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Being in the spotlight of accusation is not a state that anybody relishes. There’s always some suspicion of guilt, even in the mind of the genuinely innocent. It occurred to me that I’ve been accused of many things -and I’ve only been guilty of a few. Perhaps the things that we get accused of provide a certain insight into our real character…

Dreamer
I have had to sit various psychometric tests: the kind of thing that employers who are lazy or poor judges of character inflict on job candidates. You have to make a large number of choices between statements such as ‘I like working hard’ or ‘I love my family’ under pressure of time. It’s a bit like the replicant test in Bladerunner, but with a less friendly ambiance. As a result of my first such ordeal, they accused me of being ‘clever but with my head in the clouds’. I told them it was quite true but that I didn’t regard it as the insult they thought it was. So: Guilty.

Fascist
Sick of reading ignorant letters about how people in the UK should be happy to deal with terrorists, I made the mistake of writing to my local rag describing why appeasement was a strategy which had never worked in the past. This led to a flurry of responses accusing me of Fascist tendencies. More worryingly, I started receiving mysterious fanmail from the BNP, a sad group of recreational racists who make the Ku Klux Klan look intelligent. Not guilty.

Liberal
Later that same year I was offered the chance to stand as Liberal Party candidate (presumably the selection committee doesn’t read any newspapers). It was the then prime minister’s home constituency, you know, whatsisname, the guy with the grey personality and the standard parliamentary adultery habit. The seat was marginally safer than a fireproof box of heavyweight condoms in a nuclear bunker. I’d have been less a stalking horse, more a ritual sacrifice. As a protest against organised politics, I voted Christian Democrat. Not guilty.

Homosexual
It’s common practice to make courtroom accusations of all sorts, if you’re an employer who casually sacks people. You know you won’t be censured and it’s a good idea to get your playground bullying in first. A particular evil associated with the court process is that it’s so inefficient that anyone who is accused has to walk around bearing that tag for ages before they get to defend themselves. By that time, the individual is already branded in his own mind as ‘the accused’.

I found it particularly unpleasant, when I was illegally dumped, that homosexuality can, even these days, be used as an accusation. It’s just another cynical tactic to unsettle legal opponents and raise doubts in the “mind” of the automatically homophobic employment tribunal. I won my case and I’m not allowed to discuss the massive amount of cash those characters had to pay me. No case to answer.

Cheat
If you have a cushy job as an academic, especially an Oxbridge academic, you get to live your life entirely on the strength of your exam results when you were 21. All the vintage wine you can quaff and a pangalactic superiority complex. Your career is solely concerned with self aggrandisement at the expense of your intellectual rivals. It’s particularly galling to be accused therefore of being a cheat by one such freeloader. Not guilty.

Authoritarian
The divorce papers referred to me as ‘ruling my family with a rod of iron’ and of scaring my children. They regard the idea of me being able to rule them as risible. On a good day, they listen carefully and then ignore me. Case dismissed, for lack of any evidence (but the accusation still exists, unchallengeable, on the official record).

Bloody fool
This was my father’s standing accusation. That I listened to him for 40 years and didn’t take the opportunity to tell him to fuck off is, sadly, indicative that he may have been right. Guilty.

Money launderer
A member of the legal profession recently accused me, out of the blue, of being a money launderer. Does the concept of slander mean anything to these people? I wish I had enough money to pay for the laundromat. Not guilty.

“Strange Irish chap”
An old Republican saying goes ‘Innocent until proven Irish’. I’m no big fan of the Irish Republic, because I’m not keen on terrorism, but I do understand where this kind of comment comes from. It’s sometimes tough to make it with an accent (and an attitude) like mine. People assume I’m Irish and therefore a thief, vagrant, terrorist, etc. I should perhaps have turned up and given the BNP a lecture on what it REALLY means to be British. Guilty.

Obsessive
Me, “obsessive”, me, me ? Really, how can anyone accuse me of that, how? How? My then doctor, a run-of-the-mill almost-failed medical student, once actually wrote this down on my records. Later, when they were made public, I found myself labeled as suffering from some kind of obsessive-compulsive, attention deficit psychosomatic syndrome. Thank goodness I don’t have to keep revisiting all those petty insults made against me; and justifying myself…ok then, Guilty.

Idiot Optimist
It’s a fair cop.

I really only ever get to look closely at magazines on three types of occasion (That’s not counting a free, furtive flickthrough on railway station platforms during the odd eon between trains).

The first is at Christmas when I splash out on one or two to help fill the gaps between meals and reruns of White Christmas. I finally realised it’s much more fun to glance at images of scale model aircraft than to waste hours actually assembling them into a sticky web of sprue and decals. This is probably the secret of magazines’ success: it’s fun by proxy. No-one is ever going to buy that £7,000 hi-fi or the £380,000 supercar…at least no-one who frequents my local newsagency looking for crazy ways to blow a whole £4.

It’s odd that magazines haven’t been completely replaced by web content. Can the feel of that shiny paper, the mobility of the reading experience and the hi-res imagery really be what drives circulation of the highly-priced hardcopy? Maybe this will change when phone makers get their act together and provide a) a screen bigger than a baby tamagotchi and b) a service which can actually deliver mobile web pages.

My second magazine opportunity is when I’m at my monthly rendezvous with the barber (sorry, hairdresser). A former source of haircutting recently changed from a spit and sawdust barber’s into a perfumed emporium with tv screens and a £29 ‘fee’ for a dry cut. It also offers a specialist service, at a tenner, called “de-stressing”…something that used only to be available via less respectable commercial outlets. Monthly? yes, my hair seems to grow like scutch grass now that I’m greying out (and I find myself perusing ‘Age of Steam’ and ‘ZimmerQuest’).

As well as the established titles, like ‘Pig News’ and ‘Amateur Masturbator’, we also now have:

‘Popular Weaponry’ -containing this month a how-to guide headlined ‘Build your own home-defence ballista’

‘Name Your Baby!’ -for people who have only imagination enough to procreate

‘TV Gardening Gossip’ -Alan bloody Titchmarsh again. Is he really Carol Vorderman’s lovechild?

‘Brides Unbridled’ -a directory of this week’s celebrity divorces

‘Pension Penchants’ -a bus timetable of the small print for those planning not to die just yet

‘Charm’ -mostly knitting patterns for those hoping to die soon

‘SlutBike’ -low-intensity pornography for retarded 16 year olds (without girlfriends) and an all-consuming passion for Gigabikes (once they pass the test)

‘Pzazz’ -advice to prepubescent girls on how to entrap prince charming using only the free mascara on the cover

‘35-Something’ -advice to 50-yr old’s on divorce lawyers and plastic surgeons

‘What Mortage?’ -definitely one to avoid…100 microfiche pages dedicated to minute comparisons between millstones with which to drown yourself. If there are people who find that interesting, I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a sister title ‘What Gravestone?’ (or even, ‘Why Bother?’)

‘New Arhaeogeonephrologist’ -obscure stuff, something do do with science. Circulation zero, since no scientist can afford the necessary £3.99

‘LadMag’ -obscure electronics roadtest stuff for immature males. Contains words like moolash, shaggret, bimble, blagger and tot (?)

‘Corgi Fetishist
and
Scouting’ (the last two being actually an amalgamated publication).

Many of these organs of the press now cost more than a house in Newcastle, or almost as much as two packs of motorway sandwiches. Despite this, they are usually over half full of adverts. I’m especially amused by the images in ‘XYY’ magazine of the pouting, emaciated young men in dinner suits and pink leather cowboyboots, stubble and burberry cummerbunds. Then there are the pictures of Greek gods selling aftershave (didn’t the Greek gods have beards?)

Almost every edition these days contains an article on something called ‘ripped abs’ and how to give your man/woman more pleasure in bed (nothing to do with buying him/her a hot waterbottle, I was surprised to discover).

I must admit, I do sometimes have a weakness for ‘BigHouseInTheCountry’ magazine. The doctor’s is my third reading venue (not that I’m ever ill, having subscribed to Monkeygland Monthly). The waiting room collection enables me to look at pictures of houses, from the late 1980’s, that only medical practitioners could afford. It is at least a pleasant alternative read to the landslide of official literature encouraging testicular palpation (for which glossy competitors already exist, I understand).

Soon to be released is a new weekly publication entitled Pruck! -at a newsstand near you. All the usual hilarious online fun, the amusing punctuation, the self indulgent ramblings and inexplicable rantings -only £4.95* .

You read it here first.

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I found myself on a bus one day and was eavesdropping on the conversation of two young boys earnestly discussing their social lives…

Boy 1: “What do you belong to?”

Boy 2: “I’m in the UDA Junior Red-Hand Commando Association, the Boys 3rd Territorial Ulster Defence Volunteer Brigade, the Linfield Supporters’ Young Protestant Tearaways, the Fife, Armalite and Drum Youth Band…..and the Scouts”

Boy 1: “The Scouts?…Who do you hate if you’re in that?”

I never heard the end of this dialogue because the bus had foolishly stopped at a red light. I watched it quickly become surrounded by assorted boys in jumpers their careworn mothers had knitted for them to wear during acts of civil unrest. They were using the piles of handily placed paving slab fragments to hurl at the bus I was sitting in. It was not as if the vehicle was particularly identified with some enemy tribe. It was just big, moving and full of squelchy pink suburbanites who would be made to look entertainingly terrified by sudden acts of naked violence. A practise target before the evening’s main event: Burn the Landrover.

It was Belfast 1973 and I was rapidly becoming a victim of urban decay and ethnic conflict. No, actually that’s complete bullshit. I was a well-scrubbed, overfed, lower-middleclass boy on his way to spend pocket money on a plastic construction kit representing a killing machine from some previous war…a perfectly healthy upstanding World War, rather than the present grubby domestic skirmish: The Troubles.

Every night on tv a man called wdflacks had started to speed-speak his way through the who-called-whom-what of the political day. I remember two arch-rivals undertaking a particularly effective vote trawl by haranguing each other one evening. The interview stopped although the studio was still on-air. Both men were suddenly seen smiling and shaking hands like old pals. The real enormity of the “worsening political situation” only came home to me when it was announced that there would be no more fireworks.

Some boys down the street had constructed a pipebomb which, when it went off, rattled the windows for about five streets in a windward direction and ended their careers in saxophony. Not considered unusual for that era, I myself spent rather too much time making matchstick ammunition for a toy brass cannon and firing lead canonballs across our garden. I used to lie in bed at night as the noise of construction sirens in the shipyard gradually became replaced by the detonations, 9 miles down the road, of ammonium nitrate and later, semtex. Important to remember that this was politically-motivated violence aimed at achieving parity-of-esteem, so that’s all right then.

One day, two rather well-dressed young men (remember it was the 70’s in Ulster, so that meant the couture of 1960’s Glasgow) arrived at my father’s business and announced that they had kindly brought him some indispensible insurance -in the form of a truck full of FN rifles. Other unwelcome visitors included a woman who made a good living from claiming out of court settlements for assault by shopkeepers who foolishly threw her off the premises. My father foolishly threw her off the premises, past a queue of farmers who were being made to wait for their tractor repairs because they had used the vehicles to block roads during the UWC strike. Some of them had apparently had their keys removed and pitched over a hedge by some insane old man. It was my insane old man.

We just got used to things. Driving along with army rifles casually aligned with your vital organs. Not going out at night. Being drilled how to use our wheelnut-firing home defence catapult in the event of a break-in. Everything then had tribal significance: names colours, schools, areas, pronunciation…We went to the Armagh Planetarium on a school trip and had to be explicitly instructed not to use the word “taigs” when we were guests for lunch at the local convent. Returning from holiday one summer, we were carrying my uncle’s electric hedge trimmer back for repair. The policeman who unveiled its black pistol grip, during one of innumerable vehicle searches, suddenly disappeared behind a handy pile of sandbags. There was even an occasion when I was obliged to remove my T-shirt whilst being driven to the airport. It was July 12th and the T shirt was foolhardy orange: an easy target for snipers.

Getting used to being away from that situation was just as difficult. When I went back on college vacations, I found myself actually phobic about walking past parked cars if they were unoccupied. During a rare shopping trip to Harrods, my family walked in the front door and all of us automatically raised our arms in the air to be searched. We seemed to be either undertaking a Mexican wave or praying to Mecca. To hide our embarrassment, we pretended to be confused members of some foreign ethnic cult, which, of course, we were.

Some mustn’t-have suggestions for things not to buy me this, or any, Christmas.

A Camelbak rucksac (sic): a bag so small that it can only hold 250ml of osmotic potential high-energy sports drink. My advice is to fill it with warm Bushmills single malt and it might make it as a hot waterbottle.

Something in teal and purple dralon: if the 80’s are coming back then I’m leaving.

Jamie Oliver’s Guide to the Philosophy of Gardening or anything bearing the imprimatur of this month’s celebrity chef.

Sony Aibo: an annoying little robotic bastard made by people whose last great invention was the Walkman. He can find his ball, wow. For £1200, I’d expect him to be able to find himself a job.

Facial hair gardening tools from the Innovations catalogue: genuinely nasty (once used, how exactly do you clean this stuff?)

C1alis soft tabs…whatever that is. They must be really good because I get about four email advertisements every day from that nice man with a beard and a 1000-yard stare.

A “fuckin’ big (plasma) tv”: nowhere to put it, no interest in lowbrow broadcasting. A good way to start your own fun collection of dust particles.

Anything to do with golf: I don’t do golf.

Illuminating, novelty egg timer cufflinks: no.

Your company calendar: unless your company is an award winning architecture/ product design/ photographic studio hoping to recruit me as a highly-paid visionary guru.

Brown socks, in fact anything brown. Anything with a “pattern” on. Aaaaaarggghhh.

A jigsaw: If I want to have a picture of a million baked beans or Her Majesty Trooping the Corgis I’ll draw them myself without the tedium of piecing together 10,000 scraps of cereal packet.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I’ve lived next door to some very odd specimens of homo sapiens.

There was the man who had apparently been shellshocked in the war. Cialis Soft Tabs are taken under the tongue as needed 15min before sexual activity. BuyCheap Cialis Pharmacy Order cialis soft tabs for treat impotence now. Generic Cialis Soft Secure online ordering and FedEx next day delivery of brand names and generics with no doctor fees. Search for buy cialis soft tabs online in Topical Index | Dictionary. He used to drive thirty miles to buy fuel for his car. This was the vehicle to the dashboard of which he had an array of long-stem switches fitted…they weren’t connected to anything, he just wanted the switches. He’d wake us at five in the morning by hammering on the corrugated iron lid of his coal bunker with two specially designed brick Cheap minipress, quick shipping, and free secure online medical consultations. PRAZOSIN Minipress. Generic Minipress Effective Natural Cure- No Side Effects. Более 30 моделей производственного оборудования: технические характеристики, фотографии, прайс-лист. s. At one point, he tried to cut my father’s arm off with hedge clippers, so it was no real surprise to observe him occasionally right-hooked into a low orbit.

Then there was a chap who placed an open-ended butterbean can on someone’s car, seemingly by way of an anti-adultery protest. Other neighbours in this area included a man whose behaviour was driven by the completely false beliefs that he could paint, that his daughter could sing, that his wife was a member of the same species, that his son was heterosexual and that he himself was intelligent. He kept a loaded automatic under his bed, which my little sister discovered whilst playing auditions with the tone-deaf daughter.

We also had neighbours who made a rockery of builder’s rubble and other carefully selected rubbish (bottles, washing machines, a boat.. Associates, a Partnership, Defendant-Appellant. Drug Usesv-noni – Google News. Generic V-noni Men’s Health. Bustine Monodose pronte all’uso Libro in OmaggioV�€“Noni is a 100% natural supplement used improve heart functions and boosGet the Best Value on Noni B. ..). Neighbours who would enter our garden unbidden and begin rodding the sewer whilst quizzing me about my household’s consumption of sanitary towels. These people would undertake car maintenance at 11 at night by driving a corner of their vehicle inside their front doorway. Given a chance, they would park across my gateway and then hammer on my door to complain. Thick enough to need instructions on how to use a vacuum cleaner, their favourite recreation was drumming on the wall next to my bed and singing to ‘dance’ music (which was so bad the CIA have been banned from using it as an interrogation tool). They encouraged their children to develop careers which consisted largely of prancing about in tv adverts for carcinogenic lard d org PortViagra Super Active – Viewing Profile Subscribe to free Celiac. 82 per pillTop of viagra shop, viagra substitute, viagra super active. Generic Viagra Super Active Join Answerbag today. 82 per pill. rinks.

More recently, we find ourselves co-terraced with a man who looks like an inebriate, out-of-season santa, a real olde english eccentric (from Wales). He always wears the standard-issue looney scarecrow uniform of straw hat, open-toed sandals, yellow-streaked beard and a linen suit that looks like it used to clothe the body of christ. Arriving on his trademark boneshaker bicycle, he announces his appearance with a burst of romantic horn-honking, coughing, swearing and occasional vomiting. He regularly hammers on the door of his sexagenarian ‘girlfriend’s’ house for an hour, howling obscenities and rolling in the gutter (without spilling much from his wineglass). The cameraphone image of him defecating in the flowerbed opposite my front window is a joy to behold. Maybe he missed his vocation as an MP.

No doubt some of these folk will remember me with similar fondness.

On his way back from the appointment, he looked out of the rain-streaked tubetrain window at a giant airliner taking off from a runway beside the track. It appeared hardly to be moving; to just hang there. Knowing all about the theory of aerofoils somehow didn’t help it look at all real. He’d never sat in a kite made of linen and string and felt the upwards suction that might have allowed him to really ‘get’ what was going on. He imagined the white knuckles of those strapped into the hovering 747.

The woman sitting opposite him was extremely attractive. He prided himself that he was never influenced by advertising of other kinds but even when he mentally discounted the fact that faces are almost completely transformed by the application of a few spots of strategically applied colour, he couldn’t stop himself from feeling the usual, inexplicable responses (the weirdness of sex itself seemed entirely to have escaped the rest of the world). His reaction was especially odd since he’d recently been feeling a bit cut off from things, not ‘himself’, a little unreal.

Bicycling the last leg home into an icy headwind, he glanced down at his Nike Air Blaze trainers and wondered what had happened to the last few minutes of his life. The route was so familiar that he’d been riding without even consciously navigating -but neither had he fallen off. He’d never quite shed the magical feeling that it was possible to stay upright at speed on two tiny patches of rotating rubber, and so easy to topple off when they stopped revolving. The sphere of rock that formed their incredible road rolled on.

As usual, when he got home, he downed two quick gins -just to take the edge off -there would be some wine with dinner, so he’d restrict himself to just another couple before having a quick lie down. He had lately developed a strange dragging pain in his large intestine. Obviously nothing to worry about, at his age. Almost certainly it was nothing nasty. So why was his body letting him down so badly? How come he had no insight, no internal instructions about what was going wrong, no mental picture of what he even looked like beneath the surface? That poster the doctor had shown him with all those yellowish-brown organs made no sense whatever. It wasn’t just that he didn’t understand the obscure terminology but that it didn’t reflect how he felt inside about his own insides. Certainly, that his mind was somewhere within that lump of wrinkly pink meat at the top seemed unconvincing.

The Doctor had said that he knew that he knew that it was not altogether completely clear that a second opinion would be contraindicative. Those whitecoated polysyllables had somehow made him feel better: one small success for medicine that day.

The idea of needing something so badly that your whole life centred on it was foreign, absurd. Outside now, a storm of unimaginable ferocity was in the making. He poured himself another one, gulped back his prescription and thought, with no understanding, about his chances.

Macbeth (Act 2 scene 3):

Macduff: What three things does drink especially promote?
Porter: Marry sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.

The three most terrible hangovers of all time all happened to me. It’s not like they just happened of course, I had something to do with causing them. I find it odd that having had one, I ever had another. My suspicion is that when I’m feeling down (Ulster protestants don’t get depressed) the memory of how bad the ‘morning after’ feels is subordinate to how bad the present moment feels. I either have a small amount to drink (and no hangover) or, as in these three instances, a catastrophic amount too much. There was a guy in Finland who claimed to have had a hangover that could make it onto my leaderboard, but he’s not even in the running (to test this, try a cocktail of 1 part vodka, 1 part creme de meths. Oblivons sets in after about a litre).

My first hangovers were a surprise. I had no idea that it was possible to feel so sick (despite being naturally subject to carsickness, this was a whole undiscovered ocean of nausea). No-one else I knew had hangovers like I did. All the other sixteen year-olds seemed to able to drink all night, eat several botulism burgers, travel three hours in a foetid, airless coach and then play rugby successfully before heading for their next pint. Me, I always felt seriously – I mean clinically ill. Maybe it was that I drank a lot more than they did, or maybe it was my slow metabolism (the same one that caused me to become fat, despite eating only 15,000 calories per day).

The top three events in increasing order of severity are:

3rd Place Conway Square Newtownards, 1982
It was dawning on me that I had to do stuff for which I was ill-prepared, like growing up. I had failed at school and had to go to college in London. For lots of other young folk, this was a fantastic adventure. For me it was a prison sentence. At the time, I had begun to realise, after only about 4 years, that the young woman who was, I thought, my best friend was never going to be anything more. So naturally, to improve the situation I drank the best part of a bottle of Teachers, got comprehensively ‘blocked’, fell asleep in her Mother’s bathroom and threw up in Conway Square. Good job I did throw or I’d definitely be dead.

2nd Place Godmanchester Old England, 1999
I apparently bawled raucous songs and told ‘jokes’ into a microphone for about an hour dressed in an improvised orange toga. Let me assure you, I don’t know any jokes. No-one pulled me offstage so I must have been good or surrounded by people who didn’t give a shit. The reason I was drinking so hard was that I knew which of these two it was.

1st Place St John’s College, New Mexico, 1991
The global, all-time overall prizewinner. Halfway around the world from my family I had begun to realise that something terribly wrong was going on domestically. Without much of a model about how things should have been, I decided that a little alcohol would provide some valuable therapy. Two new academic friends of mine went with me to the local supermarket, and we bought two cases of cheap beer, six limes, a box of table salt and three bottles of tequila for that genuine New Mexico weekend getaway experience.

I woke up in a cm-deep pink slick that newly carpeted the floor of my room -wall-to-wall.

Even now just the T-word can make me feel queasy. I missed a full 36 hours of my life and instead there was a strange hallucination in which pink elephants actually did play a prominent role.

If you are squinting at this through a hangover to challenge the league table entries above, here is a suggested remedy:

1) Eat breakfast. A meal consisting of eggs, a banana, burnt toast and fruit juice or a sports drink should help limit the damage.

2) Sort out what ever is really bothering you.

Me? Never again.

Before Miss Ritchie’s P1 class in 1965, I could read individual words like ‘bus’ and thought myself clever for being able to distinguish between god and dog (actually p,q,b,9,d,g can still get me confused, 90b help me). I was then introduced to Janet and John, an unlikely couple whose relationship was never made clear and who said things that seemed inane even to a pre-literate 5 year old like “See the cat”. No-one I knew spoke like that. No-one other than Miss Ritchie, who regularly used vernacular Ulster-Elizabethan forms such as “Come you here”.

Since then, there have been numerous books. My guess is two books a week on average since 1965…ie about 4000 books. Actually, this seems an astonishingly small total, given how many years I have spent allegedly being educated. It’s particularly salutary that only 5 in 4000 or 0.5% have had any real influence. So many books, so little effect.

The Teddy Bear Annual 1965
This was a formative book in that the Bear family characters were very real. There was the saintly mummy, the gruff daddy, the slightly mad, car-obsessed uncle Fred bear who used his mansion to house his car collection whilst sleeping in a tent. Is it stretching credulity too far for me to say that I’ve just remembered that he dressed as a tramp and that the pun has only now, 40 years later been appreciated? I can remember Paddy Paws the puppy and Doctor David and Nurse Susan. I’m sure they had some unfortunate formative influences on me. I was given my first felt-tip pens at around this time with which I annotated the book pretty comprehensively (mostly with ill-formed p’s, b’s 9’s etc).

Lomond Arithmetic
A seriously difficult, traditional Scottish no-nonsense-now-you’re-nine (or in my case q) textbook. It was designed, I believe to provide preparation for the old 11-plus, the one in which there were questions on Maths and English, not just a multiple choice verbal reasoning guessionnaire. The book, which had a maroon cloth cover was, like all our textbooks, School Property and had to be treated with the respect granted such things in that era. I can still see the large, serif font and hear the fearfilled-banging of desktops as the books were ordered into action.

The questions ranged from the standard 20-at-a-time long divisions of £sd etc to the wordy Problems set towards the latter part of the book. These are the ones which I remember with particular fondness. The reason is that although I was not good at dealing with these to start with, my father spent probably five evenings teaching me how to think clearly about solving them. There were problems of proportion “…if it takes two men a week to dig a hole, how long will it take 4 men?” and even ones of the form “…if a bath is filling at a given rate and someone removes the plug, how long will it take the bath to empty if the plughole removes water at twice the incoming rate?…”

My mind at the time was completely unable to stop thinking about the image of the bath, the noise of the fluid, why didn’t it matter if the sum was done with water or oil, where did the water go? etc etc.

My father took a long time explaining how to solve these terrifyingly complex questions by breaking them down into parts that were individually easy to focus on. Whoever Lomond was, he must have been a real hardass but I owe him for the challenge provided by those problems as well as for some of the few positive memories of my Father.

The Apple Macintosh manual 1984
This is such a beautiful production, filled with wonderfully minimal diagrams and sumptuously lit photographs. These images show a North American lifestyle for which the Mac was designed and to which I very much aspired. Startling skyscraper views over Central Park, sunlit bike rides around Stanford, whiteboard sessions in high-tech startups…I left my heart in Cupertino. I recently talked to someone who spent much of their working life just down the road from the gloriously named Mariani Avenue, home of the Mac. They said it’s actually quite polluted, industrialised and choked with traffic.

In 1984, however, this book represented several things to me. First was the fact that it was made by people who were talented and clearly cared about making something beautiful way beyond basic requirements. The Mac itself stood for a new way to have machines behave, “No more memorizing long commands with names only a programmer could love”. Oh how I wish that were actually true.

The ubiquitous, freehand screen “Hello”, meant that a career in computer graphics could now be a possibility. Computers had just developed personality.

1984
By far my favourite novel, this book doesn’t rely on chapters full of scene setting, specious dialogue or even much character development. It’s all plot directed towards making its point.

My view used to be that governments aim to control thought, to the point where people want to obey -to love Big Brother (It’s now clear to me that by far the majority of people actually want to be told exactly what to do in most spheres of activity).

How ironic that Orwell had to accept censorship of this book -to tone down the theme of abject capitulation, the personal treachery of which we are all, in extremis, capable. O’Brien would be particularly pleased that I contiinue to revise these jottings, so that no two readings will ever be the same. Doubleplusgood.

Foveolar Pattern Recognition, MSc thesis
This is the book that nearly broke my heart. Not because of any emotional content, but because of the process of writing it in the face of professional and domestic opposition. Only 4 copies were printed and I have two of them on my shelf (no electronic backup exists).

It is an attempt to document about ten years of compulsive research into how the 10,000,000,000 or so nerve cells in the visual cortex of higher mammals can perform shape recognition (and yet get p and q confused). I did the work largely without funding or any real supervision by a senior academic. It was also hindered by having a subject which lay at the interface between two academic disciplines…traditionally a dangerous place for fledgling ideas.

On the premature death of my supervisor, this PhD-in-progress was left defenceless and I had to fight a rearguard action to get it examined as an MSc.
It could have been a much, much better book but, at the time, it represented my very best effort. I have (co)-written other papers, articles and books since (oh, alright, one book) but I have never cared about writing something as much as I did this thesis.

It’s 1:30pm on a Friday in 1972. I’m wearing a maroon and black segmented school cap which doesn’t even come close to fitting my 12-year old head (It wouldn’t have fitted my 6 year-old head but I’m learning that uniform has some value: when the rest of the herd wears maroon and black, it helps you hide). There’s a queue down the side of the school gym and I’m part of it, waiting for something exciting which was described as ‘Games’ on the timetable.

This is my first week at a grammar school that’s doing what these institutions are for: pretending to be an English public school. I’ve been hearing all week about one teacher who is clearly crazy. Some older boys have already told us with delight about “DB”, a psycho who screams and slaps everyone in sight. I have attempted to console myself with the thought that surely it wouldn’t be allowed. At least we seem to have made it to the haven of ‘Games’ at the end of the first week without anything too unpleasant taking place (other than French).

Then he appears. He’s wearing his checked brown sports coat, v-necked jersey, baggy brown trousers, brogues and thin gold-rimmed glasses. This outfit is by no means new and he will continue to wear it for the next seven years. He also wears an expression on his hatchet face that wouldn’t look out of place underneath the black brim of an SS officer’s cap. He speaks in short bursts of instructions. Failure to follow them instantly results in a tightening of his sharp features and a scream of rage that turns almost everyone’s guts to water (apart from a few nerveless cretins who are used to this kind of performance at home and don’t seem perturbed by anything -except perhaps having to sit quietly for more than 30 seconds) There is something about that reddening, drawn back forehead that reminds me of my own father when doing his domestic tirade routine.

It turns out this is the infamous DB (or Dick as we later call him behind his back). He is also nominally in charge of certain low-level maths classes, although he admits to not being able to understand, let alone teach the subject. I was expecting some fun, but he regards it as his duty to instill discipline in we young men of the Empire via the medium of organised games.

He points us toward a polluted field on the side of which are some pebble-dashed huts filled with hooks -It’s a scene from the gulag. He drives himself the 500 yards in his ancient offwhitish VW beetle (the one I threw up in later on a raiding party sent to attack some unsuspecting Welsh schools).

Here, 20 minutes of screaming seems to suggest that he expects us to change in under a minute in order not to waste time, and that all this is a precursor to something even worse.

No letters from mums suggesting any form of excuse will be tolerated. At one point he yells in the face of some hapless boy, who’s desperate to avoid developing complications of his advanced pleurisy:

“Tell your mother to get her fat ass down here to see me”.

How I pray for rain on Friday afternoons. It means a ’session’ in the gym of 30 circuits, but at least we might get home before 6pm. The word Rugby is never mentioned. We play the game as infantry are drilled with fixed bayonets.

Dick uses a combination of public humiliation and physical threat to get the required performance. This goes on for fully seven years, sometimes three or four times a week. At one stage, although academic output nosedives, we win trophies and are described as ‘playing like a machine’. In one particular practice session, I almost have my ankle crushed and hobble a mile to the hospital for x-rays. He phones later to apologise for having been so livid with me and for not driving me for treatment. I should have told him to get stuffed and ended my rugby career. I didn’t and my parents didn’t disagree.

I’m in a pre-match team talk. Of course the team is silent. Only DB talks.
He’s on a serious Baden Powell trip. No knots, but masturbation is discouraged and any more strenuous forms of sexual activity outlawed to promote performance on the pitch.. He has a style of speaking that is unselfconsciously surreal. We are, “on a fine line between defeat and failure.” Our play is sometimes “obsane.” or “slungeing.”

During our games he strides along one touchline, generally avoided by other staff, his Ulster trenchcoat flapping in the perpetual wind. When the mud approaches periscope depth, he dons a pair of track suit bottoms that looked as if they had been shortened by shark attack. He whines orders and disparaging observations, many of them about my complete ignorance of the rules.

Back in school, Dick routinely walks down the school corridors slapping children who are out of line and screaming that he will “thrash” them. In a school with any leadership, he’d be sacked at once. At my school he is allowed to run riot by the ineffectual, remote Headmaster. Eventually, DB punches the music master (mind you, that bastard deserved it).

After I left, I heard he had got a free transfer to the more prestigious Baxter College. He lasted a few months but was then removed when some sharp eyed fee-paying parents noticed that he was in fact a dangerous lunatic.

Strange then how we came to have a sort of affection for Dick. We were proud of his widely-recognised eccentricity and we came to believe, I suppose that he had done his best for us. Some of his proteges became Internationals and even ascended to careers in local TV.

His ability to manufacture team spirit by fear fell apart, though, when we were about 16. We stopped being scared and saw how pathetic he was. Dick had a Paisleyite absolutism that was not unusual for the time and place. I think it was intended to make men of us.