Fifty Years Later: Monday, 5th July 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
Slept badly. It’s so warm and humid. I woke up at 5:30am.
I’m not one for staying in bed once I’m awake. I like to be up and at it. So I got dressed and went out to revise by the tennis courts. I sat on the grass bank with my books. There was usually one other boy about, often someone doing O-Levels or A-Levels. At that time in the morning the world belonged to whoever had managed to crawl out of bed first.
The weather feels unusual. It can’t have been much more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight degrees, but for a Northumberland boy it seemed extraordinary to have sunshine and warmth day after day. Usually summer-like sun burst in for a few days ik July or August and then was gone.
Latin exam. Do very badly.
To be honest, I expected to. Latin had become a lost cause. Seven years of it and my brain had shut down all interest in the subject. Looking at the paper, I didn’t even feel inclined to hunt around for answers buried somewhere in my memory. I just wrote what came into my head and moved on. It was like trying to persuade a serious architect to admire pebbledash. And it served my purposes to do badly. I was going to drop it.
Physics: 8th (holding in there! Like a nice trapeze artist learning to keep his balance. I want this one!)
Chemistry: 19th (out of 17 – I think the teacher was making a point. Had there been a lower set I’d have been in it).
French: hard (I’m a lost cause. It’s like I’m colour blind in a world rich with linguistic colour).
The strange thing is that I wasn’t upset by any of this. Had I done badly in Geography, Biology, English or Maths I would have been distraught.
Lunch.
German: not too bad. The thing with German – I felt a connection to history via the two world wars. I’d had a deeper value and insight.
In amongst all this I suddenly started writing a play.
God knows where that came from. It may have been called You’ll Die of Water, after a gypsy curse. The phrase had floated around our family for years. The story was that a gypsy woman had said it to my sister while she was being held in my mother’s arms. It had become part of family folklore, repeated often enough to feel real whether I genuinely remembered it from childhood or not.
Perhaps that phrase resurfaced because stories were already swirling around in my head. We had been reading Shakespeare. Twelfth Night. Possibly The Tempest. I already knew Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth from film versions. Shakespeare was full of curses, storms, ghosts, mistaken identities and impossible romances – just the ingredients for a thrilling story.
Then again, it may have been something completely different. Perhaps a science-fiction tale inspired by the strange heatwave. Perhaps some mixture of both. The title and the idea now hover somewhere just out of reach.
I always liked making things up. At home we’d put on shows. Action Men and toy soldiers were given elaborate plots, battles and dramatic endings. Whole campaigns would be imagined and acted out. Perhaps this was simply the next version of the same thing.
I may have typed it up – they felt more professional, more believable. A proper writer wrote proper words on a typewriter. Or they wrote longhand with a fountain pen.
Like so many stories I started, it was never finished. Or at least never to my satisfaction. The gap between the story in my head and the one on the page always seemed impossibly large.
Athletics: Tried discus and javelin. Did relays.
Back at house: I Had a bash on Bassett electric guitar. A £50 unbranded sun-kissed Hertiecaster. He was learning too. I had half imagined that you picked up an electric guitar and somehow became a rock star. Instead it immediately dawned on me that it was a genuine instrument. Like a violin or piano. You had to learn it. He wanted someone to sand off the glam sun-kissed colour and paint it black. I offered.
I fiddled about with the usual clichés. Heavy rock riffs. Fragments of things that sounded vaguely familiar. The reality was less glamorous than I’d imagined.
Yet the guitar itself represented something larger.
I wasn’t dreaming of becoming a session musician. I was imagining Bowie. Performance. A 12 string acoustic visitor. Stage lights. Being the front man. Singing rather than playing. The guitar pointed towards the possibility of standing in front of an audience, whether in a band, a musical or something else entirely.
Who needs to play guitar if you’re the singer?
Revise English and Biology.
Another day gone.
Reflection, fifty years later
Reading this now, I see less an examination candidate than a boy already beginning to sort the world into categories of genuine interest and tolerated obligation.
The marks matter, but selectively. Latin, French and Chemistry were subjects I endured. Geography, Biology, English, Maths and Art were different. They were bound up with identity. Success or failure in those felt personal.
There is something rather revealing in that distinction. Schools like Sedbergh measured boys across every subject equally. Yet even at fourteen I was already assigning my own values. I cared intensely about what spoke to my imagination and scarcely at all about what did not.
What also emerges is a recurring pattern that appears throughout later life. Whenever pressure mounted, I drifted towards creativity. Stories. Plays. Art. Music. Performance. The imagination was not an escape from reality so much as another way of engaging with it.
The unfinished play is perhaps the most revealing detail of all. Like many later projects, it began with enthusiasm, possibility and a strong image. The difficulty was never starting. It was matching the finished work to the richness of the version that existed in my head.
That tension between imagination and execution may be one of the most persistent themes running through these diaries and, indeed, through much of my life since.
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