write.as/jonbeckett

Another excerpt from this year's NaNoWriMo – Enjoy!

I'm sitting here, trying to remember the most significant memories from my time at secondary school – and struggling somewhat. It's all become so fragmented – it feels like a collection of snapshots, stored away inside my head. The strange thing about memories is that they unlock each other – one recollection leads to another, and another.

Perhaps I can use the trail of breadcrumbs to my advantage – if I start with the first day at secondary school, hopefully the rest unfold somewhat naturally.

My first teacher at secondary school was called 'Mr Way' – Martin Way. He was the prototypical history teacher – with a comb-over, a bushy beard, and a huge array of thick knitted tops that made him look like he might have just stepped from a north sea trawler. He was a wonderful artist, local historian, and perhaps the most knowledgeable teacher I've ever known. He didn't so much teach history, as bring it to life – I remember a scratch-built Roman helmet and shield in the corner of his tutor room throughout the years he taught me.

Perhaps the biggest change with moving to secondary school was walking between different classrooms for different subjects. While we started each week with Mr Way, our typical school-day took us from class-room to class-room throughout the day. A single lesson was about 35 minutes, and a double obviously double that. There was a morning break after the first two classes, a further two before lunch, and a another three afterwards.

I remember the first morning, sitting in Mr Way's classroom – and him handing out exercise books for every subject. We were to write our own name, and class at the top right corner of every book cover – on lines measured 1 centimeter from the top of the book, and from each other. Guess who wrote his name on the left side of every book before realising his mistake?

I remember using a fountain pen for the first time at secondary school. You were allowed to use either roller-balls, or fountain pens – no ballpoint pens. Of course the novelty factor meant that everybody had fountain pens for the first few weeks, and made a huge mess with them too. I dare not guess how many children ended up with ink stains in the lining of their blazers.

Oh yes – school uniforms! All secondary schools that I have ever known in the UK require a school uniform. I think uniforms were instituted to remove the entire question of means, or background – if everybody wears the same clothes, nobody can use their clothes to differentiate, or divide. Of course the uniform also meant that children could be identified and associated with the school while outside of school. We were reminded of this on a regular basis. In the first three years of secondary school everybody wore a dark blue tie with white stripes. Beyond that, a red stripe was added to the white stripe. The only time I can ever remember the ties being checked was in the queue for the school canteen.

The school hall doubled as the canteen, with vast kitchens being hidden behind huge rolling blinds. At lunchtime, children buying lunch from the canteen queued along the corridor towards the hall, in year order – unless you were third year or above, in which case you could could go to the front of the queue. I seem to remember fifth years could jump the queue entirely.

At morning break-time the canteen sold crisps, drinks, fruit, chocolate bars, and an endless supply of chocolate cornflake balls. At lunchtime things were much more healthy – with curries, vegetables, chips, lasagne, or anything else that could be baked in a huge tray, to be honest. I think I probably lived on baked potatoes with beans for quite some time.

The tables in the hall were arranged into rows, with bench seats on either side – the same bench seats used in the morning for assemblies in the hall. Each class took it in turns to both set out, and put away the chairs and tables. Each table sat about ten people at a push – eight if you wanted any elbow room.

I remember the first time I visited the canteen – and meeting up with my older brother. I put all manner of things on my tray, with no regard for how much money it might cost – at primary school the food had been free. Luckily I had enough money, and have no clue what I would have done if I had not.

I remember a girl sitting next to my brother smiling, raising an eyebrow, and winking at me – obviously put up to it by him. I pulled an apparently hilarious face, judging by the immediate laughter, and disappeared inside myself for the rest of lunchtime, my face burning.

As the years passed by, I rarely bothered with lunch from the canteen – instead either taking my own sandwiches in, or walking to the local petrol station with friends to buy chocolate bars instead. Not exactly a wonderful diet – but I'm sure children still do it now if given the opportunity.

I remember following a few older boys – friends of my brother – into town one lunchtime, and being amazed that they went to the local chip shop. One of them went to the supermarket and bought a pint of milk – and drank it straight from the carton. In my little world this was rock-star behaviour.

Some of the secondary school teachers are burned into my memory far more clearly than others.

My first French teacher was called Mrs Wilson. She lived in a flat above the chemist in town, and was perhaps in her mid to late 20s with shoulder-length dark blonde hair, and a wardrobe of clothes that screamed sensible. In our first French lesson we had to pick French names for ourselves from a hat – I picked 'Michel', which caused the entire class to burst into laughter. This was years before I discovered Jean Michel Jarre. I retreated inside myself for that entire first lesson. I was terrible at languages – I still am. I think the only phrases I still recall involve pencil cases, ice creams, monkeys, gineau pigs, and trees. Not exactly conversational.

The English teacher was called Mrs Crossland – the mother of a girl I had gone all the way through infant and junior school with. Looking back, she was a wonderful teacher who fought valliantly to make us interested in both reading and writing – unfortunately at 11 years old I was just a bit too disinterested in anything that didn't involve either computers or lego to care very much. She was slim, always smart, and had a piercing gaze that was impossible to avoid if you were messing around.

I remember once attempting to perform a huge chunk of a Shakespeare play with a group in class, and taking note that the previous group had been too static. During our turn, I tried to walk around a bit while reciting my lines (very badly, it should be added – I had the memory of a goldfish) – and was asked after we finished if I needed to go to the bathroom.

My first math teacher was called Mr Fitchew. A tall retired Royal Air Force pilot with grey hair, and a seemingly endless supply of shirt and cardigan sets. I bet they were Christmas presents from his family. He was always immaculately presented, with a booming voice, and a wicked sense of humor. I'll never forget the afternoon – towards the end of my time at school – when one of the girls asked him (during an aside about his career in the RAF) if he had ever crashed.

'Yes – I actually survived several crashes'

'Did you have to ejaculate out of the window?'

We all knew what she meant to say, but the explosion of laughter around the room, and the grin on his face will be etched into my memory until I die. Of course – knowing what I now know about sixteen year old girls, the entire conversation could have been expertly steered towards the joke.

The music teacher was a large lady called Mrs Hawker who wore huge flowing dresses, had a mass of curly hair, wore huge glasses, and somehow controlled an uncontrollable rabble armed with noise making devices (read: musical instruments). I remember in the first few music lessons being asked to sing 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', to see if each of us could hold a tune – and being pants-wettingly terrified. Thankfully, after a childhood messing around on the upright piano at my grandparents house, and on my parents musical keyboards, I could 'play a bit' – certainly enough to impress a few people in the music class.

A lasting memory of music were the once-monthly 'record lessons' – where we were allowed to bring a pop record in, a track played to the class from each record of the teacher's choosing, followed by questions about it. I can still remember David Langstaff bringing the gatefold 'Thriller' album in, and the teacher dropping it – scratching it in the process. We all cringed as she picked it up – we could all see the scratch.

I grew to like Mrs Hawker. I carried on with music as an exam subject, even though I was a bit hopeless at it. I never did learn to sight read music, and never played with any of the school bands that formed among friends. I got continual requests to be a keyboard player, but I think that had more to do with them wanting to borrow stuff off my parents, than wanting me in the band.

The science teachers were an odd bunch. Mr White was perhaps the most strict – a tall, imposing man who always wore a suit and a lab-coat. He taught chemistry, and most people thought he was insane. He wove the most ridiculous stories (that we all believed) in order to teach the most boring parts of the subject – and had a particular talent for calling people by their names backwards.

You always had the sense that you shouldn't cross Mr White – and this was proven when a boy from another class was brought to him to be disciplined one day – he quietly excused himself, and walked to an adjacent classroom, across the corridor. We could see him through two sets of windows, and the corridor – inches from the boy's face, screaming at the top of his voice. I remember the boy's face becoming slowly more purple, and tears trickling down his cheeks.

Mr Lloyd also taught chemistry, and had a somewhat spectacular record at setting up experiments that failed. I remember an entire lesson being wasted while he attempted to make hydrogen pop from a test-tube – finally explaining what should have happened. That happened a lot.

My first biology lessons were taught by a Welsh teacher called Mr Davies, who never bothered learning anybody's names. Everybody was Jack, Jill, Flossy, or some other ridiculous 1950s Enid Blyton name. The strange thing was that we all knew when he was referring to us, even though he didn't use our name. I remember being chosen to demonstrate the method of preparing a sample in agar jelly, in a petri-dish, and shaking so violently with nerves that one of the girls whispered 'why is he shaking so much?' – Mr Davies immediately asked if she would like to also demonstrate, which caused her to almost climb inside her own shoes.

I don't remember Mr Davies teaching us sex education, but I suppose he must have. It usually fell on the biology teacher. I remember it all being very serious, and the books being full of diagrams, and cut-away drawings of internal organs – not exactly the naughty pictures we had imagined it might involve.

We had two male PE teachers. I'm not entirely sure why. The first was a slight guy with a speech impediment – and I can't remember his name at all. The other was a boisterous, loud, thick set guy that played rugby each weekend called Mr Clarke. Of course we learned to play rugby. Rugby was one of the few field sports I was any good at – mostly because I did as I was told. Unlike the more talented kids that ran sideways across the pitch (like the wind I might add), I would charge forward with the ball, crashing straight into the people ahead, setting up for a hand-off behind me – with echos of 'Well done that man!' behind me.

The female PE teachers were gazed at from a distance. By all the boys. I remember one in particular – Miss Foot (later Mrs Clarke) taking part in sports day one year – running in a 100 metre relay against the fifth years (the seniors). It's the first time I had seen anybody that could really run like she could – the entire field fell silent, with whispers of 'Jesus' as she ran 100 metres in about 11 seconds – pulling back a 30 metre lead given away by teachers on previous legs.

Ever since I was little, I had been obsessed with drawing things – so it was no surprise at all that I was good at art. The art teacher from the second year on was called Miss Ritson, and was probably more artist, and less teacher. I thought the world of her. She was perhaps in her mid 30s by the time she taught me, and dressed in that way that art teachers so often do – with flowing shirts, jeans, and scarves.

Art was one of the few subjects I was naturally good at – it probably still is. Even all these years later, if ever cornered into drawing anything for anybody, they wonder why I didn't take up a career in art or design. I guess I just lost interest in it at some point. Although I went on to do art at college, I wonder if the first seeds of destruction were sewn by the popular girls in the art-class muttering behind my back when my work turned out better than theirs.

I remember one day we had to draw an old boot – a still life. At the end of the lesson the various drawings were pinned up to talk about – I think we had only been allowed to use line – no shading. One of the girls pointed at mine:

'Oh my god – look at that one – who drew that!'

'Oh. It was him.'

There was a tone. A tone I've still not forgotten, thirty-something years later.

I took history as an exam subject, and remember the first lesson with the 'proper' history teacher – a bald man with white hair around his collar called 'Mr McCollugh'. The children called him 'Dungeon Master' behind his back. He talked at length about sporting events that had happened over the summer, about movies that had come out, about the various news stories in the paper recently. We thought we were getting away with doing nothing for the entire lesson – then as the bell rang, he stood up, and asked us all.

'What have we been talking about today?'

There was a murmuring around the room.

'History. We have been talking about history.'

He smiled, and we all stared at him. Some of us got it, some didn't care, and some still had no clue. You can't win them all, I suppose.

I remember a wonderful female teacher called Mrs Porter, that taught history, sociology, and various other subjects that commonly got wrapped up as 'social studies'. One day – while starting a new topic about prejudice, and persecution – she asked us what we thought about Jews. Bit by bit, the children in the class volunteered more and more things they had been told, or learned from others – that they had big noses – black hair – wore waistcoats – just about every stereotypical prejudicial trait you might ever think of. After filling the board with everything volunteered, she looked at us all, without a hint of hurt, or reaction.

'I'm a Jew'.

That moment has stayed with me. I can remember the silence that followed, and the ring-leaders that had volunteered so many things wanting the ground to open up beneath them.

When I started at the school, the headmaster was a tall, gangly old man called Kenneth Mumford. He had an impressive moustache, and perhaps the most creased face I have ever seen. He told endless stories about visiting India to meet Mother Teresa, and banged on about bible stories whenever he lead assemblies. My only real experience of him was while queueing for PE one day – one of the boys in my class sprayed another boy in the face with deodorant – and Mr Mumford saw it happen. He immediately threatened the perpetrator with the cain (which we all thought had been banned several years previously).

Mr Mumford eventually retired, and was replaced by a very young headmaster called Jeremy Cunningham. He was very obviously a product of either Oxford or Cambridge, and it showed in everything he said, or did. He wore quite possibly the thickest glasses I've ever seen, and was also the most clumsy, awkward person too. To introduce himself to the school, he played an acoustic guitar in assembly and sang. It must have taken some guts, because he wasn't very good. When he finished, he looked out at us all, sitting in rows, and said 'Good morning everyone'. We obviously didn't respond very volubly, so he repeated his greeting.

'Good MORNING everyone!'

Suddenly a single boy's voice returned his greeting, shouting as loud and comically as possible:

'GOOD MORNING!'

There was a stunned silence, after which the gathering proceeded as-per-normal – with notices of things going on around the school, and so on. Finally the headmaster bade us farewell, and we all stood and prepared to leave.

Mr Bradley shouted at everybody to sit down again, then strode directly towards the boy that had shouted.

'STAND UP. NOW!'

I don't think I've ever seen a more furious teacher, a more purple face, or a louder voice. We all sat with goggle eyes, unable to take our eyes off the dismantling happening right in front of us. The boy that had shouted was one of the popular kids – one of the kids that always seemed to get away with everything. Only this time he didn't, and his stock sank like a stone. All of the formerly adoring girls watched as he burst into tears while the teacher ranted in his face – explaining to everybody that if you did anything in your life, don't be like this guy.

While sitting at the departure gate in Frankfurt Airport, waiting for my flight home, is occurred to me that I might release another chunk of this year's NaNoWriMo – an autobiography of sorts. Today's excerpt takes you through infant and junior school with me. Enjoy!

Apparently my start a infant school didn't go well. I was pretty determined at 5 years old that I wasn't going to be going to school, thank you very much, and my Mum would be coming to get me – which she did for the first few days – to take me home for lunch, and then back in again.

Thinking back, it must have been a bit of a nightmare – we lived well over a mile from the school, so no sooner had my Mum got home after dropping me off on a morning, she would have had to turn around, and walk back again. Obviously at some point I realised there was far too much walking back and forth involved, and decided that staying at school would be far easier – mostly for me.

The school I attended was one of four in the town – and perhaps the biggest. After entering through the main gates, you would walk through the junior school playground, and on towards the infant buildings on the far side. Most of the early years classrooms were built in the 1960s along the edge of a tarmac playground lined – which doubled as a netball court – with telegraph pole benches around it's perimeter. Rather mysteriously, there were climbing frames on the school field alongside that we were never allowed to touch. It was very frustrating.

My first teacher was a bubbly lady by the name of Mrs Hollenberg. I don't remember her face – just her mass of curly red-brown hair, and the huge flowery dresses she wore. I also remember her cutting letters of the alphabet from pages of broad-sheet newspapers, and pinning them to the walls of the classroom.

A little way through my first year of infant school, it became obvious why Mrs Hollenberg wore the giant flowery dresses – she was rather heavily pregnant. We arrived in class one day to discover she had been replaced by a tall, young, elegant, and looking back, beautiful lady with jet black hair called Mrs Ellis.

Until Mrs Ellis had a car crash.

I remember our teacher changing again – to a Mrs Komenick, who all the parents at the school gate adored, and I can remember Mrs Ellis returning to work some weeks later. We were to be careful of brushing against her legs on account of her injuries. She and another teacher – Mrs Woodcock – had been in the car, and both of them seriously injured. Of course none of this was communicated on to us at the time – we found out years later.

My only real memory of Mrs Ellis is that she was quite strict. This may have had quit a lot to do with my propensity to daydream. I was good at daydreaming – I still am. Where most people have distracting thoughts, I seem to have an entire theatre of the mind going on – playing out scenes that haven't happened and probably never will happen in their entirety.

I suppose there is one other memory – but I'm not sure if it's to do with my teacher's injuries, or a very early sense of 'I shouldn't be doing this'. During story time one day, while a group of us sat on a rug to listen to Mrs Ellis read from a story book in that upside down fashion that teachers are so good at, she needed to get up and fetch something – so strode over the top of us all, picking her way through the gaps between us, her skirt billowing as she did so. Myself and a friend looked up as she passed overhead – on purpose. Here's the funny thing – I have absolutely no memory of what we saw, but I do remember looking at my friend wide-eyed as we sat cross-legged, and giggling at our own bravery and/or stupidity.

You'll be glad to know that was my only such brush with such goings on – I didn't progress to dropping things underneath girls skirts, or playing kiss chase on the field at lunchtimes in the summer.

Each day – after arriving at school, we would gather in the school hall, sitting cross-legged on the herring bone patterned wooden flooring, and listen to the headmaster as he made announcements, and probably picked something witty or interesting to say from a book of witty and interesting things to say for headmasters. He was a frightening man if you were five years old – perhaps sixty-something years old, always in an immaculate suit, slicked back hair, and a tiny moustache. Kind of a more friendly version of Hitler, I suppose. He drove a lumbering Jaguar to school – the kind you sometimes see criminals drive in 1950s movies starring Lesley Phillips and Terry Thomas.

What we didn't know about W.R.Tull (that was his name) was that he had been a Lancaster bomber navigator during the second world war. We found this out when my brother took a model aircraft he had been building into school, and was accosted by Mr Tull while showing it to his friends. A sea of children gathered around him as he told stories about ditching in the sea, and floating on the waves in inflatable boats until help arrived. He pointed out the panel on the side of the plane where the boat was stored, and we all listened in stunned (and frightened) silence.

Getting back to the school hall, if you had achieved anything of note during the school day, you would be invited to stand at the front and receive the congratulations of the rest of the school – every day names were read out, and certificates handed out by the headmaster, one at a time, to thunderous applause. He read out the names from a lectern at the side of the stage area.

I got to stand on the stage perhaps four or five times during my time at junior school – for various smimming certificates, and to act out a parable from the bible with the rest of my class.

Our school had a swimming pool! How could I forget that! For such a small school (there were perhaps three hundred pupils across years one to six) to have a swimming pool was unusual to say the least – it had been paid for by fundraising by parents over several years, and the school was very, very proud of it.

The pool was in an unheated out-building, on the edge of the school field. It was ten metres long, by five metres wide, and about as deep as an adult's hips (not very deep at all). The walls were painted white, with a mural running all the way around with under-sea scenes – octopi, fish, coral reefs, and even Poseidon, if memory serves. The boys and girls changing rooms were communal (we were only five, remember) – although there was a half-height dividing wall between the benches where the girls and boys would get changed. If we stood on the benches to look over at the girls getting changed, the instant screams would alert teachers, and we would find ourselves in all sorts of trouble.

It's funny how punishments form such a big part of your memory of your early school years – even if you rarely found yourself in trouble. At my school if you did anything ridiculous at break-time or lunchtime, you would find yourself 'in the middle'. This referred to a small circle painted in the centre of the playground, that was kind of the real-world equivalent of the phantom zone that General Zod got confined to in Superman. You had to stand in the circle for the rest of playtime, and a teacher would deal with you afterwards. Nobody was allowed to talk to anybody standing 'in the middle', and if you were 'in the middle', you were not allowed to talk to anybody else. To be honest, it was incredibly rare that anybody ended up standing in the imaginary purgatory – I only did once, as far as I can remember – for squirting a dinner-lady with a fake flower ring filled with water. I thought I was tremendously funny until I saw her reaction. I can't imagine how the teacher kept a straight face while telling me how disappointed she was in my behaviour.

Perhaps the most humorous 'in the middle' episode happened a couple of years later – when I was in the juniors. At the end of playtime, all of the children would form into class lines at the edges of the playground, ready to be walked back into class by our teachers. This of course left anybody standing in the middle doing exactly that – standing in the middle – waiting for a member of staff to approach, question, and express their disappointment. There was this one time though, when the boy standing in the middle decided he had had enough of it all – and rather than listen to the aerated teacher rant at him (he was a well known lunatic of a child), he turned and ran. I can still see the teacher racing off after him across the playground, and catching him after a few strides – lifting him with huge hands around his upper arms, and his legs still running in midair as he was marched – still running – towards the head-master's office. Shocked and stunned whispers murmured all around the playground for quite some time before we all began filing in for afternoon lessons.

That same little boy died in a car crash years later. He passed his driving test, and days later killed himself, and very nearly killed his friends while driving like a lunatic. I've often wondered if he might have been an example of nature versus nurture. His parents were lovely, and his brother was lovely – he became one of my best friends – but his little brother was an absolute lunatic, and everybody knew it.

Another memory of infant school was the school tuck-shop. At the beginning of break-time each day, you were allowed to venture to the adjoining junior-school playground, and visit their tuck-shop, that sold packets of crisps (invariably the cheapest crisps available from whichever retailer), and foil-wrapped cookies called 'Mojo”s. Each item only cost a few pence, and the shop was run by students, who took turns to be shop-keeper for the day – I'll get back to this later. I can still remember the day – at about six years old – when Sarah Bates arrived back in our classroom during a wet playtime, in floods of tears. The crisps had gone up in price by 1 pence, meaning she didn't have enough money to buy any. It took her quite some time to calm down enough to tell the teacher what had happened.

The junior school that you walked through to reach the infant school was built in the post war years, and very much resembled a collection of military buildings – long, thin sheds subdivided into classrooms, with high windows – preventing children from seeing out to the playground. The buildings bordered the playground on adjacent sides, and were later partnered by a hall, and further classrooms in the 1960s.

The classrooms were warm in the summer, and cold in winter – heated by post war plumbing that rarely worked – huge cast-iron radiators lined the walls, and would break your kneecaps if you caught them while walking past.

Between the classrooms, long tiled corridors led out to the playground, and to the boys and girls bathrooms. The corridors were lined with benches, and coat hooks – usually festooned with hundreds of coats, scarves, gloves, and hats. We were supposed to have an assigned peg in the hallway, but one or two children would entirely disregard that plan.

My first teacher in junior school was called Mr Hannant. He was charming, funny, and a favourite with all the mums at the school gates. He was fairly short, stocky, sported an impressive moustache, and neat mop of black hair. He decorated his classroom with various shapes made from cut and folded paper – octohedrons, decahedrons, dodecahedrons, and so on. Looking back, it must have taken him hours to make them all.

Mr Hannant would sit on his desk to tell stories for the last half-hour of each day – swinging his legs as he read. I remember him reading 101 Dalmations one term, and use all becoming swept up in the story – breathlessly telling our parents about each day's adventure after the bell rang.

At the end of each day, the teachers would walk their class out to the school gates, where parents waited for their arrival. For many of the parents, those few minutes were their only chance of social interaction during the week – and boy did they take advantage of it. Every afternoon you would find endless children hanging from their Mum or Dad's sleeve, asking if they were going home yet.

“Soon'.

Mr Hannant inspired all sorts of wonder in us at 7 years old. In the school hall there were a number of pieces of gymnastics apparatus that could be wheeled along tracks in the ceiling for PE lessons – I can still remember watching him climb a rope hand-over-hand – that single act lifted him up alongside Superman.

'Outside of school, Mr Hannant also presented the early morning show on the local radio station. One of our school trips took us to visit the station, and meet the various presenters. A new presenter that had just started at the station gave us all a photo of him jumping off the roof – his name was Timmy Mallet, and he would go on to become a stalwart of children's television years later. He now lives about ten miles from me – it's funny how life works out.

The only time we spent apart from our teacher at Junior school was to go and sing in the school choir. You had two choices with regard to the school choir – you either went to choir, or you went to choir. Not really much of a choice then. Looking back, your time with the music teacher was a chance for the other teachers to go and get a coffee, and a break from their class for a few minutes – except Mr Hannant invariably joined us in the hall to sing along with us all.

The Music Teacher was a stalwart of music hall theatre called Mrs Coates. It seemed she had starred on the stage at some point earlier in her career, and was somehow bitter about now teaching music to children who either could not, or would not sing to a level she was happy with. She had long dark hair, and enormous breasts. Even at 7 years old I knew she had enormous breasts, and it's not something I typically notice. She would bark at us all to 'Sit up straight, smile, and sound your esses!', while playing the upright piano in the corner of the hall like a demented machine gunner.

Along with Mrs Coates, and Mr Hannant, we learned to sing all manner of songs that generations of school children before us had also learned – standards, ballads, and unfortunately a number of church prescribed songs trumpeting God's might, and how our soldiers would go to war and defeat everybody who questioned him – all in the name of God. Those songs were eventually banned.

I followed my brother through the junior school – he was three years ahead of me, meaning that we crossed paths for one year. I still remember the day I had forgotten my PE kit, so had to visit his classroom and ask if I might borrow his. I arrived at his teacher's desk – an imposing tyrant called Mr Lock – and only then noticed that not only my trousers on inside out, they were also on backwards. Thankfully Mr Lock said nothing.

As far as I recall, we did PE in our underwear if indoors – which would probably get schools shut down these days. The hall would be transformed into a gymnasium, with ropes, rings, a trapese, a vaulting horse, and all manner of crash mats. I remember being envious of the children that could climb the ropes up to the ceiling – I was hopeless at it.

The hall was also used for 'Country Dancing' – a regular activity where guided dances were dictated from a tape player on a trolley – calling out rote moves over and over again. Although we all said we hated it, we secretly enjoyed it, and always put in as much effort as possible. I can still remember a sequence of steps called a 'do-se-do' to this day.

What else do I remember about my time at Junior school? Oh yes – the desks! The desks were wooden, and half of the surface folded, to expose a storage drawer underneath. The drawer under my desk typically contained a few books, my handwriting pen (which had to be earned), and a star wars figure. Most children had a toy car, or some other small thing. The desks all had an ink-well in the far corner too – a throwback from an earlier time. Thankfully by the time I went to school, pencils and rollerball pens had become the norm. It's worth noting that we were not allowed to use biros – only school issued 'handwriting pens'.

My Mum kept many of my school exercise books, and gave them to me when I moved away from home. They are pretty entertaining. One book is titled 'Weekend News', with room on each page for a picture, and a sentence of writing. Almost every weekend is filled with a total and utter work of fiction – telling stories of things that almost certainly never happened. One page in particular is telling though – a very detailed account of watching a Godzilla movie on TV, with a spectacular scene drawn above. The school project work books didn't always translate facts accurately either – according to me, the Lancaster Bomber had a range of about five miles. That's going to be quite limiting, isn't it – only being able to bomb the enemy when they get within eye poking distance...

My memories of Junior school are almost all positive. I moved from Mr Hannant to Miss Hughes, Mr Lock, and then Miss Edge before leaving for secondary school. I remember some days with particular affection – like the day Miss Hughes wheeled the school television into the classroom for us all to watch the first launch of the Space Shuttle – or the day Mrs Ellis returned to teach us for one day – or the times Miss Edge read us fantastical stories while perched on the benches at the end of her classroom.

Miss Edge was a newly qualified student teacher, who taught me during my final year of junior school. She drove a Citroen 2CV, which she parked at the end of the school playground. She had a shock of red frizzy hair, was slender in build, and typically wore flowing dresses covered in Laura Ashley flower patterns. She may as well have been called 'Mrs Lovely'. A favourite memory is of her inventing math questions involving numbers of kangaroo burgers, or other such made-up foods.

Only recently I discovered that Mr Lock and Miss Edge eventually got married. This kind of stunned me, because you couldn't imagine two people more different than each other. Mr Lock was a tall, imposing, frightening teacher. He terrified my brother, and caused a visit by my parents to visit the headmaster about his teaching methods (fear, intimidation, and cruelty, if my brother was to be believed). Here's the thing though – my brother is the only person I've ever heard tell such stories about him.

I met Mr Lock years later, driving the bus to college. He smiled, but didn't say anything. I often wonder why he left teaching, and became a bus driver – was my brother right? Or had he finally had enough of pulling crayons from children's noses ?

Throughout junior school my best friends were Jamie Blackwell, and Claire Goodman. Both Jamie and Claire were the children of local police officers – it may surprise you to learn that this only just occurred to me. Claire lived across the road from me, and had a little sister called Anna. She insisted her real name was 'Fred', but her own family all called her 'Sid'. I've never actually questioned why, or even thought to question why – I guess when you're young you just take information on-board without really questioning it.

At the end of junior school, Claire went to a different secondary school than me, so we almost became strangers overnight – it's funny how that happens. Where we had spent countless evenings and summers in each other's company, suddenly we were reduced to occasional waves if we left the house at the same time as each other. Our favourite dinner lady on the school playground called us 'you lovebirds' on more than one occasion – causing burning red faces, and more than a few awkward moments.

Dinner ladies. Who remembers the ladies that watched over the playground at lunchtime? In the world I grew up in, dinner ladies came out of some kind of 'dinner lady mold' – complete with a large wool coat, sheep skin lined boots, and a small upset child attached to at least one hand as they wandered through the sea of children like a first world war battleship. They always seemed to be sturdy, yet softly spoken women of a certain age – sometimes sporting the type of battleship hairdo I had only previously seen at the bingo hall. My favourite dinner lady was called 'Mrs Daily' (or Daley – I'm not sure of the spelling). She always had a kind word, and would seemingly spot trouble entire minutes before it actually occurred. Her hair was always pulled up into a bun, with a long fringe swept neatly to one side with hair-grips. She always wore a quilted three-quarter length coat, and huge mittens – at least in my memory.

I don't really remember my last day at junior school – or infant school for that matter. I'm not really sure why. All I do remember is the tremendous excitement felt throughout the class when the summer holidays approached. I also remember my year six teacher crying on the last day as she said goodbye to us all.

I planned to write last night, but got sucked in by the World Chess Championship. Rather than go out for something to eat, I bought food from the supermarket and sat in front of the laptop in my hotel room, watching the games unfold. Before I knew it the evening had gone.

This morning the alarm woke me at 6am, interrupting a dream where my late father-in-law was telling me a story about a pub on a walk somewhere. Huge parts of the story have already fallen to pieces – it's strange how dreams disintegrate in the minutes after waking up, even though they seem so tangible when they are happening.

Anyway.

It's the last day on-site today – I fly home tomorrow morning. I'm not entirely sure where this week has gone, if I'm honest. One more day of sitting in a conference room, wrestling with the leviathan I have spent the year constructing. Plans are already being made for my return in the early months of next year.

I took part in NaNoWriMo this year, and set about recording a slew of memories from my early life. This is a small excerpt. Enjoy!

When I was five years old we moved to a much bigger house on the other side of town. Suddenly I had my own bedroom, a new garden to explore, and new friends to make that lived nearby. To begin with we couldn't afford much – I remember sleeping for some time on a mattress on bare floorboards. When carpet did finally arrive, it was the late 1970s carpet so many people had – a synthetic off-yellow foam packed carpet that could generate real lightning bolts if you slid your socks on it fast enough.

The kitchen was lined with 'G-Plan' units, surrounding a pine dinner table – my Mum's first major purchase in the new house, and her pride and joy. I still can't imagine her horror when one of my brother's friends pulled a model knife across the table while building an Airfix model kit, a few days after it's delivery. Years later we discovered she had shut herself in the toilet and cried.

Here's the thing about my parents – about twenty years ago now they retired early – and moved to the coast (I'll tell the story elsewhere), and people started making snap judgements I guess – that they were wealthy enough to do that – that they had always been that wealthy – and they could not be further from the truth.

If I get anything from my parents, it's my work ethic, and the value of everything – even the smallest things. As mentioned – I had no carpet on my bedroom floor for quite some time – neither did the rest of the house. The house got furnished bit-by-bit as things could be afforded, and by golly those things were looked after. My Mum stopped working when we were young, so she cooked, cleaned (our house, and our grandparents house), did the grocery shopping, and walked us to and from school every day. I can still remember the excitement of the first new television we had – of it having a remote control, and teletext.

I had only ever known teletext at my Grandparents house. My Dad's Dad was a life-long gadget freak – from the hilarious frankenstein three-phase switch he had installed on the cooker in the kitchen one day (Nan never let him forget it), to the calculator watch he proudly showed everybody in later years – that he had no idea how to use. Teletext was magic though – you could key a number into the television, and after a few minutes wait, a page of text would appear. Most people used it for TV listings, or the weather forecast – I used it to read jokes. Looking back, it was hilariously slow and convoluted, but in was the closest we would get to an internet-like experience for at least another ten years.

The house at Burswin Road had been a bungalow – sold to my parents by my Uncle when his marriage failed, and he ran away to sea in the merchant navy to find himself. The new house had an upstairs. This was huge – because – stairs! I can't begin to count the number of times myself and my brother were told off for running up and down the stairs, skidding down the stairs, jumping down the stairs, and so on. If it involved any amount of daring, or stupidity, we probably put each other up to it. Stairs aren't without their dangers though – many years later my Dad was stumbling around in the dark early one morning, when he fell down the stairs – putting a foot through the banister half-way down, and trapping himself, upside down, battered and bruised, and furious. We thought the house was falling down – or that there was an earthquake. Then we heard a quiet call from my Mum as she rushed from their bedroom;

'Dave? Are you alright?'

She turned the landing light on, and saw him, upside down, holding his trapped leg, with his eyes tightly shut;

'WHAT THE FUCKING HELL DO YOU THINK!', he shouted at the top of his voice.

I'm still not sure how we didn't laugh.

At five years old the garden at the new house seemed to go on for miles – I remember digging around in what had once been a rockery at the far end, and finding the remains of a dog from many years before – I proudly took the skull into the kitchen to show Mum, and was shouted at pretty spectacularly.

Our golden retriever, 'Ben', thought the garden was fantastic, and wasted no time in dumping spectacularly all over it. I think one of my first chores at the new house was walking around the garden with a refuse sack, and a shovel. Not fun – particularly in the summer, when you had to fight the flies to retrieve what the dog had proudly left for you.

After a few days we began to discover the next door neighbours. The house was in the bottom of a cul-de-sac, so was surrounded by other family homes. To our immediate right lived a dinner lady I had known from infant school – Mrs Ruddock. She had a son and daughter who were older than us – I inherited her son's collection of 'Look-In' magazines – an early weekly teen magazine filled with stories about the pop-stars of the day. I seem to remember a recurring photo comic-strip about somebody becoming best friends with Limahl from Kajagoogoo, and having all sorts of innocent adventures with him. I also inherited an accoustic guitar, which I never did learn to play properly.

To the left side of the house, an old scottish woman lived on her own. She was feared by all of the children in the neighbourhood – mostly because the footpath outside her house had a slight incline up to a grassy area that swept behind the row of houses. We always referred to the area at the top of that footpath as 'on the hill', even though the grass was only a few feet higher than the road.

The inclined section of footpath was of course a natural ramp – and we are talking about 1979. BMX bikes hadn't arrived yet, but all the bike designs were headed that way. As children came hurtling along the footpath towards 'The Hill', with hopes of a spectacular Evil-Kinevil style stunt, the old scottish woman would either bash on her window, or come dashing from the house, shouting at you all to go away.

One day years later, the council put railings on the footpath ramp, stopping all the fun. I was old enough by then not to care very much, but the younger children in the street thought their world had come to an end (well – those not small enough to carry on hurtling under the railings without taking any notice of them).

My brother and I got BMX bikes in about 1983. Apparently I came down from my bedroom on Christmas morning and walked straight past my new bike in the hallway. My grandparents were staying with us over Christmas, and asked me to go look in the hallway – I walked back through, straight past it for a second time, and my Granddad laughed in that long 'hahaaaaa' way he had of laughing.

We treated those bikes like they were made of gold. For my brother, the BMW was a tremendous upgrade – he had previously had a Raleigh Grifter – a bike that seemed to be made from leftover parts from a construction site. You know when you see a motorbike rider struggling to pick a bike up after falling off it? The grifter was like that – made from lead pipe and angle-iron probably. If you had run into a brick wall with it, there was every chance you would have been fine, and the wall would have disintegrated on impact. That didn't stop my brother from trying to jump the grifter on 'the hill' though.

I can still remember his final attempt. The Grifter was equipped with Sturmey Archer drum gears – operated from a lever on the handlebars. This meant it could reach pretty death defying speeds. Unfortunately drum gears tended to also incorporate an accidental 'slip gear', where all resistance was removed from the pedals without warning – removing the rider's ability to have children at a moment's notice. And that's almost what happened to my brother. Just as he reached perhaps thirty miles an hour (not bad going for a 9 year old) on his two ton bike, immediately outside our house – with yards left until the base of 'the hill', the bike went into slip gear. I can still see him sliding along the footpath in his nylon running shorts, everybody stopping in a stunned silence, and then him getting up, dancing about a bit while beginning to cry, and then running indoors.

He didn't come out, but we heard him. Other kids in the neighbourhood knocked on our door to see if he was ok – when in reality all they really wanted to see was how gruesome it really was. He had to wear shorts for WEEKS.

Davis Close provided a wonderful childhood. Apart from the odd strange neighbour (I'm sure every street has them), we lucked into moving in during a time when lots of children of similar ages also lived in the street – and as children do, we made friends immediately. Their was Claire, and Anna, the daughters of the local policeman that lived opposide. There was the very friendly (later discovered very homosexual) man that lived next door to them, the scottish couple (everybody called her Aggie, but I don't think it was her real name) and her quiet husband, then 'The Pinks'. I think they moved to England in the 1950s along with lots of other immigrants from Africa, Asia, India, and the Carribean – they had a beautiful daughter that turned heads when she walked home from work called 'Monique'. Further along the road lived 'The Seaths' – a family from Wales – the Dad became the manager of the local newspaper shop, and his daughters firm friends of my brother and I. At the far end of the street a little Irish man called Sean always seemed to be working on his garden. I think this was a ruse – to trap people in conversation as they wandered past. If you got caught by Sean, you were there for quite some time. His wife Cynthia would either excuse herself from conversations before they got started, or interrupt him to allow your escape – a co-conspirator of sorts, that he had no idea about.

Like I said – we were lucky. Lucky to have such wonderful friends and neighbours. We were probably shaped far more than we ever realised by the friendships, games, and idiotic scrapes we got into. It's interesting – looking on Google Street View – to see the old house, and wonder how many more children have grown up in the houses on that street – and if they still all play in the road together on an evening after school. Somehow, with the advent of computers, and the internet, I doubt it.

I think we saw the beginning of that happening with the family that lived on the end. The Dad was a salesman for some sort of engineering company, and the Mum was a nurse. They had a pretty daughter called Julie that was really a bit too proud of her body for her Mum's liking, and a son called Andrew that we rarely saw. Actually – scratch that – from the point Andrew was perhaps seven or eight, we didn't see him for perhaps five or six years. Eight bit computers arrived just in time to capture his imagination. For all I know, he's a dot com millionaire now.

I lived at Davis Close with my parents until my mid-twenties. During those latter years I really lost touch with everybody in the street, because the only times I saw anybody was while going to work, coming home from work, or heading out for a night out. Sean would still stop me in the street to say hello, but beyond that, the only people I really knew were the next door neighbours.

Mrs Ruddock moved away when I was perhaps eleven years old – I seem to remember conversations between my parents about the company her husband worked for going broke, I really have no idea though. Mr and Mrs Griffiths replaced them – she was a supply teacher at the secondary school, and he was a high ranking officer in the Royal Air Force. They had two children – a boy called Paul, and a girl called Hannah, who we became friends with immediately. Paul was a few years younger, but age doesn't make much difference before you become a teenager – not in my experience anyway.

I don't want this trip down memory lane to become an essay filled with foaming invective about elitism and snobbishness – but I will say that as soon as Paul was about nine years old he was packed off to boarding school. When he returned the next summer, he was a very different person – no longer mixing with any of us. I suppose it was my first experience of any sort of class system, and I didn't like it one bit.

One day – while home from school at lunchtime – there was a knock on the door, and Mrs Griffiths stood in our doorway, asking for me. I rushed to the door – wondering what on earth I might have done wrong (a natural reaction to anybody asking for me – even now) – and discovered that she had locked herself out of her house, and could I break in through the open upstairs bedroom window above the flat roof for her ?

A few minutes later, after pretending I was some sort of cat-burglar, I let her back into her own house, and was given a hug for my troubles. I can't tell you how many shades of crimson I probably turned. I also realised that day that any ideas of a career as a cat burglar were gone – although I pretended I was brave while stood on her roof, my knees were shaking so badly I thought I might collapse.

Can you even imagine the insurance claim – 'I broke my arm after the eleven year old boy that was breaking into my bedroom fell off the roof and kicked me'.

The Griffiths family eventually moved – I think Mr Griffiths was posted to a different area of the country with the Air Force – it had happened to a lot of my friends over the years.

They were eventually replaced by the Knight family – she was something to do with every social group imaginable at the air base, and he was an ex-fighter pilot, now teaching pilots to fly VC-10s. They had children too – younger than my brother and I, but pleasant enough. For several years I thought the son incredibly funny because he picked up his father's RAF radio voice, and spoke incredibly correctly. All of this reverse-snobbishness flew out of the window when he took my flying one day (part of an effort to get his flying hours up), and I found out just how useful a perfect, clipped RAF English accent was when communicating on the radio. My entire view of him changed – seeing the usually distracted, daydreaming boy from next door become a thoroughly professional pilot.

Occasionally, while cutting the grass in the back garden, stories would be told about past adventures. Mr Knight had been scrambled on Christmas morning one year during the tail-end of the cold war. He had flown Phantoms – racing out over the north sea to turn Russian bombers around.

I can't imagine what that must be like for forces families at the sharp end – knowing that each day an exercise might be the real thing – and that somebody might not come home.

The Knights were our next-door neighbours right up until our house was sold in 2000. And therein lies a story – but I'll tell you about Mr Mays first.

When we moved into the street when I was young – as mentioned earlier – there was an old scottish woman that lived next door. I don't remember if she moved away, died, or moved into a home – but eventually she was replaced by an engineer that had retired from London. His name was Mr Mays, and he lived alone with his dog 'Bob', a black labrador, and a sister that regularly visited in a muddy estate car.

Years later we discovered that Mr Mays moved away from the city because he saw so many of his co-workers retire, and sink into a life of pubs, beer, and not much else. He was determined that wasn't going to happen to him, so bought a house in a small town in the Cotswolds, and left everything he had known behind.

We heard banging and crashing in his garage for years. Literally years – and always wondered what he was doing. And then one day a locomotive train appeared on his driveway. It had taken something in the region of five years, and he had scratch-built it in his garage. For the remaining years we lived there, he toured the nearby counties – towing children on railway tracks for fun.

I looked him up last year on the internet, and discovered he was still alive and well, and the president of an esteemed fellowship of master engineers in Oxford – he had only stood down a year or two previously. I read the article, and wished I had known him better – wished I had taken the time to get to know him. I bet he had amazing stories to tell.

I woke with a start this morning when the alarm clock went off on my mobile phone. I had been having a dream about a baby elephant chasing a guy along a beach – it seemed completely normal at the time, but looking back was utterly preposterous.

I was somewhere above the beach looking down, and could see the elephant trying to get to the guy – he ducked under a boat in the shallows, and then ran from the surf – the elephant in hot pursuit. Once on the sand, he left the elephant far behind, and slowed to a walk perhaps a hundred yards further on – stretching out a towel, and laying on it among a group of others. Meanwhile, the elephant walked slowly along the beach towards the group of people sunbathing, and began to pick up pace – half running directly towards the man. He spotted it at the last moment and sprang to his feat – holding his towel out as a bullfighter might, causing the elephant to run through it again, and again.

That's when the alarm clock went off.

I stared into the darkness of the hotel room for a few minutes, working out what time I would need to get up in order to have a shower, shave, and reach the hotel restaurant by 7am. I have learned through experience to go for breakfast early – you get to drink your coffee in relative peace and quiet, and not have to fight over leftovers from the buffet. At home I very rarely bother with breakfast, but having ticked the box for breakfast when booking the hotel room, it seemed a shame to waste it.

While eating a hastily constructed egg and bacon roll, and sipping a rather lovely cappuccino, I scrolled through notifications on my phone. One in particular stood out. A distant friend – a blogger – from the other side of the world might be visiting London in March next year – would I be around to meet up ?

'Of course!'

A breakfast time conversation via instant messaging ensued – and the beginnings of a plan to bring two or three bloggers together at a pub in London. It made me realise how lazy I have become with this whole internet thing – I just write my words, post them, and comment on others – it never occurs to me to reach out and actually meet up with anybody, even though I know several of the people I read are within traveling distance.

Anyway. I'm back in my room now, having chickened out of going for a walk along the river. Alongside the river – not in it. I'm not sure why I just clarified that. It's freezing outside. Properly cold. Maybe tomorrow I'll summon the courage, wrap my Hufflepuff scarf around me, and brave the elements.

The alarm on my phone erupted at 6am this morning, and woke me with a start. I don’t remember the dream now, but I remember wanting to return to it. I watched the clock tick through each minute until 6:30am, thinking back through everything I had packed – wondering if I had forgotten anything obvious. Traveling has become so routine, I now worry that I’m not worrying – if that makes any sense.

After having a shower, shave, and filling and packing my washbag, I still had half an hour until the taxi to the airport would arrive, so busied myself with making lunches for everybody – lining them up along the cooker, ready to go. With a few minutes remaining I spotted the taxi draw up to the front of the house, and made a final call up the stairs.

“I’m going now.”

There were muffled grunts from upstairs, followed by the clomp clomp clomb of my shoes in the hallway, and the clunk of the front door closing behind me.

The taxi driver has become familiar. Perhaps once a month he arrives at the end of our driveway, and delivers me to the airport. No fuss. No drama. Occasionally he makes conversation along the way, but not always. This morning he talked about the traffic – debating which route to go – worrying unneccesarily about my itinerary.

“It’s fine – I always allow an hour to get to the airport, and I always work around arriving two hours before departure – just like they advise you to”

Of course it never takes two hours to get through the various hurdles at the airport – particularly London Heathrow. This morning I arrived outside the terminal at 8:15, and was through security by 8:30. Everything seems to be done “at scale” at Heathrow – with legions of staff standing ready to work through occasional gluts of thousands of passengers at a time.

I’m always impressed by the airport – by the relative calm that seems to exist within the terminal buildings. I imagine if you tried to map out what everybody is doing in some sort of time-and-motion study, you would quickly go insane – and yet “the machine” quietly continues – 24 hours a day, day after day. Planes arrive at gates every few minutes, calls are made to passengers, people disembark, and board continually – I don’t think any plane stands at a gate for longer than half an hour.

I remember watching a documentary about air travel some time ago – where they stated that most large passenger jets need to be in the air for at least 18 out of every 24 hours to turn a profit – and the aircraft will be expected to work at that rate for twenty years or more. I wonder what will happen when the oil runs out though (which it will, in the next thirty or fourty years) – will all the jet planes be scrapped to make way for something else ?

Maybe the internet means we won’t need to travel as much. I’ve always thought it slightly insane that I travel to Germany every month with work to sit in an office, when I can quite happily sit in the office at home – or even our spare room – and achieve the same ends.

People are sitting around me in the departure hall looking up anxiously towards the information screens – watching the time tick down on each flight. My flight is already delayed by over half an hour. Half an hour to sit here and wonder how to fill my time. Perhaps a book. The Kindle is in my bag – filled with movies, music, TV shows, books, and magazines. Given the unpredictable and unreliable nature of fast internet connections while travelling, I tend to bring my own entertainment.

I’ve tried to watch Germany entertainment TV shows while holed up in the hotel, and can never make head or tail of them. It would of course help if I spoke any German. It’s interesting how different languages sound when you don’t understand them – French is somewhat soothing, English polite, and German invariably sounds like a raging argument.

I keep yawning. Perhaps a coffee will help.

It's 4:30pm on Sunday afternoon, and you find me sitting in the junk room, emptying my head into the keyboard of the old computer. It's been making strange noises recently – I'm half-expecting it to stop working entirely soon. It's already dark and cold outside – the nights are drawing in quickly.

Our middle girl played rugby this morning – which for me usually entails standing on the touchline with a video camera to record evidence of progress for her college course. Not this morning though – having charged and prepared the camera, I discovered there was no match – just a training session. I busied myself by making conversation with another parent while slowly losing feeling in my feet. Crikey it was cold.

Following rugby we returned home, fed our faces, and then my other half left to visit her Mum – about an hour away by car. I have been left in charge of making roast dinner. I've already peeled the potatoes and prepared the vegetables for the steamer – I just need to put the chicken in a bit later.

Roast dinner is one of those meals that I always thought unimaginably complicated while growing up – but turned out to be remarkably simple. Saying that, my version of roast dinner is perhaps more simple than most – just roast potatoes, steamed carrots, broccolli, and sweetcorn, roast chicken, and gravy. Note to self – must remember to put a vegetable option in the oven for other half (she's vegetarian).

At some point – either while waiting for dinner to cook, or maybe later – I need to pack clothes into a suitcase. I fly to Germany again in the morning. Another week away from home – another week alone in a hotel, eating alone in restaurants, and walking the streets of a distant city alone in the mornings and evenings. I'm taking a couple of books with me, and will no doubt find something to write about along the way too. People watching has become a guilty pleasure while traveling.

I keep watching the clock. I should go and switch the oven on in a bit – warm it up ready for the chicken.

Do you ever have the sense that something around you is different – that something has changed? Over the last few days I have become increasingly aware that something is going on – that a cog somewhere in the machine that surrounds us has turned.

I keep hearing whispers and murmurings that 'blogging' is making a comeback. I don't mean the traffic chasing niche blogs either – I mean the candid personal journals that proliferated in the early 2000s – intimate records of people's thoughts, ideas, hopes, and dreams.

Perhaps people are rebelling against the established social networks – rebelling against being controlled, constrained, and their information sold. We all have a voice – an identity. We all have so much to contribute – so much to share.

Perhaps the status quo really is changing. Perhaps the very same platforms that democratized the sharing of information on the world wide web have unwittingly forged the path to their own destruction. This is no bad thing.

Nearly two decades ago I was among the first wave posting public journal entries to the internet. At the time we were a curiosity of sorts – seeking each other out, connecting, and forming disparate online communities. Given how steep the learning curve was in terms of setting up a blog, it's amazing how quickly the movement grew. And it WAS a movement – at one time the web was a cauldron of opinions, thoughts, and experiences from all over the world.

In some ways you might describe those that built the first social networks as city builders. People were invited in with promises of ready-made-community, law enforcement, ease of entry, and so on. Few in the cities saw the walls being built around them. Perhaps we can draw parallels between the re-emergence of blogging, and the inevitable exodus that happens from all cities when they reach a given size – for some, city life just doesn't work.

For the first time in a long time, I'm looking forward to what might happen next.

No, this blog post is not about questionable sexual escapades – apologies if that's what you were expecting. It's also not about a lunatic shooting somebody with a banana. Trust me – given the title, it's REALLY difficult to find a picture that fits.

When I get in from work, I never quite know what I'm going to find. Sometimes I walk into a happy nuclear-family scene straight from the 1950s – where Mum is cooking dinner, the children are doing their homework, the radio is playing in the kitchen, and the kettle is already on to make a cup of tea. At other times I walk in to find out that one of the children has already eaten, along with her Mum, and gone to rugby practice – and I've stopped on the way home to buy food for myself and the rest of the family, because we haven't had a chance to buy any groceries for two weeks. On those nights I walk into a war-zone in the kitchen, with plates, pots, and pans thrown everywhere, various items of rugby kit thrown on the floor along the hallway, and dirty plates left on the dinner table.

The latter scene occurred earlier this week.

Before cooking the remaining rabble something for dinner, I decided to clear the kitchen first – empty the dishwasher, fill it back up – the usual chores. While doing so, Miss 13 appeared. She has a knack of appearing within minutes of any food plans being made.

'What are we having for dinner?'

'Pizza'

'YES!' (she does a fist pump in the middle of the kitchen, still wearing her school uniform)

She begins helping me – loading dishes into the dishwasher alongside me.

'Any drama at school today?'

'Yes – Maisy and Amber aren't friends any more'

'Oh no!' (feigning concern) 'Why is that?'

'Maisy called Amber a bumhole'

Now I'm not sure about you, but when children come out with things like that I have a really difficult job keeping a straight face. I'm really not sure how I did.

'That's awful! What did Amber do? Did she tell a teacher?'

'She called Maisy Daddy Pig'

At that, I finally burst out laughing, and so did Miss 13. We related the story to our eldest over dinner, and she couldn't control her laughter either – finally shrieking 'buy YOU look like Daddy Pig!', pointing at me with her fork.

I suppose at least I'm not a bumhole...

I have spent the evening tinkering with the new 'Twenty Nineteen' theme that's in sort-of-secret development at WordPress. It's not generally available yet, but the beta is if you know how to acquire and install such things. Once upon a time I built WordPress themes and plugins to make money on-the-side – so I have to sheepishly admit to knowing far more than I ever let on about such things.

It's all a very long time ago now though, and when people ask if I can help them build a website, I set them marching in the direction of Weebly or Squarespace, then run in the opposite direction.

It's not that I'm lazy – I just prefer to walk away from too much tinkering when I get home. I spend all day in the office staring at source code – and have fallen into the trap of taking on extra work at home from time to time – to make extra money. A quote comes to mind:

Too much work and not enough play makes Jack a dull boy The Shining, by Stephen King Anyway – getting back to 'Twenty Nineteen' – I'll just wait for it to become available later in the year. I'm not about to up-sticks and tell everybody I've moved the blog yet again – only a lunatic would ever do anything like that, right ? (stop laughing).