I was very specific. Normal kids would write in their letter, ‘Dear Santa, please bring me a skateboard’; I would write, ‘Dear Santa, please bring me a skateboard, model XT47, blue, available from Halfords, priced £14.99.’ That way I’d be sure I was getting the right one. And it had to be the right one. I didn’t want a red one or a black one or a yellow one, I wanted a blue one. I didn’t want an XT20 or an XT40, it had to be the XT47. And if my granny asked my mum what I wanted, there was always the outfit to go with it. I had the full gear – the knee pads, the arm pads, the helmet.
Our little farming village had never seen anything like it. I looked a right pillock going down the road, slowly, on my skateboard dressed head to toe in all the get-up. I don’t think any of the other kids in the village had seen anything like it either. Me and my best mate David Coates used to skateboard together, but his wasn’t as good as mine because he would just write ‘skateboard’ on his list for Santa. David used to be way better than me at almost everything we did, but he never quite had the right gear. He may have been better at sport than me, but he never looked quite as good doing it. Yes, there was intense competition to have the best skateboard, the coolest BMX. It was like real life Top Trumps back then. It still is now, only with Ferraris.
Getting the right board and outfit was only the start of it though. I could never leave it as the standard board everyone else had, I had to ‘trick’ mine. It’s always been the way, no matter what I’ve owned: I’ve got to modify it, make it better. So every penny of the pocket money I used to earn mowing the lawns, doing a bit of gardening or helping out on the farm mucking out the pigs went on ‘improvements’.
We weren’t proper farmers, of course. With my dad’s catering manager post at Castle Howard came a house and some land which was pretty much useless for anything other than farming, so at various times we had pigs, cattle and chickens which me and my sister Charlotte, who’s a year younger than me, used to help out with. It wasn’t highly paid work – we were only seven and six – so when you spent you had to spend wisely. At the corner shop my 50p pay would buy me a Coke and a Mars bar (twice) and a handful of Floral gums. I hated Floral gums. They were, and still are, disgusting. They tasted like soap, but they were the only sweets my sister didn’t like, which made them good value. She’d have all the good sweets, which I’d nick off her; I’d have all the crap ones, which she wouldn’t come near. They might not have been pleasant, but they made the most of the money.
With only limited funds and a standard skateboard in need of ‘improvement’, some particularly creative thinking was required. I could work all year and I still wouldn’t be able to afford the proper (and eye-wateringly expensive) foot grips they sold in Halfords, so I cut two feet-shaped pieces out of some sandpaper in my dad’s shed and glued them to the top of my board with UHU. Careful saving of my hard-earned fifties meant I could just about afford the four new wheels I wanted – one red, two white, one blue – and, most important of all, the special tricked-out ball bearings required to do all the proper stunts. The only problem was, I couldn’t ride the bloody thing. I could barely stand up on it, never mind do stunts. I used to have to sit on it on my bum to go down hills. Which is why I did most of my skateboarding in the kitchen.
So there I was in the kitchen, in all the gear – knee pads, arm pads, helmet – looking like a pillock, holding on to the towel rail of the Aga. It was a Sunday lunchtime and everyone was in the kitchen, sitting round the table, which I was launching myself around again and again, making everyone dizzy and increasingly irritated. My grandfather was getting particularly annoyed as I tried, and more often than not failed, to circle the ten seated obstacles.
Of everyone around that table, my grandfather, my mum’s dad, was the least likely to put up with such antics. A former cricketer, a fast bowler, he used to play for Yorkshire with Freddie Trueman, he worked as a ticket man on the railway and was a proper no-nonsense Yorkshireman who didn’t really make allowances. He used to say things like ‘Get a proper job, play cricket.’ When we used to ‘play’ in his back garden, which always featured an absolutely perfect cricket pitch lawn, stripes and all, he’d bowl cricket balls at me at 150 miles an hour, overarm, like he was warming up against Botham in the nets. You learned quickly to give the ball a good hit to show you were trying, but not too hard because you knew that if you really whacked it and it went over the hedge the next ball would be coming straight at your head. Needless to say, I hate cricket.
So, everyone was chatting away, trying to ignore me but getting more and more annoyed as I went round and round, almost but not quite making it all the way round the table because, maybe, someone had pushed their chair out and I’ve crashed into it. On my fourth or fifth attempt, my grandfather had finally had enough.
‘So, son,’ he said with a force that put me off what could have been my first full flying lap of the day, ‘what do you want to do when you get older?’
I stopped my skateboard right next to him and without even thinking about it I replied that I wanted to be a chef.
My dad, being a catering manager, knew a thing or two about chefs and he was nodding and saying, ‘That’s all right that. Good career. Hard work, but a good career.’ Granddad wasn’t looking quite so impressed, but spurred on by my dad’s approval I added, ‘I want to be a head chef at 30, have my own restaurant at 35 and have a Ferrari when I’m 40.’
My granddad turned to me, a look of disgust on his face, and in his firm Yorkshire accent he said, ‘You want to get a bloody proper job, play cricket. You’ll never get all that, not being a chef.’
Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m not one to shy away from a challenge. They’ll also tell you that I’m the hardest-working person they know. All my friends will say that I put in more hours, more effort and more passion than anyone else they’ve ever met and that if I say I’m going to do something, I usually do it. Even so, through all the years of working 18-hour days, living on the breadline, begging, borrowing and stealing (literally) to survive, standing up to jumped-up little French chefs, being battered and abused in restaurant kitchens over the years, being ripped off in business and being mistaken for a fool more than once, I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined the truth: that I’d achieve all the boastful ambitions I voiced as a seven-year-old on a skateboard by the time I was 24.
2 ARCADE GAMES AND ASTON MARTINS: THE V8 VANTAGE
Scarborough, 1979. I’m in a ‘Kiss Me Quick’ cowboy hat, eating pink candyfloss, walking along the seafront with my mum, my dad and my sister, and I’m having a lovely time. It’s grey and windy and the only thing moving on the beach is the rubbish and the poor old 10p-a-ride donkeys, but it doesn’t matter.
We went to Scarborough a lot when I was a kid, at weekends and during school holidays, so much so it’s a wonder that eating all those whelks and pickled herrings and pots of winkles in vinegar – the ones you ate with a plastic fork – and the tons of sticky rock (which for some reason wasn’t the traditional pink stick kind but made up to look like a plate of sausage, bacon and eggs) didn’t leave me scarred for life. Thankfully I only have happy memories of our trips to the seaside, not least because it was on that grey and windswept east coast seafront that I discovered two of the greatest passions of my life.
At the time, I thought Scarborough was one of the best places on the planet. I know now that although it can be fun, it can also be one of the most boring places. I mean, the Labour Party hold their conference there. I just remember it being bloody cold and grim at times, with one solitary speedboat that went up and down and a funfair that hardly ever used to be open because it was either too windy or pissing down with rain. And it hasn’t changed to this day: it’s still your typical sleepy seaside town full of old dears and the faint smell of wee and Dettol. But back then, to a young lad with a pocket full of hard-earned and carefully saved 50ps, it was magic, full of excitement. Typically, my sister used to blow all of her money in the pound shop as soon as we got there; she’d come out with rolls of clingfilm and 15 teddy bears, thinking she’d got a bargain. Me, I headed straight for the bright lights and endless pleasures of Scarborough’s only real