so here's a thing

in the process of moving house i found "a thing" - to whit the novel that i wrote when i was sixteen whilst waiting for my GCSE results. not for me a hedonistic summer of celebration with my friends - oh no. i was a strange wodehouse/ doctor who/ douglas adams obsessed teenager whose best friend idolised george formby. so it kind of made sense for us very weird kids to challenge each other to write a novel over the summer

dave wrote a thing called "school daze" which was amazing in the way it built up to set pieces beautifully - it was exquisitely timed and gorgeously written... and then whenever a set piece was needed he just sort of left it for later... whereas i zipped along merrily with utter disregard for structure and timing and logic. it just sort of fell out... as you will soon see

for yes, i am going to post it all up here. the ridiculous outpourings of a sixteen year old who felt that just what the world needed was an anarchic, knockabout comedy version of euripedes' "iphigenia in aulis"...

but before all that here is the folder it was found in...

this lot on the back were the main cast of my fictional world - st dominics. this was a heavily greyfriars influenced version of my horrible private school i was stuck with going to: bedford school. i was a scholarship kid, my dad being one before me - he loved every second of it, i hated every second of mine. i was a lower middle class kid in a world of arrogant, stuck up rich kids. i was bullied from the get go. i loathed it. the school promoted rubbishy sports' people over actually GOOD old bedfordians like john fowles and saki. i retreated into a fantasy world more akin to a wodehouse book than the real world

the idea that st dominics - later st judes, when i realised i hadn't come up with the name - was home to a wide range of characters, and each book and story would involve those characters individually and occasionally as a collective. they included the rubbishy ed mcbrane, constantly in denial of his own rubbishness; bill "the pathetic" perkins, who was an inverse of the great gatsby - always hoping he was the romantic hero of his own life but actually horribly anachronistic; greg and mabel, my weirdly chaste romantic leads; neil redburn, mad scientist and loon; hamish cambofflebuffle, an ill thought out to write novels based on e j thribb from private eye

the book that is about to start was a neil one, and a not very good one at that. it's.... very much the vision of a boy who was very immature and unworldly, but probably quite brighter than average and deeply, deeply in love with the books that gave him an escape from his miserable daily life. it's... a thing. and it's here. and it's for you, if you want it...