My memories of school are dim and vague and distant. Zammo, Miss McCluskey and a sausage flying across a dinner hall on the end of a fork are about all I can remember. Maybe it’s better that way. I was definitely much shorter.
After leaving school I went to St Philip’s College in Birmingham, a prestigious institution for mutant renegade wiseacres run by an enigmatic bald man in a wheelchair. I then spent three years at Hull University studying Combined History and Oil-Change Techniques, a unique course sponsored by the local branch of Kwik Fit. I made lifelong friends, acquired lifelong habits and fell in love, constantly.
At Univeristy I formed my first band, a genre-busting four-piece combo called Thus Spack Bacharach. Sadly, the world wasn’t ready four our post-industrial easy-listening sound which seamlessly combined the Goth Nihilism of Fields of the Nephilim with the Pringle-sweatered optimism of Matt Monro. We split after our third gig, when even a blistering rendition of “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” – featuring a pneumatic drill on a rusty tin bath as percussion – failed to incite a single stage-dive, crowd-surf or clap.
Following graduation – and the subsequent incident with the shoes – I moved to Tangiers to manage a low-rent, late-night rendezvous absinthe den [The Absinthe Makes The Heart Grow Fonder Bar, Upper High Street, Tangiers]. I still have fond memories of the bar and its colourful clientele of journeying fugitives, fidgeting journalists and dead Victorian novelists.
Following an local outbreak of gout and blindness I left Tangiers and moved to the quaint Eastern European principality of Gertrudestein, where the President was a former Politburo Chief who convinced the locals of his democratic credentials by trimming his eyebrows as a concession to Glasnost. I ran ‘The Tower of Bagel’, the nation’s first all-nite bakery and delicatessen [cakes and savoury snacks had previously been banned under Soviet rule, while warm bagels were tolerated, though grudgingly]. It was during this period that I met Olga Sonitchka-Maurypovichka, a beautiful, classically-trained accordion player who yearned to be a waitress. The only daughter to a family of High Society Cossacks from the upmarket Ural Mountain region, Olga was mysterious, and yet enigmatic. She had the kind of body that would make heads turn in a spinal injury ward, and the kind of teeth that could make a man believe in flossing.
Inevitably, I set about wooing her. Each night I would stand outside her apartment block in the rain, gazing at that lone, illuminated window on the top floor. After doing this for a month, I realised she was living in the basement. Eventually she invited me in, but only after I serenaded her with a rendition of Sacha Distel’s “This Guy’s in Love With You”, accompanied by a bicycle chain and a metal bin lid.
Despite all the terrible things that Olga subsequently subjected me to, I still have fond memories of our time together and continue to smile like a dim-witted child as I recall the time we tried to bake a Vattern soufflé using nothing but olives and woodchip.
Olga encouraged me to bake with wild abandon and treat the oven like a big, hot canvas. For my part, I taught Olga to break free from the conceptual straitjacket of melody and learn to think of the accordian as an odd-shaped pie. Ironically, we broke up over musical differences after I interrupted her secret tryst with the entire woodwind section of the local Philharmonic.
Alas, I had no time to grieve or sulk. The President issued a controversial decree outlawing certain types of clogs and lederhosen and unveiled of a new national flag depicting a gingham napkin set against a turquoise backdrop. While there was some popular support for tighter lederhosen controls, the people were violently opposed to the napkin’s prominence in the new flag, especially as the traditional national symbol was the serviette. Widespread dissent soon congealed into a popular uprising. Revolution gripped the nation as mobs took to the streets, the streets took to the hills and the hills fled to the border.
As is often the case during times of violent social upheaval, cake sales plummeted. Luckily, the market in puff pastry and other savoury snacks flourished and I soon became the main provider of Cornish pasties, pork pies and spicy samosas to the hard-pressed rebel forces. This, of course, made the shop a target for the government troops, and – after a protracted siege that lasted an entire busy lunch period – I was captured and declared a prisoner of war.
Luckily, I had a smart lawyer and managed to be reclassified as a prisoner of conscience. Within days I made my first escape attempt, convincing a guard that I had a clear conscience and thereby making myself technically invisible. Sadly, I was recaptured within minutes after inadvertently remembering a regrettable incident from my youth. I was eventually freed as part of a prisoner-exchange programme and released in lieu of a noodle vendor who’d been supplying Special Fried Rice to the government troops.
Disillusioned with love, life and the savoury snack industry I recently moved to Ko Samui in Thailand where I enrolled at Roshi Ralph’s Gonzo Zendo, a controversial Buddhist meditation school that tried to fuse tree-hugging Eastern mysticism with white-knuckle extreme sports. My Zen master, Roshi Ralph, was a burly, wisecracking New Yorker who eschewed the traditional look of the Buddhist monk, preferring to dress like a construction worker.
His teaching style was equally strange: whenever I asked him to clarify a Zen koan like “Who is the master who makes the grass green?” he’d smack me across the eyes with a basketball shoe. It was only after his arrest that I discovered that his unorthodox behaviour and casual acts of violence were due to the fact he was an escaped mental patient.