We are born from darkness. A darkness that is warm and protective and we emerge from the shadows to a world that is new to our senses. Sounds retain elements of familiarity, voices that we have heard from within our protective cocoon, while the reassurance of the first touch of our mother’s hand prompts a flurry of previously unknown activity and we experience smells and tastes for the first time. Light filters through our clouded vision, unidentifiable shapes that bring the first experience of ‘outside’ into our tiny world that never stops expanding from that moment. In an instant, we are more fragile, more vulnerable than we have ever been, a creation filled with love and hope and the best of intentions. We are beauty, we are innocence. We are perfection, unspoiled by reality. Our purity is fleeting, slipping away with every sound that we hear and every moment that we live from this first minute, our future shaped by unseen hands and unspoken words.
We take those tentative, shallow breaths, oblivious to our place in the universe. We now exist trapped between two moments, our first and our last, barely aware of what it means to be alive and oblivious to the end and our distance from it.
Everything happens.
Sounds and smells retain elements of familiarity, voices that we have known that have become part of our protective cocoon. Light filters through our clouded vision, barely identifiable shapes bringing the final experience of ‘outside’ into our enormous world that never stops diminishing from that moment. In an instant, we are once again fragile, more vulnerable than we have ever been, a creation filled with love yet without hope, eroded by the intentions of others. We are beauty, we are guilt, laden with our shattered dreams and hopes that never were, carrying the time that we wasted with the hearts that we broke and those who broke ours. Our impurity is permanent, cloaking us as we slip away with every sound we have heard and every moment that we lived to this final minute, our past shaped by the hands of those we knew and the words we came to be known by.
We take those tentative, shallow breaths, afraid of our place in the universe. We existed, trapped between two moments, our first and our last, painfully aware of what it meant to be alive, aware of the end and our distance from it. The darkness arrives and some of us head willingly towards it, while others rage against the inevitable, clinging to the surface of a cruel world that teased us with a myriad of dreams and possibilities, some just a heartbeat away and some as distant and unreachable as the edge of the universe. It is a darkness that is cold and fearful, accompanied by the shadows of who we were and the things that we did in a world that is new to our senses. It is, we are told, the way of things.
I was born on October 29th, 1973, in the city of Exeter. Wait, that’s weird, writing in the first person. Still, I digress. You may need to get used to that.
Where was I? Ah, 1973. David Bowie was tearing up the charts, while the unremarkable ‘Daydreamer’ by David Cassidy occupied the top spot during the week of my arrival (David Cassidy fans need not get in touch to disagree). Sunderland had shocked Leeds United in the FA Cup Final in May, much to my father’s delight, Roger Moore’s first Bond film was released (Live and Let Die) and Pizza Hut opened its first restaurant in the UK in Islington. Two IRA bombs went off in London in March, killing one person and injuring 250. Women were admitted to the London Stock Exchange for the first time and JRR Tolkien passed away.
Three minutes to one in the morning was my official time of birth (as pictured below), narrowly missing October 28th, an occurrence which would have impacted nobody at all in any meaningful way. Born to parents (yes, I know it’s supposed to say ‘loving’, but more on that later), Rosemary Letitia and Thomas Southern Hepburn into a family of three sisters (Carole, Alison and Rachael). My parents had previously lost a son, Andrew, so I suppose in some ways my arrival was a blessing. However, theirs was a tumultuous relationship. I have no idea when the cracks started to appear, but I suspect that by the time my younger sister Ellie burst onto the scene almost two years later, there was definitely more than a hint of all not being well with the Hepburns of 178 Kingsway, Teignmouth.
Wikipedia, that occasionally reliable repository of fact and fiction, tells me that Teignmouth is a seaside town, fishing port and civil parish in the English county of Devon on the north bank of the estuary mouth of the River Teign. From the 1800s onwards, the town grew rapidly in size from a fishing port associated with the Newfoundland cod industry to a fashionable resort of some note in Georgian times. The port still operates and the town remains a popular seaside holiday location. To me, it’s always felt like a town that can’t quite make its mind up as to what it wants to be. I have no quarrel with that, indeed I find it quite endearing. While my earliest experiences of the town were traumatic, I have since returned to establish a new narrative and it’s one of my favourite places to spend time these days. In 1818, Keats completed his epic poem, Endymion, in the town, which begins with the line; ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. Triple jump world record holder, Jonathan Edwards, also lived in Teignmouth in his early years and attended Inverteign Juniors school.
For obvious developmental reasons, memories of my early days are sparse to say the least. Dad was working as a nurse; I have a vague recollection of Starcross, a small village between Teignmouth and Exeter, being mentioned as a place of work. I would imagine that Mum was very much a full-time mother with five of us to parent and with no in-laws to help, it must have been hard work. Our house, to partially quote the Madness song, was part of a row of terraced houses opposite flats that to a young and imaginative mind were accessed by a glorious and slightly precarious-looking bridge at the far side of the narrow road. The reality, when I returned several years later, was very different!
Of course, during those early years, I had no idea about social status and council estates, but we certainly weren’t in the most affluent area of the town. We lived a very short walk from the nearest school, the aforementioned Inverteign Junior School, where the fearsome Mr Last ruled with an iron grip, a man whom I had the misfortune of crossing on just the one occasion. The ‘once’ was more than enough and the resultant lecture and subsequent threat of the cane, only deferred because my reputation (or at least that of my familial circumstances) preceded me, had me managing my own behaviour ultra-cautiously from that point on.
My parents argued and as I grew older, I discovered that those arguments were often punctuated by acts of physical violence. At some point, before, during or after, perhaps all three, this spilled over into the family. Dad was very much the disciplinarian and coupled with a short temper, a lot of time was spent treading on eggshells. Despite this spectre looming over the family, there were brief moments of…I hesitate to call them happiness, but perhaps calm would be more apposite. Relative calm at least.
My earliest memory takes me back to a Christmas Eve, perhaps 1978, in the kitchen with mince pies and sausage rolls under preparation and the air filled with magic and the hope of better days. There was I, in my pyjamas, rocking merrily back and forward on a long, wooden bench adjacent to the kitchen table, upon which my elbows were comfortably resting as I continued to enthusiastically enjoy the sound that the bench was making on the cold, kitchen floor. Having already been warned that what I was doing had more than an element of danger to it, it will of course be of no surprise to anyone that the bench tipped over, managing to land on all of my toes, breaking them in the process and necessitating a trip to the local A&E department. By all accounts, this wasn’t my first emergency visit to the hospital either, as I had previously had my hands run over by a go-kart, which had broken my knuckles as it sped off over the aforementioned bridge to the flats, leaving me wailing in its wake, the kart’s dastardly driver remaining unknown to all and sundry. Rumours of a sniggering dog in the kart have never been verified (I’m afraid you’ll have to be of a certain age to understand that cultural reference!).
Living in an environment where we were regularly exposed to violence was bound to have an effect. I will say here that there were reasons behind my father’s behaviour and I will discuss these in detail later. I won’t excuse what went on and neither will I make light of it, but what I will say is that all behaviour is communication and I believe that later in his life, he found another way to express himself and went some way towards achieving the healing that he so desperately needed. For me, the effect of living in that environment reached crisis point quickly. I don’t know how old I was, five maybe, but to the best of my knowledge, there had been a falling out between one or more of my sisters and a girl from the flats. It would seem that I was a protective younger brother as I acted impulsively at the sight of my upset siblings and to my shame, I picked up a rock and threw it at the girl in question. Possessing a decent throw for someone of such tender years, my aim was unfortunately far better than I had intended, the missile hitting my target in the head and precipitating a scene resembling Carrie at the Prom. I can speak with reasonable certainty when I say that I suspect my actions that day earned me a hiding and it’s not something that I look back on with anything other than disappointment and ignominy.
Time moved inexorably on, the house itself took on a starring role in our lives (to be discussed in future posts) and the situation deteriorated with alarming rapidity. Whether or not my memory of the timeline is correct remains to be seen, but I am reasonably confident in stating that Mum left at one point and moved, at the very least, me with her to Sussex, leading to a brief spell at the unimaginatively named Colgate Primary School before returning to Teignmouth. I guess that a reconciliation with my father was attempted before she left again, a much more vivid memory for me that I will come to shortly, simply because it led to one of the most painful days of my life that is forever etched in my mind. Essentially, however, this was my beginning. I’m not going to lie; I think it could have gone better.
‘People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,’ said David Tennant’s Doctor Who in the episode Blink. ‘But actually,’ he continues, ‘from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff.’
I could probably have chosen one from any number of quotes or song lyrics to open with and most of them would probably have been appropriate. I love beginnings. They can be tricky beasts but they are exciting and fresh and full of hope. Endings are much harder and in truth, I try to avoid them whenever possible because they often hurt. I rarely know what to say at the start (which is often what makes it the exciting bit) and I always have too much to say at the end, but for the next however-many-articles I’ll let you be the judge of that and hopefully you’ll find the beginning, the middle and the end entertaining, enlightening, amusing and inevitably, a little bit sad. I used to think that sadness was all that I was entitled to, but I’m very pleased to say that’s not the case these days. Mostly.
Who am I? (Not a direct quote from the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie starring Paul McGann – apologies here and now if you’re not particularly enamoured of the following: the aforementioned fictional Time Lord, cricket, Plymouth Argyle and football in general, the fabulous sitcom Bottom, the songs of Paul Heaton and various other singer/songwriters/performers scattered liberally within these pages). More often than not, I’m nobody important, but occasionally, when the stars align, I am something to somebody and sometimes I think that’s the best that I can hope for. I can already hear at least five dissenting voices and I’ll take that as a fifty-two-year-old father of three who is socially awkward and laden down with enough emotional baggage to fill the hold of Concorde. Perhaps ‘Who have I been?’ would be a more apposite question.
Well, in approximate linear terms, as a progression of cause to effect, I’ve been a lonely and battered child, a victim of abuse. I’ve been an average footballer, a failed student with a propensity for inadvertently finding trouble, a comedian (briefly), a private detective (even more briefly), a songwriter, a lover and a broken-hearted fool. I’ve been a shop boy, a bastard, homeless and a broken-hearted fool again. I’ve been an arsehole, a husband, braver than I’ve ever had to be, a gullible, broken-hearted fool, suicidal, a shop manager, an average cricketer, even braver than the time before when I was braver than I’ve ever had to be, an inexperienced father and a husband again. I’ve been a mobile phone salesman, a slightly more experienced father, a slightly less average cricketer, a father for the third time, a wedding photographer, a cricket coach, an argumentative and opinionated cricket coach, broken-hearted once again, a reluctant hero, a complicated, prickly so-and-so and a writer. And in the words of the lyrical genius that is Paul Heaton, ‘I’ve been bad man, sad man, certified mad but never 007 or Saint. Trendsetter, go-getter, international jetsetter, just a few things that I ain’t.’ I’ve probably missed a few out, certainly the broken-hearted parts, but for an ordinary person in an ordinary world, that feels like quite a lot. I wonder what’s left. Hopefully a bit less of the broken-hearted and a few new experiences to add to that list. Success of some sort would be nice too, but I often think that’s for others to measure. Ultimately, I would like to leave a positive footprint on this Earth before I disappear on my awfully big adventure.
A blog like this inevitably prompts the question ‘why’? Why has an ordinary bloke written a blog about his ordinary life? Well, in all honesty, I’m not sure that it has been ordinary. This was going to be a book, but I felt that this was a better way of sharing my story. Look at all of those things I’ve been, flick through these pages and draw your own conclusions. Of course, I’m not going to publish everything all at once, where’s the fun in that? Besides, I’ve always loved a good cliffhanger! So, instead, I’ll be adding frequent updates. I’ve got a particularly lovely short-ish Christmas story coming up as it’s that time of year. There are plenty of stories and reminisces already written and I’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Also, it’s only fair to warn any readers that there will be times when this blog is not for the faint-hearted and I will try to give warnings where possible. It might be a tough read but it’s been even tougher living it and it’s only recently that I’ve accepted that I’m what’s commonly known today as a survivor. It will become obvious why.
For some reason, I’m one of those people who things happen to. And all I’ve ever wanted is ‘a life more ordinary’. However, I long ago concluded that I’m not meant to have that, no matter how much I pine for it. I’m too opinionated, I’m too scarred by my past and I’m too bloody-minded not to stand up for what I believe in. I know I’m not perfect (Was it Something I Said – Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark), but I never strove for perfection, just to be the best version of myself that I could be. There have been times when I’ve been anything but that and I think I’m still trying to find out who that is, but I’m closer to it now than I have ever been. Sometimes I’ve had to be someone I’m not and sometimes I’ve had to be someone I didn’t want to be, but we all wear different hats from time to time; some fit well and suit us. Others don’t.
I’ve tried to assemble these reminisces in a reasonably linear format, but as those of you who know me will be aware, there is a tendency to disappear off on tangents! I’ve also tried to change things up a little and have included poems and short stories that I’ve written that I feel are relevant to everything within these pages. Breaking things down into shorter essays should also make it easier to dip in and out of the overall narrative – something I’m trying to take into other areas of my writing. If there’s something that you like, feel free to comment. If you have questions, feel free to ask. I’m not telling this story to vilify anyone but it is my truth about my life and some people don’t come out of this smelling of roses. I’ve tried to be fair in my recollections, even when it’s perhaps not warranted and more than that, I have always tried to understand why some people did the things that they did. Some of those people are no longer with us but they are fondly remembered despite the bad times. Inevitably, it’s only one side of my story and I’m sure that other versions are available. But not here.
One other thing. I don’t generally like photos of myself. It’s taken a bit of courage to include one here, albeit with one of our many animals! Yes, my beard really is that grey and I’m afraid I really do have that many chins, but I’m trying to work on it.
So, this is me. And in the words of Paul Heaton once again:
‘This is my life and this is how it reads’ (My Book – The Beautiful South).
A Life More Ordinary 