My parents made few fundamental errors in their youthful efforts to raise me, and I’m happy to say that I survived them all. Just.
The haze of cigarette smoke from womb to living room to dinner table failed to inflict lung disease or even asthma on me. The subjection at an early age to the “The Omen” and subsequent psychological trauma of being told that Damien was hiding in the dark in our house ensured that I was permanently one broken light-bulb away from shitting in my pants. But the decision to send me to an all-boys Catholic school may well have bestowed on me a useful academic education, but it made me hopelessly socially retarded when it came to talking to girls.
I was rubbish.
Not that the kindly, altruistic Jesuit priests of St ******** College were adverse to sex education. After embarrassingly but excitingly cringing while my parents signed a consent form to allow me to receive my first taste of sex education, our decrepit corpse of a biology teacher showed a video about sweating. Therefore, it was left to my peers to fill in the gaps, via the media of biro penises on every page in every textbook and the more worldly comedians in our year group telling jokes about prostitutes (which I heard as Protestants, naturally) and nob-nibbling.
It didn’t help that the school was 3 miles out of town, where our sister school (the convent which produced Mandy Smith, consenting bride of paedophile Stones bassist Bill Wyman) was situated. By a cruel twist of fate the timings of departure at the two schools precluded any opportunity to mingle with our female compatriots, except for the three gutter-mouthed and very obvious slappers who hung about the bus terminal and knew the hard lads from my year group.
By this stage I was living on the North Circular Road, six lanes of traffic three metres from the front gate and nowhere to hang around and meet local girls. So my first futile attempt to get a girlfriend was laughable in the extreme.
At this stage, let me point out that it wasn’t until I was 18 and at university that a female friend advised me that you don’t just “get a girlfriend” but instead you meet someone, you say hello, you get to know them and then you ask them out. At 13, I thought that you skip all of that and just ask them out.
So after idolising Dawn B***** on the bus for months I puffed up the courage to do just that. The whole conversation, as we passed in the street was as follows:
Me (mumbling too fast): Excuse me, do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her: What?
Me: Do you want to go to cinema with me on Saturday?
Her (frowning incredulously): No.
This run of form continued for several years. Had I been a football team, I’d’ve been relegated on an annual basis until I was playing in the conference south with double-figure crowds and administration and ground-selling on the horizon. To meet girls, we’d walk around the local park at the wrong times or go into central London and stare out of the window like starving hyenas at anyone with boobs.
But eventually I was old enough to go to pubs and clubs and ACTUALLY meet more than one woman at a time. All you needed, I was conditioned to believe from popular culture (probably just crap sit-coms) was a clever and witty chat-up line.
Fucking hell! Which total bastard invented the concept of a chat-up line? Again, it was only later that I was told that the best chat-up line was “hello.” Not “my brother and I work in biscuit design and were wondering if you’d like to do some modelling work as part of our advertising campaign.”
Me and my equally crap droogs would sit at a table in a bar for hours mustering up the courage (meaning getting drunk enough to make an arse of ourselves) and striving to invent the one killer line that was needed in total isolation to get us some luck. This was on the back of meticulous pre-night-out routines, such as spending the afternoon in a pub, shaving just before going out and thereby cutting my face to ribbons and necessitating a cheap cologne-facial dip, and then sticking on the Led Zep while adorning myself in my “pulling” (Hawaiian) shirt and “pulling” (cowboy) boots.
I was rubbish.
My son is 15, has had a girlfriend for over a year (and others willing to take her place), a supremely laid-back competence in how to socialise with girls and he never, NEVER feels like shitting in his pants when we turn the lights out at home.
