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Had you learned how things would turn out today in your childhood, would you have done anything different?
I've asked myself this question, now, for the last handful of days. If I knew about things like email, mobile phones, the internet and roleplaying games when I was a child; if I knew that they would become the dominant phenomena in my life rather than what I thought would become the dominant phenomena, would I have done something different?
The answer? Well, yes. But would it have made the slightest bit of difference? I doubt it. Certain environmental factors conspired to make any life changes I sought to make impossible.
The bullies at school. The frustrating nescience of life in small town North Wales, in some part of the world that lies still forgotten, despite it having been the birthplace of one Bryn Terfel, operatic legend.
The fact that, in 1981, there weren't any real choices for IT courses available anywhere. IT was some strange academic attachment to other courses to which you had to dedicate yourself, like Marine Biology or Chemistry.
Did my parents have too much ambition, or not enough ambition, to fight for mine? I can't speak for them. All I can tell you is that I had none. I had all this knowledge, but I had next to zero interest in anything. I don't know if that was a reaction to the life I was living, being every fucking bully's victim from Ysgol Y Babanod onwards or what.
All I knew was that, if I tried to do anything well, I'd get a fucking kicking after class. So I hid my mind under a bushel.
Had I known what was coming, and given a chance to do anything different, would I do something about it? I think I might have.
I might have carried a knife to school, for one thing.
Or I might have figured out a way for the bullies to appear to off themselves and leave no forensic traces linking their suicides to me.
But then, my personality might be a little different today. A little harder. A bit nastier, with no time for my f'list.
Oh, and my Dad would not have spent most of his life deliberately putting me down in favour of my brother, who as anyone who knows my family knows, turned out to be the biggest waste of skin to ever wear an ASBO, and a scoundrel who seemed to go out of his way to reward Dad's misguided loyalty with betrayal, deceit and downright disappointment.
I saw my bro the other day, going out shopping with his missus, a huge wadge of cash - all twenties - in his pocket. "You can have cash like this," he said. "Work for me."
I just spent £70 on a voice recorder, and thought it expensive. My Bank of Sock contains pennies. Oh, and if I save up more than £2000 in total capital, I have to start paying full Council Tax and rent, so how can I save up for my retirement?
Dad's even worse off. For all that he regularly and systematically put me down with outbursts of calling me "mental" and "stupid" whenever I came up against my brother, for all that he favoured my brother in business and treated me with contempt when I kept telling him about how computers were going to change the world, he's living now in the same kind of poverty in which he once lived as a young man.
For all that he wanted to advance, he got nowhere.
For all that I wonder today whether I should have wanted to do more with my childhood, I'm living now with debilitating panic attacks in a small single occupancy flat in a town that reflects the hell I grew up in.
I have had more than 16,000 days to get my act together - and when you consider that I've sought to live my life, with its strangeness and its ethereal spirituality, rather than what other people thought my life ought to be (a dismal 9 to 5 job in some office, being the victim of the same bastard bullies as I faced in every school I went to), I don't know that the choices I made were the wrong ones after all.
You see, the same destination awaits us all. But at least I'll meet it head on, free, with a sense of childlike curiosity that I never let go of.
What was it someone said? "Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free."
I still have mine. And all the arrogant twats who let their fists lead their conversations never had that inch - not even to sell out to someone else.
I told my bro, with his wadge of cash, "Funny thing, money. You can't eat it. You can't fuck it. But we are all told we've got to worship it."
And when Dad goes on about "Money makes you free," I respond with "Money equals work, therefore work makes you free, eh?" or, occasionally, "He who would not work - neither shall he eat," the motto above the Workhouse. Sometimes, I go all out and quote Dickens' Scrooge at him. "Are there no workhouses?"
Right. 'Tis half past seven am. Got to get washed and dressed. I've got a fair day ahead of me, outdoors, listening to the birds and watching Nature. Doing somethng those cooped up in cramped, sweaty offices dearly wish they could do, but never quite get around to doing when they get the chance to.
I may be broke. But I'm free. :)
I've asked myself this question, now, for the last handful of days. If I knew about things like email, mobile phones, the internet and roleplaying games when I was a child; if I knew that they would become the dominant phenomena in my life rather than what I thought would become the dominant phenomena, would I have done something different?
The answer? Well, yes. But would it have made the slightest bit of difference? I doubt it. Certain environmental factors conspired to make any life changes I sought to make impossible.
The bullies at school. The frustrating nescience of life in small town North Wales, in some part of the world that lies still forgotten, despite it having been the birthplace of one Bryn Terfel, operatic legend.
The fact that, in 1981, there weren't any real choices for IT courses available anywhere. IT was some strange academic attachment to other courses to which you had to dedicate yourself, like Marine Biology or Chemistry.
Did my parents have too much ambition, or not enough ambition, to fight for mine? I can't speak for them. All I can tell you is that I had none. I had all this knowledge, but I had next to zero interest in anything. I don't know if that was a reaction to the life I was living, being every fucking bully's victim from Ysgol Y Babanod onwards or what.
All I knew was that, if I tried to do anything well, I'd get a fucking kicking after class. So I hid my mind under a bushel.
Had I known what was coming, and given a chance to do anything different, would I do something about it? I think I might have.
I might have carried a knife to school, for one thing.
Or I might have figured out a way for the bullies to appear to off themselves and leave no forensic traces linking their suicides to me.
But then, my personality might be a little different today. A little harder. A bit nastier, with no time for my f'list.
Oh, and my Dad would not have spent most of his life deliberately putting me down in favour of my brother, who as anyone who knows my family knows, turned out to be the biggest waste of skin to ever wear an ASBO, and a scoundrel who seemed to go out of his way to reward Dad's misguided loyalty with betrayal, deceit and downright disappointment.
I saw my bro the other day, going out shopping with his missus, a huge wadge of cash - all twenties - in his pocket. "You can have cash like this," he said. "Work for me."
I just spent £70 on a voice recorder, and thought it expensive. My Bank of Sock contains pennies. Oh, and if I save up more than £2000 in total capital, I have to start paying full Council Tax and rent, so how can I save up for my retirement?
Dad's even worse off. For all that he regularly and systematically put me down with outbursts of calling me "mental" and "stupid" whenever I came up against my brother, for all that he favoured my brother in business and treated me with contempt when I kept telling him about how computers were going to change the world, he's living now in the same kind of poverty in which he once lived as a young man.
For all that he wanted to advance, he got nowhere.
For all that I wonder today whether I should have wanted to do more with my childhood, I'm living now with debilitating panic attacks in a small single occupancy flat in a town that reflects the hell I grew up in.
I have had more than 16,000 days to get my act together - and when you consider that I've sought to live my life, with its strangeness and its ethereal spirituality, rather than what other people thought my life ought to be (a dismal 9 to 5 job in some office, being the victim of the same bastard bullies as I faced in every school I went to), I don't know that the choices I made were the wrong ones after all.
You see, the same destination awaits us all. But at least I'll meet it head on, free, with a sense of childlike curiosity that I never let go of.
What was it someone said? "Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free."
I still have mine. And all the arrogant twats who let their fists lead their conversations never had that inch - not even to sell out to someone else.
I told my bro, with his wadge of cash, "Funny thing, money. You can't eat it. You can't fuck it. But we are all told we've got to worship it."
And when Dad goes on about "Money makes you free," I respond with "Money equals work, therefore work makes you free, eh?" or, occasionally, "He who would not work - neither shall he eat," the motto above the Workhouse. Sometimes, I go all out and quote Dickens' Scrooge at him. "Are there no workhouses?"
Right. 'Tis half past seven am. Got to get washed and dressed. I've got a fair day ahead of me, outdoors, listening to the birds and watching Nature. Doing somethng those cooped up in cramped, sweaty offices dearly wish they could do, but never quite get around to doing when they get the chance to.
I may be broke. But I'm free. :)
