mature

From a very young age, I was strangely mature. I don’t mean physically, although I had a growth spurt at the age of twelve that saw me move quickly from distinctly average to unusually tall within the space of a few months. 

At the age of eight, I jumped a year into the school’s scholarship stream. Not surprisingly, given that I was now surrounded by kids at least a year older than me, my lack of physical and emotional maturity was probably painfully apparent to everyone. As a result, I think I kept myself to myself and tried not to stand out too much. 

This jump in academic year meant that I was going to spend two years in the sixth form, as my former peers caught up with me. I was being prepared for a scholarship exam that I sat when I was just turned thirteen. By now, I was Head of School. Until now, I haven’t really given this much thought; this was just a sequence of events that happened to me, and I dealt with them as they came along, not giving them much thought. Looking back though, I was by now noticeably more emotionally mature (in some respects) than my contemporaries. Maybe this was because I’d been forced to grow up faster when I jumped a year, although I don’t think this explains my over-developed sense of responsibility. I was the very model of an upstanding schoolboy, and I did everything by the book. I imagine I must have been insufferable, but my teachers recognised strong sense of duty in me and were happy to put me in a position where I was their representative amongst the pupils. Head of School. I had a little yellow badge announcing my status, and I wore it proudly. I used to get invited to spend my breaks in the staff room, having tea and biscuits with my teachers. Jesus, can you imagine? 

 I’m not sure what happened to that kid, to be honest. I think that was my absolute peak of maturity and responsibility and it’s largely been all downhill since then. Imagine realising that you peaked when you were thirteen years old. 

Of course, at thirteen, I wasn’t really mature at all. Apart from anything else, it’s hard to think of a more unnatural environment for a child than to strip them away from their parents and to throw them into a largely single sex environment at a boarding school. It’s a wonder that anyone who experienced this sort of culture grew up to be even remotely well-adjusted. Assuming that anyone did, of course. 

I changed schools, and by the time I was eighteen, I was a very different kind of a person. I was angry at the world – I suppose a lot of teenagers are – but I was becoming aware of the shortcomings of my environment. I’d grown up in a mostly single-sex environment, but I was now interested in girls but with absolutely no idea of how to go about talking to one, never mind anything else. I was angry and frustrated about that but also began to kick out against authority figures. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I was also smart enough not to show this rebellion obviously. I never got caught drinking or smoking or anything like that, and I never got summoned to the headmaster’s office. No, but I did spend my time challenging what I saw as stupid and arbitrary rules and enjoyed asking difficult and awkward questions at every opportunity. I used to edit a weekly school newsletter that was pinned up in every common room across the school. The teacher who supervised us as we pulled this together every Thursday afternoon used to tell me that there was always a queue of other teachers wanting to talk to him about the latest edition every Friday breaktime in the staff room. To his eternal credit, he never once tried to stop me publishing what I fancied. Perhaps I had a well-developed understanding of where the line was and never quite stepped over it. I used to write editorials satirising the sermons we had in chapel, for goodness’ sake. Jesus, what a precocious little shit I was. 

And yet..and yet… That sense of responsibility and that firm grip on right and wrong never disappeared. I used to find it fascinating and frustrating that my school seemed to think that authority was derived from success in sport, particularly in rugby. Almost without exception, the prefects were picked from amongst the first XV. To my mind, although I quite liked a lot of these guys, I was often acutely aware of how nonsensical it was to pick your leaders from people who happened to be good at sport. Frankly, a lot of them weren’t really very bright. There was a part of me that still thought that I was going to be picked by my housemaster to be head of house. Although I was never really actively in trouble, I did spend quite a lot of my time being an awkward, contrary little shit. Not surprisingly, when the time came, my housemaster picked someone else. I was annoyed, and also stupid enough to be quite vocal about what I thought about his choice. He picked someone who cut quite an intimidating figure and was likely to be able to scare people into behaving themselves. That was never going to be me, but I spent a couple of days moping about, carping about the decision and quoting Martin Luther to anyone who would listen: 

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise 

What eighteen-year-old walks around quoting Martin Luther? Apparently, me. 

Looking back now, I can still see that thirteen-year-old with an over-developed sense of responsibility. I do a lot of volunteering: I coach athletics; I guide blind runners and have worked with Guide Dogs for the Blind as a sighted volunteer; I’m a trustee, director and company secretary of a domestic violence charity; I’m on a parkrun core team; I am always amongst the first to volunteer at my rowing club and spent my whole weekend last week on a BBQ to help raise money for the club. That kid is still in there somewhere. So, it must be said, is the angry, Martin Luther quoting eighteen-year-old. The little company where I work has just been taken over by an international corporation. We had an away day with them all last week in the Cotswolds. The dress code for dinner was “dress to impress”. Ugh. I wore a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. 

Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

somebody I used to know...

For most of the time I've been in my monthly writing group, I've been doing a lot of "magical realism" style of fiction. I seem drawn to things like talking animals and a world that's like ours, only slightly different. In an attempt to try and get away from this, and in a style that's probably familiar to long-time readers of this blog, I've been delving deeper into my memories and dredging out things that I've never articulated before. It's been a rewarding and also occasionally alarming process. Cathartic, I think.

Anyway, here's something I wrote over the summer. It's all true, albeit obviously only viewed from my perspective. It's the story of somebody I used to know: Hugo.

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To most people, Boris Johnson must seem like a character out of a book: he’s Billy Bunter made flesh; he’s Just William, he’s Flashman. It’s present in the ruffled hair, the snatches of Latin and in the classical references that pepper every speech. You can even see it in the way that, although he is clearly dressed expensively, he still somehow looks as though he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. It takes a lot of money to look that scruffy. Yes. Johnson – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – is every bit the caricature of the English public schoolboy of popular imagination. 

We should probably be used to this by now: since Robert Walpole became the first, Britain has been served by fifty-five prime ministers. Nearly all of those enjoyed a private education, and fully twenty of them (starting with Walpole himself and finishing with the present incumbent) were educated at Eton. Is it really any wonder that people with this sort of educational background often seem entitled, or that most of us think it’s normal to be governed by people like this? The history of our democracy tells us that both these things are true. 

Johnson likes to present himself as a man of the people. He loves to visit factories and warehouses and to dress up in the clothes of the normal working people of this country, to pretend that he’s just like us, when clearly, he is nothing like us. Can you actually imagine going out to a pub for a drink with Boris Johnson and trying to have a normal conversation with him? He doesn’t seem like a real person at all, does he? 

He might seem like an alien to many people, but he’s all too familiar to me, because I went to school with people like Johnson and I’ve seen this kind of easy, unearned self-confidence before. 

I first met Hugo when we were both thirteen and were being shown around our boarding house on the first day of term at our new school. It’s quite an overwhelming experience. Both of us had been to boarding schools before but being dropped off by your parents and being left alone with the eighteen-year-old prefects is legitimately terrifying. I’d been a pretty big fish in the small pond of my prep school: literally. As well as being head boy, a growth spurt also meant that I was also comfortably the tallest pupil in the school. That first afternoon being shown around my new school by two members of the school first XV rugby team (flanker and second row forward) was a pretty clear demonstration that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. 

There were fourteen of us in my year and Hugo didn’t make an immediate impression on me. I’m sure he didn’t make much of me, either. Probably we were both just overwhelmed by the whole experience. A handful of the other boys had been at my prep school, so I likely gravitated towards the people I knew. Likewise, one of the other new boys had been at Hugo’s old school, and I’m sure the two of them were drawn to each other as we tried to take it all in without drawing anybody’s attention. Now was a time for blending in, not sticking out. No one is that confident. 

It didn’t take too long after that for Hugo to make his mark. He was one of those boys who seemed to be full of boisterous energy and enthusiasm. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he was still a pretty big lad. At the age of thirteen, like a puppy, Hugo seemed to have huge paws, a massive head and a general lack of coordination, but he was also very physical and liked a bit of rough-and-tumble. He was pretty thoughtless and never really seemed to give any thought to any possible consequences, but he seemed to lack malice. He would act on impulse, get into trouble, but then be so charming that he always seemed to get away with it. 

It was hard to dislike Hugo. 

I liked him.
Everyone liked him. 

The environment at a school like this means that you spend an awful lot of time with the people in your house, and none more so than the people in your year. From that very first day onward, we would spend almost every waking hour of every day together, including weekends. We weren’t necessarily in the same classes, but we would eat together, play sport together, muck about together and sleep in the same dormitories. Over the course of five years living in each other’s pockets like this, you really get to know someone, for better and for worse. To make things even more interesting and to spice up the mix, most people also go through a lot of physical and emotional changes between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. There was very little privacy here and nowhere to hide. You learn to bury your emotions deep in an environment like this lest you show anything that makes you seem weak or makes you vulnerable. 

Hugo and I knocked along pretty well. We were very different people: neither of us were particularly good at sport, but I was pretty academic, and we tended to hang out with very different groups of friends. I spent a lot of time listening to music, reading and making a few, really good friends (many of whom are still my very closest friends today). Now I think if it, I can’t actually remember Hugo having any particularly good friends, but he was popular enough, and was certainly better-known around the wider school. As I said, there were fourteen people in my year in my House, around 100 people in total in my House and something like 900 people in the school as a whole. It was quite self-contained little galaxy of overlapping orbits. If Hugo hadn’t been in my year in my House, I’m not sure I would have had any reason to know him, and might actually have actively avoided him, but as things were, we spent a lot of time together and got on without ever really being bosom-buddies. At one point, we actually shared a two-bed dormitory. 

I think it was the arrival of the girls that changed everything. At our school, the first three years were entirely single sex, but as you entered the sixth form, girls were allowed to join the school (lucky them!). They had their own boarding houses, of course, but they joined our classes and they were assigned a boys’ boarding house for their meals. To the fourteen of us in my year in my house, now aged around seventeen, we now suddenly had four girls join us at mealtimes. It’s a bit of a shock for all concerned. It’s overly simplistic to say that it was the very presence of the girls that brought about the change in our relationships, but I think it’s fair to say that they were a prism that revealed a side of our characters that we’d never really been forced to look at too closely before. 

Like most teenage boys, we talked about girls all the time. Most of us had been at almost entirely single-sex boarding schools since the age of seven or eight, so we had no practical experience to speak of. The arrival of girls into our everyday lives was like the arrival of a foreign species. I can only imagine how bizarre an experience this must have been for the girls. For us boys, we suddenly saw these people with whom we had shared nearly every waking moment of the last three years, and thought that we knew pretty well, suddenly start to behave quite differently. 

For myself, I had very little idea how to begin to talk to these strange creatures, but I did have a fairly strong sense of how I did not want to behave. Hugo, who had often regaled us in the dormitory after lights out with tales of his supposed success with women, had a very different sense of how he wanted to behave. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a predator; women were not people in their own right but they were something to be pursued, consumed and then dropped. He was pretty cold-blooded about it too. I remember one poor girl, Alice, who soaked up the full focus of his charm. She was a year younger than us, seventeen, when he wooed her. She thought she loved him. Eventually, he got what he wanted and he more-or-less came charging out of his study to tell us all about it. He left her in tears and never spoke to her again. It felt wrong then and it feels even worse now I type those words. That is literally what he did, and I found it impossible to consider him charming when I knew that he was capable of this sort of behaviour. 

I haven’t spoken to Hugo since the day we finished our A-levels and left the school to head off to University. We have friends in common, of course, and he has sporadically tried to make contact with me over social media, but I’ve always declined. I think he has kids now, but after leaving school, he seems to have drifted through life on a sea of privilege and lack of consequence. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t had to work too hard for anything that has come his way in life. Perhaps he’s changed. Perhaps he hasn’t. 

There were a lot of people like Hugo at my school. 

Barack Obama observed of David Cameron in his autobiography that he had “the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life.” That phrase really resonated with me. I know far too many people from my school days to whom that phrase could be equally applied, not least Hugo. Many ended up working in banking in places like Hong Kong and Sydney. None, as far as I’m aware, have gone into politics, but whenever I see Boris Johnson, I can’t help but think of Hugo and how much collateral damage someone like that is capable of causing to the people around them.

potatoes...

I don’t really believe in bucket lists. I’m not a fan of keeping lists of things I want to do before I die. Partly, this is because it seems a nonsense, as the simple truth is that no one knows when they’re going to die. If you could die tomorrow, why are you writing a list instead of getting out of the door? Mostly though, my objection probably comes from how lucky I am to have done some incredible things in my life, so a bucket list seems kind of redundant. 

 I’ve swum in the chilly waters off Kaikoura in New Zealand as hundreds of dusky dolphins swam around me and leapt over me. I was told that you need to sing to them through your snorkel to keep them interested in you and to stop them just swimming off when they get bored. As a result, I’ve discovered that they’re big fans of “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. 

I’ve skydived from 10,000m above the Skeleton Coast in Namibia, where the big dunes of the Namib desert meet the ocean, freefalling for a seemingly endless 30 seconds before the parachute opened, surprisingly filling me with mild disappointment. Here I learned that it’s okay to pack your main parachute up in a slightly slapdash way as long as you’re careful with the reserve as that’s the really important one. 

I’ve done a lot of diving too: on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, in the Maldives with giant Manta Ray doing a graceful dance together no more than a meter above my head, or along the edge of a canyon into the deep ocean surrounded by literally three hundred sharks, all bigger than me and a few casually swimming along behind me as if to see if I was worth the effort of a closer look. It’s at moments like these when you really begin to appreciate your place on the food chain. 

I’ve walked with lions and wolves, seen sperm whale, humpback and orca, kayaked with baby seal, stood within 2m of an adult male grizzly bear, watched dawn breaking above the jungle temples of Ankor Wat… So there’s no question that I’ve been very lucky. 

All this brings perspective; when you experience the elemental beauty of nature first-hand like this, it’s not hard to understand your own existence as comparatively insignificant, in the most wonderful way. All our sound and fury ultimately signifies nothing, and that’s okay. 

The time I felt this most acutely was standing on the sides of Mount Tungurahua in Ecuador as it erupted. Ecuador is a small country, barely the size of the UK, but it contains in that space an enormous diversity of landscapes, from high Andean paramo all the way through to Amazonian jungles (not to mention the Galapagos Islands). We were on a three-week trip and wanted to cram in as much of this as we reasonably could. We hiked the high Andes up to about 5000m, we watched hummingbirds feed, fished for piranha in tiny jungle rivers, brushed tarantula off the benches before sitting down to dinner, drank fresh passionfruit juice and picked coffee berries straight from the tree. Banos is a city in the middle of the country and is renowned for its hot springs and adventure activities. I’ve never seen the appeal of bungee jumping, but we did mountain bike along mountain gorges and, on our first evening in town, we took a trip up the town’s volcano (as our guide would say, the hot springs are not for free) Now, when you think about active volcanos, the chances are that you’re thinking of Pompeii or Krakatoa, but not all volcanos are quite that explosive. Tungurahua means “throat of fire” in Quichua, and although it is erupting and you actually have to drive over the pyroclastic flows that have poured over the road to reach the town itself, you’re not seriously in danger of being overrun by lava. The town does have volcano warning alarms, but apparently the lava moves so slowly that you will have around three days to actually leave the town before you’re really in trouble. Mind you, the volcano dominates the skyline and, as you drive into the town, you can see the column of smoke and ash it produces from a hundred miles away. It’s quite an impressive sight. 

That first evening, we drove up the volcano before it got dark. It’s quite steep and narrow in places, and as we slowly wound our way up the narrow, wooded tracks, we came across a tiny, wizened old lady dressed in the traditional costume of the region, complete with natty woollen Spanish-style trilby hat (a legacy of the Spanish colonisation). There’s only one path up or down the mountain, so we stopped and – through our guide – offered this lady a lift, which she gratefully accepted. As we continued up the mountain, we began to be aware of the rumbling of the erupting mountain. “Ah,” said this tiny, birdlike lady, cackling delightedly, “Mother Tungurahua is putting baked potatoes into the oven for her children”. 

 Before long, we dropped her off to make her own way, and as she smiled and waved, we continued up the mountain. Not long after that, I was standing in the gathering dusk, listening to the sound of an erupting volcano and feeling the ground rumbling beneath my feet. I have never before in my life felt quite so connected with our planet whilst also feeling utterly insignificant. It was, in the most literal way possible, awe inspiring. 

Our precious planet is huge and beautiful and life is short. Later that day, I ate guinea pig for the first time. I don’t recommend it. Tarantula is nicer and neither are a patch on crickets fried in sesame oil served as a bar snack. Travel really does broaden the mind… as well as the palate.

round and around...

In the process of clearing out the 10,000 surplus emails in my inbox, I've come across another post that I wrote for someone else (in 2009). As I'm loathe to let good(?) content go to waste, and because I find it interesting (even if no-one else does).... I'm (re-)posting it here.  Enjoy. I still have a soft spot for Nik Kershaw.

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Memories Can't Wait.... a song that reminds me of a friend (originally written for Ben on Silent Words Speak Loudest, or possibly The Art Of Noise. I can't remember)

I didn't grow up in an especially musical household.  Neither of my parents are particularly into music and because it had never formed a large part of their lives, it was only natural that my two brothers and I didn't initially form much of an interest ourselves.  I've always found it a little hard to understand how two people, both just five or six years younger than Paul McCartney and presumably slap bang in the prime demographic for the Beatles, could have both have missed out on such a vibrant period of British music, but miss it they did.  My mum tells me that she owned a copy of Revolver and my dad had a pile of "Top of the Pops" LPs that he had inherited from his father's pub, but their hearts weren't in it and our house was largely devoid of background music.

My first real musical exposure, then, came instead from regular visits to the house of a friend just down the road.  Like me, Will had two siblings, although where I was a middle child, he was the youngest by several years.  I don't know if his parents were especially into music, but his dad worked for Rotel, manufacturers of high quality stereo equipment, and their house was naturally filled with top-notch hi-fis.  Although we spent a lot of our time together mucking about with computer games, playing with our Star Wars figures and riding our bikes outdoors, we did occasionally mess around with the record player and with his brother and sisters' 12" singles.  Although I can remember listening to the likes of Murray Head's "One Night in Bangkok", a bit of Level 42 and "Hole in My Shoe" by Neil from the Young Ones, the artist that always stood out the most for me was Nik Kershaw.  Both "Human Racing" and "The Riddle" were released in 1984, and we used to sit entranced by songs such as "I Won't Let the Sun Go Down on Me", "Human Racing", "Wouldn't It Be Good", "Wide Boy" and - especially - "The Riddle".  Our listening coincided with our reading of "Masquerade", the book of illustrations for children by Kit Williams that concealed clues to the location of a golden hare hidden somewhere in the UK.  The book was first published in 1979, but the hare had only (apparently) been discovered in 1982, so the idea of riddles was fresh in our minds as we tried to work out what on earth Nik Kershaw was trying to tell us when he spoke of trees by rivers, holes in the ground and old men of Arran.

Kershaw has, of course, subsequently revealed that there is no meaning to "The Riddle" at all, but to our ten year old minds it was a puzzle well worth trying to solve.  Besides, it was (and remains) a fantastic record, and through it I began to discover a love of music that has stayed with me to this day.  I can't say that I listen to Kershaw very much any more, but he has the proud distinction of being the artist who created the first two albums that I ever bought with my own money.  Better yet, whenever I think of him, I can't help but think of the letter that I wrote to Jimmy Savile in the summer of 1984 asking if he could fix it for me and for my best friend Will to meet our hero.  Saville never wrote back, sadly, and he certainly never fixed it for me.  Although his parents still live down the road from my folks, I lost touch with Will a few years ago after we both went to University.  Musically we had drifted apart, with him baffled by my love of heavy metal and me a touch confused by his love of Lenny Kravitz.  We'll always have Nik Kershaw though, and whenever I hear the chiming opening chords of "The Riddle", I'm reminded of my first best friend.

here's mud in your eye...

In the process of clearing out about 10,000 emails (I'm not even joking) from my account, I stumbled across this review I wrote of Glastonbury 2009 for one of my old blogging friends, Postculturist aka Queenie, aka Lizzie aka Urban Fox. Her website doesn't seem to exist anymore, and it's sort-of topical and kind of interesting, so I thought I'd reproduce it in full here before expunging the email into the digital void forever.

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"Here's mud in your eye".

If Worthy Farm's Ministry of Propaganda has anything to do with it, and they were at it from the very first day, then the 2009 Glastonbury Festival will be hailed as the best ever. This is the view that will be slavishly be repeated in the rapturous reviews that will now be appearing across all available media outlets, print, broadcast and online.

Perhaps we've all been seduced by an affable 73 year old farmer and his Utopian ideals and charitable work, but of all the festivals, Glastonbury is the one that is most readily given a critical pass. Yes, Glastonbury has raised millions of pounds for charities like Oxfam, Water Aid and Greenpeace, but this is no hippy idyll and big corporations are everywhere you look: the beer is provided by Carlsberg; the mobile phone partner for the Festival is Orange; The Guardian and Q Magazine are the official print media partners and both have their own venues on the site. In case you missed their saturation coverage by actually being at the Festival, the BBC are all over Glastonbury like a rash, sending more than 400 employees and flooding their networks with saturation coverage. I actually thought that Steve Lamacq might be stalking me at one point this year, so often did I run into him.

Those parts of the site that made the Festival different are slowly bur surely disappearing: Lost Vagueness disappeared after 2007, The Leftfield Stage, run by the Unions and a place for campaigning, watching Billy Bragg play and Tony Benn speak, disappeared after 2008. As long as the Green Fields still exist and the Glade is still hosting endless gigs by Ozric Tentacles and Gong, then I suppose there's still hope. There can't be many people that really miss the drug dealers selling Class A narcotics on the bridges between the two main stages, but surely there's no denying that the individuality and anarchic edge of the festival is slowly disappearing, to be replaced by something altogether more corporate and conventional. There are now even special entrances for hospitality pass holders at the pedestrian gates, for goodness sake.

Given that I consider it essential to take a flask of homemade Mojitos and a cool bag filled with ice and fresh mint, I can hardly complain about the festival becoming middle class, but I do I like to think that I was at least a little less middle class than the couple carrying the flag proudly proclaiming that they were "Tougher than the Rest" because they'd got married in Italy and were honeymooning at the Festival. Tougher than the rest of the tennis club maybe. To steal a line from Jimmy Carr, they're not so much hard as 'al dente'. The Festival has become a place to be seen, something that you do to say that you've done it, somewhere you go with your mates to celebrate a stag or a hen do.

As a relative veteran of eight Glastonbury's since 1993, including several very wet ones, I tend to pack for the worst and hope for the best, I expect the toilets to be a little more basic than the one I have at home and I make do without a shower for a few days. I find it amazing to see people moaning to their friends as they struggle through the mud in their flip-flops and pull faces in the queues for the toilets as they push toilet tissue up their noses to try and avoid the smell. I know it's not something you would normally do, but does your shit not stink? Do you really need to straighten your hair, curl your eyelashes and have room for your own shower tent at your campsite? Is life not worth living if you don't bring your own stereo system into the campsite at a music festival?

Perhaps I'm just grumpy because it took me more than 8 hours on Wednesday afternoon to drive the last 25 miles onto site; because it inevitably started to pour with rain on my first full day on the site; because I barely saw a dozen bands over the whole weekend that I really enjoyed; because I found myself drawn to the main stages again instead of making a bit more of an effort to get around the rest of the site; because the sound at Maximo Park at the Queen's Head on Thursday was so appalling; because the crowd trying to see Rolf Harris at the Jazz World stage was so predictably large and so un-stewarded that we couldn't even get close; because I fell asleep during the much anticipated, but ultimately very uncompromising set by Bruce Springsteen on Saturday night (frankly, I can't top Dorian Lynskey's simile in the Guardian that watching the Boss play the Pyramid was "like someone standing in front of a magic-eye picture and being told that, if he stares long enough, he will see the Statue of Liberty but who finds, two-and-a-half hours later, that it's still just squiggly lines")

Was this the best Festival ever? Well according to such backstage luminaries as Harry Enfield and Peaches Geldof, then it certainly was.

Me? I'm not so sure.

Still, although it might not have been a classic Glastonbury, that's not to say that I didn't enjoy myself. Highlights for me included: finally arriving onsite after 12 hours in the car, that first pint of Burrow Hill cider at the Cider Bus, getting to wear my fedora for four days solid, Neil Young's seemingly endless false endings to "Rockin' In The Free World", listening to the early morning rain on my tent, the Fleet Foxes, that ridiculous rumour that Michael Jackson was dead, Lily Allen - yes, Lily Allen - on the Pyramid, watching the British and Irish Lions on a big screen in the blazing sunshine, Status Quo, Tom Jones, Nick Cave ripping the heads off a sleepy Sunday afternoon crowd with a coruscating rendition of "The Mercy Seat", Blur's stately rendition of those beautiful sad, slow songs in the middle of their set.....

My absolute favourite moment? Standing in a massive crowd in front of the Pyramid Stage on Sunday afternoon, surrounded by all of my friends for perhaps the only time in the whole festival, singing and dancing along to Madness. I love Madness. They're one of first bands that I can remember, and I haven't seen them performing live since Madstock in 1994, when they were supported by A Guy Called Gerald, Aswad and Ian Dury & the Blockheads. They have a new album to promote, but essentially they gave the crowd exactly what they wanted and played all the old songs we remember: One Step Beyond, The Prince, Night Boat to Cairo, Embarrassment, House of Fun, My Girl, Baggy Trousers, Wings of a Dove, Shut Up, Grey Day, Bed & Breakfast Man.... when they played Our House, I looked around to see (almost) everyone singing and dancing their hearts out with huge smiles on their faces, and found myself uncontrollably welling up with tears. It's a nostalgic song, and I was filled with nostalgia for my childhood, for the friends around me and for this moment at this brilliant festival. I pushed my sunglasses back down onto my face, turned back to the stage and continued to dance happily as the band brought their families out onto the stage to share the moment with them and with us.

Same time next year?

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Though I say so myself, I think that stands up okay!

My last visit to the Glastonbury festival was 2016, the year I heard the result to the referendum when my phone pushed an update in the early hours of the morning in my tent. I actually haven't missed it all that much, to be honest. I enjoyed watching this year's virtual festival, watching some iconic sets that I actually attended on tv for the first time. Will I be hurrying back? Well, never say never, but - whisper it quietly - I've discovered that smaller festivals are actually more fun. Not that it's easy to imagine attending any kind of large gathering of people ever again, given our current situation.

Ah. Great days, crazy nights (not that I've ever been one for partying the night away at a festival, to be honest. And now I'm old, so.....).

I've often said it, but nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

you're an embarrassment...

So, I've started doing the Neil Gaiman Masterclass on storytelling. Each chapter comes with a workbook and a writing exercise. I'm not sure if I'll be posting them all, but here's the one I wrote from the "Truth in Fiction" chapter.

A time when I was deeply embarrassed

As you write, pay attention to your inner register about what you’re writing, noting the particular things that make you uneasy. Try to be a little “more honest than you’re comfortable with.” Remember that being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared; it means you do it anyway.

A few years ago, I went back to my old school. I would say that, on the whole, I have an uneasy relationship with my schooling. It’s not that I don’t have fond memories of much of that time, because I do. I’m just embarrassed by it: I’m embarrassed that I received a private education and I’m embarrassed that I haven’t exactly taken advantage of any of the opportunities it might have presented me. My parents both came from fairly humble backgrounds and worked hard. They wanted their children to have the best possible education and were happy to sacrifice holidays and other luxuries so that they could afford it. What this meant for me is that I spent eleven years of my life at boarding schools. At the age of seven years old, I effectively left home in pursuit of this brighter future. I learned lots of things in this time, and I’m sure that it has afforded me many advantages in life. I’m privileged. I also think that it robbed me of a closer relationship with my parents and damaged my ability to form meaningful emotional connections with other people. I once mentioned to my mother that I would not send any children of my own to a private school and she cried. She only wanted the best for me and it must have been intensely difficult to send her young, vulnerable seven year-old son away to school and it was very upsetting to hear that same son effectively rejecting those decisions and those sacrifices.

I generally avoid reunions like the plague and I’m not sure what I expected from this one. I met various teachers and old school friends, but it was the smell of the place that really took me back. All it took to throw me back in time was the smell of the place, the changing rooms, the dormitories. They smelt exactly the same, and the scent brought the memories flooding back of the seven-year-old boy teased for his crooked teeth, his glasses and his puppy fat. No matter how thin I get, somewhere inside me is that child teased for being fat. I wasn’t fat then and I’m not fat now, but the damage was done. I can still remember some of their names. They would be fifty by now, and they were only twelve years old then, but I remember them, and I remember the way their teasing made me feel. The funny thing is that, in spite of everything I never really felt homesick, even in those early weeks. I feel guilty about that too. I suppose that’s the kind of self-reliance and stiff-upper lip that the British Empire was built on. You don’t get to rule over most of the world by talking about your feelings, do you?

On the very last day of my first term, we had a carol service in the village church. It was only a short walk away from the school, and the whole school processed there, all dressed up in our Sunday best and our bright, yellow ties, neatly scrubbed and brushed to within an inch of our lives for the set piece finale to the term. It was a very traditional, church of England kind of a carol service with the traditional songs and some readings: Once in Royal David’s City, The First Noel, O Come All Ye Faithful. You know the drill. In later years, I would be a member of the choir and would play a much more active part in the service, but this year, I was just one of the smallest members of the congregation and sat on a pew in the cheap seats. I don’t imagine that the service was very long, but at some point, I remember I began to feel the urge to pee. What started as a gentle nagging thought soon grew and grew until all I could think or feel was this terrible, burning necessity. Of course, there was absolutely no question that I could get up and leave the chapel. How could I? Everyone would be watching. Even if I did, what was I supposed to do next? I couldn’t just walk back in and take my seat, could I? I’m not entirely sure I’d know what to do if this happened to me now, but I definitely didn’t know what to do as a seven-year-old, so I sat where I was and felt this quiet desperation building inside me.

Somehow, I held on and eventually, the service ended and we all made our way back towards the school to be picked up by our parents for the start of the Christmas holidays. I can remember rushing out as fast as I could and making my way down the path through the woods that led back to the school. It was a dark December evening and there was no lighting through the trees, but I could see the lights of the school twinkling a few hundred meters away. I hurried along, probably pulling on the end of my penis, as little boys do and hoping somehow to make it back before it was too late. I can still vividly remember the moment I knew that I wasn’t going to make it back: I hadn’t managed to get very far from the church when I stopped dead in my tracks and my just bladder relaxed. I experienced an immediate relief, followed at once by a spreading sense of warmth and wetness in my pants and down my legs. Of course, the shame quickly followed. No one was there to see me, but this had now happened to me and surely couldn’t be kept hidden. I was seven years old, nearly eight. I was much too old for this to happen to me and now I’d made a mess of my best school trousers. I was going to be in trouble for this. Worse, I was going to be laughed at for this. I can remember running the rest of the way back to the school and heading straight up to my dormitory. I’d travelled so fast that I was the first person back, so I quickly stripped out of my sodden clothes and changed into the clothes I would wear to travel home. Without really thinking, I dropped the soiled clothes into the laundry basket and went home for Christmas. I did not tell a single person what had happened. From that day to this, this has been my secret.

I sometimes think about that. Presumably the person processing the laundry would have found it hard to miss the piss-soaked trousers? Heavy and wet and stinking of urine as they must have been. Like all my school clothes, they were also marked with my name and my school number, so how could this secret be kept hidden? Someone must have known what I’d done. Surely they would tell someone else and the game would be up and my humiliation would be certain. And yet no one said a word. At least, not to me. At the start of the next term, those clothes were clean and dry and folded with the rest. So I kept my embarrassment silently to myself from that day onwards, never knowing if anyone else knew. Perhaps they did and they just didn’t care.

That day wasn’t even the last time that I wet myself. After my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, I’ve experienced a few issues with my bladder and I now catheterise myself on a regular basis to make sure that it has drained properly. There’s something richly ironic about this because, amongst my friends, I’ve been famous for having a weak bladder for most of my life. I’ve always been the one amongst us who needs to go to the loo most often. I don’t know if I actually do have a particularly weak bladder, to be honest. Maybe. Actually I think it’s entirely possible that I simply developed a compulsion to take every possible opportunity to empty my bladder because of that night in the winter of 1981.

belligerent ghouls...

As I was clearing up some paperwork in the kitchen last night, I stumbled across an issue of the glossy magazine my old school occasionally sends out to its former pupils. In spite of myself, I can’t help but have a quick flick through, even though I know that it’s only going to annoy me.

I am, you understand, a product of that hoary old British tradition: the public school. Even though I left the place some twenty-three years ago – more than half my lifetime - it apparently still has the power to make me feel nervous and uncomfortable. I look at those pictures of happy, privileged children and I feel a surge of self-loathing and resentment.  I realise this says more about me than about my alma mater.

I don’t come from a particularly wealthy background: my dad was a doctor working for the NHS in General Practice and my mother was a nurse who had become the full-time mother to three boys. Clearly, we were better off than some, but in order to afford a fee-paying school for their children, my parents made sacrifices (many of which I've only really begun to appreciate as I've got older). Where my fellow pupils were heading off to Florida in the summer holidays, if we went anywhere at all, we usually went to stay with my grandparents in Devon (where my father’s father used to run a pub in the Plymouth naval docks). It probably also helped that I sat some exams and was awarded a scholarship which meant that we got a discount on fees and I got my name in capital letters in the school directory.

I attended the school at the tail end of a long period of under-investment and the buildings were in various states of disrepair. In addition, academic standards were low, perhaps because the school accepted anyone who had the money to pay the fees and didn’t apply any minimum criteria. Scholastic achievement was generally considered poor form and, with hindsight, I’m not sure that the teaching was up to much either. I spent five years there, and the only time I’ve been back since was to attend a friend’s wedding. I don’t like to talk about it very much and I am perfectly happy if no one ever finds out that I attended a school anything like it.

You’d imagine that must be because I had a terrible time, but that simply isn’t true. For better or for worse, that school played an absolutely critical role in making me the person that I am today. My very best friends are all – almost without exception – people that I met there. So why do I have such a violent dislike of the place? Because I hate people’s preconceptions of public schools and I hate it when they are applied to me; I hate it when I run into some of the people I used to go to school with and when they prove that many of those preconceptions are rooted in reality (We barely spoke at school and certainly haven't seen each other in more than twenty years.  Tell me: am I likely to want to be your friend on Facebook?). I hate the faux-nostalgia for the place that people seem to have. If those were the best years of your life, then actually I think I feel sorry for you.  As I flick through the magazine, it is filled with pictures and reports from reunion events: 40 years; 25 years; 1 year…. Pictures of people wearing the old school tie with brackets after their name in the caption detailing the house and years they attended. (C 87-92). They are in networking clubs in London, Dubai, Hong Kong; they are at golf tournaments and fundraisers (the school, which currently charges fees in excess of £10,000 a term*, has charitable status). They are in government….. It represents a world that I want nothing to do with and I’m a little embarrassed to have ever been a part of, even through no choice of my own**.

I met some amazing people at the school, people I’m proud to call my friends, but I tend to think of us as survivors rather than alumni.

* This is a **lot** more than they charged when I was a pupil.  They charged enough then, but this seems ridiculous and doesn't even include things like uniforms.  It's a better school now, I'm sure.... but holy cow, that's a lot of money.

** I should be absolutely clear, if it needs saying, that my parents were only doing what they thought was best.  You don't send a seven year old child away to board lightly.  At least, I hope they didn't.