bullied so much.) I loved the fact that on any given day, we got to learn German, saw a plank of wood in half, spectacularly fail to compose a “reggae” piece and listen to our maths teacher make up an anecdote about the time he went windsurfing and knew he was exactly 200 metres from the shoreline. Exactly how much of that stuff has been retained over the years is perhaps questionable (my use of German nowadays can probably be filed under “racism”, or “Englishman Abroad” at the very least) but I enjoyed learning it at the time.

Except maths. I hated maths with a passion. Maths homework used to make me genuinely angry. In retrospect, this was silly, because a lot of things in the real world involve maths to various degrees. Granted, I have little use for quadratic equations in my daily life (and thus can’t remember what they are) but things like basic algebra and arithmetic occasionally come in handy.

The Canteen

I typically used to take a packed lunch to school, so eating in the canteen was a rare treat. They served chips and pizza and other awesome things, most of which Jamie Oliver has probably banned by now. In the upper school dining hall (which was later converted into part of the new sixth form centre that my year was the first to pass through) you could get chips and frickin’ cheese.

The Teachers

Yeah, I actually miss the people who taught me. It would probably be horrifying to see how much they’ve aged by now, since the mental image I have of all of them is how they were between the years of 1992 and 1999, but there were some truly fine folks at the chalkface of my school. There were scary teachers, friendly teachers, knowledgeable teachers, weird teachers and, yes, hot teachers — but I can’t remember any that I particularly disliked as such. (Except for the guy who taught me four-part harmony for A-Level music, but he was a peripatetic music teacher and thus didn’t count.) I wonder how many of them are still there. I also occasionally wonder how many of the students I worked with during my thankfully short teaching career will remember me in years to come?

That’s enough waxing nostalgic for tonight, I think. Time to sleep.

#oneaday Day 801: Long-Term Memory

It’s funny what sticks in your mind and what you subconsciously decide to purge on the grounds that it’s completely unimportant. It’s not always a case of big life events staying in your mind and the day-to-day stuff disappearing, either — often the strongest memories are those from seemingly irrelevant happenings.

For example, I can think back to my own primary school days and have vivid memories of doing shoulderstands on the field with my then-best friend because we thought it would allow us to make ourselves fart. (It didn’t. And to this day I’m too scared to try and make myself fart on the grounds I might shit myself instead.)

I also remember the fact I used to get very angry with one of the dinnerladies and regularly kicked the bin that stood in the corner of the playground. I do not, however, remember the reason I got so angry with her — though it was probably an attempt to exorcise the pent-up frustration I felt from being pretty ruthlessly bullied throughout most of primary school.

Or how about the time I discovered the word “shit” was a swear? I must have been about six or seven at the time (I was in “Class 2”, anyway) and I was sitting on the “Blue” table with the other clever people, most of whom were rather fickle about who they were friends with — some days they’d accept me, others they’d specifically exclude me. We were doing some sort of spelling exercise, and Natalya Forrester (all names in this post have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent) was spelling out the words out loud as she wrote them down. “Ship… S-H-I-T…” she said. “Shit?” I responded. “UMMMMMM.” replied my compatriots, who promptly reported me to the supply teacher covering the class, who in turn threatened to wash out my mouth with soap and water.

Once we’d left primary school and were going to our secondary school, which was seven miles away, we had to wait for the bus outside our old stomping grounds, which suddenly looked very small. Oddly enough these occasions of waiting for the bus provide some of my most vivid memories from the time. It was during these periods that I learned how to make myself burp under the expert tutelage of Dave Oyster, who could sustain an ejaculation of oral flatulence for an impressive ten seconds or more at a time — loud, too.

Other secondary school memories include sitting in our tutor room and my then-best friend (the same one I’d been attempting to fart with some years previously) sneezing all over his hand and spraying stringy snot all over himself — and then eating it. Urgh. It was also at this point that I decided that my then-best friend might not be best friend material any more. The final breaking point was when he inexplicably sat in his seat miming masturbation and muttering “I’m a wanker! I’m a wanker!” at me, presumably hoping I’d find it funny. I didn’t. Next registration, I went and sat next to my new friend Ed and never looked back. The thunderous look I got from my former best friend burned like fire, but then I remembered that he thought he was a wanker, so I silently agreed with him and moved on with my life.

I don’t remember a great deal about specific lessons at secondary school, though I do have oddly fond memories of GCSE Maths class — not because I liked the subject (I fucking hated it) but because of the various ways we used to mock our possibly-an-alcoholic teacher. His first initial was A — to this date, I don’t know what that stood for — and we decided that this must stand for “Abraham” because that would be funny. There was also a group of three girls whom he often called on to answer questions (also I fancied two of them) who became known as “Abe’s Babes”. Also he liked to add context to the mathematical problems we were working out, so often referred to himself doing unimaginable things for his age and demeanour, such as windsurfing and hang-gliding.

There are plenty more memories lurking in there, too — both good and bad. And I have no doubt that these bizarre, seemingly irrelevant mental snapshots will continue to stay with me for a long time to come. I can’t help feeling that maintaining these memories in my mind is what helps me call upon “childishness” or “immaturity” (for want of a better word) if the occasion demands it — for contrary to the way the world works these days, seemingly requiring kids to “grow up” at younger and younger ages, being able to draw on your “childish” side lets you enjoy life in a way that stuffy old adults can’t. In my case, it’s the side of me that lets me enjoy My Little Pony and colourful Japanese role-playing games; the side that lets me fantasise and come up with amazing stories that I rarely finish (or, in some cases, start); the side of me that lets me sit around with friends and casually insult them for a whole evening without anyone getting upset.

Of course, it’s also the side of me that doesn’t really understand what insurance is, how economics work and what the fuck the stock exchange is for, and the side of me that always forgets whether cream-coloured clothes with small bits of colour on them go in the “white” or “coloured” laundry load. But I think I can live with that.

#oneaday Day 764: Sports Day

Sports and me have never really got on. There are a variety of reasons for this but the long and the short of it is that said antipathy towards each other meant that 1) I was usually picked last for the teams in PE (when I wasn’t, it was usually Steven Finnegan instead) and 2) my body isn’t exactly a rippling temple of man-beef.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to get involved with sports over the years. I was in my Cub Scout football team, for example, a team so terrible we were sponsored by a junkyard. Our best result ever was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 20-0 to them. No, that’s not a typo. Twenty-nil.

Despite my ambivalence towards sport, I do also have some fond memories of various school sports days, particularly if it happened to be a nice day out at the time. I can’t remember a lot about primary school sports days, but secondary school sports days tended to be a pretty big deal, bringing most of the school to a standstill for a wide variety of track and field events.

My tutor group (the erstwhile 7FMQ, later 8QU, 9QU, 10QU and 11QU) were the very souls of apathy for the most part. There were certain events that people just plain didn’t want to enter, which would have put us at a significant disadvantage on the leaderboards (yes, this was in the day when it was still acceptable for school sports days to have “winners” and “losers”) had I not stepped in.

I’m not sure why I stepped in, given that I knew full well I was crap at sports, was not very good at running and wasn’t particularly agile. Therefore, you may be thinking, it would be somewhat foolhardy for me to enter both the 800m race and the high jump, but enter them I did, and I learned a number of things. Firstly, that I was surprisingly quite good at high jump, and secondly, that I was very poor at pacing myself when running — something which I still struggle somewhat with today.

The problem stemmed from the fact that I had never even considered running a long(ish)-distance race before, so I didn’t really know how they worked. As such, I was off the starting blocks like a fucking rocket and exhausted by the end of the first lap. This gave the rest of the pack, who had been pacing themselves somewhat more modestly, ample opportunity to catch up. I don’t think I finished last, to my credit, but it certainly wasn’t very far off. After the race ended, I went back to my tutor group’s area of the field, lay on the floor and didn’t move for a very long time.

The thing that sticks in my memory about that race, though, is not the fact that I ballsed it up so spectacularly. It’s the fact that for once, the rest of my tutor group was rooting for me. I spent a lot of my school days feeling like something of an outsider thanks to my awkward social skills, my weird accent, my crap hair and my forehead and nose’s tendencies to flare up with greasy zits. I was a geek and someone who did well, too, which made me pretty much the polar opposite of “cool”. Thankfully, barring a few exceptions, I was mostly left to my own devices to hang out with my equally geeky friends (most of whom had better hair than me) but this meant I didn’t feel a particularly strong sense of camaraderie with the rest of my tutor group.

Until that day. I heard them cheering for me as I ran past them on the first lap, and staggered past them on the second. And when I finished, far from being admonished for my poor pacing, I was congratulated and praised for getting out there and giving it a shot. It was a surprisingly special moment that’s stuck with me over the years. And while in short order things went back to being the way they had always been, for those few short minutes when I was on that track, I meant something. I was cool.

#oneaday Day 736: To Sir and Miss, with If Not Love then At Least Fondness or Enduring Memories

Following a conversation with Andie, I thought I would challenge myself to name as many teachers from my own schooldays as I possibly could, along with the contribution they made to making me the person I am today, for better or worse. Mostly the better, I think, which doubtless they’ll be delighted to know if they do happen to be reading this, as unlikely as that might be.

If you are one of my old teachers and you are reading this and I forget to mention you, I apologise in advance.

Anyway. Let’s consider these in roughly chronological order.

At primary school, our early years were accompanied by Mrs Place. I have to admit I don’t remember a great deal about her, but I think given my tender age at the time, that can probably be excused.

Class 2 in primary school was taken by Mrs Robson, whom I also can’t remember a great deal about. I do remember her not being there one day though, and me being tricked into saying “shit” to Mrs Powell the cover teacher by Natalie Forster, the bitch.

Class 3 was taken by Mr Edwards, who had a bit of a mullet and a moustache. He liked to play the guitar at every opportunity, meaning that “Circle Time” (the point of which I’m still not sure of even having been a primary school teacher myself) more resembled a campfire singalong than anything more meaningful. It was fun though.

Class 4 was taken by Mrs Barrett, a formidable lady by all accounts who had some very old-school values. The rest of the school was terrified of her, because she had a withering look that could cause geese to fall dead out of the sky if she so desired it. Once you got into class 4, however, it became apparent that she wasn’t so scary after all, and even had something of a sense of humour. Her insistence on strict discipline meant that she ran a tight ship, and her class achieved well. Crossing her made you feel like, as cliche as it sounds, you had let yourself down.

On to secondary school, and my form tutor was Miss Quirk. She was Scottish, had short black hair and said “poem” as “poyem”. She taught Maths, but I don’t think I ever had a lesson with her.

Elsewhere in the Maths department was Mr Wilbraham, who may or may not have had a drinking problem. He was certainly rumoured to have a drinking problem, but I can’t say we ever saw any direct evidence of that. He was another of the Mrs Barrett breed — regarded with fear and misunderstanding from afar, but actually turned out to be very pleasant to work with once you were in his class. He didn’t help me enjoy Maths, however.

The English department was my second favourite department. At various points, I was taught by Ms (not Miss) Derbyshire, who was a bit like Victoria Wood when she was being funny; Mr Bowie, who was the obligatory male teacher whom all the girls fancied, was very cool and convinced me to explore the music of Jeff Buckley; Miss Idziacszyk (I think I’ve even spelled that correctly), who was a good, knowledgeable teacher, particularly at A-level. On one memorable occasion, Mr Bowie came with us to a local recording of Songs of Praise which our steadfastly secular school had, for some reason, been invited to. On that occasion I had my shortest ever relationship with a girl — we went out for a week, during which time I saw her once, kissed her once before she decided she wanted to go back to the way things were before.

The Music department was my favourite department. Initially staffed by Mr Murrall and Mrs Choy-Winters, later by Mr Murrall and Miss Garrick (whom my erstwhile best friend Craig fancied the pants off) and even later by Mr Murrall, Miss Garrick and Mr Wrigley. All of the teachers in the department were laid-back, fun and a pleasure to be with both in lessons and outside. By far the highlights of my time at secondary school were the school concerts, during which staff and student were able to interact in a way that just wasn’t possible in the normal classroom.

Up in the Upper School were the Geography and History departments. Here, two particular teachers stood out — Mr Mason (pictured above) on the Geography side, and Mr Watts on the History. Mr Mason had long hair and a porn star moustache, and always spoke in a calm, quiet voice. Instead of shouting when he got angry, he went quieter. It was terrifying.

Mr Watts, meanwhilem was the exact opposite. He could shout your face off, and frequently did. Despite his deservedly formidable reputation, he was an excellent teacher. Okay, I can’t remember a lot of what we covered in History, but I certainly remember the lessons I had with him — and the occasions he looked out of the window, saw a year 7 kid and just tutted and shook his head.

Mrs Lloyd taught Integrated Humanities and Sociology. She knew a lot about her subject and was also one of those teachers whom it was very easy to talk to. Perhaps it was the nature of the subject itself, which often dealt with issues that affected us directly, or perhaps it was just her nature. Either way, I remember her very fondly.

Then there’s the senior staff. I have fond memories of Mr Cragg the erstwhile head teacher for understanding fully why I turned around and lamped Murray Crofts in the face after the little cunt had been harassing me all day. And Mrs Knight, who was a motherly figure to much of the school in many ways — right down to inflicting embarrassing discipline on those who stepped out of line. (One of the worst punishments, particularly for younger kids, was to be forced to have lunch with her, or to to be on “Five minute report” to her.)

There are doubtless plenty of others I’ve missed — Miss Cuthbert, who was one of heads of Sixth Form, and regularly tried unsuccessfully to get us all being a bit more religious; Miss Stafford the art teacher, whom I didn’t spend a lot of time with (as is probably apparent from the pictures which accompany these posts); Mrs Graham the formidable and terrifying Home Ec teacher.

I know one thing, though — as difficult as schooldays were at times, I’ll remember the adults who got me through it for the rest of my life, even more so than those whom I considered close friends at the time, but have since drifted far away to pastures unknown.

I now know first-hand how hard your jobs were, Sirs and Misses. I respect you even more than I did back then. Those of you who have the courage to remain in education with the kids of today, I salute you.

#oneaday Day 611: That Happened: “…Oil and Poo”

When struggling for things to talk about, or indeed write about, any creative shortcoming can usually be quickly rectified by a nostalgic trip into something which happened in the near (or distant) past. Some people base their entire blogs on this, and, of course, the lucrative autobiography industry uses this approach as a fundamental basis for a bajillion books all called “Celebrity Name: My Story”.

So I thought I’d start an occasional series based on bizarre incidents which have occurred throughout the course of my life that probably aren’t that bizarre in reality, but certainly amuse me if no-one else. These will not be presented in anything even remotely approaching chronological order — they will simply turn up as I think of them and when I feel like it. Much like the inspiration for the vast majority of other entries in this increasingly-lengthy blog, in fact (for which I salute you if you’ve been reading since the beginning).

Preamble over, I shall begin. Are you sitting comfortably? Here we go.

At university (the University of Southampton, UK, to be precise, if you’re picky about that sort of detail) I was a member of the university theatre group, which underwent a number of name changes during my time with them. Initially it was the “Blow Up Theatre Group” (I, to this day, don’t know why), then simply “Theatre Group” and later “Rattlesnake! Theatre Group” (the reasoning for which I now, sadly, can’t remember).

The point of this story is not the name of the theatre group, however, but rather the shenanigans which I and the other participants got up to.

At one point late in my university career, I got together with a friend with whom I was a member of the group and we decided that we were going to put on a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As was fashionable at the time, we decided to set it in the 1920s era. (I say “fashionable” — my sole basis for this assumption is that my secondary school also set its production of Twelfth Night, in which I played the role of Malvolio, in the 1920s) We were all set to begin rehearsals when my friend and co-director decided that now would be a really good time to go on a lengthy skiing trip. (She came from a family with money and was somewhat prone to flights of fancy.)

I wasn’t sure what was going on until I got a gushing, apologetic email from her announcing that she didn’t feel she could be responsible for the show and decided to leave me in the sole role as director. I, of course, had never directed a show before and had not a fucking clue how to lead a ragtag group of wannabe actors into producing a show. Fortunately, the remainder of the crew rallied behind me and helped out, and I was enormously grateful for their assistance — even if the stress of carrying out the project gave me both a spectacularly tramp-like beard and more than a few nosebleeds, somehow and inexplicably earning me the nickname “Beast Man” in the process.

The show went well. It ended up being somewhat farcical in its execution, but this, in fact, worked in its favour and helped make the typically obtuse Shakespearean humour somewhat more digestible to a modern audience. We were all pretty pleased with how the whole thing turned out, but by far the most memorable thing about the whole fiasco was the aftershow party.

I can’t even remember whose house the aftershow party was at, just that it was quite an event. Several key events from that evening stick in my mind, however, starting with a member of the cast sitting in a wicker chair that he thought looked rather comfortable and then discovering that it was not, in fact, as pleasing to sit on as it looked. Said chair was consequently dubbed “The Chair of Eternal Disappointment” and became a focal point for the evening, helped in part by the amount of drink and weed which was in circulation throughout the course of the celebrations.

At some point after midnight, a small splinter group of partygoers decided that it was time to leave our generous hosts’ house behind and go and seek adventure elsewhere. Thus followed one of those journeys across town which meandered so much you ended up completely lost, but somewhere cool.

In our case, we found ourselves on the banks of the river Itchen (I think) on a makeshift beach covered in gravel and some unpleasantly dirty-looking seaweed. There, we indulged in what all good luvvies should do at approximately 4am in the morning — improvisatory theatre. We laughed and giggled until the sun started to peek its head over the horizon, at which point things took something of a turn for the bizarre.

One of our number, who already had a particularly loud, bellowing voice, was somewhat intoxicated through a cocktail of various chemical substances coursing through the pleasure centres of his brain, and thus became even louder than usual. As such, we were unsurprised when he proudly announced that he was going to go for a wee in the river. He took off his shoes and socks and paddled into the water, then happily stood in profile to us, got his (clearly visible) cock out and started to piss into the Itchen. (It’s nothing worse than the filthy river was usually full of.)

Following this display, which he was not at all abashed about, he decided that now would be a really good time to see what the dirty seaweed on the beach tasted like. Stomachs in throat, we watched him pick up a piece of the filthy, slimy crap from the floor and gleefully stuff it into his mouth.

What followed was the kind of facial expression you get from anyone who puts something they find distasteful into their mouth but doesn’t quite want to spit it out. He chewed on it for an alarmingly long period of time before letting the mangled remains of the goopy crap spill forth from his mouth.

“Ugh,” he cried. “It tastes like oil and poo!”

Despite the hilarity that statement caused, the fact that one of our number was reduced to eating seaweed tipped the rest of us off to the fact that it was probably time to head homewards. Of course, we had no fucking idea where we were, so again followed a meandering course through the back streets of the city until we eventually found ourselves on familiar territory and, bizarrely, craving Jaffa Cakes.

Unfortunately, the era of 24 hour shopping had not made a big impact on Southampton by this point, and so we found ourselves stranded outside a closed and shuttered newsagents’ store begging to whatever gods we did (or didn’t) believe in for them to let us in for Jaffa Cakes.

Unsurprisingly, the gods in question did not yield and the shutters remained firmly closed. This, it seemed, was the final straw — it was time, once and for all, to go home. We all went our separate ways — walking, naturally, using that bizarre amount of stamina that total intoxication gives you — and found ourselves back in our own houses, safe and sound, ready for bed just as the rest of the world was waking up.

The following day was, naturally, a complete writeoff. But I’m almost certain that if I spoke to anyone else who was there that night, they’d remember the events as clearly as I do. It was, to paraphrase one Mr Stinson, legendary.

#oneaday Day 516: Away Game

Spending a weekend in markedly different surroundings to the place where you spend most of the rest of your week is an eminently worthwhile experience, particularly if you spend most of your week chained to a desk — whether that’s in a working-from-home sort of situation or the daily grind at an office. Over the last few weeks (and probably months) I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to spend some time away from the environment I spend the working week in, and it’s a healthy, positive experience.

The only frustrating thing about the whole shebang is the fact that most places I go away to are inevitably attached somehow to either my awesome girlfriend Andie, who currently lives 150 miles away from me; or to friends I left behind back in the Southampton area (about 120 miles away) when I was forced to depart last September.

In some senses, this is good, though, as it means I get completely out of the daily “grind”, as it were, by going somewhere markedly different from the places I see every day. Even if I do go out while I’m back at home, it’s inevitably to the same old places time after time — local shop, local supermarket, post office, local coffee house. And while I know Southampton and Winchester pretty well having spent the best part of 10 years living and working in the area, the fact I don’t live there now is enough to keep them feeling fresh, pleasant and not “new” as such, but places I feel I can rediscover each time I visit.

Now, granted, Southampton’s a bit of a shithole and if you want to do something on a Saturday night that isn’t getting pissed (and, by extension, into a fight) or going to the cinema, there’s actually really not a great deal to do — not in the town centre at least. But as I’ve said on several occasions in the past, it’s a place in which I lay down some “roots” and even if I end up never moving back there to live — which is looking increasingly likely — it will always be if not a “home” then certainly a home away from home.

Winchester, on the other hand, is a place I’d return to in a flash given the opportunity. My favourite place I’ve ever lived was in Winchester. It was a gorgeous big fully-furnished flat with a dishwasher, heated towel rails and a dressing room off the main bedroom. The furniture provided was good quality, not the usual hand-me-down shite, and while I was there, even though I was working a soul-crushingly awful job in the secondary music classrooms of Hampshire, it was a haven I could return to of an evening and feel like I had come “home”. Of course, as Sod’s Law tends to go, this dream-come-true of accommodation was snatched up by the landlord, who rather inconsiderately wanted to give it to their daughter, so we ended up living in a nice-ish cottage that was unfortunately afflicted with a great deal of damp and mould, and smelled disconcertingly of gas in the living room.

I often wonder where I’m going to end up next. I hope it’s somewhere good that I can lay down some roots once again and start afresh. For now, there are weekend escapes like the one I’m on now with Andie, and right this second, that’s the best life has to offer, so I’m damn well going to enjoy it.