us, and I’m not making this up, how to correctly measure your penis. The woodwork teacher. He said, as only a man could, that looking down at your penis was an inaccurate way to determine its length due to depth perception. A tape measure was best. I was now trying to work out how I was going to smuggle my mum’s tape measure out of her sewing kit.
‘What do you need that for, darling?’
‘Just going to measure my cock.’
‘OK, don’t forget your tea’s almost ready.’
My journey into self-pleasure coincided with something that I now look back on as some kind of cruel trick played by my parents. They had done my bedroom out and pretty damn cool it looked too. The problem was my bed sheets. They were black.
Well, black with what resembled snail trails everywhere. I remember my mum’s look of surprise as I started to do my own washing – but just the bed sheet. I almost had to get help to break it in half to get it in the washing machine. The evidence, trail of evidence, was there for all to see, and it prompted my mum to say ominously, ‘Your dad’s going to have a chat with you about all that.’ Yes, it was time to have the birds and bees chat. Oh God.
It was a very brief chat, short on detail and anything of any use. Just a ‘You know about it all, do you?’ and that I was to use a condom. Which I was already. For making water bombs. Did they have any other use?
Thankfully, one of the kids at my school had the business acumen of a young Sir Alan Sugar and had started selling pornographic magazines. Where he got them from we never knew. If you were really lucky, though, you would find a free one in a hedge. You don’t seem to see this so much any more. I often wondered how this started. Was it someone’s remote storage place? Were they hidden there by the publishers, trying to get us hooked? No one knows. These days hedges have been replaced by the internet.
I did eventually have to buy one (the hedge supply had dried up) and I have to be honest and say it actually scared me. The nudity and images were too much too soon for me and I disposed of it in the neighbour’s hedge. A lovely old man lived there with his wife, and he did have a heart attack shortly after my hedge gift. Was my copy of Razzle (with its ‘3 Bum Special’ feature) to blame in any way?
Things went into hormonal overdrive every Friday night with a new TV series called Dempsey and Makepeace. Move aside The A Team and The Rockford Files, Glynis Barber has arrived! By now I had a TV in my room and I would say good night to my parents a full ten minutes before it started – much to their surprise. What kid when finally allowed to stay up late goes to bed early?
Saying I was tired and needed to go to bed, I would leg it upstairs to get ready. I needn’t go any further other than to say that the TV needed a good wipe down on a Saturday morning. Those snails had been on the move again…
SCHOOL DISCOS
I think our fear of the dance floor stems directly from the experiences at the school disco. I’m sure the French spend their youth grinding up against each other to soulful ballads but in my experience all you used to do was skid on to your knees across the polished gym floor, push the nerds into the girls and pogo around like an idiot to Adam and the Ants.
When Phyllis Nelson’s ‘Move Closer’ came on, it was simply a signal for me to take a break from the action and shovel more crisps, E numbers and Panda Pops down my throat. If you did get lucky and find a girl actually willing to dance with you, her mere physical presence in your postcode brought instant arousal. I think that’s another reason why men are so rubbish at dancing.
Trying to dance while hiding a massive diamond cutter in your trousers can be a very traumatic process. I also remember a very dodgy teacher ‘insisting’ he had a slow dance with all the school hotties. I think it was this that first got me thinking that teaching might be the career for me.
SATURDAY JOBS
Saturday jobs are the first taste we get of the dullness of paid work. And wearing an ill-fitting polyester uniform. But you learn valuable lessons. Firstly, that people who work in management are often from the shallow end of the gene pool. A gene pool someone may have pissed in. Secondly, you learn the importance of skiving and that if you’re given a good job to do, you make it last as long as is humanly possible.
I was lucky in that after a few jobs waiting tables and washing up, I was headhunted from the groceries aisle of Sainsbury’s by Marks and Spencer. That’s not strictly true, although I did work on the groceries aisle at Sainsbury’s. There was a stunning girl who worked on the till who I was besotted with. My affections were sadly never returned. I guess it’s hard to be won over by a streak of piss in a three-quarter-length brown overall and matching Stay Press brown pants. That were three inches too short. In movies, a mental person is usually the one wearing pants that are too short for him.
One of my best mates, Kevin, and I both managed to get jobs at Marks and Spencer. This was the place to work as they paid well and had a great canteen. That and the fact they had a lingerie section you could gawp at.
What happened next was the stuff of novels and movies. Two friends enter the same institution but are given vastly different jobs and their lives and fortunes change for ever. I was put straight on the tills. The best gig. Ten items or less. I became something of a hotshot, famed for my rapid scanning technique. The ‘Maverick’ of Winchester Marks and Spencer. My friend Kevin, my ‘Goose’, however, was put on trolley collection. This is a role usually reserved for people who enjoy licking windows. He was not happy about it. I was.
Sadly my time there came to an end as my Saturday hangovers got worse. Most mornings I would excuse myself to the store sick bay to sleep off the effects of a night on the cheap cider. Or the ‘24-hour flu bug’, as I told them. Things really came to a head one Saturday morning when I didn’t turn up and went to a big party for the weekend instead. The personnel department feared the worst – that I’d suffered an accident – and called my home. (I should point out here that I used to ride my motorbike into work. When I say ‘motorbike’ I mean one of those 50cc hairdryers on wheels.) My younger sister happily told them where I really was.
Upon returning to work the following Saturday, I was quizzed by the personnel lady and I’m afraid to say a very bad lie came out. I told her I had been at a beloved aunt’s funeral. Dabbing my eyes in a performance De Niro would have been proud of, I was thrown off when she then said, ‘That’s odd because when we called you your sister told us you were headed to a party.’
I reflected momentarily on this before replying. To this day I’m ashamed of this even more shocking lie: ‘My sister, yes, she has something wrong with her… Her brain… Retarded… Very sad.’ The poor woman in personnel looked at me with a mixture of utter disgust and pity. Pity, I guess, about what would become of a young man who could lie in such a fashion. A DJ, obviously.
UNDERAGE DRINKING
Just as my experience of the working world was forming, so was my enjoyment of getting drunk with my mates and then trying to get laid. In my peer group I looked the oldest because I had bum fluff. Who can forget bum fluff? Wispy growths of hair around your chin that you thought made you look like Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The plain truth was you just looked silly
Whether you had bum fluff or not, there was one thing all teenagers needed: fake ID. You could usually get your fake ID from someone’s older brother who was like Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape – ‘The Forger’. He’d make them on his BBC Micro or Commodore 64. The standard was pretty poor.
Getting the booze was by two routes, both with their own hazards: the off licence or the pub.
Let’s look at the off licence first. This needed planning. Any hormonal wobble in the not consistently broken voice could jeopardise the whole mission and it would be no White Lightning or Merrydown cider for you. I remember once going in and successfully buying six litres of cider and two cans of tramp juice (Special