A Life More Ordinary

Running backwards, forwards and sideways in time.

Category: Uncategorized

  • Saturday, August 6th, 1994. The date was set. After four turbulent years away from Plymouth, I’d made the decision to move back to Devon, where my Dad had a spare room waiting. Still working at McDonalds, a transfer had been arranged, my bags were packed and I had said most of my goodbyes. Still not the…

  • With little to do but lick my wounds following recent events (Alone Again (Naturally)) I plodded through the next few months working as many shifts as possible. People might knock working at McDonalds, but I quite enjoyed my time working there, with the exception of the failed romantic liaisons and a couple of other incidents…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  •  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…