Facebook 'Things'

At the start of the year, another one of those Facebook threads popped up asking people to present lists about something. Favourite albums, favourite films etc are usually the order of the game, but this one was to just list ‘seven things about you’.

It probably gave further cause for the people who don’t use Facebook to ask in horror “why do people reveal so much information about themselves online?”

I can see that point to a degree, but personally I just see it as a bit of fun… I’ve not got that much to hide! Besides, bloggers around the world will state that making lists about things (and particularly making them a bit personal) is a staple diet for subject matter!

I’ve upped it to ten, just to make it a nice round OCD list, so here are my ‘things’, ever so slightly expanded:

1. In 1975, I was born and was named Aaron Richard Berry after Elvis Aaron Presley and Richard the Lionheart. And Berry after my parents

I’m happy enough with the name I was given, but do people ever make a meal over how it’s spelt and/or pronounced!? It’s only five letters and two syllables – it really shouldn’t be that difficult! At work, I have a name badge that I wear constantly and yet a colleague who has sat adjacent to me for 10 years still manages to spell my name wrong on Christmas cards. Bless them they even get it wrong in the office birthday card where eight other people have already written my name down to observe and copy!

Yes he spelt it both ways!

 

2. In 1982 (6 years old) I could do multiple cartwheels on an upside down gym bench that was only 3 inches wide

When a lot smaller (and more agile), I was quite good at gymnastics and even went to a proper club to train for a few weeks before being forced to cease attending. The cartwheeling was done in tangent with a girl who ‘matched my symmetry’ according to the instructor.

3. In 1985 (10 years old) I inadvertently appeared as an extra during the filming of the Bob Hoskins cult classic movie ‘Mona Lisa’

There’s a scene on the Palace Pier with Bob (RIP) and I can be seen in the background buying an ice cream (a ‘99’ of course) even though it was a cold and grey day. If you want to see it, make sure you get the Blu-Ray version – I’m clearer in that one!

Anyone fancy an ice cream?

 

4. In 1986 (10 years old) I was one of the first 20 children to go on the new waterslide flumes at the King Alfred Swimming Pool, Hove.

Yep I won a competition in the Evening Argus to get first dibs on opening day. This was a HUGE attraction for Hove at the time and they were great fun… until they deteriorated and just became plain dangerous! The only annoyance on the day was that the school bully was also a winner in the competition too, so I had to put up with that lowlife for an hour or so.

They were cleaner back in the day - well for the first few weeks anyhoo

5. In 1988 (11 years old) I sang solo lines in Oliver! at the Brighton Dome in front of 2000 people each night for four shows

My Grandad had been part of the Crescent Operatic Society (amateur dramatics) for a few years and persuaded me and my brother to audition for Oliver! We didn’t get lead roles, but I did at least get about 10 seconds of solo lines to melodiously deliver!

6. In 1992 (16 years old) I was the first male ever to get a B in GCSE German at my school

Or so I’m told. I’m sure it’s been bettered since!

Helped in no small part by our 5^th year teacher, after the 4^th year teacher had been a little out of his depth, to say the least > see Substitute Teachers for a fuller explanation of this!

7. In 1997 (21 years old) I literally bumped into George Lucas at a Michael Jackson concert

It was my second Michael Jackson concert in just three days at the old Wembley Stadium, and having just got through the turnstile, I half stumbled into George and his children. No words exchanged unfortunately, but there was this instant murmur of those around the scene that it definitely was him! The one thing that I still find a bit odd is why on Earth would George Lucas be amongst the masses in the cheap seats? Surely he and Michael were good enough mates to have secured him a better view?

8. In 2002 (26 years old) I cried when Ally McBeal ended

Many people will rib me for this one, but I really don’t care. I couldn’t get enough of Ally McBeal and found it to be a terrific show both incredibly funny at points, and incredibly sad at others. I don’t know why but I really related to the show, though I can’t see how I had any right to.

Ooga Chaka, Ooga Ooga Ooga Chaka

9. In 2005 (29 years old) I won £250,000 for Brighton & Hove Albion FC, but I don't like to talk about it...

Nah! I love talking about it!! To help the club I love by winning a Coca-Cola sponsored competition, at a time when they needed all the financial help they could get was definitely one of the best moments in my life. I might even do a blog about it soon as it’s been ten years since the win!

You can't beat a novelty sized cheque!

10. In 2015 (39 years old) I posted this blog discussing 10 ‘facts’ about me… but one of them is a total falsehood!

So which one is it then!?

Falling Into Football

It’s fair to say that my two main hobbies / interests are music and football. Plenty of my blogs have delved into my music tastes, so maybe it’s about time to talk football.

I didn’t really grow up having a direct football influence in my house. My parents have never been into football so by default it was never on TV, save a handful of times as I recall my Dad watching the occasional England Vs Scotland clash, probably due to a sense of patriotic duty.

Nor did I ever really play much football as a child, as I just wasn’t that good, and liable to break into a fit of nervous giggles whenever I actually got passed the ball… though I did get better as I got older and proudly even scored one solitary goal for the school team in a mini tournament when I was about 13. In fact it was a bit like Lineker's first in this clip!
No really!

The only occasions I got anywhere near close to football exposure was via my grandparents – both of whom loved the game. My paternal Grandad was a Tottenham fan (even though he came from south of the River), and his father before him had been a dyed in the wool Fulham fan. My maternal Grandad was a Brighton & Hove Albion season ticket holder, but nothing really drew my attention too much to the sport whilst I was young. Not even the 1983 FA Cup final when my local team Brighton, in unlikely circumstances, actually took Manchester United to a replay before succumbing to defeat. I do recall watching both games, but really I was just a seven year old boy supporting Brighton for geographical reasons rather than actually knowing much about it.

So the tide didn’t turn until I was ten and a half years old, and around about May 1986.

We had a school project running about a month before the Mexico ’86 World Cup and we were allocated teams to write about in ‘news bulletins’.
As I wasn’t particularly fussed about football I just went with the flow, and along with a couple of other girls in the class, I was asked to adopt Scotland. 

Were Scotland any good? I really didn’t know!

I do remember hearing that England had beaten West Germany in a pre-tournament friendly (whatever that meant) so maybe this was a good thing?

As the tournament started I remember learning that England had lost their first game, and then drew the next and was on the verge of going out of the tournament early. ‘So what!?’ I thought. I hadn't watched either England game, or any of the other matches so far – I was just so totally nonchalant about it all.

And then a strange thing happened which I still can’t fathom out to this day. On June 11^th I went to bed as normal – probably around 9pm, but got woken up by my Dad at about 1030pm. My Dad – generally a loather of football and all that was associated with it – woke me up and said:

“Come downstairs and watch the football, England are two nil up!”

I really only went down because it was an excuse to be up late, but as I got downstairs, some guy called Lineker banged in his third goal and England – or we the nation as I instantly now felt – were three nil up! 

Why my Dad brought me downstairs I just don’t know, and I’m sure he doesn't know either, but watching that goal and the second half of the game got me solidly involved with football hook, line and sinker, and I never looked back. It really was just like a switch that someone had turned on. 

England had two more games at that tournament before being knocked out in the cruellest of fashions. The Maradona ‘Hand of God’ goal was hard to take for a young child naïve to the ways of fair play (or lack of it) in football.

Diego Maradona made me cry about football for the first time (though not the last) and I couldn’t understand how such a thing could have been allowed to happen. I’m sure it wasn’t corruption on behalf of the officials, though it was highly incompetent officiating for them ALL to miss such a blatant aspect of cheating.
Maradona was the classic flawed genius whose misdemeanours caught up with him in time; other such talents followed suit in the years to come as England were denied a greater impact on the world stage without the fully realised potential of (for example) Paul Gascoigne, largely due to injuries.

One thing I learnt very early on though in my football education is that there’s one thing you can guarantee from the beautiful game: Football will continuously let you down.

Anyway, I digress.

The tricky thing about getting into football during a World Cup is that I had to learn quickly who these England players actually played for and I quickly wanted a club to support. Whilst I knew very soon that Brighton & Hove Albion was to be my team, it wasn’t out of favouritism for one of my Grandads’ over the other – in fact I still hold a soft spot for Tottenham in memory of my Spurs supporting Grandad – plus my son’s great great Grandfather had actually been a Spurs player.
Add into this I really admired Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle during the World Cup, and they were / are absolute Spurs legends.

Mullet-tastic

My Dad’s Mum was from Islington, which likely explains why his only soft spot for any club football team was Arsenal. Regardless, I was born in Brighton, so I proudly opted to support my local team.

The football season couldn’t start soon enough and my brain soon started soaking up stats like they were going out of fashion. In fact I would suspect this is where my OCD started. I was playing catch up with my friends who had been into football for years and I just had to get my knowledge factually correct or they’d cut me down in a second – because let’s face it, kids can be cruel that way!

During that first full season, I became deeply immersed with it all, culminating in attending my first proper football match ever with my Grandad on April 10^th 1987.

The Goldstone Ground

Brighton and Hove Albion Vs Crystal Palace was a local derby with deadly historic rivalry and I sat in the West Stand at the well loved, but run down Goldstone Ground on the Old Shoreham Road / Newtown Road to see us win 2-0. It was a terrific day and set the grounding for my desire to follow ‘The Albion’ forever, even though we were relegated that season!

That aside, it was largely good experiences in my football journey in those early years, but it wasn’t always wonderful.
Yes, I’d been upset about how Maradona cheated England out of the 1986 World Cup, but that feeling was nothing when compared to watching fellow football fans die on the television. Merely watching the Hillsborough tragedy unfold in 1989 was devastatingly awful, so it's impossible to comprehend how those directly involved must have felt - and still feel. I remember watching the presenter of Grandstand (Bob Wilson) trying desperately to keep it together. He was getting so choked up and I was on the verge of doing the same.

You can’t really go and research to see what it was like through recorded video footage (not that I’d recommend it anyway), because huge amounts of coverage were never broadcast on television or elsewhere again, such were the graphic images being shown. At the time, British football fans had a reputation (rightly or wrongly) of hooliganism, but this wasn’t the same scenario. The outpouring of emotion and grief at this tragedy was heart wrenching and it literally made people ill. I had absolutely no connection with Liverpool Football Club, but I had every connection with the fans as I was one of them. I could have been one of them; a football fan dying on a terrace. This is why the plight of the families directly involved was so enduring in the years that followed.

Tremendously, campaigns were fought and eventually won in helping justice prevail over the circumstances of that particular event, but in the initial aftermath, all fans could do was to pray for common sense and changes so that it might never happen again. It started the slow but sure alteration of how football was perceived and run in this country, which was has been good in many, many ways. It’s fair though to say that in 2015 football has nearly become as elitist sport in the eyes of many, but if part of those changes mean that lives are never lost again at a football match, then maybe that's the right way to go.

I try to detach from the financial side of what football has become, as at the end of the day, I just want to go and watch my local team with my family, whether they are successful or not - but possibly over time football has changed to the degree that the peoples' game has been taken away from many of the people for better or for worse.

I appreciate the highs in football so much because I know that the lows are more frequent, and being a Brighton fan maybe highlights this more than some other clubs! Football for me over the years has gone from being fun and frivolous, to being tense and escapist. That’s fine, because you keep going for the handful of moments that are frankly beyond emotive description.

Even now, aged 39, I still get asked “Why!? Why do you love football – what is it about it that is so good?”

Well I’ll leave the final comment on that, to the broadcaster (and Millwall fan) Danny Baker, who whilst commenting on Manchester City winning the league in literally the last couple of SECONDS of the 2011/12 season, captured the overriding and all too infrequent feeling of all football fans everywhere in one short sound bite :

“Football! F****** football! Imagine not being into it. Those poor, poor half-alive b*******!”

It Was A Woman’s World

When I first started writing blogs (September 2014) I couldn’t really have guessed just how they would be received. Would anyone read them? Would they get some lip service? Would they be genuinely liked? Who knew?

One particular earlyish effort was merely blogged because I was looking forwards to the return of the Sky 1 programme ‘Trollied’ – mainly because I used to work at a supermarket and found it was very close to the mark in its observations! I didn’t for a second think  that it would ultimately become the most popular blog I've written to date!

So on the back of that ‘Getting Trollied Again’ blog, I thought I’d give a further insight into those glorious retail years:

As previous readers will know, I spent the formative years of my employment working in a supermarket.
My first couple of years were enjoyed as a student on the Produce section and checkouts, before moving to working on the Delicatessen counter, initially as a student, but then as a full time member of staff once I’d left Sixth Form and was undecided about what I wanted to do with my life. So many people fall into this route, and I actually really enjoyed it for a long time before finding something outside of retail when I was in my early mid twenties.

A picture of a Deli Counter. Not mine though - I had some staff behind mine

After learning the Deli role inside out for a couple of years, I was fortunate enough to get a promotion to become the new Delicatessen Manager at a store in Brighton, starting just three days after my 21^st birthday.

It’s fair to say that up till that point of my retail career, I’d seen a few things that had opened my naïve innocent young eyes a little, but nothing prepared me for the response I received on my first day in that new role, and indeed the first couple of months.

What could be so wrong?

Well specifically it was three things about me that made some of my new staff not that keen on me at all:

1.       I was introduced to them on the first day as God.

2.       I was young.

3.       I was male.

Being introduced as The Almighty was horrendously embarrassing. I have no idea why my introducer opted to say that, but I think maybe because he had been looking after the counter in the absence of a manager and wanted them to think I was there to ‘save’ them. I REALLY had to underplay that title in the first few weeks to stave off fears of being called arrogant. Talk about a stitch up.

As for ‘being young and male’ – well they both sound ridiculously ancient don’t they!?
But it was a genuine issue as Delicatessen counters traditionally (although not exclusively) had been a rather female dominated environment, and here I was, this boy, taking over the running of their baby and many of them were not at all comfortable with it. To them, I was the Anti Milky-Bar Kid in more ways than one.
Had I not been their manager, and just been joining as an assistant, I doubt it would have irked them so much, but it took a ton of effort to win certain staff over and prove I was worthy.

For example, during that first week I remember cleaning out the bins. I wanted to muck in and do everything and not be some aloof ‘suit’, so I thought this might help somewhat. Nope. The opposite in fact, as this action extremely upset one of the senior ladies as she’d done the bins for the last twelve years, and boy had I now stepped on her toes!

Whilst she was being comforted and consoled by another elder stateswoman (because she WAS in tears), my confidence wasn’t helped by the deliberately loud comment ‘I told them we should have been given a woman manager’

This would take some skill to turn them!

Altogether I had 17 staff initially, which included two male students, three female students, and the rest were females old enough to be my mother or grandmother. It would be wrong though to say that ALL the elder females didn’t want me there. One Scottish lady in particular took to me quite early on and stated that she felt I’d been a bit stitched up, and that even before I’d arrived I was on a hiding to nothing as a colleague of mine at my previous branch had popped in the week before to ‘advise’ them about me. Her assessment being:

‘He’s a nice guy, but he’s not up to being a manager’

...which was ironic given that less than 12 months earlier, I’d had to cover her sorry ass over a Christmas period when she couldn’t cope when acting up as a deputy manager herself. It was a shame to be knifed in the back before I’d even started, but she’d always been a touch bitter, having felt mistreated by the firm over her own career path over the years. I felt sorry for her but why try and hurt me?

All this made me think that perhaps the dislike of me from these people who I felt didn’t know me from Adam, might actually be a bit misplaced through gossip, so I tried not to fret too much about it.

Rather soon, I lost my senior assistant to another department. She had also applied for the Deli Manager’s job and failed to get it, and she wanted some more responsibility. She was fair to me in that she knew it wasn’t my fault, but she wanted to be appreciated and after she helped settle me in, I was happy to help her get a promotion to another role in the store.

Perhaps I didn’t help improve my standing with the others though as when appointing her replacement, I (fairly) opted for the best person, following interviews. As it happened, another male!

The furore that kicked off simply because I’d given the job to a male was unbelievable. It took intervention from the Personnel Manager to sort out the ridiculous complaints (sexism, ageism, experience-ism!) that arose because of it.

After a few weeks had passed, they started speaking to me again...

Time heals, and ultimately as a team, we all contributed to making our Deli the best performing counter in the district, and second best in the region. Given we were bottom of that list before I’d arrived, I was very proud of the work we’d all done.

My reward was to be appointed as the Delicatessen District Trainer for our area, which in turn made our counter the jewel in the area that other Deli Managers came from afar to admire and seek advice from, which thankfully, my lovely staff took immense satisfaction out of and ultimately meant I had earned their respect.

Fair play to some of the stronger critics, as when I reluctantly moved on from the store, they apologised for their preconception of me and offered that I’d actually been a pretty good manager when all was said and done! Praise from them was more important than praise from above, and the best compliment I could pay them back in return was that the two years I spent at that branch were two of the best years of my working life.

Looks like a prison hospital doesn't it!?

Leaving was a huge wrench. A destructive one too, as within a week of working at my new store, I knew I wouldn't be staying long. That was October 1998, and I left the company in May 1999.

Those 8 months were as bad as the previously 24 had been good.

I’d gained promotion on the basis that I completed a pilot assessment centre training course for Managers seeking advancement. I had furthermore been promised to be fast tracked through the full management course as specifically I had management experience under my belt already.. Ideally it wouldn't take anymore than 6 months to get fully qualified and trained up before I’d be given a proper large department of my own to manage.

But literally the week I moved to my new placement, they changed it. Who they were, I’m still not sure, but I got thrown in with a dozen or so university graduates on a post-graduate scheme and no such real opportunity arose for an actual promotion.
Essentially, despite 8 years with the company, starting from joining in 1991 and working 10 hours a week as a school boy to what I’d recently achieved,  I now had to complete a mandatory full year of training – literally I was told I had to relearn how to stock shelves!

Just to rub salt into the wounds, the university grads went straight on to a starting salary that was nearly £6000 higher than me! If it wasn’t for real it would've been hilarious.

I should say that at no time did I blame the grads – It wasn’t their fault at all. Indeed they had a huge amount of sympathy for me being entrapped in this time wasting slavery scheme, and two of them were placed at the same store I was. They were two of the nicest girls I could have hoped to be paired with and they at least made my time at the store much more bearable.

When I resigned, the District Manager offered apologies and said I’d been earmarked to have been a ‘40 yearer’ with the company – the store manager added that in his opinion, the company had failed me ‘criminally’.

It was a sad end to my time in retail really, and prior to October 1998, I couldn’t have envisaged my departing so soon. But all in all the 8 years were mostly pretty good, and watching Trollied on Sky 1 brings back some fab and funny memories.

Would I want to go back to retail though? Well never say never.

But no! NO! NO! NO!

Substitute Teachers

In these present days of Teaching Assistants galore, classrooms are nicely awash with support for children, but it wasn’t so long ago that only having your regular teacher in class was the norm.

That said though, a sprinkling of substitute, cover or student teachers occasionally dipped in to the mix which usually meant absolute chaos would ensue within seconds of them entering the classroom.

They were often an odd sort weren't they? Horrendous dress sense, totally incapable of maintaining any kind of decent control over the class, and seemingly prepared to accept all kinds of personal abuse from those who fancied their chances against them.

"Yes, Barry Manilow DOES know..."

In fact, none of those who taught classes I was in seemed to exude any skills of note. Perhaps they should have watched what Sidney Poitier did in To Sir With Love?

My memory is usually pretty good, but it has failed me a little for this one, as there are quite a few such specimens that I can remember by appearance, but not by name! So out of fairness, and to promote anonymity, I've opted to revert to nicknames for all of the candidates below:

Alan

Let’s start by clarifying that Alan was actually a female, and was only known to us as ‘Alan’ as she looked like the brother of one of my best mates – who was called Alan!

Alan was a student teacher assigned to teach us French in Year 11 (5^th year) during the LAST TERM before we left to take our GCSE exams. The LAST TERM! Whoever made that decision wants their head examined… at a time when we needed that final push and support before leaving school, it’s no wonder so many people got low pass marks. On the whole, she was a very forgettable teacher, but  bless her she was memorable for trying to express ‘pain’ in French, by running around the classroom feigning tummy illness – for 20 minutes.

At least I think she was faking it…

Denny

So named because I think this chap was Danish. I could've gone with other food related links to Denmark, but was advised caution against being ignorantly racist!

Poor Denny seemed to lose the class before he'd even started. Another student teacher, he was brought in to teach German and miraculously managed to survive just about one term before moving on. Bright and breezy in his introduction, some of my more ruthless classmates started tearing him a new one almost immediately. The lessons immediately crumbled into a torrent of abuse towards him, his accent, his beard, his dress wear, his lack of authority etc. No amount of him shouting and literally screaming could stop the barrage of mocking coming his way.

Towards the end of his tenure, our class was split into two, in order to help him attempt to manage / teach a smaller group – which clearly didn't help our education. During these split sessions, one of the heads of year asked me to tell her what we'd learnt, so I honestly and openly told her ‘not much’ and that it would take a miracle for the majority of the students to ever turn and warm to him.

Coming towards the end of term, we were ‘lucky’ enough to have him cover a Design Technology lesson for us. During which some students wound him up so much that he literally threw a desk at a girl who had dared to laugh at him! He then sent her in to another room and about a minute later all we could hear was screaming. Evidently he had held her in an attempt to calm her down apparently, and she had retorted with 'get your hands off of me you b******!’ before running out and home.

And to cement the growing list of incidents, shortly after the above incident he had the tyres slashed on his Citroen 2CV Dolly by a 1st year student.

Unsurprisingly he didn't return in September, and we had a brand new female teacher in his place. She was a breath of fresh air, instantly liked by all, and didn’t receive one dot of abuse.

A footnote to this story though, is that she actually knew her predecessor rather well. She ended up being one of the best teachers I ever had, but to be fair, whoever his replacement was would have been almost angelic in comparison. Long after his departure, she told me how amazed she was at the series of events as she found him to be such a nice chap!

Trusting her assessment of him, I'm sure he was probably a nice guy – he just didn't get off to a good start for whatever reason and it got diabolically worse from there on in.

Hagar – But Not Horrible

“I used to teach in London.”

A fact he often reminded us about. Possibly it was coding for ‘don’t screw with me’, but he was generally alright in the way he handled the classes. He basically used to give as good as he got, and to that end he had a fair good rapport with most students. What we ever learnt was debatable though.

He opened himself up to abuse by declaring he was a Crystal Palace fan, which was a burden for one of my Crystal Palace supporting mates (coincidentally the brother of Alan above), as every time Hagar appeared before us, he’d make a beeline for him to discuss how the football was going.

Oh and apparently he also taught John Barnes. Just in case we’d forgotten from the last 50 times he’d told us.

'Digger' Barnes - not yesterday

I think he also used to lift share with another cover teacher who I think was nicknamed Charley Farley, or Farley’s Rusks or something similar? The name Rudolph rings a bell though, but that might be due to a red nose I recall him having. It distracted from the tweed suit.

The Twins: Cunning Linguist & Watoo Watoo

And finally, a brief mention for these two student teachers who popped up at Primary School.

The Cunning Linguist wasn’t popular amongst fellow teachers and children alike. This was compounded when I heard other teachers slagging him off just after he left. The nickname is because he often used to mispronounce the name of our lovely headmaster Mr.Cunliffe (RIP) to Mr.Cunnicliffe – which as a child I found funny, and as an adult I find mildly disturbing!

And finally, Watoo Watoo was just a friendly play on the family name of the preceding nice young student teacher who at least came back and visited us again.

Think how much our children are missing out on these delights!

This Sporting Life

To start with, here’s a joke (though nowadays probably both politically and factually incorrect) that features in the spoof disaster movie ‘Airplane!’

Elaine Dickinson: “Would you like something to read?”

Hanging Lady: “Do you have anything light?”

Elaine Dickinson: “How about this leaflet, ‘Famous Jewish Sports Legends?’”

The point being that a leaflet would pretty much sum up the pool of achievement and talent that is my sporting prowess!

But I did have a couple of moments that linger…

Dreadlock Holiday

“I don’t like Cricket. Oh no! I LOVE it!”

During the glorious Euro ‘96 footballing summer of, erm, 1996, I played in my very first ever proper cricket match (in actuality there was only one other match).

I honestly had no idea how good I would be at cricket, but suspected I might be a reasonable bowler, but a below average batter. So on one warm summer evening as part of a work inter region tournament, off we went to play in a lovely field on the Kent / Sussex border,

We won the toss and decided to bat first. I was not expecting to even get to put pads on, let alone to actually bat, but we had a mid order collapse and so as eighth man, I had to gingerly trot out for what would be the last couple of overs. Was I scared? Yes. Yes I was.

Of the six balls I actually faced, the first four produced a single and a four – and I would have been happy with that effort. But – astonishingly – for the penultimate delivery I smashed the ball out of the field and over the clubhouse to the waiting parked cars behind for a glorious six! Marvellous scenes!

That moment when your own actions stun yourself speechless? That.

And so our innings finished with my batting career total score being 11 not out, off six balls.

I bowled my allotted two overs quite well too, and managed also to take a catch in the gully, but the batting effort was such a shock to me. Thankfully I have a family member that witnessed it, as if I had only witnessed it myself I doubt anyone would have believed it!

BBC* Sports Personality Of The Year 1989

*Sorry, NOT BBC, I meant PCC (Portslade Community College)

Incredibly, in 1989 I was jointly named the inaugural school ‘Sports Personality of the Year’ alongside one of my best friends! This really was a miracle and one or two jealous types considered it to be a joke in light of the fact that neither of us was particularly talented at many sports (maybe apart from Hockey, at which we both played games for Sussex Schools.)

The fact that the award was given for effort and willingness to take part in virtually every sport going was lost on some people… though it gave my mum a laugh!

One-Seventy-Five

This one was a very nice conspicuous victory!

I’ve never been that good at ten pin bowling, though I’ve always enjoyed playing for a laugh. That said I was probably rubbish in the initial games I played as I had the wrong fingers in the bowling ball holes. Note to adults: Children need to be shown these things sometimes!

Anyway, fingers adjusted and on to one of the last events I was involved in for my retail career: a work night out with about 25 colleagues down the bowling alley.

Anyone who has worked in a supermarket will know that there are some over precious egos at work much of the time, which generally involves boys showing off to girls and vice versa. So we had this mammoth game with all these people fighting for bragging and shagging rights, and I simply played my own game quietly and unnoticed amongst all the sawdust flirting. Evidently most hadn’t been paying much attention to scores other than their own, so after an epic 3 hours later (for ONE game) up pops my name on the screen as the winner, with a pretty reasonable total of 175! I kid you not, at least three lads stormed off home. I have no idea if they were embarrassed or had lost bets etc. but they just went! I’ll always remember one lad, who once the screen had done its reveal, just turned to stare at me in disbelief, threw his shoes off, grabbed his coat and ran out via the fire escape. All very odd!

What else could I do but smile that I was soon to be leaving some of these morons forever!?

The Backwards Race

You see THIS should have been the best one.

Picture the scene. Unsurprisingly I wasn’t the fastest 7 year old there’s been, but I DID have an ability to run backwards with some cohesion, and at some speed. In the practise sessions for the always eagerly anticipated primary school sports day, I won every backwards race heat going. I’d found my niche! So come the big day, I couldn’t wait to get a coveted First Place sticker, to go alongside the same prize I’d won the previous year at Wellyboot throwing. It was a formality surely.

Nice action

BANG! Went the gun… and I fell on my backside quicker than the gunpowder leaving the casing. The audible groan of sympathy from the crowd wasn’t lost on me either. So I got up, ran backwards for about 3 metres, and blow me if I didn’t fall on my arse AGAIN! I could’ve cried – it would’ve sounded in tune with the now embarrassed audible groan from the crowd this time.

Determined to finish, I still had 30 metres or so to go. So I just absolutely went for it…

…and I’d love this story to have a happy ending…

But I finished second!