Rose snagged me.
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I got engaged to be married when I was sixteen. Aw, sweet. Her mother was ex-colonial from the isolated heights of the Seventies South American Anglo upper-class, suffering the culture shock that British ex-pats get when they return from abroad and instead of Olde Englande, find 1980s Essex. Her mother used to chaperone us to the movies (I watched Ghostbusters for the first time with her sitting between us), and she spent her remaining money on antiques which she grew to love too much to sell. My girlfriend was desperate to escape, I was very in love, and the nature of her family’s cultural timewarp required that we get engaged and married in secret to do just that. In the end, she ran off with a muslim chap she met on the tube.
Hi, Alison!
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I was born in Basildon. It was a home birth, in a self-build house, in a new town. my family didn’t make the house ourselves, but we bought it from someone who had. An electrician, he engineered many many electrical outlets in every room, which I now remember every time I have to string extensions across corridors. It was a fluke of my introverted nerdly childhood that I grew an accent that was more BBC presenter than Basildon cockney. I got bullied over that a lot.
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I have one of those birth marks that if it were anywhere visible you’d stare at me when you thought I wasn’t looking. Fortunately for me, it covers most of my right shoulder blade instead. I can’t see it unless I really strain around, and I generally forget about it until either I go swimming, or a new love says, politely, “What the hell is that?” It totally ruins the odds of me being James Bond, but marginally increases my chances of being a Evil Master Criminal.
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I write “please” on my checks. As in “Pay Foo Bar twenty-two dollars only please”. I figure it helps them to clear.
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I have publically kissed both Pauline Calf and Al “the pub landlord” Murray on the mouth.
