Computers

When I was little my friend Christian's dad had a ZX Spectrum computer. He had it in the study, it stood alone on a table with a small portable television and you were not allowed to bring drinks or snacks into the room. We played Harrier Attack and The Hobbit. I'm sure I walked past him on Commercial Street a few years ago but I was too amazed to say anything. After a couple of years I told my dad that all households would have a computer one day and requested that Santa bring me a ZX Spectrum. I was obviously paraphrasing TV's 'Tomorrow's World,' my dad disagreed but Santa brought me one all the same.

Quite a few years later, when I lived in Bracknell, my closest friend at the comprehensive school there was a boy named Andrew. He was a very good illustrator, always drawing cartoons with a Rotring pen. He was talented but very competitive. I would often visit his house in the nearby council estate at lunch time and we would play games on his ZX Spectrum. His mother always wore fluffy slippers and was always smoking. Sometimes Andrew would come round to my house on the weekend or an evening after school and she would still be wearing the pink, fluffy carpet slippers and be smoking a cigarette when she came to drop him off.

There were often photocopied sheets of racist/sexist/homophobic jokes lying around his room which his elder brother, I was told, would bring back from work. They weren't funny despite being distasteful. I remember one, which I needed explaining to me, went 'Q: Who likes eating pussy? A: You, me and Billy Jean King.' I didn't know who Billy Jean King was. He had a Sam Fox duvet cover, the page three girl who posed topless in The Sun. Her head was on the pillow case and a life size image of her topless body on the slip. It must have been almost like sleeping with Samantha Fox herself. The Projects once missed her by ten minutes in the rehearsal rooms that we used to use, incidentally.

One time his mother offered me a cup of tea and a doughnut. The mug was dirty and she wiped it with a dirty cloth, the doughnut was old and oily and had been squashed under lots of things in the fridge. I hid the doughnut in my bag when Andrew wasn't looking, pretending that I had eaten it.

As I say, he was competitive and reticent to give complements or acknowledge anyone's successes and so being friends with him was tiring and unrewarding, but he was an interesting and intelligent person all the same.

I lost interest in computers until University when I discovered the internet. An English Literature professor had explained 'email' to us (we were all amazed and had difficulty coming to terms with the concept) so I went to the IT room. I looked up Geordie Mick from Prolapse's page on the internet but I couldn't really work out how Netscape Navigator worked and it was all so slow that I gave up for a few more years.

Long after University, realising that I had a potential job opportunity, I followed in Howard's footsteps and taught myself how to animate using Flash, securing a job in the dot com bubble. I'll talk more about this job later, so much money was wasted on such a stupid proposition. I taught myself how to program games with software called DIrector and then later with Flash. I taught myself c++. Then I decided to turn my back on programming.