I wish I had kept ‘Story and Picture’ books throughout my entire childhood, although most of the teen entries would have involved crudely drawn pictures of me telling my parents how unfair they were, and crayoned images of my increasing angst over inappropriate boys. Still, I would have perhaps found the humour in a failed attempt to lose my virginity much quicker had I the opportunity to sketch it out in felt-tipped pen [*pauses to attempt a quick biro draft, smirks*].  Think Dad’s dressing gown, unnecessarily large condom,  Coal Chamber on the CD player, Nine Inch Nail lyrics grunted seductively in a ear.  ["On Thursday my boyfriend attempted to 'have it off' with me but it didn't really work so he got grumpy and told me that I was uptight..."].

Anyway, to more innocent days when spare time was filled with sweets and Sunday night TV, where the only things a six-year-old girl could write about were her family’s arguments, her Mother’s weight gain and the inconvenient death of a grandparent.  John’s books from a similar time reveal a fantasy world of Dr Who monsters, battling robots and effortless space travel. The only monsters in my books are my sisters and the local paedophiles.

I recently found a stash of my ‘Story and Picture’ books in my Dad’s attic, and settled on the bathroom’s carpetted floor, laughing and crying  my way through the clunkily illustrated and appalling misspelt exercise books.

The first entry I wanted to put up here describes a Littleton First School sports day. I have very few memories of my sporting activities prior to Montfort winning the house rounders competition at Blackminster in 1995. The most sporty thing I ever did at first school was to throw Paul Stansfield’s pumps down the corridor when I thought no-one was looking. The wretchedly omnipresent Mrs Hall caught me red-handed. There is a 200m swimming badge in a shoebox somewhere (but I think I may have pinched that from one of the Kirbys) and I remember being awarded a yellow ribbon for my performance in a sack race, that was stitched onto the hip of my itchy school leotard.

Tuesday 91th July

On Thursday it was sports day. I was in the hoop race. After a while it poured with rain. So all the people had to go home. And the children who were in sports day had to go to there class. So we had to have are sports day on a Monday. I was in the harnes race and the skipping race.

There was a sack race, bat and beanbag race, a three-legged race, a fathers race, a mums race. In the mums race Liz Keene, Matthews mum, tripped over a dog. There was a toddlers race too. Reds won in sports day and I was reds. I saw Lee’s mum and Dad. Lee’s sister ran in the toddler’s race. My mum didnt go in the mums race.

When I was at middle school I was allowed to stay up later on Thursday evenings to watch The Crystal Maze. I loved the theme tune (Zack Lawrence’s “Force Field”), hated the renovation of Industrial Zone to Ocean Zone, and scoffed at the I.T. executives and management consultants as they missed the crystals that were so obvious to their frustrated teammates. I planned the type of game I would pick (Mystery) and which zone I would want our team to start in (Aztec, so that we could kayak through the ‘jungle’ to the games arena).

When not pretending to be part of a Man. United-based fantasy game with my friend, I avidly played The Crystal Maze game on her Acorn computer (even though it would always crash during the last level in the crystal dome), and was overjoyed when my Dad announced that the Jones girls could each pick an item from the Benson & Hedges tokens catalogue and I found a handheld Crystal Maze game therein. The game bore little resemblance to the television show, taking the form of an impossibly difficult side-scroller with background music that sounded like a dying smoke alarm. I took the device into school in the hope of impressing my classmates but it was promptly confiscated by the deputy head.

The Crystal Maze still influences me today (and not because Challenge TV has it on repeat). When I was 11, I devised a series of Crystal Maze-like games to motivate me to complete my daily housework tasks. To this day there is part of my brain that approaches the drying-up as if it was a Crystal Maze game in ‘Chore Zone’, where the challenge is to carefully lift items off the monstrous pile on the draining board so as not to move anything else remaining on there, with 3 lives to lose before being ‘locked in’. Furthermore, like zombie videogames, the programme has embedded itself into my dreamscapes and I frequently have nightmares that Richard O’Brien forces me to play ‘Physical’ games.

As to the O’Brien vs Ed Tudor-Pole debate, I remain undecided. The latter lives in the same part of London as me and I often see him decked out in mock country gent garb as I wait for my bus in the mornings.

I went up to university in the autumn of 2000 and fell in love by letters sent between Oxford and London, Worcester and Offenham. Whilst we both acquired mobile numbers (differing only in their last digits) and our first e-mail addresses, our main form of communication was the handwritten letter and on occasion, the humourous greeting card. The latter would then be affixed either to my noticeboard or on the door of my room in International Hall. My friends and I would also ’amusingly’ exchange letters with descriptive addresses and wait with great trepidation  to see if they were successfully delivered by the local postal worker.

With the rise of e-mail, emoticons and chatcronyms,  comes the death of the envelope as a medium itself . Whilst the sentiments expressed within the undergraduate correspondence are long past their use-by date, the goofy artwork and silly notes of the envelopes still make me smile.

The mail sorter in my halls of residence must have thought we were a right pair of pillocks.

The first year of university was one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I was one of the youngest in the year, everyone in my archaeology cohort seemed to have been on gap years in exotic and/or underprivileged climes, and International Hall seemed mainly populated by braying trust fund types.  Through the Evesham years my Mum had consoled me with romantic tales of how I would meet like-minded people at university who would become my best friends for life. I looked around my student halls and a tiny part of me died. There were of course exceptions but nevertheless my first year was a bleakish mess of insecurities, verrucas, drug scares and unwanted pregnancies (the latter two fortunately not mine).

As hard as it is for those who know me now to believe, I felt pretty timid and shy and frustrated that my Worcestershire-primed gregariousness had taken leave precisely at the time in my life when it was  needed the most. Towards the end of the second term I realised that something needed to change and I decided to run as the Specialist Degree Rep. for our student archaeology society ( the unimaginatively monikered ’SAS’) so that I had an excuse to be outgoing and friendly towards my fellow students. The plan worked and I enjoyed a year of event organising, dabbling in student politics  and reassuring nervous first years.  

The student handbook we lovingly crafted succeeded  not only in welcoming 2001′s freshers to the Institute of Archaeology but also gave Rochester’s ex-girlfriend a much-needed glimpse of her replacement. I found his copy of the handbook some months later, peppered with yellow highlighter and a single comment: “She seems like quite a gal but what’s wrong with her face?”

I owe my ‘career’ to an educational adventure videogame from the 1980s. I wish I could say that I was motivated by a fervent desire to solve the world energy crisis (was there even a crisis in 1988?) or to improve the lives of others, or that I inherited my Dad’s work ethic or my Mum’s conscientiousness – but no, I pushed myself through school so that I could beat all the other kids to the class computer, and the habit stuck.

This all began back in Mrs Prentice’s class with Granny’s Garden. I would rush through my comprehension exercises and maths workbooks so that I could be the first to get onto the BBC computer and hear the sweet sweet sounds of the folksy theme tune. I don’t think I ever managed to rescue any of the royal children (Esther, Tom, Clare, Anna, Jessica, and Daniel) – although I do believe I’ve now found the names for the next generation of Joneses.

In addition to good grades, I  owe my abiding love of videogames and fondness for the <SPACEBAR> to Granny’s Garden, and thus the following:

• several big friendships – Stayte and I have lost hours of our lives playing through Jurassic Park on the SNES, defeated time after time not by crazed velociraptors hiding in darkened generator rooms, but by shonky game glitches.
• resourcefulness and perseverance
• elements of my vocabulary – particularly playing through Toejam and Earl with my sisters.
• a general desensitisation to violence
• strong thumbs

Whilst waiting for our two-hour session on the Archaeology of Egypt to begin, one Thursday morning in Autumn 2001, one of the more mature students on our course uttered the line all near-skint second years want to hear: “girls, I’ve got some work for you, if you want it.” Before I could fully rationalise selling my sparkling company and/or body (aforementioned student had hinted at an escorting history), he continued:  ”for a royalty free image publisher in London Bridge, £9 an hour, a few mornings or afternoons a week.” Woohoo. We had hit the money without having to jeopardise our studies (ahem) and I was one step closer to living out my Scrooge McDuck fantasy.

The company was located just south of Tower Bridge and I caught the 149 bus from outside my flat on Kingsland High Street straight to London Bridge and then walked through the wharves  to the office.  In addition to supplementing my student loan, the opportunity was also my first foray into the world of the London urban professionalerati. Everything in the office was chrome and there were flat screen TVs everywhere [ahh, good old 2001, when the 2010 East London Line Extension seemed a lifetime away and the cathode ray tube was king].

We spent our time updating the company’s client database with one ear on the sales team’s clumsy, anti-charismatic patter (had The Office been created at this point, we would most certainly have put on our best Brent impressions, at a volume just loud enough to be impolite). After about six months things started to change. The role gradually shifted from ‘updating the client list’ to ‘cold calling everyone in the industry’; the sales reps grew yet more desperate in their pleas, our motivation waned and we took the opportunity to use the 192.com business account to find out contact details of exes, potential boyfriends and new girlfriends. A summer back at Bomfords beckoned.

Nigella Lawson eat your heart out… (actually, she probably would).

My early years at primary school involved one or other of the following activities:

• measuring everything in sight using hand spans and cubits;
• battling various poxy childhood lurgies
• throwing mini beanbags
• losing myself in puzzle adventure books
• rushing through my comprehension exercises so that I could play Granny’s Garden on the school computer (that’s right, just the one)
• baking

The Usborne Puzzle Adventure series and Walker Books’ Funfair of Evil, Castle of Fear etc collection will no doubt feature in their own posts at some point, as will the tremendous influence Granny’s Garden and videogames in general, have had on my life so far. As for baking, I seem to remember spending all my time with Mrs Thould either cooking things in the school kitchen (usually involving melted Mars Bars and cereal) or writing up recipes in her classroom. The reason for my unrelenting sweet tooth might just be found in this recipe booklet penned by my 5 year old self. Whilst my baking repertoire has expanded somewhat, my artistic ability remains woefully unchanged.

Like most mothers, I imagine, my Mum trotted out the line “videogames rot your brain” on a fairly frequent basis in a futile attempt to get her first born to stop playing on the Megadrive and develop healthy interests in things like embroidery and learning how to use the washing machine. My 12 -year old self would reply (as indeed would my inner 12-year old now reply to cries from videogame snobs that “videogames are for mongoloid losers”): “they don’t rot your brain, they encourage you to think laterally and come some kind of zombie/nuclear apocalypse, I’ll be better prepared than half you goons out there.” All of this was rendered invalid however when I woke up at 3am one morning to find my Mum sitting with her back against the foot of my bed playing Columns.

She is quite the sucker for blocky puzzle games now. Columns, Klax, Bejewelled – my Mum has high scores on all of them.

I had a lot of orthodontic treatment growing up. My gums are wincing at the very thought of it.

The great tooth shuffle of the 1990s began when I was in Year 3 at Littleton. I would be taken out of school to have the extractions deemed necessary for my lower face not to look like a fight in a denture factory. Too many teeth, not enough mouth was the basic diagnosis. For moral support my classmates, under Mrs Prentice, were instructed to write letters and send drawings to me. Chris S. was the class illustrator and was always on hand to sketch the range of situations experienced by your average 8 year old. Mrs Prentice, ever the professional, always made sure I had a copy of the spelling list so that I could not miss the weekly spelling test on ‘but-I-had-to-go-to-the-dentist’ terms. I had removable braces for most of my late-childhood/early adolescence and was ‘lucky’ that I only needed to wear “traintracks” for a year (I had hoped for the full three year term so that my oboeist’s embouchure would be irreversibly damaged and I could hand the wretched thing back to the county).

The headline from the local newspaper almost makes me sound jet set: ‘Egyptologist leaves dig to award prizes’ (and buff ego).

In June 2008 I was asked to be the guest of honour at my middle school’s end of term award ceremony. I suspected that someone more important/interesting had pulled out at the last minute but that didn’t dint my chuffedness at being asked to return to Blackminster (the school that my Dad had attended and where my Nan had worked as a dinner lady**). I cut short my season in Kouphovouno to fly back for the ceremony and wrote my ‘inspiring the younger generation’ speech on the flight from Athens to the UK.

The ceremony went well despite my Mum sneaking in at the back (motherly pride never dies) and it dawning on me  as I arrived that it had been 13 years (exactly half my lifetime) since I had been in the assembly hall.

After the assembly had finished and the students had escaped home for the Summer, the teachers retired to the staffroom to neck warm wine and have one last check of the timetable. It felt an almighty privilege to be asked to join them, I suddenly felt 13, not 26, and enjoyed a surreal half hour or so getting slightly tipsy with my old teachers whilst I waited for my Dad to pick me up.

**My Nan had left the school by the time I attended but that didn’t stop the other dinner ladies from giving me super mega portions of sausages and sweetcorn. Hooray for Jones nepotism.