Five-Year Diary: Sunday, 29th March 1976
I keep waking through the night. Not properly awake, not properly asleep either—just drifting in and out as if my brain is being flushed through with dreams. It’s my first night back home. Nothing I can hold onto, just the sensation of movement, fragments passing through.
Morning comes slowly.
I give Mum some chocolates—something small, dutiful, a gesture more than anything. Then I sit down to type out key contact numbers, neat and ordered, to stick beside the telephone. It feels oddly important, as if organising these numbers might impose some structure on everything else.
Swimming Club
Later, I head into Newcastle for the swimming club at the City Baths.
You pay £1 at the door and change in those narrow wooden cubicles that line the pool, the smell of chlorine already heavy in the air. I’m in a group with girls—older, stronger, more confident in the water. They are noticeably fitter, faster, and more purposeful. I feel it immediately. I’m slow. Behind. Exposed.
And yet I’m barely training compared to what’s required. Outside of school competitions, I’m nowhere near the level needed. I know it, even if I don’t quite admit it.
There’s a quiet embarrassment to it—not dramatic, just a steady awareness of not quite belonging in that lane.
Newcastle City Hall
Afterwards, I check out the posters for what’s on next door at the City Hall.
10cc. Leo Sayer.
It reminds me of some years ago, when the Rolling Stones were playing while we trained next door. They were playing a matinee show. We’d slipped out, still in wet trunks, towels wrapped around us, and crept in through a cellar entrance, convinced we might make it backstage. We didn’t, of course. We ended up somewhere beneath the stage—close enough to feel the vibration, not close enough to see anything. Still, it felt like we’d brushed against something bigger.
After swimming, I take presents around to Granny and Grandpa.
Grandpa is decorating—methodical, absorbed in it. I’m given lemonade and a McEwan’s beer, which feels faintly illicit, or at least grown-up enough to notice. Lunch follows, unremarkable but steady, part of the rhythm of the day.
At home, the television goes on.
The Little Mermaid.
There’s some sort of discussion—bordering on argument—about whether the lawn needs cutting. It drifts in and out of my attention.
Hamster Maze
I end up playing with the hamster, setting up a maze we’ve made for it. Watching it move through the tunnels, hesitate, choose, retrace its steps. Something is compelling in it—the smallness of the world it’s trapped in, the illusion of freedom within it.
And then the idea comes.
A story: Escape from an Alien Zoo.
Children captured, kept, observed—like exhibits. They have to survive, then escape. Something like Land of the Valley of the Giants, I suppose—but more enclosed, more controlled. The hamster becomes the model. The maze becomes the world.
Film’76
Later, Film ’76 with Barry Norman.
A feature on David Bowie—Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Bowie as the alien. Pale, other, displaced. Not quite human, not quite at home anywhere. Watching it, there’s a strange pull—not fear, not even fascination exactly, but recognition of something I can’t quite name.
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