what's cooler than bein' cool?

I don’t think I’ve been cool at any point in my whole life.

When I was around 8, I jumped a year at school and was generally in classes with people a year older than me. This was probably good from an academic point of view, but it meant both that I was young compared to my classmates and also generally considered a nerd because I was bright. I was made head of school at the age of 12 or 13, and I’d consider this to be the point in my life when I was the most mature. I sat exams and was awarded a scholarship to my next school and I was generally ridiculously sensible and with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.  It's been pretty much steadily downhill ever since.

At my next school, as a scholar, I was streamed with the other bright kids and was generally held in disdain at a school where academic achievement was actively frowned upon. I was only averagely good at sport, so I was generally just the tall guy in the top sets with an older brother also at the school. In fact, for much of my first couple of years at this school, people didn’t even bother to call me by my own name and just called me “Little Dave” after my brother (who is actually shorter than me anyway, dammit!). Even worse than just being in the top sets for everything with the other dweebs, I also marked myself out by being so appallingly bad at maths that I was initially in set 5 (out of 6)….So I stood out because I was the guy who was smart but comically bad at maths.  Perhaps even worse, I was also the guy in maths set 5 who finished his end of year exam with half of the 90 minutes still to go and when almost everyone else was still sweating over their answers. I handed my paper in and the teacher actually began to mark the two finished papers there and then, turning to put down the scores so far on the board.

BOY A: 48%.
SWISSLET: 98%

…You can only imagine how popular this made me with everyone else in the room, particularly when I then demanded to know what I’d got wrong.

This was a mostly single sex school, with girls arriving in the sixth form. I know.  Old school.  Generally speaking, the boys split up into three groups over this:

- high status: guys who were in one of the school sports teams and/or who were generally considered to be cool. These guys were the top of the pile, and some of the girls were drawn to them. It must have been difficult being a girl thrown into this sort of an environment, but an attachment to one of these guys could radically change your status within the school. You became cool and desirable by association.  It's hard to blame the girls that took this option.  These were the sort of guys who grew their hair, played in the first XV, smoked, had copious facial hair and played the guitar

- low status: nerds and odd-balls. In the awful social ranking that took place in the school, if you were one of the girls who were generally – and there seemed to be a general sense of these things – considered unattractive, then these were your people (and, at my school, 13 year olds thought nothing of giving girls aged 17 or 18 an audible mark out of ten, or... below a certain score... just making vomiting noises). These guys probably played the euphonium and – even within the confines of a strict uniform code – managed to look like they’d been dressed by their mum

- the rest: Neither one thing nor the other. I was definitely in this group. Definitely not cool, but also not quite the total opposite end of the scale either.  Not quite, anyway.

It feels ridiculous to even type this, but we even sat like this at the meal table…. cooler guys and “pretty” girls at one end of the table, odd-balls at the other end and me in the middle. I did my best, but aged 17, I was very poorly emotionally equipped to strike up conversation with anything so alien as a GIRL.

It’s one of my biggest regrets from this time of my life that I wasn’t nicer to people at the far end of the table / social scale. A few people I treated very badly, and I’m not really sure why. Generally, I just went with the flow of things and didn’t feel able to just take people as I found them. It sounds like a terribly limp excuse, but I essentially lacked the social capital to stand out; I was clinging on by my fingernails and didn’t feel that I had anything left over to help anyone else out.  Pretty cowardly, but there you are.  I was a teenager.

This theme continued through university too, where I always felt slightly “other” because, having been to a boarding school since the age of 7, being away from my parents and being able to go out drinking and stay up late really wasn’t that big a deal. I wasn't cool here either, but nor was I yet comfortable with myself to be entirely happy in my own skin. I don't remember university all that fondly - either my bachelors or my masters degree. Both were fine, but they just weren't the massive milestones in my life that everyone would have you believe.

And then to work.

I’m still not cool, but at least I’m old enough now not to care. I joined a choir because I like singing; I’m happy to listen to Taylor Swift, Iron Maiden and Bloc Party; “La Reine Margot” is one of my favourite films, but so is “Anchorman”.

I’ve got a framed 7” single of “Don’t it make you feel good” by Stefan Dennis on my desk at work. My team gave it to me because they caught me earworming it out loud at my desk one day.

I’m still pretty far from cool, right?

a long, long time ago....

Over the weekend, I took the time to watch the classic Star Wars trilogy again.

I’ve seen all of these films literally hundreds of times over the years, so this wasn’t so much a question of preparing myself for the release of the new film in December as much as the fact that I just thought I was due. When I watch these films, I can remember where the original boxing day adverts were in the version we taped off the telly and onto Betamax; I can remember Luke throwing his grapple on the Death Star and missing the first time; I can remember queuing in the rain outside the Elektra cinema in Newport Pagnell to watch the Empire Strikes Back for the first time; I can remember playing with my Star Wars figures and counting down the days to the release of the Return of the Jedi. I’ve owned these films many times and in several different formats, from that original Betamax copy of Star Wars taped off the telly, through various video box-sets (the one of the original cuts I left with an ex-girlfriend, which seems ridiculously generous of me, given that now it’s basically the special editions or bust), and finally onto DVD. I drew the line at buying the Blu-Rays because I figured that, by this point, I’d given George Lucas more than enough of my money. I’d love to get the original cuts again, but the crappy edits available on the Blu-Ray just wasn’t enough to entice me.

When I went to the cinema in 1997 to watch the Special Editions, I was a little surprised that Return of the Jedi was the film that I actually enjoyed the most. Like most fan-boys, I’m an ESB man, and had a healthy loathing of the damn ewoks… but when it actually came to watching the films again on the big screen, it was Jedi that grabbed me the most. Perhaps it was because it was the one of the films that I’d watched the least, but there it was. The same thing happened again this weekend: there’s something satisfying about the way it rounds off the whole journey with the death of the Emperor and the destruction of the second Death Star. Maybe I’ve mellowed, but I don’t even really mind the ewoks anymore either.

A couple of things did strike me about the films though: the first was that almost every single addition that George Lucas made in the Special Editions was a complete waste of time. Either they added nothing at all to the plot (that extra scene with Biggs before the assault on the Death Star – yes, they had the footage, but all it does is slow down the story and shows us how crap an actor Red Leader is), or they just looked hideously dated. Never mind the fact that it’s all a bit childish, all that additional CGI to beef out Mos Eisley just looks like it has been pasted onto the original film and doesn’t look real. Why squeeze Jabba in? It doesn’t make any sense and the logistical problem of having Han walking around him could just have been avoided by leaving the scene out in the first place. It’s tinkering for tinkering’s sake, and shows again that George Lucas didn’t really understand what made Star Wars so charming in the first place. We like Han Solo precisely because he is the kind of scoundrel who would shoot someone under the table. Still George Lucas was only insisting last week that he hoped that JJ Abrams didn’t “ruin” his vision and that Jar-Jar Binks remained his favourite character in the whole saga. Trolling Star Wars fans to the end….

The other thing that struck me was quite how much of the thunder of the original trilogy that the prequels take away. One of my friends has never seen any of the Star Wars films before, and so her boyfriend is preparing her for the release of “The Force Awakens” in December by watching the films in order of Episode I to Episode VI. That seems like it makes sense, but when you think about it… it really doesn’t. Think of the dramatic tension we get from finding out that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. If you watch the prequels first, that tension is completely ruined. And… of course, they’re crap films. If my friend can make it to Episode IV after watching all six hours of that crap – never having been interested enough to watch any of them before, remember – then she’s probably doing pretty well. We took part in a Star Wars quiz the other week, and the quizmaster was talking about something we should watch out for the next time we watched The Revenge of the Sith. I snorted. I’m never bloody watching that again, I thought.  It's better than the other two, but really that's not saying much.

At the end of the day, the original films are just great entertainment. Several times, my wife passed by as I was watching them, and several times she found herself sitting down to watch as she got sucked in. It was a pleasure to watch them again, having not watched them for a few years. Even if I have seen them all hundreds of times over the years. I’m a fan, but I’m not one of those people who is so excited about Episode VII that I’ve booked my tickets already. I remember getting excited about seeing Darth Maul on the first Phantom Menace trailer, and look how that turned out. I’m hopeful that it will be a decent, entertaining film… but I think I’m past the point where I’m expecting it to really rock my world….. although I will admit that when Han and Chewie turned up in the trailer, my heart did skip a beat. Those cynical, manipulative bastards.

There will be more exciting Star Wars news here very soon. To misquote Lando, I’ve just made a deal that will help us with our marathon fund for the MS Trust enormously. Watch this space for a running / Star Wars based announcement that you will all be able to get involved here in the next couple of weeks….. For reals.

big star overnight....

At the beginning of March 2014, I will have been blogging for ten years.  In all that time, and in spite of the millions and millions of words I have gifted spewed onto the Internet and my obvious talent and star quality, I haven't exactly been inundated with interview requests.  Or book deals.

Never mind.  The worm may finally be about to turn.  I have just been featured over at Uborka!

If you want to find out my views on where I am living, why I grew a beard, my most satisfying achievement of the last seven years and why I feel like a musical fraud, then you'd best make your way over there now and read the article:

Where are they now? An Interview with Swisslet

One of the things that I've learned from doing this is that it seems that my 2009 identity switch from SwissToni to Swisslet apparently confused a few people who wondered where I had gone.  Maybe there's a massive nostalgia market just waiting for a SwissToni comeback?  Or maybe I've been around so long that I'm finally coming into fashion?

Hmm.  Perhaps not.

Well, regardless.  I now await the arrival of my book deal with a renewed sense of anticipation.

Thanks to Karen and Pete for having me, and thanks to Gordon for tagging me and asking the questions.  It's a splendid website anyway, so if you haven't discovered them yet, then you should get yourself over there forthwith! (The most recent post, "Safeguarding" is fantastic, for starters.  "In here [the Internet], shy people can be gregarious, anti-social people can make friends, people having a hard time can get support, people can find out that there’s a name for the way they feel and that they’re not the only one to feel it."  Beautifully put.)