And then I was thirteen

And I have never, in my life had pain as bad as the period pains I had then.

Now admittedly, I’ve not had a baby. I’ve never, in fact, broken a bone, or fractured one, or puntured a lung or recieved an axe wound to the face. Or been run over, or had anything particularly heavy fall on me, or had an accident running with scissors. Or been shot. Or hanged. I’ve never had an operation, I’ve had four stitches in my entire life, I’ve never had a brain scan, a brain hemorrhage, a brain tumour, a heart bypass, transplant or massage (I’ve had a head massage, mind). I still have all my organs. I’ve never slept in a hospital bed. I have never, ever fallen off a building of more than 60 stories in height.

Overall, I’ve had a pretty dull life, it has to be said.

And the period pains, the ones I had throughout my teenage years, were also dull. Not just in the sense of that dull, throbbing, crippling pain that left my legs too weak to walk and caused me to faint, but dull in the sense of boring, in the sense that I knew that they were coming, that there was nothing stopping them, and that frankly, there is nothing as dull as the inevitable.

So enough of that. I realise more than half my readers are likely to be men, and quite frankly the ‘I’m a girl, I have periods, meh meh meh‘ was never quite my line.

But still, the fact remains, if I’m trying to place a memory in my early teens, I remember musicals, which I’ll talk about another point, and starting to fall in love with a) Indie music and b) a different boy two days, which I’ll also talk about later, and I also remember the cot bed in the nurses room where I’d go and lie down when the period pains got too bad. Every month, they got too bad.

Conveniently, they used to get mostly ‘too bad’ quite near the beginning of Maths class, or a different class that I happened not to have done my homework for. Having said that, I’m sure those pains were as real as they were mighty, and not a product of teenage over-dramatics even a bit. Nono.

Nonono.

Oh come on, it’s a good way of livening up a dull life.

Speaking of which, I did get strangled once. But that’s another story. In the meantime, for sake of completism

A full list of my injuries and medical procedures:
- Birth. I was in hospital for a couple of days.
- Large gash on left hip. Cause: hydrangea leaves and rocks, later, slightly gangrenous complications, cause: slightly more complicated things. Age: about 8.
- Concussion. Age: 9. Cause: Showing off, dancing on top of a chest of drawers.
- Dislocated shoulder. Age: 17. Cause: Running down hill to fetch hymnbook. Damn God.
- Two wisdom teeth removed under sedation. Age: 18.
- Two wisdom teeth removed under General Anaesthetic. Age: 19.
- Mole removed under local anaesthetic. Age: 21.
- Torn ligament in foot (undiagnosed). Age: 26.
- Hurty nose. Possibly a tiny tiny bit broken, unless I’m being overdramatic and it wasn’t in the slightest (undiagnosed). Age: 27

Yes, I know, dull.

And you know, writing it down, it looks even more ridiculous than I thought it would. 28 years. 7 noticable medical incidents. That’s ridiculous.

Am I ridiculously below average? Because that sounds ridiculously below average. Are you all sitting there, counting off the seven medical emergencies you have every year? The more I think about it, the more freakishly lucky I’ve been.

I am so totally due a running-over.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was twelve

Ah. It seems the diaries don’t begin til 1990.
Damn my illiterate youth.

By 12, I was still going to church every Sunday. By the age of about 14 or 15, that sort of rash behaviour had cleared up nicely, and I was on the righteous path of sleeping like a bear all the way through the weekend. But churchgoing is not something you can avoid easily as the child of a minister and a lay preacher, and so by the age of twelve, I was still there, every Sunday, religiously. Or semi religiously. Look, I was there, that much I can vouch for. Let’s leave the religion out of this.

In its favour, I have to say that organised religion has stood me in good stead, pub-quiz wise. I can name the shortest verse in the bible (John 11:35), and the world’s longest hymn (all of them), and at least 9 disciples. No, hang on, I used to be able to name at least 9 disciples. Now I can name at least 9 rice-based cereals. Equally useful.

But… But then … it was a bit like having the biggest family in the world. A bit. There were always plenty of sweets, which is as good a reason for believing in a higher power as I can think of… Last week someone gave me a Murray Mint, and I almost believed in God again - suddenly, I was sitting on the Brown carpet behind the pews, trying to find funny bits in the Book of Proverbs and wondering what we were going to have for lunch.

Then I finished the Murray Mint, and reverted to agnosticism. I’m beginning to suspect a link between the rise of evangelism and the rise of obesity and tooth decay. I’ll look into it.

After Church, there would be coffee - everyone standing around and talking, for what seemed like either a reasonable period or forever, depending on how hungry I was. But there were always people talking, people who liked each other, who just wanted to stand around and chat after the service for as long as chatting took. If one of my friends was there, we would chat, or play, or explore the darker corners of the building. Or just mooch around looking angsty - priorities change as you get older.

As I approached my teens, I started to develop those things that girls get. Breasts, hips, and general puppychub, the norm. My 15 additional aunties, mainly Carribean, would congratulate me each time they saw me;

“Turn around for me now! Mm-mm, girl! You’re getting nice and big and fat, aren’t you? Gloria! Gloria, come and have a look this beautiful young lady - look at that nice round bum, will you now? … Nice and fat …”

And so on, and so on. And I know now, as I knew then, they were paying me great compliment. That, having known me since birth, they were pleased that I was eating well, becoming a real woman, filling out - but my God, at the time, when the cultural influences of peers and magazines were telling me that filling out was a cardinal sin? That starting to grow serious curves was something I should never be considering doing?

Well, at that point their hymns fell on faithless ears. But I believe in them now. Whole heartedly. And I’d thank them, now - too late, but still, you can’t expect a teenager to be grateful at the time.

By the middle of my teens my church-going fell off entirely. And - apart from a contractual-based glitch in the early part of this century where I had to go 9 times a week - I’ve stayed away from churches ever since.

Not in an angry way. Just in a ‘not seeing the point of it’ kind of way. Because if organised religion were all about the liking people and about Murray Mints and being loved by boisterous pseudoaunts, I’d sign up for it in a second.

But luckily, you can like people while being a humanist, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim, or just like huge swathes of lovely people, nothing at all. And your local newsagent stocks Murray Mints, buy some today. And Boisterous Carribean pseudoaunts? Well, I don’t know. You can probably hire them or something. No idea. Should have thought that through.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was 11

I can’t believe this. It’s Monday, and I’m staring into my five-day week and the five years of secondary school all at once. Come Friday, it’ll be both the weekend and the end of my secondary school experience. Again. While the pleasure will be two-fold, the intervening five years - five days, whatever - had better have pulled their socks up since the last time I had them.

It’s already consumed five years of my life. So I plan not to spend very much time talking about my secondary school career. But it lived up to cliché well enough. Yes, they were some of the happiest days of my life, but that doesn’t say much coming from a depressive. Yes, they may have been my ’salad days’, but only if you expect your typical salad to include things that don’t taste very nice, things that have gone off and bullies.

It was a school that liked to pride itself on its discipline and high moral standards, and tried admirably to pass those on to its pupils, and generally failed. It wasn’t known as the best school in inner London then, and now it’s apparently worse. My alma mater. Positioned perfectly close to both a hospital and a prison, which covered most of the important bases. We were only missing a morgue.

The teachers, though, were great. Slightly harrassed looking, perhaps, with a small percentage whose spirits had seemed to have left them entirely, but on the whole lovely. I went back a couple of years after I’d left, when I was eighteen and feeling more confident. And while I was there, I went for a chat with an old English teacher.

I remembered her from my first year at the school, the way she seemed to constantly amuse herself, saying things we didn’t quite understand, but certainly shut us up. It was only when I went back older that I realised how funny she was. She was the driest, most sarcastic woman I’d ever met. If I’m ever going to make a list of heroes, I may put her on it. I’ll have to remember her name first, but once I’ve done that, she’s a shoe-in.

So there wre good teachers. And then there was the PE cliché. Sorry, teacher. A mixture of the two. A PE Cleacher. He was built like an enormous brick shit, fond of tight vests and the sound of his own voice, and was my form teacher when I first started at the school.

We were all in shock. We were quiet, we knew that things were different in the new world of Bigschool, and we weren’t - I suppose - clear on what was and what wasn’t acceptable behaviour. Well, we knew what was unacceptable behaviour from us. Talking without permission, walking in the wrong place or time or sometimes at all, not standing when an authority figure walked into the room, lateness, non-delivery of homework, etc, etc, Most things natural to children, and to people in general, were unacceptable behaviour for us.

For the PE Cheacher though, anything was acceptable.

Ours was an extremely diverse multi-cultural school, as all of our primary schools had been, and therefore nothing surprising to us, and not worth commenting on. Or we would have thought.

Obi’s parents were from Nigeria, but Obi was from Willesden. Yet, if Obi walking in late of a morning, the PE cheacher would ask if he’d missed the banana boat and had to wait for the next one. Halfway through one of us giving a presentation on something he bored of, he would start beating the desk in crude drum fashion, and tell Obi that his mum was calling. Typing this in now, I can feel myself boiling with rage.

But at the time, I remember at the time we sat there, all quiet and confused. Was this what was allowed in Bigschool? Is this how teachers always were allowed to behave toward pupils? Was this allowed?

As it turned it wasn’t. And if he wasn’t fired, he certainly left, quietly, and without trace, very quickly, while we were on holiday.

Someone told me he’d emigrated. Canada, or the USA, Australia or New Zealand - the rumours were vague.

So, my international friends, should you ever come across a short musclebound cockney bigot, teaching soccer by rote and intimidation, hanging around and polluting your beautiful country, tell him that ‘you have a liberal stand on immigration but in his case you’re willing to make an exception’ and that ‘he should fuck off back where he came from’. Except we don’t want him either.

A Deal? A deal. Good.

Right.

Goodbye Mr PE Cleacher, you can disappear again now. Goodbye first year, good bye 11.

Four more years to go, just to get out of school. Still, the teenage angst will be rocking up soon, and I can only guess at how much fun that’ll be - yes, that’s right, I’ve got diaries.

Oh God.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was ten

With her long blonde hair and her well-set, sparkling, big blue eyes, you would find it difficult to believe that the little girl was on commission from the devil himself, but she was.

Sent to cause pain and emotional destruction to all girls of similar age in the little inner London primary we attended, she rained misery down upon us like shards of ice chipped from her cold, cold heart.

She was a child model. Her name was Flangerabbit Moronface.
That’s not true. I have given her a false name, in case she finds this, hunts me down and skins me. Because that degree of evil doesn’t fade even with the best part of twenty years grace. I bet she’s still out there, torturing kittens, having blonde hair and big blue eyes and making the whole world miserable about it.

She had, and I wish I knew how she did it, an incredible hold over the girls of our little class in our little school. She managed once to convince us that it would be cool to make a circle in the dust of the dirt part of the playground, just outside our classroom. So she had us, about 7 of us, Walking Around in a Circle while she watched us, reporting on our progress, and shouting instruction at us.

This is what happens in non-progressive prisons. This is not fun. How did she ever, Ever convince us that this would be a fun thing? Why did we ever, Ever obey her?

No, I know why. Because she was beautiful, and confident, and if you wanted to be in her ‘circle’, you wanted to please her to be so. It drove me crazy that we all bent over backwards to be liked by her. It drove me mad.
I wanted to be friends with people because they wanted to be friends with me. Not because they were the prettiest girl in the class, or the best dressed. But at the same time, I wanted to be liked. And if she was the hardest to be liked by, then so be it; I wanted to be liked by her.

So we would bow down to her. When she decided to take a new dislike to us, and spent the day making fun of a coldsore, or an item of clothing, or something we said, or the way we said it, we would accept it, and bow down even lower, and do whatever it took to make her like us again.

I was about ten when my rebellion started.

Slowly it started to dawn on me that if Flangerabbit Moronface didn’t like me, it might not, actually, be the end of the world. Because, taking all things into consideration, she was really deeply, deeply unlikable. In every possible way I could think of.

I remember when she was the fawning star of a kitchen roll billboard and magazine advert campaign. It was a bad brand of kitchen roll, let me first say that. She forced us all, stating intention of the withdrawal of her favour if we didn’t acquiesce, to obtain a copy of this advert - by buying some godforsaken women’s magazine, as far as I remember - and have it stuck up on the inside of our fliptop classroom desks.

We each had a tiny shrine to our vapid classmate, by order.

I think my first active step was the refusal to tie her shoelaces.

She had a habit, when the shoelaces on her perfect shoes became untied, of asking one of her satellites to bend down to the ground and do it for her. One day, at the corner of the building, while taking our aloof turn around the playground, she asked, and I refused.

She asked again, and I refused. She looked mean. I looked petulant. She said nothing. I said less. The other satellites held their breath. We stared at each other, and at the shoe, and at each other. It was a stand-off the likes of which West London had rarely seen. Apart from perhaps in those race-riots of the 1960s. But this came very close.

And after that, it got easier and easier. I wasn’t so much in the circle as I had been, but that tuned out to be not so bad. I used to like reading more than talking about barbies anyway. Ah, how times have changed. And although Alison Flangerabbit Moronface was consistent in her cowiness, the satellites were still my friends, at end of day, and really, although I have strayed far from this understanding now, it’s easier to tune out people who don’t like you than you would have ever thought.

My beloved is going to laugh like a drain when he reads that. This is not something I manage to live by. Still.

Flangerabbit was the only person in the world I have ever, Ever had a physical fight with. It was about a week before we left primary school and went to different schools, never - as I know now - to meet again.

It was a game that someone had made up. We all stood in lines, each line representing a different shop. One person had to call out the names of products (or things, I have no idea) and whoever was representing the appropriate shop had to run to the hill at the top of the playground and back down again.

I will leave you short of the whole sordid detail, excepting the fact that I was representing the Butchers and She the Bakers, but there was a brief argument on the best origin of Mince meat, and after only a few fierce verbals, the arms started flying, and we were into windmill heavy girlfight hell. Hairpulling, shouting, scratching. I didn’t care what happened to my face. She did.

I can’t remember who won the actual fight.
But let’s face it, taking everything into account, the whole history of Flangerabbit Moronface and the Satellites and Me, I will confidently say, at end of day, I won.
I win.

And what kind of twunt says mince comes from a bakers, anyway?

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was nine:

My first boyfriend was called Nourdin. Or rather, Noodles.
Noodles was his ’streetname’, and his grafitti tag. Noodles and I got together in the same way that everyone else seemed to at that age; someone told me that Noodles had decided that I was his girlfriend.

We never kissed, we never held hands, I’m not sure we even talked from the point we became ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ until the moment we broke up. It was a very modern relationship that way.

I have to admit that the ending of our very special time together was nothing but my fault. Mine and my crazy attempts at fashionability. Apparently, Noodles couldn’t be the boyfriend of anyone who would choose to wear a tennis skirt in the rain. And that was it, my first, formative thing, over. I have to say, it taught me something, relationship-wise. And you can check with my beloved. I’ve not worn a tennis skirt in the rain for the whole of our relationship.

This was the year that John McCarthy was kidnapped in Beirut (he was released in 1991). This was the year in which, in Ukraine, one of the reactors exploded at the Chernobyl plant, causing thousands of deaths in years to come. This was around the time my parents finally decided to seperate. I don’t remember exactly when that was. This the year that my father became very ill, spending three months in hospital. This was the year in which a postal worker in Edmond, Oklahoma turned ‘postal’ (thus the term?) killing fourteen of his co-workers before killing himself. And the Oscar winning ‘best song’ was Take My Breath Away by Berlin.

I apologise. I didn’t actually think about it enough beforehand, but even wearing the rose-tinted nostalctacles, some years were never going to be funny. I’m sorry.

This is the end of the doom laden.

It’s just that some years are less funny than others, aren’t they?

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was eight

No cute childhood picture today, I think. Nor, perhaps, for the next few days/years. Not because kodak happened to be on strike for several years. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Nor because no pictures were taken. Unfortunately, they were. They’re not, however, in my possession. For a very very good reason.

Because, for several years back there, I looked very much like a boy, with a fish on his head. A fish that sounds very much like bullet. No, hang on. That’s spelt similarly but sounds not like at all. A fish that sounds like … erm … wulllit. It’s a word, honestly.

I remember - very clearly - a day when I was playing on my own in a park near my dad’s new manse [church house, house for the minister], and I dropped my ball, and a mother asked her child to ‘pass the ball back to the little boy’. I cried fron that moment until I went to sleep that night. I must have been about ten, therefore. But this is all about haircuts.

The hair, gone from the fringe and bunches of the pictures I’ve uploaded here, suddenly contracted, as far as I remember, to spikes and tufts and easy-cared-for late-eightiesness. On some people this looked good. On me?

Tony. He was our hairdresser. He worked. It wasn’t the most imaginative name, but we seemed quite loyal.

Every time Tony cut your hair, he would finish, and hold the mirror to the front and the back and the side, and tell you, in a confident and romantically accented voice, that you looked like “A meeeeeleeeon dollars! And the Chaynge!”.
No economics expert in my youth, I had no idea what that meant, and took it to mean a good thing. Unfortunately for me (I wasn’t to know) the exchange rate was particularly bad at the time, and a million dollars (and the change) seemed actually to be worth about 15p.

No hairdresser, looking at a head of hair as thick as mine, would think that a shortallover style would do well on my bonce. But it was the beginning of my experience with hairdressers who didn’t give you a haircut, but just gave a haircut.

It may also have begun my fear of haircuts. After David’s we went to His n’ Hers. New hairdressers, new stylists, yet I still managed to get exactly the same crappy haircut, time after time after time. Until the last time. I had been staying with my primary school age cousins - I was early teenage at this point - I went in, they took my coat, my bag, put me in the washing chair, tipped my head back, rinsed my head, soaped it up, and found a nit.

And threw me out.

Out on the street. In my school uniform, with my bag, and my coat, thrown at me. And with soaking wet, dripping wet soapy hair, and a sense of humiliation that has not left me to this day.

I grew my hair long. I kept on growing it. It was long, then, for a long, long time.

To this day, I’m happier if my sister cuts my hair, or a friend, or whoever. But they don’t, anymore. I’m a grown up now, and have the kind of proper job that’s supposed to lead to proper haircuts. And so, duly, every couple of months, I brave a proper haircutter, and pay the million dollars (and the change) that that involves, in London. And then I hate it, and wish my sister had cut it instead.

Last time I had it cut, I had a haircut so bad that the only way I can fix it is by wearing it in bunches. With a really big fringe. Which makes it, funnily, exactly like the pictures you’ve seen these last few days. But not blonde.

I think that’s a coincidence.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was seven

Weekends outside South Africa House, singing songs about freeing some man Della something and wearing badges. Walking down roads with lots of other people all at once and shouting that we didn’t like the new-clears because they were bad. Also the bomms. And then, when the Bad Government wanted to abolish the Gee Elsie and the eye-ell-ee-ay, which were good things, we were cross about that and got new badges and all went walking some more. Walking and shouting.

My mother was very active, still is, in areas of peace, and justice, and, you know, stuff. It’s one of the things that makes her the most lovable. My little militant mummy. And, when young, we were political too, by default. Whether we truly understood what we were protesting for or against, or not.

Or, as I wrote here in 2002:

I was the kind of kid who, when being taken on a Nuclear Disarmament March and instructed to paint a picture on a placard to carry, would do so.

I would sit and think about what picture I wanted to paint, look at my large piece of cardboard and my paints.

And I would paint a picture and a slogan for my demonstration placard.

But while every other clued-up, already left-wing, intelligent child was carrying a banner proclaiming;

“I don’t want to grow up in a world with bombs”
with cartoon trident symbols scored through,
or
“Think of the children, we are the future!”
with small round faces smiling all around the carefully formed lettering,
or
“Nuclear bombs make kids cry”
with some fancy picture that would make it onto the six o’clock news,

I’d be marching round, proudly holding high a placard with a picture of a brown and white oval and the words;

“This is my ginny pig her name is debbie.”.

Which could possibly make a political point, but I’m fucked if I know what that is.

Still, some of it must have sunk in, because one of my very favourite possessions is a story I wrote when I was about 7. It sits in a frame in the living room. It has a picture of a princess on the back, which you can’t see, but the story is what really matters. I’ve written about this before, I know I have. But it is, as I say, one of my favourite things in the whole wide world. So I don’t care.

It starts off pretty normal, but quickly gets a little… erm … well, here it is…

Well, it’s just what you do with witches.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

Now I are six

And lo, the door swung open upon a new era.
And yea, I happened to be on the doorstep at the time.
And I didst have my dancing shoes on.

And that era was called “Now That’s What I Call Music” Nay, no number did it have. Just “Now That’s What I Call Music”, for there had never been another one. Before that, forsooth, people had just called it music, rather than calling it that’s what they were calling music. Um. Henceforth.

And it did come to pass that we were given it by our Auntie Jean Burt. And also “Hits of ‘83” “Superchart ‘83“.
And it was good.

Well, not very good. But at the time? My God. You’d never heard the like. Each a gem on the tracklisting, each more sparkling than the last. Kajagoogoo, Men Without Hats, The Rock Steady Crew, Flash in the Pan, Will Power - each one of them sticks in the mind. Because of the names. But importantly, they also had songs. As well as names. And I remember those too.

The names were better. And boy, that’s clearly not saying much.

It was exciting though. It was incredible.
Before that, there hadn’t been very much music in the house. If there was radio, it was sensible-people-talking-radio, if there were records, they were very quiet or very old.

This was new music. It was exciting. These were the songs that people talked about at school. I learnt them. Word by word by word. Dances were choreographed. Outfits carefully selected. The tapes were played so many times they wore thin. Unspooled by creaky old stereos, lovingly rewound by hand and biro. Lost down backs of sofas, hidden in knicker drawers in sibling spats, thy hung about and hung about, listened to occasionally and… And I have absolutely no idea where they are now.

I could download the whole lot, I suppose, and may do still. If I could find the tracklisting for “Superchart“, which I can’t. Anywhere. Can you all have a look through your tape boxes, see if you have it? Double album, Yellow cover. Ta.

It wasn’t the first music I ever bought (that was Rain or Shine by Five Star), but it was the first music that belonged to me, as I belonged to it. As much as one can belong to Kajagoogoo. But as much as you can, I did.

I’m being harsh, of course. Lovecats, by The Cure was always, and is still, a good song. That one song was a good song. Yup.

Oh, but then, of course, then, and how can I forget, then, there was Will Powers.

I knew all the words. My sister knew all the words. My sister, in fact, with her incredible memory, probably Still knows all the words. She’s amazing with remembering. But, I am not. And so was delighted to find the whole thing, history, lyrics and ACTUAL song to LISTEN TO (sorry, too exciting) on this page here.

Go and listen to it. Go and listen to it now.

To see the kind of music Will Powers led me to, you could always look at my wishlist. Ahem.

I’m really really tired, sorry. You can probably tell by the sentence structure. It’s short and pointy and nonsensical. Always is when I’m this tired. Training course sapping special powers. And I’ve realised I’m a whole bloody day behind. At this rate, my birthday will be on the thirteenth, which it isn’t. It’s on the twelfth.
Ah… ah… ahh…ahh … Ahh-ishlist! Do excuse me.
Tickly nose.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was five

My sister still calls me Binnie, you know.
There are 8 bears in my cellar.
And this site is called little.red.boat.

What do these facts have in common?
My lack of imagination.

Many have heard the story of my boat, so I won’t tell it again, (it’s here, though, just in case). But to summarise - I had a boat, it always sank, I called it Sinky. New boats where tentatively suggested, and dismissed out of hand, because I loved my little red sinky, even if it sank. Or perhaps because it sank. I’m not sure. My sinky.

Binnie, was my doll. Or one of my dolls. But not bought for me. And not a pleaded or tantrummed for peace offering in a busy shop. Or even yet another hand-me-down, from siblings, or older kids at my dad’s church.
No no, I have my pride.
It was my doll, and I found it my very own self.
Sitting next to a bin. Or on a skip. Or something.
And so I called her Binnie. Naturally.
I saw her, I found her, and I would not leave the side of that bin without taking her home.
My mother bleached that damned doll five times, washed it solidly for two days before she would hand it over.
She had ‘eyes-that-close’, like all the fancy dolls on the adverts. Except she’d been through a hard time, and the eye-closing mechanism had suffered.

When you laid Binnie on her back, she’d wink at you like a cheap whore.

Once, we were given two dolls for Christmas. While my sister called her rag doll a saucy ‘Marie’, a name that conjured up spring evenings on the Champs Elysee, red dresses and fine wine, mine was called Rachel. Because the woman who gave them to us was called Rachel.

My teddy bear was called Bear. And then there was another teddy bear, called Teddy. He often kept company with Ted. And then there was another bear, called Big Bear. Little Bear was the same, if slightly smaller. And Pink Bear. Man, I loved Pink Bear. In an act of charity I gave him away to a school fete. Then cried for two days and bought him back with my pocket money as soon as the doors opened. There was a bear I was given free on Lufthansa. He was called Lufty.
Lufty Bear.

At present, I have two much newer teddy bears, just hanging about the house. One is called Bear. The other bear is called Other Bear. Still, at least they’re kept company by the teddy which (as a child) my Beloved took to bed. It is called BedTed.

And the pets? Well, I never really got to name a pet. Which is, looking at the evidence, probably a good thing.

I worry for my children. Although I personally consider Child, or Boy, or Small, or Unbelievablypainful to be perfectly acceptable names for children.
Hell, if I had more than one, I could just refer to them as ‘Hey! Children’, and wouldn’t have to remember individual names at all.

My sister and I were just running down that names of pets. Tango the Rabbit. In the previous family he was with, they called him Houdini. Not an auspicious sign.
Debbie, the guinea pig. A pair of gerbils, called, and this is great, Snow White (named by my sister, 7) and Ghengis Khan (by my brother, 9), and then Daley Thomson, a hamster, and Sid Vicious, the hamster that followed Daley. Then some more gerbils. There is debate of the existence of another guinea pig. Cats came later.

But, and this is awful, I don’t remember the endless stream of rodents anywhere near as fondly as I remember the stuffed things. A proportion of the stuffed things are still, for example, in my cellar. A proportion of the rodents, however, are not. Not those ones, anyway. Perhaps some new ones.

*shudder*

Still. That’s the way it is with childhood pets, sadly. Or the little, temporary, much loved and soon forgotten ones particularly.

My mother was telling me on the phone this evening that once, a neighbour stopped to talk to her as she knelt amongst the shrubbery.

“Every time I see you, you’re gardening,” said the neighbour. “What are you planting now?”

“Gerbils.” Said Jan.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was four

Small girl with blonde hair. Dimple on the left hand side, pinafore dress. A thin red headband with yellow flowers. Holding: A yoghurt pot with a pipe cleaner and some tissue paper, in front of her, very proudly. It is a flower in a flowerpot, and she made it. She wears those white tights with the tiny holes in that only little girls wear, and red shoes.

Red sandals.

See, I don’t remember my first day of school, but I remember the picture that my mother took of me when she came to pick me up.
I just don’t have it, so you can’t see it. But it looks like that. Oh - apart from one thing.

If you look carefully at her sandals, you’ll see that they’re pointing inward, the left one a little more than the right, perhaps, but very noticably her feet are pointing inward.

It’s one of my favourite pictures of myself now.
Because it’s the first one in which you can really see my little signature crookedness. I’m wonky, you see. And this picture reminds me of it.

There are other pictures that make me smile in the same way. Sometimes my mother would take pictures of the shoes of her three children, carelessly abandoned on the beach with the incumbent feet run off paddlewards. You’ll always find two pairs of shoes facing forward and then one pair (the smallest pair) appearing to rub noses. Or toses.

It’s only in the last ten years I’ve started to think of my feet fondly; even though they wear down shoes in half the time they should; even though they were an easy excuse for bullying all the way through school; even though, comedically, I’ll trip over them sometimes if I’m in a panic - (because although they’re a lot better now, they can still get worse in that kind of state) - I don’t really care. They’re mine.
And I like their wonkiness.

During secondary school, as growing pains came and made walking a bit painful and the bullying carried on and made everything a bit painful, we went to a specialist who spouted long words like ‘femoral anteversion’, and said that it might correct itself or it might not, but if we didn’t want to take that chance, he was quite happy to smash both my hips and put me in traction for a couple of months.

I think it was at this point that I decided to love my wonkiness. Because although it wasn’t a big thing - it’s not like they face backwards (although I can make them do that if you like, it’s a good party trick), the only thing it really stops me doing is jogging (boo hoo) and it isn’t a disability, but it’s my little crookedness.
And it’s preferable to someone smashing both your hips. Especially if he sounds like he’d enjoy it.

Standing at the bus stop, I look down at my feet and smile.

No one is perfect. And there are lots of other ways I’m not perfect, but I like this one. I am wonky. And anyone that wants to bully me about it now can simply fuck off.

Because aren’t we all wonky in some way or other? And isn’t that nice?

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was three.

I was incredibly blonde as a child. Incredibly blonde, with chubby little cheeks and a dimple on the left hand side of my grin.
Like a cherub.
Like an angel.
Like something you couldn’t imagine backing into the room with bottom high in the air, knickers around ankles, looking over one shoulder to steer, and waving, with the other hand, a long piece of toilet paper shouting ‘muu-mmeeeeeeeee, can you wipe my bott-tummmm?‘ at the top of her voice. It was kind of a little sing-song request, and tuneful at that. Anyone in the family can probably recall the tune to it still.
And quite a lot of other people.

You see, I don’t think this would have been so bad if my mother didn’t hold so many church meetings in the living room opposite the toliet.

Now, I don’t know whether I remember that because I actually remember it, or because it’s been mentioned by my family so often, or whether it’s simply because I didn’t stop doing it until I was 19.
I’m kidding about the last one, of course.
I was 21.
Again, I’m kidding.

But, the thing is, for me, as for most people, memories from this age are going to be a mixture of family legend, conjecture from well-thumbed photo albums and actual memory.

For the longest time, I’ve believed my first memory to be a birthday party, and I’ve decided, at some point, that it must have been my third birthday party, and so that’s what we’ll say it was.

My nana came. That’s one central part of the memory.
I don’t think it would be possible for a little girl to be more in love with my nana than I was with mine. We saw her almost every holiday, taking the train from London to Liverpool and the ferry to the Isle of Man. And I associate her with gardens and pebbledash and reclining chairs and the colour orange and the smell of sun in a closed room and sand and lots of other things. Also we shared the same birthday, which made the whole thing specialler. Yes, it’s a word.

So I remember a sunny day, and a round tablecloth with flowers on, and picnic things, and then my nana arriving, walking over toward the picnic and my mother telling me to look who had arrived.

And then I don’t remember much else about her being there, so I’m guessing I was excited about it for about a minute before running off to find more jam sandwiches.

My best friend, at that point, was called Anna. This wasn’t as hilariously confusing at the time as might have previously been thought, because I was Jo. So that’s that, really, name-centred-comic-potentialwise.

But I do remember Anna - whose dad owned a D.I.Y interior design fittings shop called Knobs and Knockers (a name always as likely to pull a disapproving face from my mother as a giggle from my older brother and sister) - and I remember she was there, and she was crying, and wailing that she wanted her dad, and she wanted to go home, and making ever such a racket about the whole thing.

And I remember standing nearby, silently seething, wishing that someone would just put her out of her misery, or at least go and get her bloody dad, because she was crying really loudly and it was ruining MY party.

And that’s what leads me to think this really was my first memory, because it’s the emotion - of being really cross about someone else being the centre of attention at my birthday party (mine!) - that I remember better than anything else.

It’s so nice that we can grow out of these things. Well, some of these things. Not the dimple, still got that. And the secret seething at sometimes not being the centre of attention. I still get that, too (look, you can grow up all you like, but you’ll still be the youngest child….)

But the walking into my mum’s front room backwards, waving toilet paper and requesting a sing-song wipage?

Grown out of that.

Which is a bloody good thing, because my mum lives in the Inner Hebrides. And that’s a long way to walk backwards. And cold.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was two

Two. Only two. Ah, the regrets. Things I could have done, if only I’d have been Not Two! But I wasn’t ‘not two’. I was two. So I didn’t have the vote.
Damnit.

Still. Two, eh? Two, two, two, two, two. Twotwo. Twootytwo.

You know, there are several reasons why I probably should have thought this project through before I started it.
1; I have perhaps the worst memory of anyone I’ve ever met.
2; I just know there will be people and people and people out there, thinking “Nostalgia? Are you Stupid? You’re 28! You’re a little Baby! Nostalgia? You know Nothing from nostalgia! Etc. Etc etc!”
3; My memory isn’t very good.

And yet… I’m going to bloody do it if it kills me. And it’s not that I’m being particularly ‘ohmigod this is my twenty-fucking-eigth birthday’, it’s just the movable type coincidence and that fact that I actually bothered to work out when 28 days before my birthday began. So I’m sticking with it, dagnammit.

So here’s the thing. The thing about ‘two’.
I don’t have any pictures of me at two, and I don’t remember anything.
Arg.

…

This project is going to get easier, I swear to Christ. It’s going to get easier, and it’s going to get better.
Mmmmm.

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was one

So much happened, the year I turned one, that it’s going to be difficult to fit it all in. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll start a new blog, and put it all in there, but for now I’ll keep it secret, because it’s not a good idea for blogs to get discovered very quickly, and one day I’ll tell you where the secret blog is, and then you can go there, and read about all the exciting things that happened in 1978 when I was suddenly one.

Sorry, that was ‘when I was suddenly one‘ I meant ‘when I was suddenly One Years Old‘ rather than any kind of euphemism. Things don’t get that interesting at this point.

Or, in fact, at any point.
Damn. I shouldn’t admit to that his early on in the project.

Ahem. It gets a lot more exciting. Phew. Boy. Woof. The excitment, eh? But later. Later.

First, 1978. Look, I was one, I was taking a lot of stuff (mainly pureed stuff, it was the way my dealer delivered it, it’s the 70s, we were all doing the crazy shit), I can barely remember a thing. It’s all a blur.

So , what can I tell you? The 1976 copyright laws came into operation, radically changed US approach to copyright legislation; Dick Smith, of Dick Smith Foods, dragged a fake iceberg into Sydney harbour; and on my birthday, rebels occupied the city of Kolwezi, Zaire. I had nothing to do with it. I was eating pureed cake in a living room in West London at the time. I had nothing to do with it.

Honestly, I didn’t. I was still quite dull at that point, and to add to it, I looked like a baldy old man. See?

Naturally photogenic. Yup, Naturally Photogenic, that’s …. my sister. Always has been, always will be.
I, meanwhile, looked like a confused chubby old bloke. Always have done… etc…

Still, at least I don’t have freakishly large hands.
Nor does she.
Or at least, not any more. But on the evidence presented above?…

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)

And then I was there

Some weekend, should you be of the mind, I’d invite you to walk down our local high street, and count prams. No, scrub that, don’t actually do it, I’ll just tell you about it. There are a lot.

We counted, the other weekend. On a ten minute walk from one end of the road to another, we saw 38. We didn’t count any twice. I don’t think. But then, a pram is a pram is a pram. But a baby? A different matter altogether. A baby is not just a baby.

My nephew, for example, is a baby. And the most beautiful one in the world, at that. You would probably disagree. Not that he was beautiful, you might allow me that (you couldn’t deny it), but you might argue that he is not the MOST beautiful. You would probably have some baby in your own world that you believed to hold the title. You would be wrong, of course, but you would believe yourself to be right.

Because, and yes, it’s often said, to somebody, somewhere, every baby is the most beautiful baby in the world. So of all the people that think that, at any part of any day, every baby has to be the ultimate most beautiful baby in the world at some point.

I like that.

In 1977, I was the most beautiful baby in the world. Bar None. For some very brief moment. I’ve never been the most anything anywhere since.

On the 12th of May, as my mother says, the first tube train rattled past the window, Joanna Mary Clare Olusola Pickard was born.
I’m dubious about the ‘first tube train rattling past the window’ bit, I mean, hey, she’d been in labour for a fair few hours but, well, she’s a poet, and there’s no arguing with them. And yes, I suppose I wasn’t called that then. I wasn’t called anything. Apart from ‘the baby’.

But then, seeing as ‘John’ was out of the window, given my lack of penis, I was called Joanna Mary Clare Olusola Pickard. Or Joanna Mary Claire Yaddayaddayadda. Or something. Never sure about the spelling of Clare/Claire in the middle there. I’d have to check my passport.

And then that was it. No one talks about the next bit. I know I was born, I know I then hung around the house quite a bit, I’ve seen pictures, but apart from the birth bit, no one can tell me much about the next bit. No one says ‘Ah, you did the funniest things when you were around 7 months old’. Which means I either did something really shameful in that time, or I was actually really dull.

But what could be that shameful, that everyone would pactofsilence it for 28 years? Who knows. I may have set fire to a church. Maybe I brought down a government in a small south asian state using funds pillaged from charity boxes for diseased children. Perhaps, mere weeks after my birth, I saw the first Star Wars movie and declared that it was rubbish.

Or perhaps, like all other contenders for ‘Most beautiful baby in the world 1977′, I drank milk, pooed myself, and made a volume of noises that in any reasonable society should have got me an ASBO.

I was beautiful, yes, but I was dull. So how did we get from there to here? And having shed one of those tags already, is there anything I can do about the dull thing?

· (What is this ‘28/28′ thing? What the hell is going on? Confused? Ah, well then, you should read this. It will inform you. Also, it has important birthday information)