One of the many opportunities it afforded was a French exchange trip, and the above image of me and my opposite number Hugo, both gangly and shapeless in a bowling alley in Normandy, must be one of the first taken on a camera that I owned myself. Bourne Grammar wasn’t without its problems – the lingering banks of demountable classrooms, the new headteacher fresh from the private sector and determined to emulate it as sycophantically as possible – but its academic focus set me firmly on the path towards the kind of life I’ve ended up living. The school itself was a state-funded selective institution, which gave me good educational prospects – demonstrably, I’ve since learned, at the expense of others. There were other, more productive ways of meeting us where we were: few interventions in my life have made more of an impact than the moment when I was taken aside after an English lesson in which I’d made a snidely homophobic joke, and told by the teacher that she knew a boy my age who was gay and happy with who he was. I’m not twelve any more, so in a way they are:īack then, though, it was cool to hate – teachers, school, and the people around me – and easy enough to do so with what another of my pop-punk faves referred to as ‘ reckless abandon.’ The teachers, of course, were mostly perfectly helpful, though that didn’t stop us roasting them for making minor, old-person mistakes like asking ‘When’s Green Day?’ when they saw the band logo on somebody’s pin badge.
#Stuttering song lyrics how to#
1 I remember distinctly knowing every word to the California skate-punks’ – Garden Grove, no less – 1997 opus Ixnay on the Hombre, though looking at the lyrics today rings so few bells that they might as well be a language I’ve forgotten how to read. The Offspring hoodie comes from a stall in Peterborough market – you’d have found Nirvana, Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit hanging up beside it, and my nascent CD collection looking much the same.
I didn’t hear the Mountain Goats’ first release on 4AD until three or four years later, but on the evidence of this photograph of myself at the time, I’m not sure I would have been ready to get all that much out of it.
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