Hello!

That large head is me there, on the left. I live and work in London, producing world class HTML and mind breaking images. I like sheep, they are fluffy. Sometimes I yodel. I believe in love. My sodastream is awesome and my biscuits melt in mouths the world over.

The early years

I was born in Barking in 1974, which is where my fondness for chips and little fluffy dice came from, as, technically, this makes me an Essex boy. After a brief time spent in a little flat in the East End of London (no memories of this, I guess coz I wasn’t big enough to go out anywhere) our family moved to Petts Wood. We lived above a shoeshop in a 1st floor flat with an external, cast-iron flight of stairs. We had a next-door-neighbour, with a poodle, who then became one of the inevitable surrogate aunties that I seemed to pick up so many of when I was younger. The next-door-neighbour on the other side was the sister of a man who I met on the Internet 18 years later.

Having left this job, we moved with my father to a little place called Bishops’ Stortford (just round the corner from Stanstead). We moved into a lil’ 2 up 2 down terraced house, with a real coal fire and real gaps between the windows. I had a selection of pet snails. I had Tonka Toys. I had a fear of football. I had an urge to play with the little bugs that lived in the water tank in the garden. I also had an urge to know everything about everything and would frequently annoy my parents by asking “Why?” about things they knew nothing about. This ended up being a good thing, as mum would lend me her textbooks from school, and I would greedily digest all the information in them. I guess I was about 5 at this point. We lived in Bishop’s Stortford for a little under 2 years, then we left the greater London area for fresher climes.

My childhood

Fresher? Well...We moved to Norfolk anyway. We bought a house in a little village called Hethersett. Quiet place, with a duck-pond, and a lot of ducks. Smelt of fields and all the associated chemicals that are squirted on them to make them work. Next time any city boy waffles on about the fresh smell of the country, point out that it is in fact fertiliser and horse shit, and isn’t terribly nice in the Summer.

Having concluded after a couple of years that it wasn’t going to work no more, my parents did the decent thing and separated before they got to the plate-throwing stage. Both myself and my brother were informed that “Daddy is going to live somewhere else for a while, he’ll try and pick you up from school each day, so you’ll still see him”. Lots of things brought this on, most of which, and the subsequent actions have been made better between the three of us, although my brother still doesn’t really seem to know what happened... maybe when he’s old enough *grin*.

The house was sold, and me, my mum an’ my brother moved across to the other side of Norwich to a place called Catton. We obtained a tiny flat with a housing association and resided there with not much money. Mum got a job working behind the bar at a hotel and we survived. Mum met a few guys, and eventually, settled down with a guy called Glyn, who used to be her mechanic. They had met a few times before, I guess if you go for that rugged, macho mechanic type, buying yourself an old Skoda like ours was could be a useful aid in meeting them.

I had just started what was known as “Middle School” in Norfolk, the school for people of 8-11 years of age and found it all very confusing. I was back at the start of the maths books I had finished at my previous school, and everyone at the new school had been learning French for a year and I’d done none. Also, there was compulsory football for everyone. I didn’t know the slightest thing about football, I’d never even played it, nor did I want to, and so I did not have a clue what any of the rules were. Needless to say, I didn’t like being there very much and wanted desperately to be back in Hethersett with my friends.

We stayed in Catton for four years, we got a house on the estate, mum got promotions and eventually mum and Glyn decided to buy a house together. So we got one, back in Hethersett. Cue moving back to all the people I’d known there and leaving all my friends yet again. This time, I was just in time to start High School, I was 12 and was, once again, confused. The schooling systems used were once more completely out of synch and everything was turned on its head once more.

All this moving about makes it difficult for anyone to settle down, I was no exception. I took to not getting to know many people very well and doing things on my own more, I suppose to subconsciously remove the hurt of separation from my friends each time I’d moved. I loved science, and I owned all kinds of scientific things, including a telescope, microscope, electronics kits, chemistry sets and numerous books on the subject. It fascinated me (and still does) how things work, and so I had to know. When I was young I used to wonder why the clouds stayed up, and where rain came from. My parents could usually half answer this, but would be stumped if I asked “why?” too many times. Mum forked out for a set of books on the sciences, covering everything from the physics of the universe to the workings of a fruit fly. I would spend hours reading about these things, learning the most up-to-date information I could about astronomy, particle physics, medicine, all these things that still fascinate me. Whenever I was able to use this knowledge at school the teachers praised me, and my class-mates ridiculed me. This caused a kind of vicious circle which meant that I would interact with other people less and read more. I made few friends at school, but some I made and were good ones, and I still stay in contact with them all now. We made a pact, in the summer of 1990, when I was 15 and doing my GCSEs that we would, no matter what, all meet in the local park in Hethersett on 31st August 1999. I don't think anyone turned up though.

I did my GCSEs, and did reasonably well, excelling in the areas that had no coursework and doing badly in the areas with coursework. I would have been an ideal candidate for the old-style ‘O’ levels, being good at not losing my head during exams, but I had a very short attention-span and working my way through endless textbooks in my spare time was not my thing, unless I found it interesting. By this time I’d become very interested in both PCs and music, and so most of my free time was either spent in the computer lab on a 80186 or in the music room on the M1. It was around this time that I wrote my first two “proper” songs, The Fog (to this day, I still don’t know where it came from, it just seemed to fall out of my fingers on the keyboard) and the other song, The New Age. Enigma had just released their first album, MCMXCad, and I’d fallen in love with Sadeness Pt II. I wrote this song with that kind of ambient drum sound in mind.

Finding myself

I started college in the September of that year and found a completely different group of people to hang around with. They didn’t wear trainers and shell-suits and all of those commercial things I despised, they wore black and purple, had big baggy sweaters and seemed to be so much deeper than all the people I’d known. These persons didn’t care whether your parents were rich, or whether you had the latest design of trainers, they cared about your personality. I realised that these were the kinds of friends I wanted so I met them.

All throughout the previous 5 or 6 years, I’d had thoughts about men, back even before I knew it was different. I’d had the word for that beaten into me aged 13 and I knew that I was gay but didn’t want to be. I so much wanted to be like everyone else, because in our society conformity is normal and diversity is shunned. Nowhere is that more true than on the school playing field. I was different, I knew it, they know it, they didn’t even know what gay was, but I was it because I didn’t want to play football.

Here I was at college with people I’d just met who didn’t seem to care about what you were, just who you were. I secretly hoped they would be accepting of me as I was, but I wasn’t brave enough to do it on my own. I’d just met these people and they introduced me to “indie” music and night-clubs and drinking and smoking all kinds of substances. They were all vegetarians, so I became a vegetarian. One thing we did was talk about many things. Not just girls and football, which was what I was used to with most of the blokes I knew, we talked about religion, politics, the mystic, ghosts, life after death, all kinds of things. For the first time in my life, I started to come out of my shell. I listened to the music they listened to, and fell in love with a band called The Smiths. They talked of Morrissey, the band’s lead singer, almost as a god. One of them, a guy called David, also told me that Morrissey was bisexual, and that so was he. The others knew about it, and didn’t seem to mind at all. Right, I thought, I’m going to go for it. I told David that I was bisexual too, and everyone found out about that as well...and they were fine about me also. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I would stay out later and later, talking to them and enjoying myself. At this time, things started to go wrong at home. Mum and Glyn weren’t getting on how they used to, and I was getting into trouble for not being at home much. I didn’t want to be at home because I wanted to be with my friends more than I wanted to hear arguments. When I was at home, I’d just stay in my room and listen to songs, play my guitar and write.

My first year of college went quickly. I’d met a guy called Mark, and we very quickly became best friends and then more. I wanted to spend all my time with my friends, I guess if you have them all the time you never appreciate what life without them means. My college work started to suffer and I was skipping lectures. I finished the first year with predicted C grades in my “A” levels, a big comedown for someone who got one of the highest marks in the county for sciences GCSEs. I was losing interest in studying. My love of maths was never very great, I quickly discovered that Physics and Chemistry were very maths based too. I have always loved Physics, I still do, and I think I would have stuck it out if my lecturer had taught us anything instead of “This is a problem in physics. Memorise this equation to solve it” , which was essentially all his lectures involved. I wanted to learn about quarks, photons, astro-physics, not moments, SHC, Joules, electrical equations and the like. I knew I couldn’t want to give up, because I was in Hethersett, 6 miles from the college, and I had a small income from working some weekends but not enough to get me into Norwich every day. College meant I had a free buss-pass, so I somehow had to keep at it. I made it through the summer, I cycled into Norwich lots, and saw some of my friends. I saw Mark a lot. I was 17, he was 19 and we just enjoyed each other’s company. I was a musician, he sang, so we formed a band together with a load of our friends, called the Bluesicians. We drank Thunderbird down by Norwich Castle. We ran around Norwich with no cares. My home life was getting worse, so was his so I think we both hid from home within each other. Then one morning, just into my second year at College, mum informed me that we were moving out of home and going to get a house somewhere else. I don’t know quite why I decided so fast but I told her that she could move out with Shaun, but I was moving out into my own place. She was upset, but recognised that I was determined and that there was more to this than I’d told her. She knew I had a friend, Mark, who she thought was an OK guy, I think she’d also guessed what was going on between us, but knew I wasn’t ready to tell her about it yet.

I had a friend called Jim, who was living in a shared house with eight other people, almost on the riverbank in Norwich, near the rail station. They had a spare room going and so I enquired to the landlord about renting it. Glyn at this point didn’t believe that I’d be able to make it in the world on my own. He was still living with his mother when he’d met my mum, and had moved in with her, I guess he didn’t think I’d be any different. He took it upon himself, I don’t know if it was out of spite, or a twisted attempt to help me, to bet me fifty pounds that I wouldn’t be out within a month. Two weeks later I was living in my new place. I guess it was spite, because I never did get the £50.

I was living on £13.50 a week, with my rent paid by the DSS. I had no money, but I was happy. I could do anything I wanted, I had no curfew, no-one to tell me what to do. I also had no heating and it was September and freezing cold, but no matter. I could afford bags of TVP (Soya protein that is cheap but kinda good for you) and I could afford cheap white cider once a week so me and Mark would stay in and listen to music, smoke and drink. Every Thursday we would go to the Loft, the local gay club and try and pull. Mark and myself were pretty much a couple, but he was (and probably still is) really confused about his sexuality, so he was always trying to meet women and I was always trying to meet men. The Club was free entry and even though it was a dingy hole, it was somewhere to meet like people.

Within about two weeks of moving out of home, I met a guy called Nigel at the club. I met him on account of my friend Eri asking me whether or not I liked the look of any of the men in the club. I replied that some of them looked OK. Eri pointed at Nigel and asked “What about him?” Me, being as I was in those days, a very shy person, said “He’s OK”. “Good”, says she, “Because he’s staying in the room next to you and wants to meet you”. By the end of the night, I had my first real boyfriend, Nigel.

There will be a test. Pay attention ;o)