Category: Uncategorized

I really really love books. From my point of view, the house will not be finished until the last of the shelving is built in. When I was a boy I was a desperate and dweeby member of the Puffin Club and read as much as my pocket money allowed. From then on I have accumulated box after box of books. I have ranks of (Iain) Banks; mazy backstreets full of Dickens and Corinthian columns of Penguin Classics. For most of the last 4 years my little darlings have been in boxes in the garage. Now P menaces them like Herod with a hangover. For her the answer the Malthusian difficulty I have with the sheer number of books I possess is obvious: throw them out. But how can anyone, I ask you, throw a book away, even a raddled Penguin Modern Classic with yellowed leaves?

The answer used to be to give them to charity. However, when P turned up today with two boxfuls of the stuff I could bear to be parted from (in truth, they were mostly her holiday novels) Oxfam closed and bolted the door. I gather that most of the books dumped on them end up recycled in any event.

It is time to be strong. I will have to cull. Some of them I will hit with a spade and bury in a riverbank; others will have to be dropped mewling into the water in a sack. I know it must be done. But some were good attentive books that washed behind their ears and paid attention at school and somehow summarily executing them seems a brutal act. I would like to give these bright souls a chance to escape. Give them, as it were, a headstart, before my gap-toothed, hilly-billy pyschopaths and I start chasing them through the underbrush with a shotgun and a bottle of moonshine.

Would anyone, for instance, consider giving a home to the 12 volumes of Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”? I will happily wrap them and send them through the post to you at my expense. This is a no obligation offer and, if things don’t work out between you, you can always have them sew footballs for a dollar a day.

I have always looked dreadful in photographs. Something about me (perhaps my mass) warps the light on its way to the lens. As I have got older it has got much worse so that when I look at photos taken of me now I wonder how the camera has somehow managed to make me look like a balding fat bastard with a leer like a hillbilly serial killer. My only consolation is that I am told that I look worse in real life.

My wife particularly despairs of my lack of clothes sense – but that is unfair. I grew up in the 70s when any clothes designer worth their salt was smacked out on an array of drugs so mighty that they could not help but design clothes whose awfulness made them visible from space.

Things started out calmly enough in the 60s:

The photographic genius that is Mr Partington rated me 3/5 for this performance. This is the look that later came to be known as my “TV face”. Put a sports event on the gogglebox and this is what I end up looking like; complete with dribble. Apart from having had my cow’s lick plastered to my head with dripping and a look that makes it clear that my first and only word is going to be “duh”, there are no real fashion disasters happening here.

Come 1971 and it would appear that I had at least learned to breathe through my nose. Here I can be seen dressed for my first day at primary school at St John’s School in Gravesend. Still recognisably human, it has been all downhill from here. This was probably the last time anyone risked “tousling” my hair.

By 1973 I had sold my tiny pre-pubescent soul to the great god of fashion. For gentlemen in the 70s, hair meant one thing: sideburns (or as my uncle Peter engagingly referred to them: “bugger grips”). Of course, being 6, growing a beard was difficult without the sort of course of hormone therapy that would have left me apine and impotent by age 10. The inventive “gentlemen’s barbers” of 1973 got around this problem by letting the hair grow into “pretend sidies”. Coming at a point at which my teeth were growing in, this created the alluring look I like to call “Village Idiot”. It conjures the unfortunate impression that I am not only the product of an incestuous union but that I might very well be up for a bit of sibling-on-sibling action myself. This is probably what is worrying my sister, who is pictured sat beside me.

It’s 1974 and the wheels have started to come off the sartorial caravan. This is a picture of me and my younger siblings in our grandmother’s garden in Bexhill. My ensemble consists of a pair of battered brown Clarks’ sandals worn, unforgiveably, with a pair of grey socks. (By the way, dear brother, lest you be tempted to mock me please first note your own raspberry knee-length man-stockings). The shorts are my blue “Chelsea” football shorts pulled up to a gonad shattering height. The top is a picture of caribbean life as imagined by a jaded Yorkshire designer whose evenings are spent drinking Worthington E and coughing away at a skinny joint of ersatz cannabis before walking home in the rain. My hair has been allowed to roam free, in the fashion of the time and gives every impression of trying to eat my head.

At least until this point, I have the excuse that I was wearing whatever my mother insisted I wore. Pictured here on the day of my brother’s first communion, you see me beaming with pride. The pride is not because my brother was about to enter the great communion of the saints (dressed in brown and with his knees showing), but because of my super-cool Steve Austin stylee denim suit. Finished with a bottle green polo neck sweater, there was simply no trendier dude on Stafford Close (except everyone else).The look perhaps lacked the Little Jimmy Osmond knee patch, but I had outgrown him anyway. This look said I was prepared to gun you down suckah whilst sliding on my knees across an underlit disco floor; and in the unlikely event that Frinton had closed down the Elderly Resident’s Social Association and opened up a disco (and handed out sidearms to 11 year olds) that is exactly what I would have done.

I need to stop now because the shame is making it hard to type.

I am living disproof of the adage that the more you do something the better you get at it. What is untrue in my case, however, is true in others. Amongst the bloggers I read regularly are people who not only update with a metronomic regularity but who never seem to get any less interesting. A daily update from me would rapidly degenerate into talking about my toenails and how I got bored on the train. Three Americans whose output, both in terms of quality and quantity humbles me should be an immediate priority visit if you are not already a regular reader:

(1) Redsy. This is Crankmama’s new site. What I love about Redsy’s site is that it does not have a single theme. It is not “about” motherhood or politics or social issues. It is about all of those things. Diversity of topic is tamed by a unity of tone: everything is addressed with an unrestrained passion. Reading her site is energising.

(2) Oh the Joys. I simply have no idea how she does it. The more she writes the funnier she gets. The best friends are those whose view on life is just askew enough to make you see the funny side of everything. I am simply in awe.

(3) Kevin Charnas. I genuinely cannot think of a duff entry this man has produced. You can tell how good he is by how bad most of the comments are on his site (my own especially). Having read one of his entries you want to leave a comment simply to join the party he has created. On the other hand, you know that anything you are going to say has to sound banal sat so close to the effervescent blogging that precedes it.