A Life More Ordinary

Running backwards, forwards and sideways in time.

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Writer. 52 years old with a tendency to overthink and overshare. Likes to create worlds and people. Dad. Survivor. Rubbish at writing bio entries.

  • Song For Whoever.

    We’ve all got them, haven’t we? Songs that we really love to sing along to while driving in our cars or songs that mark individual moments in our lives. I’ve got a whole library full of those, multiple compilation tapes in old money. A whole archive of lyrics and tunes that stir these inept, clumsy feet when nobody’s looking or lift this tired, old heart, teasing out memories, both good and bad for me to soak in.

    But what about the songs that undeniably made you who you are today? I’ve been thinking about this ever since I decided to try and pull this blog together. Which songs have provoked a change in me or had a profound impact on my life? So, here for your delectation or your indifference, in no particular order because that makes sense in my brain, are the songs that changed my life.

    1 A New England – Kirsty MacColl.

    No surprises that Kirsty MacColl made it into this list. This was her first hit single, an upbeat, pop version of Billy Bragg’s original song.

    Despite having four sisters in my family, I was living in a household that was dominated by my father and all that that entailed. This song was a breath of fresh air in my life and was to have a huge effect on me in my future years. By now, at the age of eleven, many of the relationships in my life were damaged, more often than not by circumstances out of my control. To me, this song spoke of longing for simplicity and wanting to be loved but still being brave enough to make a stand when things were out of your control and making you unhappy. Despite Kirsty’s best efforts, it would take me a long time to learn that particular lesson, but because of this song, I was at least aware that it was an option. It would have been all too easy for me to have fallen into the trappings that were on offer at the time and blindly stumble through life. The words in this song gave me hope.

    2 The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death – The Housemartins.

    I grew up with Tory-voting parents. Stupidly, I wasn’t interested in politics until I left Plymouth, but once I had the freedom to start to experience and then question the world, this song really encapsulated some of my earliest memories. I have a vague recollection of the Royal Wedding in 1981, of street parties and tasteless cakes, bad haircuts and that favourite Muppets t-shirt of mine. I’d have been eight, too young to understand social injustice or the stark differences in class at the time, but still firmly entrenched in my working-class roots in a family that could afford very little. This song was to be my awakening and the start of my personal rebellion. What it also did for me, was to shock at least one of my parents and I still remember the look on my mother’s face, looking like a slapped arse, when she heard the chorus:

    ‘The people who grinned themselves to death

    Smiled so much they failed to take a breath

    And even when their kids were starving

    They all thought the queen was charming’

    So, I turned it up louder. I would argue that The Housemartins were way ahead of their time while also being incredibly relevant in the eighties. Maybe that says more about how little things have changed in our political system and the role of the press in society, something that they also addressed in the song ‘Freedom’ from the magnificent ‘London 0 Hull 4’ album. But the fact that so much of the music that they played would not be out of place in today’s climate speaks volumes and that trend has continued throughout Paul Heaton’s career, whether it be his observations on the ruling classes or his wisdom-laden musings about relationships and people. The most influential and important musician in my life. Long may that continue.

    3 Being Boring – Pet Shop Boys.

    So, having admitted to growing up in a Tory-voting household (which still doesn’t make any sense to me), it should be no surprise that there were also elements of racism, misogyny and homophobia dotted through my formative years, it was the eighties and nineties after all and it was there, up front and centre as they say, either in the form of ‘jokes’ or lofty sneers displaying a complete misunderstanding of anyone who dared to be different, whether through choice or circumstance. In hindsight, and through rose-tinted glasses, which believe me, are incredibly difficult for this writer to wear, I suspect that it was generational conditioning that was impossible to break free from (and I know that it shouldn’t be, please don’t think for one minute that I am defending such attitudes and viewpoints). On the other hand, there was a choice and one that still continues to this day, a ‘looking down the nose’ at certain types of people. This song and in particular the video, helped me take a huge step in breaking free from parental conditioning and beginning to understand and embrace cultural and sexual differences. Everything about this song is beautiful, lyrics teased from nostalgia it’s an easy listen yet it challenges you with so many thoughts. And to someone who has always considered themselves to be quite boring, it offered a different option, an escape. The hope of being who I wanted to be, rather than who I was being told that I should be. And even though it was a long time coming, I think that I got there in the end, partly because of this song:

    ‘Now I sit with different faces

    In rented rooms and foreign places

    All the people I was kissing

    Some are here and some are missing

    In the 1990s

    I never dreamt that I would get to be

    The creature that I always meant to be

    But I thought in spite of dreams

    You’d be sitting somewhere here with me’

    4 Older – George Michael.

    Another song that I didn’t discover until a little while after its release. Late 1990s following a long string of failed relationships and one failed marriage, I was still in that desperate rut where self-worth and believing in better had long since abandoned me. I’d been through traumatic break-ups in my later teen years before believing that I’d found ‘the one’ only to discover through a sense of abandonment and being taken for a ride, that she was ‘the one from hell’. When we separated in 1998, I was still ridiculously insecure, partly because of my upbringing but partly because I thought that I had found what I was looking for, what I needed and it was suddenly falling apart in front of me.

    I went through that torturous stage of self-denial, where I was convinced that she would realise how much she loved me once she was without me, but little was I to know that she was already and had been for some time, in the arms and the bed of another. Then I found this song, long after the utterly brilliant Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 that had captivated me in 1990. Not only did the words tell me that I deserved better, but they also helped me to believe it as well. And this song has come with me, all the way through the rest of my life. Not that I harbour any feelings at all towards the person in question, but…but this matters in the same way that I have said ‘no more’ to the perpetrators of my childhood unhappiness. Because something good has happened to me. Several somethings good. And I am a better person for it.

    Sometimes you can’t see the possibilities because of the darkness or the person that you are with. Sometimes you are so beaten, both physically and mentally, so broken that you don’t want to fight any more. And it’s easy for others to say that you can because they are just words. But when you are at rock bottom, and I think that I subconsciously took this approach, it can’t get any worse. It can get better, but it might be a long way off, so far off that what you are looking for doesn’t even exist yet because you don’t believe in it. Now, I sit and think about who I was then and who I am now.

    Interestingly, even the opening line reflects the person I thought I was back then. ‘I should have known, it seemed too easy’ reinforces the belief that I wasn’t worthy of being loved, that I deserved no better and the Universe was just hammering home that fact by snatching my happiness away from me. Except it wasn’t the Universe, it was the actions of two selfish people with no regard for how I felt or the impact that their actions would have on my life. It’s so easy to lessen that impact by believing that it’s just ‘the way things are’ or that it’s ‘just my lot’. Actions have consequences.

    Don’t you think I’m looking older? Yes, but also a little bit wiser.

    5 Walking on The Milky Way – OMD.

    This song taught me one important lesson, perhaps, given everything that had gone before, the most important lesson of all. It’s ok to look back and to enjoy nostalgia, for it to be a happy experience. So much of my life has been taken up by sadness, but I have the right to fight for the privilege to look back upon my days with a smile on my face and not have my memories dictated by those who hurt me or took what I should have had away from me. I should have had a ‘normal’ childhood and that was taken from me by the actions of others. I shouldn’t, at the age of 52, still wake up in the night feeling alone and afraid. I shouldn’t be fighting the battles that I continue to fight with my mental health. But I am. And actually, as long as I still have the choice to look back and find those few ‘sunshine days’ among the darkness then I know that I can still fight. As long as I know that I am making new memories and doing good things, then slowly, those moments are going to replace the bad stuff. I can remember who I am and where I’ve been precisely because I’ve come so far. Nothing can recreate my youth. But I can create my future while still remembering who I was.

    ‘As time goes by, reality

    Destroys your hope and dignity

    There’s nothing left but shadows on the wall

    But just remember who you are

    And where you’ve been you’ve come so far

    And never ever let them see you fall

    I don’t believe in miracles

    I don’t believe in truth

    I don’t believe that anything can recreate your youth’

    6 When You Tell Me That You Love Me – Diana Ross.

    Given everything that has gone before, this will probably seem like an unusual choice. Upon its release in 1991 (absolutely not the Westlife version), it completely passed me by if my memory serves me well. It missed the mark upon relationships well into the 2000s. Even when I heard it, I was never particularly enamoured of it. Until one moment, when my wife suggested that I listen to it not as a ‘traditional’ love song, but a song from a parent to a child. That simple suggestion changed this song totally for me. All of a sudden, it put all of my thoughts that I wanted to express about being a parent into words, someone else’s words admittedly, but words all the same. And as difficult as parenting gets, when my children tell me that they love me I do become a hero, capable of anything. I want to protect them from every single bad thing that has either ever happened or will ever happen, which of course is setting myself up for failure! But it ceases to be about whether or not you can actually achieve it because wanting to be that hero, wanting to be capable of anything is enough. Because all I ever wanted was someone who would want to do that for me.

    I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere about my father once telling me that I loved my children too much and that one day they would break my heart. Even now, that makes me sad for him more than anything, that he was incapable of seeing past that irrational fear or belief. I know we’ve all got our demons to face, but he deprived himself of so much as a parent. And that was never going to be my way. I will continue to love my children so fiercely because that’s what they deserve. If I’m making up for something I never had it’s because I don’t want to make the same mistakes. Being a parent is a privilege, a joy and an honour and not something that I take for granted. And it’s not been easy at all, far from it. It will continue to be a difficult journey to share, but I’ve never understood people who think that they are absolved of parental responsibility once their offspring reach eighteen years old. Which brings me to my next song…

    7 Soon You’ll Go – Howard Jones.

    I first heard this song at a gig in 2017 in Hove. It was a very small, intimate gig where Howard talked about his music and played songs that he had chosen or that fans had requested prior to the gig. When I heard this song, I sat in a room with probably around 200 or so people and I cried. I cried so much because this was my next challenge, this will be my next challenge in life. It is both heartbreakingly sad but filled with so much love and hope, it gave me hope that I can face those moments when my children move on to greater things without being afraid. It gave me hope that I can see the happiness that awaits them and share that with them to take away my own fears and feelings of loss. Because I’m not losing anything, if I think about it, our lives are just transitioning, moving along to the next stage and the stage after that. I won’t stop being a parent, if anything I’ll be needed more! For advice, for moral support, for those 3am phone calls when their worlds are falling apart and they just need someone to listen or to come and get them when they feel so far away and bring them home. Home will always be home to them. As it should. Dad should always be Dad to them. As I should. ‘Soon you’ll go. Soon you’ll soar into the sky. And I’ll be there to watch you fly. Spread your wings. It’s your turn to fly’.

    8 Prettiest Eyes – The Beautiful South.

    In my humble opinion, the greatest love song ever written. From the opening line to the final note, not a single word or moment is wasted and it feels as though it takes you on a complete journey through life. I adore this song because it completely sums up what love should be about and the first chorus really tugs at the heartstrings:

    ‘Now you’re older and I look at your face

    Every wrinkle is so easy to place

    And I only write them down just in case

    That you die

    Take a look at these crows feet (just look)

    Sitting on the prettiest eyes

    60 25th of Decembers

    59 4th of Julys

    Not through the age or the failure, children

    Not through the hate or despise

    Take a good look at these crows feet

    Sitting on the prettiest eyes’

    The song tells of an innocence in the first verse before inferring hardship in verse two. Verse three drops in one of those tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that we often just sweep away and move past but can mean so much and it all builds to the tender, beautiful fourth verse that tenderly recreates intimacy and completeness. The second chorus swaps out the ‘not through the age or the failure, children, not through the hate or despise’, substituting in the poignant and touching ‘You can’t have too many good times, children, you can’t have too many lines’.

    The final few lines see the subject imagining looking at his aged features, perhaps even bemoaning the onset of time a little, but any sadness is countered by the simple truth and ultimate compliment as they tell their paramour that ‘You’ll never hear the crack of a frown when you are here, you’ll never hear the crack of a frown’.

    For me, this is what I imagined love would be like when I was a child. As I got older, I realised that it’s not necessarily about the things that we did when we were younger, although we are obviously an amalgamation of those moments. It’s more about what happens when we cross those thresholds from young to middle-aged or middle-aged to older. When we’re not so afraid of not finding love and we’re more afraid of having had love and losing it. We’re afraid of how we’d recover from that when we’re weighed down by our baggage of broken hearts and faded dreams, when we’ve fallen and the person who would have picked us up is no longer there.

    Yes, love is about flowers and rings and moments. It’s about innocence and commitment and passion. It’s about choices and mistakes and compassion. And then one day, love is about holding them close, picking them up, showing them the light in the darkness. It’s about running your fingers through their grey hair and facing the unknown and loss. It’s about being afraid but trusting completely in your rock, your soft place to fall. This song tells you that in the most beautiful way.

    9 Tear up this Town – Keane.

    I love Keane. Sounds like a fairly obvious thing to say about a band that made a song on this list and to be fair, it could have been one of about ten songs that I put in here. Why this one? Well…

    There are times when I feel like an outsider. Even in a room full of friends, I can sometimes feel like a stranger. That’s ok, it’s who I am and says far more about me than anyone else, but I think it stems from not being sure where I fit in. I’m easily…I was going to say irritated, but I think it’s more disappointed. There are some moments in conversations where I might disagree with something that’s been said and because I’m ‘all or nothing’ I tend to have two responses. Disagree (all) or stay silent (nothing). I’m not very good at the bit in between. I’ve tried fitting in, I really have.

    Despite that, I recently came to a realisation as to why I feel like I don’t fit in. It’s because I don’t like the person that ‘fitting in’ makes me. I’ve spent so long fighting for what I believe in that I can’t relinquish that stubbornness, that defensive part of me that has kept me protected for so long. It’s my biggest fault but has also been my biggest strength when I’ve needed it. So I guess I’ll carry on not fitting in because it’s not who I am. I used to say that all I ever wanted was a quiet life, but I don’t think that you can be principled, true to your values and enjoy the life of Riley. Or maybe that’s just me.

    I find friendships and relationships really difficult and taking the lyrics of this song at their most simple meaning, there are times when ‘I need a friend but a friend is so hard to find’. Maybe that’s not true, they’re not hard to find but they’re harder to understand. It also comes back there being (to quote another Keane song) ‘Something wrong about the way I feel’. Just like there are times when I don’t feel deserving of love, I don’t feel worthy of friendship. I convince myself that people don’t actually want to spend time with me, that I’m difficult and argumentative and they’d generally just be better off if I was quietly tucked out of the way. Which often prompts the other two responses mentioned in this song:

    ‘Some days I rage like a fire in the wilderness

    Some days I only need the darkness and a place to rest’

    The tension builds in the song, swelling from the gentle beginning to initial burst of energy leading into the first chorus, finally rising to a glorious crescendo throughout the second tearing up of the town. Another song of hope with a little bit of the rising of the underdog thrown in. It features in the film ‘A Monster Calls’, which somewhat ridiculously, I have yet to see. I must rectify that.

    10 The Man in Black – Johnny Cash.

    Proof, if ever it were needed, that we are always learning and always discovering new things. Growing up in Ideford, Johnny Cash (and in particular the album ‘At San Quentin’) was a staple part of my musical diet and likely influential in an appreciation of country music. Aside from the obvious ‘A Boy Named Sue’ and the eponymous ‘San Quentin’, I found a lot of fun in the quirkier, amusing songs such as ‘Starkville City Jail’ and ‘The One on the Right is on the Left’, a stark contrast to some of Cash’s more heartfelt offerings.

    However, this particular song came to me just a few months ago (September 2025). I was driving up to Burton with Tris for an Argyle game and knowing that he also had a fondness for country music, I found a playlist on Spotify and hit play. When this song came on, I stopped my cheery (for once) warbling and listened carefully to the words. Cor, it didn’t half hit me. What a statement that seems even more poignant given the current political landscape, I can imagine it being denounced from the MAGA rooftops as ‘utter woke nonsense’. Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, give it a listen. My admiration for a man who had remotely serenaded me through the medium of vinyl and a rackety old record player skyrocketed. Sometimes, the songs of Johnny Cash can be a little too steeped in religion for me, not that I would begrudge anyone their beliefs, neither would I judge them on that basis. But that aside, often he would hit the nail on the head. While neither as vocally mellifluous as my other musical hero, Paul Heaton, nor perhaps as satirical in his musings, Cash was an absolute giant of his genre and turned his own pain into often underappreciated beauty. Would recommend to a friend, as the kids would say.

    So, there you have it. Some people might call that therapy! It’s very personal of course, but I suspect that those who know me have come to expect that by now. Music can mean so much to so many people and I honestly believe that it does change lives. These ten songs absolutely changed mine.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Alone Again (Naturally).

    Another image from my photography days, a solitary green leaf defying autumn. Relatable.

    To say that things were frosty at work after this latest discovery (see previous update, Road to Nowhere) was an understatement. Not only was I still public enemy number one given what had happened with Sarah, but I now had no idea where I stood with Amanda. I didn’t object to the fact that she didn’t want a ‘relationship’, but I certainly wasn’t keen on just being a backup for when her ‘ex’-boyfriend wasn’t around. As for walking past my home with him…careless or cruel? I was undecided.

    Eventually we talked and slowly repaired whatever it was that we had between us and while it was difficult it didn’t take long for the spark to reignite and we continued to spend time together while not officially being together, which was confusing to me given the strength and nature of our apparent feelings towards each other. It’s hard to understand what her motivation was and as I think about this for the first time in many years, I wonder if there were things going on that I was oblivious to. Certainly the ending to this particular saga would suggest so. Perhaps she just wanted to enjoy herself without getting tied down, she was a year or so younger than me and I clearly had what was bordering on an entire airport terminal full of baggage. Whatever the reason, it was, to quote Heinz Doofenshmirtz from the Phineas and Ferb episode ‘Brain Drain’, a strange set of circumstances.

    Heinz Doofenshmirtz in a strange set of circumstances…there’s a platypus controlling me…

    The other complication in my life at that time was partly of my own making and I would go on to learn a valuable lesson in playing my cards close to my chest, something that I’ve always struggled with. I’d sent some of my writing off to numerous publishers and while most had written back to politely decline my inexperienced scribblings, a couple had shown a little tentative interest, which caused me great excitement. I shared this news with a few friends and in the blink of an eye, the story snowballed out of control, becoming far more than it ever was. Sadly, I possessed neither the skills nor the maturity to orchestrate an exit so I ended up trapped in a ‘Mr Maddens-style situation’ in the first Nativity movie. It was excruciating and embarrassing and went on far longer than it should have, but at the same time, I was suddenly a little more ‘popular’ than I had ever been and as someone who had been starved of adulation of any sort, I was reluctant to let go of my newly found social standing.

    There were so many awkward conversations and the longer the whole farce went on, the more convinced I was that people must have been perilously close to working out what had happened. I felt like Hugh Grant, in that glorious scene from Notting Hill where he pretends to be from Horse and Hound magazine and finds himself having to conduct celebrity interviews with Hollywood’s great and good. Obviously my torment was on a much smaller scale, but it was equally cringe-inducing and even now the memory of it will shoot a thirty-plus-year old surge of embarrassment through my system!

    But once again, I digress.

    Despite Amanda’s reservations, we grew closer again and our physical relationship continued to develop. A few months later things reached the point of no return. Or so I thought.

    We’d always been respectful of the fact that I was living in someone else’s house, so when we were together at ‘home’, we would spend time in the dining room and not go upstairs to my room. Our relationship was by no means based entirely on physical attraction, I’d like to think that there was a genuine intellectual connection between us too. Our conversations were often varied and those exchanges were as important to me as any other part of our non-relationship. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that was a huge part of the attraction, the ability that we shared to connect in a way that was more than just physical. That meant a lot to someone who came out of Devonport High School with two ‘decent’ grade GCSEs, dropped out of college on the first day due to crippling insecurity and self-doubt and never went to university.

    Whether Anita and Adam would have objected to us seeking more privacy, I have no idea, but I felt it best not to test the waters. Instead, we would be left alone together in relative quiet and during the course of an evening things would often become…heated, shall we say?

    Me, camera in hand. And quite the statement…

    On the night in question, the lights were low and the curtains drawn and as I’m sure you can imagine, things progressed further than they had before. Without going into detail, I can honestly say that up to that point, it was the most incredible experience of my life. As we lay in each other’s arms, basking in the warm glow of mutual satisfaction, raining small kisses down upon each other, I felt more connected to anyone than I ever had. I felt understood and I felt loved. Completely.

    As the ecstasy subsided, Amanda looked into my eyes and said that she was ready to have a proper relationship. All of the cliches that you read about in books and see in the movies came true. I’m pretty sure that somewhere in Horsham fireworks went off and the stars shone in the sky purely for the two of us. Songbirds warbled and somewhere, Cupid sat back, satisfied with a job well done. Life, it seemed, was finally working out for me.

    At the risk of sounding like one of the comical reader’s letters printed in Viz, imagine my surprise when I found out the following day that she was indeed ready to have a relationship, but not with me. Instead, it transpired that there was someone who she was at college with who was the lucky guy.

    I’m not ashamed to admit that it broke me, a third betrayal, and while some might say it was deserved given the circumstances of our initial fling (and again, I concede that they may have a point), for some time I couldn’t see a way of coming back from it. All hope had been snuffed out and this felt like the cruellest betrayal of all. She’d given me hope, totally played me and then delivered the killing blow when I was at my most vulnerable. In less than twenty-four hours, it was all over.

    Alone again. Naturally.

  • Road To Nowhere

    This was an image that I shot back in my photography days, maybe in the mid-2000s.

    While a move to Southampton represented the chance of a fresh start for me, it was far from ideal. Mum had moved in with Brian, which I think gave Lydia and Hannah their own room to share, while I was sleeping on a tiny landing on a wafer-thin airbed. It wasn’t a particularly harmonious time and things were quite fraught. After a short time, I moved in with Brian’s mum, who had a spare room, but I felt increasingly lonely and cut off from everyone. I hadn’t managed to find a job and had no friends so at the first opportunity I agreed to return to Horsham to visit Lizz, who by this point had moved out of her parents’ house and they kindly agreed to let me stay there during my visit. What hadn’t helped matters in Southampton was the ridiculous argument with my mother prior to my visit to Horsham and I had very much left under a cloud (as detailed in the post ‘We Might As Well Be Strangers’).

    Originally, the plan had been for me to stay for a weekend but I was so relieved to be around friends again that I stayed for a couple of weeks. When the time finally came for me to return ‘home’ I called Mum to say that I would be back the following day. In my absence, however, it had been decided that I was no longer welcome at Brian’s mum’s house or indeed theirs. It was a complete shock to me and totally out of the blue. Essentially, I was now homeless and out of work with barely the clothes that I’d brought with me to Horsham and a handful of belongings. I wasn’t aware that I’d done anything serious to warrant my expulsion from the family unit and neither was an acceptable explanation forthcoming. I had no idea what to do. I suppose that it was probably a ‘gamble’ on their part to ‘teach me a lesson’ and to force me into finding work. Considering that I had no savings and one bag of belongings that I had brought with me, it stills feels like a cruel thing to do and probably should have sounded the death knell for my relationship with my mother there and then. I do wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been treated with unexpected kindness and generosity by two people who had no reason to get involved.

    Sometimes, in our lives, we meet people who we are meant to meet, those we are meant to know. Lizz’s parents, Anita and Adam, swept straight into action and offered me a permanent room in their house for which I remain eternally grateful. I went straight out to the local McDonalds, who were hiring and got a full-time job. It may not have been what I had ‘wanted’ to do, but I had to find something and quickly. Gradually, the shock of what had happened subsided and I began to put roots down again. I was surrounded by a good group of people at work and made friends relatively easily, something that I haven’t always managed to do. Most of my time at home was spent in my room or in the dining room as I began to write ‘properly’ for the first time in my life. I wasn’t particularly outgoing so would spend hours at a time filling exercise books with notes, poems, lyrics and potential novels, some of which began to attract some initial interest.

    Me with my sister, Ellie and her eldest son in Horsham – possibly around 1993-94.

    I also began to find out who I was. For the first time in my life, I developed some confidence and became flirty, no longer convinced that I was a dreadful person. I suspect the necessity of having to suddenly do everything myself was behind that change and within a few months of working at McDonalds I started a relationship, which was to be short-lived but this time the problems were of my own making. I suppose the only blessing, if it could ever be considered to be so, was that my relationship with Sarah was still in its infancy when the issues arose. We’d been flirting for some time, enthusiastically egged on by our colleagues, before finally taking things further and I’d already started to have doubts when I fell for somebody else. And I fell hard.

    Amanda was quiet with an unassuming air of confidence and we shared a similar sense of humour. She was short with blonde hair, had a small, snub nose and given my lack of knowledge of fashion, dressed in a way that might be described as hippy chick? She had a coy smile that she used well and a way of looking deep into my soul with her piercing eyes. In short, she was beautiful. We hit it off immediately and I did little to curb my newly flirtatious nature. She also lived around the corner from me, so we’d regularly ‘bump into each other’ if we were out and about.

    Perhaps the most important part of my attraction to her was that she seemed genuinely interested in who I was and the stories I had to tell. One night in December, I couldn’t tell you exactly how, we ended up sat in the local park, huddled together in the wee small hours, looking up at the stars and telling stories to each other. I suspect that we were both enjoying those moments when we were acutely aware that something was about to happen, revelling in the giddy thrill of it, prolonging the mystery and anticipation for as long as we could. In truth, I think that we may have both been doing this for some time, put off by the knowledge that it was forbidden given my relationship status.

    Amanda had been clear about the fact that she had an ex-boyfriend who would still visit her from Kent, where she had lived previously. She’d also said that she didn’t necessarily want to get into a relationship, which I did my best to respect given the strength of the feelings between us. With all of that said, we shared a kiss on that night in the park and sat in the cold for hours just learning about each other. So, while all of the above had been said, I was in too deep already.

    I finished things with Sarah, because it was the right thing to do. If I’d been a different person, it might have been easier to say nothing, I doubt that Amanda would have complained given her insistence that whatever it was that we were enjoying wasn’t going to be in any way permanent. Having been on the receiving end of dishonest and disloyal behaviour, however, I felt it was only fair to own up to what I had done and suffer whatever consequences it would provoke. Most people put two and two together to come up with what was essentially the correct answer and for a couple of weeks, we went through hell at work, with most people ignoring us both at best and at worst giving their opinion when frankly it wasn’t welcome but not entirely unexpected. Fortunately for Amanda, she only worked part time as she was a student at Collyer’s Sixth Form College, so she probably avoided the worst of it. I copped the lot though and was very grateful that a couple of people were a little more supportive and one of my best friends at the time, Iain Williams, did more than perhaps he realised at the time in keeping me sane. In fact, Iain was one of the few constants through some pretty challenging times and I remain grateful for everything that he did to this day.

    If I’d thought that the silent treatment and the sarcastic comments were bad, worse was to follow. I was sat at home writing one afternoon when I saw Amanda and her ex-boyfriend (I knew that he was visiting so I’d been keeping a low profile) walk past the window hand-in-hand and looking very much like a couple. I crumpled, instantly, hot tears stinging my eyes, my heart breaking once again. Some might say that I was getting my just desserts for my infidelity and they may have a point. It didn’t make it hurt any less.

    Once the tears and the initial pain subsided, I felt cold and empty. Somehow, I pulled the following words together, which even after all this time I rate as one of the best things I’ve written, which is unusual as I often find it difficult to remain objective when looking back:

    Celestial Spies.

    The mystical patterns that swim in my tears

    Reflect all my memories, reveal all my fears

    The stars watched every night, when we walked hand in hand

    Thought our secrets were safe, but our future was planned

    We were sculpted by destiny, twisted by fate

    We were shackled by time, though we outlived the wait

    It might never have been, but then hope took the chance

    Shook our lives with a dream and the briefest romance

    A part-time love that I couldn’t abide by

    It was under the stars that we let our love die

    Orion wondered if we’d pass the test

    While under Saturn’s waltz we laid our love to rest

    Wish upon a falling star and catch a lonely tear

    Think of me, the next full moon or the same time every year

    When Venus is crying because love lost its way

    Dry the tears from her eyes, tell her I couldn’t stay

    If someone should ask what the stars knew those nights

    Say they watched for a while and then turned out the lights

    And if anyone asks if I ever knew love

    I’ll say look to the skies as the answer’s above

    A part-time love that I couldn’t abide by

    It was under the stars that we let our love die

    Orion wondered if we’d pass the test

    While under Saturn’s waltz we laid our love to rest.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Lovestruck

    An image that I shot back in my photography days. Sums up what my world feels like most days.

    I suppose by this point in my life, love had been mostly accompanied by violence, blackmail and exploitation, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I had no idea what ‘love’ actually looked or felt like and my first, best guess in an adult relationship had been massively wide of the mark. I also had issues of my own making, a jealous streak (perhaps with good reason) that had a tendency to present often, accompanied by self-harm. You’d think that after all I had just been through in that first relationship that I’d have been more wary. But as I said, patterns repeated and perhaps I just attracted a certain type of person.

    Soon enough, I was in another relationship where I would endure similar treatment. On a sunny evening around mid-1992, while Graham Taylor’s England were stinking out Euro ’92, I was kicking a football around the local park on my own, which to me was a perfectly normal thing to do. I got chatting to a girl who seemed confident, the total opposite to me, and perhaps by a rare stroke of luck, I summoned up the courage to ask her on a date, an offer that she accepted. Buoyed by this rare show of bravery and feeling very pleased with myself, I nervously prepared for the said date a couple of days later. After an hour of waiting at the prearranged location in Horsham, I sullenly made my way home, convinced that I would now remain forever single and at the mercy of that inner voice that tells us how ugly, useless and pathetic we are. A few days later, back in the same park, the same girl approached me and apologised profusely, asking for a second date. I agreed and this time around it was a much more successful venture given that she actually turned up!

    As I said, Lizz was confident. Very confident. I mean, she’d have to be to have included an extra ‘z’ in the spelling of her name. She was tall and lean with long, dark hair that had a tendency to ‘frizz’ in the rain. She was attractive, stylish and popular. What I didn’t understand at the time was that confidence disguised a controlling and coercive personality. In the early stages of our relationship, I imagine that I fed off her assured nature, even gaining a little self-respect given that ‘someone like her’ should like ‘someone like me’. However, I was still incredibly insecure with that same jealous streak that had previously given me issues. I found it difficult to navigate when she flirted with other men, which again is probably unsurprising given my background (I’m trying to not always come back to that as I’m worried it makes it sound like it’s an excuse). There were a couple of occasions where Lizz disappeared for an evening and I had enough doubt in myself to fuel my concerns. As before, there were times when we were happy and I wasn’t the only one to display signs of possessiveness, although I was so focussed on being a ‘loyal and loving boyfriend’ that others finding me attractive kind of passed me by.

    I do have a very clear recollection of Lizz aggressively warning someone off me and in hindsight, I wish that I’d been strong enough to stop it – not because of the way that things ended up with her, but because the person in question hadn’t really done much to warrant the treatment she received. It’s only really with maturity that I can now look back on moments like these and accept that I have to bear some of the responsibility for the behaviour of others. Being desperate to be loved shouldn’t excuse me for ignoring what I would call my moral duty and if I have any regrets it is that I wasn’t able to stand up for what I believed in during those early relationships. I could have saved myself and maybe others an awful lot of heartache.

    Because of her confidence and outgoing nature, not to mention her ability to flirt with anything in trousers, Lizz was in demand. The area of Horsham that I lived in at the time was not an affluent area and there were people on our road who I didn’t get on with, one of whom would ultimately be the reason behind our breakup. At the time, I was still working in Athena in Swan Walk, which started as a part-time job ended up as a place that I just kind of got stuck in. During my time there I struck up a friendship with one of the girls who worked in the nearby newsagents and we’d regularly spend breaks just chatting. Lizz was aware of this and as far as I knew, she had no issue. However, the day before Valentine’s Day, everything changed. It was a Saturday evening and I was supposed to be seeing Lizz, but she never turned up. Of course, all of my usual fears surfaced and I was convinced that she was with someone else and in this case, I was right.

    It turns out that one of the guys on our road who I didn’t get on with had told Lizz that he’d seen me walking ‘hand-in-hand’ with my friend, Susie, from the newsagents. On the strength of this ‘evidence’, from someone who, if I said they had a reputation it would be very much an understatement, she decided that it would then be perfectly acceptable for her to spend the night with him rather than actually asking me if there was any truth in the rumours, which of course there wasn’t.

    She confessed to me the following day and I had to put up with knowing smirks and comments from the guy who I now despised rather than merely loathing. Lizz and I agreed to call it a day, but she would regularly turn up at my place (I guess when there was no-one else available for her) and spend the night with me, keeping me hanging on to the belief that there might be some sort of future for us.

    This went on for months and I even turned down a couple of potential relationships on the strength of those empty promises and she was quite happy to ‘put the time in’ with me if anyone appeared on my radar, doing just enough to convince me that a reconciliation may be on the cards without actually committing to anything. Blinded by love and paralysed by fear, I couldn’t see that she didn’t want me. She just didn’t want anyone else to have me either. The only small pleasure that I took from the situation was…Lizz liked to impress people. She was by no means stupid, but she wanted people to think that she was more clever than she actually was. At this point, I was still regularly writing and took it upon myself to introduce ‘new’ words into our conversations as often as possible. When she asked what those words meant, I may have accidentally given her incorrect explanations…it was a slow, low-level win, but I like to think that over the years, she probably made herself look a bit daft on more than one occasion.

    A short while after we had split, I was with a group of friends at the house of a mutual acquaintance and I got talking to a blonde girl named Tammy, who I think was a couple of years older than me with enviable biceps and a forthright manner. We got on well, under the distant yet watchful eye of my ex-girlfriend and spent a big chunk of the next 24 hours in each other’s company.

    The following evening, Tammy and I found ourselves alone in the house for several hours. We were probably low-level flirting, which somehow developed into full on wrestling as we playfully attempted to overpower each other and pin the designated ‘loser’ to the floor. It was a very physical, sometimes bordering on rough, exchange of intimacy which I had never experienced the likes of before. Arms were twisted, legs were purposefully grabbed and some bits were inadvertently manhandled and after about an hour of this (I was much, much fitter back then and far less feeble!), pausing only for the odd drinks break, I had managed to finally pin Tammy down on the floor, on her back with her hands above her head as I lay on top of her. Our faces, hot, red and sweaty were inches from each other and I was struck by the dawning realisation that I wanted to kiss her. I mean, like really, really wanted to. And, in hindsight, the signals could only have been clearer if she’d written ‘Go on then’ on her tight, white t-shirt that her breasts strained beneath or if perhaps there had been an animated crab, accompanied by ducks drumming on turtles while flamingos and a handful of frogs had encouraged me to ‘Kiss de girl’.

    Of course, she could actually have gone ahead and kissed me herself to make things far easier, but I suppose that didn’t really fit with the whole dominant/submissive thing that was playing out. So instead, somewhat disappointingly, with our clothed groins mashed together as a side effect of our wrestling, the moment passed. As the evening wound down and our bout reached its timid, non-sexual conclusion, I confessed that I had wanted to kiss her during our earlier skirmishes and she gave me one last signal that completely went over my head by saying that she might have let me. If that word ‘might’ had been ‘would’ I may have been brave enough to chance my arm. However, having already experienced her fighting skills and having been pinned on my back between her thighs (yes, I know, another ‘sign’), I was also well aware that any unwanted attention may well have led to a swift and painful kick in the knackers. Not forgetting, of course, that I was still beholden to my crippling fear of rejection.

    As everyone returned home from their respective nights out, we fell asleep together under a blanket with no shenanigans occurring. A couple of days later, after I had returned home for a few hours, she had disappeared and my ex-girlfriend seemed very pleased with herself as she copped off with someone old enough to be her father. Lizz would retain a hold over me for longer than I would have liked and I wish that I’d been strong enough to instigate a clean break. But, as the little-known Robbie Nevil sang in 1986 and then B*Witched irritated the shit out of me in 1998 with a completely different song of the same name, C’est la vie.

    No…just no. B*Witched’s C’est La Vie…

  • Bell Bottomed Tear

    Looking pensive in my mid-twenties (ish). A little older, a little wiser and a little fatter than I was during the time that covers the next few updates.

    I’m not even sure where to start with this part of my story. How does the quote go? ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?’

    Well, that depends on the circumstances around the loss, I think. Because frankly, some of the losses I’ve suffered I could have happily done without!

    Given the nature of my upbringing, relationships were always going to be difficult to navigate. The mental and physical abuse that we went through as children scarred us deeply and as I’ve mentioned earlier, some of us also experienced sexual abuse, which has also impacted those relationships. I don’t intentionally make light of it, but…look, when you find out about sex in the way that I did, it will have leave scars. It hit hard and it never really left me. It was always there and I’m sure that I’ve blocked much of it from my memory. It was traumatic because as a child in a situation where love was not always present, it became very easy to become confused about what love actually was or how it was shown. When you aren’t learning about physical love via the pages of a book or a carefully worded if slightly awkward parental explanation, it can be difficult to understand how people express love and indeed what love looks like to others. Perhaps more importantly, what the other stuff looks like to others too. In that situation it’s easy to confuse sex and love and to be able to differentiate between what is just sex and what is an intimate act between two lovers.

    Attending an all-boys school meant that relationships in my early teen years were hard to carve out. Poorly constructed teenage fantasies were bandied around the classrooms as fact, supplemented with florid descriptions that had been gleaned from whatever magazines were doing the rounds between friends and not-so-friends. I wasn’t necessarily in a hurry to experience sex as a teenager, given what I had been through in my early years, but even in my writing, those experiences bled through, sometimes graphically and at other times in a more subtle manner.

    By the time the loss of my virginity arrived, or at least the version that I could comfortably accept as so, I was 14 and still very much the shy and retiring type. What little there is to tell would hardly fall under the genre of erotic fiction and I’d love to be able to dress it up as a wonderfully romantic experience or even an overt display of magnificent sexual prowess, but I’ve been honest up to this point and plan to continue in the same manner. I’ll spare you the detailed, if brief, review but it was an underwhelming experience (as I’m sure it was for Anne-Marie, the girl in question who I had known for about two hours before we commenced ‘nocturnal activities’ on a dark, September evening with Home Park just a few yards away). I hope you’ll forgive me for not managing to avoid the ‘he shoots, he scores’ pun!

    Home Park, Plymouth, where I first scored in the late eighties. And I’m not talking about football…

    After a second less-than enthusiastic encounter with the same girl, I think we both decided that brief, awkward fumbles in public places weren’t for us and we went our separate ways. I’m not entirely sure how I felt after the first time, likely a sense of relief that I had an experience that didn’t have to be hidden from everyone and something that could at least pass as a positive step on the road to ‘growing up’.

    After moving to Horsham in 1990, I had a couple of brief flings, neither of which amounted to anything serious and neither furnished me with the love that I was seeking. I was very much a romantic at heart, convinced that there was the right person ‘out there’ for me and that once I met them my problems would magically disappear and together with the love of my life, we’d live happily ever after.

    All of which takes me to a few months before I turned 18, to May,1991. Paul Gascoigne borked his knee in the FA Cup final, Roxette’s Joyride topped the charts and Helen Sharman became the first British astronaut in space. In slightly more localised news, I met a girl called Suzanne, who I would have my first serious relationship with.

    Partly due to my naivety and insecurity, I found certain patterns from my earlier years repeating themselves. That makes it all sound rather dreadful, which it wasn’t, but I didn’t really know who I was, so trying to work other people out was suddenly a whole lot harder.

    We’d been together maybe for a couple of months, enjoying the proverbial but not legally binding ‘honeymoon period’ when she first told me that she was attracted to someone else. Had I possessed a higher opinion of myself, I would likely have wished her luck in her new relationship and stepped away, but I was in love and having found that love, I didn’t want to relinquish it. Indeed, I was so desperate to be loved that I was prepared to accept being loved in such a manner, that it was ok for my girlfriend to find other people attractive and subsequently attempt to act on it. I remember being advised by her mother (who was a very domineering figure within her own family and had by all accounts played by the same rules) that I should allow her to play the field and ‘wait for her’, possibly the daftest fucking advice I’ve ever received, yet in my resigned state, a viewpoint that I instantly subscribed to if it meant that I could still be loved in some way.

    Some handsome devil at a party in the early nineties.

    During these tormented days, I would often be found working in the card shop, Athena, in Horsham, unwittingly mirroring my mother’s morose existence by (autism alert) playing numerous tearjerkers on the store CD player, much to the frustration of my colleagues I suspect. I would spend far too much time worrying about what Suzanne was getting up to and not enough time working and in all honesty, I must have been a right dour pain in the arse. My managers, Sue (who was supportive but professional) and Kellie (who was utterly lovely and indeed a lot lovelier than I realised at the time) tried to help me see reason and guide me in the right direction, but unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, I was resolutely stubborn. I wasn’t ready to give up on the love that I thought was mine. If only I’d had the foresight of the saxophone-wielding and raven-haired Curtis Stigers, whose song on his imaginatively titled album ‘Curtis Stigers’, told of a similar situation that led to his similar assumption and subsequent understanding as he crooned among the posters and the t-shirts with ‘I Guess it wasn’t Mine’.

    After a couple of weeks of torture, she decided that her new target was either out of her league, not worth the hassle or not as subservient as I was. She returned to me and as ridiculous as it sounds, I was grateful. This would happen four times over the course of our relationship before we finally parted and each time I was expected to ‘wait for her’ until she had decided whether or not it was me that she actually loved.

    As for her mother, she had issues of her own to deal with. One particular night, after Suzanne’s father had given us and my mother a lift home in the rain following a game of stoolball, saving us a 45-minute walk, her mum phoned us at home and shouted all manner of abuse at my mother for having ‘sat in her seat in the car’. I had a certain amount of sympathy for her long-suffering husband, who seemed a decent guy but carried with him that same, downtrodden air that I began to recognise in myself.

    Like most relationships, it wasn’t all bad and there were times when I think that we were genuinely happy. There were also times when we were challenged by issues other than her possible infidelity, moments that inevitably left their mark on us. But as with so much of my life, I never really felt secure and was always waiting for the next problem to arise. Despite the advice of friends, who could clearly see what I was going through, I stayed longer than I should have which I know I can attribute to my low self-esteem. Some habits are really hard to break…

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Sundial in the Shade

    Birdsong heralded the start of a new day, gently ushering in the chilly, grey morning with a subtlety that was appreciated by all in the house. Gradually, eyelids fluttered open, fingers and toes stretched and alarm bells of the non-panic-filled variety coaxed the more resolute sleepers from their beds. The stillness of the night slowly receded into the furthest corners of the house, where it would watch and wait amid the daily hullabaloo.

    The woman flitted about from room to room, silently chivvying the sleepiest heads into action by means of a well-timed flick of the light switch or the opening and closing of a door. As everyone rose, so did the tension in the small, terraced house. Kitchen smells and sounds, the burning of toast and the scrambling of eggs ricocheted around the walls and up the stairs, hastening the brushing of teeth and the painful detangling of ‘bed hair’. Like a carefully crafted scene from a play or a movie, the hustle and bustle built to a crescendo before peaking and falling away as one by one, everyone went on their way.

    Somewhere, a clock ticked, marking time. The woman sighed with relief and mentally gave herself a pat on the back. Another morning successfully navigated and that certainly wasn’t easy in this house. Of course, it had helped that he hadn’t been home. God only knew where he’d ended up the night before, probably in the bed of some local trollop sleeping off the mother of all hangovers. Again. Leaving them to fend for themselves. Just like his father had. A memory stirred, incomplete. Something missing, something that she couldn’t quite remember.

    She checked herself. Perhaps not quite like his father had, but she could see it coming. She could see history repeating itself. Time going round and round in circles, oblivious to the destruction in its wake, the reiteration of mistakes and life-changing decisions as if to make a point that nobody could ever quite understand.

    She was a simple woman, in both appearance and outlook. Pragmatic and certainly not a believer of fairy tales. She’d lived enough to know that happily ever after was a childish concept devoid of any understanding of reality. Her shoulder-length hair hung loose but was well-maintained, her dress clung to her slim, athletic figure devoid of creases or stains. Simple but ordinary and she was happy to be so. She accepted that there were many things that women were not meant to understand and the ignorant, heartless behaviour of some men was one of them. Once upon a time, she had placed all of her faith in God but had long since seen the light.

    The morning passed slowly, the ticking of the kitchen clock a constant companion to the otherwise silent atmosphere that accompanied the woman moving from room to room, carrying out her daily routine. Still she couldn’t shrug the feeling that she was forgetting something, that something was missing. Around mid-morning she turned on the old wireless set in the lounge but received nothing but a short, raucous burst of static for her troubles, a poor substitute for Elvis Presley or Patsy Cline. To quell her disappointment and in an attempt to bring a little life to the otherwise hushed aura of the house, she began to hum a tune to herself.

    The sound of a key in the lock fifteen minutes later came as an unwelcome intrusion into her day, more so when he barged through the front door reeking of stale alcohol and cheap perfume. He loomed over her, perfectly framed in the doorway, a silhouette against the slate-coloured sky outside. A memory surfaced of primal fear, of vicious whispers and hands closing around her throat. Feeling the panic rising within her, she swiftly brushed past him and padded quietly up the stairs, hoping that he would just carry on doing whatever it was that he had in mind now that he had returned home.

    The remainder of the afternoon passed without incident, until the children came home from school, the four of them bundling through the front door as one, an amalgamation of arms, legs, jumpers and bags. At the sight of their father sprawled asleep on the sofa, they fell silent, terror writ large upon their faces as they quietly scurried away, three up the stairs and the eldest, a girl of thirteen with short, blonde hair disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. She reappeared a few minutes later, carrying a cup of tea and a pile of Rich Tea biscuits balanced on small plate as a pre-emptive gift of appeasement in the event of any such necessity occurring in the coming hours.

    Back upstairs the woman spent time with the children, watching them with a calm air of sympathy and understanding as they drew and scribbled and played with dolls and occasionally teased each other in a good-natured manner so as not to catch the attention of their father, who remained snoring steadfastly in the lounge. Relative calm reigned until dinner, when the children were summoned downstairs with a solitary holler, hunger causing a rumble in their tummies and a nervous gaggle of excitement as they swept into the kitchen, only to be silenced by a reproachful glare from their father.

    The woman made as if to follow them but paused as she reached the top of the stairs, her senses piqued by the ticking of the old, incongruous grandfather clock on the landing. She watched the pendulum swing back and forth almost hypnotically as the melodic chimes signified the arrival of seven o’clock. Again, that feeling of unease, the nagging doubt at the back of her mind. The clock felt important, time felt important. Then the shouting began.

    It was hard to tell what started it all off. It often was. Sometimes it was the smallest of things and sometimes it was as though trouble was just waiting to happen, the catalyst was irrelevant. In this instance, the green beans were just slightly overcooked and the gravy hadn’t been stirred quite enough. As the woman made it to the bottom of the stairs, she heard the husband shouting, the atmosphere thick with a tension that was palpable. Two of the children were already crying, the youngest two, while the eldest was offering to remake the gravy in a bid to keep the peace. The woman watched in silence, feeling something amiss. Something that she’d been feeling all day but hadn’t been able to put her finger on. Then she saw another woman sitting at the table, cowering in fear, a bruise rapidly developing across her left cheek. And then she remembered. Terrible flashes of the past crashing across her senses, the same fear that she saw in front of her now spreading its icy tendrils through her veins. A rage unfettered visible in eyes that bored through to her very soul. Hot breath on her cheek as hands closed around her neck, pressure increasing on her windpipe and a terrible, final darkness creeping in at the edges of her vision as she fought for breath, feet flailing wildly and hands clawing at her assailant.

    The husband picked the gravy jug up and threw it at the wall. It shattered instantly, showering the table with shards of porcelain and globules of thick, brown liquid. Children scattered as the table was upended, plates of mashed potato and pork chops sliding from the tablecloth to the floor, gravy pooling on the carpet like dark, viscous blood. The man was standing over his wife, who was cowering against the wall, feet slipping from beneath her in blind panic as she begged for mercy over the wailing and the sobbing of their children.

    ’STOP IT!’ The woman screamed from the other side of the room, picking a glass up from the coffee table and hurling it at the man, missing him by inches before it too smashed against the wall. ’STOP IT, STOP IT, STOP IT!’

    Surprisingly, everything stopped. Everyone turned in silence to look at the woman. No, through the woman. They stared at the space that she occupied and the woman realised, with a crushing disappointment that they couldn’t see her. Collectively, their eyes widened in disbelief as she slid a pile of newspapers, magazines and envelopes from the coffee table to the floor. And she finally understood.

    Every night she would disappear, her memories slipping through her fingers before she returned to the house in the morning, oblivious to how she had lost her life. Until now. Because this was the house where she had died, murdered by the father of the man who now stood before her, bestowing the same pain that she had suffered upon his own family, repeating the actions and mistakes of his father. She was here to stop him. To stop history repeating itself.

    On the far wall of the kitchen hung an ornamental, wooden crucifix holding a silver figure of Christ upon the cross. The woman moved across to it and used all of her concentration to slowly turn it upside down. The children gasped and tried to hide behind the tipped over table, scrabbling among the mess beneath their hands and knees. The rage built inside the woman as she remembered her dying moments, how her husband had squeezed the very last breath out of her in front of his son, her stepson. She focussed, channelled her energy and used her mind to throw the crucifix across the room, hitting the husband square in the face, cutting him just above the right eyebrow. As blood ran from the wound, mixing with the sweat from his exertions, she summoned one final effort to unleash a scream so full of fury that it split the veil between life and death, a deathly cold blast of vengeance and defiance bellowed into his face.

    ‘LEAVE THEM ALONE!’

    The man whimpered, losing control of his bodily functions before hurtling across the room, throwing the front door open and fleeing, leaving the traces of his personal misdemeanours hanging in the air. Silence slowly fell, like fresh snow on a winter day. The sudden quiet, a total contrast from the recent pandemonium, brought with it something else. Relief. And hope.

    The children scrambled to their mother, who held them tight as she sobbed, completely bewildered by the unseen intervention. The pile of newspapers on the floor ruffled and separated as a yellowed, aged-looking front page blew towards the devastated family. The mother reached down and picked the paper up, reading through tear-filled eyes.

    The lead headline told of the murder of Mary Hepburn by her husband, Thomas. He had strangled her in their bedroom at seven o’clock on the evening of April 30th, 1958, the sounds of the struggle drowned out by the chimes of the old grandfather clock and the music from the radio.

    The mother caught her eldest daughter trying to read the article and still had enough of her wits about her to know that it was not a story that should be told this day, folding the paper and tucking it away beneath her. She had read enough to understand and silently offered up a prayer of thanks that caught Mary’s attention as the world around her began to dissolve and disappear from view. It was time to move on. Mary had never believed in happily ever after, but she was happy for her final thought to consider that this was the next best thing.

    The husband never returned. But neither did the ghost of Mary Hepburn.

    There’s a footnote to this particular story, one that I’ve agonised over sharing and have ultimately come to the conclusion that it’s worth including. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to make sense of my childhood and the behaviour of my parents, in particular my father.

    For context, my Dad loved a story. I think that he was ashamed of his roots and following his passing in 2015, I decided to dig into our collective past. He had often alluded to a dark secret concerning his father and on the rare occasions when he talked of his childhood, he spoke more of his mother and grandfather. His grandfather, I believe, was a stern and cruel man and I heard from other people that he had broken both of my father’s legs when he was a child. I didn’t press them for more details, I’m not sure that my brain can cope with that level of cruelty. My father certainly didn’t enjoy a happy childhood (relatable) and would often tell us stories about his past that were fabricated. I think that he wanted to feel important and he wanted us to be proud of him. I don’t believe that he would ever have experienced that before and at times he craved approval. He would often tell us that he had trials for Huddersfield Town or talk about games of cricket where he had scored hundreds but the details were spartan and inconsistent. However, they were also inoffensive, so I never felt the need to challenge him regarding the validity of those tales and I figured that if it gave him a little confidence boost then who was I to take that away from him. I mean, we all tell stories every day, they are an integral part of our social interactions and the basis for many friendships and relationships.

    So, as mentioned previously, he often hinted at something in his past but he never gave details. And, it turned out, that was for good reason.

    My paternal grandfather was Thomas Hepburn, who murdered his second wife, Mary Hepburn (my father’s stepmother), in a B&B in Sunderland in May 1958. Newspaper reports at the time mention them spending time with Thomas’s children in the days before the incident. Mary was just 35 years old and was a registered nurse. So perhaps it was no coincidence that my father went into nursing when he left the RAF. On April 30th, it seems that Thomas Hepburn senior discharged himself from a mental hospital at Morpeth and booked himself and Mary into a lodging house. The next morning, the landlady found Mary lying on the floor of the bedroom with a pillow over her face. Upon his arrest, he told the police:

    ‘I did it. She was good to me, very good to me. She was kind to me. There was not any reason. She loved me very much. I felt funny, very peculiar. I remember her being on the floor. I remember her face going blue…she was the finest woman that ever lived.’

    Thomas was found guilty and spent the remainder of his life in an asylum before he passed away in the late 1970s.

    So when I try to make sense of my childhood and the things that my father did, I have to consider that not only did he grow up with a violent grandfather in a broken home, but he also had to come to terms with the knowledge of what his father had done. Of course, the flip side is that I grew up with similar challenges, exposed to violent behaviour and didn’t follow suit, but I think we live in a more enlightened world these days. Again, I have no wish to excuse the things that my father did but I think that he tried to change as he got older, certainly to the best of his ability and I expect that for all of his bravado, he carried a lot of emotional baggage around with him. Shortly before he died, we spoke a little about what we had been through together, which was very helpful for us both and enabled me to speak honestly at his funeral.

    Dad with my eldest sister, Carole, at her first wedding.

    The last time I saw my Dad is a memory that will live with me forever. I had already driven down to see him once that week and he was in quite a bad way- to be honest I thought I was seeing him for the last time. So, imagine my surprise when I received a call from him a few days later asking me to go and see him! I jumped in the car again and drove for another 6 hours and it turned out that he didn’t remember that I had been to see him just three days earlier. As I walked into the hospice to see him looking frail and old, a shadow of the man I remembered, he looked up at me and gave me such a smile, that I would have happily driven for 600 hours just to see that reaction! We spent the afternoon with me wheeling him around the garden talking about cricket, his beloved Sunderland, family and days gone by. When I had to leave I think we both knew that we were saying goodbye for the last time, so I told him, from the heart that I had no regrets and that I was proud of him. I told him that I loved him and he told me that he loved me too. And that was enough.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • We Might As Well Be Strangers

    Some ‘handsome’ devil modelling the ‘just woken up’ pose. Note the poster in the background complete with ‘inspirational, religious quotation’ and the commemorative Charles and Diana wedding mug on the arm of the chair. Neither provoke any level of fondness in my memories or would have any place in my adult life.

    Around 1992, while England were failing miserably at the Euros under Graham Taylor, Mother made the decision for all of us to move away from Horsham and relocate to move in with a man that she had been seeing for a while, Brian, who was a dead ringer for the guy from the ‘Courts’ advert that was doing the rounds at the time (the song went something along the lines of ‘then I sincerely hope to see you all in Courts’, which, given the area of Southampton in which he lived, took irony to a whole new level).

    This led to a tremendous amount of upheaval and involved Mother and my two half-sisters, Lydia and Hannah, moving into Brian’s small, terraced house and me somehow moving in with Brian’s Mum. It was far from ideal and I was really unhappy about moving away from Horsham and having to live with a complete stranger. I was also out of work at the time as unemployment continued to rise under John Major’s Tories and I was struggling to adapt to the changes in my life having navigated two relationships since I’d arrived in Sussex, neither of which were particularly happy, but I’ll reflect on those events a little further down the line. The Queen would refer to 1992 as an Annus Horriblis and I would have found it hard to disagree with her sentiments, albeit for reasons other than the Windsor Castle fire and the various scandals within the Royal Family (such as the Andrew formerly known as Prince discovering that at the age of 32, Sarah Ferguson was ‘too old for him’).

    Anyway, Royal ignominy aside, one evening in Southampton, we had a big bust up at Brian’s house, I think because I hadn’t managed to put the lid on a squash bottle properly (which we all know should be classified as a major crime) and then found it funny when Hannah shook the bottle, coating the kitchen and herself in orange flavoured cordial.
     
    I travelled back to Horsham the following day to visit an ex-girlfriend for a few days and arguably stayed a week or two longer at her parents’ house than anyone had expected. Eventually, after essentially running out of money, I phoned Mother to tell her that I would be coming back home. Only to be told that I couldn’t, there was no room for me anymore. Just like that (no Tommy Cooper impersonation intended). I was basically homeless. For once, I sprang into action, driven by a mixture of fury and frustration. I applied for and was given a job at McDonalds and discussed living arrangements with Anita and Adam (parents of my ex), who took me under their wing despite the fact that their daughter and I were no longer dating. In fact, I’m pretty sure that she wasn’t even living with them any more. I am eternally grateful for the kindness that they showed me during the time I was with them and I really regret not staying in touch after moving out. In hindsight, this should probably have been the moment where I turned my back on Mother. To throw me out for no apparent reason knowing full well that I had no alternative option should have been unforgiveable.

    Mother and her third husband, Brian.

    By the time I married Louise in 1995, my relationship with Mother had recovered somewhat, largely due to the loss of Carole (more to come on that as well, apologies for any chronological confusion). When I left Berkshire in 1998, following the breakdown of my first marriage, I spent some time sleeping on an airbed on Mother and Brian’s landing until I could afford a flat of my own and following that we had what I would describe as an ‘arm’s length’ relationship. After Charley’s birth in January 2000 and my marriage to Sally around eighteen months later, Mother seemed to become more distant and began to make some decisions that I found difficult to understand. I can only assume that Brian didn’t like me and of course, he’s perfectly entitled to his own opinion. I always found him to be surprisingly arrogant with a vacuous personality and the sincerity and charisma of a boiled potato. He was one of those people who was always going to do great things…but next year. Or the year after that and of course, nothing ever came of those ‘great things’. I’d also had discussions with Lydia and Hannah about him over the years and I suspect that one or both of them had used the details of those conversations in order to win his favour. That sort of behaviour has always been prevalent in my family and probably goes some way towards explaining the fragility of some of our relationships over the years.
     
    I was back in Sussex by now and we were living as a blended family trying to adjust to our new responsibilities. Maybe that’s what Mum struggled to understand, that Rosie (Charley’s Mum) and I were capable of having a friendship despite having separated. I think she resented the fact that we were trying to make things work and prioritising the welfare of our daughter, maybe she took it as a personal insult, highlighting what she had been unable or unwilling to do. It was almost as though she was only happy if my life was in the doldrums and I was suffering. I wonder if she thought that pain and misery was our lot in life as a family and that anyone who tried to break free from that was ‘too big for their boots’ and thought that they were ‘better than they were’?

    Burgess Hill, where we settled, is a short trip away from Horsham, where my niece (Alison’s daughter), Kelly, was now living. Brian would happily drive to Horsham for Mum to visit Kelly but they wouldn’t come and see us. I think they managed one visit when Charley would have been maybe four or five. For Tristan’s seventh birthday party, I finished shooting a wedding at 10pm on the Saturday night, drove straight to Southampton to pick Mum up and drove home again. Then, following the party on the Sunday, I drove her back to Southampton before turning around and completing the return journey once more. Similarly, she would visit Ellie and her children in Plymouth but not us.
     
    There was one summer when Tristan was selected in the Sussex disability cricket squad and they had a match just five minutes from their home in Southampton. He would have been maybe 10 or 11 by this point and hadn’t seen Mum since his 7th birthday. When I called her to tell her that we were close enough for her to come and see him play, she said that she couldn’t because she was taking Hannah’s daughter swimming, something that she did regularly.

    Tris in action for Sussex against Hampshire.

    Things were strained after this, but we persevered because I wanted my children to have a relationship with their grandparents and it was unlikely to be forthcoming from my Dad’s side of things. Mother would send them money in a card for their birthdays, totally missing the point. We didn’t want her money, we wanted her time, but it seemed that by now, her main area of focus were Lydia and Hannah, her family that were essentially in her lap in Southampton and that she could conduct a relationship with using minimal effort. The final nail in the coffin occurred when Lydia got married and we offered to shoot the wedding free of charge (I was working as a wedding photographer at the time), which we did and thought that the day had been something of a success.

    However, after the wedding, their attitude changed when we sent them the disc of photographs taken. Firstly, the initial disc that we sent got lost in the post (and there was a story in the press a little later about a Burgess Hill postman being arrested for stealing letters and packages) but Mother accused me of lying about having sent the original disc. Then, after sending a replacement disc, we asked them to use the images for personal use only and to ask other guests to purchase reasonably priced prints from my website. We were told that wouldn’t be happening. We had also indicated that we would be putting an album together for them as part of the gifted package but told them that we would have to process other ‘paid weddings’ before we got to their book. However, after the initial problems mentioned above, they began to complain about not getting their book.
     
    I think this was where I reached the point of no return. After years of feeling pushed aside and insignificant, it was a bridge too far. There had been too many disappointments (Mother had missed Tristan’s naming day due to ‘illness’) and it was becoming painfully obvious where her priorities lay. I made the decision to say enough is enough and we haven’t spoken since that day. Do I miss her? No, I don’t think that I do. I miss my idea of what I think a mother should be, but I’m not sure that she was ever capable of being that. Coupled with the fact that I think every time she looked at me she saw my Dad, it was a no-win situation for me, I was never going to be anything other than my father’s son to her. I don’t think that we will ever see each other again and I’m ok with that. She was absent through large parts of my life and has long since made it clear what she wants in her twilight years and she pretty much has that on her doorstep.

    I don’t know your thoughts these days. We’re strangers in an empty space. I don’t understand your heart. It’s easier to be apart. We might as well be strangers in another town. We might as well be living in another town – We Might As Well Be Strangers by Keane. Songwriters – Richard David Hughes, Timothy James Rice-Oxley, Tom Chaplin.

    One of the things that I was often bemused by, was the way that both of my parents reacted when they felt ‘wronged’ by their children. It was a little too close to ‘victim mentality’ for my liking, attempting to claim the moral high ground while conveniently forgetting their own mistakes or lies they had told over the years. Everyone lies. Big lies, small lies, insignificant lies and huge, damning lies. To suddenly act like some sort of moral arbiter where only your opinion and feelings matter just reeks of hypocrisy. I think that they both conveniently forgot what we lived through at times and again, it comes back to that total and utter refusal to acknowledge that the consequences of their actions were very real and the devastation that they wrought upon us was being lived through, somewhat unsuccessfully, by young people who had been permanently damaged. Those facts alone made their indignation feel cheap and hollow, but they wouldn’t have seen that from their ivory towers of reclaimed purity and truth, their self-righteous absolution freeing them from the sins of their past. People in glass houses and all that…

    A photograph with both of my parents from our wedding in 2001. It looks for all the world like a perfectly normal, happy picture. Proof, if it were needed, that Bucks Fizz were incorrect in their assertion that the ‘camera never lies’ back in 1982.

    Occasionally, I’m struck by a random emotion or two and I feel a little…disgruntled perhaps, that in many of her relationships Mother was able to forgive indiscretions and mistakes but ultimately I was beyond any sort of redemption and while I was no angel, I’m not sure that I was any worse than others that she bestowed her forgiveness upon. Of course, nowadays I wouldn’t want that forgiveness. I pity the fact that she still seems unable to separate the man I became from the man that she thought I was. I wonder if she was always waiting for me to turn into my Dad. I’m afraid that the failing of our relationship is the thorn in her side of her own making, but I don’t think she sees it that way. That’s her choice and I long ago learned that there are some people whose paths we cannot walk for them. I’m not the only one who has been cast out and I suppose that gives me a little consolation but mostly I feel sad for those of us who have been on the receiving end of her disappointment and general insouciance.
     
    There were moments when we were shared some happiness and I’m sure that there were times when she felt that I let her down…and maybe sometimes I did. But I’m not entirely convinced that she ever truly let me in. And that’s not my cross to bear – I have enough of my own baggage weighing me down I’m afraid.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Mother’s Ruin

    Edited in Prisma app with Mountain

     
    My relationship with my mother has always been a complicated one. Fundamentally, I think that she is unable to see past me as a ‘male Hepburn’ and as such I am a constant reminder of my father and everything that he did to her. Unfair, maybe? But as I said before, to me in some ways that’s understandable. As I grew older that became more of an issue and for that and numerous other reasons it has now been many years since we had any contact. I have long since grieved for her and I’m afraid that now I occasionally miss the idea of what I feel a mother should have been rather than the mother I actually knew.
     
    That might sound harsh, so I’ll try to add a little flesh to those bones. It wasn’t always like that. I think that I inherited my creative side from my Mum, which means a lot to me. During my childhood, we had some happy times when I visited her in Horsham, endless afternoons playing cricket in a nearby park or evenings enjoying stoolball matches that she played in while I scored for the team. We had a shared love of sport and one summer, her stoolball team, Roffey, were playing in a tournament down in Rustington and the organisers were a team short, so they cobbled together a team of kids who had attended with their parents. I could only have been about nine or ten and at some point in the afternoon, I found myself bowling at a fully-grown woman with years of sporting experience behind her.
     
    To the uninitiated, stoolball is similar to cricket but the wickets are higher, the bats smaller and more rounded and the ball perhaps a little softer, but not by that much. The bowler underarm bowls the ball to attempt to hit a square ‘top’ of the wicket at around shoulder height of the batter and the batter attempts to hit the ball and run/score boundaries. Batters can be bowled, caught or run out (keeping it to the very basic rules here) and after both teams have batted, the team with the most runs is the winner. It’s a great game and I spent many a happy evening at Roffey CC, which is a beautiful ground in Sussex, watching Mum and her teammates play. Anyway, back to this particular Sunday, there I was in my t-shirt and shorts, slowly walking up to the no-ball line, bowling at this woman who towered over me. I bowled the ball and she swung, mightily, connecting with the ball with a resounding thwack. The ball flashed back towards me and I stuck out my right hand, more as a reaction than anything else and the ground fell silent as the ball nestled in my palm. I shrugged as if it was the sort of thing that happened to me every day before the stunned batter walked off towards the boundary.
     
    I genuinely adored those days around the stoolball team. I was painfully shy, especially around girls and women and suspect that during the early years I barely said a word, but as I grew older and moved through my early teens I began to feel more settled around everyone. I navigated a couple of crushes on older women as best as a young, insecure and socially awkward boy could do and there were a couple of occasions where things may have developed if I had possessed a) better timing and b) an understanding of subtlety and feminine wiles.

    Roffey Stoolball Club around the very late eighties or early nineties.

    There was a woman who played for the club for around half a season, who I got on tremendously well with. I’m not going to mention her name, I don’t think that’s particularly fair on her, but it began with a K. She was really keen and I would regularly turn up before matches or stay late to help her practice after training. She must have been in her early twenties, while I, by now, would have probably turned 16 – at least I hope so or this story becomes decidedly dodgy! I also seem to remember that she had either recently married or was due to take the plunge, probably the former. So, over the course of this particular summer, we spent a reasonable amount of time with each other. Even back then, my ‘coaching’ style was more based around positive reinforcement and encouragement and we started to see her skills developing. There was an away game on the horizon that I think, for some reason, my mum wasn’t able to play in but I still went along to score and got a lift from the aforementioned K. We were very comfortable in each other’s company and if my memory serves me right, there was probably a little flirting going on, even though I usually need numerous signposts and occasionally a map to know when such shenanigans are afoot. After the game, driving back to Horsham, she pulled in to a garage to get petrol while I waited in the car.
     
    She came back to the car, smiling, and dropped into the conversation that they’d asked at the counter why her ‘husband’ hadn’t got out to get petrol instead. We both laughed a little awkwardly and I completely missed the fact that it was probably an open goal in terms of letting her know that I liked her. Just a simple ‘I should be so lucky’ or a little throwaway ‘If only’ would probably have done the trick. And I really did like her, but she was married/getting married and in my head that was totally off limits. I also had ridiculously low self-esteem so the idea of anyone finding me attractive was almost laughable. Even now, I’m not sure I would ever have possessed the confidence to ‘make a move’…sometimes some of us need things spelling out very clearly! So I said nothing and ‘the moment’ passed and she gradually became less present at matches and practice, further cementing the feeling that I had missed the boat, for want of a better expression.
     
    During my later days around the stoolball club, before we moved to Southampton, I was in a couple of unhealthy relationships while being aware of someone who seemed shy, like me. I think, while never taking anything for granted, that she liked me but I was deeply embedded in those situations whenever an opportunity arose. One of the girls I went out with went to the same school as her and I suspect was particularly unpleasant in ‘warning her off’ even though there may have been nothing to be warned off about! The irony of that girlfriend being a flirt of the highest order and ultimately cheating on me wasn’t lost on me at the time. Again, I think it’s unfair to name the other girl in question, L will suffice. L seemed very much the opposite to the girl I was with and I wonder if things could have been different. We would often run into each other and whenever I returned to Horsham, she would inevitably be one of the first people I saw. Fate? I’m undecided, but there was something amiss in the Universe and my timing was clearly horrendous – something I tried to explore in the short story ‘We Let the Stars Go’.
     
    But there I go again, off on another tangent. I should be talking about Mother. After my parents separated, I would go and see her during school holidays once all of the custody battles had ended. These trips involved me travelling by coach to London Victoria on my own (a prime target for noncery, something I was fortunate enough to avoid) where Mum would meet me and we would walk to the train station, red buses and black taxis flashing by in a city environment that was totally alien and a little alarming to me. Once we had navigated the busy streets that had so inspired Ralph McTell, we boarded a train and made our way back to Horsham. I found those trips particularly unnerving, especially given that many of them would have been around the time when IRA activity in the capital was a very real possibility. I would have loved to have viewed those streets as an adventure to be had rather than something to fear, but I was a timid child, full of loss and doubt with a permanent expectation that the worst of times was always just around the corner.

    Mother in Teignmouth, date unknown

    I’d spend a lot of my time writing while at my Mum’s house, avoiding her second husband, John, as much as possible. Any combination of my siblings and half-siblings would have been present during those days and visits would often produce encounters fraught with emotion and drama.
     
    Carole’s propensity to seek attention would often rear its head along with numerous police visits to inform us that one or more of the girls had absconded from the care homes that they intermittently resided at. On more than one occasion the house would have to be searched, including any personal belongings if the police were looking for Alison, I guess because of her history of addiction. There was also a time when Carole was bathing our youngest half-sister, Hannah, who could only have been two or three at the time. She came running out of the bathroom telling us to phone an ambulance because she’d left Hannah alone for a few moments and had ‘come back’ to a bottle of bleach in the bath with her and was afraid that she’d had a drink from the bottle. Cue the rapid arrival of a couple of paramedics and absolute pandemonium, which I think really pressed Carole’s buttons. If I sound dismissive or unnecessarily harsh I don’t mean to but these things happened regularly whenever Carole was about – there was hardly ever a night out that didn’t descend into chaos or a visit that went by without any drama. She was a product of a violent, failed marriage and of the system into which she was placed to provide ‘care’ for her. Maybe it affected her this way because she was the oldest, but all four of the girls who ended up in care homes struggled to adapt and lead a ’normal’ life. I often wonder how bad things must have been for them and I sometimes think that I’m better off not knowing – it will do nothing to diminish the frustration I feel.
     
    My biggest struggle regarding both of my parents has been the absolute refusal to take responsibility and acknowledge their roles in the difficulties that their children have suffered. At no point am I suggesting that they should have stayed together, I think that particular scenario would never have ended well. But there is no doubt in my mind that the subsequent custody battles were never about the good of the children, merely about point-scoring and running each other into the ground. At no point was the overall welfare of the children considered during the early days of their separation and it was a spiteful, vicious situation. How the hell do you come through that unscathed as a child? I’m sure that there were times when the behaviour of the children was difficult, maybe it even felt impossible to manage but I think you reap what you sow and the troubles that we had to navigate were very much a result of the consequences of our parents’ actions.
     
    Of course, you could argue that there is always an opportunity for individuals to make the ‘right decision’ but some of the abuse and treatment that we had to endure has scarred us forever. It’s not as simple as doing the right thing. Even now, at the age of 52, I struggle to understand why people love me, why they would want to spend time with me. If you are told that you are nothing and nobody often enough you do start to believe it. And that’s not just the direct use of such words, it relates to the whole underlying approach to one’s own existence, being encouraged to remain downtrodden and not even try to better yourself can be as damaging as somebody telling you that you are a worthless piece of shit, that you’re thick and useless and that you will never amount to anything.

    ‘Now don’t wake me up again
    Don’t let me feel anything
    But when you go, let me dream that I go with you
    So you won’t make my heart ache anymore
    Leave the light on and don’t shut the door    ‘

    Mother’s Ruin by Kirsty MacColl

    I’m very much aware of an attitude towards me from within the family that I ‘seem to think that I’m better than them’. It’s not that at all, not that I need to justify any decisions that I’ve made. I want to be better than the version of me that I used to be. I don’t want my children exposed to attitudes and behaviours that are damaging and at times unpleasant. I also grew up at a time and in a place where racist, homophobic and generally demeaning ‘jokes’ were the norm. Some of my family also seem to have clung to their Tory principles that have now descended into the UKIP/Reform gutter and I will never apologise for dragging myself out of that particular shithole. I have been through a lot to get to where I am today and I have made an awful lot of mistakes to learn what I’ve needed to. I can understand a difference of opinion, although I do struggle a little politically. What’s harder to navigate is a difference in values. If misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia…well, any hatred, really is for you, then I neither want nor need that in my life.
     
    My relationship with my mother became more strained after I left Plymouth to move in with her in August 1990. Things were fine at first but she was either in the process of divorcing my stepfather or it was on the horizon and he would spend a lot of time stalking her and following her if she went out for the night. By this point, I think she had developed a selfish streak and at times the priority would be for a bottle of wine over other familial essentials. Maybe she felt she deserved to be selfish after two failed marriages and to some extent I can kind of see that. I can remember one night, being stood on the corner of the road where we live in Horsham, some four or five houses down from our humble abode, just hanging out with (not of) my girlfriend at the time. It was gone eleven o’clock and the lights in most houses were off and I knew that Mum had been out on a date. During a flirty, whispered conversation with my girlfriend, we became aware of a loud (and I mean loud!) wailing sound coming from one of the houses. It took about thirty seconds for us to realise that it was coming from my house and…well, I’m sure that I don’t need to spell it out. I was absolutely mortified. On an on it went and lights in the other houses came on. I didn’t go home that night. It became a regular occurrence and an embarrassing one. I mean, she was clearly enjoying herself, good for her, but…
     
    Around the same time, we ended up working together in a factory in Denne Road, G P Instruments that made the optics, self-measuring drink dispensers for spirits at bars. Mum was involved with one of the managers/directors, a tall, pot-bellied chap named Cliff, who looked a little like Roger Mellie (the man on the telly) from the Viz comics. Anyway, no-one was supposed to know about their affair but of course, everyone did. It was a small factory with only 6 or 7 employees, one of whom, Richard, was one of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. We forged a decent friendship for a time, mainly based on trying to make each other spit our drinks out, childish humour and songwriting. On a Friday afternoon, the highlight of the working week would occur when owner, John (Gibbs, I think, we nicknamed him Gibbo, though not to his face, he was a feisty man with a purple face and poor people skills), would tip his skip in the work toilets producing a monumental turd that inspired the game ‘Sink the Bismarck’, where we would have to take it in turns to attempt to flush the obstinate log away.

    Roger Mellie, the man on the telly (who says bollocks)

    The affair continued for some time and Mum would regularly be let down as Cliff would have to change his plans at short notice and leave her thoroughly miserable at home, listening to the songs of the broken-hearted and guzzling cheap wine to numb the pain of further rejection. He had a partner who was clearly his priority and didn’t treat Mum particularly well at all. I sometimes wish that I’d taken a moment to put him in his place, but that wasn’t for me to do. But he was as responsible for my mother’s unhappiness as anyone who had gone before him. Mother did not have a good track record for choosing men.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026
     

  • Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

    A shot of Dartmoor that I took a couple of years ago. Not the bleak wilderness described below…

    It’s June 1990 and the torment of the whole GCSE ‘situation’ was coming to an end. Not only had I had to contend with my own shortcomings in the revision/retaining of information/examination processes, but some clown had also decided to schedule the beginning of the World Cup in the middle of the most important exams of my life. As if I really needed any more distractions…

    Despite the feelings of disillusionment, abject failure and the ongoing repression of my past, something was changing in me. I wasn’t quite as afraid of my father as I had once been and while I do acknowledge the main reason for leaving Plymouth was the impending doom upon receipt of my exam results, I also began to feel the need to spread my wings. Eschewing Big Fun’s suggestion of Blaming it on the Boogie in 1989, I knew very much where the source of my frustration lay and who I held responsible for it. At the age of 15, almost 16, I felt that I was still treated like a child. I’d had a paper round for several years and had always been instructed to put half of every week’s pay packet into savings. I now realise that it was because my dad had little to no intention of supporting me for any longer than he deemed necessary, so he was encouraging me to squirrel away six pounds fifty on a regular basis so that I could become self-sufficient as soon as possible. I wasn’t allowed to go to Argyle games on my own, yet he wouldn’t take me and apart from running around Central Park with a football on a regular basis, I didn’t do much else. Two years previously, I’d finally ‘broken my duck’, so to speak, in the relationship department, albeit with a tryst that could at best be described as ‘fleeting’ and at worst ‘disappointing’ with perhaps a non-committal shrug of the shoulders too, but I’ll come back to that at some point. The temptation to fly the nest became more attractive as time wore on.

    It wasn’t any easier after my exams had finished. I got a job working in the local store, Barbican Discounts, through a family connection and there’s a whole story to unpick there, which I’m leaving well alone for the moment. Suffice to say that anyone who knows their ‘Plymouth history’ will be very aware of the noise and subsequent revelations surrounding that particular establishment. There is one tale worth sharing at this point, however. The work was not overly stressful and I worked in the warehouse with a peculiar band of misfits. I use that term endearingly as I immediately felt comfortable around my new friends and we enjoyed ourselves to the point where we made potentially long days fly by. I still possessed a gob that remained, at times, a little uncontrollable and I retained my uncanny knack of finding trouble.

    Royal Parade, Plymouth, where I took on my first job in retail, an industry that I fell into and struggled to escape from.

    One lunchtime, our little crew had gathered in the warehouse for lunch when we found a newly installed fire extinguisher. One of the girls I worked with, I think her name was Karen, but I have a vague memory that we had nicknamed her ‘Olive’ (I have no idea why!), had just bought a new jacket and was proudly showing it off when I decided that it would be really funny to pretend to squirt her with a fire extinguisher. In hindsight, I suspect that there was some sort of immature flirting taking place and Karen jokingly threatened that she would deck me if I carried out my threat…so I clamped my hand down on the operating mechanism and pointed the hose in her direction, fully expecting some sort of lock to kick in to prevent it from going off.

    There was no lock and it did indeed go off, precipitating a scene that looked not unlike a particular variety of adult movie that I’m told exists…we all stood frozen in absolute horror. Karen recovered her wits first, strode over towards me and absolutely hammered me with a belter of a left hook to the side of my head. I literally saw stars and the ring that she was wearing cut my eyebrow as vengeance and justice were delivered swiftly. I was left sporting a beauty of a shiner for a few days and we all got a slap on the wrist for messing around with emergency equipment. There were no hard feelings between Karen and me; it was entirely my fault and I paid to get her jacket cleaned, an act that made a noticeable dent in my first pay packet.

    After three or four weeks of working and still having my finances watched over, I began to realise that nothing was going to change unless I made it happen.

    Me with one of the many pets that we owned. We always had animals around when we were growing up, which at least goes some way to explaining why I now have three dogs and twelve cats!

    I was already tempted to throw in my lot and move to Horsham, where a room was waiting for me if I needed it. But before that happened, I had the bright idea of running away. To Dartmoor, of all places.

    I had this exotic, exhilarating fantasy that I would be able to live rough for a while before finding work at a pub of some sort and carving out a successful and fortune-filled existence for myself, all while making everyone feel terrible for the way that they had treated me. Perhaps it would even change my family; everyone would miss me dreadfully and I would be loved and revered forevermore.

    Except, it wasn’t like that at all. In the days leading up to my Great Escape, I plotted and conspired with Ellie, my younger sister, having bought her silence with the promise of a wad of cash from my ‘savings’, which I was going to withdraw from the building society. In my youthful ignorance, I was totally underprepared, not only for the betrayal that would follow but in terms of understanding what I needed to ‘live rough’ and apparently, two bags of shopping from Tesco is somewhat insufficient.

    So, the day arrived. Dad and Brenda disappeared to work and I put my plan into action. I swiped my savings book, made my way into Mutley and withdrew all the money that I had. The exact number eludes me, but fortunately, that particular detail won’t detract from the abject failure of my Master Plan. I paid Ellie off, spent a small fortune on tinned goods and a mixture of perishable and non-perishable items. Having already done my research, I hopped on a bus that took me to freedom, out through the gloriously named village of Crapstone and into Yelverton. From there, I walked out onto the moors for about three miles, finding shelter under a thick covering of brown ferns that looked perfect for hiding beneath to avoid detection.

    It was a little after two o’clock in the afternoon and with nothing else to do, I settled down to await nightfall. In early June. After about twenty minutes of doing nothing, I became fidgety. These were pre-mobile phone days, so I had no way of knowing if I was already classified as a ‘missing person’ and besides, a problem of a far more pressing nature had reared its head. In my haste to escape my prison, I had neglected to purchase a tin opener. It was a bit like the episode of Bottom, where Eddie and Richie have to camp out on Wimbledon Common for a week to win a bet with ‘Mad Ken Stalin’, only I was neither furnished with a packet of Chocolate Hob Nobs nor indeed a tent. And there was most definitely an absence of Wombles.

    A screenshot featuring Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson from the episode of Bottom referenced above. In my humble opinion, the finest sitcom ever written.

    Still, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I was free to live my life however I wanted, unfettered by unwanted interference and the trappings of everyday life. I’d hopped aboard the last Freedom Moped out of Nowhere City and I hadn’t even told my parents what time I’d be back. It was great. I let out a long, relieved sigh.

    Just as it started to rain.

    I lasted until about seven o’clock the following morning and to be honest, I think that in itself was quite the achievement. Once the rain began, it refused to abate and within an hour, I had discovered that while the ferns under which I was nestled did obscure me from view, they had all the resistance to water of a cotton shirt. Which was handy, because that was exactly what I had thrown over the top half of my body and it was now soaking. The overhead greyness settled in for the afternoon and the evening, during which a friendly but mischievous horse managed to steal my bag of apples and demolished them with alarming rapidity. Once sated, the horse buggered off, but not before it had emptied its bowels about six feet away from my hideaway, meaning that not only was I drenched, but I now had the constant stench of horse poo for company. I slept fitfully and uncomfortably once darkness fell; every noise was a potential ghost or goblin or worse, someone with designs on my swiftly diminishing store of supplies. Every horror story that I had ever read teased at my brain in its drowsy state, so that by the time the night receded and another grey dawn crept across the misty moors, I was thoroughly and utterly dejected. I sat in the same puddle that I’d tried to sleep in and cried before scooping up my soggy belongings and squelching back to Yelverton. On the way, a woman in her sixties with long, grey hair and a cheery disposition pulled over as I walked along the road. She wound down her window, looked pityingly at me and asked if I needed a lift anywhere.

    I no longer had the fortitude to consider my own safety. In fact, if this slightly wrinkly but overwhelmingly pleasant Galadriel figure, beaming at me from behind the steering wheel of her Land Rover, had turned out to be a bit noncey, I may well have sold my honour for the want of a warm bath, dry clothes and a bacon sandwich. Fortunately, she only provided me with the latter and an ear to bend, both of which were most welcome. She telephoned my father, who was suitably annoyed with me and fully informed of Ellie’s version of events, as she had promptly spent the cash I had given her and then phoned him at work to tell him that I’d run away.

    The woman was kind enough to drive me back home and after she had deposited me back with Dad and Brenda, long conversations followed that eventually saw them agreeing to my request to move to Horsham. Things were awkward for some time after, as we couldn’t get the move finalised until the beginning of August and perhaps this was what Dad had been referring to when, in later years, he told me that my children would break my heart. It’s a wonder that irony didn’t just keel over and die after that statement and the times that I wanted to point out that he’d broken my heart on many occasions were numerous.

    So, it was a time of change, my dear. And it seemed not a moment too soon.

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

  • Sweet Molly Malone

    The programme cover of the first Argyle match I attended back in 1987.

    Whisper it quietly, but when I first discovered football, I became a Manchester United fan (I suspect to my father’s disappointment, he would have loved nothing more than for me to follow in his Sunderland-supporting footsteps). I have no idea why I followed the Red Devils and perhaps that’s part of the reason why, on February 14th, 1987, I fell in love with Plymouth Argyle. It’s quite the switch, granted, but not one that I have ever regretted.

    So, when did football get its claws in me? The first game that I ever recall seeing was the 1979 FA Cup Final, Arsenal v Manchester United. At home in Teignmouth, Cup Final day was quite the thing, watching the build-up and settling down just in time for ‘Abide with Me’. A classic cup final followed with Arsenal coasting into a 2-0 lead before a late United fightback, Sammy McIlroy’s 88th-minute leveller and my subsequent celebrations provoking a falling out with Alison of Rooney vs Vardy proportions. With the scores level at 2-2, it looked like the game would go to extra time until Alan Sunderland popped up to nab a late winner and break my little United-loving heart.

    For the next few years, it was all about United. The 1983 cup triumph (via a replay) against Brighton was perfection, given that my stepfather was a Seagulls fan and, of course, two years later, Norman Whiteside was the hero when he fired past Neville Southall in extra time to end Everton’s hopes of cup success. At some point, I was given a birthday card signed by the entire United squad, which I was absolutely blown away by. Sadly, I have no idea what happened to it.

    A picture of me wearing an old Manchester United top while sat looking pensive in Mother’s lounge. I’m probably wondering why my hair is still so horrendous.

    After moving to Ideford in 1982, Saturdays consisted of a kick about in the frankly humungous garden that we had, trying not to lose the ball in the masses of hedges (mainly because it would be me braving the brambles and thorns in retrieving said ball). At some point during the morning, the newspaper would get delivered along with one of my two luxuries, Champ comic, which contained the magnificent comic strip ‘We are United’, so I would settle down to read that. Around 2 o’clock the ice cream van would make its weekly visit to the village, pulling up at the top of the hill (we lived at the bottom but with only eight houses in the road it wasn’t a huge inconvenience) and prompting a dash to beat the queue for a screwball, my other luxury, vanilla ice cream packed above a rock-hard bubblegum at the bottom presented in a plastic container that doubled up quite nicely as a home-made Dalek once empty and clean.

    By 2.45, I’d be in the lounge with Dad, the radio on, him lurking behind his copy of the Daily Mirror, me probably doing my best to try and be as quiet as possible. The next couple of hours would dictate the remainder of our Saturday in a simple equation. If Sunderland won, we would enjoy a harmonious evening. If they lost, Satan and his minions would descend upon number one, Church Road and condemn us to what felt like an eternity of misery and torture. Of course, if Sunderland were playing Manchester United, I’d be willing my team to lose. If they won, it would be entirely my fault and I would suffer the silent treatment until I had made up for something completely out of my control by completing an unspecified number of household chores.

    Despite the endless trepidation around the outcome of Sunderland’s matches, those Saturday afternoons were mostly enjoyable. On reflection, it was only really sport that my father and I bonded over and we would go on to spend many a weekend listening to match updates, which, in the summer, would be traded for long afternoons watching either the Test match or the John Player League on Sunday Grandstand. Days like these formed the basis of my relationship with my dad as I moved into adulthood and we only really progressed beyond them towards the end of his life.

    By the end of the 1984-85 season, we had moved to Plymouth. I’d been aware of Argyle during their FA Cup run of 1983-84 and despite now living in the city, I’d not made it to Home Park by the time they won promotion from the Third Division to what is now the Championship – although living in Westbourne Road in Peverell, we could always hear when Argyle had scored and none more so than the night they clinched promotion, thumping Bristol City 4-0 in front of ’20,000’ and the rest.

    In the Second Division in 1986-87, Argyle hit the ground running and were becoming harder to ignore, back pages of the Evening Herald regularly catching my attention while on my paper round. In January 1987, they were drawn against Arsenal (top of the First Division) in the fourth round of the FA Cup, a game which would see them succumb to a 6-1 defeat against the likes of David Rocastle, Charlie Nicholas, Niall Quinn and Tony Adams.

    Two weeks later, my stepbrother, Martin, offered me the chance to join him in watching Argyle take on Blackburn at home.

    Once I’d committed to going, the excitement had started to build. My morning paper round had taken a little longer on the Saturday as I scanned every article in the sports pages of every newspaper in search of Argyle-related news. I was paid my week’s wages upon my return to the shop, which was followed by an interminable wait, the hours dragging by until we left home and headed towards Central Park. A quick stop at the pasty van by the entrance to the park yielded beef and potato (and assorted vegetable-based ingredients) goodness and we joined the steadily moving crowd to walk up the hill towards the ground. It was there that I felt it.

    It started as a peculiar tingle in my fingers, accompanied by a nervous rumble in my stomach. A tiny, almost imperceptible shiver coursed down my spine as I looked around me, green and white scarves and bobble hats growing in number as we marched on. Half-heard conversations about the possible line-up, grumbles about the previous week’s defeat to Reading and the odd puff of tobacco smoke drifted over my head, We stopped to pick up a programme, the beginnings of one of my many hobbies, before we arrived at the entrance to the old Lyndhurst stand, pushing through the narrow turnstiles and making our way up the slight incline towards the terraces. Once at the top, I was afforded a moment of magic as the Home Park pitch blossomed into view, the grandstand opposite already filling up while the noise from the Devonport End briefly grabbed my attention before the momentum of the crowd carried me into the Lyndhurst stand and down towards the halfway line. Feet were shuffled, the murmur increased in volume and the atmosphere was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was magical!

    The back page of the programme from the Blackburn match.

    Out came the teams and within five minutes I heard the Argyle crowd vociferously suggesting that Steve Cherry, who had replaced fan favourite, Geoff Crudgington, in goal for the Arsenal cup tie, may have regularly enjoyed activities that involved one-handed reading and self-gratification. This dissatisfaction with the Pilgrims number one continued for much of the game, even after the 29th minute, when Kevin Summerfield headed past Bobby Mimms to give Argyle the lead. Blackburn were offered a golden opportunity to level early in the second half, when Gerry McElhinney was penalised for a foul on Keeley, with most of Home Park convinced that an equaliser was imminent. Barker’s spot-kick was well struck, but Cherry guessed correctly enough to block the ball with his legs, a chorus of ‘One Steve Cherry’ breaking out among the ranks of the Argyle faithful as the ball was cleared. If anyone ever doubted the fickle nature of football fans…

    Blackburn did find an equaliser, but I was hooked. Plymouth Argyle were the team for me and from that day on, I never wavered. For better or worse!

    Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.

    No copyright infringement intended by the inclusion of the photographs from the Argyle v Blackburn match.

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