If you go back one entry there's a nasty double-Sampras surprise waiting for you ;)
Anyway, the third and final entry in my set of three. Nineteen Ninety-Nine. Tomorrow I'm going to put up in a private entry some photographs I found from all 3 summers. I went looking for them earlier and they made me smile, particularly the stupid one of me conquering the Bureau :) And of me looking in serious danger of marrying the Uxbridge sign at the station.
So, the summer of 1999. Between going back to college after the previous summer and breaking up for the final summer holiday of my life, I'd had the most awful year. At college there was a new tutor who we called The Adam because he looked like Adam from Bugs. He pulled me apart in a really nasty way, not only making me feel bad about my work but picking on me for personal reasons as well. His sheer presence made me want to run right home. He was a crap tutor as well - he behaved like he was teaching five-year-olds so no one responded to him.
I was feeling lower than I ever had in my life. I was no more over what had happened the summer before than I had been on the night it happened. And just to do my nerves the world of good, I'd also been stalked by a weird old man a few months previously. I also felt as though I was the only person in the world who wasn't in love and still believed at that time that you can only be happy if you're with someone. I was finding my sexuality harder and harder to keep under wraps, and the first anniversary of that was coming around.
I must have had some kind of break down at that time. Looking back, I can see that. I didn't know it at the time. On the second day of the summer holiday - and the anniversary of my assualt - I painted a picture which to this day is the best thing I've ever created, and then my mind just.... closed down. I spent the whole day painting, pouring everything into it, and it was as though after that my mind just collapsed. There was nothing left in me. I felt empty. And coinciding with this, a certain 'friend' sent me that letter; the one listing all the worst points of my personality and how no one would ever like me unless I changed every thing about myself. I had.... nothing left.
For days, weeks, I couldn't do anything. I could not write, draw, even talk to anyone. I shut out the whole world. Nothing went on inside my mind. It was too painful to think any thoughts. I didn't leave the house. I didn't leave my room. There were thoughts of suicide, which stopped when I realised I didn't even have the strength to do it.
One afternoon, I suddenly realised what was happening. As though realising I was in the middle of a dream while asleep. I realised that I had to do something. I had to get myself working again. get my mind working and my body working. I didn't know how. I just had to *do* something - anything - and to throw every drop of energy I had into it.
My first task was to make a board game. Yes, highly intellectual, I know.... *cough* - I made a Bugs board game. First I painted two huge sheets of cardboard (repeatedly. I used bloody poster paints instead of acrylic so the damn grey showed through all the time!) and then drew out squares and coloured them different shades. In the corners I had things like The Bureau and The Hive (And also Channing's Place, which just goes to show how lame I was feeling!) and then I spent days typing up the little cards to go with it, with dares like "Do an impression of Jan hosting Whose Line is it Anyway?" and various questions and such. Then I accidentally slashed my hands to pieces as art students unavoidably do by cutting the cards up with a craft knife and also managed to glue several instructions to my fingers, but when it was finished, I felt proud.
And let down.
Now what was I supposed to do? As soon as I stopped, my brain came to a dead halt again.
I found something else to keep me busy: A sculpture I started two and a half years earlier of Jaye Griffiths and had abandonned because.... it was too difficult! Now.... Now I wanted to try again. So day after day I set myself up a little work area in the corner of the room, with my clay board on a stool and my tools all around me. I would start working at 9 am and carry on until late in the evening, breaking only briefly for food. It took a week or so, but at last - with the accompaniment of my entire collection of Bugs tapes - it was complete. I have never been so proud of anything in my life as I was of that.
The last three episodes of Bugs has still not been shown so another of my missions was to write to the BBC and to Carnival Films to ask when they would be shown. The BBC responded almost immediately with an 'I don't know' while Carnival held back until they could give me good news - that the showing was imminent - except my will to live was destroyed when I received some complimentary but unexpected Bugs postcards, with the sunburned Houghton on the top.
Another task I gave myself to get my brain working again was to complete all the Sonic the Hedgehog games. Now, I have always been a huge sonic fan, but had only ever completed Sonic 2 (I'm not a very good games player!) so for a week I did nothing but play them. I finished Sonic 1 on the first day. I'd never completed it before! Then I started on Sonic 3 and got right to the end of that! Finally, I started on Sonic and Knuckles.... to this day, the final part of the final zone still gets me :/ Damnit!
I don't know.... maybe these tasks worked for a while, but I was still deeply unhappy. I'd received *that* letter and had my confidence shattered even more so than it was before. The only way I could stop myself from curling up and dying was - and this sounds really stupid now - to force myself to think of three things to look forward to the next day. Three things to live for. Unfortunately, I was so desperate that one of these things was.... the Eclipse.
How many fellow brits remember with sarcasm the eclipse in 1999? Oh my goodness, it was pathetic. Everyone made an enormous fuss over it. Everyone! I could only see one good thing in it: It stopped everyone talking about the Millennium for a couple of minutes. All channels suspended their usual programming in order to show a shot of the sun going dark, or to show Philippa Forester crying with bare feet, or to show that Patrick Moore had been brought out the mothballs for the event.
As a bloke said on the radio the next day,
"In a hundred year's time there's going to be another eclipse. And I think patrick Moore's still going to be there!"
Ahh, the radio. I started listening to the now defunct Breeze in 1999. It was a new station back then, playing mainly 70s and 80s music, which of course I adored. It was where I discovered songs like Donna by 10cc, Driver's Seat by Sniff & The Tears, and The Promise You Made by Cock Robin. I used to have it playing for hours while I dyed my hair yet another colour. It was on that station I discovered there was a song called Stool Pigeon, which amused me more than I can say!
I made a mistake that summer, a mistake of going out with someone because I thought I had to have a partner to be happy. C had been one of my best friends, despite being obsessed with that damn dog. She'd moved away the year before but we'd stayed in touch. I had always found her attractive and I'd always hoped for more, but it never happened. However, one day she happened to be coming back to Surrey for the day so we met up and it was just like old times. She hadn't changed a bit.
We talked and talked, a thousand words a second. It was good to have her back in my life. As the day drew on I plucked up my courage and I told her that I fancied her. All at once she exploded with reciprocation, as though it had been a case of who was going to say it first. And there and then we decided to give it a go.
To begin with, it made me happy. I'd always cared for her quite deeply. We used to meet at brighton for the day, halfway between her town and mine. We'd walk through the lanes hand in hand, we'd hug and kiss under the pier, we'd laugh at all the silly things people got up to. We'd just talk for hours about anything and everything. We'd mock Kirsten and Otis, we'd talk about Bugs, we'd talk about music. One day we saw a camera crew in brighton, filming Eastenders which we thought was a great laugh. But one day she said 'I Love You'. And I couldn't say it back.
I knew then that it wasn't right. I loved her as a friend but I wasn't in love with her and I never would be. I really wished that I'd been able to say it back, but I couldn't. By the end of the summer I was single again.
I met up one day for lunch with a friend I'd made online. We had a debate over whether Robert Smith was the lead singer with The Cure or The Smiths and I went looking for proof that he was the singer of The Cure online that night to send him with a 'na-na-na-na-na' declaration!. I'd never heard the song 'Lovesong' by them for some reason, but I found the lyrics while hunting. When I read them I realised that's what I wished for should I ever fall in love. All laid out in song. I printed out a copy to remind me. I had no idea I'd find it all so soon :)
A couple of weeks later I bought a Cure CD on one of my trips to Brighton, and played it repeatedly that summer. The other song of the summer was Drinking in LA, which I'd loved on the Rolling Rock advert and I was desperate to buy when it came out as a single. Again, I bought it in Brighton. I bought a CD on every date that C and I had, in fact. I know one was a Nik Kershaw album, but we can gloss over that one.....
As the summer drew on, my pain worsened. I'd suffered from extreme pain with my periods since I was 16 but suddenly it got so severe I thought I was going to die. There was one particular bleed - the day after the eclipse - that I spent just laying on my bed whimpering. I only left the room to crawl on hands and knees to the toilet to let out the blood, then crawl back again. I spent the day reading the Drop the Dead Donkey novel I'd purchased a year earlier and never gotten round to reading. The ending was disappointing... and I can't remember a word of it because I was so out of it on pain!
I also watched a kid's programme called Telequest. Much to my disappointment, I only discovered it at the last minute and saw only the last 3. The first one I saw was on the day of the eclipse. The plot was that the main characters, Questor and Butt, were supposed to be from 100 years in the future and had come to collect information from children in the year 1999. However, this involved kids calling in, live. Oh dear. You can imagine how badly this worked.
Great TV!
Talking of TV, the last episodes of Bugs came on. I was.... disappointed. They'd lost something. or I had. I still did the whole running-down-to-buy-magazines thing and I still drooled over every picture of Jaye that appeared, but the passion wasn't there. It really, truly saddened me. But I found myself glad when they were over. I never thought i'd be saying that, but it was true.
At the same time was all this was going on, we had our whole central heating system ripped out and replaced. I cannot begin to describe the disruption this caused. Not to mention the fact that a certain teletext service had me terrified of Apples by this point. I spent days packaging up all my belongings so that furniture could be moved around the room as the radiators were ripped out and to top it off I was in agony again. When we actually had the things replaced.... Well, I can't remember much of it. I was dosed up on painkillers and in agony. I spent the four days locking myself away in the only unaffected room, looking after the parrot and typing the last book that I wrote before my 4 year hiatus - a Bugs/Drop the Dead Donkey crossover, in which I also bizarrely killed off Neil Buchannan. Face it, he deserved it!
By the time the heating saga was over, my bedroom was left in tatters by it. So was my favourite picture of Jaye Griffiths. The plumbers had torn it accidentally and it was ruined. I was completely devastated. A redecoration was in order.
I moved into the spare room for 2 wonderful weeks. I loved it in there. So cosy. Me, squashed up with my TV and my hifi, and my painting from the start of the summer. All my books tucked under the bed so I could get to them with ease, the room warm and tucked out of sight. I loved it. I still have reasons for liking that room - it's a nice place for sex ;)
During the last week of the summer I went to see two stand-up comedy shows with my patents. The first was Richard Digence who we went to see every year, and the second was Craig Charles. Craig Charles was fantastic which was more than could be said for his support act. Craig Charles also nicked my pen afterwards, but that's another story :)
Somehow, at the start of the last week of summer, my head cleared. As my room was all packed away and belongings just got swept up, so did some of the pressures that had hounded my mind. The mists cleared. I looked at my art afresh and I did not hate it. I did my whole college summer project in one week, in that squashed up room, in front of the first ever episode of Spaced and the first episode of Belfry Witches. I worked and worked, and I liked what I made.
I rediscovered it a week ago, and I liked it even more.
This time, when I went back to college, I really was stronger. I'd learned valuable lessons that summer: That happiness does not just come to you. You have to work at it. You have to find it. And it doesn't come from an accessory. It comes from within you.
That was the first of many steps since that's led to me being the person I am now.
And now? Now, I am really, really happy :)
Thank you so much for reading xxx
# Some men there wanted to hurt us,
And other men said we weren't worth the fuss.
We could see them all bitching by the bar,
About the fine line, between the rich and the poor.
Then Mike turned to me and said:
"What do you think we got done son?"
We've got a conclusion, and I guess that's something. #
..