Blog On The Motorway

There are going to be some fairly major changes around here pretty soon. I have bought my own domain finally, so I will be leaving the hallowed terrain of 100yen soon for the sunnier climbs of www.bloodonthemotorway.com which will soon be the hub for all things me. I have pretty big plans for the place eventually, not least of which will be some nice free serialised fiction for you all to enjoy free of charge on a regular basis. It will also be the home to the blog and the online writing portfolio I have dreamed of for so long.

I’ve been here at 100yen since I left livejournal in July 2006. It has been a lovely little home for me, created by Jonic, to whom I owe my entire love of the Internet.  So to everyone who has stuck with reading this, I hope you’ll stick with me while I get the changes underway.

On another note, I mentioned earlier that I had recently run into an old friend through twitter, which got me thinking about looking back into my past to try and reconnect with other old friends. In this spirit I recently entered my old school, Vinehall Preparatory in Sussex, into Facebook, curious to see what would come up.  It was a small posh boarding school that was my home for six years, and a place that held some lovely and other deeply unpleasant memories.

Much of the latter came through a distinct penchant for naughtiness and trouble, that often saw me pitched against the Headmaster and Headmistress, an austere Thatcherite couple called the Chaplins. They hated me, and for good reason for the most part, as I was right little bastard.  From day one, however, they looked down on me because my parents were not of the normal stock.  They were the very definition of working-class done good, at the time self made millionaires who had gotten there by running nightclubs in London. Not the sort of people you’d normally get sending their kids to Vinehall.

This most often presented itself in the way that I was treated compared to the Chaplin’s darling son Tom.  He constantly won favour, boarding school being of course the ideal breeding ground for nepotism. I don’t remember him that well, but I do remember that ever time there was a school play, I would audition for the lead role, only to see Tom automatically bequethed the role and myself relegated to the role of (you guessed it) bartender.  In the last school play the bartender had to eject the lead from a bar in one scene. On the last day of school I kicked him so hard in the bottom I nearly booted him clean off the stage.

This is not to say I hold any animosity toward the family Chaplin. It was a long time ago and the things that seem so vitally important at the time fade into obscurity over the years.  In fact I haven’t thought of him or his parents in years.  Until the other night when I went on Facebook.  Because that little boy is now the lead singer of Keane.

I knew there was a reason I didn’t like him.