Categories: uncategorized
Date: 13 August 2008 23:21:53
Around the age of ten, I had to make the decision about which secondary school I wanted to go to. My parents were keen to let me choose the school I wanted; rather than the local school in another village a few miles away (which a good 90% of my classmates went to), I wanted to go to a school on the other side of Cambridge. Why? Quite simple really - Tina had originally gone to the nearby school but had a difficult time there; when she moved to the other school, she was much happier. So right from the start, I wanted to go there instead. It was an inter-church school (all flavours of Christian welcome), but until a few years earlier it had been a Catholic school, and many Catholic families elected to send their kids there - meaning a large proportion of my classmates had Irish or Italian names.
From my village, there were only a handful of us going to this school, and in my year group there were just two of us - me and Phil. I only met Phil for the first time a couple of months before we finished junior school (his father was in the armed forces - well, not all of them obviously, I just can't remember which specific one it was - and had been posted in the USA for the last few years, meaning that Phil had a strong American accent which gradually wore off over the next few years), but we soon became friends. Well, you do, don't you, when you're the only two kids in your year going from your junior school to the same secondary school?
In the next few years, my close friendships changed a few times. At school I eventually fell in with a little crowd - Richard, Pat, Rupert and me, plus a handful of others - who I loved hanging out with, although we never really did anything other than wander around together. Outside school I used to spend a bit of time round at Phil's house, usually playing Super Mario Brothers (the only computer game I've ever been much good at), and then in later years I became good mates with Ronan and Daniel, two brothers who lived round the corner from me and also both went to the same school as me, albeit in younger year groups. Typically our main times hanging out revolved around music - on a Wednesday evening we'd trawl through the new issues of NME and Melody Maker reading about bands we'd never heard of before (some of whom, of course, went on to become very successful and thus suddenly be slated by NME and Melody Maker for, y'know, actually having sold some records) and on a Saturday morning we'd watch The Chart Show and bemoan all the rubbish early/mid-90s Eurocheese that got into the top ten while all the trendy NME bands were struggling to sell four copies to anyone.
Yes, music was my first love, and it will be my last... It was in my early teens that I really fell in love with music. Having an older sister meant I was exposed to pop at an early age, and as a result I ended up liking most of the same music she did (mainly the 80s electropop stuff - Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, New Order, Depeche Mode, that kind of thing). There were always exceptions though. I hope I won't be embarrassing Tina too much by saying that she had a Bananarama single. I hated it, but sadly my attempts to hide / destroy it were unsuccessful. That said, I was rather sucked in by most of the late-80s naffness created by messrs Stock, Aitken and Waterman; I have subsequently repented.
And speaking of repentance... I'd kind of wandered away from church around the age of 8, largely because I was given the option of not going to church and I liked the idea of watching cartoons while eating chocolate at Nanna K's place instead. When I was 10, Mum mentioned to me one day that there was a new Sunday morning group for my age at church which was supposed to be really good, so I agreed to give it a try. And I quite liked it, so I went back... And before I knew it, I was going to church most weeks, going to various youth groups with ridiculous names (Gabberdine Swine, anybody?!) and generally back in the whole church loop. And then... well, then things got really really really interesting.