I tried to mis-spend my youth, fairly successfully really, because it seemed more fun than the alternative. But only with the wonder of hindsight do I realise I had some kind of dyslexic ailment/affliction/disability/disease? Yet because dyslexia wasn’t invented until 1993 (Ronnie Dyslexia, et al, ‘Plobrem pselling in chlidrne’), I was just called ‘thick’. Although I was great at maths and pretty good at any science subject which didn’t have too many words in it. I hated English. History. Too much reading, too many words. I’d rather watch Dixon of Dock Green, thanks.

The retrospective irony, of course, is that I truly love readin’ and writin’ now, obviously, which is why I’m here every bleeding day with an outpouring of words. All checked by someone in the Apple ‘cloud’ before you read it. Yet I never picked up a book to read until I was about 21. Not for pleasure. Because it wasn’t. I loved comics, but never books. Since that first book (Exodus by Leon Uris; bit relevant today really), I haven’t stopped reading.

But so what?

What was worse that I grew up in a house with the two most ‘capable’ people alive. Although my mum was incredibly capable in a very pragmatic way, my dad and my brother were truly exceptional at ‘doing things’ which to me were impossible. My dad built fitted wardrobes. Not from a flat-pack, but from… like… wood… nails… paint. He paved our front garden, beautifully, then built a fabulous low-level wall around it. He could do anything with his hands. And he was an optician, not a builder.

Whereas my brother was a world expert at the nascent ‘solid state electronics’ (when it got ‘small’; going from valves to transistors, moving from massive to really small and neat), when he was 10. He taught his physics teacher. He built the first stereo I ever heard (Sargeant Peppers; the first album produced in ‘stero’) and, given a ‘wiring diagram’, or, if there wasn’t one, just drawing his own, he built amplifiers, mixing units for his rock band, absolutely anything up to and including his first computer. When he started driving he would just service his car himself. Got a book, followed the instructions, how hard could it be?

I looked at those ‘instructions’, those ‘exploded diagrams’ with 7,000 components, washers, valves, bolts, cylinders, and saw nonsense. Confusion. No meaning whatsoever.

My talents were less useful really. I was good at football, a world champion at lusting after beautiful girls and I could generally make people laugh. I was simply fucking useless at anything more practical than turning an album over on a record player. Didn’t stop me trying, but I always had my dad around to put it right afterwards, and my brother there to laugh.

But we needed a new plinth in the garden for our iron sculpture. And the only ones available were really dull and boring or ridiculously expensive (360 quid for a pile of tiles). So I built my own. Bricks and tub of cement: 35 quid, and from that, from NOTHING, I produced… THIS!!! I’m not saying it’s like the 7 days of The Creation, mainly because it took me at least 14 days of procrastination and rain before I started, but wow. I built it, laid those bricks, used a spirit level (I love tools, have literally a shed full, I’m just not very good at using them) then abandoned it because it must have been broken, telling me my bricks weren’t straight, when they almost were, and I did it. If it’s still standing in 3 months time is yet to be seen, but for now? It awaits our ‘Dolly’!

Happy cement drying day

A xxxx