a room is still a room....

My wife informed me the other day that I would be on my own this weekend because she is going home. It's an odd turn of phrase, isn't it? We've lived together for something like eight years, and we've been in the same house together for a little over six of those years... and yet when she goes to visit her mum and dad in France, she says she's going home. She hasn't lived there for fifteen years or so, and it's not really the house that she grew up in, but it's still home; it was the place her parents were living when she moved out.

Home. I'm not really sure what that means. I was born in Northampton and my parents lived in the same house a few miles outside that town for something like thirty-four years before they moved last year. Does that mean I should consider Northampton my home town? Did I think of that old house as my home? Was I sorry when my parents moved down the road? Not really.

Someone once told me that they thought I had a Northampton accent. If that's true, then I have absolutely no idea how I picked it up. My dad is from Plymouth and my mum is from Essex and I was born in Northampton General for the simple reason that both my parents were working there and living just by the hospital. The worked in the hospital itself, actually. Neither has an accent of any description, as far as I can tell, and anyway, I don't even know what a Northampton accent sounds like. I hardly picked one up by osmosis from the locals either - I was sent away to boarding school when I was seven years old. Although I suppose I technically didn't leave home for another eighteen years, when I finally finished University, to all intents and purposes, from the age of seven, I was spending more than thirty weeks of every year living somewhere completely different: at school until I was eighteen, then as an undergraduate at University for three years, and finally as a postgraduate for another twelve months. In that time, home was probably still near Northampton with my parents, but you were far more likely to find me in, successively, Brackley, Rugby, Coventry, Leamington Spa, Venice or York*

Northampton has never felt like my home town, it was just where I was born. Even the house that I called home wasn't where I spent the majority of my time or near where my friends were; it was just where my parents lived and where I spent my holidays.

I moved to Nottingham on the day that Princess Diana died in 1997, and I've lived here ever since. That's more than a decade now, and certainly the longest I have ever solidly lived in one town in my whole life. Since January 2003, I've even lived in the same house (I can remember painting the skirting board of the dining room on the day that Hans Blix revealed to the world that he had not been able to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq).

Does that make Nottingham home? I suppose the fact that my parents have moved out of the house I grew up in helps clear things up a bit, but is Nottingham now my home town?

Home. It's just a word, isn't it?

* One of the great advantages of buying a house has been finally being able to fill in a form without needing to try and remember about twelve different addresses: I've now lived in one place for long enough that I only need to remember a couple.

let's talk about it....

Unless you're one of those strange people who plans these things months in advance, if you are anything like me, then you're probably still on the lookout for Christmas presents for various people. I find the hardest ones to cover-off are often the smallest; that little token present for that person you're not planning on spending more than a tenner on. If you haven't been struck by a brilliant idea, then no doubt you've been browsing the tat tables in various shops in the desperate hope of receiving some inexpensive inspiration, even if that means getting somebody something that (barely) seems amusing at the time and after all the polite thank yous are done is quietly put away and never thought of again. Well, somebody must buy that stuff.....

I'm sure you've got your own ideas, but if you'll allow me to humbly make a suggestion.....

The Art of Conversation by Catherine Blyth.



"A guided tour of a neglected pleasure"

"Mixing philosophy with literature Catherine Blyth wittily encourages conversation. It seems we’ve forgotten how to talk. The art of face-to-face engagement has lost its allure as the world of facebook has seduced us. Catherine Blyth is on mission to convert us back to pleasures of good conversation in this charming, celebratory look at repartee. Wittily mixing up philosophy with literature, blending science with psychology, and with a nod to the great chatterers of history, she persuasively argues the case for banter and badinage - it’s free, its fun and it gets your brain cells firing like the prettiest of firework displays."

I can sense that you're on your way to buy yourself a copy or two as we speak, so perhaps I should declare a couple of things here:

1) I haven't actually finished this book yet. In fact, I'm on about the fourth page of the introduction (every page of which, to be fair, I have enjoyed hugely).

2) The author is an old friend of mine.

I first met Catherine when she had the great misfortune to be assigned to eat her meals in my boarding house back in the distant, sepia tinged days of 1990. It can't have been much fun being a girl at my school: joining a tightly knit bunch of institutionalised emotional cripples when they've already had three years to form deep bonds and who, even at the age of 17, have absolutely no frame of reference for dealing with the female of the species, having spent most of their lives in single-sex seclusion. Catherine must have been a conversational genius even then, as she somehow managed to pierce my outer shell of awkwardness and establish that we actually lived only a few miles from each other. We soon bonded over the number 33 Johnsons bus that we had both used to get into Northampton as kids, and we never looked back. I admired Catherine hugely for having the strength of character to walk her own path at school and not to be beaten into conformity like so many others, including me. Many people spent their school years trying to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, but Catherine always seemed to remain true to herself, even when that made her stand out dangerously from the crowd.

Much to my regret, we lost touch for a few years some time after University, but thanks to the magic of the internet and her very trusting husband generously forwarding on a speculative email from a complete stranger, we have rekindled our friendship. And look! She's only gone and written a proper, honest-to-goodness book. She's been on breakfast telly and met Rolf Harris and everything! The reviews have been excellent, but if she manages to distill a mere half of her wit, insight and droll humour into the book, then how could people not love it? It's hard to explain, but it makes me proud as punch to know that a friend of mine has managed to get something like this out into the shops. I waste my time writing nonsense on the internet, and she's gone and written a proper, published book that you can buy in an actual shop.

So, if you're struggling for ideas for Christmas prezzies this year, why not give someone you love the gift of conversation? You can pick it up for less than a tenner on Amazon, and it's included in the Waterstones 3 for 2.

Bearing in mind that I'm the kind of person who will deliberately and obtusely provide one word answers to small talk in the coffee queue, perhaps this is EXACTLY the kind of book I should be reading.....perhaps I should be more inclined to think of it less as a light and entertaining read and more as a self-help manual.

Beware: I might want to talk about this again once I've read it, so you might as well give in now and go and buy several copies. I'm only going to go on about it until you do..... (and actually, as I've already bought six copies, you may well be getting it from me for Christmas anyway).

is this a vision or normality I see before my eyes?

I've got the post-Glastonbury blues.

It's that killer combination of bone-weariness and a general malaise that strikes me down for a few days after I get back from Somerset. Rubbish. Still, I'm slowly pulling myself out of the slump as my mind turns towards the treat that I've got in store on Saturday evening.



I'm off to meet up with Mark, Stef, Graham and a couple of other guys to watch the mighty, mighty Iron Maiden play Twickenham stadium on the only UK date on the "Somewhere Back on Tour". Unbelievably it's their first stadium show in this country.

Me and Iron Maiden go way back to 1987 when I first bought "The Number of the Beast" on cassette because I quite liked the front cover. It was probably the defining decision in the shaping of my music taste, and although my sonic palate has expanded somewhat since then, I've never been able to quite shake off an enduring addiction to screaming guitars.... and not many people do screaming guitars better than Maiden. I've seen them several times before, of course, but they are apparently playing something of a "golden era" greatest hits set, and I'm starting to get really, really excited about it.



Scream for me Twickenham!

Bring it on.....

come with me friday, don't say maybe....

Not two months after writing that last little cry from the heart, life changed a little bit for the 19 year-old me. Well, it didn't really change much at all, but it felt like it had: I had a bit of a kiss and a cuddle with a friend's younger sister when she came up to visit for the weekend. It wasn't quite famine to feast, but it was a start. She was only a couple of years younger than us, and she was pretty cool (a whole lot cooler than her brother anyway), but when you're nineteen years old, two years feels like an awfully big age-gap. We got on from the very beginning, mainly by forming an alliance against her brother who (once he had taken her down the pub to meet his mates) seemed determined to play the part of the surrogate father, and frowned at every drink she had and every cigarette that she smoked. We got on like a house on fire. After closing time, we all went back to another friend's place where we all ended up crashed out. As I remember it, the kissing all happened whilst we were zonked out on the same bed as her brother. As you can imagine, nothing much happened, and I'm fairly sure that the thought of doing anything else never even crossed my mind. To be honest, I probably couldn't believe my luck. When I woke up, I remember feeling nothing so much as really elated. I had no expectations of it going anywhere, but what had happened seemed like enough.

A couple of days later, I wrote down how I was feeling.... and here it is, fifteen years later in all its horrible, inarticulate clumsiness.

---
Tuesday 30th November 1993

c.12:00am

"On the day that your mentality tries to catch up with your biology"

Strange weekend, what do you make of it? Who can you tell here? No one. Drop hints like you want to - but that would be no use - especially living with someone like Roger and the perhaps dubious circumstances in which it took place. It raises the question though: am I living a lie? all this 'no experience' thing that dominates all my conversations and reaction against this last week shagging fest. Yes and no. Yes in that I haven't actually done it yet, but, well, let's just say I have finally had a first taste in a drunken fumble.

How do I feel? Well a little unsure of what actually happened and how she feels about it (if she can remember). What do I do when I next see her? Well, I know what I will do: either I will be all brash and confident, or all coy (depends on the situation).

Not exactly perfect, I suppose. In a way, it doesn't really matter. Nice now that it's happened. Just a harmless snog after all, but hey, can't even brag about it or face up to it like everyone else has to do.

On a physical level, full marks, I think. [I'm sorry about this, but this is actually what I've written here, and I'm not editing....] Wow - schwing - but did you take a child and make her old? [*cringe*. Step away from the Morrissey... he's done you enough damage already, I think] Don't think so and don't even say so... not as bad as perhaps it seems. Power trip? big bad student / man of the world [!!]. Well, she knew my history and perhaps that was kind of endearing. (He says).

I really feel like shouting it out, but although it doesn't feel sordid, in a way it does. Dirty old man takes advantage shocker. How the fuck would I tell HIM [meaning my friend and her elder brother] ? No way - anyone else and it would be all "nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Well-done-mate-better-late-than-never-it-means-nothing". But HER? Uh-oh. Different story altogether - perhaps she'll tell him, but perhaps not judging by the whole extra parent vibe and 'hoho mum, she was in a trolley" thang. Too heavy.

On the bright side though, that she really enjoyed it and wants to come back might tell me something. Maybe she knows!

Well, one for the record books anyway. I loosened up sufficiently for it to happen and that bodes well for the future - I mean, I'm getting on really well with Nicky and I didn't think that would ever really happen again after last year. God, what happened then? [answer: nothing much] At least I must have relaxed since then - something university has done for me!

Thought I'd write this all down for future reference - or perhaps for discovery! Unlike the last piece, less likely to show it to Leon though! Free love sex machine shocker!!

---

Behind that garbled outpouring, I can still detect some relief and some genuine optimism for the future.... It might not have been much in the grand scheme of things.... but I felt as though I had finally crossed a little mental rubicon. I'd proved something to myself. Perhaps I wasn't really a complete freak after all. I took a little more time and a lot of luck before I got any further than this, but one step at a time, eh?

Although, goodness me, I was still clearly very much in need of a slap and someone telling me to get over myself.

Her brother actually didn't find out about this little tryst until after we had both finished our finals, some 18 months later. It was a complete surprise to him, but he bluffed that he knew all about it... until he realised it was me that we were talking about and not someone else he knew called Tim.

Anyway.

I'm a whole lot wiser and articulate about these things nowadays. Obviously.

*cough*.

Let's hope there are no more manuscripts out there waiting to be discovered, eh? There's only so much of my teenage self quoting Morrissey that I can ask anyone to bear....

unpacking books from boxes...

Whilst sorting through some boxes of my stuff that were turfed out of the roof in my parents' house move, I found a couple of bits of writing from my late-teenage years. They're both about girls, and they're both a little bit embarrassing, but as a historian and as a shameless blogger, I'm going to put them both up here, one today and one tomorrow. Besides, I've had a couple of super-strength homemade mojitos now, so what the hell? Finding this stuff was a bit like opening a window straight back into my past. I certainly remember feeling like this, but I don't remember writing it all down.

Dear oh dear.

Anyway, here we go. Please forgive my teenage self.

---

Notes on Being Single. 10th October 1993. [which makes me 19 and just starting my second year at University, I think. Bear with me. I was a slow starter.]

Is it just me and Morrissey, or is that when you're single the whole world seems to be a couple who are both laughing at you? It doesn't matter if almost everyone I know is either totally single or in a massively disfunctional relationship, I am still the only really, irreversibly single person that I know. Let me explain. I seem to be incapable of making any kind of sexual manoeuvre aimed at anyone - I deeply believed at school that when the girls arrived in the sixth form and we treated either like crap or like sex-objects or both that it should be different. Call me a fool, but I felt that first what you did was to befriend somebody and then things would lead on from there. The first problem that I encountered was that once a friend, I didn't feel it was worth risking the friendship. It might just be a chronic fear of rejection, but I think I really have something that blocks off such actions. I've even got to the stage where I surprise friends by even passing a compliment about such and such a girl who just walked past - of course I know what is pretty, what is ugly and what is fat etc., but I find it very hard to apply to the vast mass of people who fall into the middle category. I simply become indifferent and non-judgmental (another glitch in an otherwise massively judgmental personality.)

What if someone makes a move on me or if I hear of an interested party? Well, obviously, after the initial flattery I'll become deeply scared and avoid confrontation entirely until that particular feeling has died away. What to do? Even worse, many people say that I'm of serious marriage possibilities. As one friend said, I'll marry the first girl who gives me a blow-job [ha! wrong!] Well thank you, but no. The thought of being perpetually single without a single experience at University is deeply worrying, but so too is the thought of instant puppy-dog devotion and marriage.

Is it this deep contradiction that throws me into depression and bad moods? Certainly at such times, I tend to lash out at people who may most likely be my friends and will feel disgusted when a close friend has pulled / been pulled and feel that the whole thing is temporary and sordid. Even now I'm still a bit revolted by the behaviour of my male friends of 19/20 who are in relationships of more than six months and appear to want them to end for no especially good reason - are they simply bored of the sex and the commitment that surely goes with it? Do they think that they will instantly find someone else who will gratify their urges and want very little in return? What time is right to feel secure? What ask me for advice as (a) I'm on the girl's side and (b) what experience have I got?

At the end of the day am I just wallowing in self-pity? Am I just a sad bastard who should get off my arse and do something about it? Well, easily said, but I'm sure that I'm not asexual and whether I'm a subconscious devotee of celibacy, I can't tell. I've now put down pretty much everything that has been praying on my mind - why can't I communicate normally with most women? Can it be only a result of experience at public school? Surely not. Well, I'm sure I'll be pissed off, rude and grumpy for a few more days at least, so I guess I'll make the most of it before you show me yours and you laugh at mine [oh, God...]! I guess I'd just like to be understood.

----

So, there you go. Me as a 19 year-old in all of its unedited glory. What a strange, serious boy who has listened to far too much Morrissey and has some very strange ideas about girls and relationships..... so not much has really changed in the last 15 years then.

Dear oh dear. If only I could go back in time and give myself a good slap.

More tomorrow.

it was acceptable at the time.....

I had my annual phonecall yesterday evening from my old University. They wanted money, of course. In spite of being one of the richest educational institutions in the UK, they're not above trying to make me feel all nostalgic about my student days to tap me up for some money.

Having gone to a boarding school, it wasn't the first time I'd been away from home for any length of time, and so university was never really all that big a deal for me. As a result, I'm perhaps not as sentimental about my time there as I might be, and I'm not the kind of person who plans his life around the next reunion. Perhaps the university knows this. Their trick to get my attention is to get a current student on my old course to ring me up. They still want my money, of course, but they get to wrap it all up in a nice conversation about old times.

Although I have absolutely zero intention of giving any money, I always feel for the student in this situation. They are presumably doing this primarily because they need a job to help pay their way through University. They haven't volunteered to talk to old graduates out of the kindness of their hearts, they are doing it because they are paid to do it. I get no thrill at all from being rude to people at the best of times, and I'm certainly not about to get on my high horse about the begging policies of a stinking rich University to some poor kid trying to raise a bit of beer money. Instead, the student will enquire politely about my time at the University, and I'll politely respond.

The best part of my undergraduate course was the term that I got to spend studying the Renaissance out in Venice, and the student who called me last night was particularly interested in finding out about that: where I lived, whether I had to speak much Italian, how hard the coursework was... that kind of thing. We also talked about tutors (she has the same one that I used to have), how the union had changed (they're knocking it down to build a new one over the summer, apparently) and the merits of living in Leamington over living in Coventry. Small talk really, and in its own way it was perfectly pleasant. I made it clear right from the start that I wasn't going to be committing to a donation on the phone, and she didn't push it too hard. We got on fine.

The thing is though, every time I found myself being drawn out of my reluctance to talk in any depth about my time at University, I remembered that I was talking to a kid. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, it's just that she was in the second term of her first year. This means that she is probably little more than 18 years old and was likely born around 1989. I graduated from that University some 13 years ago, and in 1989 I was sitting my first GCSE. In other words, I'm nearly twice her age and I'm more or less old enough to be her father. She was politely interested in what I was saying, but to her, I must have seemed absolutely antique.

Bless her for trying, but my God it made me feel old.

I remember it well....

I sometimes wonder at my brain's capacity for storing information of patently little use. Yes, it's a talent that occasionally serves me well in pub quizzes and Trivial Pursuit, but in the main it's a total waste of time. I can't help but think that all that space in my head could be better used.

Here's an example: I went to they gym this evening to go for a swim. I parked my car and wandered into reception. I was planning to rent a towel, so instead of pushing straight on down to the changing rooms, I walked over to the reception desk. Just in front of me was a short-ish, chubby-ish guy. I didn't catch what he said, but I did hear the receptionist asking what his name was. He gave it, and the receptionist let him through the gates and into the main body of the gym. It was a slightly unusual name.

So far so unremarkable.

The thing is though, that hearing his name had made me stop dead in my tracks. The reason? I remembered him. I'd never met him before in my life, but I knew him.

Rewind to 1995. I am studying for a Masters degree in Medieval Studies and am living in a postgraduate hall on the edge of the main campus. As you might expect, the postgrads living in the hall were an interesting mix of nationalities... German, Portuguese, Rwandan, Canadian, Greek... all sorts. As chance would have it though, my next door neighbour was from Bolton studying archeology.

Are you paying attention at the back?

Will, my next door neighbour, had completed his undergraduate degree at Birmingham University, so when he saw that they were featured on the new series of University Challenge and that one of his mates was the team captain, he made sure we all made it to the TV room in time to watch it.

His mate was a bit of a character. He had long-ish, curly hair and although I can't remember if his team won or lost, I do remember that he had managed to get under Jeremy Paxman's skin... for all sorts of reasons, I'm sure, but the one I remember most clearly is that he stopped Paxman mid-question to wonder whether, in fact, he should be asking a starter for 10.

"This is a starter for 10!" brayed Paxman.

I don't know why that's been stuck in my head for the last 12 years, but it has.

The bloke who wound up Jeremy Paxman? It was the same bloke who was in front of me in the gym this evening. A bit older, a bit balder and a little fatter perhaps, but very much the same person. Besides, how many other people have such a distinctive name. I nearly tapped him on the shoulder to remark upon this. I wondered if it would make his day if I mentioned something that happened to him back in the day. Perhaps it would have done, but I hesitated and the moment passed.

Still, if he or any of his friends happen to do a spot of ego-surfing on Google at any point in the near future...... Aeneas Rotsos, I remember your TV appearance very clearly and I salute you!

Mind you, as he appears to work for the BBC, perhaps this is no big deal for him. Perhaps Paxman put in a word for him after he made such an impression? Who knows, eh? What I do know is that I'm sure that if didn't use my grey matter to store nuggets of information like this, then I might perhaps have been able to put my mind to something really difficult.

Cryptic crosswords, perhaps. It would have been really nice to be good at them......