The Watch House

A Ghost Story for Christmas It was Angie – or ‘Angelique’ as she now styled herself – who first figured out that the old watch house on the Spit would make a great venue for a Christmas party. An early adapter to acid house, she loved beach parties in the summer and warehouse parties in…

The Museum of Everything

A Ghost Story for Christmas When I was a kid, I made a list of things that scared me. Like a Desert Island Disks list, I got it down to seven: Spiders, especially the really big sod in the attic that my dad insisted on referring to as ‘Sam’.Velociraptor hide and seek.GhostsNuclear war.Being coated in…

Blue Christmas

A Winter Solstice Story Despite several theories to the contrary, the priapic spirit that has in the last few years been seen at Stone Henge during the winter solstice was not, in fact, a druid. Accounts of the apparition vary, but common features suggest a tall, emaciated male figure, naked from the waist down and…

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood

Coming of age in the early-80s could be a pretty miserable experience. I was eighteen when I left school in 1982, clutching three useless ‘A’ levels, having been rejected – mostly without interview – by every university to which I’d applied. (Unless you were grammar school, which I wasn’t, you weren’t getting in from a…

The Early History of Flight (My First British Bike)

As I sit here contemplating the intermittently sticking throttle on my BSA, I find myself wondering why I still do this to myself? I can fix it of course. It ain’t the cable or the spring, so I probably just need to clean up the carb. If that doesn’t work, I might have to dress…

My First Bike

I can’t remember who went first, but I’m going to guess it was Mick. He was just that touch older than me, though we were in the same year at school (I was born early in the year, Mick late the year before). He started out with a Honda 50, the classic ‘Crunchie’, followed by…

Grebo Gurus (Finding the Scene)

Fast forward about ten years. Like most places in the mid-70s, my hometown was very tribal. The working-class kids were predominantly rockabillies and skins, the National Front having a strong presence. This pretty much covered the council estate I grew up on. The few ‘rebellious’ middle-class kids at school, on the other hand, were hanging…