loft – or possibly a straw loft, full of straw waiting to be turned into hats; and (b) I wasn’t abused.
At some point in 1986 I remember getting an erection watching a Madonna video, although I had absolutely no idea what to do about it and no way of getting in touch with Madonna to ask.
Hobbies: I collected badges. Non-swimming badges. But only out of duty, like a Japanese businessman glumly taking golf lessons. If we went to any tourist attraction – Warwick Castle, the Tower of London, etc. – I would always buy a badge from the gift shop and I kept all those badges in a tin. I never wore them, I never displayed them, they’re probably still in the drawer in Oxford where I last added to them in about 1987.
I don’t know what gift shops sell these days – I never go into them. Probably themed iPod covers, business card cases, novelty condoms, cheese knives and melon ballers. Maybe porn? Maybe you can get tourist-attraction-themed jazz mags where the Madame Tussauds waxworks are all doing each other in a big gangbang. I wouldn’t be surprised. Honestly, what is the world coming to? I’m really surprised.
Speaking of gangbangs, or gangs at the very least, I didn’t join the Cub Scouts. That’s what you had to do if you wanted to become a proper human – or so my parents heavily implied. It would be a great way of meeting other children and broadening my range of interests, so that I didn’t just spend all my time watching Knight Rider – that was their view. I did not share it. I had an aversion to fresh air and didn’t want to go camping. That seemed to be the jewel in the cubs’ crown of activities – or the turd in their cesspit, as I saw it. The concept of the cubs was bad enough: on top of having had to develop friendships and a survival strategy for school, this was a new group where you had to find allies and evade enemies.
Also, it would wipe out an evening a week. I jealously guarded my TV-watching time. It was always being encroached upon by homework (or ‘prep’ as we called it – that’s one of Britain’s hidden class signifiers). I saw no reason to commit to anything else. And also, all the cubs’ activities that didn’t involve going away from home and sleeping outdoors (something my parents were so keen to encourage and, yet, if I’d mooted it in my late teens under the influence of heroin, you can bet they’d have raised objections – honestly, you can’t win with some people) were almost as bad: lighting fires, cooking, sewing, chopping, climbing. All the wholesome shit that I hated and, when brought into contact with, hated myself for hating.
The only hobby I really enjoyed was writing. I developed the habit, whenever we were watching TV as a family and I wasn’t particularly gripped by the programme, of writing a sort of endless fantasy epic. It involved kings and emperors and wizards and dragons and wars. It was sort of cod-Tolkien, I suppose, but even less likely to come to a satisfying conclusion before you lost the will to live.
I wasn’t a Tolkien fan. I spent the best part of a year trying to get through The Lord of the Rings, finally grinding to a halt halfway through The Two Towers. I don’t know why there are adults who treat its tedious daftness with such awed solemnity. That just makes it less fun. And it’s zero fun to start with. Even something that is a tiny bit fun, like pressing the button to make an electric garage door go up, is infinitely more fun than the endless moaning of a jewellery-obsessed, hairy-footed midget.
Anyway, I would write and write and write this epic. It wasn’t supposed to be entertaining – I just did it for the pleasure of filling the pages. I wrote it in play form, enjoying the escapism of seeing drab mundanities being exchanged between people supposedly living in fantastical circumstances. It probably read like an EastEnders script except all the characters were wearing armour or capes or crowns or wizards’ hats. Like an EastEnders Hallowe’en special.
I also loved the look of the playscript format: writing the character’s name in capital letters with the dialogue next to it and how they might say it (‘angrily’, ‘quietly’, ‘waving his wand’, ‘dropping his axe in horror’) and putting all other business