School daze: an audio-visual extravaganza!

When my dad came to visit a couple of months ago, he brought with him a bag of bits and pieces belonging to me that he had salvaged from the garage when my folks moved out of their latest property to go their separate ways.

The bag was a veritable gold mine of nostalgia for me, containing things I hadn't seen for years, things I thought I'd lost, and things I didn't know I'd kept.

One of the best bits was my school shirt from my last day at school, aged 16 in 1986, still unwashed and covered with all the signatures and well wishes of my friends and classmates. You can see a pic at the bottom of this post.

Also in the bag was a copy of The Guinness Book of Records from waaaay back (the 1979 edition), including this picture of the Indian guy with crazy long fingernails. His record has long since been surpassed, but I used to love being grossed out by this pic as a kid.

There was also a Marc Bolan book that has words and music for many of his big hits. I thought I'd lost this years ago, so I was really pleased to see it again. Strange, cos I'm not the world's biggest Bolan fan, but I do quite prize the very few books of sheet music that I have. It's a small but perfectly formed collection: The Complete Beatles, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Billy Bragg's Back to Basics, Nirvana's Nevermind, and this Bolan book.

But there was also a bunch of English exercise books. A few years after I left school, I threw away lots of my exercise books. The only ones I felt were vaguely worth keeping were my English ones, since they were the only ones in which I had been creative, writing stories and poems and shit. I figured one day it would be fun to look back on some of this stuff, but who wants to look back on their old Math(s) books? Or Physics, Chemistry, Geography, or... Computer Studies?!

So, over the coming days I'm going to transcribe some of this stuff to my blog. They are, by turns, funny and ridiculous, bizarre and embarrassing, so I'm going to cherry-pick the "best" stuff. That said, sometimes the best stuff will be the stuff that is most embarrassing. Certainly there is nothing there that has quite the creative vibe that I obviously thought it had when I decide to keep these wretched books!

As a taster of what's to come, listen to me reciting my poem "My Dog" by clicking on the little mini pic of me here. I wrote this on 13 May 1983. It says some things that I wish it didn't now that the pooch is in dog heaven, but it's what I wrote when I was 13, and I'm not about to censor it now.