Running up that hill (a deal with God)

A running blog for people who are not very good at running

I only ever made one sports team when I was at school. I never quite made the football team; there was an argument that by the 3rd or 4th year I was certainly good enough but as a winger never seemed to fit in with the PE teachers' plans, perhaps I was just too small (early on) or too skinny (later) to be thought of in competitive terms. We never had a table tennis team; if we had I'd definitely have made that but it was not to be.  We never had rugby, cricket or (boys) hockey teams either because frankly in the 1980s my school was a scuzzy, underfunded and not highly regarded comprehensive and those were posh kid sports.

The only team I made was the cross country team.  I went off to Midhurst with the school back in 1984 (I think) and performed atrociously, not helped by my parents refusing to buy me new trainers when mine fell apart so I was running in what were essentially leisure shoes (which my father, not an athlete in any sense, had decided were good enough).  I came second to last and was so cold I couldn't do up my shirt buttons in the changing rooms after. I was never chosen for any team again despite consistently being in the top eight in the school; in our final race in 1988 I finished third out of everyone in the year who ran (everyone who could run) which was around 100 kids.
Then I went to college, got into music, girls and beer (probably in reverse order)  and didn't run again in any capacity for about 14 years.

In 2002 I entered my work's area sportsday 1500 metres race. I decided I'd be able to do this because I was running that far on the treadmill in the gym I'd joined.  I did do it!  Very badly but I did it; I think there were six of us and right from the off I realised I was not on the same level as everyone else.  My arms really hurt! I'm not sure why this was, it was not like I was running with my arms by my side on the treadmill and I'd been using the arm-bike too  (not to mention one of my favourite pastimes involving a lot of vigorous arm activity) but they really ached with use on this run.  As I started my last lap I could hear everyone else coming up behind me to finish their's so I was not quite lapped and the others graciously waited for me to finish. I couldn't tell you the time, I honestly can't remember but it was SLOW!

I eventually stopped going to the gym; I have tried again several times since with varying results but I am too parsimonious to pay for such a service for long and despite having no issues with being in the gym I do have quite a problem with getting myself to it and that tends to be why I only manage if for three months before boring of it.  The gym shall feature no more in this story.

The next time I ran was probably around 2007 or later (and from this point the dates will all be approximate as I can't be arsed to check on them). I was now living in the house I live in now and wifey and I decided to go running together; we went "around the block" and I thought my lungs were going to climb out of my body and slap me about.  I would estimate we ran no more than half a mile on that first occasion. We did do that a few more times but wifey decided running was not for her and I continued alone, slowly altering my route and building up more distance.

I think it was 2008 I entered both the Chichester 10K (just over 6 miles) and the Great South Run (ten miles), both in October.  The 10k was a disaster, it was ridiculously warm and sunny and I'd been generally running early in  the morning when it was cool.  I overheated very early on and had to stop several times.  I finished in an appalling 75 minutes but considering I walked about a quarter of the route that's probably understandable. By the time I finished the organisers had run out of water; luckily I had enough change on me for a can of pop but I was not impressed. I was also alarmed that I'd signed up for a ten miler when I'd struggled at half that distance!

As it turned out my first GSR was not that bad; bad but not terrible on reflection. I was running in support of NACC (the National Association of Colitis and Crohn's as I have Colitis) and at one point, running alongside two other people in NACC vests I felt the camaraderie these events are famous for. It didn't last long.  At one point I was overtaken by two men dressed as the crap-transvestites from Little Britain which really did my confidence the world of good. I didn't manage to run the entire ten miles but it wasn't until 7 miles I had to take the run-walk-run-walk method which took me up to 8.5 miles and I ran the rest. The last mile down the seafront was very strange; I was very emotional, actually in tears for some of it. I did manage a little sprint near the finish line; I overtook a girl who'd probably actually run it much quicker than me and that would not have been difficult as the ten miles took me almost 125 minutes. I decided as I came through that this was it; I was done with running and didn't want to feel as terrible as I did at that moment.

Within a week I was running again and I did a ten mile run (worked out by Map My Run online) a good twenty minutes quicker. But I still had no intention of running with other people again at that stage, clearly I had an issue with stage-fright! Around this time wifey bought my, for my birthday, my first "fitted" running shoes from Alexandra Sports in Portsmouth.  Until then I had been running in off the peg Nikes.  Now I had my over-pronating factored in and was running in a lovely pair of... Nikes. They were just the best fit for me at this point!  Not long after Nike stopped making proper runners and concentrated on the fashion trainer so even though I've moved on since I've kept my Bowerman's as a memento.

I carried on running around my local area for most of the next two years, I did take some lengthy breaks over the winters but never went more than a month without getting a run in and more usually it was weekly. Around this time, getting a little leaner and faster and running further generally I started to experience one of my least favourite aspects of running; the famous Jogger's Nipple. I'd probably had it before but it was whilst out running in a white t shirt I first realised. Jogger's Nipple if soreness caused by friction of nipple agaisnt fabric when running.  Ladies are generally protected from this if wearing a proper running bra and I guess "proper" runners build up tough, leathery nipples over time. My nipples were (and remain) beautifully soft and kissable.  As I reached the latter part of what I recall being a nine miler I noticed a lot of people staring at me as I passed them; I thought in admiration of my fluid style.  It was not until I reached home and looked in the mirror I observed the red/brown slick running south of each pectoral area... I'd bled like a bugger and those bystanders probably thought I'd been shot.  I've tried various methods of avoiding this since; vaseline on the nips, a sticking plaster over them, avoiding cotton in favour of smooth synthetic fabrics.  The only thing that works is running topless and generally I have felt too whale-like to consider that so the problem persists. For the record, those shorts with an inner mesh brief and no other underwear has a similar effect on one's junior member: stick to the lycra chaps.

I did another GSR two years on, it went much better, I ran the whole route and finished in around 105 minutes and would have been quicker if I'd been more confident in my abilities, started further up the filed and not got badly bunched in for the first 15 minutes. From my point of view it was quite a novelty being the guy passing other people for once.  This time I ran for Cancer Research Uk and in memory of a friend's mum who had died. I will dig the picture out at some point of me with my finishers medal and tell-tale blood stains on my chest.

Then... there was a gap.  There may have been a few false starts but I didn't really run again until 2016.  I'd increased in mass somewhat by that April, I wouldn't say I was fat but the only way I could touch my toes was by sending them flowers.  It was so bad I had to lose about a stone before I could even contemplate running but soon it became an integral part of my weight loss programme. I started running around 1.5 miles and slowly built it up.  I'd had to see a physiotherapist about repeated knee issues which it turned out where very likely caused by my over-pronating so once again I invested in some new fitted shoes, this time a lovely pair of Brooks. The knee problem didn't go away completely but it was manageable. Before long I was regularly exceeding five miles so I entered the Chichester Ten Miler.  I did only scant research into the route which would come back to bite me on the bum (well, on the knees and lungs actually).  Though I was not as prepared as I should have been by the time we reached October I was able to run 11 miles and had incorporated some climbs in to my run.

If you want my advice about doing the Chichester ten  miler or half marathon, and if you do I'll assume you are fairly new to running,  please note the following:

1: Make sure you have run at least two miles longer than the route you are running with plenty of rough terrain. By rough terrain I mean pot-holes you could have a bath in, not just grass.

2: The hills you've worked in to your route are not steep, long or rough enough. Honest. Try and run the actual route up to the Trundle (and the Trundle itself for the Halfers).

3: Don't go out and get trollied with a friend from work the day before; stopping at 6pm will not make it much better. Oh yeah, it feels fine for five miles but those second five are bloody awful.

4: If this is likely to be the toughest run you've tried up to that point, as it was for me, insist that one of your nearest and dearest is there for you at the finish line.  There's not much worse than finishing a route, feeling wretched and then having to go off and find someone who knows who you are (and no, I didn't need to be told who I was, I wasn't that wretched).

5: If you usually run early in the morning remember it will be hotter later in the day, even in October, so think of bringing some water of your own.

I was very disappointed to finish in just over two hours; I knew I could do better and though my preparation could have been improved it was the day before that had the most impact on how I performed.  I probably walked two miles of the course, I stopped at around 6.5 miles and just couldn't get going again. I ran this as a fundraiser for St Wilfred's Hospice in Chichester and raised over £300 for them so there was some good to come from the whole sorry saga.

I never intended to stop running at this point; I did the Chichester Parkrun and a "proper" cross country not long after but this coincided with a downturn in my motivation in just about every area of life.  I took my foot off the pedal big time; in excercise, in diet, in moderation regarding alcohol... the next thing I knew it was February and I'd regained half the weight I lost the previous year and was pissed twice a week.

I've started running again now.  I'm only doing short runs as my priority is to get some weight off but I intend to run little and often for now with the only aim to be back at a Parkrun within a month. Parkruns are great by the way; I've done Havant, Lakeside (Portsmouth) and Chichester and have even made (dare I say it) a running friend through this (ironically she came to my attention through her running Blog, which is much better than mine, and she just happened to have really good taste in music).

Parkrun UK

I may contemplate the GSR for a third time because I know I can do ten miles when
I'm fit and it's a nice, flat, on road route; I don't know.  I had to give away my place on the Worthing Half marathon so I don't want to jinx myself, if I do it it will be for me, no sponsorship, not in anyone's memory, just for fun.  In the next few weeks I'll be doing something different.  It is Ash Wednesday next week.  For those unaware that's the first day of Lent (the day after "pancake day") and rather than giving someothing up I'm going to make an undertaking to run my little mile-and-a-half every day until Easter, gradually incorporating longer runs at weekends.

I doubt if this would persuade anyone to take up running as I've spent so much of it saying how shit it makes me feel.  It does also make me feel great sometimes though.  To just be able to say I did a five mile run and felt fine after is something not everyone can say.  I'm never going to be the fastest runner; indeed I'm 45 now so if anything I'm going to get slower and slower. I probably look a right shocking mess during and after runs too (some would say before as well).  There is no doubt though that when I'm running regularly I feel better, not just fitter but happier.  Going out and seeing a bit of the world before it wakes up is one of my favourite things.  I've missed it very much.

Music and Me: 1971 to 1988

I don’t remember being unaware of music, there must have always been music in my home as far as I could tell.  I don’t remember a time before around late 1974 when I would have been three years old; I’d lived in Emsworth and Plymouth when I was younger than this but have no recollection of either so my earliest memories are of living in Gosport, near Portsmouth. My father was in the Royal Navy and thus not always around though I don’t actually recall not noticing him. My younger brother was a baby and my older sisters both seemed to be at something called “school” most of the time.  I heard this as “stool”.  I imagined they had to sit on a high, uncomfortable stool and be talked at.  I remember the television, particularly on one occasion when my mother called me from the kitchen to change the channel and I managed to break the set, to this day I don’t know how. But I don’t remember music at all. I think my father played music much more often than my mother so the television of the early 70s sticks in my mind more.  I have memories of watching Barnaby the Bear, Andy Pandy, Captain Pugwash, Rainbow and I think Trumpton or one of its variants but I don’t recall any music, even television theme tunes.

Sometime in 1975 we moved to Southbourne in West Sussex as by then my father had left the navy and our previous home had been forces married quarters. With my father being around more there was an increase of the amount of music I had in my ears. The earliest songs I remember were by Elvis Presley or Peter Sarstedt, particularly the latter’s 1969 eponymous album featuring the “No More Lollipops For You” track, which I found hilarious on account of its speeded up vocal mix at the end.  The Elvis tracks my father preferred were the songs from his movies or the more country and western themed numbers. There were also various country artists that to this day all blurred in to one with the exception of Johnny Cash, memorable to me at this time for the giggle-inducing “A Boy Named Sue” which had been recorded at his 1969 San Quentin gig.  Finally, a smattering of old rock and roll artists made it in to my father’s collection; Adam Faith, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison were all artists I don’t remember not knowing so I must have picked them up in my consciousness  around this time.

In September 1975 I started school and music suddenly had a whole new dimension to it; singing.  I distinctly recall when my mother was dragging me by the hand to the infant school open day my major fear was not being separated from her; surprisingly, considering my reluctance to attend play school; but the prospect of being made to sing.  I can only assume my sisters, who had already transferred to the Junior School, had been teasing me about what would be expected from me when I started the educational regime.  Of course singing did not turn out to be the ordeal I’d dreaded and in fact I quite enjoyed it.  The singing in school assembly at that age was generally quasi-religious rather than full on hymns. The songs I remember most of all were “Morning Has Broken”, which though a Christian hymn had been popularised in the years preceding my educational beginnings by the then Cat Stevenson his 1971 album “Teaser and the Firecat”, and “Lord of the Dance”, ostensibly a Christian song but with pagan folk undertones. Unbeknown to me the song was at that time less than ten years old, having been written in 1967 by Sydney Carter.

By 1975 my eldest sister was 11 years old and showing an interest in popular music so this also began to have some impact on my listening ears.  I would imagine I watched Top of the Pops with my sisters and possibly other pop music themed shows but memories of this era are vague.  1977 saw the Queen’s Silver Jubilee which I recall mainly for the infant school picnic which I recall mainly for the fact that neither of my parents attended as they were both working and I had to sit with another family.  The Sex Pistol’s input to this joyous occasion passed me by completely.  The other major musical event that marked me this year was the death on August 16^th of Elvis Presley.  Even with my tender years this was a massive shock, it did not seem possible that somebody so well-known and so young could just die like that. I learned of his death from a copy of The Sun left on the dining table and read the articles avidly, bewildered and enthralled all at once.  Neither parent seemed overly upset or even surprised so perhaps this was normal for pop stars (it was years later that I learned of the untimely deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Bryan Jones, Jim Morrison et cetera which even my unhip parents must have been aware of and desensitised by). Around the end of the year “Mull of Kintyre” was number one and hence played at the end of Top of the Pops for around three years, or so it seemed to my 6 year old self.

The most personal music landmark in 1978 was my first 7” single which was bought for me by my Auntie Joan.  She was visiting us from her home town of Salisbury and bought for me “The Smurf Song” by Father Abraham and The Smurfs and for my younger brother “You’re the one that I want” By John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Yes, I got the novelty single and my brother got the song from the teen focussed Grease soundtrack. It was many years later I realised that The Smurf Song was also kept from number one by the single my brother was given, which was quite prophetic in a way.  I do remember watching the clips from Grease on Top of the Pops while it and at least one other song from the movie was number one which is my only specific memory of the show around this time.

The next song to really make a mark on me despite having never owned it in any capacity was “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor in 1979. I must have heard it many times but I have a distinct memory of hearing it in a car; which must have been a hire car as our family never owned one until the mid-eighties; probably on a summer day coming back from a daytrip out.  The song would go on to be a karaoke staple for recently dumped women of little originality but when performed by Gloria Gaynor it truly makes the hairs on my neck get up and dance. It probably has more to do with the associated memory than the song itself but nevertheless this was my first favourite song. I have vague recollections of the Abba in Switzerland special on the BBC around 1979 as well but as it was some considerable time before I could admit to my camp fondness for that particular act I will gloss over that happening just now. But I can say that by the end of 1979 I was very much a regular viewer of TOTP and the Pink Floyd video for Another Brick In The Wall which was the last number one of the seventies, I’m pretty sure at this time it was the animated sequences by Gerald Scarfe in the video that held my attention the most and brilliance of Pink Floyd’s music would continue to elude me for some considerable time.

In 1979 I had started Junior School in Southbourne and music started to be noticed more and more.  A friend got what would be called a crew-cut these days but coming off the back of the seventies we all thought of it as a skinhead, knowing nothing of the right wing connotations that has attached itself to such a look by this time. The 1980 release of “Baggy Trousers” by Madness made a huge impact on most of the boys in my year, a few of whom started to wear Harrington jackets but of course my parents were not that cool.  My own personal tastes that year were forged largely by my sisters’ interest in Adam Ant who was finding success with his “Kings of the Wild Frontier” album and the singles thereof and my own young loins were starting to stir but not really knowing why when confronted with the delectable Toyah Wilcox and her hits “It’s a Mystery” (from Four from Toyah), “I want to break free” and “Thunder in the Mountains” in 1981. Presumably the rock’n’roll side of my tastes were the reason for my strange fondness around this time for Shakin’ Stevens who had a string of hits in ’81 and ’82.  My sisters’ would let me have the Shakin’ Stevens and Toyah posters from their Smash Hits and Jackie magazines. Around this time I also bought my first record: A 12" vinyl album, The Best of Bond, which actually covered music from the first three Connery Bond films.  I seem to recall it was 20p at a jumble sale. 

The rock’n’roll influences didn’t end there. One of my best friends around this time, a chubby, short lad called Matty Stringer, had older brothers who were Teddy Boys.  I knew very little of Teds, Mods, Punks, Skins et cetera at such a young age and I certainly didn’t know that the older Stringer boys often would themselves in scrapes for their look.  By this time Teddy Boys were certainly not that fashionable, what with Skins, Rude Boys and Girls, post-punks and the beginnings of New Romantic starting to shine through.  Anyway, Matt’s brothers held Elvis parties which my younger brother and I were sometimes invited to.  They were held in their long back garden on warm summer evenings and we drank pop, listened to Elvis and tapped our feet in a way that we had been taught to as Teds.  Fashionable or not I have very fond memories of these nights.

Further recollections of my time at Junior School are largely filled with TV shows and less to do with pop music.  Much as I watched Top of the Pops, not much made a deep impression on me and I was just as likely to see music on either Tizwas or Number 73 so unless the kids at school were talking about it.  Thus my mixed memories’ of the time leading up to September 1983 and in no particular order include Musical Youth’s Pass the Dutchie, The Kids From Fame, The Jam splitting up (There is no way I’d have been cool enough to have noticed this if I hadn’t heard the announcement on Radio 1when I was sick in bed), Eddy Grant, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Captain Sensible (his connection with The Damned completely unknown to us), Bucks Fizz winning the Eurovision song contest, The Human League, Gary Numan, John Lennon getting shot and the headmaster announcing it in assembly, David Bowie’s Let’s dance video, Men At Works Down Under and Trio’s Da Da Da. 

In September 1983 I went to The Bourne Community School in Southbourne, West Sussex.  I was not quite 12 years old but this, figuratively, is where my teens began.  The first number one single of my time at secondary school was Red Red Wine by UB40.  I grew to hate UB40 in time but I am jumping ahead. Around this time I bought my first 7" single (new and bought by myself) which was The Pipes of Peace by Paul McCartney for which I apologize. Another album which I really remember around this time was Paul Young's  No Parlez which I own a vinyl copy of today. 

As I progressed in to my teens I started to develop my own interests in music.  I was by now influenced by the tastes of my sister, Cathrynn, who had a record player and the teen girls interest in music which varied enormously.  Having grown out of Adam Ant, along with the rest of the English speaking world, she owned albums by The Beat and Haircut 100 which I used to listen to but the one she made me a copy of on cassette was Construction Time Again by Depeche Mode.  The austere industrial sounds they employed had a profound effect on my and I developed an interest in anything electronic sounding.  I still didn’t have my own equipment to play music on, my younger brother had a radio-cassette player made by Ingersoll, on which I’d record songs from the radio, and he also had a “walkman” (with a small “w” because it wasn’t a Walkman ©, it was a personal stereo made by someone like Alba).  

With the Depeche Mode influence now upon me I started to record songs like New Order’s Blue Monday, The Art of Noise’s Close To The Edit and Paul Hardcastle’s Nineteen.  Anything with a sampler and keyboards were game.  One evening my parents came home from a night out having won some albums from the DJ, one of which was the Who’s Afraid Of The Art Of Noise album, which kinda blew my mind at the time being largely experimental and not very commercial at all, unlike their later dalliances with Max Headroom, Tom Jones and Duane Eddy.  I also had an interest in Electro hip-hop, largely forged by peer pressure but helped along by the likes of Doug E Fresh sampling the Inspector Gadget music for their single The Show.  Eventually I got my own stereo, a Toshiba with a single tape deck, which was annoying as I couldn’t copy tapes myself but had to ask my friend Mark to do it.

The first cassettes I got that year were Madonna’s Like A Virgin (a teen crush that had started with Live Aid, a pivotal music moment), Depeche Mode’s Singles 81-85 and Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love.  By the Christmas of 1987 I’d added Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, The Pretenders Singles, Alison Moyet’s Alf and pretty much everything Simple Minds and U2 had done up to that point.

I’d been aware of Simple Minds, I’d recorded songs like Alive and Kicking, Sanctify Yourself and Don’t You Forget About Me from the radio but oddly enough it was the weakest single from the Once Upon A Time album, Ghostdancing, which really grabbed me.  Ghostdancing was little more than a jam with meaningless, ad-libbed lyrics that had gotten too big for its boots but it had a killer riff and I decided that they were my new favourite band and set about collecting their back catalogue.  I started with Once Upon A Time, an obvious choice but for my next few choices price dictated what I bought so the mini album Sister Feelings Call (1981) and the early effort Real to Real Cacophony (1979), both of which were some way from the later pompous and commercial stadium sound that had attracted me in the first place.  Real to Real in particular had an art-rock sound unlike anything I’d ever come across before and the first stirrings of pretentious git were rousing in me.  

I had also been very much influenced by Mark’s fondness for The Pet Shop Boys and hadn’t completely given up on Pop so the likes of Erasure also had me listening.  Eventually though my tastes were changing from those of Smash Hits though I continued reading for most of my school days.  My fondness for Simple Minds and U2 was in full swing, Mark had a mutual interest in U2 and more money so while I had the albums he’d have all the 12” singles, imports and bootlegs.  Then my loins moved me on to the next stage.  I had a massive crush on a girl called Lucy and through her got in to The Cure.  There was little effort involved here; the eclectic and often irreverent style they employed in their poppier efforts appealed to me and as I grew older the more melancholy aspects of their back catalogue meant more and more to me.  I went out with Lucy for a bit, not for long because I discovered alcohol and did something bad whilst drunk which she found out about.  Shame, lovely girl she was.

And so it was that in 1988 when I started college I turned up on day one with back-combed hair, black jeans, a black blazer and great big, white Hi-Tech trainers with the tongue sticking out, a la Robert Smith.  Being a “Cure fan” characterized me all the way through college and to a lesser extent, all the way through life.

The annual Christmas blog repost...

First published 22/12/2013. Images from my collection of vintage cards and postcards. Updated December 2016.

Christmas: for some a religious festival celebrating the birth of Jesus.  Others are more than keen to point out that Saturnalia and the pagan Winter Solstice celebrations have more bearing on why we celebrate in December (it’s not clever, by the way, we all know this).  There are elements of all in the modern Christmas and to an extent we can pick and choose what parts we observe.

I am not a Christian.  I was not brought up as one by my parents but was by school and a couple of years ago during a time of crisis I did get baptised but I have since come to believe that there is no God.  I don’t say that to offend; I have no problem with those who do (unless they use their beliefs to be shitty to others) and I find the Christian bashing attitude of some atheists rather tiresome. I just don’t think there is a divine deity that watches us; not even Father Christmas (he knows when you’ve been sleeping?  Kindly old elf or MI5 spook?). And yet I celebrate Christmas whole-heartedly, including Christian elements of it.  You think that makes me a hypocrite?  Well, I don’t like your attitude!  Fuck you!

Yesterday I went to the village square and sang carols rejoicing a god that I don’t believe in.  So what?  I don’t believe Star Wars (episodes IV to VI) is real either but I still enjoy it and even find parts of it inspiring.  Ditto ghost stories.  There are no such things as ghosts.  If you have seen one you are either insane or a liar.   Nonetheless I still enjoy a ghost story (and am looking forward to Mark Gatiss’ take on the MR James classic The Tractate Middoth on Christmas day, 9.30pm, BBC2).  I celebrate Christmas mostly without the religious aspects but I like a good carol and I call it Christmas rather than Yuletide or what have you mainly for convenience. And don't get me started on the closet racists moaning about the "PC brigade" trying to "ban" christmas, or rename it or whatever... it's just bollocks. 

So what is it I like about Christmas still when so many others find it such a chore?  There is one aspect of the season that becomes more apparent each passing year and that is that people moaning about how early Christmas starts and how commercial it has become getting earlier.  Chaz was already moaning about Christmas in October.  Christmas is commercial because we live in a capitalist system and people need jobs to live.  Now that we no longer produce much in this country that means buying and selling stuff we don’t really need to each other.  You don’t like it; think of that next time you vote.  For me Christmas starts in December because I have this amazing super-power called being able to ignore stuff if it doesn’t interest me.

Christmas for me is largely about eating and drinking well but it is also about nostalgia and evocation.  I like and attempt to replicate the kind of things that remind me of the Christmas times of my youth.  I was born in the early seventies and can remember very little of what happened to me before I started school so it was the late seventies and early to mid-eighties Christmases that I remember most. I will now bore you with a long list of Christmassy things and memories that evoke that warm feeling in me…

One Christmas in the late seventies I had a toy gun from my Dad.  I can barely remember that but I still remember the label on the box had a spaceman on it.

Carol singing, door-to-door with my sisters.  I rarely went out at night in the dark so just being outside when it was dark and cold in the crisp night air, all wrapped up, was slightly magical.

Top of the Pops Christmas Special on Christmas day in the days when I was not only interested in pop music but liked almost all of it.  Around 83’ to 85’ was possibly the high point for me… and covered the Band-Aid phenomenon.

Star Wars Episode IV recorded off the telly followed by a Duran Duran concert which cut off half way through because the VCR got switched off by a Satsuma kicked across the room by my brother.

The Christmas my Great Auntie Kit came to stay.  My Mum had only re-established contact with her earlier that year and she died the following Spring so it was a wonderful memory of a lovely lady.  Somehow the thing I remember most is staying up past midnight on Christmas Eve to watch Santa Claus And The Martians which was the finale of a terrible-movie season on BBC2!

One year having an advent calendar that instead of a picture (and before the days of chocolate filled ones) had a little novelty gift in each door.  I still remember in particular a little plastic seal (as in the semi-amphibious mammal, not the Kiss From A Rose bloke).

The same Christmas I think having a stocking filled with little knick-knacks on my bed on Christmas morning.  This was all silly things, little ornaments and the like but I loved it.  I still remember a little resin pig in a rocking chair reading the Wall Street Journal but couldn’t tell you what my “main present” was that year.

Then there was the hamper year.  This was before I was at secondary school, I'm guessing I was nine or ten.  We had a fairly un-elaborate diet at home but one year my parents bought one of those hampers which are in essence a massive rip off. This introduced various exotic foods to us that I'd never tried before... in actual fact it was really not that exciting but at the time I'd never had canned game soup (posh oxtail), canned french onion soup, tinned crab and chocolate limes.  Chocolate limes has become part of my own tradition, I always buy a bag in December even though they're actually not very nice. 

Reading the double festive issue Radio Times from cover to cover is still a tradition for me but goes back to the days when we’d have the Radio Times for BBC TV and radio and the TV Times for the commercial channels (and before 1982 that must have been one channel!). I still find old issues of these fascinating.

Quality Street… not Roses!  The old tins with the soldier and the lady on were much better though. I do regret the year I announced that I liked the green triangle best and then got given all of them for the next five years. 

Scrooge.  The 1951 version.  I now also like the Muppet one but that was not around until the early nineties.  There used to be shown an animated version which used Alistair Sim’s voice but that never gets shown any more. 

Add to this the sort of films one could only possibly enjoy at Christmas like Digby The Biggest Dog In The World and also classics like the Ray Harryhausen Clash Of The Titans (Christmas Eve, 12.40pm, Channel 5) and who needs modern blockbusters?

Christmas Shopping at Havant Hypermarket (now Asda Wal-Mart) with my Dad.  It was about the only time of year there’d be alcohol in the house and he’d spend a good deal of time deliberating on what to buy.

My Dad, who never really had his finger on the pulse of contemporary music, inexplicably coming home with Now That’s What I Call Music 6 and Now – The Christmas Album in December 1985; on Vinyl of course.  Until then I’d never heard Mike Oldfield’s In Dulce Jubilo.

Mr Thomas, my oft derided Headmaster at Junior School (years 3 to 6 I think) going bonkers for Christmas, including a spooky reading of A Christmas Carol in assembly.  I also loved the school being decorated for Christmas and the season started with the Christmas Fayre, which was usually in November (so early commercialisation started in the public sector… we really are a bunch of gits, aren’t we?).

The year I got my first stereo was a good one and when I really started to get into music. It was a Toshiba with a three band graphic equaliser (all the rage at the time) and detachable speakers.  I was mildly disappointed at the time not to get tape-to-tape but the Toshiba was still working twenty years later when I sold it at a car-boot-sale.

Tapes.  Getting tapes, both pre-recorded and blank, for Christmas was great. These were generally gifts from my Sister but I would also get more with any Christmas money I had.  A multi-pack of c90s would then allow me to copy albums that Mark over the road had on his tape-to-tape Matsui (which I doubt lasted 20 years!).  Albums I remember getting on cassette for Christmas include Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night, Madonna’s Like A Virgin, Depeche Mode’s Singles 81-85 and Kate Bush’s The Whole Story.

There was the year I went to stay with my cousin Lisa in my aunt and uncle's pub in Titchfield just after Christmas until new year.  That was my first pub related christmas, I was 15 but they let me have a few beers. I also met a girl on New Years Eve who became my very first girlfriend for about a month! This Christmas introduced Lipstick On Your Collar by Connie Francis to my annual listenings as Lisa played it so often on the jukebox it now makes me think of that time of year. 

Christmas Tips as a paperboy.  In Christmas 1989 (when I really should have given it up by) I made around £150 in tips from my various rounds and spent much of the time in various pubs around Chichester and Havant with Harry at a time when going in a pub at Christmas still seemed special.  I seem to remember getting drunk 16 times in two weeks.

Christmas 1989 was the end of the best days of Christmas for me.  That boxing day my girlfriend, who had just come back from visiting relatives in the USA , dumped me.  I was 18 and grown up stuff kinda took over then.  By Christmas 1990 I’d left home for the first time and the less said about ’91 the better.  Things started getting better once I’d started work but I was stuck between boy and man and never got the balance right.  Too much drinking, not enough money, lack of real involvement in anything left me always feeling like I was not really at the centre of Christmas for anyone.  Then in 2000 I met Becky.

Christmas 2000 we spent apart but since then we have spent every Christmas together; either at her Mum’s, my parents or later at our own.  We tend to mix it up each year.  The last few Christmas seasons have been hard due to not having any money and last year in particular was not too good because I was mental.  This year we are still poor but with the prospect of a more affluent Christmas in 2014 a very real one and I am not nearly as bonkers and sleep deprived as I was last year. I am determined to enjoy it!

Update: December 2016

I'm no longer sure I'd call myself an atheist but I don't like the term agnostic; I am open minded about spirituality but I do occasionally go to church. Why? Because I find it relaxing and interesting. It's almost like meditation when I'm there.  I've been going to the advent services; carols in the (Westbourne) square has become a tradition and I intend to go to either Midnight Mass, the Christmas morning service or both this year. Another tradition that Becky and I have developed is getting a "real" tree (which I'm assured is from an environmentally sustainable source).  As a kid my family always had an artificial one and the tree we had from when I was an infant until I think my secondary school years probably lasted around eight years in total.  But I like a traditional look for decorations and prefer a real tree for that purpose.  Also, dragging it down to the square to be chipped is, for me, where Christmas is well and truly ends and I always feel a pang when I do that.

There'll be time enough for counting when the dealin's done...

Just over three weeks ago my father-in-law died.  I’m not going to write here about the how, why and when but suffice to say his death was not unexpected when it happened but would have been only a few weeks before.  I’m also not going to write about my grief or about my feelings; not because I don’t have any but because I’m acutely aware that his children and grandchildren have experienced a greater loss than have I.  Again, I will simply say that I am sad and I have a few regrets but mainly positive memories of a man who had been part of my life for 15 years.

What I going to write about is the process of clearing out Tony’s home.  I am thankful to say that his daughter (my sister-in-law) has largely dealt with the administrative side of things so we have been most shielded from that frustration (that is not to criticise the authorities, it’s very easy to do that when unaware of the massive workloads they experience).  I am talking about the actual, physical and practical emptying of a man’s home (and to an extent removing traces of his life in that home).  It’s been hard work and it isn’t done yet.

The home in question was a two-room bungalow probably built by the local authority in the 1950s.  I put this date on it with my limited knowledge due to the coal bunker in the shed and the open fire in one room (and evidence that there was once an open fire in the other).  The floor was tiled (more of that later).  It had a nicely sized front garden that took two sides of the house and a small back garden which was just about enough to dry washing in.  The bathroom had not been updated for some time and the toilet was the old high cistern/pull chain variety and I was surprised that was still there.  It also had a built-on shed with the afore mentioned coal bunker. This could have been a lovely little home.

I write the following not to denigrate someone I was hugely fond of and not to belittle him as a man or person but to present an honest picture of a situation; much of what follows is based on the  first hand testimony of his children and former wife.

In his younger days Tony had considered himself to be a practical man and was very pleased when asked by others to lend his practical skills to a situation.  However… Tony did occasionally cut corners, sometimes never fulfilled assignments to completion and as he become older and frailer he often did not have the strength or will power to get started.  His home was, unfortunately, a bit of a mess.  He also was not fond of asking for help or having others interfere which contributed to the situation.  He had been the kind of bloke who accumulates items, sometimes in very bad condition, would repair (to a degree) those items and sell them on.  His daughter mentioned a tale of a collective of Dyson vacuum cleaners that he intended to work on but that is another story for a different media.  Tony had accumulated a lot of stuff, especially tools which we are in the process of sorting to see what can be salvaged and what is for the tip (by “the tip” I refer to the municipal recycling centre or dump). 

My first job a few days ago was to sort through records and DVDs for anything we could sell.  I do not wish to sound like I am moaning here but Tony was not well covered for his death and when he died the cost of his funeral was largely born by his daughters.  It has been agreed that anything that has no sentimental value we will attempt to sell with monies raised going towards the funeral bill.  So, records first!  I am quite a fan of vinyl and I read Record Collector and though not an expert I do think I have the skills to identify what has some commerciality and what is essentially without financial value.  One of his Grandsons had already made claim to the Johnny Cash albums and the (signed) Slim Whitman box set but the rest came to me to sort and I truly enjoyed going through them with a mixture of fascination and bemusement.  Of around 60 albums and a handful of singles there are four or five that may be worth a few pounds to the right collector in the right place, possibly around £50 in total if eBay is to be believed.  However, the right collector is very unlikely to appear at a car-boot sale and that value is assumed from eBay listings for the same items and none of these had bids against them.  The rest of the albums we are keeping hold of as there is no point in even trying to sell.  I like to have vinyl in the house just to look at, there are around 25 country and western albums for t’mrs and who knows, one evening in times to come I may have an urge to listen to an Open University English Literature album from 1970, Hawaiian music or Swiss yodelling.

DVDs are much harder to clear these days and having sorted through and removed a few which were possibly not quite legal (for reasons of copyright, not subject matter!) and a few more that were just not playable due to tea stains there were still around 100 DVDs.  Another Grandson has requested a couple of Clint Eastwood box-sets that he had given his grandfather and we have decided to keep around ten for ourselves (including The Omen and The Evil Dead).  We have largely moved to Blu-ray ourselves and sold most of our DVDs so these ten now make up around a quarter of all DVDs we have.  The rest we will attempt to sell at the car-boot sale and at 50p for most we will be undercutting just about every other person selling DVDs.  Any left will then be donated to charity.

A few days later my next tasks were the destruction of furniture and the lifting of carpets as well as helping with lifting and carrying on a few tip runs.  Most of the furniture being destroyed was nothing to get excited about but there was one sideboard/cabinet that I was genuinely sorry to smash to pieces, therapeutic though it was.  I couldn’t date it, could have been as early as 1950s but possibly as late as 1970s it had a retro rather than vintage or antique look.  It was a big bugger too, possibly five feet wide and apart from the feet being missing was in fairly good condition.  Our problem was time.  The landlords want the bungalow emptied and cleaned by the end of next week (and we are all back at work then) or they will start charging the estate, which means us.  There was no time to advertise for anyone to buy or even take for free as we needed it out of the bungalow so we could lift carpets and clean and even charities, if interested, would take weeks to come and collect.  If we had room and it matched our furniture we’d have had it but we don’t and it didn’t.  So I took a mallet to it.  I smashed that mother to pieces in five minutes flat.  The wood was then taken to the recycling centre where it will be sold on (good news for council tax payers), processed and will probably end up in some posh git’s new kitchen.  Still, it is very sad that such a cute piece of furniture had to be destroyed because no service exists to quickly remove it for recycling as itself; I wonder how much other furniture from rented homes goes the same way.

The carpets did initially seem to be a fairly easy job as they had not been tacked down and they lifted easily.  Carpets?  You remember I mentioned the tiled floor earlier, why am I now going on about carpets?  The floor was indeed tiled in both of the main rooms and with a bit of work this would have looked gorgeous with perhaps a few well-placed rugs around.  At some point, however, somebody had placed carpet over the tiles; I’m not sure if this was Tony or another but it wasn’t the best quality carpet.  I’m no expert but I’ve always been advised to get separate carpet and underlay.  This was foam-backed carpet and as I lifted it became obvious that the foam had disintegrated and had become stuck to the floor in some places, little more than powder in others.  Getting the carpets up took a couple of minutes, scraping the residue of foam off the floor and sweeping up the Sahara of formerly-foam has so far taken a couple of hours and is not yet finished.  The carpets themselves were in a poor condition and have been taken to the tip along with two old, still working TVs of the not flat screen variety that can’t even be given away these days; one of them was the one we gave Tony about six years ago and I’d forgotten how heavy and unwieldy it was.

My only other task to date has been going through some of Tony’s personal effects to see what can be sold and this has been a quite endearing task.  The daughters and grandsons had already requested a few items each for sentimental reasons and I found myself also wanting to keep things to remember him by.  I have decided to keep a set of cufflinks which I think he wore to our wedding; two pairs of my own will go to the car-boot sale instead.  I don’t smoke but his tobacco tin with a horse on it had clearly been in use so I’ve kept that.  There were also a few serendipitous moments; a knob on our cooker had broken and Tony had a spare cooker knob, not matching but workable so now we can use our grill again!  The knob did not match his own cooker so why he had it… who knows?  Also I’d been looking for the old style glass, dimpled beer tankards to drink dark beer out of and couldn’t find what I wanted anywhere.  I now have three, one with a horse on it, courtesy of Tony.  I’ve swapped my wallet for one he had even though I’m not sure he had used it, mine was more functional but I just want to be able to say this was his.  Finally, there was an old Timex sports watch, not working, no strap, worth bugger all.  But I want to get it working, put a suitable strap on it and wear it.  Again, I’m not sure whether it was a watch he owned or something he picked up thinking he could make money from it, either way it will remind me of him.

The task is now almost complete at least as far as clearing the bungalow is concerned, still some cleaning to do and a washing machine (faulty) to dispose of.  There is lots of broken up furniture and rusty old tools to take to the tip, at least three runs in a little Toyota Starlet.  My Sister-in-law has all the tools that may be usable to go through, clean up and then possibly sell but that may require another car-boot sale; we already have more than enough for one.  Soon, very soon, the little bungalow in Chidham will be empty, the landlords will no doubt do it up and someone will be moved in (sort the bathroom out you bastards).  I think that before we started clearing it out I’d only been in the bungalow twice, both times to help deliver heavy items.  I think it’s fair to say that though this was Tony’s home for some time it’s not the home his daughters grew up in and will remember him from so though it will be sad to see it empty it won’t be the saddest of all the sad things that have happened recently.  I can say though that whenever I walk, cycle or drive by I will wonder who is in there now and I will remember Tony.  It really is a lovely little bungalow. 

Pictures of me...

I have had a few issues recently and haven't been writing much as a result.  So, here's a few recent pictures for anyone who is wondering how I'm doing.

I can lose myself in Chinese art and American girls

Originally posted 6/8/2012

The Cure, girls, and Cure girls

So… I was at work and I’m going to be off for a week so I asked my huge fan, the lovely Kate, what should be the subject of my next blog?  Kate, with hardly a pause for breath, suggested I write about my ex-girlfriends because I’m always so funny when I talk about them.  Eh?  I didn’t know I did that!  I then started to wonder in which ways I spoke about my exes and hoped that it wasn’t in an excessively bitter way (I assume not as there is little a woman would find amusing about another woman being slagged off by a man, I’m sure).  So, I had a think about it. 

Basically, I can’t write a blog about exes as I am still on speaking terms with so many of them.  Well, some of them.  And I want to keep it that way.  I still talk to these people because I like them and generally one or other of us (usually the other) decided for whatever reason it wasn’t working out and we should be friends and somehow we still are, though after gaps of years mended by the wonder of social media networking.  So, I’m not going to write specifically about my previous relationships and I’m certainly not going to write about my sex life, all you need to know is that I am VERY good.  But I am going to write about girls and girlfriends, sort of.  In that insular, self-regarding way that is fast becoming my trade mark… and with a theme.  The theme being one of the things that defines me as a person; in the same way as Nick Hornby felt he was defined as an Arsenal Fan in Fever Pitch I am, or I suppose was, defined as a Cure fan.  And I like girls who are Cure fans, who look a bit goth but not too much, dark hair, pale skin, perhaps a bit of red lippy, dark clothes…(hey Kate, how you doin’?).  You see I used to be a massive fan of The Cure.  And it was all because of a girl.

Without saying too much, Lucretia (the names will be changed to protect the innocent but not very imaginatively) was at my school and we are still in touch via Facebook and she is married with children and I have no wish to embarrass her.  Not that I have much to embarrass her with as this was such an innocent time.  It started out with a bit of joshing at school, in that way that awkward boys who like girls but don’t know how to deal with it still do.  There was nothing nasty, just gentle mickey taking.  We talked about music, as being such a big Simple Minds and U2 fan obviously I was really serious about music and had started to denigrate music I felt was beneath me in the snide and insidious way that was to make me such a massive tool for the next few years.  But we had a few things in common, I forget what now, probably liking Siouxsie and the Banshees or something like that, so I started to take an interest in other bands she liked.  I initially dismissed The Cure as a pop group that wrote love songs, clearly I did not know anything about them at all, but as my crush on her grew I decided to seek them out.

This was 1988.  There was no Spotify or You Tube and it was not easy living in a village even to go out and buy an LP or cassette and making that commitment to a band you hadn’t heard was a ridiculous notion.  I honestly didn’t know any Cure songs at this stage, I must have heard some on Top of the Pops or the chart show on Radio One, Sunday evening, which I would listen to, fingers poised over the “record” button on my stereo for anything I liked.  Evidently anything I’d heard by The Cure never made it on to my chart show tapes.  As luck would have it my sister had a compilation album, I think it was a Smash Hits collection of some sort, which had The Lovecats on it.  So Lovecats was the first Cure song I am aware of hearing and I just thought it was mental.  No Poe faced seriousness with a message like Jim Kerr et al were knocking in to my ears on a regular basis, just fun and zany, mad-cap, don’t give a crap about the rules fun.  I think if I’d seen the video at that stage I’d have gone in to apoplexy with the silliness of it all.  I was hooked.  By the summer holidays, after I’d taken my exams, I had a Saturday job at Waitrose and could afford to buy myself a few records.  My first Cure album was Japanese Whispers which wasn’t really an album but a collection of three singles and (most of) their B-sides.  It was of a similar sound to Lovecats; upbeat, disaffected pop music, a bit psychedelic in parts, proper music despite the throw-away fun nature of these particular songs. By now Lucretia had become my girlfriend, in a very sweet, hardly ever saw each other kind of way.

A 17 year old me with one of my first Cure albums... the T'Pau poster belonged to my brother!

Next I got hold of Standing On A Beach, their singles compilation, on vinyl so I only got to hear the singles and not the extra tracks on the cassette.  I’m fairly sure the next album I bought was Faith, one of their austere works from the early eighties which was probably because I wanted to impress Lucretia with how serious I was.  Though this would become one of my favourite albums of all time it was quite a leap of… er… faith at the time because it was so bloody melancholy.  At least The Smiths had tunes?  I’m not convinced that the sublime beauty of the album really appealed to me at the time but I carried on buying up their back catalogue.  The first time I heard “One Hundred Years” was actually on the Concert live album and I remember, it was a grey dreary day at college and I was caught up in the guitar line.  Then I bought Pornography (the album, I didn’t buy porn at this time at all) and the ferocity of the track on its studio form was the final part of the jigsaw.  I was a Cure fan.

My friend Mark and my brother Chris (their real names as I’ve never kissed them) had also started to get in to The Cure and we were all toying with the image but once I’d heard Pornography I started to grow and back comb my hair.  Not long after I went to a party with Mark, kissed his ex-girlfriend while I was drunk and got found out and dumped.  Now I had some real angst to pin my music to and my love for The Cure became focused around their trilogy of Seventeen Seconds/ Faith/ Pornography.  What a miserable little git I became. 

By the following May I was still single, still a miserable little git and still mad on The Cure (and had started to listen to a lot of what we then called gothic music; Sisters Of Mercy, Mission, All About Eve and so on).  And the biggest thing in the world, ever, was about to happen.  In May 1989 The Cure released the Disintegration album.  This marked not only a change in status for the band who truly became megastars after this but it was the first album released as a new Cure album for me!  I bought it on the day of release on cassette so I could listen to it straight away on my crappy personal stereo.  I also bought tickets to go and see them at Wembley Arena.  One thing was missing though, I wanted to have a Cure girlfriend to share the experience.  As it was, my brother was now friends with my ex, Lucretia, who wouldn’t talk to me.  His friend was going out with her friend, who I also know through Facebook… hello Clare!  I went to see The Cure with Mark, Chris and James on July 23^rd 1989.  Lucretia and her gang went the day before. 

My ticket for my first Cure show

Drummer Boris Williams signed my pound note!

It was October before I did get another girlfriend, by now my hair had grown somewhat and in its back-combed glory I had a certain cool look to me.  I was also quite pretty by then.  This girlfriend was called Katie and though I did more than kiss her I have used her real name as we are not in touch, very much my decision.  Katie was very much in to her music, more so than me.  She was a year older, much more confident as a person and did things like going to Marxist conferences in London and smoking cannabis.  She introduced me to a lot of other music, Throwing Muses for example are still one of my favourite acts of all time, and she taught me a few things and I got to see her naked so I’m grateful to her but frankly we were from very different backgrounds and I eventually my immaturity got too much for her and she dumped me.  On Christmas Day. 

Me, December 1989 in Chichester

She wasn’t much in to The Cure so that is pretty much her part in the tale apart from…

A few days after Christmas I went in to Chichester to see her so she could explain things and that day I saw Teresa for the first time.

I then went out with a girl called Sarah who was lovely and liked The Cure a bit but not excessively but I was very much on the rebound and then a girl called Helen who only went out with me because Reuben Pope didn’t want to go out with her and I was the next cool thing.  She was tall and pretty and quite nice and liked The Cure a bit but not excessively.  Then I dumped her to go out with Teresa. 

Teresa is not her real name and we are still in touch and I like her (as a human being) enormously so I am going to truncate this part, far shorter than the importance in my life would really merit.  Teresa liked The Cure a bit but not excessively.  During my time with her we went to see The Cure at Crystal Palace for The Garden Party, a mini one day festival also featuring All About Eve, Lush and James.  We had an argument during The Cure’s opening number but the day ended OK.  The Mixed UP album also came out, shortly after we moved in together.  There were bad times but many more good times.  It didn’t work out.  It was very sad but it was a long time ago.   I had two more girlfriends quickly after her and it all went a bit awry.  Neither of them liked The Cure.

Over the next few years I embarked on a series of short term relationships, none of which were very serious with various girls who weren’t especially interested in The Cure though some of them had the look I liked.  I saw the band again in 1992 as a single man, presumably hoping I’d meet some ravishing, goth-ish Cure obsessed girl. It never happened.  I lost interest in them for a couple of years but when Wild Mood Swings came out in 1996 I was back in to them in a big way, going to see them twice with Mark and Chris and not meeting any Cure girls.  I had, to be fair, stopped looking the part for some time.  My hair was always short, my clothes much more casual. I didn’t stand out in any way, I was bland, vanilla.  Normal.  It was not a good look for me, a very small fish in a very big pond, I made no impression on anyone, not even people I knew at the time remember me much from this era.

It was in the mid-nineties I met the person who has most kept me off the straight and narrow regarding music.  It is true that I’d started to listen to some of the more mainstream “alternative” music, having gone through grunge I quite enjoyed the more upbeat sensibilities of Brit-Pop and was listening to a lot of Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Sleeper and so on.  I also started to take more of an interest in techno and dance music but have never been very knowledgeable about such matters, despite my half-hearted attempts to get in to clubbing which mainly involved going to Thursdays (a club near Chichester) or occasionally to a club in Portsmouth.  In 1996 I even went on holiday to Ibiza but realised whilst there that a clubber I am not! Now that is a blog worth telling.  

Charlie was and still is a big fan of Depeche Mode.  His taste in music was still developing when I met him and he is these days much more of an anorak, more of an extremist when it comes to music but back then I possibly had a slight edge on him.  I was of course already aware of Depeche Mode and I introduced him to the Cure and then we kinda introduced each other to various types of non-mainstream music.   I’m sure if either of us had been a cute chick then we’d have made a lovely couple.  But neither of us are.  Charlie shared my fondness for Cure-ish girls though but so far I don’t think he has found one either.  Anyhoo, as my tastes in music realigned with the left-field I again started to find my own identity in my image. 

What I did have around this time were penfriends.  Several of them, from The Cure’s unofficial newsletter, Curenews, all of them female, mostly from Europe and the USA.  Most of them very lovely to know and more than easy on the eye.  Yes, there were a few crushes.  One of these almost resulted in a trip to San Fransisco to meet a Polish/American girl called Ania but it all went wrong at the last moment and I was left crushed.  Still, some lasting friendships resulted, I am still in touch with Karmen and Marlo.  I know Karmen is still a big Cure fan, Marlo possible less so.  Both are still very cute.  I’m very glad to call them friends still.

Before the last Century ended I had time for one more on-off and semi disastrous relationship with a girl that Charlie once snogged when I was in the toilets while we were all out at the pub together.  Such was my strength of feeling towards this girl that I didn’t really care much at all when I found out, it was in actual fact far funnier that the guy who blurted out what had happened had mistaken my erstwhile girlfriend for another woman who we were out with one night and gave Charlie away in front of her husband for snogging his wife, which he hadn’t.  The husband was none too pleased until I figured out what had happened and put his mind at rest.  What I didn’t know was… no, I can’t repeat that.  Let’s just say for a while Charlie had his Cure girl.  The dirty dog.

Come the year 2000 and I’d given up on finding any kind of girl who’d stay with me, let alone one that was a Cure girl.  So of course I met somebody, asked them out, she never got round to dumping me (Joke!  If you are reading this wifey I was joking!) and we are still together and married.  My wife is not much in to The Cure, in fact our musical tastes don’t often cross, but she knows that they are the biggest influence on me musically and has learned to tolerate them, as opposed to, say, Smashing Pumpkins which she considers to be an appalling cacophony, if I ever want to get her out of the room I just slip Gish on and she’s off.  She has been with me to see P J Harvey and Kristin Hersh, partly because I wanted her to see women that I thought were talented and iconic but mainly because she can drive and has a car.  She also came with me to see Jeff Beck so I accidentally introduced her to Trombone Shorty, the support act who she likes very much.  I have seen The Cure several times since we met but there has never been any question that I’d ask her to come along.  My love of The Cure has changed, they are now like old friends who I’ll always love no matter what tripe they put out (half of 4:13 Dream, for example).  It is a thing I do with Mark and Chris and Charlie but not with a girl or my wife.  I’m sure she is not too worried that she hasn’t seen them, if she had tickets to see Billy Joel I’d certainly not expect her to offer me one of them, in fact I’d beg her not to.  The Cure is just one of the things about me, not all of me, and there are many things now that are us.  The trips to Crete and Paris and to China, the naturist evenings, plays and movies, our cats, our home. 

Fancy dress on my 80s themed 40th birthday party..

I’m sure I’ll continue to buy anything The Cure release.  I’ve seen them ten times now so I’m not desperate to see them again but pending ease of getting tickets, travel et cetera I would certainly consider it again.  I’m never going to be as obsessed as I was when I was buying up their back catalogue and watching the videos excessively to get Robert Smith’s hairstyle right back in 1988, of course not.  I was 16 then, I’m 40 now and not nearly as mental as I may appear.  In the same way I’ve long stopped wanting for a Cure girl as I found a girl that cured me.  I still think it is a cute look and would possibly make a great niche porn site but beyond that, it is a part of my life that has long passed. 

However, should Cure bassist Simon Gallup ever make me an offer…

I Miss The Comfort in Being Sad

Originally posted 14/7/2012.

Yesterday I was a sad panda. 

It started when I had to cycle to work because I had no money for train fare, a mere 13 days in to the month.  Then, when I had started work I looked at the diary for next week and found I’ll doing a few things I’d rather not be doing.  Then I had to sit through a meeting taken by my insufferable buffoon of a manager who, like many managers, has no ears to hear when we are telling him why shit aint working. Then I had too much to do and lost my temper and swore at a colleague who, though being a knob at the time, really didn’t deserve it.

In the greater scheme of things I have absolutely no “right” to be sad.  I have a roof over my head and food in the house.  I’m not seriously ill and neither are any of those who are dearest to me.  I am married to a woman who has lovely breasts and still lets me see them.  I have two lovely cats who give me lots of love and I get to play on the internet a lot when I can’t afford to go out, which is most of the time.  I get Sky, Spotify, have a Kindle Touch and am a Planet Rock subscriber so most of my media wants are taken care of.  I’ve repaired the relationships that I damaged in my past, or at least the ones that matter.  So why so sad, Glad?

First of all, when people say things like “you’ve got no right to be miserable” they are talking utter pig-poo.  Of course one has the right, we live in a relatively free country where despite what the right-on may think thought control has not gone as far as telling people how to feel “or else”.  If I want to be fucked off then I bloody well will be.  If you win £100 million on the Euro lottery thingy you still have the RIGHT to be pissed off if you choose to though you will of course look like a total dickhead.

Secondly and most pertinently, people who are depressed don’t generally choose to be and on the whole would rather not be.  I got past the idea of being withdrawn and insular as a way to impress girls when I was 18 and even then I never thought it was a generally good approach to life in general.  Depression is an illness that many are prone and have little choice in, notwithstanding medical treatment.  Can you imagine a world where we say to people “what right do you have to get asthma?” or “how dare that millionaire football player say they suffer with Ulcerative Colitis”?  Yet change either ailment for depression and it seems to be fair comment.  Stan Collymore is a fairly reprehensible person by most standards but I when he announced he was suffering from depression his manager at the time insinuated he was some sort of fairy, as if depression was a made up illness for weak and lazy people.  In his case, mental health issues would explain a lot of his subsequent behaviour. Sadly, mine too.

I have been prone to bouts of depression since my teens and it has no doubt affected many areas of my life; a crippling lack of confidence at such a vital stage of my mental and emotional development has had long term repercussions on my “success” in life.  It may sound big headed of me but I have underachieved academically and in vocationally; most people that know me well would probably agree.  Most of this is down to self-confidence.  True confidence makes up for so much else.  I don’t mean that superficial, wear-it-on-the-sleeve kind of confidence that so many young people like to announce they have because clearly they don’t.  I mean that deep, ingrained belief in oneself, that idea that anything truly is possible with enough application.  I’d very much like to be more handsome, slimmer, more stylish and so on in many, many regards but with enough confidence one can more than compensate for any lacking in those areas.  Sadly, I am not that confident.  It varies from day to day but my opinion of myself varies from thinking that I’m an ok guy with some good points to utter disgust.

Some years back now, when the brown stuff hit the ventilator and I went to see the mental health nurse for a diagnosis I was in such a state and so alarmed at my unpredictable behaviour that I thought I was bi-polar.  I was not.  Most people who think they are bi-polar do so due to extreme mood swings, like the ones I was having that lost me so many friends but like me most of those people are not bi-polar.  People with bi-polarity disorder are effectively crippled by the intensity of their lows and a danger to their own well-being when high.  I was not suicidally low and though my highs led to some foolish behaviour, particularly regarding spending, I was not going out and trying to buy aircraft carriers on credit.  It sounds interesting to say “Oh yes, I’m bi-polar” but believe me, you don’t want to be.  So I got diagnosed which was actually quite a relief.

You know those cards you can get for your desk that say “You don’t have to be mad to work here… but it helps” or some similar banality?  I want to get one made up that says:

“You don’t have to have traits of a borderline personality disorder to work here but if you do you’ll fit in fairly well”.

There, I can’t even be mental properly.  “Traits of”!  Effectively I have some elements but not all of a Borderline Personality Disorder with underlying depression; coupled together this causes anxiety that I shouldn’t really have as I have little to be anxious about!  The “borderline” part of the diagnosis needs to be understood.  It does not mean that this is almost a proper disorder (though in my case it is almost a proper disorder).  Borderline means pretty much on the border between different behaviours; manic, depressive, disorganised, compulsive, obsessive and so on.  This is where the wild mood swings come in.  Though my “traits of” diagnosis did in part make me feel I was making much ado about nothing it was also a relief in that the actual process of being diagnosed had made me write down how I thought of my own behaviour in many different aspects, thus helping me recognise what was fairly normal and what was, frankly, just a bit odd. As a consequence I can in most situations now tell when my feelings, which used to overwhelm me, need to be controlled and my disorder taken in to account.  As an example, I used to often feel bitterness towards groups of friends if I felt that I was being left out in some way, now if I start to feel that way I can talk myself up again, make myself realise that I am entering a destructive cycle of withdrawal that will alienate me further if I am indeed alienated at all.  The thoughts still come but now I can step back from them, analyse them and tell them to fuck off.

As for fitting in fairly well in my work place, I can think of at least three people in my office who are considerably more mental than me, who appear to have quite serious defects in their personality but appear to be oblivious to how they are perceived by others.  Another colleague is quite open about having depression, indeed has it much worse than I ever had, yet her behaviour is a lot more normal than my own, at least to my eyes.  Ultimately it is far too easy to pin how we behave to some medical or psychological reason rather than admitting we are at fault in other ways.  I could say I snapped at my colleague yesterday because I have traits of a Borderline Personality Disorder, depression and anxiety but it is more likely I snapped because I was pissed off and didn’t want to deal with the ‘phone call I was dealing with.  The increasingly bizarre behaviour of some of my colleagues could be down to a personality disorder or they may just be oddballs with no sense of self-awareness.  And I may have lost friends, got in to debt, flirted and got drunk for mental health reasons but it may just be that I was an arsehole.  Either way, I am reapplying for admittance to the human race so please bear with me.