A Life More Ordinary
Running backwards, forwards and sideways in time.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Needless to say, at an all-boys school, opportunities to engage with girls were limited. At the time, the premises on which Devonport High School was situated were shared with a mixed school, Tamar High School, which was attended by a few of the students from Pennycross and, of course, the much-maligned apple of my eye,…
A Life More Ordinary 