Me and Madness

Hey you!  Don't read this!  It's far too self-indulgent.  Not unless you like Madness,  In which case, have a quick drink first, like I just did, to get yourself into a similarly nostalgic and sentimental state of mind.  And then, have a butcher's.

In 1981, when I was 11 and on a school trip, I discovered the magic of popular music.  Robert Hutchinson brought along a copy of Madness's 7th single, which the teachers let us play on the hotel record player.  The single reached number 7 in the charts and was called The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  When I got back home to London, I bought it.  And later that year, a new LP was released, which the 7 members of Madness agreed to assign a simple title to. '7'. (Noticing a theme yet?) My first single and my first album and the start of a (near) 40 year love for a band that has gone (dare I say, 'one step') beyond any other music in how it has wrapped its way around my life.

Over the next 5 years, until they split up in 1986, I indulged a need to buy every record they released in every format - single, album, picture disc, 12" single, imports and even cassette versions of the albums.  Most of this collection, I still possess, all in mint condition, cared for protectively.  But while I was away at university, my little brother opportunistically decided to sell the 12" singles to fund his pub visits.  He's not forgiven.

From the age of about 13, I was allowed to get the 29 bus down to Bayham Street, Camden Town, in order to buy each newly released single straight from Madness's record company, Stiff Records.  I would go down with my mate Kevin Keady and we'd be given free button badges and posters along with the records.  The badges bolstered a collection I obsessively added to every time I went to Carnaby St or Brighton promenade or Walthamstow market.  I had about 100 badges and I once put these all onto the back of my Harrington jacket; but this didn't prove to be particularly practical.  And the posters helped fill a huge amount of bedroom wall space, alongside anything I could cut out of Smash Hits magazine or obtain from any source.

Smash Hits also provided lyrics to the singles and I unleashed my inner geek to create a book of facts and lyrics and cut out pictures for every single, including each chart position (from The Prince in 1979 to Waiting for the Ghost Train in 1986, the chart placings are 16, 7, 3, 6, 3, 4, 7, 4, 7, 4, 14, 1, 4, 5, 8, 2, 5, 11, 17, 18, 21, 35, 18... most of that consigned to memory as a result of making that book).  

After one trip to Carnaby Street with Kevin Keady, to buy more Madness merchandise (and consider buying dog-tooth patterned drain-pipe trousers), we were upstairs on the 29 bus as it went along Camden Road and were stunned to see Mark 'Bedders' Bedford get on.  The Madness bassist was with two of the Belle Stars, a much less successful female version of Madness.  We shot downstairs, said hello (and what a lovely bloke he was) and I got him to autograph the back of a Madness mirror I'd just bought.

Kevin Keady remained my best friend for a short time - on account of his equal love of Madness - until he suddenly decided that he'd gone off them and was into Duran Duran.  One minute, we are watching the Madness film of how they started out (in which they play themselves), Take it or Leave It, at Enfield Town cinema, and the next minute, he's grown his fringe into a long wedge and started to show interest in girls (and girls' music, evidently).  To his credit, it kind of worked for him, he got girlfriends and I didn't, but Madness weren't worth the sacrifice, I still maintain.

Things went downhill from there.  Madness had run out of steam and they split up, just as I was moving on musically and was snobbishly heralding 'serious' rock music as superior to Madness's more jaunty, fun-loving pop sensibilities.  I probably stopped listening to them for a while in my late teens; and then in 1992, they returned to play what was intended to be one off weekend of gigs at Finsbury Park, cleverly named 'Madstock'.  By this point, I'd met my future wife.  We were engaged and having inflicted a really poor Bob Dylan gig on her in the early months of going out together, we discovered a shared love of Madness and went to Madstock with huge expectations and anticipation.  I had not been old enough to see them in concert first time around and the 6 years in which they had been absent felt like an eternity to me, as it would to anyone who found that time to fall between their 16th and 22nd birthdays.  We were not let down.  Madness were amazing and the impact of tens of thousands of fans jumping up and down caused a minor earthquake in the Finsbury Park area.

The following year, there was an easy and obvious consensus between us in regard to our choice of song for the first dance at our wedding:  It Must be Love.

Madness were back and they weren't going to go away.  Well not for long.  They would tour occasionally after this, usually around Christmas (we saw them again around the millennium at Wembley Arena) and from 1999 onwards they even managed to release albums of new music - not far off as good as their early stuff and sometimes equal to it - every  5 years or so.

We had two children and inflicted Madness on them with ease.  Both our kids love Madness and in 2014, the 4 of us saw them at the O2, the only gig we have attended together as a whole family.  I'm not one for dancing, but Madness are one band that can push me beyond my self-conscious reluctance.  Nonetheless, it took until the encore and Night Boat to Cairo  for my daughter to convince me to join the family in dancing along.  And then when I did, she just laughed at me and asked why it looked like I was just jogging on the spot.

Madness are also the only band I would sing karoke to.  Because I can't sing.  But then, nor can Suggs really.  His voice suits the music, because it has that wonderful North London brogue that I have grown up surrounded with.  Much as my love of Madness has been all about the songs, there are additional layers to them that make them special and part of that is the North London link.  They hail from the areas around Camden Town and have imbued a plethora of North West London characteristics into their lyrics, their attitude and the visuals for their music.  Living in some of these areas as a young child, meant that the nostalgia I have as an adult is interlinked with this aspect of Madness.  For example, I lived opposite Chalk Farm tube station (location for the Absolutely LP cover), and used to walk up to Primrose Hill to play (location of the Rise and Fall LP cover).  Camden Town was another short walk away, passing the Roundhouse as we left our flats, and here is the spiritual home of the band.

Another layer of specialness for me was the much overlooked depth to their music, their completely unique blend of different styles of genre (ska, old style R and B, boogie woogie, soul, rock and roll, 60s pop with a Kinks feel to it) and the unpretentious ordinariness of the subject matter for each song, which managed to provide an insightful social (and sometimes political) commentary or convey a dark humour (or humorous darkness) that made me want to listen to them closely rather than just dance along and laugh at the funny videos like casual fans did.

Madness songs - from the well known to the obscure - still give me a tingle when I listen to them after all this time.  The way in which they have seeped into my life, had an existence beyond the turntable, and projected a character which echoes my own, make them utterly special to me.  And to share that love with my family brings me pleasure that I can't put into words.  My daughter is the one whose love of Madness equals my own and this is partly reflected by the fact that we have matching Madness tattoos.  And this shared love was best celebrated last year, when the two of us went to see their 40th anniversary gig at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, which started with a short set of those obscure B-sides and albums tracks that they would have played when first starting out in 1979.  

What more can I say?  Madness, madness, I call it GLADNESS.

Live Aid when you're 15

It's Saturday night as I write and there's a documentary on about Live Aid and I guess, maybe, as it's July, it might be an anniversary.  And it surely is, 35 years, and it made me think back to those formative teenage years when something as globally STUPENDOUS as that could have a marked effect on your life when you're 15.  There's no denying, that - despite the posthumous tales of rock star diva behaviour and the perverse incentive of a career boost outweighing the moral imperative of the exercise - Live Aid was the most significant musical event of the decade and one of those historic moments when everyone knows where they were at the time.

I was in a transition stage of my life in 1985.  Not a gender one.  A musical one.  From liking pop songs that I'd tape onto a cassette during the Sunday evening Top 40 radio show to loving  PROPER rock.  The turning point for me was U2.  I loved them at the time.  I'd just got into The Unforgettable Fire, as a result of having sold a load of dodgy pirate tapes of that album at school, sourced from a Korean contact of my Dad's.  And therefore, U2's slot at Live Aid was something I was eager to see more than any other.  In those days, believe it or not, Bono could do no wrong in my eyes.  I wanted to BE Bono.  I was similarly short, with a big nose, loved Ireland, had some poncey boots and a brown mullet. Of course, nowadays, Bono can do no right in my eyes, the gurning, supercilious, self-aggrandising, overly-earnest, hypocritical, affectation-riddled, self-righteous bore. But in 1985, when he decided that there was too much space between stage and crowd, leading to his decision to forego U2's 3rd scheduled song (the brilliant 'Sunday Bloody Sunday') to climb down and direct security to pluck a pretty girl out of the crowd so that he could hug and dance with her (she was 'getting crushed'...yeah Bono, but she was also fit, eh?) , I naively thought, THIS IS SO COOL.

U2 were the second best performers of the day.  The very best, unarguably, as everyone agrees, was Queen.  I had just got into Queen at the time, as well.   So for me, Live Aid validated my decision that U2 and Queen were the two greatest rock bands of all time, which, given my very recent introduction to rock, says absolutely nothing.  But the general consensus is that those 8 boys done good.

Unlike the bands I went on to like in the next few years.

Within a year of Live Aid, I started my obsession with Bob Dylan.  This might have been delayed, had I seen him perform that night.  He was the closing act of the US leg of the concert.  He went on stage with Keith Richard and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and the three of them had only about half an hour's rehearsal beforehand.  In true Dylan style, he then made a bad situation worse, by telling Keith and Ronnie, once on stage, that he wanted to play completely different songs, which they hadn't rehearsed.  Inevitably, the result was execrable. And, given Bob's pretty atrocious 1980s (though that's a non-devotee's opinion, not mine), Live Aid proceeded to be the shit cherry on a big fat cake made of shit for Bob in that decade.

I was also a year away from getting into Bowie, but at least he did a decent set.  It was a bit 80s, and Bowie unfairly got a lot of stick for being too 80s in the 80s, until he died, when people started to celebrate how well he adapted to the times.  And I was also a year away from liking Led Zeppelin, who fell flat in the first of two (kind of) reunions since splitting after John Bonham's death in 1980.  They roped in Phil Collins on drums, possibly the most mis-cast drummer they could have agreed to use, and blamed him for their crap performance.  (I mean, Stairway to Heaven needs bud-a-dum, bud-a dum, bud-a dum-dum dummmm, and not a bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup, bu-dup,)

But going back to the whole concept of knowing where you were at a certain time, I was mostly in my bedroom, but had a short spell in North Mid's A&E department.  During an act that I was less interested in (and there were several, The Boomtown Rats most notably, because let's face it, Geldof's own band were WAY out of their league) I decided to re-arrange the posters on my bedroom wall.  In the process, the pin bit of a drawing pin drove its way through the flat head bit as I pushed it into the wall and so it ended up embedded in my thumb.  That part of the pin had a thickened end and so you couldn't simply ease it out as smoothly as it went in.  My Dad took some pliers to it to pull it out, but I felt faint and wouldn't let him, asking to go a hospital instead where they would have a less crude method of extraction.  At the hospital, they used pliers to pull the thing out.  Bastards.  It hurt like hell.  But it was quick and I was soon back watching Live Aid.

I'm not sure anything like Live Aid can happen again.  The sheer scale of it, relative to its time, was way beyond what was thought possible then.  The line-up of artists has been unequalled since and these days we are beyond even having that many iconic artists available to snort coke backstage, lap up expensive gifts on their riders, treble their records sales, demand everyone vacates the area around a port-a-loo so that they can take a shit without their straining being overheard (Madonna, apparently). ...er, I mean, iconic artist available to freely gift their services to save the lives of starving Ethiopians.  But then, that fact just helps to make Live Aid a one off.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 12 - Another School trip, ghosts, Adam and the Ants and Harringtons)

Junior 4 was all about trying to be cool.

My best friends (both now and in the years before Junior 4), John and Darren, were abandoned by me in favour of Robert Hutchinson and Gerard Lynch, who I considered to be the coolest kids in the class.  The girls all loved Hutch, he had that air of confidence and looked like a ten year old baby-faced David Soul, only, he was a bit of a short-arse and, if I'm honest, consequently chubby in the way that a baby is before it starts walking.  Puppy fat, maybe.  Or short-arsed kid chubbiness, stored up energy ready for when he grows tall, which he never did.  Robert knew about proper pop music and so did Gerard.  And they both understood fashion.  No one in our class even thought about fashion before that.  Maybe the girls did, but I wouldn't have known that and I doubt it, looking back.  But Robert and Gerard both declared themselves to be 'Rude Boys' and each owned a Harrington.  Gerard also had a Crombie and was tall enough to carry off the much longer coat.  Robert would have looked like something from Michael Bentine's Potty Time in a Crombie.  Anyway, I wanted to fit in and persuaded my parents to buy me a Harrington.  (Incidentally, my Dad bought me another one for my 50th birthday last month, knowing that I am both nostalgic and a creature of habit).  We were the Harrington gang and sometimes Robert suggested we turn our jackets inside out so that the iconic red tartan lining was fully on show on the outside.  At this point, my effort to fit in failed somewhat.  Robert and Gerard had plain white lining on the inside of their sleeves.  I had bright green.  That was embarrassing.  I looked like a Scottish racing jockey.

Despite the green sleeves, they agreed that I could be in a room with them on the school trip that summer.  That was where my temporary abandonment of Darren and John was most treacherously realised, having been in a room with them in Combe Martin the previous two years.  This year the holiday location switched to Lympsham in Somerset and there were 6 of us in that room, 6 of us self-styled coolest kids in the class, with our Harringtons and with Robert as our leader.  The holiday was brilliant, especially as somehow I had got over my chronic travel sickness and didn't puke once on the coach the whole time,  which was fortunate given how much my jacket meant to me.  I'd have been mortified if the outside ended up as bright green as the inner sleeves.

The hotel in which we stayed was reputedly haunted.  And we believed this, after all, we were all Catholics, so we were open to all sorts of superstitious nonsense.  Originally the building had been a farmhouse and our room was built on an annex where the dairy had once been.  This became significant once the spooky story gathered some meat and we were told that the ghost was a milk maid.  Someone then claimed to have looked through the frosted glass of our bedroom door to see the silhouette of a woman bending over as if milking a cow (I imagine if we were older and more worldly, we would have interpreted this rather more crudely).  If that wasn't scary enough, I then imagined - as I twisted the handle of the door leading to our corridor - that someone on the other side of the door was turning it back forcefully and yet, as that door also had glass in it, I could see no one there.  I totally pooed myself and ran back to the main building armed with this addition to the story of the haunting.

This holiday proved a rite of passage for me, though.  It was when I got into PROPER MUSIC thanks to Robert bringing with him two 45" singles to play at the party.  The first was Adam and the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier.  The second - and more in keeping with the Harringtons - was Madness, The Return of the Los Palmas 7.  I was blown away by both and became a fan for life of Madness and an obsessive Adam Ant fan for at least a year afterwards, much to my Dad's discomfort and concern over my sexuality, once the posters of this obvious 'poofter' in make-up went up on my wall.

On the last evening, each room had to perform an act for all the other kids.  John and Darren's room mimed along to a Beatles song, while we did the same for Kings of the Wild Frontier, just to highlight the chasm in coolness.  However, in a moment of self-conscious awkwardness reminiscent of my green sleeves, I was instructed by Robert to be 'on piano'.  There is of course no bloody piano on that song, so I felt like a bit of a prick.  We Ants weren't even allowed to put the famous white stripe across our noses, as only Adam had this, the Ants didn't, as Robert pointed out.  And Robert was Adam Ant.  Gerard was guitarist, Marco Pirroni.  And I was just the prick on piano that wasn't in the song.  Robert might have looked the coolest, but at least he suffered for his art.  As I discovered later, when I tried it myself, applying a thick white line of toothpaste over your cheeks and nose sends a wave of stinging mintiness into your eyes that hurts like buggery.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 11 - School trip to Combe Martin, the double bed, Dutch ovens and a nuclear waste vomit)

Combe Martin is a coastal village in North Devon and it provided the destination for our primary school's summer trips in 1979 and 1980.  The experience has ingrained itself on our collective memory, like seeing a Granny's bloomers on the bus, with that same mixture of comedy and horror.

The key source for the horror was the sleeping situation.  Four ten year old boys.  Three beds.  I know it sounds like a priest's midnight party, but fortunately our Catholic school had not invited any along to supervise.  It required a practical solution.  Three of us - me, John and Darren (still my best mates today, in spite of Combe Martin, or maybe because of it!) -  were joined by another John (there were 7 of them in the class).  The deal was that everyone had to have a spell with one other boy in the double bed and the other nights in a single; and that you kept your pyjamas on in the double (as if you wouldn't); and put pillows down the middle.  As for farting, well, there were no boundaries there and John was eager to perform a 'Dutch Oven' on anyone sharing the double with him.

Anyone sharing a double bed with a brutally malevolent farter like John discovered that it was almost as bad as sharing a seat on the coach with me.  My inclination towards vomiting on account of debilitating car (and coach) sickness in the 70s was as inevitable and as unavoidable as Ollie Reed being drunk on a TV chat show.  My stomach started to stir after about an hour, no matter where on the coach I'd sit or if I'd been sucking on enough of those boiled sweets that came in a round tin full of icing sugar to look like a hamster.  Given that we travelled from North London to Devon and back, and was on and off the coach for excursions every day of the week, my throat ended up with more hot bodily fluid flowing through it than a Port-a-loo at a spicy food festival.  I threw up on EVERY single journey.  I have to lay some of the blame on your average 1970s coach, with no air-con and rubbish suspension, but the packed lunches provided for us really didn't help.  SPAM, I worked out, is HAM which makes you SPEW, hence the portmanteau.  And that other invidious culinary invention, sandwich spread, just looks like pig sick, so naturally made you think of puking up as soon as you looked at it.  But I was my own worse enemy the time we had a day out to Exeter Cathedral (the other side of Devon from Combe Martin).  I washed a Mint Choc Chip Cornetto down with a can of lime-flavoured fizzy drink just before boarding the coach and the very moment I stepped off it back at the hotel, I unleashed a bright green torrent that looked like it would require a clean up from people in radiation suits.  You didn't want to ever tell a teacher when you were feeling sick, because they would give you a sick bag, which as we all know, was so-called not so much for what it was meant to catch, but more for what it already smelt like.  

The final night of each trip was celebrated with a disco.  Some boys plucked up the courage to dance with the girls, which was always a strange sight, as at that age girls tend to be taller.  Were we among those brave, confident boys?  The four of us, who shared a double bed, with one of us a serial puker?  Of course not, we hid under the table the whole time.

The hotel we stayed at in Combe Martin has long gone, but the spirit of those trips SHALL live on, because my 50th birthday present from my wife was to book me, John and Darren into another hotel in Combe Martin for a nostalgic re-enactment.  And she booked the 3 of us into a room with just one single bed and one double.  Oh dear.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 10 - Diamond socks, rubbish songs, Steve's spits and pissing up the wall)

It felt like a rite of passage, moving from infants into juniors, the other side of the school, with all the big kids, scary.  And for the first time we had a male teacher.  Which felt more grown up.  Mr C_____ managed to fit my Dad's contemptuous view of male primary school teachers, insofar as he WAS "wetter than a pair of pissed-in pants".  The evidence was plain on first sight.  The corduroy trousers, the yellow diamond-patterned socks, the soft shoes that looked like they were made of macaroons dipped in tea.  And he played guitar and piano, as in those days before portable stereos it was a prerequisite for primary schools to have at least one competent musician.  His most ubiquitously played song was something so sickly sweet and mawkishly sentimental that even at the age of 7 you'd cringe every time you were made to sing it.  The words were:

    Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you,

    When another day is through, I'll still be friends with you.

And Mr C____ claimed that he wrote it.  It took me about 30 years to find out that John Denver did.

Singing was something we did LOADS of in school, especially hymns, most of which were dirges, as the Catholic Church preferred something more solemn than the Church of England's frivolous melodic nonsense.  But I hated singing and mimed every time.  It was even worse if you had to stand next to Steve A____ who had a speech impediment (just one of many afflictions) in which he SSHHHed his S's.  I had the misfortune to be next to him once when we sang Boney M's 'When a Child is Born'.  Imagine the saliva-soaking from this verse:

    A shilent wisshh shails the sheven sheas

    The windsh of schange whishper in the treesh

    And the wallsh of doubt tumble tosshed and torn

    Thish comesh to passh when a child ish born

I'm not sure a song exists with such frequent use of the letter S and if he wasn't as limp as a Willow Tree (another of my Dad's analogies) I would have suspected Mr C____ of choosing that song with Shteve in mind.  Not that Steve had the slightest self-consciousness about his lisp.  If he did, he wouldn't have constantly run around the playground pretending to be his heroes - the Shix Million Dollar Man or Kenny Dalglisshh.  Poor old Steve.  He was quite smelly too.  And fat.  And in the remedial group.  And a motor bike once went right into him as he crossed Bowes Road without looking and bounced straight off, sending the rider to the ground, while Steve merely rubbed his leg and said, "Ouch".

Back to the whole excitement thing about joining the juniors...  We got to play in the big playground, or rather we didn't because Junior 4 and Junior 3 dominated it with football, so we just ran around the fringes or stayed in the grassy area where girls skipped and sang songs (Mr C____ was probably dying to join in).  We also got to use the big boys' toilet, the novelty being that it had a urinal.  Not individual ones.  One of those shared metal ones, where if you stood too close you'd get splash back all over your light grey jumper and not much darker grey trousers.  There was a clip halfway up the water pipe above the urinal where it was fixed to the wall and we had competitions to see who could piss high enough to hit it.  You had to get your distance from the urinal right, not just the angle, otherwise you'd end up pissing in your own face in an effort to point your willy too far upwards.  It might be that Steve did this quite often.  It would explain a lot about the smell coming off his jumper.

I don't remember much more about Junior 1 with Mr C____, except that me and my best mates John and Darren were in top group for Times Tables and the following year we skipped Junior 2 and went into Junior 3.  Our parents probably had us ear-marked for Oxbridge from that moment onwards.  But having recently seen a class photo of Junior 3 with less than 20 kids in it, we worked out that they only stuck us in it, because it had too few kids and our class had too many.  We had to stay in Junior 3 for 2 years anyway, in the end, while our original class joined us.  Pointless.  But at least we got to go on an extra school trip to Devon which only Juniors 3 and 4 went on.  But that's another story....

Phil Knows - A 50th Birthday Tribute to a Best Man

Irony is a wonderful thing, the root of British humour.  No one revels in it more than my friend Phil and he has turned exploiting irony for amusement into an art form.  His love of the absurd is infectious and indefatigable. On too many occasions to count he has brought tears to my eyes, crying with laughter tears, thanks to his swiftly conceived, sardonically delivered nuggets of wry wit.  But few of the funniest people in life are also the nicest, almost as if you sometimes need a slightly nasty side to take the piss.  Phil bucks this trend.  I say 'nicest' but 'nice' is a rubbish word, almost meaningless due its lack of specificity.  But I struggle to describe adequately what I mean by 'nice' without descending into the sort of mawkish sentiment that Phil would rightly scoff at, with a comic turned up lip and frown and a shrug like the ubiquitous Alan Partridge GIF.  So let's get the mushy bit out of the way quickly.  Phil has shown to me over the decades genuine warmth and consideration and a forgiving nature for the times when I was younger and acted like a prick; he is a role model in how he lives his life, sticking to his principles, never succumbing to vanity and showing wonderful devotion to his family; and as a friend he has been loyal, consistent and supportive.  He has always been a measure against which I check myself when I stray towards self-indulgent, egocentric, attention-seeking behaviours, because he is the apotheosis of those sins.  And he is a sage, someone whose opinion everyone values, because it comes from an intelligent, logical and compassionate place; hence the oft-used response of 'Phil Knows' (though, with classic absurdity, he turned this into 'Feel Nose' by always stroking his nose in response to anyone saying that).

He lives in Shrewsbury and isn't one for too much social media contact, so it would have been easy to lose touch over the 30+ years in which I've known him, and indeed we have sometimes gone a long time without much contact.  But now we meet up each year with other university mates in the central location of Birmingham and do what we used to do as students by spending a day drinking beer, moving from pub to pub and making each other laugh out loud with the same sort of nonsense we indulged in back in 1988.  And that is enough to remind me that Phil is the best of men, as he was at my wedding where I chose him alongside my brother and oldest school friend, Dalboy, as my 3 official Best Men.  He's the best of men and the best of friends.  And to return to irony, as the most self-effacing of people I have ever met, he will probably cringe all the way through this tribute and feel slightly embarrassed at (but nonetheless appreciative of) the fact that I have written it to mark his 50th birthday today.

So, brazen sentiment aside, let me now focus on something of the frivolous and the absurd nature of my experience of Phil.  There are enough tales to fill a comic novel, but I will edit myself down to half a dozen or so.

I first met Phil in Mansfield Hall of Residence at the University of Reading in September 1988.  We were brought together by the sort of self-absorbed dickhead that we both thereafter came to view with gentle contempt, a lad who dragged everyone to the pub that first night in a fit of attention-seeking social engineering.  Over the next few weeks, our social group formed, with Phil as the reluctant leader and his room the 'place to be' for our gang of equally self-deprecating misfits.  It was Phil who recognised the bond that held us together - crapness - and it was he who created what became a long running joke, how our lives can be measured against an imaginary 'crap scale'.  He took the joke further by reminding us of a line from Blackadder to describe each situation any of us got into in which things (typically) went wrong: 'At home to Mr Cock-Up'.

So often, Phil reminded us that Mr Cock Up was with us and at no time more so than when a few of us went Inter-Railing around Europe.  One incident in a catalogue of disasters was Phil's ill-timed, horrendously loud fart, which terminated a rare opportunity in which I was being successful in chatting up a girl.  I say 'successful'... we were in Munich and she was German and our friend Geoff translated using the limited amount of O' Level German that he could remember.  At some point while she was explaining how many pets she had, Phil, who was sat next to me on the ground with his knees up and legs parted, let rip with a pavement-shattering 'PPPPHHHHAAAAARRRRRPPPPPPP'.  As if his bottom had decided it had had enough of all this nonsense and was shouting in protest.  The German girl consequently decided it was time to bid us 'Auf Wiedersehen'.

Phil not only holds the record for the most ill-timed fart in my experience, but possibly the smelliest.  He once strolled into my room in hall and silently started at me with a deadpan expression as I chattered to him nonchalantly, until the point at which I wondered why he wasn't answering me.  A grin spread across his face at the same time as his rancid fart spread its way towards my nostrils.  He hadn't come in to talk.  He'd come to leave me that gift.

Phil laughs at himself rather than ever takes himself too seriously, which means that when he laughs at you, you just want to join in.  He reminds me regularly that I have a 'funny shaped head' and after I once told him that the 'fat, smelly. thick kid in our class at school was nicknamed Flump' he replied with, "But you were the fat, smelly, thick kid in your class at school, so you must be Flump" and he has called me Flump regularly ever since.  His lack of malice is that disarming that he can laugh at people's misfortunes if there is something comic about them and no one ever minds.  I once went into a shop with him and there was no one to be seen, so we waited a minute or two before hearing a quiet voice from behind the counter calling, "Help!  Help!"  We looked over to see a old woman lying on the floor.  "Are you ok?" one of us asked.  "I've fallen over," she replied, comically stating the obvious.  We helped her up and checked she was OK, but afterwards we found that the whole thing was making us laugh uncontrollably due to the sheer absurdity of this woman lying on the floor and feeling the need to explain that she was there because she fell over, as opposed to perhaps choosing it as place to sleep or trying to polish the tiles with the back of her dress.

University threw up a number of pretentious wankers, people who created affectations to make themselves more interesting, made up their own nicknames on arrival or played guitar in front of others in an effort to be impressive.  Phil managed to play guitar in front of us regularly (and actually quite beautifully) without EVER appearing to be like those attention-seekers.  And that's because he just did it for his own satisfaction and we just happened to be in his room all the time; so why not?  He never said, 'Listen to this!'  But we did listen and it became a feature of our lives at the time.  That and his choices of records to put on - Jethro Tull and early Genesis (unfashionably and with pride) and more contemporary stuff from that time like The Waterboys and The Sundays.  I've seen both Tull and the Waterboys in concert with Phil, both amazing gigs, both all the better for sharing the experience and love of their music with him.

Anyway, that's all just the tip of the iceberg, but a flavour of my good friend, Phil.  Happy half-century mate.  I will raise a pint of bitter to you tonight and look forward to another 50 years of pub-crawls, laughing at all the nonsense the world throws up and the unwelcomed intrusion of the odd ill-timed fart.

Stupid Things I Remember about Growing Up (Part 9 - Infants 3, Softies, Alan's funny teeth and Priests )

When we moved to Southgate, I was 6 and changed schools to the very lovely little Our Lady of Lourdes RC primary in Arnos Grove.  For part of my first year there, I actually got picked up and driven in by my Infants 3 teacher, Mrs Green.  But at some point my mum made an arrangement with another school mum called Peggy to take us there by tube.  This required a walk to Oakwood station (nearer than Southgate) and a two stop journey on the Piccadilly line.  Peggy was Irish, with the strongest of accents (think 'filum' instead of 'film') and two sons, each a year younger than me and my brother.  That year seemed a gulf.  Those two boys were pretty bloody wet, smack-arse-faced, like real-life versions of the 'Softies' from 'The Beano' (the swots that Dennis the Menace bullied).  Not that they would have read 'The Beano'.  John - the oldest one - preferred 'TV Comic' which I considered with contempt to be babyish.  Not quite as babyish as the fact that his younger brother slept in a cot at the age of 4 or 5 years old.  That was Thomas.  He had an accent as strong as his mum's, maybe because he didn't talk to anyone else.  When a tube train arrived at the station, he'd shout out where it was bound.  He'd pronounce Cockfosters as Cockfodders and Arnos Grove as Arnot Gove.  That killed me and my brother.  I'm not sure what accent John had, because he never spoke.  Except when he was crying about his mum not buying him TV Comic.  Later in life it dawned on me that together their names made 'John Thomas' as in slang for a willy.  They really were a couple of willies, the poor buggers.

My first memory of arriving at Our Lady of Lourdes was being buddied up with some weird kid called Alan.  Being called Alan was weird enough at the time.  All Alans were bald middle-aged men.  I might be wrong about his name, but sod it, most of these memories could be unreliable, so let's still call him Alan.  He had the straightest teeth you've ever seen.  Like someone had taken an electric grinder to them.  And the third respect in which he was weird was that he refused to ever eat snacks at playtime, saying that his mum told him it would spoil his appetite for lunch.  I soon negotiated my way out of that situation and Alan left the school soon after.  I suspect his mother home-schooled him.  You would if you were the sort of fucked up parent who called your kid Alan and denied him snacks at playtime.

In the equivalent of Infants 3 these days, 7 year old kids are made to do SATs; but this is nothing compared to what we had to do as Catholic kids in the 70s.  First Confession!  Because by 7, you've clearly accumulated enough sins to need to purge your burdened soul of them through verbal exposition to a priest.  Unlike normal confession, which happened in those traditional wooden cubicles, our first one was alone with a priest in the vestry.  Not something you'd write to Jim'll Fix It to ask to do.  There was lots of time spent in class preparing for this moment.  Nothing practical like self-defence, but just some old shit about Jesus and families and how we are born with sin and basically fucked if we don't confess everything bad we do.  We had to fill in a special book as preparation with pictures and writing.  What the book missed out was a list of suggested things to confess.  Because at 7 years old, you just aren't sure what counts.  Did Knock Down Ginger count?  Did laughing at Alan's funny teeth count?  What about finding pleasure in seeing a 6 year old kid throw a wobbler because his mum won't buy him TV Comic?

In the end I went for the same unspecific term that everyone else used - I confessed to having 'bad thoughts'.  (Luckily the priest didn't reply with, 'Well, funny you should say that...' and I got away with 3 Our Fathers and 5 Hail Mary's)