The Blair Years, by Alastair Campbell
The Punisher: From First to Last, by Garth Ennis, John Severin, Lewis Larosa and Richard Corben
We’ll Live and Die in These Towns, by The Enemy
‘Your English is Good’ 7″, by Tokyo Police Club
‘Talk to the Left’ 7″, by Shrag
Sight & Sound magazine
Artrocker magazine
Ah. Stuff. I love stuff.
Other people get to be ‘one of the gang’. Not me.
I was just checking the email of an absent colleague, and noticed a series of messages on his machine from a bunch of people in the office – a group email. I know all of these people, some of them pretty well, maybe well enough to call friends, and yet, for whatever reason, I wasn’t included on the email. I mean, there’s no real reason I should have been included, but it was still disappointing. Ultimately though, I suppose it’s only to be expected.
The last time I was ‘one of the gang’ was in primary school. There were four of us in this gang – we actually called it a gang too, taking our lead from Dennis the Menace’s gang in The Beano, although in truth it was more a semi-sadistic dictatorship ruled by my best friend, Kevin Betts. The only membership requirements were a willingness to have one’s feet stamped on regularly (by Kevin), and a taste for mortar, which we used to pick from the crumbling Victorian brickwork bordering the school’s playground, and eat. I think this particular fetish stemmed from Kevin and mine’s earlier predilection for the sand in our junior school classroom’s sandbox, although again this ritualistic sand-scarfing was driven largely by him rather than by me.
It would be unfair to lay any blame for my later reluctance to join groups at the door of Kevin Betts’ gang’s hut, however. That’s more likely the result of an unsuccessful year-long stint as a Cub Scout, during which I managed to distinguish myself by getting lost orienteering on a camping trip (not to mention tripping over a guy rope, winding myself and bursting into tears) and attempting to procure a badge in modelling by bringing in to a meeting an elaborate spaceship I’d built out of Lego. Indeed, the only badge I managed to attain during this year of too-tight-short-trousered hell was the one you get for turning up every week, and that was down to my mother forcing me to attend.
After that, any kind of organised group activity became anathema to me, and I guess that resulted in a certain stand-offishness on my part, which in turn bled into my social life, so that getting to be ‘one of the gang’ eventually became nigh on impossible. And so it has remained.
