So here we are at the end of my little experiment, and I have to say I’ve really enjoyed it, so thanks to everyone who suggested topics, or put up with me on Twitter while I procrastinated over how the hell to write a blog post on ambiguity, or cardigans, or whatever.  I also put up my very first ever piece of publicly available fiction, which seemed to go down quite well. So in that vein I thought I’d do the same again and give you a little children’s story, something I’ve never really attempted before. I’m not sure how well it has worked, but I have never actually seen a real life marsupial, so I have had to make up something, and the topic seemed to lend itself to a kid’s story.

Molly Marsupial.

Molly the Marsupial looked around her tree with an anxious look on her face.

‘Mummy?’ she asked to nobody in particular, because her Mummy wasn’t there. In fact it was precisely because her Mummy wasn’t there that Molly felt anxious. She shuffled on her branch as best she could with her claws. The sun was high and bright in the sky and light was coming through the branches all around her.

Suddenly she heard a sound, a snuffling sort of sound. She looked down, and there was an anteater down below her. She didn’t know it was an anteater though, because she didn’t know what an anteater was, so in her head she decided that he should be called Nosey.

Nosey hadn’t seen her, and she didn’t know if Nosey was a friend or a foe, so she kept quiet, but then Nosey used his big nose to sniff around and looked straight up at Molly.

‘Hello,’ he said, with a soft, low voice. Molly thought he sounded friendly, but Mummy had told her not to speak to strangers. But she also needed to know where her Mummy was, and Nosey might know where Mummy was, seeing as he could smell so well.

‘Hello,’ she said quietly, thinking that she was safe as long as she was in her tree.

‘Hello,’ said Nosey again. ‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Molly, Molly the Marsupial.’

‘Is that right? You look more like a Koala Bear to me.’

‘That’s what I am,’ replied Molly, and Nosey looked very confused, and Molly felt very clever. ‘A Koala Bear is a Marsupial, see? You are silly!’ she said. Nosey’s nose wrinkled a little, but even a little wrinkle on such a big nose was a very big wrinkle indeed. His brow was furrowed, and he mouthed the word silently again and again.

‘Mar-Soo-Pee-Al,’ he said slowly after a minute. ‘Well I think you are a very nice mar-soo-pee-al, Molly.’ Molly felt bad though, because now Nosey was looking a bit sad, and Molly thought she shouldn’t had said he was silly. ‘My name is Greg. Greg the Giant Anteater.’ As he said this he puffed out his chest proudly, and Molly could see that he really was a very big anteater.

‘Do you eat giant ants?’ asked Molly, her own very much smaller nose wrinkling in confusion.

‘Noooooo,’ Greg replied, a big hearty laugh echoing down his long snout. ‘I eat normal ants, I’m a Giant Anteater because I am a very big Anteater.’

‘Oh,’ said Molly, feeling silly. They both stared at each other for a minute. Molly thought to herself that she shouldn’t have felt so clever knowing something that Greg didn’t when she hadn’t even known what Greg was himself. She was about to say the same thing to Greg when he started to move away.

‘Bye then Greg,’ she called down to him.

‘Bye Molly,’ he said as he walked away. Molly heard a rustling above her and looked up, her Mummy was coming down the tree with a lot of leaves for molly to eat. Molly was very pleased to see her mummy. But she felt bad for saying that Greg was silly. She told her Mummy about Greg and what she had said.

‘Well Molly, that will teach you not to be too proud. There are a lot of things to know in this world, and you will never know them all.’ Molly nodded her head, and then took a leaf and began to munch, and she started to think about what it would be like if there really were giant ants. She wouldn’t like that very much. If that ever happened she would be very glad to have a Giant Anteater around.

I’m all for ambiguity, that ethereal interpretive joy at being left to think something out for yourself, to find your own meaning in something, be it in a lyric, a film, a book, a play, a conversation. Art should always be a fluid and interpretive thing. Where ambiguity should be less welcome, however, is in the world of work. Call me old fashioned but I hate nothing more than being given just enough rope to hang yourself. How hard is it to make clear your intentions? If you want something done in a certain way, you should be explicit in your instructions, something I have learnt to my cost many, many times over. In one place of work in particular, ambiguity led to disaster on a daily basis.

I know it’s generally considered bad form to talk about a place of employment, as I have personally found in the past, but I think I’m safe on this count since the company in question is no longer with us. When I first moved to York one of the first things I looked into was moving into media, thinking that by leaving the north east behind I might finally have the chance to work in the field of my dreams. Previously the closest I had got had been watching the Kevin Costner baseball film Field of Dreams.

I found a job at a small half charity/half enterprise kind of thing, lots of young people wanting to be in media getting the chance to get experience doing a variety of small media projects for local charities, and get minimum wage. Looking back on it now it was the easiest job I ever had, but this was mainly because there was absolutely no direction from the manager, a man whose previous experience extended to having created a couple of basic websites when the internet was still in its infancy. You could just tell that when it was set up he was given the job because he actually knew what the internet was.

Once we got assigned to projects there was no direction, and any there was was so ambiguous as be utterly unhelpful. I was tasked to write a database for a homeless charity, and my only direction was that it should be a database. I was assigned to make an audio guide for the blind for a local historical venue, and told that it should appeal to blind people. But best of all, there was one of our number who was assigned to do the company’s entry to a prestigious multimedia event, and was given no direction at all, other than it should be ‘good.’ Unfortunately for the company’s reputation it was given to someone without even a modicum of talent.

My friend and I used to refer to him as Nathan Barley, except this was when Barley was only the fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home website, where he starred as the lead character in a TV show called ‘C***’ so he never cottoned on to what we were saying. But he fit the profile exactly of a ‘fuck-haired, swaggering cock-about-town, who used to brag to us all about how his neon jeans had cost him £200. He was obsessed with Flash, making these catastrophically awful web animations that were infantile and cheap looking. He had the fashion sense of a mole, and to top it all off, his only real talent was self promotion.

The months went by and the ambiguity of his instructions was answered with ambiguity of answers. Whenever we asked what he was doing out would spill a torrent of excrement about his art and talent, but no evidence of the finished product. Of course the only person who didn’t see it was our boss, and so he was the only one who was surprised when ‘Nathan’ turned round just before the event itself and declared he had nothing to show, save for a couple of half baked flash animations. Almost anyone there could have done a better job, and the company had to pull our, scarring their image irrevocably. I had moved on by then, but was amazed when I bumped into Nathan six months later to find him utterly unfazed by his failure, banging on about his new projects. The companyon the other hand had folded, and some good people lost their jobs

As to what happened to Nathan, well I have no idea, but I like to think that he is now running a magazine somewhere, wearing trainers that cost more than his salary, attending nights of interpretive dance music where a small man painted orange hits a bongo drum every seven minutes, followed by a howl of pain, while all around him haircuts sharp enough to cut mirrors in half talk excitedly about their new projects, before they all go home on their won to their mum’s houses, and cry themselves to sleep, Nathan included. Then, at the age of forty five, he will look at the wardrobe full of expensive trinkets and the decks he keeps only to pretend he is a DJ, and he will hand himself by the dreadlocks he will inevitably have grown by that point. My vision for Nathan, it turns out, is not ambiguous at all.

At some point as I entered my thirties, the notion of the cardigan seemed to become suddenly and inexplicably popular again. I don’t really know how this happened or why, but suddenly emos and other general young folk were taking to the streets in all manner of button down cashmere or knitted wool numbers that previously would have only adorned the elderly or the terminally unfashionable.

I’ve never been a fashionable person really. As I type I have just put together my ensemble for a night out with some very old friends and in the near decade since I last saw them my fashion sense has changed not one iota. I will be rocking the same look of jeans, t-shirt and open check shirts look that I have been wearing in one variation or another for over a decade. Take away the check shirt and the look dates back to childhood. Jeans and a t-shirt, that good old staple.

A few years back, the rules for men seemed to change, and I started to become the kind of old dinosaur I probably would have looked at and mocked mercilessly in my own head. Suddenly it was all skinny jeans, cardigans, tight shirts and guyliner, and of course the aforementioned cardigans. Don’t get me wrong, they all look they have fallen out of a fashion shoot, but what I don’t get is the effort. It looks like such hard work.

I’ve never been the kind of guy who will spend an eternity on my presentation. I keep my hair short because it never looks good so I might as well not bother putting any effort in. I have a beard primarily because it’s easier than shaving. But these days I see all these younglings, with their cardigans and their daft hair and I get it. I am, finally, an old man.

Long time readers will know that long before I was a man so utterly bereft of financial clout, I was once a boy who was supplied with a high cost education at some of the best boarding schools in the country, something I have simultaneously played down and played up to ever since. This project seems to bring out all manner of stories from that time. And so it is today, although for some reason this word seems to have dredged a pretty dark tale from my past, so apologies.

When I first got to my second boarding school, nestled deep in the centre of Canterbury, we were split up into various houses, and twelve of us new boys were ushered into one 12 bed room together, the entire first year intake for our house, none of us really knowing each other. As twelve thirteen year old boys without much adult supervision it was inevitable that pretty quickly factions, interests, bullies and bullied would start to find their natural spot on the social food chain. Unfortunately for me I very quickly fell into the latter category.

This is not a plea for sympathy, it was a very long time ago, was a big part in shaping the person that I am today and all that. To some extent I can see now looking back on it why I was singled out for the bullying. I was even then a little tubby, had greasy hair, and was a moody little git. But still, that first year, and the year after that were both pretty miserable times for me, even if now I can see them as the time when my interest in music became an all-encompassing passion. I was pretty lucky that at the exact time I was going through a teenage hell that Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder and the rest suddenly appeared, and I spent most of my time sat at my desk with my oversized headphones on piping grunge into my ears until everyone else had gone to bed, at which point I would climb into bed and listen to the radio until I fell asleep.

Sleeping was a problem for me back then, not surprising when you consider that all of the mattresses were ancient hand-me-downs that had seen so many previous owners that they were nearly paper thin, I sometimes woke up with spring marks on my face. The quilting was threadbare and itchy and thin, and we only got one pillow. Even now I cannot sleep with a thick duvet or more than one pillow, my sleep patterns irrevocably changed at that time for what now seems like the rest of my life.

As for the bullying itself, looking back on it now I can see that it was actually quite well thought out and clever at times, although maybe that makes it worse, but the lengths that bored intelligent boys will go to in an attempt to amuse themselves are quite long lengths indeed. For instance, there was the time when they pulled all the books and binders to the edge of the shelf on my desk/cupboard unit, then put several bottles of rancid milk underneath them, then said something to piss me off as I walked in the door. This got the desired result that I threw my books down hard enough to send everything tumbling from the shelves, covering pretty much everything I owned in rancid milk.

But the one piece of bullying that sticks out most in my mind is the occasion when on a Friday evening, instead of heading to the canteen for dinner, we twelve filed out of the school to the nearest fish and chip shop for a treat. The shop was tiny and we had to queue for ages. One of the boys ahead of me decided to order a jar of pickled cockles, and I turned my nose up at the sight and smell of it as he opened his jar. We were having one of the rare days when we all got on well together, and as we all headed back I felt pretty good. We ate our chips then settled down to do our homework and general night time routine. Of course for me this meant headphones, possibly a book, and wait until lights out.

When we all went to the bathroom to brush our teeth before bed, there was something different in the air, a sense of stifled laughter that somehow excluded me, something that I experienced quite regularly and had become somewhat immune to by this point, but I still remember walking back to my top bunk in silence, and noting that something was off, different. Looking back on it now it as probably that the bed was made at all. I pulled back my quilt, and was hit by a wave of revulsion as I saw that my whole bed was filled with what had to be the contents of at least a dozen jars of pickled cockles, and the vinegar they came in. My quilt, mattress, sheet, pillow, all drenched in it. All because I had turned my nose up at them a few hours earlier.

Of course when you are the victim of this sort of thing on a regular basis you learn that the best response is to just react calmly and ignore it as best you can. I looked around at my roommates, whose faces at least looked as though they knew they had perhaps gone too far, finally, then I scooped out as much of the horrible little fishy carcasses as I could, then climbed into the bed, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of watching me change the bed. I didn’t sleep a wink, and the next morning I got up and headed to the showers. When I got back I found that my bed had been changed for me. I don’t know who did it, or if it was all of them, but to this day the sight of those little jars of pickled cockles you see in every fish and chip shop sends a shiver down my spine.

I hold now grudge against my bullies now, they probably look back on the escapades of their bored teenage counterparts and cringe, and as I said before, they made me who I am now. Who knows, under different circumstances I could have been one of them. But anyway, when I think of quilting now, I think of that vinegary, fishy smell, and of a very uncomfortable night.

Do you remember the urban legend about the Scottish student who tried to survive on nothing but Porridge when they were skint and ended up getting scurvy? He would apparently make up a massive batch of Porridge and leave it to set, then cut off chunks and fry it, that was until he became Scotland’s first case of Scurvy in 120 years. Or at least so the urban legend goes. I remember hearing that back in my first summer at university and took it as a cautionary tale, I’d been surviving on little else for a fortnight, but took the warning on board and took the advice to broaden my horizons and pilfer the occasional carton of orange juice from the cheapo shop that was working in that summer. I never did get scurvy, or indeed find out if the myth of the Glaswegian Porridge Scurvy Man was ever anything more than that.

Now that I am a semi-grown adult who has taken an interest in cooking and food and all that other grown up nonsense, I look back on my university years and the twenties that followed them and wonder who on earth I actually managed to survive them on the diet that I was on back then. Saying that, now that I am a father I’ve been recently rekindling my porridge obsession with ready brek every morning. But my diet used to be borderline insane.

There was for instance the summer when I ate a frozen pizza every single day for two months, because the local Food Giant ran buy one get one free offers on Goodfellas for the whole summer. Or there was the two weeks when I lived on nothing but milk and Maryland cookies. Or all the times when I decided my dinner was going to be a Sara Lee chocolate cake with a carton of cream.

I’m sure everyone can remember similar bizarre food adventures that they went on over their misspent youths, but two particular recipes stand out in my mind, creations of my own deranged and culinary ignorance and dead palate, things I am even now still rather proud of. I may not have been able to cook anything more sophisticated that a frozen pizza, but I still rustled up these two marvellous concoctions.

• Number 1, The Cholesterol Egg Death Sandwich. Now this is hardly the most original of creations, but it had been remarked by several ex-housemates down the years that it is breathtaking in its lack of respect for the body it is about to enter. Basically take two pieces of bread and melt cheese onto one side of each, then place a fried egg on each, finish off with a slice of fried bread and lashings of barbecue sauce. Put together, eat, and wait for the coronary. If you are feeling extra adventurous you can add bacon, sausages, mushrooms, whatever you can fit into your mouth. I have had dozens, perhaps even hundreds of these sandwiches over the years, and I am still alive, somehow.
• Number 2, Smash Noodles. Take any packet of super noodles and prepare as normal. Take one serving sachet of Smash and prepare as normal. Once both ready, mix together. This will quickly congeal into the tastiest brick of solid awfulness you have ever encountered. Delicious, but you won’t know why.

Put next to these recipes, which would I think you would agree put Heston Blumenthal’s own creations in the shade, the accomplishments of Glaswegian Porridge Scurvy Man seem rather pale, eh? And if any of you celebrity chefs out there wish to use any of the recipes in this blog post, feel free as long as you drive a car full of 50p pieces up to my house.

So, Cheesecake eh? That’s some delicious dairy based desert goodness right there. This is the point where I start to curse the folly of asking for random one word topics. Usually the trick with this sort of thing is to take the word and rake your memory for any occasions which have involved the subject that can be strung out into a mildly entertaining yarn, but cheesecake? I mean they’re delicious and lovely, but I cannot think of a single event which has been made drastically more interesting by the involvement of a cheesecake. So instead, let’s have a short story, eh? After all, nothing says overwrought kitchen sink drama like cheesecake.

Cheesecake

The cracked linoleum took the brunt of her stare, which felt so possessed of hate and malice that she was surprised that it didn’t burst into flames at her feet. The silence of the kitchen seemed filled with the rush of the blood in her ears, and she could not bring herself to look up at him, scared she would not be able to restrain herself should she meet his eyes.

Desperate to do something to occupy herself she moved across the kitchen, her back to him at all times, and the pulled a knife from the drawer, and took it over to the defrosting cheesecake on the side, not a cheap strawberry one but a posh M&S one that had remained in the freezer for months, waiting for the right time. The thought of wasting it now brought the fire back to her and she chanced a look at him.

His face was one of a terrified little boy, and an image flashed in her mind of him as a boy, wearing shorts and standing awkward, but rather than provoke any warmth the image brought only more anger. How dare he stand there in mute fear, having dropped such a bombshell?

The detritus of the valentine’s day meal was stacked on the side, the remnants of the mushroom risotto turning to grey wallpaper paste already. The broken wine glass that she had hurled across the room that was responsible for the blank look on her fiancée’s face was still dripping the last vestiges of its contents on the kitchen top.

Absently she started to jab the cheesecake with the knife, too much anger in the movement. The cheesecake was still frozen at the centre, but she needed to do something. It wasn’t working though, and the rage was starting to subside and give way to an empty hollow feeling, her eyes swelling against her will with water that threatened to tumble down her cheeks. She wanted to remain angry, didn’t want to feel weak, She had felt enough weakness to last a lifetime.

‘Honey?’ He was the first to try and break the tension, but the sound of his voice fell flat, like all the air in between them had suddenly disappeared. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him inching towards her.

‘Honey?’ he asked again, the sound stronger in his voice now. ‘Honey look at me.’

She shook her head, unwilling to give him the opportunity to try and talk his way out of this mess.

‘I have nothing to say to you,’ she said, the voice so small in her throat that she cursed herself for its emptiness.

‘Honey, please? It’s our wedding, he has every right to,’

‘He has no right!’

The rage flooded back through her in an instant, and she barely recognised the primal scream that had come from her, and the look on his face showed that he didn’t either as she whirled in his direction, raising her hand in accusation.

‘You have no idea what that man did to me,’ she started. But he cut across her,

‘You never tell me, that’s why!’ he shouted, his voice no match for hers but the note of defiance in his voice showing he was determined to prove he had done a good thing.

‘That man is dead to me, that’s why,’ she answered, the rush of blood in her ears again, ‘twenty years, twenty years I have done everything I can to avoid thinking of my father. I cut my own mother out of my life to get away from him, and you arrogantly presume to invite him right back in?’ The walls seemed to reverberate with her voice and she jabbed him indignantly in the chest. ‘You may want to project your own idyllic family onto mine but not every family fits into a box, Rob. I will die before I let that man anywhere near my wedding. And the fact that you would do this without even thinking to run it past me tells me that maybe I am marrying the wrong man.’

His eyes were filled with panic now, and she was pleased to have had such an impact, hoping that she had made her point now. But then there was something else in his eyes that went beyond fear, and the colour was draining from his face, his mouth open in a soundless ‘o’.

She looked down and saw the knife, its tip buried in his shirt, surrounded by several other tiny holes, each of which was silently oozing a black stream of blood. She pulled out the knife slowly, the world going slow now like it had when she had broken her leg as a little girl, and she stared at the cheesecake crumbs that clung to the blade, mingling with his blood. The knife fell from her hand in slow motion, and she looked up, their eyes linking in mutual panic for an instant before he fell to the floor at her feet, his shirt slowly changing colour at her feet.

‘Rob?’ she said weakly, but all she got back in response was a gurgle, and she dropped to her knees and cradled his head, dimly aware of the streams of water that were pouring down each cheek. He flashed her one last look of panic, and she mouthed a feeble apology to him, which she hope got through to him in that moment as his eyes went distant.

She sat there in that spot cradling his head until the sun had gone down and come back up again, unable to do anything but cry, and think of the Father she had disowned so long ago.

Twenty years ago he had killed a part of her, and that killing had begotten this death. Eventually she stood and absently packed away the remains of the cheesecake, putting it back in the box and returning it to the fridge, where later policemen and crime scene techs would remove it and examine it, and she went back through to the lounge to phone the police.

I got a bit bored today trying to think of a topic for today’s post, but then I remembered a long forgotten project called 7 days, in which I blogged for 7 days using only suggestions from twitter, and decided to bring it back, except this time getting only one word suggestions. Within an hour of putting out the call I had enough for the whole week, starting with this topic from @lisalovescheese.

Like every boy who grew up in eighties urban Britain the Sasquatch loomed large in the imagination, although we knew him better as Bigfoot, the mythical man beast who I seem to remember was everywhere when I was a kid, from TV investigations to family friendly fare like the (fucking excellent) Bigfoot and the Hendersons. I remember I actually had a Bigfoot scrapbook, but that may say something more about my predisposition to collecting scrapbooks than the focus of their attention. I also had a shark scrapbook, a dinosaur scrapbook, a tank scrapbook, and a second world war scrapbook, filled with pictures of Nazis. I think the child version of me could easily have turned out to be a lot more of a psychopath than the well adjusted blogger I am today.

As a kid growing up in Bournemouth, however, there seemed to be little prospect of ever coming across the hirsute man of legend amongst the seemingly endless rows of suburban domiciles and conurbations, not least of all because the sasquatch of legend is a myth (or not) of North American descent. But I used to read stories of the wild places he would roam and know nothing of wild land, the colourless concrete playgrounds of Thatcher’s Britain and the cold grey seaside with beaches filled with the elderly as far away from woodland as it was possible to get.

All that changed when I was seven and was sent to a school in the countryside,  a bewildering place that seemed completely alien to me at first, nestled in 72 acres of lush Sussex countryside, where on the weekends we would split into wild tribes and camp in upturned tree roots and play in streams and chase rabbits over long rolling hills. If it sounds idyllic then in some ways it was, but of course the grandness of the surroundings were somewhat counterbalanced by the austere place itself. But that’s for another time.

Of course at the school the fanciful imaginations of the 300 or so students, all under the age of thirteen, concocted all manner of fanciful flights of imagination, from elaborate ghost stories about old groundskeepers buried alive with their dogs, to UFO sightings along the distant skyline, and of course, our very own Bigfoot myth.

Now of course when I first heard the rumours of a hairy man-sized animal sighted at the creek on the far ends of the grounds, my mind shot straight to my scrapbook, and I traded on my extensive Sasquatch knowledge to great effect, and before long I seemed to have become the de-facto leader of a group of eager eight year old boys determined to use the knowledge of tracking we got from the tracking and wilderness survival books we had all gotten for Christmas to go and find this mythical beast. Every Sunday after church we would assemble, four slightly terrified but excited boys, and we would head off across the fields.

For a month or so we had no joy, aside from tantalising clues of the existence of something there, an old discarded can, a crisp packet here or there. But we concluded that all of these clues could have easily have come from some other group of boys, or even our own previous forays into the woods. We were getting ready to give up, there were no footprints lie the ones I had read about people finding in the woods of north America, just the muddy imprints of our own Clarks shoes.

One weekend, just as we had abandoned all thoughts of the bigfoot, and were instead using the creek as a good place to spend a Sunday afternoon, we heard something move in the trees along the creek, a loud a startling crack, just as we were having some kind of game, probably cowboys and indians or other such boyish pursuit. We all heard it together, loud as it was, and suddenly the air seemed to freeze and we all stopped in mid sentence and looked furtively at each other, not daring to look in the direction of the noise itself. Slowly we turned, but we could see nothing. We waited, and were rewarded with another loud crack, further away but still close.

Without thinking we started to move in its direction, minds flashing with images of the creature we had built up in our minds, of telling the world, of the praise, the adoration. My heart was racing in my chest, and when I caught sight of a flash of hair, of wild eyes, I froze. The other boys froze as well, the fear and panic coming off us in waves. The eyes fixed us, we fixed them. The face, wild and hairy after a moment broke into a wide, toothless smile.

That was how we met Andy the Tramp, who for three years had been living in and around the creek and the surrounding countryside, and continued to live there until one of the girls at the school stumbled across him and the police came and took him away, and we never saw him again. He wasn’t the bigfoot after all, just a homeless man who had tired of city living and had decided to try the countryside instead. He would always try and avoid us if he could, and after a while we stopped going down to the creek because he weirded us out a bit. But for a few fleeting minutes, I was an adventurer on the edge of discovery, or something excellent.

Indecision is a bitch.  For example, my boss currently can’t seem to decide whether he wants to go on his lunch or not, which is playing havoc with my ability to make this post.  Or take the fact that on Monday morning, already a day behind on this esteemed challenge, I couldn’t decide whether to start on the next post before going out drinking. Which inevitably led to this post being two days late.

I’ve always had a problem with making decisions. Or at the very least I inevitably choose the path of least resistance. Why do something today that you can put off until tomorrow? While I have always suffered from an inability to choose a course of action, back in my teen-aged years this was an almost debilitating affliction, and in the end it cost me all the money I had saved up for University. 

One hot summer’s day, I had a day off from my job at Blockbuster Video (which still ranks as the best job I ever had, even now) and so a few of us grabbed the train from Basildon to Southend for a day at the seaside. Our ulterior motive was to purchase some weed, as there was a drought in Basildon at the time.

Once in Southend, we started to ask around in all the usual places, and eventually came across a very scary looking fella, who took our money and disappeared. He said he could only buy in bulk, so we ended up forking out all the money we had on us. We waited for an hour or so, and just as we decided that we’d been skanked out of all our money, he returned. But this time he had a group of thick skulled thugs to accompany him. ‘I couldn’t get any smoke for you, so I got you these pills instead,’ he said, menace and violence in his eyes.

Now, none of us in our party were interested in anything more than smoke (I have never gone past smoking weed) and so we started to argue that this wasn’t what we wanted, and so please could we have the money that we gave him back, please?  He refused, and his group of associates started to square off for a fight.

Sensing immediately that this wasn’t a fight we were about to win, outnumbered as we were two to one, we retreated immediately, without either the drugs or the money in hand.  Displeased overall with our day’s visit, we decided to call it quits and return home.  The only problem being that we no longer had the funds to get the train back.

Southend station was one of the first to have installed ticket barriers leading on to the platform, making it almost impossible to get onto a train for free, and so we pooled what little money we had and decided to buy a single to the next station on the route, allowing us access to the train without paying the full fare.  If we saw inspectors coming along, we’d simply alight at the next station and wait for the next train.

And so we boarded the train, all rather pleased with the duplicitous nature of our entry, feeling somehow that we’d finally had a small victory in a day of failure. The ticket man even came up and checked our tickets while they were still valid, before disappearing to the other end of the train. We laughed and joked and felt better.  All up to the moment when we looked up to find a British Transport Police officer stood right next to us.

He asked to see our tickets, making it plainly clear with his tone that he knew what he was about to find.  He looked at me first, and I decided that I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.  I pretended to look in my pocket, and said I couldn’t find my ticket, until he ordered me to empty my pockets.

‘Oh, there it is.’

‘Are you aware that this ticket doesn’t take you this far?’

‘Doesn’t it?

‘No.  You need to make up the rest of the fare.’

‘I don’t have any money.’

‘Then you will have to pay the rest of the fare, and a £25 fine. Can I take your name please?’

And this is where I got really foolish.  About a week previously I had split up with my girlfriend, who I discovered had been cheating on me with her ex, who was also now incidentally a heroin user.  Needless to say, I was miffed by this, and without thinking, I blurted out his name, presumably with my brain deciding that the least he owed me was 30 quid or so for stealing my girlfriend.  Although to be fair, I had stolen her off him to begin with.  My friends looked at me in shock.  Without looking up, the policeman continued. ‘And your address?’

Ah.

I hadn’t thought this through. I didn’t know his address. What should I do? Give mine? Make up an address? Admit defeat and come clean? Instead, I simply stammered, feeling my face grow redder and redder. The policeman looked up from his notepad and fixed me with a stare, making it even worse. Now I couldn’t even remember my own name and address.  There was a thumping sound in my head.

He let me stand there in my own shame and indecision, my mind literally frozen, for what seemed like hours (although, given that it was only a half hour train journey, that seems unlikely) before slowly he said;

‘That’s not your name, is it?’

I shook my head, and then proceeded to answer every question truthfully. When I had finished, he gave me a caution and told me that my fine would now be for a higher charge, and I may need to go to court. I sat down slowly, my face undoubtedly still supernova red. Needless to say, my friends made no such mistakes, and gladly reeled off their names and addresses.

Two months later, having elected not to defend myself in court, I was handed an additional £250 fine, on top of the £25.  I paid it out of the money that I had spent the summer saving towards University, and as a result went to Sunderland with about £15 in my account.

Looking back on it now, I think it’s safe to assume that it wasn’t my finest hour.

I can’t really claim to be a huge authority on Graphic novels, having what would be described by most comic book geeks as ‘a pitiful collection.’ But I do love a good one, so here is my entirely subjective list of the graphic novels that have really moved or tickled me since the tender age of 12, when I first found a copy of Aliens vs Predator in my newsagent.

1. The Walking Dead.

Technically not a single graphic novel, but instead a continual story that follows a rag-tag group of survivors through a zombie apocalypse. What really moves me about this is the wonderfully rich ways the characters are written, coupled with the sparse but haunting style of the drawing. Always gripping, frequently hilarious, this is a must have for me.

2. Chasing Dogma.

As with many things in geek life, Kevin Smith does it best.  This tale of exactly how Jay and Silent Bob make their way between the films Chasing Amy and Dogma is the only graphic novel to have made me laugh out loud from start to finish. It’s good enough that Kevin Smith was able to plagiarise half of his own work for the plot of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

3. Watchmen.

Of course. A seminal moment in comic book history, and like so much of what Alan Moore has done, breathtaking from end to end. The interweaving plots, the use of seemingly real news clippings, and best of all the comic-within-a-comic Tales Of The Black Freighter just make this the most ambitious and perfectly realised graphic novel ever produced.

4. Daredevil Vol 1: Guardian Devil

Another Kevin Smith entry, but this couldn’t be any further from Chasing Dogma. The character of Daredevil has always been intriguing, but Smith’s own weaving of his religious tale around a taut and suspenseful noir backdrop is for me the best tale from one of my favourite characters. Genuinely moving in places, the conflicts within Matt Murdoch have always been what drives Daredevil’s books, and Smith and Queseda capture that brilliantly.

5. Civil War.

Normally event comics are a nightmare. The studio, in this case Marvel, realises there are just too many plots in their universe and enlist someone to do a bit of a spring clean.  Cue needless fights between friends, enemies switching sides, yadda yadda. But Civil War, which examines the very Watchmen-esque possibility of unmasking and registering all superheroes for the sake of humanity is perfectly done, and the battle scenes are superb. The moment when Peter Parker unmasks at a news conference is one of the tensest moments in comic book history.

Geeks, feel free to tell me how utterly wrong my choices are…..GO!

Dear Rosie.

As I write this, your Mum has gone to work, and you are sat in the lounge in your ball pit watching Cbeebies. You just came in to give me a cuddle and I told you that I was writing you a letter, and you told me (in your roundabout way) that you didn’t want to grow up, so wouldn’t be able to read it. I hate to break it to you, but you are going to have to get older, so one day you might stumble across this.

Since I set myself this test, this was the one topic that has me genuinely daunted.  There are so many things I could say to you, so much advice I could give you, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few days, and there is one piece of advice that I can give you that hopefully can help you later in life.  It’s something that it has taken me most of my adult life to work out, and I offer it to you in the hope that it doesn’t take you as long.

Don’t ever regret your decisions or your actions, for they have all brought you to this point now, and for good or ill, they will all inform the path that your life takes. You wont ever know what that path is until it’s upon you, so enjoy the path you are on, and let it take you where it will.

This may seem like strange advice for a parent to give their child, given the emphasis we all put on making the ‘right’ decisions.  Maybe by the time you are reading this we are hassling you about your GCSE subjects, and how those choices affect your life, but the truth is that it is the smallest decisions that shape your life, just as much as the ones that seem to be big decisions at the time.  Every decision you ever make is a big one, and the truth is that nobody ever gets those decisions right all of the time.  I’ll give you one example, a small incident that has shaped everything that followed.

When I was seven, I was sat at school, alone on the swings, listening to a tape of Kylie Minogue.  Even back then I listened to a lot of music, mostly tatty 80′s pop, but when I was sat on those swings a boy called Ben came up to me and asked me what I was listening to. I told him, and he told me that I should listen to a band called Guns N Roses. Now at this point I could have dismissed him or forgotten the conversation, but I didn’t. Next time I was home I begged your Granddad for some money to go and buy the tape. And that was the tape that got me into music, something that has stayed with me for all of my life, and which has informed so many of the decisions that followed.

Now, I know that no matter what, I would have ended up becoming a music obsessive. It’s in my blood, and I hope that you will share the same passion for music that both your Mum and I have.  But I often wonder what would have happened if Ben had told me to listen to The Smiths instead.  Would my musical journey have been altered by a different point of entry? Would I have had the same friends at college if I had gotten into indie music rather than rock music? What if he had gotten my into the other new scene at the time, dance music?

When I went to Sunderland to go to university (again an utterly random decision based largely on the fact that I wanted to move as far away as possible from your Grandparents, who I wasn’t really getting on that well with at the time, in part because I kept blaring Korn and Marilyn Manson at top volume from my stereo) my entire social circle was based around the music I listened to.  I started a DJ night, and my love of music deepened even further.  I formed a band, and because of that, and the friends I had, I stayed in the north east for four years after I finished University.  Would I have done that if i hadn’t had those passions, those friends? No.

When I was still living in the North East I met someone, and when they left Sunderland I went with them to York.  When I was there it was the music that I loved led me to the friends I met here, a lot of whom you now call Auntie and Uncle because to me they are family.  But without that first Guns n Roses tape I wouldn’t have met them, wouldn’t have been in York.

And this brings me to my final point. Under no illusions do I want you to think that I’ve always been happy, or that I’ve always made the right decisions. There have been many times that I could have made a decision that would have improved my career, or taken me to new places, but I can’t ever change those decisions, and I will never regret them.  How can I ever regret anything? Even the slightest difference in my life could have taken me on a different path.  If I had never come to York, if I had taken a different job when I was here, or if I had skipped one particular works party then I would never have met your Mum. And if I had never met your mum, then you wouldn’t be reading this at some unseen point in the future, and I wouldn’t be writing this while you run around in your pyjamas, placing brightly blocks into a shape sorter. And that is a world I would never want to imagine.

I can’t ever regret any of the choices I made because without them, you wouldn’t be here, and no matter what happens for the rest of my life,I know I will  always have made those choices right because of that.  And so whenever you sit there and regret some boy you didn’t talk to, or exam that didn’t go well, or job interview that you missed, don’t worry too much, because that path you are on is still there.  And besides, no matter what road you take, what choices you make, none of them will ever mean that we love you any less, or that we won’t be there to pick you up when you fall down.