The programme cost two pounds. David paid. He always paid — that was David, the oldest, the one who made the gesture. He handed it over like it was nothing, but two pounds in 1976 was a fortune. It was glossy. Properly glossy — the kind that made you hold it with both hands, afraid your thumbs would leave marks.

Christmas Eve. London Olympia. Rod Stewart.

I was fifteen, though for the longest time I’d have told you twelve or thirteen. I had the venue right. I had the excitement right. I had the feeling of it — the noise rolling back off the walls before Rod Stewart even walked on. All of that was right. What I had wrong was who was there with me.

We were staying at my brothers’ place in North London. Upstairs of two semis knocked together. David and John shared the place. The family downstairs had a son my age, and his dad was a detective who looked like he’d walked straight off the set of *The Sweeney*.

David would make his famous cherry cheesecake when we visited, and nobody’s glass was ever empty around him — he’d refill them before you ever noticed. Not long before he died, I convinced him to share his cheesecake recipe with me.

Mum and Dad were with us that Christmas. Her health had really deteriorated — happy pills, they’d called them, prescribed until they’d destroyed her liver. The Royal Free in Hampstead was just up the road. She had two years left. She was soldiering on. That was always the phrase.

We spent Christmas together in London frequently after her surgery. Pantomimes in the West End — Rod Hull and Emu one year. Superman in Leicester Square. But mostly we’d stay in and watch the Christmas specials. Les Dawson. Dick Emery. Those were Mum’s favourites.

John said he couldn’t come to the concert. Had to work on his PhD. But he’d watch it on the TV — Whispering Bob Harris was presenting it live on the Old Grey Whistle Test, John Peel simulcasting on Radio One. It’d be *just the same*, he said.

I didn’t think twice. I was fifteen and going to my first ever concert. I wasn’t thinking about what John was giving up. I wasn’t thinking about John at all.

So it was David, Mary, and me. Mary was John’s girlfriend — not David’s. She’s his wife now. Forty-eight years.

David steered us in. I remember the noise hitting us — not music yet, just the sound of thousands of people pressed together, all of them bigger and older and louder than me. I remember Rod kicking footballs into the crowd. I remember him wearing the Scottish football strip for part of the set, though I’ve learned not to trust the details anymore. Britt Ekland was supposed to be there. They were together then, and there’d been rumours. I thought I saw her, stood off to the side of the stage. But maybe I made that up too.

What I know is real: the second song.

This Old Heart Of Mine.

The Isley Brothers. Tamla Motown. One of the records John used to play at home after he’d dragged me into Chesterfield on a Saturday, spent what Mum gave him to look after me at Hudson’s Records, carrying his haul back like treasure. Hudson’s still had listening booths back then — you’d hand your single to the person behind the counter, they’d put it on, and point you to the right booth. John would slip into the booth and I’d stand beside him, too small to reach, too young to be offered a turn. I couldn’t really hear anything. I’d watch his body pick up the beat — the nod, the shift, the half-smile when the hook landed. I’d ask if I could listen. He’d ignore me. I’d pretend to hate his music.

I didn’t hate his music.

And now Rod Stewart was singing it. The opening bars, and the crowd pushed forward, and I was fifteen, stood in the Olympia on Christmas Eve, and the song I used to pretend I couldn’t stand was filling a room I had no business being in.

John was back in Hendon. Watching it on the TV. Just the same.

I told this story for years. Decades. It was one of those stories you recycle — John and I would get together, start reminiscing, and the Olympia night would come around like a favourite track. I’d tell it the same way every time. The four of us — David, John, Mary, and me — at Rod Stewart on Christmas Eve. My first ever concert. What a night.

John never corrected me.

Not once. Not in forty-something years of me telling it wrong. He’d let me keep him in the crowd, standing next to me, watching his favourite singer — Rod ‘the Mod’ Stewart, the voice of The Faces, who’d come out of The Small Faces, who were John’s band. He’d let me have the version where he was there. Where we heard This Old Heart Of Mine together, the song he’d played on Saturday afternoons while I pretended not to listen.

I found out about three years ago. I was back in the UK for John’s 70th birthday, and we were doing what we always do — pulling out the old stories, turning them over. I started in on the Rod Stewart night. Told him how he’d taken me to my first ever show.

He went quiet. Not waiting-for-his-turn quiet. Something else.

Mary said it.

“No he didn’t. He didn’t go.”

I thought she was getting confused. I had this memory — fully formed, detailed, certain — of John at Olympia. But she was adamant. It was me, her, and David. I’d taken John’s place.

John wouldn’t look at me. I asked him to confirm it. He did. And when I asked him why — why he’d given up Rod Stewart on Christmas Eve, his favourite band, a gig going out live on national television — he said:

“You really, really wanted to go.”

That night became a story about me, when it was really a story about him all along.

The programme is gone. I threw it away when I was seventeen. Mum died, and I got rid of everything that marked my youth up to that point — the toys, the books, the glossy programme David had bought me at my first concert. It was time to put them behind me.

David’s gift — the one you could hold — I threw that away. John’s gift I kept for fifty years without knowing I had it.

His records, though — those I kept. He gave me his 45s in 1980, and I carried them back to Wolverhampton like holy relics. They’re in my jukebox now. A 1951 Seeburg, model 100B. His records and mine, side by side on the carousel.

Every time I drop a quarter in, I’m back in Hudson’s Records. Saturday morning. John with the headphones on. Me beside him, too small to listen, reading his body for the beat.

He’d already put me in the booth.

Mary’s still a little miffed he wasn’t there with her.

We scrubbed in silence, four teenagers bent over pie-shaped halos that refused to blend in. Cream carved pale scars into the grease of decades, lighter patches that made the rest of the wall look darker. Every wipe made it worse. The cloths turned gray. None of us looked at each other.

The night before, bread rolls had flown. Arcs of flour-dusted bread, soft thuds against shoulders and walls. Crumbs clung to our clothes. We picked up the rolls, brushed them off, and set them back on the plates. Napkins folded into the shapes Mrs. Simpson insisted on, lined sharp as soldiers. I still fold them that way. Laughter too loud in the empty ballroom, the kind that dared someone to catch us. Flour hung in the air, sticking to sweat, catching the light.

The Shoulder of Mutton could seat six hundred. More, at a pinch — six hundred and fifty, though by then you were tripping over each other. Long tables pressed close, chairs squeezed so tight knees touched. Rooms opening into other rooms. Each louder than the next. Voices colliding until no one knew where one gathering ended and another began. Smoke clung to curtains. The few carpeted areas carried the smell of beer too deep to lift.

Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest. Weddings with confetti still stuck to shoes. Works “dos” ending in slurred speeches, fisticuffs in the car park, and usually someone crying in the toilets. Plates clattered, waiters darted like minnows, arms strained with carrying up to eight stacked dinner plates, piled high with mixed grills.

Other weeknights were quieter. Not calm. Pharmaceutical reps doling out freebies to hard-drinking doctors, pushing their latest wonder drugs under the clatter of cutlery. Doctors leaning too far back in chairs, ties loosened, glasses fogged with drink. Reps grinning, briefcases stuffed with pens and pads, voices oily with promises.

There had been a fire once. One restaurant burned to the ground. Rumors said insurance — figures seen piling car batteries against the flames. Maybe not. After the fire, the Derby Room rose. Upstairs, the Phoenix Suite. Menus thick as card. Wine lists stretching beyond Blue Nun. The Phoenix smelled different: new varnish, polished brass, a sweetness that didn’t belong. Carpets springy where the old ones lay flat.

Downstairs in the Main Ballroom, we’d occasionally have boxing rings raised where tables should be. Gloves thudding. Crowds pressed close. Bands later, bass rattling glasses on the bar. Walls trembling long after the noise stopped. Ribs shook with the bass, floorboards gave, even when you stood still.

Tupton Hall’s Sixth Form made our own claim. Do’s stitched together with under-age drinking and blaring discos. Not the school, but groups of students cobbling fictitious organizations — “The Tupton Photographic Society” was a favorite — just enough to convince The Shoulder they weren’t renting to teenagers in flared trousers and black ties from school. We’d rent corporation buses for the drunk run home. Windows fogged. Breath thick. Brut aftershave cut with beer. Songs sung loud and off-key, faces pressed to glass.

Sunday lunch was always busy, but only the anointed worked it. Afterwards, the staff sat down together for a big roast in the Derby Room. In the north, dinner was midday. Tea later. Supper after that. Plates passed hand to hand. Gravy thick. Yorkshire pudding collapsing under its own weight. Meat carved with a flourish, potatoes piled until they slid. The clatter of knives and forks gave way to a lull — the weight of roast beef settling into bellies, the room fogged with steam. Jokes duller. Plates pushed aside. Silence heavier than the meat itself.

And there were nights we dreaded.
The chicken processing factory most of all.
The dread started early. When Hoppo read the bookings, the name landed like a weight. In the cloakroom, ties pulled tighter, faces tense before we even left the kitchen. Someone muttered, “chicken lot tonight,” and no one answered.

It began with whistles. Crude jokes. Shouts of “send us one of them waiters.” Laughter rolling like a dare. Then hands. Tugging shirts. Fingers at waists. A palm. A belt yanked. Younger girls pushed forward by the older women, shrieking as they clawed, laughter high and sharp. Plates wobbled. Soup rings widening on white cloth.

We were sixteen, seventeen. Black trousers. White shirts. Black ties. Uniforms not that different from school. And they laughed at that too, tearing it down with every grab. We never thought to ask the female staff what they had to put up with.

There were about fifty of us, mainly from the same twoor three schools, with a few kids drafted in from the catering college. Then the permanent staff — a handful of veterans, fed up with babysitting us. Their eyes followed us, not kindly, when rolls flew or plates wobbled. “Useless lot,” one muttered, not bothering to lower her voice.

We’d run like ants through the maze: plates wobbling, gravy jugs spilling, dishes too hot to touch. Shoes squeaked. Sweat ran down backs. Orders shouted, colliding. Soup sloshed over bowls. A trifle dropped once, quivered on the carpet. Everyone looked away. Someone singed by a dish straight from the pass. A boy walked out mid-shift. Never came back. The rest of us kept moving.

Mrs. Simpson counted every minute. Hoppo shaved hours wherever he could. “You’re not on the clock until the doors open,” he barked, sweeping a hand as though we were loiterers instead of staff. Sixty pence an hour. Never enough.

After our shifts ended, we drank beer, chalked cues, plotted. The carpet in the bar smelled of stale beer, the lights always too dim. That was when the idea came: late-night snacks. Burgers. Scampi. Chicken in a basket. Hoppo frowned at the cost of extra kitchen staff. That was our trick — we’d do both. Cook and serve.

For a while it worked. A trickle of orders. The hiss of oil, batter clinging to our hair, grease soaking into shirts. Fingers burned on fryer handles. Smell of fried food following us home. When it slowed, we tidied. Cheese boards scraped, trifles spooned down before the dishwasher hissed and steamed. A spoon clinking against glass long after it was empty.

Then the strainer became a bat. A slice of apple pie raised in pitcher’s stance. The first thwack split the pastry, sharp as a starter pistol. Cream flew, laughter cracked — sharper, higher than it should have been. Pies arced like comets across the kitchen, walls spattered, beams dripping, trays emptied. Pedal down. No brakes.

And then the quiet. Crumbs underfoot. Brushes squeaking against tile. Pie-shaped halos refusing to blend in. The smell of apple turning sour in the grease, meat and roast clinging underneath. Each cloth worked faster, harder. None of us spoke.

The next night, Hoppo killed the experiment with a shrug.

I still fold napkins the way they taught me. I still hear the thwack of pastry against steel, sharper than laughter, heavier than silence. The stain wouldn’t lift.

Being back in the UK—for the longest stretch since I left three decades ago—has stirred something quieter loose. Not a piece I once polished, but a memory I never set down. Not until now.

It came back all at once: the heatwave, the awkward joy of failing deliberately, the feeling of something light tipping suddenly heavy. It’s not a story I planned to tell. But it surfaced. And it stuck.

So, for once, this isn’t a re-visiting. It’s a recording. A return of a different kind.

It wasn’t a problem at Park House Primary School. We were small. So was the playground—just a square of tarmac where you could manage Rounders if no one missed a base, Tag if you were fast, and British Bulldog if the teachers weren't looking. So was the expectation. PE was more like sanctioned fidgeting—beanbags and hula hoops and something called Music and Movement, broadcast on a clunky school radio, where we swayed like trees or flapped like birds at the mercy of a disembodied BBC voice.

But senior school came with linoleum corridors that echoed your footsteps too loudly. And teams. And a teacher with a whistle on a lanyard who picked captains like they were checking for contraband. First lesson, he scanned the lineup, barked two names—boys who already moved like they knew they were being watched—and had them take turns picking their squads.

I was tall. That bought me two weeks of false promise. By week four, they’d learned. I had reach but no rhythm. I moved like a placeholder.

After that, it was always the same: me and the boy with the asthma pump and a body that never fit the bench, let alone the team. We’d hover at the edge of the group, pretending we didn’t notice it was down to us. Sometimes I got picked second-last. Sometimes last. It didn’t matter. What I remember most wasn’t the waiting. It was the captain’s pause. That extra breath before calling my name. Like they were stalling, hoping someone else would volunteer to go worse.

By fifteen, I’d burned through every excuse. "Forgotten" kits, phantom colds, limp wrists wrapped in borrowed bandages. The games teacher had stopped asking. I think he assumed I was the kind of kid who bruised from chalk.

Then one morning, a note on the science block noticeboard: Ogston Reservoir, Wednesday afternoons. Dinghy sailing. Optional. The technician had offered to drive a small group of us in his VW bus. He wore deck shoes with everything and had the sort of quiet patience that came from knowing knots better than people.

There were seven of us, maybe eight. We drove out past Clay Cross to where the air felt cleaner, like it hadn’t made up its mind yet. The boats rocked lightly as we climbed in. You didn’t have to win. Just stay upright. Just stay moving. It wasn’t freedom. But it floated.

That winter—’75 into ’76—dragged like wet wool. The reservoir iced over. The VW bus broke down. We waited. Asked weekly. Nothing. When we finally made it back, it was well into summer term. Just a few Wednesdays left.

And it was that summer. The heatwave. Reservoirs shrinking. At Ladybower, they said you could see the drowned village—Derwent—poking up through the water like it had been holding its breath. Ogston didn’t offer ghosts. Just warmth and algae and the smell of metal baking in the sun.

The instructor was waiting, gleaming with sweat and pride. A new fleet of dinghies had arrived. Sleek, fast, still smelling of resin. We were marched into the changing room to rehearse drills in a static mock-up. We jostled elbows in the cramped mock-up. Dryland choreography, feigned precision.

Two groups. Three in each. My trio got one of the new boats. She moved beautifully. We played it straight at first—tacking, adjusting, nodding like we cared.

But the moment his back turned, the old rhythm returned. The love of falling. I was on the tiller. The wind caught. We surged. I turned hard into it, too fast, too sharp. The hull tipped. We leaned, too late. The sail kissed the water. Then we were airborne.

Splash. Laughter. Perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

We swam to the keel, still laughing. Pulled. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing. The mast wouldn’t budge. We didn’t understand. We’d done this dozens of times.

Captain Crusty spotted us. We straightened instinctively, laughter drying up like spilled water in sun. He roared across the water in his powerboat, swearing before he even arrived. He tried to talk us through it. Still nothing.

"The mast’s stuck in the mud," he barked. "What did I tell you about going near the bank?"

He tied a rope to the dinghy, the other end to his boat, and gunned it. The rope pulled taut. The hull strained. The mast groaned.

What none of us knew: the mast wasn’t stuck in mud. It was trapped beneath the remnants of the Ashover Light Railway, long submerged. When it finally gave, it sprang free with a shudder and a bend. The dinghy righted, but its sail now listed, the mast bowed.

He wouldn’t let us sail her back. Made us climb into the powerboat. Towed the vessel behind. Said nothing for a long time.

Back at the dock, he told us we were finished. No more sailing. Not here. Not ever.

He left to file a formal complaint with the school. Said he was disappointed. Said it felt like vandalism.

We were told to get changed. Our clothes were soaked. Jeans, jumpers, socks clinging to skin. No wetsuits. No dignity.

It went quiet again. No one met anyone’s eyes. That was when I saw them: his Wellingtons, by the door. Upright. Dry. Clean.

So I filled them. Pebbles first. Then water. And then, quietly, glued the soles to the dock with epoxy from the shelf.

He didn’t return. No call from school. No letter home.

Just the boots.

Still upright.

Still full.

Still remembering.

It was a May afternoon, the kind that makes you believe in starting over.
Top down. Music low. Leather pants softening in the sun.
I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror—teal silk shirt, Cuban heels catching the light—and nodded.
Not bad for a man in reboot.

I hadn’t been to a party in a while.
I hadn’t been asked to one in even longer.
And this wasn’t just any party—it was a 50th birthday, and a kind of quiet rebellion.
A gathering of women who usually met behind closed doors.
Many still not out at work.
It wasn’t billed as exclusive.
But I understood, the moment I stepped inside, that I was the only man in the room.

At the door, I queued behind three women swapping stories about Exit 7.
The host had meant the Delaware one—but there was another Exit 7 in Pennsylvania.
Half the out-of-staters had taken the wrong turn, landed at the same gas station, and been gently rerouted by a patient attendant.
When the woman ahead of me asked if I’d gotten lost too, I told her I was local.
She smiled. “That guy at the gas station was so nice. You should go back and invite him.”

Before I could ask what she meant, her turn came.
The woman at the check-in table handed her a name tag—top right corner colored in.
It meant she was open to meeting someone.

When it was my turn, I gave my name.
“Looking to meet anyone?”
I hesitated. “I mean… I’m open, but I’m not expecting anything. Given the guest list.”
She smiled, missed the point, and colored in the corner.
Sticker logic.

Later, the host pulled me aside.
She’d invited two women.
One was the woman of her dreams—this was their second date.
The other was from earlier.
Pretty. Enthusiastic. Planning to attend.
My job was to keep them apart.

I accepted the mission.
And failed almost immediately.

The younger woman walked in. Gorgeous, of course.
And I made a beeline to the hors d’oeuvres.
We talked. She sparkled. I sparkled back.
She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said almost divorced, just starting to feel ready.
She said she’d ended a long engagement and tumbled into her first relationship with a woman—now over.
I asked if she’d ever go back to men.
She laughed. “Not after that.”

I smiled.
Inside, I sighed.
I’d already written the plotline of our romance in my head.

She left early. Said she could tell she wasn’t the one being chosen.
I walked her to her car.
We exchanged numbers.
She never called.

Back inside, I danced.
I used to love dancing—had forgotten how much.
Halfway through the second song, a woman slid in beside me.
We moved together, light and loose, until the DJ paused to find the owner of a badly parked car.

We stood catching our breath.
She laughed, told me her own Exit 7 detour story.
Then, smiling: “That guy at the gas station? He really should’ve been invited.”

And just like that, it clicked.
The woman at check-in.
This one now.
Probably everyone at the party.

They all thought I was gay.

I said, “Wait… you think I’m gay, don’t you?”
She blinked. “Aren’t you?”

I shook my head. “What made you think that?”
She looked me up and down.

“You’re at a party with 100 lesbians.
You’re wearing leather pants.
A silk shirt.
And you’re dancing.”

Fair enough.

Then she glanced across the room.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly serious. “Whatever you do, don’t let my girlfriend find out you’re straight. She gets… territorial.”

I thanked her.
Found my jacket.
And left before the DJ restarted the music.

Outside, the air had cooled.
Someone inside laughed.
I reached up to adjust the mirror—and caught the sticker still clinging to my shirt.
Top right corner, colored in.

This isn’t a memory I grew up with. It came to me sideways, pieced together from what wasn’t said, what was nearly lost. But once it found me, I couldn’t let it go.

Things You Don’t Talk About

My dad used to rattle off his share of the winnings like it was part of his birth certificate: £18,759, seven shillings and sixpence. Not boastful — just exact. Like muscle memory. Like it still amazed him.

In 1952, four miners from Glapwell Colliery split a world-record football pools win: £75,037 and ten shillings. My dad was one of them. There’s a British Film Institute (BFI) listing for the newsreel — grainy black-and-white footage that played in cinemas across Britain — but I’ve never been able to track it down, and believe me, I’ve tried. What I do have is a photo album of stills from the film. Each of the men was given one. My dad's copy sits in my desk drawer. I open it more than I admit.

At the time, my parents were living in the small rented house my mum had grown up in — a two-up, two-down with coal fires, no hot water, and communal outhouses shared between the run-down terraces. Once a week, they’d heat water on the stove for the tin bath, taking turns in the same water. They’d been married for four years and had their names on the list for a council house. It wasn’t just space they lacked — it was air.

That same house had once held her father, who returned from the trenches gassed in the First World War and later broke his back in a mining accident. He spent the rest of his life in that front room — bedbound, with a hole in his back that never properly healed. My mum was seven. My grandmother became the breadwinner, running the canteen at the Clay Cross Foundry. My mum, though clever, left school at fourteen to help.

So when the win came, it wasn’t just money. It was reprieve. A door opened that had always been closed.

They had a four-bedroom house built for them, spending more than most did at the time, but with good reason. The plot my mum had her heart set on sat above an active coal seam. My dad consulted local mining engineers, who advised that if they built there, they should do so on a six-foot concrete raft. It added about 20% to the cost of the build. They did it anyway.

A few years later, the local pit began working the seam directly beneath the house. The blasts echoed through the floor — dull, regular thuds — and slowly, the house began to tilt. It eventually settled again, more or less. Other houses nearby weren’t as lucky. Like stitching up a wound, the one across the road had to be held together with a steel rod.

Of their £18,759, seven shillings and sixpence, my parents spent nearly a third on that house. They bought a small place for my grandmother nearby in Hasland. They gave each of my mum’s three siblings £1,000 — a sizable amount, when you could buy a semi-detached house for about £1,500.

All four miners said the win wouldn’t change them. They’d stay in the pits. And for a time, they did.

Then, two years later, lightning struck again.

By then, my parents had moved into their new home. My middle brother John had been born. They still played the pools every week — same syndicate, same routines — but my mum and Mrs. Elvin, wife of a newer member, had begun to think it was a waste of money. They nagged. The men relented. They dropped out.

That weekend, the syndicate won again.

There were four winners the second time, so the syndicate's share wasn’t quite as dramatic — around £20,000. Still, another small fortune. Vernons, the pools company, turned it into an event: a trip to London, a stay at the Dorchester Hotel, a party with British celebrities in attendance — David Nixon, Terry-Thomas. My parents were invited along, even though they weren’t among the winners this time. There was another newsreel, and another album of stills. My brother treasures that one.

There’s a photo I love from that second album. Terry-Thomas — gap-toothed, grinning — is in bed, propped up like a king, with all four of the miners’ wives around him. All five of them were smiling, like they’d known each other forever. The next photo shows him balancing a chamber pot like a crown, playing the fool.

I imagine my mother laughing harder than she had in months. That flash of absurdity suspended in celluloid — something she never spoke of again. Even if the win wasn’t theirs this time, the moment still was.

After that, her mind was made up: it was time for my dad to leave the mines.

They’d both grown up around it — seen what it did. Her father. Her brothers. Health never lasted long in families like theirs. The thought of my dad going the same way — she couldn’t let it happen. Especially with two small children and a house they'd built from the ground up.

My dad had left school at 14 — another bright lad, another life shaped by duty. As the oldest of five, and with a cruel father who drank too much and spent what little he had on his fancy woman at the other side of town, he’d been called on to provide. Mining was all he’d known. But I like to think my mum asked him, just once, what he wanted. And I think he let himself answer.

They bought a shop. A corner store in Hasland. Modest, but theirs. He came alive behind the counter — chatting, solving problems, remembering names. For him, being around people was like plugging into the mains. I’d say he chose wisely.

And they were smart. Practical. They still had money put away.

Or so they thought.

It turned out they’d been caught up in a local investment scam. Their accountant — a man who promised to grow their savings — gave them confident updates, listed shares they supposedly owned. Everything looked promising — until one day, he disappeared. And with him, the last of their savings.

They never got it back. But by then, they'd learned how to carry on. You always did.

I didn’t know any of this as a child. Not the pools win. Not the shop. Not the second syndicate or the vanished savings. My parents didn’t talk about it. Not to us. I found out the way seven-year-olds usually find things out: by accident, and by not doing what I was told.

I’d been swinging on the back legs of a school chair, showing off, and fell backwards. The cast iron radiator broke my fall — and the back of my head. After a rush to A&E, a few stitches, and a turban of gauze wrapped around my skull, I was parked at home to recover. Bored. Curious. Slightly concussed. No one noticed when I started poking around in the bottom drawer of the sideboard.

That’s where I found it — tucked beside the best cutlery, in among the off-limits things. A yellowing football pools coupon. What caught my eye was the blurb down the side: something about four Derbyshire miners winning a world record payout. There were grainy little headshots along the bottom — each winner with his wife.

And there, in one of them, were my parents. Looking proud. Young. Impossible.

I don’t know why I didn’t ask them about it. Maybe I already knew it was one of those stories you weren’t meant to hear from a drawer. So I kept it to myself. I tucked it away — the memory of finding it — for another five years, at least.

I was twelve when it finally came up. One Sunday morning, the phone rang. My godmother, Auntie Ivy, was calling to speak to my dad. Her mother-in-law — well into her eighties — had just learned she’d won the pools. £300,000. A staggering sum.

Auntie Ivy was calling for advice.

After the short call, she and Uncle George (my godfather) came over. While we waited, my parents talked around it, as if in code — careful not to say aloud why they were being asked for help. I listened from the sofa. Then, quite calmly, I said something about them having experience with such matters.

They looked at me — confused. How did you know? I told them I’d seen the coupon. Years ago. I hadn’t said anything because, well… I didn’t think it was something we talked about.

The advice they gave Auntie Ivy was simple: “Don’t let anyone else make a story out of you.”

Back then, football pools coupons had a small checkbox — a preference for anonymity. When my parents won, that box had been checked . But the company pressured them relentlessly: it was a “feel-good story,” they said, one that “gave people hope”, they said. Eventually, worn down, everyone agreed to go public.

My parents always regretted saying yes. Not because of the cameras. Because after that, the story never quite belonged to them again.

He didn’t ask. Just wandered over as we slowed on Hepthorne Lane, slipping into a Top Gear-style review—handling, performance, ride—before finally arriving at the boot.

“Boot on these is like a glove compartment with ambitions.”

No one asked. That never stopped Hicksy. He moved like someone who’d skipped ahead in the manual and assumed the rest of us would catch up.

It was the middle of the day, maybe 2pm. Bright, warm, quiet in that suspicious way afternoons sometimes are. We were just back from the tops—Chatsworth side, moors still hazy with early afternoon heat. Andy in the front. Johnny folded up like cargo in the back. Me driving the Mini Cooper that I’d originally called Clarissa. People found that strange, pretentious, stupid—or all of the above. So I changed it to Min. Beige, with a chocolate brown go-faster stripe I’d painted myself—masking tape, spray cans of primer and top coat, a whole Saturday given to speed’s illusion. It wasn’t quick, but it looked like something someone had meant.

We spotted him from a distance—Hicksy was always recognizable by his gait, a kind of loose-limbed defiance of pavement logic. I crept beside him at walking pace, let him study the silhouette. He circled once, slowly, like the car might confess something if stared at long enough. He tapped the boot once, then said: “Bet I could fit in there.”

No one had asked. No one doubted him. But the moment he said it, it felt like something that had to be proven.

He didn’t take anything off. Just ducked, folded, twisted himself in. Even skinny as he was, it was astonishing. All of him disappeared except one arm—stiff, jutting out—like those novelty limbs people wedge in tailgates for a laugh.

Only this wasn’t a joke. Hicksy was actually in there.

He was grinning, ready to declare victory, when someone—maybe Andy, maybe me—said: “You’ve got to be driven in it. Otherwise it doesn’t count.”

That logic held. So we got back in. Engine on. I drove the half-mile to the Blue Bell with Hicksy in the boot—arm sticking out, voice muffled but constant, offering commentary we mostly ignored.

We pulled into the lot of the Blue Bell—a 15th-century pub with a sagging roof, its ghost stories half-remembered and more than half-embellished. It was where all of us had been served our first pints. Under-age drinking was just something you did back then, like starting to take an interest in girls, or getting acne.

I remembered being woken from my bed and shoved into a too-big coat by my brother and his mates as they set out for their own first pints. They’d filled my head with stories about the pirate’s grave—there wasn’t one, though there is a stone in the churchyard marked with a skull and crossbones—and the ghost that haunted the shortcut through the cemetery. Then they left me outside in the dark with a Coke and a packet of crisps while they went in. I sat on the low wall, listening to the laughter spill out through the warped door, and waited for the light above it to flicker.

And now here we were, years later, parking a little too close to that same wall. No Coke, no crisps. Just Hicksy, boxed and booted, his arm sticking out like punctuation.

I was about to kill the engine when I had an idea.

I pulled forward, turned around, and reversed—inch by inch—until the bumper kissed the pub’s back wall.

The boot on the old Mini opened downward, like a glove box—little chains on either side. Reversing into the wall meant it couldn’t open at all.

We got out. Looked at each other. A moment hung.

“Are you not coming with us?” one of us asked, and the three of us collapsed into laughter.

Ignoring Hicksy’s muffled objections—now loud, now impressively creative—we walked into the pub and ordered a round of beers.

“Do you think we should go and get him out?” someone asked eventually.

Pause.

“Should we have another beer first?”

That seemed funnier.

But as the pints arrived, so did the guilt. We drank quickly.

There’s something about that time in your life when even being the butt of the joke feels like being let in. Like being seen.

When we finally went back out, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Hicksy’s arm was still there, accusingly lifeless. We moved the car. Opened the boot.

He erupted—a full-throttle, expletive-laced monologue that had clearly been building the whole time we were in the pub. The kind of fury that needs an audience. (We didn’t tell him about the second round.)

And yet—even then—there was a glint. A flash of something like pride.

He’d done it. Squeezed himself into a tiny boot. Got driven to a pub. Got parked against a wall. Became legend.

I haven’t seen Hicksy in years. But an old school friend mentioned, not long ago, that he’d spotted him.

I do wonder, sometimes, if he ever tells that story.

I hope he remembers it like we did—louder, stranger, and somehow… perfectly logical.

This is a story about trying to hold on to a self you’ve only just managed to build. About hair as armour, as ritual, as one small thing you can control when the rest keeps shifting. It’s about being young, being seen, and what it takes to stay seen. A good haircut can make you feel invincible. A bad one can undo you.

Same as Last Time

The trick was to hang your head over the end of the bed. Not halfway. All the way, until blood pooled and the angle was right for Emil’s geometry to reveal itself. Gel first, then hairspray, then the whine of the blow dryer—not aimed, but ushered. The strands rose, slow and deliberate, until the shape locked in—more ritual than style.

It had started back in Chesterfield, in the little salon where Emil—once the bane of St John’s Ambulance cadets, now rebranded with a softened vowel—had figured out how to feather my hair so gravity could be reverse-engineered. Emil had been a menace on the annual getaways, where we got to enjoy a free weekend at one of Derbyshire Miner’s Holiday Camps, in exchange for learning bandaging techniques, perfecting the recovery position, and learning how to treat mining-related injuries. It was still spelled E-M-I-L, but he now pronounced it Emile, and took pleasure in playfully teasing women of a certain age who mispronounced it.

Back in those earlier years, he’d been the ringleader in a gang that would terrorize younger cadets: pinning them on the floor or on a bed, pulling down their trousers and underpants, and blacking their testicles by applying shoe polish with a stiff brush. It never happened to me. But I lived in fear of it for years. Apparently, the pain was one thing, but it was the slow, humiliating process of scrubbing off the thick, greasy polish that stayed with you—the sting of the brush, the stubborness of the polish , and the shame that clung longer than the colour. That fear stayed tucked away—lessened, maybe, but never gone. Even years later, sitting in Emil’s chair, part of me still flinched at the idea of surrendering control. Now he wielded thinning shears with something approaching grace.

By twenty-one, I’d stopped colouring my hair every week, so no more henna-stained pillowcases, but the ritual had simply shifted form. Style over shade. Height over hue. At college, I was always being miscast as an art student. People would tilt their heads and say, “You’re in... Fine Art? Design?”

“Computer Science,” I’d reply, and watch them recalibrate.

They’d laugh. Embarrassed. “It’s the hair. The way you dress. Your makeup.”

That started in 1978, the year my mum died. I wasn’t ready to grieve the usual way, so I masked it: mascara, hair dye, outlandish clothes. Let them see that boy, I thought. A boy who looked like he belonged on the cover of Smash Hits. In my first weeks at Brinsford, the cleaner walked into my room in K-block and saw the makeup on the windowsill. She blocked the doorway, assuming I was in the wrong room. It took a while to convince her. The chocolate helped.

Fair enough, if it were still 1979, when I’d first turned up in eyeliner, scarlet zip-up trousers, and ex-RAF jackets festooned with punk badges. But by the end of 1981, I was a married man (okay, more of a married boy), and the makeup had gone. The hair, though—that stayed. My hair wasn’t spiky anymore—I just prided myself on making it different from everyone else’s, by style, by colour, or both. Not rebellion anymore. Just ritual. Something to keep doubt at bay.

Everyone else had nicknames that came with their surnames. 'Muddy' Slinger; 'Spider' Webb; 'Tiny' Cox. Mine was different. Mine was earned.

Spike.

Not Rob. Not Fordy. Just Spike.

While the spikes didn’t last—I eventually moved on to a Phil Oakey–inspired asymmetric bob, long on one side and post-war short back and sides on the other—the nickname stuck. By then, I’d found a different swanky salon in Wolverhampton. Very expensive, but always on the lookout for models. If you timed it right, they’d cut you a break on the price. I’d been there with various friends over the first couple of years, and while their results were sometimes a bit hit or miss, I always seemed to come out with something special. I’d bring in pages ripped from one of the music weeklies—magazine fragments smelling of ink and pocket lint—and they’d study them like blueprints. Then the master stylist would be summoned, murmuring suggestions, adjusting angles, guiding the process like a conductor easing into the overture. The result was uncanny.

With that as a backdrop, I honestly don’t recall what prompted me to try the local Polish barber on the estate where we lived in Heath Town. Maybe convenience. Maybe curiosity. Maybe just a lapse in aesthetic judgment. I was popping down to the little shops that sat in the centre of the open-access housing complex, and just as I walked past the barber shop, I remembered I was due for a haircut. "Why not?" I thought. To get the model rate at my regular salon, I had to pre-book weeks in advance and be prepared to change plans at the last minute. Here, there was no queue. No ceremony. No waiting. Just a red vinyl chair and a severe-looking man with a buzz cut who looked like he sharpened his scissors on bricks.

But when I walked in, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. It reminded me of Stan the barber, where I’d get my hair cut alongside my dad as a little kid. I always loved every minute of Dad-time. Stan had this tiny place in Holmewood, and he believed a liberal dollop of Brylcreem was the pièce de résistance to any haircut. He wore short-sleeved nylon smocks over long shirts, and his scissors and combs would rest between snips in a glass of fragrant blue disinfectant. Your head would always end up smelling of it by the time he was done. His was the kind of barbershop where, at the end of the cut, he'd always discreetly ask, “Anything for the weekend?”—and everyone except me knew exactly what he meant.

Heath Town in those days was a collage of brutalism and bravado: concrete towers with peeling paint, kids wheeling BMXs across broken walkways, multilingual arguments drifting through cracked windows. It had warmth, yes, and community—but also corners you didn’t linger in. We were the racial minority and stuck out like sore thumbs—visible, peripheral, not quite belonging.

That first time—oh yes, I went back—I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary. He wasn’t as talkative as other barbers, but when I told him what I wanted, he nodded, said “yes,” and immediately jumped in. This was in the midst of the Mod revival, and I’d opted for a retro ’60s look—short back and sides, with more length on top. He made short work of it, and it looked fantastic. What’s more, it was about a third of the heavily discounted ‘model’ rate at the swanky place. I couldn’t believe my luck.

It wasn’t just me that thought that—everyone did. People were asking me where I’d got my hair cut, and I’d be bragging about this great place I’d discovered... no waiting... no hassle... all at very little cost.

It must have been about six weeks later when I very confidently returned to the same barber.

As I sat in the chair, he smiled enthusiastically, which I took for recognition. I relaxed.

He didn’t say anything—just stood poised with his scissors. It felt a little awkward, so I decided to break the ice by gushing about my last hair cut, how much everyone liked it, and then went on to say that I wanted it exactly the same.

He paused, set down the scissors, and picked up his trimmers, switching the guard to what I now know to be a #2. I consider that to be the perfect length for the sides and the back of one's head, and that is where I assumed he was going to start.

No. What he did instead was take the trimmers and make a pass from my forehead to the back of my head. Realising what he was doing, I screamed—but it was too late. As Magnus Magnusson used to say: he’d started, so he had to finish.

I tried to explain the horrors of what he’d done, but that was when I learned I'd pretty much already reached the limits of his English. It didn’t go much beyond that emphatic “yes” and his eerie ability to parrot sentences back without understanding a single word they meant.

That was how I ended up with a #2 buzz cut, and I was crying by the end of it. There was no shame involved—just acceptance of how awful it looked. Buzz cuts look great on some people, but I am just not one of them. Plus, because my hair was so blond back then, I looked close to bald.

I ran back to the flat, determined to try and do something about it before Roz saw me. She happened to come out of the kitchen just as I was trying to sneak up the stairs. She didn’t need to say a word.

"It's not as bad as it looks," I said. It was. "It will look better after I wash it," I said. It didn’t.

Still, I tried. I got in the shower and scrubbed at my scalp like I could rinse away the mistake. When that failed, I moved to stage two: damage limitation. Somewhere in the back of a drawer, I still had a box of copper-coloured hair dye. I convinced myself it would help. Funny how little dye you need when you barely have any hair left. Funnier still, how wrong you can get it.

Remember when the Eurythmics first broke out with “Sweet Dreams,” and Annie Lennox had that whole close-cropped androgynous look with short orange hair? I had that look probably a year earlier. And trust me—I did not wear it well.

I took to wearing hats after that. For about eight weeks, I think, until my hair was back to a reasonable length.

While it was regrowing, I went home and thought about falling on my knees and asking Emil—Emile—to fix it. I imagined him tilting his head, the way he used to with clients who couldn't quite pronounce it right, that patient correction now tinged with judgement. In the end, I decided that would have been more humiliating than a 'blacking' would have been.

I learned my lesson, though. Never assume that a head nod means someone understands.

No matter what you were studying at Wolves Poly, if you were male and living at Brinsford Lodge, you were also studying Applied Resonance. Not officially. But everyone learned it. At some point in its long and checkered history, someone had discovered that if you tapped just right—just the right frequency, just above the window latch—the catch would vibrate loose. Not a trick. Not a hack. A kind of sonic persuasion. Tap, pause, wait. The latch would slowly turn itself open, like it had changed its mind.

Each year, the technique was passed from seniors to freshmen. Not ceremoniously—just quietly, inevitably. And once one fresher had it, the rest did too.

Naturally, this led to a curriculum of additional learning: Improvised Engineering and Advanced Tomfoolery. Especially on weekends, when someone had gone home and their room sat there—unguarded, available, deeply tempting.

Once the latch yielded, it was just two quick bangs at the base—where the metal arm with its row of holes sat stubbornly against the frame. A well-placed knock and it would spring free, like it knew the drill. The window opened with a groan that felt almost performative. Then one person climbed in, tiptoed to the door, and let the rest of the cohort in like guests at a secret party.

The boldest innovations didn’t require an empty block—just an unattended room and a working knowledge of sockets. One guy came back late one Sunday, flipped on the light, and triggered a spin dryer that had been filled with gallons of water and plugged into the ceiling light socket. Instead of illumination: chaos. Water sprayed in every direction. The machine convulsed around the room like a drunk unicyclist. He found the plug. He did not find the joke funny.

Another time, Supersonic—so named not for his warplanes, which he built lovingly for a wargaming club in Wolverhampton, but for his Sid Little frame—returned to find his room gone. Not stolen. Reassembled. Every piece of it had been moved outside and pinned to the exterior wall of K Block. Bed made. Posters hung. Certificates framed. Pyjamas tucked. Slippers placed. A life-size diorama of his life, relocated with unsettling accuracy. He stood, assessed, and finally said: "It's the wrong side of the bed." Then went in.

It was every Sunday afternoon. That was when the mischief happened. When the building sighed, half-empty, and time bent just enough for absurdity to become logic. We were all eighteen or so. Which meant we thought we were subtle, but we were really just thorough. Clumsy in the way only sincerity can be.

Two weeks after the Kate-from-Kent incident, I hadn’t been plotting revenge. But when both Kevin and Paul went home for the weekend—Kevin, the party-starter Scouser, and Paul, the dry-witted Yorkshireman who had theatrically unveiled my embarrassment—it would’ve been rude not to accept the invitation.

Up until then, every operation had focused on one room. I wanted more. Not chaos. Just symmetry. So I doubled the stakes.

We cracked the windows in under ten minutes. At first, I worked alone. I expected someone to talk me down. Instead, they joined in. We formed a bucket line, passing each item across the corridor—bedframes, bins, desks, chairs. Posters were retacked. Socks re-sorted. Even the lightbulbs were swapped. We were careful, precise. It started to feel like a strange kind of honour.

Their doors faced each other. Mine was next to Paul’s. I didn’t even have to pretend not to watch.

Kevin returned first. We were all peeking through cracks as he stepped in, flipped on the light, and froze. Then backed out. Checked the number. Checked his key. Tried Paul’s room. Locked. Still blinking when the first laugh escaped. Then we all did. Kevin grinned. He got it. Like Supersonic, he saw initiation where others might see insult.

We didn’t get time to bask. Paul was close. A lookout whispered from the doorway. Doors shut. Radios off. Paul walked in. Paused. And sighed. “Of course,” he said.

Feeling the joke had peaked, we offered to restore order. And we did. We were nearly finished when we hit the wardrobe.

I can’t remember whose it was—whether we were moving Kevin’s back from Paul’s, or vice versa. But halfway through, Kevin stopped. White as a sheet. There, taped to the back panel: a strange, spindly illustration.

“That,” he said, voice low, “is a Black Mass.”

We stared. It wasn’t just squiggles or vague menace. There was a pentagon. Black candles. Symbols that didn’t feel made-up. Kevin, being a good Catholic lad, wasn’t having it.

“I can’t touch that,” he said. “It’s blasphemous.”

He wanted a priest.

It was half-nine on a Sunday.

We negotiated him down to Plan B. He pulled a small bottle from under his bed. Holy Water. Sprinkled it in corners. Over the desk. Around the doorframe. We watched. Something between ritual and release. A little clumsy, a little sincere. And as the last drops fell, his panic started to melt.

“It’s okay now,” he said.

We nodded. And no one ever mentioned the picture again.

After that, I don’t remember us doing it again. Or if we did, I wasn’t involved. Not because we got caught. Just because something shifted. The joke had landed. The spell had broken.

Better to leave it intact.

Let the corridor sleep.

I’ve told this story before. The original version—Badge of Fandom, Mark of Mischief—was more amused by itself. I almost got thrown out of my course for hacking a sign-on message. A neat anecdote. A shrug of nostalgia.

But that’s not the part I remember most.

What stays with me is the bag. Or rather, what it signaled: a full teenage logic, fixed in place like a dare. If you’re going to be caught, make sure it’s for something that mattered to you.

This version edges a little closer to that—less hack, more longing.

Going Underground

The bag gave it away. Not the code, not the keystrokes—just the bag. Industrial green, heavy-duty nylon. Cylindrical, with a thick zipper that ran the full length. Heavy with textbooks and the kind of certainty that doesn’t age well. Across the top: an embroidered patch I’d sewn on myself, and a scatter of cheap Jam pins—fuzzy print, bent backs, slogans already soft with wear. As if I could badge my way into becoming the kind of person their lyrics demanded. As if being noticed for something you loved might be enough to hold a shape in the world.

It was March 1980. I’d just turned nineteen. My A-levels had been polite but not persuasive, and I’d ended up at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, in a Combined Studies course that sounded like something invented mid-panic. The computer labs were more advanced than they had any right to be. Dumb terminals clustered across campus, all tethered to a minicomputer running on trust and default passwords.

Everyone in Computer Science had to buy the manual. Page 74: a tidy list of access credentials, unencrypted and unembarrassed. It felt less like security and more like a suggestion.

I didn’t think of it as hacking. Not then. Not really. It felt like editorial work. A minor correction to the system’s cultural awareness.

That week, The Jam had gone straight to number one. I decided the network ought to show some respect. System availability out. National significance in. Going Underground had arrived. You’re welcome.

Took fifteen minutes, maybe less. I typed it once. Then again, to check the spacing. Then again, just to watch it happen. The new message looped like a secret handshake—private enough to feel personal, public enough to be noticed. I stayed logged in, watching it scroll.

Then footsteps.

He entered like a warning. Senior lecturer. Senior scowl. Already sure of what he’d find. His voice made the terminals flinch. He’d traced the change to this bank of machines, narrowed it to two still glowing. I looked busy. The other student had only just sat down. We both claimed innocence with the reflexes of small mammals.

He grunted and left.

Relief showed up early, and I let it settle. I stayed in my seat, hands still on the keyboard, breathing like stillness might protect me. The terminals kept humming. The other student had already moved on.

I hadn’t.

Two minutes passed. Long enough to believe the danger had shifted elsewhere.

Then the door slammed open again. This time, he didn’t speak. Just pointed.

“Come with me.”

I didn’t argue. Just gathered my things, the bag swinging like punctuation.

His office was small, beige, and quietly certain of my guilt. He didn’t ask for a confession. Just listed consequences: no more computer access, which meant no assignments, which meant failing the course. He couldn’t expel me, but he could make staying pointless. It was surgical, and it was practiced.

I apologized. Not out of strategy—just the flat panic of realizing that admiration, when worn too loudly, can turn on you.

He paused. Something shifted.

“You did show us the weaknesses,” he said. “Tell me how.”

I did. Quietly. No performance. Just the facts—testifying not to guilt, but to a version of myself that still thought cleverness counted as protection. Cocky. Hopeful. Afraid of being ordinary.

He let me go. Warned me there’d be no next time. I nodded. Waited, unsure if this was a reprieve or the setup for something else.

Just as I reached the door, he asked if I wanted to know how he’d known it was me.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

He pointed at the bag.

“That thing,” he said, almost laughing.

Not because I’d broken the rules. But because the bag had already confessed, louder than I ever would.

I was uneasy as I followed Katerina through the gate and down the overgrown path toward her apartment. She lived in one of the Victorian houses owned by the university, the kind that had been chopped into awkward units for single faculty. It felt like a place that held on to its ghosts longer than its tenants.

Her unit was on the ground floor. "Three rooms in an L-shape," she’d said. I nodded, as if that meant something. Inside, the main room must have once been the grand parlor: high ceilings, wide windows, and an upturned bicycle mid-disassembly on the dining table.

Not a recent project. Dust on the frame. The chain lay coiled on a folded napkin, as if plated. It felt less like a repair in progress, more like an art installation—Still Life with Derailleur.

I stared.

"It needs a new sprocket," she said, walking past me. "But I have not yet decided which one."

The dining chairs were mismatched. One had a cushion that looked like it used to be a child’s winter coat. The others were bare. The whole room felt thrown together in a hurry and never reconsidered—each object obeying its own private logic.

She caught me looking. “All this furniture—it was already here when I moved in,” she said, with the pleased certainty of someone who believed she'd gotten very lucky.

To the left: an open-plan kitchen. Cheap cabinets. Oversized fridge. I approached it like an archaeologist.

She started opening cupboards, hunting for—anything, really. I joined in. We moved in sync, unintentionally, each reveal confirming the same thing: bare.

"You don’t cook much," I said.

"I don’t cook at all," she replied. "I told you—we have excellent vending machines."

She paused, glanced toward a high shelf.

"I might not actually have any tea."

Eventually, behind an unlabelled jar, I found some dodgy-looking tea bags and filled the kettle.

"Would you like to see the rest of the apartment?" she asked.

It felt like ceremony. And something in her posture made me think: I might be the first person to be shown around—friend, partner, witness. Like crossing a threshold she didn’t know she’d built.

The bedroom was large but hollow. Empty in that way rooms get when their purpose is theoretical. No desk. No drawers. At the far end, a queen-sized bunk bed, built into an alcove. Handmade. Slightly uneven. Proud.

She climbed up to the top level, crouching on the bare platform, her head resting against the ceiling.

"I like to sit up here," she said. "I feel safe... it’s soothing."

I stayed below. "It looks... sturdy."

"Do you want to come up?"

"I’m good down here."

She nodded, smiling.

And then I saw it: the sack.

It was tied to the bedframe and hung like an industrial stocking. Burlap. Bulging.

"What’s that?" I asked.

"What?" she said, eyes passing through it.

"This big sack," I said.

"Oh, you mean my closet."

I paused. "Closet?"

"Yes. In your country, you might say wardrobe."

"I know the word closet," I said. "But that’s... a sack."

She nodded. "My system is simple. I wash the clothes, dry them, and put them in the sack."

To prove it, she untied it and pulled out a crumpled shirt, followed by a pair of crumpled shorts. Both clean. Both devastatingly wrinkled.

I asked if she had an iron.

She blinked. Like I’d asked her if she churned her own butter.

She offered to show me the bathroom. I declined. Suggested the kettle had probably boiled.

She excused herself, said she’d join me in a minute.

I went back to the kitchen. The kettle had boiled, cooled. I restarted it.

While the kettle hissed, I opened the fridge. The light was dim and flickering, like it didn’t really want to be involved. Shelves: empty, aside from a lone takeaway container and a few condiment packets—soy sauce, ketchup, mustard—spread out like a sad buffet.

At the bottom, one drawer. It resisted, then gave, like it knew what I was about to see and couldn’t, in good conscience, let it happen easily.

Inside: a collapsed half-lemon. And something behind it, inside a plastic grocery bag. I leaned in. Whatever it was sat on a polystyrene tray, the cellophane torn. Whatever color it had originally been, it was now green. And blue. With white specks. The mold bloomed into topography—soft craters, ridges, tiny peaks. Furry and unnatural. The texture of something halfway between science and myth.

I wasn’t sure if it was food or folklore.

That’s when she walked in.

She didn’t flinch—just looked at me, calm and unblinking.

"Oh," she said. "You found the cheese."

"Cheese?"

"Yes. From my boss. Last Christmas. I’d believed she didn’t like me, but she gave me such a beautiful cheese selection."

She looked at it, then at me.

"Yes. I know. But—it was kind."

"Katerina... it’s March. You’ve had this cheese rotting in your fridge for three months?"

"Not this Christmas, Robert. Last Christmas."

I placed the cheese back in the drawer. She relaxed.

I poured the tea. No milk. No lemon. Just the gesture of tea. It tasted like patience. Or like staying polite on a sinking ship.

We sat on the sofa. I scanned for conversation. The bookshelves were bare. A handful of Russian prog rock CDs. Nothing I could translate into small talk.

Then I saw the photo.

What looked like an older, mousier version of Katerina. Two children. Two smiling grandparents.

"Your sister and her kids?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "And these are my parents."

"Nice," I began.

"You’ll be meeting them next month."

"I didn’t know they were visiting Philadelphia."

"They’re not," she said. "They’re visiting my sister. In San Antonio."

"So... how will I meet them?"

"We will go there," she said. "They must meet the man I will marry."

There was a long pause, while it sank in that she wasn’t joking.

I don’t remember what I said after that.

I don’t remember leaving.

I don’t remember getting in the car, or starting the engine.

The next thing I remember was the state line: Delaware.

I was safe.

That night, I sent the email. "Dear Katerina."

I don’t recall what it said. Probably some version of "It’s not you, it’s me."

She never replied.

Years later, I searched her name.

Now teaching in the Midwest. Publishing often.

Probably still building systems.

Still surviving.

I wonder if her closet still hangs in her bedroom, and whether she was ever able to part with the cheese. Or if that was what unsettled me most—not the mess, but the method.

And for those of you who might have missed the first two parts of this story, here they are.

If you’ve read Eligible, Not Suitable, you’ll know that by the end of date five, I wasn’t expecting much from date six—except maybe closure. But then K—let’s call her Katerina, though that wasn’t her real name (something to do with discretion and a fraught departure from the motherland)—Katerina asked me to take my birthday off. She promised a surprise. We were going to New York. Tickets to a show, dinner somewhere grand. Just enough spectacle to make sense of the last two weeks of emotional dodgeball.

What I got instead was something else entirely.

The day began with a kind of quiet promise—sky washed pale blue, light catching the corners of buildings like it was trying to make them beautiful. Still, there was a knot blooming beneath my ribs, like the overture already bracing for the finale. Other than the destination, Katerina hadn't shared any details. The arrangement was that I'd pick her up on the U. Penn campus at 1 p.m.

I'd never been on the campus; you weren’t allowed there at night unless you were faculty or a student. She suggested I meet her outside Huntsman Hall, where her office was. Because the building had only just opened, her office was one of two Portacabins squatting inside like misfit modules beneath a cathedral dome.

I'd assumed that we’d be heading straight to the train station. Instead, she told me she wanted to show me her office. It was nicer than I expected, but unmistakably a Portacabin. She motioned for me to sit and turn away—"no peeking," she added, half-joking—and when I turned back, she was holding the birthday card she'd clearly just written, along with a large box beautifully wrapped, ribbons curled and trailing.

When I took it from her, it was surprisingly heavy. I opened the card first—a slightly offbeat blend of formal well-wishes and unexpected emotional specificity. Then, as I unwrapped the gift, she began flapping—hands fluttering, breath caught, a small step backward. Just a little. I paused until she recovered, then continued.

My gift was a very fancy 18lb chocolate cake. I know the weight because she proudly announced it as I scrambled for the appropriate response. She’d had no idea how to choose a gift, she confessed, so she’d wandered into a gourmet shop that sold extravagant chocolate tortes by the slice, and asked if she could just buy the entire thing. The sheer audacity of it—this massive, decadent monument to confusion and affection—took a moment to process. And yes, it was delicious, as my entire department could later confirm when I took it into work the next day.

I thanked her, telling her no one had ever bought me an 18lb chocolate cake before. She was giddy that I liked it. Gathering my thoughts, I asked why she’d chosen it.

Without hesitation: "Survival fat."

Now, I consider myself smarter than the average bear, but I had no idea what she meant.

"In Russia, we have long and hard winters," she said, gesturing to my midsection. "And we Russian women like our men to have some... survival fat. And you, Robert... you are too skinny!"

"And you've decided I need fattening up?"

"Yes," she said, beaming.

Rewrapping the cake for what I assumed would be a short journey to my car, she suddenly said, "Before we go, I'd like to show you the lecture halls where I teach."

"Sure," I said, thinking it would be quick.

It wasn’t. We left the cake behind, and I followed her down a series of hallways until we reached a modern lecture hall with raked seating. She peered inside, found it empty, and stepped confidently to the front. Then she began: listing every course she had ever taught in that room—titles, departmental codes, perhaps even in chronological order. Her delivery was meticulous, as though she were defending a thesis no one had asked for. I stood in the back, rows of empty seats watching her with more warmth than I could muster.

Next door, the lecture theater was identical. So was the ritual. Another roll call of courses, her tone unwavering, the cadence automatic. It was impressive. It was relentless. It was surreal.

At first, I thought it might be a way of showing pride—or transparency. But by the second hall, it felt like something else. An insistence on being seen, exactly and only as she chose to be. I nodded, smiled, and said nothing.

After ten more minutes, I gently suggested we should probably get going. She nodded, and we returned to her Portacabin. I'd assumed she’d been passing time until our train. That’s when she dropped the bombshell: there was no train. She hadn’t known how to plan a surprise like that, so she hadn’t.

If I were playing Emotional Bingo, I was ready to shout "House!" Frustrated, sad, confused—but empathy was making a strong late finish. I let the silence stretch.

Then she said she had another idea. She'd asked a friend about restaurants, and maybe we could go to a Thai place nearby. I just wanted to go home, but I found myself agreeing. We packed the birthday cake into my trunk and walked.

Imagine a cross between a restaurant and a Greyhound terminal—formica tables, buzzing fluorescent lights, stale oil in the air. It was cavernous, nearly empty—exactly the kind of weird that still made sense.

Every instinct said leave. But I had other things on my mind.

The meal was just as I expected: slow service, bad food, and the place was freezing. We kept our coats on. I just wanted it to end. But something nagged at me. I asked her—why would anyone recommend this place?

She said her friend had. I asked which friend. "You met her," she said. I hadn’t met any of her friends. "When?" I asked. "Earlier today."

"Do you remember the woman who held the door open to the lecture hall?"

Yes, I did. A diminutive Asian woman who looked barely out of high school. No pleasantries, no introduction. Just an awkward nod, like she was a cameo who hadn’t learned her lines.

"She’s your friend?"

"She’s a research assistant," Katerina said. "Just arrived from China. I asked if she knew of any restaurants."

"And this is her favorite?"

"No, this is the only one she's ever been to."

I was speechless. A rarity. I sat quietly while she paid, counting down to being back in the safety of my car.

Still silent, we stepped into the kind of cold that claws through fabric and skin. My car wasn’t far, and we walked in the same direction. I knew the route—her apartment was nearby. I'd dropped her there before. This time, I planned to say goodbye and drive off.

But I couldn’t let her walk home in that cold. I’d drive her. We didn’t need to talk. Just one last act of decency.

It wasn’t about cake or curriculum anymore—I just didn’t want to feel alone. Not that day. Maybe not ever. Maybe trying—just showing up—was its own kind of survival. A loop I’d unknowingly traced since the day she explained her partner selection process—when she picked me not because I was "the one," but because I was number eight. And I stayed. Because even absurd effort was better than none. Because hope, too, needs a kind of survival fat.

I’d never been inside her apartment before. I’d always just dropped her at the door. That night, we drove there in silence, and when I parked, I waited for her to get out so I could say a final, quiet goodbye.

And then she turned to me and asked if I wanted to come in for a hot drink before heading home. I hesitated, teetering between a clean getaway and a stubborn curiosity. After everything, I needed to know: what kind of world did someone like Katerina retreat into?

I know I said this was a two-part story, but this feels like a good place to pause.

If you're as curious as I was, you'll have to come back tomorrow for the final installment.

The year was 2002, and the silence in my house no longer echoed—just hummed. My divorce had been finalized the day after 9/11. That fall, the world grieved—and I joined it, feeling everything and nothing all at once. We’d weathered a lot together—fertility issues, repeated relocations across the UK, my father’s long decline. Then came a transatlantic reboot with little support, as we tried to outrun a past we didn’t yet realize was catching up. In the end, what we carried cracked us open.

By winter, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to date again—or just desperate to feel something.

Friends had promised introductions. Each had someone in mind—a friend of a friend, a co-worker, a cousin. But when it came time to follow through, every prospect vanished. One had moved. One had married. One had come out. Another just stopped returning calls. It was like stepping onto a stage and realizing the rest of the cast had quit.

So I tried something new: Match.com.

Back then, online dating still felt vaguely illicit. People spoke of it the way they mentioned frozen embryos or offshore accounts. Amazon still only sold books. Most of us were still writing checks. But the internet was beginning to stretch its limbs. Why not look for love?

I filled out the questionnaire, uploaded a photo that was neither flattering nor dishonest, and waited.

My first match was K, a tenured psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a few years younger, but not enough to feel strange. Our emails were fluid. She asked smart questions. Responded thoughtfully. It felt like something.

She suggested ice skating for our first date. I checked the rink’s hours, but she assured me it would be open. When we got there, though, the gates were locked. It turned out she’d simply felt it should be open.

We walked. It was bitterly cold—the kind that climbs through your sleeves and settles in your spine. She didn’t seem to notice.

She apologized with a shrug and suggested we try again the next night.

Part of me—an increasingly louder part—was screaming run away. But another part, quieter and more afraid, whispered that if I bailed now, I might not try again. So I said yes.

As we wandered, she shared her “partner selection process.” Her term, not mine. She’d started with 2500 men within 25 miles of the university. Narrowed it by age: no more than ten years older. That left 225. Then came education—must have a Master’s or PhD. That brought it to 27.

“I have an MBA,” I offered.

“Of course you do,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

I smiled. “I feel honored to have made the top of your list.”

She blinked. “You’re number eight.”

“Did you meet the other seven?”

“Yes,” she said. “They were not suitable.”

She wasn’t being cruel—just clinical. As if I were the eighth résumé on a shortlist. It wasn’t unkind, exactly. It was logical. And after everything I’d been through, I understood the appeal of logic. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that I wasn’t quite a person to her yet—just an input in an algorithm.

We ended the night with a brisk goodbye. And then went on to have five more dates.

In our emails and evenings, there was a matter-of-factness to K—a way she had of appearing only lightly tethered to this plane. As if she were simultaneously present in fifteen others, playing speed chess or coding a new world order. I found her idiosyncrasies both endearing and exhausting—often in the same breath.

Once, she told me she loved dance—as a spectator. I got us tickets to a Broadway-style history of dance at the Walnut Theater. She was spellbound, barely remembering to breathe. At intermission, I turned to ask how she was enjoying it, but she grabbed my hand and urgently gestured that we needed air.

We made our way outside, into the crowd of smokers. Then, suddenly, she began jumping up and down—repeatedly, for about a minute. When she stopped, she held my arms and said, matter-of-factly, that she sometimes had to do that when she got overstimulated.

Later, I would learn the term “flapping.” That night, I was just grateful no one seemed to notice.

Another time, she mentioned that her diet mostly came from vending machines. I thought it was a joke. But over the next two weeks, I learned she meant it: soda, candy bars, energy drinks.

I’ve always been drawn to quirky people—those wired a little differently. Maybe it’s because I’m wired a little differently myself. Looking back, many of her quirks suggest she may have been on the autism spectrum. I didn’t see it then, but it makes me feel a complicated tenderness now—for how much I didn’t understand.

At the end of one date—another long walk in the cold—she casually mentioned needing to get divorced. I stopped walking. Her profile had said she was single.

When I questioned her about it, she simply said she felt single.

She’d married someone while at Moscow State. He’d built a promising internet business that had threatened a mafia-run industry. They fled the country, going separate ways for safety. She hadn’t seen him since.

Then there was the night she was an hour late meeting me at the university bookstore. This was pre-smartphone ubiquity, so I just waited. When she arrived, arms full of books and papers, her first words were: “Robert, this is your fault.”

She explained she’d been in the psychology library—researching me. “I think your many homosexual friends stem from unresolved maternal conflict… I believe you are a latent homosexual.” She gestured to her stack of papers like a prosecuting attorney presenting evidence.

I asked, calmly, “What do you want me to say, K?”

A week earlier, she’d struggled to understand how I—a straight man—could have close gay friends. I’d explained my involvement in my company’s LGBTQ+ affinity group. But it hadn’t landed.

There was no dramatic goodbye—just a quiet understanding that it wasn’t going anywhere.

Still, I wasn’t ready to stop. Not because I thought she was “the one.” But because I needed to prove to myself that I could try. Even if it was awkward. Even if it was absurd. Trying meant I wasn’t stuck anymore.

They weren’t bad dates. They just weren’t a beginning.

But just when I thought things were coming to a natural close, she told me to take my birthday off. She had a surprise planned. A day of adventure in New York, she said.

What I got instead was a birthday I’ll never forget—and not for the reasons you’d hope.

But that’s tomorrow’s story.

Why start the week in the middle of the weekend?

Call me naive, but aren’t week and end in there for a reason?

Sunday still has its own pace.
Endless tea. Drifting headlines.
Sometimes a story seed lands before I’ve even left my bed, and I’m up early chasing words before they evaporate.

But then I moved to the U.S.—and there it was:
Sunday at the top of the calendar.
Sunday bolded.
Sunday as Day One.

It felt like being asked to start a sentence mid-paragraph.

Every January, I go into my calendar settings and fix it.
Start the week on Monday.
Small act. Full meaning.

Small acts of defiance have always been my signature.

Not the smash-the-system kind.
The quiet ones.
The ones that tweak a setting, rearrange a frame, plant a flag where no one else is looking.

A calendar edit.
A turtleneck in a room full of suits.
A crawling desk toy with too much personality.

I came to the States on a three-to-five-year secondment.
That was thirty years ago.
I’ve been a U.S. citizen for fifteen.
But time doesn’t naturalize as easily as people do.

I brought my European terms with me—
five weeks of vacation,
two more days from a holiday bonus,
three extra days to fly home and remember who I was.

Thirty days total.
I used them all.

About five months in, I told the department secretary I’d be taking three weeks off.
She looked at me like I’d suggested closing the office for a séance.

“Three weeks?” she asked.
“Yes.”

Word spread.
At the coffee machine, a colleague stood waiting like it was an intervention.

“I hear you’re going on a long vacation.”
“Yep.”

He paused. Then, solemnly:
“I’ve never taken more than a week. In twenty years. Never even used all my vacation.”

He said it like confession.
But with pride.

Well, you’re an idiot then, I thought.

Here, overwork isn’t just a habit.
It’s a value system.
And apparently, using what you’ve earned is cause for suspicion.

When I was running my own department, I worked 10am to 7:30 or 8pm.
Not for show. It just suited me.

I was newly separated. No one waiting at home.
The far-too-big house echoed.
The company had rented it—cheaper than moving me somewhere smaller.

Mornings were for tea—copious amounts—and catching up on emails and listservs.
Afternoons through early evening: that’s when I hit my stride.

Then I heard it was “frowned upon.”

I checked the policy.
Flexitime was at the discretion of the business leader.
Technically, that was me.

I asked my boss where he stood.

He smiled.
Said he supported flexitime—
“As long as you’re in the office from 8am to 4pm.”

I didn’t laugh.
But it was close.

My office reflected my rhythm.
And my refusal.

It was big—too big, for some.
Wallace and Gromit. Talking Marvin the Martian.
A crawling Corporate Warrior that could clear a table like it was under siege.

People liked it.
The lightness. The difference.
Not everyone, of course.

My second boss—a short man with tall insecurities—didn’t care for it at all.
He styled himself a “man of the people.”
Said he didn’t need a big office.

Then, in the company’s sick-building shuffle, he landed in a cramped upstairs office—
one tiny window, no view, no space for meetings.

My group moved into the former C-suite.
Glass walls.
Sunlight you didn’t have to ask for.
Greenery just outside the window.

My office had a desk with a view, a full-size conference table, and a deluxe whiteboard.
His had… a desk.

He hated it.
Mr. “We’re all equals.”
Yeah. That guy.

He thought I wasn’t serious.
Didn’t like my goatee.
Didn’t like the toys.

Didn’t, I think, like that I wasn’t subservient enough.

Then came the “brainstorm.”

I’d just joined his org chart.
He offered a few ideas, then said:
“I know I’m not the only one with good ones.”

Everyone stayed silent.
They knew better.

I didn’t.
I offered something real.
Heads nodded.
I felt the shift in the room.
And in him.

After that: more check-ins.
Less warmth.
The calendar became a leash.

Then came the bonus meeting.

Because I was an international assignee, I had two bosses—
him, and a symbolic link to Europe: a pen-pusher I’d met once who had no idea what I did.

He handed me a sheet.
Bonus calculation.

Fifteen thousand dollars short.

He said he couldn’t “fairly assess” my performance after six months.
So: average.

I’d only ever received Exceeds Expectations.

The sheet didn’t show a number. Just a percentage.
He flipped to a decoder chart.
Traced the grid like he was unveiling my fate.

Then—finally—told me the number.
Like it was a gift.

I suggested he ask my former manager.
Or my dotted-line contact.
He said his hands were tied.
Said it with a smile.

Then—casually—he suggested I go “local.”
Meaning: switch to being a U.S. employee.
Higher base pay, sure—
but no protections, no perks, no safety net.

If he’d brought it up a month earlier, I might’ve gotten the full bonus.
Now? That door was closed.

I asked what I would’ve gotten.
He flipped to the table.
“Fifteen thousand more,” he said.

“Do you really think this is the right moment for that conversation?”

He froze.
Speechless.
I left.

Then came the meeting with the corporate VP.

I was told my boss would present our overall strategy and projections.
That’s it.

Then I saw the agenda.
Each business leader would present their plan.

My name wasn’t on it.

I was halfway into improv mode when he introduced someone else to speak on my behalf—
a man who’d never worked with my team.
(He later apologized—said he was just doing what he was told.)

The deck was full of buzzwords and fog.
The VP nodded. Smiled. Left.

In the corridor, my boss was basking.
He’d been patted on the head.
He’d made his point.

I asked if we could talk.
He said sure.

His office was opposite the meeting room.
As he sat, he gestured toward the door.

“You can leave it open.”

I closed it.
“Probably best if we don’t.”

I told him what he’d done.
That he’d excluded me.
Substituted someone else.
Tried to humiliate me in front of his boss and mine.

He tried to deflect.
I didn’t let him.

I said what I came to say.
Then I left.

Three days later, he came to my office.

“You’ve got six months to find something else,” he said.
“I’ll help. Write the glowing reference.”

Then he paused.

“I want you out. If you don’t find something—
I’ll find a way to get you out.”

The gloves were off.
But I’d already seen the hands.

Every January, I fix the calendar.
Start the week on Monday.

Still.

I keep the toys.
I take the vacation.
I lead in ways that would’ve made his jaw tighten.

Because presence isn’t frivolous.
Conformity isn’t competence.
And sometimes the smallest figure crawling across the desk
is the most honest voice in the room.

I walked out of his office unbroken.
And when the next Monday came,
I opened the blinds,
poured the tea,
and started my week—
as always—
on my own terms.

Before Holding On was a novel, it was a pattern: of gestures, silences, things people held onto because they didn’t know how to let go.

The Ralph in Holding On—milkman, watcher, a man both there and fading—is a direct homage to the real Ralph from my childhood. He delivered milk by horse and cart, before his health gave out. Then his wife, Lily, took over the deliveries.

After that, Ralph had just waited—for Lily to return from her rounds, for the kettle to boil, for the world to keep moving without him.

Sometimes, I was allowed to join Lily on her collections. Going from house to house as people settled up for the week’s milk.

This piece began life as a much longer essay called Chicken Run. What follows is a stripped-back return to the same memory—just the cold, the rope, the boots, the silence. It never really left.

I revisited it because the world I’m writing now still belongs, in part, to theirs.

The first three chapters of Holding On are live at brittleviews.com. New ones drop every Wednesday.

Everything Was White Until It Wasn’t

Seanor Lane is 320 yards or 293 metres long, and I used to know each and every one of them. My world was shaped by its edges: one footpath to the brook, another to the green, and a slope that vanished into the woods.

Mum’s rule was fixed:
“Don’t, under any circumstances, go past the end of the lane.”

She never said why.
I never asked.
I just believed her.

Sometimes Lily let me walk the rounds with her, collecting milk payments from the houses on Seanor Lane and Parkhouse Road. Coins passed hand to hand, usually with a nod or a few soft words. I liked the quiet of it—the rhythm, the way people trusted her to show up.

We’d stop by her house too, near the bottom of Parkhouse Road, where her husband Ralph sat by the back window like a habit no one questioned.

My brother John remembers Ralph as the milkman, before his health gave out. He used to deliver by horse and cart, and sometimes John got to ride along.

I couldn’t picture it.

The Ralph I knew never stood.
He wore a wool hat indoors and slurped tea from a saucer like it was his only task left.
He didn’t speak—not to me.
Just stared out at the backs of the terraces.

I watched him the way you watch something you’re afraid of becoming.

Then came the snow.
Thick. Slow-falling.
The kind that covers what you were told not to touch.

John—fourteen, and already angling away from childhood—dragged the sled out from the garage.
I was six. I was there as ballast.

We went up to the Pilsley hill. I begged to steer.
John said no.
I begged again, louder, until even his friends sighed.

He’d been stringing me along all afternoon—grinning, teasing, always about to say yes.
At the end, maybe out of pity, or because his friends were watching, he handed me the rope.

He ran through the rules like a teacher.
His voice flat, certain.
The last line stuck:
“Whatever you do—don’t let go.”

I didn’t.

The sled took off like it had been waiting.
My body hadn’t.
I flew.
The hill blurred.
The fence at the bottom didn’t.

I heard voices yelling—Jump! maybe.
I closed my eyes.

The crash cracked through me.
The snow stung.
I opened my eyes, half-buried, fingers locked around the rope.

John crouched beside me, pale.

“Why didn’t you jump?”

“Because you told me not to let go.”

He looked at me like I’d just told him the moon was made of cheese.
Then said nothing.

One runner was split clean.
We didn’t tell Mum.

Later—another year, another storm.
John was off at university now.

I don’t remember how I got the sled out.
Only the need.
The pull of it.
To get it right this time.

I didn’t go back to the woods. That would’ve been too far.
I stayed within Seanor Lane.
Plausible deniability.

I chose Lily’s field.

It looked untouched.
White, clean, quiet.
The chickens watched from the sheds.
They didn’t move.
They knew their place.

I set the sled just past them.
My gloves were tight.
My scarf scratchy.
I was wearing my new Chelsea boots—zippered, like John’s.
I loved them more than I’ll ever admit.

I ran.
I pushed.
I jumped.

Fifteen seconds in, the sled stopped.
I didn’t.

I’d landed in something warm.
Thick. Slippery.
Moving slightly beneath me.

A pond of chicken shit.
Hidden under the snow.

The smell rose slowly, then all at once.
I gagged.

It was in my nose, my eyes, my mouth, inside my gloves.

And I hated myself—so fast, so hard, it shocked me.

I walked home crying without sound.
The sled dragged behind me like punishment.
My boots squelched.
I couldn’t tell if I was cold or just ashamed.

Mum opened the door.
Looked once.

“You are not coming in here like that.”

I stripped in the porch.
Air sharp on my skin.
The zippers wouldn’t budge—clogged.
I pulled until they gave.

She left a towel by the sink.
Still warm.

I still remember the rope.
Warm in my glove.
How tightly I held on.

I got to school early most days. My parents both worked retail, and Mum didn’t trust me not to leave the cooker on, or the door unlocked, or any one of the hundreds of things she’d worry about. So I waited in classrooms before anyone else arrived—quiet places where nothing happened, until it did. You learn early not to expect much. Especially from the people in charge.

Same Bruises, Different Wallpaper

At Deincourt, form classes were named like chemical compounds—three characters: a number for the year, two letters for your form teacher. Mine were 1PU, 2PU, 3TR, 4GR, 5GR. Same teacher for the first two years. Same teacher for the last two.

Deincourt had recently transitioned from being a Secondary Modern school to a newly minted Comprehensive. But it was a change in name only. A new Science block, some fresh signage—but the same old culture. The teachers taught like they always had—out of habit, out of spite, or maybe just because no one told them not to.

Some of them were good. Chris Twigg—if you ever read this—thank you. But too many clung to the old ethos: survive the day, maintain control, punish often. It wasn’t a place where sensitive kids like me thrived. I didn’t thrive—I endured. I learned early that seeking solitude in an empty classroom was safer than the playground or the school fields.

I got to school early most mornings. We left at eight, with Dad dropping me and my mum off at the bus stop at North Wingfield church. If we timed it just right, I’d be at Deincourt by 8:15.

I didn’t wait outside. Too exposed. Instead, I went straight to the geography room, which was also my form room. It was quieter there. Lonelier too—but that was the point.

One morning, I was bored. A stupid idea occurred to me: put a textbook on top of the door and wait for someone to walk in. It worked. The book hit Dave Roe on the head. He staggered, laughed, saw the humour in it immediately. Then he reset the trap.

For the next thirty minutes, we kept the game going. Sometimes it hit. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes someone would clock the silence in the room and open the door cautiously, or peek up and dodge it.

At some point, I felt it shift. Fewer people left to enter. The odds narrowing. I suggested that maybe we should stop. No one listened.

Bryan and Dave had been taking turns by then. Bryan had reset it the time before; Dave had done it just before PU walked in.

PU, our geography teacher, arrived in a rush, as usual. Shouldered open the door, tea in hand. The book dropped. Square on his head. His reaction was instant—rage, unfiltered. He kicked the book aside and scanned the room.

“Who did that?”

Dave was still on the move—caught mid-return to his desk, like a cricketer stranded between wickets. “Roe, come here!”

I hadn’t touched the book in a while. I’d already stepped away—my half-hearted pleas to quit while we were ahead having gone ignored. Still laughing. Still playing. Bryan said nothing at first. Just watched. Then, as PU turned away, he called out my name—too quickly, too eagerly. Like he’d been waiting for the moment. Like he enjoyed it.

I suppose self-preservation was the one subject that Deincourt taught well.

I tried to explain, but PU wasn’t in the mood for conversation. My mouth moved, but my feet stayed still, like standing still might soften what came next. He wanted blood.

He didn’t do it straight away. First, he told us to wait in the map room.

There was a side room—where he kept old worksheets, rolled-up posters, maybe maps. I never looked closely. The walls were half pinboard, half peeling gloss paint, and everything in there felt soft-edged, like memory worn down by handling. It wasn’t a secret place. Just a place where things happened—things that didn’t leave marks on the register, only on the kids.

He didn’t use a cane or a slipper. PU had a cut-down snooker cue—his own private tool for discipline, the grip worn smooth from use. It lived in the map room, like it was an optional part of the curriculum.

We stood inside—quiet, afraid. His beatings were the kind of thing people whispered about. My hands wouldn’t stop twitching. Dave kept looking at the floor.

Then something broke the fear—just a sliver. He worked his way through the register, one pupil at a time, but skipped our names. Moved right past them.

We caught each other’s eye. One of us whispered, “Here, sir.” We sniggered. Not because it was funny. Because it was the only thing between us and crying.

Then the door opened.

He beat us. I don’t remember how many times. Three? Six? Long enough to know it was for him, not for us. This wasn’t a lesson. It was release.

There was no paperwork. No escalation. No parent meetings. Just two boys, same bruises. Different wallpaper.

The emotional scarring took a little longer.

I wasn’t supposed to be here.
Not really.
Not with those grades.

October, 1979.
Brinsford Lodge, Wolverhampton Polytechnic.
B.Sc in Combined Studies—which sounded less like a qualification, more like a confession.
Computer Science and Economics: the sensible face I put on something more tangled.

If I’m honest, I’d sabotaged myself just enough to make staying seem reasonable.
After my mum’s death the year before, the idea of leaving my dad on his own—it felt too sharp, too soon.
Maybe I’d take a year off.
Maybe I wouldn’t go at all.

That summer, I tried to loosen the grip.
Foundry work instead of shelf-stacking.
Hard, tedious, well-paid.
Something heavier than tins.
Something hot enough to make the next goodbye feel survivable.

The reps who came by Dad’s store had their own way of saying farewell.
Chocolate biscuits. Instant soups. Luxury samples smuggled from their boots like contraband affection.
By the time he dropped me off, my wardrobe looked like a fallout shelter curated by someone with a very sweet tooth.

Then came Kate.

“Kate… Kate from Kent,” she said, with the faintest pause between the Kates—like the second one needed its own runway.

There were no other Kates.

Just her.

I didn’t think much of it at first.
Short, sensible hair. Newsreader glasses. Paddington Bear–style duffel coat.
Not unkind. Just built like someone who’d packed a thermos for life.

Brinsford Lodge wasn’t a campus.
It was a place history hadn’t moved on from.
A wartime hostel, then a teacher training college, then a holding pen for political exiles.
The walls knew things. The plumbing remembered.

My room was in K Block—long and narrow, like someone had unrolled a caravan and called it higher education.
A single bed. A scratchy chair. A desk that wobbled.
And a tin of luxury biscuits tucked in the wardrobe like treasure.

That weekend, I DJed the disco.
Old habit.
I had the vinyl. The lights.
The need to keep the room moving—because stillness let too much catch up.

When I played one of my favorites—The Specials, The Cure, XTC—I’d sprint onto the dancefloor and stay for every second.
Then dash back, heart thudding, just in time to cue the next track.
Not elegant. But mine. A loophole. A reminder I was part of the party, not just its mechanic.

That night, Kate watched me.
Not flirtatiously. Not confused. Just… curious.
Like I’d become her favorite glitch.

After the last record faded—Echo Beach, probably—I packed up in silence.
She was at the door. Still there.
No discussion. She fell into step beside me.

She talked the whole way back to K Block.
Not to me—at. A stream of low-pressure chatter about crisps, dorm lighting, someone named Sebastian who may or may not have owned a boat.

I invited her in.
Politeness, mostly.
Sat her on the bed. Opened the biscuit tin—the holy grail of my stash.
“Help yourself,” I said. Then left to make coffee.

The kettle was occupied.
Someone already standing guard over it like it might float away.
I waited. Refilled. Waited again.

By the time I returned, Kate had made steady progress.

A small pile of crumpled foil wrappers beside her.
Gold, red, blue.
She’d picked the ones I would have.
The hazelnut whirls. The dark chocolate ridged fingers.
The layered ones with the wavy top.

She had excellent taste.

We drank our coffee. She kept talking. I kept sweating—remnants of disco and nerves.

I stood to change.
Not a performance—just necessity.
Surely, this was her cue to leave.

She didn’t.

Her eyes tracked me like a wildlife documentary narrator might:
The male returns to his den, shedding his outer shell.
Munch, munch, blink. Munch.

It wasn’t fear, exactly.
But it was something breath-held and dumbfounded.
A weird kind of standoff I hadn’t trained for.

Eventually, maybe when the good ones were gone, she said,
“I should probably be going.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is getting late.”
I was halfway to the door before the sentence ended.

She rose, wiped her fingers delicately on a napkin I hadn’t offered, and left.

I bolted the door.
Stood in the biscuit-scented quiet.
What was that?
Not a question. A verdict.

A week later, Kevin decided our corridor needed a party.
Twelve rooms. Six on each side. Shared kitchen. One long, echoey hall.

He knocked on doors. Handed out cans.
Asked me to turn up the music.

Kevin stood in his doorway, directly opposite Paul’s.
We were chatting—music playing, laughter pinging down the corridor—when someone asked about Kate… Kate from Kent.

I started telling the story.
Dash-dancing. Coffee. Biscuits.

Paul’s door creaked open almost immediately.
He grinned at me, leaned against the frame like a man settling in for the next episode of something very entertaining.
“Go on,” he said. “Don’t leave out the good bits.”

So I didn’t.
I gave it all—her quiet fixation, the biscuit massacre, her unblinking stare as I changed my shirt.
I thought Paul was laughing just at the story.
Then he stepped aside.

And there she was.

Kate… Kate from Kent.

On his bed.
Eating his biscuits.
Red-faced. Silent. Caught mid-munch.

She didn’t say anything.

Neither did I.

I didn’t apologize.
I just turned.
Stepped backward into my room.
Shut the door.
Bolted it.

Head under pillow.
Walls still echoing with Paul’s laughter.

It took a few weeks for me to face her.

I mumbled something over jacket potatoes in the dining hall.
She waved it off.
Said she’d already moved on.

She’d seen the funny side long before I could.

Maybe that was her magic.
Not the voice. Not the polish.

The pause.
That tiny breath between Kates.

Room for absurdity.
Room for forgiveness.
Room for someone off-beat, off-rhythm, still learning how to cue the next track.

Room for someone like me.

The Rec had the best slide. We’d sit on waxed bread wrappers to pick up speed, launching ourselves off the end toward a patch of grass, and just beyond that, a roundabout.

Our goal wasn’t to stop—it was to fly. Not land—launch. We never stopped to consider how that might hurt. At the top, we had rituals: gripping the side rails, bouncing our knees, breath held like we were waiting for the shot—then letting go.

We didn’t want to be careful. We wanted speed. We wanted flight.

The playgrounds in Lower Pilsley—The Rec and The Green—were linked by a lattice of footpaths, carved long ago by miners walking to work. They linked the pits, the playgrounds, the terraced houses—thrown up quickly and cheaply when industry arrived.

The paths were short, direct, familiar. That didn’t mean they led anywhere we were meant to go.

They once led to Pilsley Colliery—“Catty Pit,” closed before we were born. We knew the name, not the story. Not the explosion. Not the 45 who never came home. We just played. Slid. Raced. We knew how to run on it, not what it had buried.

The collieries were gone. The local train stations, too. Only the main line still ran through North Wingfield. A few years later, when I was at Deincourt, we all went down to the tracks to watch The Flying Scotsman roar past. We waved like something might wave back. It steamed by like it still believed in arrival, even if it no longer stopped.

The trains didn’t stop anymore.
But the sorting remained.

By eight or nine, the split had begun. I was one of three in the top set that year—me, Chris, and Bryan—extracted from the rest to prepare for the 11-plus. Every day, we were fed a steady diet of logic puzzles and aging test papers while the others made papier-mâché, sang with the student teacher, and watched Meeting Our Needs on the wheeled-in TV.

We weren’t bitter. But we noticed.

The 11-plus wasn’t explained so much as absorbed. It decided which school you went to—Tupton Hall, the grammar, if you passed; Deincourt, the secondary modern, if you didn’t. But what it really decided was who got to be going somewhere.

Even the language was uneven.
A few of us—boys, mostly—got verbs: aim, climb, achieve.
The rest got nouns. Miner. Sheet metal worker. Factory hand. Nurse. Housewife. Shop girl.
Maybe teacher, if you were lucky.
That was the sorting, too. Not just by gender. By usefulness.

I got a verb. Not because I was better. Because someone decided I could be shaped.

So when we were told something special was happening after lunch—and yes, the three of us were included—it felt like we’d been let in by mistake. At the octagonal lunch tables, speculation buzzed. A film? A treat? A visiting magician?

We filed into Mr. Wright’s classroom after lunch. The desks had been rearranged. On each: a pink envelope, too neat to be ignored.

"Don’t open them," he said.

He was waiting for Miss Cotton—his girlfriend, though it was the worst-kept secret in the school. She wore tailored skirts and jackets, and her hair was the color of copper—the shade that only comes from bottles, though I didn't know that then. That day, she was late. Mr. Wright looked impatient. Checked the hallway. Then left to find her.

It took less than a minute.

One rustle. Then another.
Soon, most of us were peeling open the envelopes. Inside were slim booklets—not games, not puzzles. Just rules for a body we didn’t have the words for yet.

I remember the drawing.

The female reproductive system, pale blue ink. Fallopian tubes curling like cursive. Ovaries looking like something hidden behind a curtain—familiar in shape but unnamed, unclaimable. I stared too long. Not because I understood—because I didn’t. I didn’t know whether I had any of it. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to feel. A sudden thud in my stomach. My throat tight with embarrassment. And beneath that, a hard flicker of something like envy. Or panic. I wanted to ask, but the question didn’t have words. Just shape. Just heat. Just the awful feeling of being caught mid-thought.

Mr. Wright and Miss Cotton returned to a room gone still. At least one of the girls was crying. Miss Cotton went pale, panic rising.

"Put the booklets away," she said quickly.
"Back in the envelopes."

We obeyed. Clumsily.

Then the boys were told to stand and leave.

We filed out into the corridor, awkward and silent. We found out later the booklets were part of a sanitary product company’s campaign—information for the girls, a video too.

It was never mentioned again.

But I knew, immediately, that I’d seen something I wasn’t meant to. That there were rules I hadn’t been told. That shame and knowledge came in matching envelopes. That someone else always seemed to know more about my life than I did. Not just teachers. Not just adults. The kind of systems you don’t see until they’ve already shaped you. Paths that seemed open until you stepped off them. And someone—some institution, some design—wanted it that way. It kept us polite. It kept us obedient. It kept us guessing at what we were allowed to know. And for boys, especially, it taught us that ignorance was masculine. That not knowing was a kind of strength. That questions were a kind of weakness.

Even now, in rooms where I’m meant to speak, I feel for the edge of the map.

And when the silence came again, years later—different body, different questions—I recognized it. I knew how to obey it. I still do.

Some days I think that was the real test.
Not the 11-plus.

It was that moment—when a question formed, and I was told not to ask it.

The tracks were still there. But no one said what to do when the map ran out.

Maybe that was the point.
Maybe it still is.

By the time June came up the drive, I knew I couldn’t let her in.

We weren’t really dating—just paired off by mutual friends who thought shared faith was enough. We were all church kids—Methodist by label, Evangelical by tone. Singing solos in borrowed pews one week, speaking in tongues the next. It was meant to feel like belonging. Sometimes, it did.

Helen was older, louder, and drove like she was trying to outrun her hometown.
She never said it, but you could feel it—in how she scanned every room for someone single, in how she gripped the wheel like it might steer her straight into the life she thought was waiting for her.

Even years later, when I bumped into her again, she still wanted the same thing.

June rode along. A passenger in every sense.

She was twenty. I was sixteen. The age gap didn’t raise eyebrows back then—not in church, where the dating pool was shallow and the theology forgiving. But it felt like something I’d been drafted into, not something I’d picked.

Prayers were going unanswered. Mum was slipping.
Church had started to feel like pretending.

The first time we kissed, I mostly remember what I didn’t feel. The second time, she told me that she’d read my mum’s medical chart.

She said it like she was offering something generous.
Her mum worked at the local doctor’s surgery, and June had picked up some hours there while waiting to start nurse training.
“I saw your mum’s file,” she said, like it was something she was proud to bring me.
“I know how bad it is.”

Words like ‘liver failure’ and ‘Royal Free’ and ‘pneumonia’ came out of her mouth like they belonged to her now too.

I didn’t say anything.
But in my head: You shouldn’t know that. That wasn’t yours. You don’t belong in this part of my life.

But I didn’t know how to say that out loud.
Not then. Maybe not now, either.

A few days later, she called. Said she was sorry.
I mumbled something that could pass for forgiveness, but we both knew it wasn’t.

She asked if I wanted to go out that weekend. I told her I had to be home.
Then she offered to come over. Said she’d love to meet my mum.

No one was coming over anymore.
Even my godparents—who’d lost their daughter-in-law to cancer—had stopped visiting. Said it was just too hard.

Mum had just come back from the Royal Free in Hampstead.
We’d been told it was only a matter of time.
We hadn’t told her that part.

She was in a hospital bed in the living room by then. Mostly asleep. Her breathing all over the place.

We kept the curtains drawn. What was left of our life fit behind them. And that felt right.

I told June it wasn’t convenient.
I thought that would be enough.

It wasn’t.

That afternoon, I was sitting with my mum. The house was still.
Then I saw movement.

Through the curtain: June.
Walking up the drive like she belonged there.
She’d walked the whole way.
Like that proved something.

My dad went to answer the side door.

I felt my body freeze before it moved.
Out of the living room.
Through the kitchen.
Into the hall.
Unlocked the front door.
Around the house.
Over the fence.
Gone.

I stayed out in the fields for a couple of hours.
The grass had that early-spring scratch to it—the kind that leaves a memory on your jeans.

I don’t remember what I thought about.
Just the cold. The quiet. The safety of being nowhere.

When I came back, the kettle was cold.

My dad said, “You missed your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said.
He looked surprised.
“She said she was.”
“Well, she’s not,” I said again.

I heard how young I sounded.
But also, how final.

He didn’t ask any more questions.
Just told me she’d come in, met my mum, stayed for tea and biscuits, and talked for a while.

I never asked what they talked about.
I never told my mum what June had done.
I don’t think I could.

Mum was close to the end by then.
Everything unsaid felt kinder than anything I could have said.

I never spoke to June again.
Didn’t see her either.
She just vanished. No confrontation. No apology. Just... gone.

Years later, I ran into Helen.
She smiled at me like someone who hoped I might finally see her differently.
Maybe now, she thought I’d be one of the things she was still waiting for.

Some people treat your life like something they’re owed a piece of.
Some people wait a long time for the life they thought would come.
I don’t know what June thought she was offering me.
Maybe she believed it was care.
But it didn’t land that way. Not then.

I’ve never really told anyone this before. Not like this.
Not with the fence, and the fields, and the way my heart beat louder than her knock on the side door.

But what I come back to now isn’t the breach.
It’s the decision.
Mine.

To run.
To climb the fence.
To choose distance over explanation.
To say no with my feet.

There wasn’t a lock.
So I built a door.
Out of breath and grass and flight.

She stayed for tea.
I stayed gone.
Silence was the truest thing I could’ve done.

The above story is true(ish), but below are two fictional prequels, imagining the backstory from Helen and June’s perspectives.

Some memories show up like clockwork. Others arrive mid-sentence.

If you’ve read Step Away from the Synths, you’ll know I once got banned from Woolies for pretending to be The Human League.

That wasn’t the first time.

This was.

No synths. No Woody. Just music, Woolies, and the kind of glorious nonsense that only makes sense years later.

Additionally Banned

It was the summer of ’79, and I was working shifts at Clay Cross Works before heading off to college. Days, afters, nights—whatever the rota demanded. The job was grim, but it paid well.

We’d moved that spring, around the first anniversary of Mum’s death. Just a couple of villages over—but far enough that many of the old routines fell away. I’d shed a lot that year. Books, toys, whole layers of who I’d been. It hurt too much to keep.

Still, Thursdays were sacred. Thursdays meant the pilgrimage into town and the hunt for all four music papers: NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, and the Record Mirror. Snagging more than two of them was considered a result. After due consideration, I’d bought three of them that week. I didn’t want anyone to see me as being obsessive.

I was heading for the bus station on Vicar Lane when I ran into Andy. Same grin. Like someone who’d wandered in from an earlier chapter. He’s featured in more than one of the stories I’ve already told—or still plan to.

We stood chatting in that northen drizzle—the kind that just hangs in the air like it’s got a grievance—until one of us said what the other was already thinking:

“Woolies?”
“Shall we get a bite to eat?”

It had always been our spot. Slightly sticky tables, mugs hot enough to fear, the smell of vinegar and floor polish. The photo booth was there too—where we’d captured so much of our youth, four images at a time, sometimes with a different person in each shot. Always trying to look older, cooler.

And yes, I’d go on to be banned from Woolworths again—but this was the first.
Back then, it still felt like home.

Andy and I had always been into music. But by then, our tastes had diverged. He was still into early Genesis and The Alan Parsons Project—played on his beloved hi-fi. He was already eyeing an upgrade, and within weeks, I’d buy his old stuff off him. Three hundred quid. A fortune back then. Worth every penny.

I’d gone punk. In ’77, seeing The Jam on Top of the Pops had cracked something open for me. After that, it was The Clash, Siouxsie, The Buzzcocks.
Bands that didn’t just make noise.
They gave you something to find yourself in.

We sat. We caught up. Sort of.

But the music papers were right there. Brand new. Still stiff with ink and static. And the NME, especially, was calling.

When Andy got up—maybe to check on the food, maybe just to stretch his legs—I caved. Just a peek. One article.

I don’t remember the headline. But I remember the pull. It wasn’t just music. It was proof—someone out there cared about the same things I’d rebuilt my life around.
When not much else made sense, that did.

A map, printed in column form.

By the time he came back, I was deep inside it. Eyes locked. Fully gone.
His food had turned up. Mine hadn’t.
I figured he wouldn’t mind.

I should’ve remembered his brother.

Years earlier, I’d been at their house, reading one of his brother’s Monty Python books—the ones with the sketch scripts. This was before we had reruns or video recorders, so if you loved the show, you’d buy either the books or the albums. He had both.

I was deep in it, and he was trying to talk to me.

I kept reading.

So, totally deadpan, he picked up the other thing he loved—his super-sharp rapier—and sliced the book clean in half.

Afterwards, he looked genuinely gutted. Not because he’d done it, but because I’d made him do it.
To his book.

That logic stuck with us.

So when I didn’t look up, Andy didn’t call my name.
He just reached into his pocket, pulled out a lighter, and set fire to the fold at the bottom of the NME.
As you do.

I didn’t notice straight away. My eyes were still mid-column.
Then came the smoke.
Then the flames.

We panicked. Smacked the thing on the table. Hit it with the other papers.
Managed to put it out—just. But not before the café was filling with smoke.

Not before people noticed.
Not before management got involved.

Maybe that was his way of reaching me. One last ridiculous gesture in a long string of them.

Tables scraped. Voices raised. Andy looked quietly satisfied.

We laughed about it then.
We still do now.

Someone came over and told us to leave.
We did. Slowly. And maybe not quite as sorry as we should’ve looked.
Maybe we sniggered.

We were making our way to the lift, past the photo booth, when someone shouted after us—
“You’re banned!”

I don’t think they recognised me.
And honestly, I’ve never been sure which ban came first.
They were only a few weeks apart.
This one probably.
The other one didn’t even feel like it happened in the proper store.

So technically, I wasn’t re-banned.

I was additionally banned.

Funny how a place can forget you completely, and yet you still remember the colour of the chairs.

We never did get the tea.

No synths this time.
Just smoke, fire, and a sentence I never got to finish.

Flashback Friday began as a way to revisit old essays or poems with a looser grip—sometimes to revise, sometimes to release.
The first version of this piece, No Need to Put on That Red Light, was written in 2021.
It still makes me laugh. It still makes me wince. It was, in some ways, about letting go of resentment.

But memory doesn’t always loosen its hold.
Some stories return not to be retold, but to ask different questions.
Not just what happened?
But what did we learn? What was revealed—not about school or scandal, but about power, visibility, silence?

This isn’t a correction.
It’s a reexposure.
A story, still developing.

Held Up to the Light

1. The System Was Supposed to Be Fixed

When Derbyshire scrapped the 11-plus, they promised equity.
No more grammar school elite.
No more academic caste system.

We became a comprehensive in name, but not in culture.
Same walls. Same teachers. Same second-class feeling.
Different name on the letterhead.

The myth was that all of us now had access.
The truth was that some doors stayed locked
and others swung open into chaos.

You could pick Science, but no one told you
if the curriculum would match your next school.
We were promised access.
What we got was guesswork.

2. Physics by Way of Football Boots

I picked Physics to follow my brothers’ footsteps.
Both had studied it at the University of London.
It felt like walking into the snow
where someone else had already cleared a path.

The Head of Science made it an easy choice.
He lit up the subject—until he got his Open University degree,
landed a new job, and left halfway through the year.

The headmaster filled the gap with a biology hire no one asked for,
and handed Physics to a games teacher
whose qualifications began and ended with owning a camera.

He explained this to me
in the library of a rival school,
right after I’d demolished their chess captain in an easy win.
He was feeling pleased with himself.
And, apparently, with me.

He liked optics.
He liked us liking optics.
And soon, we liked photography
more than we liked anything else in school.

3. The Dark Room

The darkroom sat between the labs.
No one told us it was off-limits.
No one locked the drawers.

In fact, we had his blessing.
He showed us how to load the 35mm cameras
with black-and-white film,
encouraged us to shoot freely,
and said we could develop everything ourselves—
so long as we didn’t waste materials.

We were curious.
We were fifteen.

One day, while we waited for our turn in the developer tray,
someone pulled a strip from a drawer
and held it up to the overhead light.

“There’s a nude woman on here.”

It took a second for the words to register.
Then everything came into focus.

A 35mm strip—just an inch and a half wide—
held more consequence than we could see at first.

We knew.
And we knew we shouldn’t know.

4. Exposure

We paused.
Held the moment like breath in our throats.
The silence had weight.

Then someone said he wanted a copy.
Another added, “Let’s make enlargements.”

Still, we hesitated—just long enough to know
this wasn’t harmless.

And then it all moved too fast.
Like it always does when curiosity gets mistaken for permission.

We made prints.
A lot of them.
A production line formed—fast, frantic, focused.
Dripping sheets.
Chemical trays.
The hum of the dryer warming to a backlog.

No class had ever lit us up like that.
It wasn’t the lesson we needed—
but it was the one we got.

5. Caught in the Red

We’d printed 25, maybe 30 enlargements.
But only two would fit in the dryer at a time.
The rest—wet and curling—lined the counters,
dripped from hangers,
piled like contraband.

When the knock came, we hit the switch.
Red light. Red bulb. Red hands.

The room glowed dim and guilty.
The negatives went back in drawers.
Dry prints into bags.
Scraps stuffed into pockets.
Wet prints under sweaters—clammy against our ribs.

“Let me in, lads.”

We stalled.
“We’re just developing, sir.”
The lie dropped faster than our heart rates.

The next day, he sent me to fetch something—
and followed.
Caught me by the lapels.
And bounced me off the corridor wall.

“You are banned from photography.
Banned from the darkroom.
Banned from being in the science block outside of lessons.
You’re lucky I don’t kick you out of class.
Now get out of my sight.”

His face was red.
Mine, I think, went cold.
I remember the chill of the wall
more than anything he said.

We had all been caught.
But I had been held up to the light.

6. What We Learned in the Darkroom

That exposure is permanent.
That institutions forgive carelessness in adults
but not curiosity in children.
That if you're noticed once—for the wrong reason—
you stay noticed.

But also this:
Somewhere in the silence after the slam,
something else developed.

I still speak when silence would be safer.
Still step forward when fairness is out of reach.
I know what it costs to be on the radar.
Maybe that’s where I learned
that visibility is rarely neutral.

And still I choose it.

Some prints dry slowly.
Some moments never stop developing.
Some screwups really do belong in a silent film.
And the red light?
It never really turned off.