If you are inspired by Tristram’s chaotic attempts to tell his life and opinions, we invite you to write your own Shandean life story in the form below, in no more than 250 words, and to send it to to us. We will publish the best entries on this page.
SHANDEAN STORIES
Dave Sambrook - Salisbury As this is my first attempt at writing for some while I expect I shall have to be careful that I don’t repeat myself too much, as I have learnt over the years, 58 to be precise, that if the reader is like me they will very quickly loose interest and go off an do something more important. Incidentally, I hope you realise that I could have gone into more detail on the previous subject, along the lines of Just a Minute. I have noticed of late, having retired recently, that I have a slight tendency for inertia, an interesting subject in it’s own right which is nicely illustrated by the World’s Strongest Man when even some of these colossus (or is it colossi – I really aught to consult my dictionary here but am in one of my more creative moods so must press on) fail to lift the last atlas stone. Perhaps inertia is the wrong word, because I certainly find the time to do the things I like, it is the things I don’t like that seem to have the greatest inertia. It may be that Melvyn Bragg should tackle this issue as he is bound to have a good bash at explaining it - not just as it applies to me I hasten to add but to the world at large. It strikes me that the one group of people who are certainly not subject to the laws of inertia are - sorry must go
Emma Segar, Liverpool Here, poorly qualified as I am to complete the story of my life -- being not yet dead -- I set down the incidents and accidents that have led me --- by way of many transgressions --- to the sorry state in which I am now occupied, namely, teaching.
My parents --- teachers, both --- were great believers in education, and so, for the first twenty-two years of my life --- saving the adventure of a gap year’s foray into the shadowy worlds of voluntary work, rainforest conservation and switchboard operation --- I followed studiously in their pursuit of this elusive quarry, taking the traditional path of schooling followed by an extended stay at University, to which I have, since, periodically returned; I have, however, in the ensuing years ---- modest in number, though momentous in experience ---- concluded my own educational quest in favour of embarking on the most worthy and respectable profession of interfering with other people’s, and, in this time, have developed a distinct scepticism with this endeavour, having witnessed little, if any, tangible, independently verifiable evidence for its existence in either myself or my students.
I seek education, now, in much the same spirit that I – along with a group of similarly-minded volunteers and a large quantity of home-distilled rice wine – sought Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in the rainforests of Vietnam, having been assured that, while there was no doubt of their existence, unless we could produce concrete evidence of their passage, their habitat was doomed.
Alice Thurling, Kingston upon Thames My father and mother begat me when their youth was such as to make the like indiscretion excusable. Although married, contrary to the custom of their friends, their wedding photograph depicts fashions which one shudders now to behold. My potential success as a businesswoman of the highest calibre has undoubtedly been thwarted by my mother’s consumption of liquorish allsorts while in a delicate condition. Alas, such empty calories have produced an individual with a marked tendency to sleep all morning, require several days to complete the washing of a batch of clothes and procrastinate diligently with regard to the telephoning of Thames Water.
My parents were informed that I should arrive on the 29th day of February 1972. However, made restless by the E-numbers in the aforementioned confectionary, and unwilling to sacrifice three-quarters of my genuine excuse to drink to excess, I arrived on the 27th. It seems I must still have been ambivalent about exchanging my First Class centrally heated compartment for the Economy Class of a Britain not entirely politically at ease. I took twenty-seven dithering hours to be born. This resulted in a head pointed to a degree rarely seen outside the pages of the Fortean Times. Added to the usual baby hue of a genetically engineered beetroot-tomato cross, this made me a truly appealing infant – a start from which I have never fully recovered.
It may be regarded as fortunate that, rather than passing on such dubious inheritance, I have welcomed the supercilious glances of cats.
Noel Welsh, Birmingham My life has been, well, more years than I can remember;
certainly more than I can count. It is a convoluted tale,
with its twists and turns, and gains and losses, and indeed
not always a happy one -- though now I may be sitting here
with my dearest friends, warm and content, this is not its
totality. No! I am forever reminded of the bad days: those
that gave me my permanent disability, my loss of balance, an
injury that cut me down in my prime, a wound to the mind
that meant I could never enjoy the freedom of my youth; that
meant I could neither run nor jump. But I shall deal with
that in its proper time, just as I shall deal with the other
unfortunate events -- the sorry meeting, outside the bounds
of wedlock, that gave rise to my existence; the sorry events
that lead to my parting from my mother and siblings; and all
those other tragic events that characterised my early life
before I entered into the greater happiness that now defines
me. All that in its proper time! I resolve to begin, and
begin with haste, and having begun to carry on promptly in
the manner that I begin and so lead briskly, without detour,
through my life so that we shall arrive quickly at the
present. But time has run away. We shall begin again
tomorrow, when I shall commence the tale of that feline who
is myself, William S. Cat.
Gerald O'Connell, Walthamstow There! My biography, for now at least, shall end with that selfsame exclamation mark, and all I now have to do is to fill in the gap that lies before it, back to the point of my birth. And yet, it occurs to me with great force and straight (or, perhaps, quite nearly straight) away that in continuing to write I am doing no more than offering my readers the most precise evidence of that very deed that I have promised not to mention - namely the act of writing about my life, and doing so, of necessity, after (mark that wretched word, for I fear it may yet undo the best of all my efforts) determining, as must any well-ordered and healthy mind, that point at which my story must end. You may immediately see, therefore, why it becomes essential that I attempt to tell you nothing at all about myself, for to do so would only bring disorder upon my enterprise. Indeed, the danger is greatly compounded by its mention, so much so that the only way now for me to return to my task is to redraw the mark thus! And hope, having finished once more, to start again the story that I am, as I have so carefully explained, unable to tell, or even tell of, without having to finish again yet a third time…
Oh dear! It would seem that the story of my life is a hole, and my pen nothing but a shovel!
Timothy Long - Coxwold A Shandean narrative! 250 words! Ok. Well, were to start. Err, well, of course I can’t start it now as I have already said something. So to start I would have to delete everything I have just written and start again. That is one of the great things about computers, isn’t it, that if you make a mistake you can just press a button and you can change the mistake just like that. Actually, as a interesting point, when people say “just like that” what exactly to they mean by “that”. They could mean like “I can finish this extra-long essay just like I could eat a huge helping of horrible, gooey, disgusting fat. Actually, come to mention it, that is exactly what my dad does. He eats fat like many people eat sweets, which looking at him is surprising as he is a thin as these disablement pensions people get. If people want decent pensions these days, they should start looking down the back of their couches. I for one loose lots of pennies down the couch abyss and, whoa, got to stop. Dinnertime!
Paul A White - Bushey, Herts It would be fair to say that by the time of my arrival into this world, childbirth had long since lost any sense of wonderment or joy that it may have once held for my mother. As baby number four, I learnt that the apathy that greeted my emergence that day and which continued throughout my tender, childhood years, was not born of parental cruelty, but more a sad consequence of the incredible success rate of my parent’s frequent sexual union. Familiarity did indeed breed, and its spawn, if not contempt, was at the very least indifference.
But that did not stop my parents who continued their patriotic, post war duty, of re-populating the entire south east of the country, filling our ‘built for a hero’ council house with as many mouths as they could conceivably ill afford to feed. Each new arrival ensuring the further deprivation and anonymity of its predecessors, until family photographs became just an indistinct sea of increasingly more distant faces on increasingly more lean bodies.
Yet strangely, amongst all these crowded childhood images that I store safely in the darkest, deepest recesses of my mind, the one that visits me most as I sleep is not of one of noise or cramped, busy rooms, it is of loneliness – of a frightening solitude that one can only truly experience when surrounded by people … of belonging, yet not… of being unloved.
Pooter of Fife What a task! What challenge! What inspiration! My life and opinions being of such great
moment, I could not, in good conscience, refuse to impart them to the eager, waiting masses. I
fair rushed to set pen to paper. The result was so profound, so affecting, so full of insight, and
yet so modest, that I was moved to tears - and, dear reader, lest you think my judgment
partial, it was not only myself who was of such a mind, for I consulted my neighbour on the
matter. “Learned Sir!” I accosted him, “have you ever seen a work of such perspicacity - such
art - such diligence - such truth?” He paused scarcely for a second, before he declared it
astonishing, and notable for its conciseness - I forget his exact words, but I can confirm that
brevity was in the gist. I returned to the computer, prepared for electronic dispatch - but oh,
what disappointment! My nib failed to make any impression on the screen, and the figure I
had drawn - the line which charted, in diagrammatic form, the progress of my early years, my
growth to manhood, that unfortunate misunderstanding and my final triumph over
adversity - could not even be submitted. It is well, I suppose, for faced with work of such a
quality and such enthralling vision, other writers may feel discouraged, and I have no wish to
quell their voices into silence as, disheartened, they compare their efforts with mine - but what
a loss to the world!
Léo Burton Albeit I have surpassed the alloted span of three score and ten, I venture that shall I now, at this sitting, begin the story of my life at its beginning, I shall have sufficient time, if I am not unduly diverted by the ardent affection of my young wife, to deliver an account of the doings and the do nots, the gist of my earthly presence,almost unto it termination, leaving a blank page whereupon some other may write my final words, which shall be, I trust, more articulate than the doubtless happy cry of my mother at the moment of my conception. Having thus begun this account, and not allowed myself to be distracted by certain rhythmical sounds from above where, as my wife informed me, she had the intention of undertaking some ladylike tasks with the assistance of a recent addition to our household, a buxom lass who bears some resemblance to the wet-nurse who suckled me, my mother wishing to preserve her natural beauty, if not for her husband, who, as I learned from his estranged brother, my uncle, from whom, when he was in his cups, I gleaned many inklings of doings which my parents would surely have disowned, including the hint that my mother's husband was not immediately present at my conception. However, my mother was made fruitful, and my life, and the story of it, is begun.
Chris Cuninghame, London Two hundred and fifty words? Not much, is it, to describe the achievement of, well - life? Still, we have to be grateful for anything we get, these days, don’t we? Given with one hand and taken away with the other – and then probably with both feet.
Sorry. Where was I? I don’t seem even to have begun and there’s the clock’s ticking. Even say the word ‘beginning’ and, like a hare, you’ve irrevocably started. Some poor souls won’t even multiply before they reach their inevitable ends: like those self-devouring snakes.
What an awful image! We’ll try rainbows instead. The radiance of their colours made even more profound because they are so mysterious, ungraspable. Yes, that could be the noble centre-piece to this argument.
But how ever do I get it there? Except, as I’ve already explained clearly – and how I wish you’d all pay attention, especially you at the back! – precisely because I’ve started, I must mean ‘did I’, mustn’t I? And it’s ‘here’, not ‘there’, as here we plainly are.
So please stop trying out these silly diversionary tricks. Do you want the moral of this history, or not? Let’s try again. I’ve some notes with me, marked, ‘Midwife: Confidential’. And what they say is: ‘Very large feet.’
And that must, as nearly as it can, account for our particular’s journey. There’s no more space, I’m afraid. All I can really add is:
‘Rest in peace – ‘
Oh, dear me! What is the name of this
Lately Deceased?
M Hollingworth Bristol I was born in West Yorkshire, one of a twin. I have always had the uncomfortable feeling I may have been greedy even in the womb and denied my sister, who died shortly after birth, the nutrients she needed. My mother and fathers, post war obsession with food led to a cherubic toddler, although an angel I was not. My earliest memories are of brash Northern woman speaking as they found, baking well and serving tinned salmon sandwiches and cucumber in vinegar on special occasions. My hardworking father moved us south. A headmaster at home and work, the embarrassment of having a daughter, a foot taller and a foot wider than her peers did not escape the notice of his colleagues. Something had to be done, after much humiliation and heartache at the age of 14, to the relief of my family; I took the matter in hand and reduced my size considerably. I then, however, realised that my friends assertions I could be a model if only I were thin were disappointedly unfounded. I left home at 17, in disgust, my father having told me he thought I was rather too stupid to complete a degree. After a turbulent time I trained as a nurse, my sister assuring me this is what middle class girls do if they are too stupid to do anything else. I met a man with a healthy attitude, had children, and became contented. I am completing a degree and am greedy only for knowledge.
Ruth Fowler Spain
They call me Facundo Quintana, and I have somewhere around 32 years, and I am of, originally, Argentina. Let me begin, and I apologise in advance for my circomlocuitous literary style. I am afraid, you see, that by telling one part of my story I will exclude others, I am trying to tell it all, I am taking all the paths, and therefore getting nowhere, and must, like History, try to choose one. But then choosing one does not necessarily exclude the possibility of revision, of going back to rewrite, maybe even choosing a different route for History and constructing a few road blocks along the undesirable passages. I am aware of the limitations of my English in this project. Even now the form of my mother tongue still haunts and colours this English of mine like a malingering odour, a stale fart in the airless tube when one is trapped on the infinite Northern Line. Que se yo. I will commence.
I am going back, my brain sifting through cupboards long locked and sealed, disturbing the dust of my brain and kicking the fat, dozing cockroaches awake with a start. An unpleasant sensation this recollection, this allowing of the mind to handle the facts of existence long forgotten, like an adolescent boy attempting foreplay – clumsy, ineffective, and dare I say it? Dry. An interesting metaphor I have chosen, and not by chance I feel, for instinct, habit, an acquaintance with probing adolescent fingers leads me back to the beginning, back to Buenos Aires, a young man in a yellowing, paint-peeling, roof-flaking, insect-riddled, dripping drain toilet of my university on Avenida 25 de Mayo en La Capital Federal.
Liegh White Keyworth Do come in. The bell? Oh yes it works it's just that with there being a porch in between you and the bell with the bell inside and you, necessarily, standing outside you cannot always hear it. Unlike any number of properties around the village I could take you to where you can be merrily pressing what to all appearances is a working door bell button but in fact last saw serviceable use several years ago whilst the owners see no purpose, or urgency to remedy the situation, and you stand there like a fool pressing and waiting for any sign of life knowing full well somebody is in there. Any one who has ever had the misfortune to be talked into collecting Christian Aid envelopes will testify to the truth of this. Well if that's the way they want it then so be it. I will save them the privilege of my company!
You are here for the story I take it? Yes, only these days all callers look the same; meter readers, postmen, water board officials. They all look like they've been disturbed in the middle of their holiday or something. What ever happened to uniforms? Are people ashamed of their work. Is it not an honourable occupation to read meters? And it's as bad in the office. One time of day you knew where you were; shirt, tie jacket - no problem. Whereas now it's dress down this or dress up that.
But I digress. To begin....
Robert Holden, Pangbourne, Berks Determination brought me into this world during the era of starched midwives. I was pushed, dry, painkiller less, forceps free onto the planet. Ouch! Determined to spare me the damage forceps had done to her 32 years before. Mother showed no resentment for the incredible pain she underwent, but got revenge by embarrassingly regaling all, with my birth story.
So was I worthy addition to our pretend middle class family. I made it without trying to the bottom of the top set of our C of E missing out on Grammar due to abolition. Comprehensive education taught me one lesson. Don’t work. I had paper round at 12 and bought a Raleigh Olympus. Liverpool stole it, and my faith. Mum was having to put aside her middle class aspirations and do the morning shift at the local newsagent due to Harold Wilson’s inflation.
Then Dad saved us. Africa for us, and boarding school for me! Best years of your life and all that. My accent meant I got bullied, but on the plus side I managed to avoid getting buggered. Finally they character built me into Head Boy. Mum played, bridge, drank gin, fought off a few gun toting African armed robbers, saved our drivers life, was rich and happy.
Returning to Liverpool and unemployment was hard. The new accent didn’t help, eventually I landed 2,300 quid a year. Wow! Then girlfriends, a real job in the south and escape.
What’s the best bit? Being her son. R.I.P Mum.
David Kitson, Manchester I was born in the front bedroom on the first floor of a council house which stands in the shadow of the Malvern Hills. It is likely that I was also conceived in the same dwelling and indeed in that very room where I first witnessed aurora’s gentle touch. (I cannot be quite certain that aurora touched me on that auspicious day; however, I was born at 6.45 am on October 12th, so given the imminent sunrise and apparently mellow weather conditions, it seems fairly likely that aurora and I did indeed make acquaintance).
As regards my conception, I have had some difficulty in eliciting the important details from my parents: My father talks ambiguously of lead pencils and ‘divvy’ night, whilst my mother smiles grimly over her crochet work. I can only assume that I came into this world in the normal way.
I am named David, after my maternal grandfather who liked to gamble and was good at darts. I am crap at darts, so perhaps I should have been called Ishmael.
My subsequent life as Grammar School boy, pothead, table football champion and schoolteacher, is enormously interesting, but can only be told in the context of my lifelong interest in Cluedo. The chapter ‘Colonel Mustard – his secret friend’ comes next.
Janet Long Coxwold I am superbly placed to write this Shandean narrative, being a resident of Coxwold, and a near neighbour of Shandy Hall itself, which, by the way, looks exceedingly pretty in April, with the daffodils trumpeting the spring, or later nearing the summer when the roses give of their delicate perfumes. Before starting, however, I must also point out that I have already been linked, inadvertently, to Shandy Hall twice in January, when Laurie Taylor read an e mail from myself, which gave my experiences of someone on a hobby horse. This intelligent gentleman linked my humble opinion with an extract from the self-same book that this narrative will be trying to emulate in a moment, on his programme “Thinking Aloud”. Not only that, the aforementioned philosopher read out another e mail the following week, after I had expressed my nervousness on the coincidence of Sterne having written his novel, and I my e mail, not 6 doors from each other!
So, as I have been saying, I will be able to give you a complete and enlightened account of my life in Coxwold. Not that it would be quite as relevant as one that my husband could have written, him having been vicar of Coxwold, joining the esteemed Laurence Stern on the list of incumbents. Not that he was an incumbent – nowadays one tends to be Priest-in-Charge, and not that his name is yet on the list in the church – but – O dear, my time seems to have run out.
Sabina Ahmed. Somerset.UK I was born in the early hours of morning, something like the first light of the day. My mother, who has just married my UK returned, liberal minded father, and who herself came from a very orthodox and traditional family, was not ready for motherhood. And then I was not a boy, nor fair of skin or beautiful. She took one look at me and handed me over to a an Ayah or nanny, and went back to her busy social life. I grew up absorbing the company and influence of servants, and loving it. The occassional audience with my parents caused a despair and dissapointment in them, as i was not up to the sophisticated standards my parents had. But i saw so little of them. The gulf between us grew wider with years. Each knowing little about the other. A troubled childhood saw me grow up into something they rather not relate to. When I announced i wanted to be a nurse, that was something unthinkable, for a middle class family in 60s India. I was thrown out of my family home for going ahead with this. There followed a period of about 16 years when they refused to even hear my name mentioned. While i struggled, studied and became a nurse. I had achieved a dream. Now with children of my own and a career of my choice, i was welcomed back in the family. But my career is never discussed or mentioned, only the fact that my children are doctors, and i am married to one. As if from birth to my middle age i have been a non-entity. I am reminded of my duty to my elderly parents, and i do what i can. But don't know where to look for the lost chunks of my life which are lost, the love, involvement and nurturing i should have had. I have a good life, but this void has never been filled and as I grow older it seems to make its presence felt more and more.
Rosie Lovell, Coventry Rochford, that quiet seduction of nothing-place in rural Essex, saw my fortuitous birth, surrounded as I was by fawning midwives:Is that right for you, Lady Prittlewell? Just a touch of airy gas to lighten your burgeoning child's progress, nay ingress, into this dark world of wartime Britain? I was propelled into the existence of a country lady of the nobility, forced to wear silks and satins, while the rough creatures curtseying and dipping around me were revealed in their meanest rags. Oh tragedy of high birth! Oh the dishonesty of it all! How could I possibly grow up into, dear readers, the wondrous, giving, lovable person that I am today? It was the kind ministrations of my nurse, old Annie Buckle, that set me, the child of golden, nay platinum spoon orientation, on the way to my superior state. Read on, readers, mark how I flow with bounteous rhetoric, which I did not learn at the hands of my maternal and yet not maternal mother.
M.M. Burke, Connecticut, USA I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me. My neglectful mother, her nose stuck in a meandering tome by some obliquitous eighteenth-century Irish clergyman at the time of my conception, condemned me to my present feebleness of body, since the shaping of my frail form was warped by a prodigious rush of blood to the brain at the vital moment, excited by a particularly lascivious passage in the scurvy volume. (Alas, my poor pater alone seemed an unsatisfactory source of stimulation to the heedless woman.) My unhappy father, noticing the wretched woman’s unseasonable obliviousness, exclaimed angrily Good G—Woman! Attend to the job at hand! which ejaculation at the crucial juncture caused me to be a quarrelsome, unvirile, mewling sort from whom acquaintances, neighbours, friends, and Fortune alike flee. I labour this point so particularly because I, who have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune, am verily persuaded that The D---ed Book disorder’d my nerves and destroyed my very life!
Esha Neogy, Mile End, London Each creature makes its own idiosyncratic, idiomatic music. Our bird barked, our dog mooed, my parents growled at each other. At school, Bennett’s dandelion-puff hair, mad-scientist glasses, and aloha shirt-plaid trousers attire led me to hypothesize that he was my type. Testing my theory, I carried a science fiction book atop my schoolbooks. There followed a summer of intense hand-holding and two years of letter-writing after he moved back to Oregon.
I visited him the summer after graduation, where I entered new idio-worlds. A letter of his reads, "Old family custom: if a good rousing thunderstorm seems imminent, we drive up to near top of local mountain and eat cantaloupe while watching." At dinner, father held mother’s chair. Once or more during the meal, someone rose to consult dictionary or encyclopedia regarding the topic of conversation, instead of each person reading his own book as in my family. Everyone helped with the dishes. Bennett sometimes dipped out a spoonful of the soapy dishwater and poured it back to make an antibubble--an underwater sphere of air with water inside. After the dishes, he practiced his tuba.
Some evenings, I heard lighter, purer music at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Recreated--or at least reinvented--from skeletons and treatises were the shawm, curtal, and sackbut that had become oboe, bassoon, and trombone; the recorder, lute, and viola da gamba that had given way to flute, guitar, and the violin family. This music changed the rhythm of my life forever.
Dave Sambrook - Salisbury
As this is my first attempt at writing for some while I expect I shall have to be careful that I don’t repeat myself too much, as I have learnt over the years, 58 to be precise, that if the reader is like me they will very quickly loose interest and go off an do something more important. Incidentally, I hope you realise that I could have gone into more detail on the previous subject, along the lines of Just a Minute. I have noticed of late, having retired recently, that I have a slight tendency for inertia, an interesting subject in it’s own right which is nicely illustrated by the World’s Strongest Man when even some of these colossus (or is it colossi – I really aught to consult my dictionary here but am in one of my more creative moods so must press on) fail to lift the last atlas stone. Perhaps inertia is the wrong word, because I certainly find the time to do the things I like, it is the things I don’t like that seem to have the greatest inertia. It may be that Melvyn Bragg should tackle this issue as he is bound to have a good bash at explaining it - not just as it applies to me I hasten to add but to the world at large. It strikes me that the one group of people who are certainly not subject to the laws of inertia are - sorry must go
Emma Segar, Liverpool
Here, poorly qualified as I am to complete the story of my life -- being not yet dead -- I set down the incidents and accidents that have led me --- by way of many transgressions --- to the sorry state in which I am now occupied, namely, teaching. My parents --- teachers, both --- were great believers in education, and so, for the first twenty-two years of my life --- saving the adventure of a gap year’s foray into the shadowy worlds of voluntary work, rainforest conservation and switchboard operation --- I followed studiously in their pursuit of this elusive quarry, taking the traditional path of schooling followed by an extended stay at University, to which I have, since, periodically returned; I have, however, in the ensuing years ---- modest in number, though momentous in experience ---- concluded my own educational quest in favour of embarking on the most worthy and respectable profession of interfering with other people’s, and, in this time, have developed a distinct scepticism with this endeavour, having witnessed little, if any, tangible, independently verifiable evidence for its existence in either myself or my students. I seek education, now, in much the same spirit that I – along with a group of similarly-minded volunteers and a large quantity of home-distilled rice wine – sought Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys in the rainforests of Vietnam, having been assured that, while there was no doubt of their existence, unless we could produce concrete evidence of their passage, their habitat was doomed.
Alice Thurling, Kingston upon Thames
My father and mother begat me when their youth was such as to make the like indiscretion excusable. Although married, contrary to the custom of their friends, their wedding photograph depicts fashions which one shudders now to behold. My potential success as a businesswoman of the highest calibre has undoubtedly been thwarted by my mother’s consumption of liquorish allsorts while in a delicate condition. Alas, such empty calories have produced an individual with a marked tendency to sleep all morning, require several days to complete the washing of a batch of clothes and procrastinate diligently with regard to the telephoning of Thames Water. My parents were informed that I should arrive on the 29th day of February 1972. However, made restless by the E-numbers in the aforementioned confectionary, and unwilling to sacrifice three-quarters of my genuine excuse to drink to excess, I arrived on the 27th. It seems I must still have been ambivalent about exchanging my First Class centrally heated compartment for the Economy Class of a Britain not entirely politically at ease. I took twenty-seven dithering hours to be born. This resulted in a head pointed to a degree rarely seen outside the pages of the Fortean Times. Added to the usual baby hue of a genetically engineered beetroot-tomato cross, this made me a truly appealing infant – a start from which I have never fully recovered. It may be regarded as fortunate that, rather than passing on such dubious inheritance, I have welcomed the supercilious glances of cats.
Noel Welsh, Birmingham
My life has been, well, more years than I can remember; certainly more than I can count. It is a convoluted tale, with its twists and turns, and gains and losses, and indeed not always a happy one -- though now I may be sitting here with my dearest friends, warm and content, this is not its totality. No! I am forever reminded of the bad days: those that gave me my permanent disability, my loss of balance, an injury that cut me down in my prime, a wound to the mind that meant I could never enjoy the freedom of my youth; that meant I could neither run nor jump. But I shall deal with that in its proper time, just as I shall deal with the other unfortunate events -- the sorry meeting, outside the bounds of wedlock, that gave rise to my existence; the sorry events that lead to my parting from my mother and siblings; and all those other tragic events that characterised my early life before I entered into the greater happiness that now defines me. All that in its proper time! I resolve to begin, and begin with haste, and having begun to carry on promptly in the manner that I begin and so lead briskly, without detour, through my life so that we shall arrive quickly at the present. But time has run away. We shall begin again tomorrow, when I shall commence the tale of that feline who is myself, William S. Cat.
Gerald O'Connell, Walthamstow
There! My biography, for now at least, shall end with that selfsame exclamation mark, and all I now have to do is to fill in the gap that lies before it, back to the point of my birth. And yet, it occurs to me with great force and straight (or, perhaps, quite nearly straight) away that in continuing to write I am doing no more than offering my readers the most precise evidence of that very deed that I have promised not to mention - namely the act of writing about my life, and doing so, of necessity, after (mark that wretched word, for I fear it may yet undo the best of all my efforts) determining, as must any well-ordered and healthy mind, that point at which my story must end. You may immediately see, therefore, why it becomes essential that I attempt to tell you nothing at all about myself, for to do so would only bring disorder upon my enterprise. Indeed, the danger is greatly compounded by its mention, so much so that the only way now for me to return to my task is to redraw the mark thus! And hope, having finished once more, to start again the story that I am, as I have so carefully explained, unable to tell, or even tell of, without having to finish again yet a third time… Oh dear! It would seem that the story of my life is a hole, and my pen nothing but a shovel!
Timothy Long - Coxwold
A Shandean narrative! 250 words! Ok. Well, were to start. Err, well, of course I can’t start it now as I have already said something. So to start I would have to delete everything I have just written and start again. That is one of the great things about computers, isn’t it, that if you make a mistake you can just press a button and you can change the mistake just like that. Actually, as a interesting point, when people say “just like that” what exactly to they mean by “that”. They could mean like “I can finish this extra-long essay just like I could eat a huge helping of horrible, gooey, disgusting fat. Actually, come to mention it, that is exactly what my dad does. He eats fat like many people eat sweets, which looking at him is surprising as he is a thin as these disablement pensions people get. If people want decent pensions these days, they should start looking down the back of their couches. I for one loose lots of pennies down the couch abyss and, whoa, got to stop. Dinnertime!
Paul A White - Bushey, Herts
It would be fair to say that by the time of my arrival into this world, childbirth had long since lost any sense of wonderment or joy that it may have once held for my mother. As baby number four, I learnt that the apathy that greeted my emergence that day and which continued throughout my tender, childhood years, was not born of parental cruelty, but more a sad consequence of the incredible success rate of my parent’s frequent sexual union. Familiarity did indeed breed, and its spawn, if not contempt, was at the very least indifference. But that did not stop my parents who continued their patriotic, post war duty, of re-populating the entire south east of the country, filling our ‘built for a hero’ council house with as many mouths as they could conceivably ill afford to feed. Each new arrival ensuring the further deprivation and anonymity of its predecessors, until family photographs became just an indistinct sea of increasingly more distant faces on increasingly more lean bodies. Yet strangely, amongst all these crowded childhood images that I store safely in the darkest, deepest recesses of my mind, the one that visits me most as I sleep is not of one of noise or cramped, busy rooms, it is of loneliness – of a frightening solitude that one can only truly experience when surrounded by people … of belonging, yet not… of being unloved.
Pooter of Fife
What a task! What challenge! What inspiration! My life and opinions being of such great moment, I could not, in good conscience, refuse to impart them to the eager, waiting masses. I fair rushed to set pen to paper. The result was so profound, so affecting, so full of insight, and yet so modest, that I was moved to tears - and, dear reader, lest you think my judgment partial, it was not only myself who was of such a mind, for I consulted my neighbour on the matter. “Learned Sir!” I accosted him, “have you ever seen a work of such perspicacity - such art - such diligence - such truth?” He paused scarcely for a second, before he declared it astonishing, and notable for its conciseness - I forget his exact words, but I can confirm that brevity was in the gist. I returned to the computer, prepared for electronic dispatch - but oh, what disappointment! My nib failed to make any impression on the screen, and the figure I had drawn - the line which charted, in diagrammatic form, the progress of my early years, my growth to manhood, that unfortunate misunderstanding and my final triumph over adversity - could not even be submitted. It is well, I suppose, for faced with work of such a quality and such enthralling vision, other writers may feel discouraged, and I have no wish to quell their voices into silence as, disheartened, they compare their efforts with mine - but what a loss to the world!
Léo Burton
Albeit I have surpassed the alloted span of three score and ten, I venture that shall I now, at this sitting, begin the story of my life at its beginning, I shall have sufficient time, if I am not unduly diverted by the ardent affection of my young wife, to deliver an account of the doings and the do nots, the gist of my earthly presence,almost unto it termination, leaving a blank page whereupon some other may write my final words, which shall be, I trust, more articulate than the doubtless happy cry of my mother at the moment of my conception. Having thus begun this account, and not allowed myself to be distracted by certain rhythmical sounds from above where, as my wife informed me, she had the intention of undertaking some ladylike tasks with the assistance of a recent addition to our household, a buxom lass who bears some resemblance to the wet-nurse who suckled me, my mother wishing to preserve her natural beauty, if not for her husband, who, as I learned from his estranged brother, my uncle, from whom, when he was in his cups, I gleaned many inklings of doings which my parents would surely have disowned, including the hint that my mother's husband was not immediately present at my conception. However, my mother was made fruitful, and my life, and the story of it, is begun.
Chris Cuninghame, London
Two hundred and fifty words? Not much, is it, to describe the achievement of, well - life? Still, we have to be grateful for anything we get, these days, don’t we? Given with one hand and taken away with the other – and then probably with both feet. Sorry. Where was I? I don’t seem even to have begun and there’s the clock’s ticking. Even say the word ‘beginning’ and, like a hare, you’ve irrevocably started. Some poor souls won’t even multiply before they reach their inevitable ends: like those self-devouring snakes. What an awful image! We’ll try rainbows instead. The radiance of their colours made even more profound because they are so mysterious, ungraspable. Yes, that could be the noble centre-piece to this argument. But how ever do I get it there? Except, as I’ve already explained clearly – and how I wish you’d all pay attention, especially you at the back! – precisely because I’ve started, I must mean ‘did I’, mustn’t I? And it’s ‘here’, not ‘there’, as here we plainly are. So please stop trying out these silly diversionary tricks. Do you want the moral of this history, or not? Let’s try again. I’ve some notes with me, marked, ‘Midwife: Confidential’. And what they say is: ‘Very large feet.’ And that must, as nearly as it can, account for our particular’s journey. There’s no more space, I’m afraid. All I can really add is: ‘Rest in peace – ‘ Oh, dear me! What is the name of this Lately Deceased?
M Hollingworth Bristol
I was born in West Yorkshire, one of a twin. I have always had the uncomfortable feeling I may have been greedy even in the womb and denied my sister, who died shortly after birth, the nutrients she needed. My mother and fathers, post war obsession with food led to a cherubic toddler, although an angel I was not. My earliest memories are of brash Northern woman speaking as they found, baking well and serving tinned salmon sandwiches and cucumber in vinegar on special occasions. My hardworking father moved us south. A headmaster at home and work, the embarrassment of having a daughter, a foot taller and a foot wider than her peers did not escape the notice of his colleagues. Something had to be done, after much humiliation and heartache at the age of 14, to the relief of my family; I took the matter in hand and reduced my size considerably. I then, however, realised that my friends assertions I could be a model if only I were thin were disappointedly unfounded. I left home at 17, in disgust, my father having told me he thought I was rather too stupid to complete a degree. After a turbulent time I trained as a nurse, my sister assuring me this is what middle class girls do if they are too stupid to do anything else. I met a man with a healthy attitude, had children, and became contented. I am completing a degree and am greedy only for knowledge.
Ruth Fowler Spain
They call me Facundo Quintana, and I have somewhere around 32 years, and I am of, originally, Argentina. Let me begin, and I apologise in advance for my circomlocuitous literary style. I am afraid, you see, that by telling one part of my story I will exclude others, I am trying to tell it all, I am taking all the paths, and therefore getting nowhere, and must, like History, try to choose one. But then choosing one does not necessarily exclude the possibility of revision, of going back to rewrite, maybe even choosing a different route for History and constructing a few road blocks along the undesirable passages. I am aware of the limitations of my English in this project. Even now the form of my mother tongue still haunts and colours this English of mine like a malingering odour, a stale fart in the airless tube when one is trapped on the infinite Northern Line. Que se yo. I will commence. I am going back, my brain sifting through cupboards long locked and sealed, disturbing the dust of my brain and kicking the fat, dozing cockroaches awake with a start. An unpleasant sensation this recollection, this allowing of the mind to handle the facts of existence long forgotten, like an adolescent boy attempting foreplay – clumsy, ineffective, and dare I say it? Dry. An interesting metaphor I have chosen, and not by chance I feel, for instinct, habit, an acquaintance with probing adolescent fingers leads me back to the beginning, back to Buenos Aires, a young man in a yellowing, paint-peeling, roof-flaking, insect-riddled, dripping drain toilet of my university on Avenida 25 de Mayo en La Capital Federal.
Liegh White Keyworth
Do come in. The bell? Oh yes it works it's just that with there being a porch in between you and the bell with the bell inside and you, necessarily, standing outside you cannot always hear it. Unlike any number of properties around the village I could take you to where you can be merrily pressing what to all appearances is a working door bell button but in fact last saw serviceable use several years ago whilst the owners see no purpose, or urgency to remedy the situation, and you stand there like a fool pressing and waiting for any sign of life knowing full well somebody is in there. Any one who has ever had the misfortune to be talked into collecting Christian Aid envelopes will testify to the truth of this. Well if that's the way they want it then so be it. I will save them the privilege of my company! You are here for the story I take it? Yes, only these days all callers look the same; meter readers, postmen, water board officials. They all look like they've been disturbed in the middle of their holiday or something. What ever happened to uniforms? Are people ashamed of their work. Is it not an honourable occupation to read meters? And it's as bad in the office. One time of day you knew where you were; shirt, tie jacket - no problem. Whereas now it's dress down this or dress up that. But I digress. To begin....
Robert Holden, Pangbourne, Berks
Determination brought me into this world during the era of starched midwives. I was pushed, dry, painkiller less, forceps free onto the planet. Ouch! Determined to spare me the damage forceps had done to her 32 years before. Mother showed no resentment for the incredible pain she underwent, but got revenge by embarrassingly regaling all, with my birth story. So was I worthy addition to our pretend middle class family. I made it without trying to the bottom of the top set of our C of E missing out on Grammar due to abolition. Comprehensive education taught me one lesson. Don’t work. I had paper round at 12 and bought a Raleigh Olympus. Liverpool stole it, and my faith. Mum was having to put aside her middle class aspirations and do the morning shift at the local newsagent due to Harold Wilson’s inflation. Then Dad saved us. Africa for us, and boarding school for me! Best years of your life and all that. My accent meant I got bullied, but on the plus side I managed to avoid getting buggered. Finally they character built me into Head Boy. Mum played, bridge, drank gin, fought off a few gun toting African armed robbers, saved our drivers life, was rich and happy. Returning to Liverpool and unemployment was hard. The new accent didn’t help, eventually I landed 2,300 quid a year. Wow! Then girlfriends, a real job in the south and escape. What’s the best bit? Being her son. R.I.P Mum.
David Kitson, Manchester
I was born in the front bedroom on the first floor of a council house which stands in the shadow of the Malvern Hills. It is likely that I was also conceived in the same dwelling and indeed in that very room where I first witnessed aurora’s gentle touch. (I cannot be quite certain that aurora touched me on that auspicious day; however, I was born at 6.45 am on October 12th, so given the imminent sunrise and apparently mellow weather conditions, it seems fairly likely that aurora and I did indeed make acquaintance). As regards my conception, I have had some difficulty in eliciting the important details from my parents: My father talks ambiguously of lead pencils and ‘divvy’ night, whilst my mother smiles grimly over her crochet work. I can only assume that I came into this world in the normal way. I am named David, after my maternal grandfather who liked to gamble and was good at darts. I am crap at darts, so perhaps I should have been called Ishmael. My subsequent life as Grammar School boy, pothead, table football champion and schoolteacher, is enormously interesting, but can only be told in the context of my lifelong interest in Cluedo. The chapter ‘Colonel Mustard – his secret friend’ comes next.
Janet Long Coxwold
I am superbly placed to write this Shandean narrative, being a resident of Coxwold, and a near neighbour of Shandy Hall itself, which, by the way, looks exceedingly pretty in April, with the daffodils trumpeting the spring, or later nearing the summer when the roses give of their delicate perfumes. Before starting, however, I must also point out that I have already been linked, inadvertently, to Shandy Hall twice in January, when Laurie Taylor read an e mail from myself, which gave my experiences of someone on a hobby horse. This intelligent gentleman linked my humble opinion with an extract from the self-same book that this narrative will be trying to emulate in a moment, on his programme “Thinking Aloud”. Not only that, the aforementioned philosopher read out another e mail the following week, after I had expressed my nervousness on the coincidence of Sterne having written his novel, and I my e mail, not 6 doors from each other! So, as I have been saying, I will be able to give you a complete and enlightened account of my life in Coxwold. Not that it would be quite as relevant as one that my husband could have written, him having been vicar of Coxwold, joining the esteemed Laurence Stern on the list of incumbents. Not that he was an incumbent – nowadays one tends to be Priest-in-Charge, and not that his name is yet on the list in the church – but – O dear, my time seems to have run out.
Sabina Ahmed. Somerset.UK
I was born in the early hours of morning, something like the first light of the day. My mother, who has just married my UK returned, liberal minded father, and who herself came from a very orthodox and traditional family, was not ready for motherhood. And then I was not a boy, nor fair of skin or beautiful. She took one look at me and handed me over to a an Ayah or nanny, and went back to her busy social life. I grew up absorbing the company and influence of servants, and loving it. The occassional audience with my parents caused a despair and dissapointment in them, as i was not up to the sophisticated standards my parents had. But i saw so little of them. The gulf between us grew wider with years. Each knowing little about the other. A troubled childhood saw me grow up into something they rather not relate to. When I announced i wanted to be a nurse, that was something unthinkable, for a middle class family in 60s India. I was thrown out of my family home for going ahead with this. There followed a period of about 16 years when they refused to even hear my name mentioned. While i struggled, studied and became a nurse. I had achieved a dream. Now with children of my own and a career of my choice, i was welcomed back in the family. But my career is never discussed or mentioned, only the fact that my children are doctors, and i am married to one. As if from birth to my middle age i have been a non-entity. I am reminded of my duty to my elderly parents, and i do what i can. But don't know where to look for the lost chunks of my life which are lost, the love, involvement and nurturing i should have had. I have a good life, but this void has never been filled and as I grow older it seems to make its presence felt more and more.
Rosie Lovell, Coventry
Rochford, that quiet seduction of nothing-place in rural Essex, saw my fortuitous birth, surrounded as I was by fawning midwives:Is that right for you, Lady Prittlewell? Just a touch of airy gas to lighten your burgeoning child's progress, nay ingress, into this dark world of wartime Britain? I was propelled into the existence of a country lady of the nobility, forced to wear silks and satins, while the rough creatures curtseying and dipping around me were revealed in their meanest rags. Oh tragedy of high birth! Oh the dishonesty of it all! How could I possibly grow up into, dear readers, the wondrous, giving, lovable person that I am today? It was the kind ministrations of my nurse, old Annie Buckle, that set me, the child of golden, nay platinum spoon orientation, on the way to my superior state. Read on, readers, mark how I flow with bounteous rhetoric, which I did not learn at the hands of my maternal and yet not maternal mother.
M.M. Burke, Connecticut, USA
I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me. My neglectful mother, her nose stuck in a meandering tome by some obliquitous eighteenth-century Irish clergyman at the time of my conception, condemned me to my present feebleness of body, since the shaping of my frail form was warped by a prodigious rush of blood to the brain at the vital moment, excited by a particularly lascivious passage in the scurvy volume. (Alas, my poor pater alone seemed an unsatisfactory source of stimulation to the heedless woman.) My unhappy father, noticing the wretched woman’s unseasonable obliviousness, exclaimed angrily Good G—Woman! Attend to the job at hand! which ejaculation at the crucial juncture caused me to be a quarrelsome, unvirile, mewling sort from whom acquaintances, neighbours, friends, and Fortune alike flee. I labour this point so particularly because I, who have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune, am verily persuaded that The D---ed Book disorder’d my nerves and destroyed my very life!
Esha Neogy, Mile End, London
Each creature makes its own idiosyncratic, idiomatic music. Our bird barked, our dog mooed, my parents growled at each other. At school, Bennett’s dandelion-puff hair, mad-scientist glasses, and aloha shirt-plaid trousers attire led me to hypothesize that he was my type. Testing my theory, I carried a science fiction book atop my schoolbooks. There followed a summer of intense hand-holding and two years of letter-writing after he moved back to Oregon. I visited him the summer after graduation, where I entered new idio-worlds. A letter of his reads, "Old family custom: if a good rousing thunderstorm seems imminent, we drive up to near top of local mountain and eat cantaloupe while watching." At dinner, father held mother’s chair. Once or more during the meal, someone rose to consult dictionary or encyclopedia regarding the topic of conversation, instead of each person reading his own book as in my family. Everyone helped with the dishes. Bennett sometimes dipped out a spoonful of the soapy dishwater and poured it back to make an antibubble--an underwater sphere of air with water inside. After the dishes, he practiced his tuba. Some evenings, I heard lighter, purer music at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Recreated--or at least reinvented--from skeletons and treatises were the shawm, curtal, and sackbut that had become oboe, bassoon, and trombone; the recorder, lute, and viola da gamba that had given way to flute, guitar, and the violin family. This music changed the rhythm of my life forever.