My History With Fighting Fantasy
I’m ten years old and staying in my best friend’s summerhouse one weekend while his dad attempts to do up my battered old BMX bike. Late that evening, before we drop off to sleep and after we’ve exhausted the subjects of girls, Garbage Pail Kids cards and bike stuff, we get bored and go hunting through his brother’s room in search of something cool to do: we find a bunch of Fighting Fantasy books and read through Crypt of the Sorcerer together. My best mate finds the whole thing a bit meh and quickly turns the adventure into an imagined quest through a typical school day… but I’m hooked and determined to find out who Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone actually are.
Don’t Make Eye Contact
I’d only been working as a shift runner at Blockbuster Video for a few days when the incident happened, and I remember thinking that it was a perfect reflection of my luck that had it happened just a week before then none of it – none of it - would have been my responsibility. I could just have continued to do stock rotation and left the entire messy business to somebody else.
But it did happen....and, somewhat typically, it happened to me.
What ARE You Wearing?
Triggered by the sheer number of questions I regularly get about my godawful dress sense, I thought I’d actually start paying attention to some of the truly outrageous stuff that I wear. For a guy who regularly reviews what goes INTO my body, why do I not concern myself nearly enough about what goes ONTO it?
Ending Your Marriage at Costa
I’ve only been at Costa for ten minutes, and I’m just about to write a really scathing attack on a well-known supermarket when I suddenly overhear:
“So, you wait until we’ve got four kids before you decide it’s her you want and not me.”
I don’t turn around. I sit back in my chair, very slowly, and put down the mocha I’d raised halfway to my lips.
Immediately, my mind scans back through the people I’ve seen arriving at Costa since I’ve been in my seat. This couple is obviously sitting just behind me, out of my sight, and there’s no way I’m turning around when they’re clearly about to have such a serious and painful discussion. I want to go and sit somewhere else, but the place is packed, and the only other free chair will trigger my back problem…
The Running Man
Terrible things can make you laugh.
I mean it: truly horrible things, when they happen suddenly and are beyond your control, can make you burst out laughing before your conscious mind has even had time to process what’s happened and start to empathise or prepare to help.
So there I am, typing away at a computer console behind the counter at Blockbuster Video on King Street, Ramsgate, sometime during a really sunny day in 2000. I haven’t been there long, and I’m checking in videos with the scanner and occasionally typing codes if the scanner doesn’t pick them up.
I’m happy and working away quite efficiently. I can’t remember who else was on shift that morning: possibly Kaz, maybe Nige. I’m not sure.
THEN it happens… quickly, but with enough warning that I get to see the whole thing in glorious detail.
Socking It To ‘Em
It's a Wednesday morning, and I'm running the shift at Blockbuster Video: I'm one of the three assistant managers, and Wednesdays are pretty quiet, so it's just two other guys and me: one is working down at the front of the store while I'm cleaning at the back. The store in Ramsgate is pretty big, so he'd have to shout to be heard. It turns out that on this occasion he does shout, but I don't hear him, so he scares the living hell out of me when I turn around, and he's suddenly just STANDING there in a mad panic.
'Dave, you've got to come to the counter. Quickly.' 'What? Why?'
'Some woman just barrelled in...and she's REALLY pissed off .'
Say That Again?
“It’s Davey from Blockbuster in Ramsgate: store code 260116. I want to place a large stock order, please.”
It’s a Thursday morning, rain is pouring over Ramsgate, and I’m on an early shift at Blockbuster Video. I’m really miserable: I’ve had a terrible night with very little sleep, and I’m on my own for the first hour of the shift. The sky is dark, people are running up and down King Street trying to get out of the rain, and there are even a few rumbles of thunder suddenly being thrown into the mix.
The store lights are flickering, but the place is empty. Apparently, even the soaking wet customers are avoiding us now...
Career Options
When my writing career didn’t explode as I wanted it to (that wouldn’t happen for another two years), I headed to Ramsgate town to see what work was available. My extraordinary collection of GCSEs and one-week show-ups at Thanet College afforded me the following tree of opportunity:
McDonald’s – not a chance: it looked like great fun, but I’d just lost somewhere in the region of six stone, and I didn’t want to put it all back on again in THREE hours.
Argos – another no: the staff always looked miserable, and there were rumours that one guy was SO depressed by the place that he’d wandered into the back to get a microwave for a customer, proceeded right through the rear exit and kept going. They never saw him again.
Burton’s – I thought it would be slightly wrong to work in a clothes shop when you’d never been able to afford any of the clothes: I’d have been a class traitor.
Dixon’s – I knew two guys who worked in Dixon’s at the time: one was trying to change his name legally to ‘Jonas Piemunch’ and the other would regularly pop outside for the sort of cigarettes you smoked if you wanted to run down the High Street with dragons chasing you.
Outsider
I must have been reasonably self-aware as a kid because I’m pretty sure I was in the early stages of primary school when Ifigured out that I couldn’t make friends.
When you’re a kid, you look for easy excuses to explain away anything difficult to understand. I had ginger hair, so at first this was easy: I looked different, so I WAS different. The only fly in the ointment was a slightly older ginger kid in the upper end of the same class who seemed to make friends with comparative ease: so it wasn’t the hair.
I came from a single-parent family and didn’t have a dad, so that was the first big excuse I used to explain away my lack of class popularity. I went to a primary school in Ramsgate that I have now come to understand was full of the middle-class kids of teachers, doctors and other noteworthy professions that – at the time – were considered acceptable. In my class, not having a dad was a genuinely unusual situation (though I’ve since discovered that in several neighbouring schools it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as unusual).
Once I’d cheerfully managed to ignore all the kids who I felt were judging me for this, I moved my focus to the difference in wealth. A lot of these kids had the latest Nikes; I had charity-shop Hi-Techs. They had designer backpacks and lunchboxes; I didn’t. In time, this felt like such an imbalance that I managed to persuade my incredibly hard- working mum to GET me a set of the best attire (that I didn’t really want) to help mefit in.
It didn’t work.
Stealing Cars at Pleasurama in Ramsgate (or not)
The year is 1991, and I am sitting in the manager’s office of Ramsgate’s old Pleasurama arcade, accused of trying to steal cars in the car park. My best friend, Russ, is sitting beside me: he’s accused, too. We have been in the office waiting for the police to arrive for about 20 minutes… but it feels like we’ve been there for hours.
We’re thirteen years old, and we’ve never so much as stolen a pen, let alone a car. Unfortunately, the staff at Pleasurama are absolutely convinced that we’re responsible for the attempted theft because they’ve seen us trying to get into at least three vehicles.
Only, they haven’t… because nobody canfind the woman who actually saw us trying to steal the cars. The staff are currently out looking for her, and while they’re running all around the building between the arcade machines, we’re trapped in the manager’s office.
We went to Pleasurama every Saturday morning, mostly going through a routine of Pacland, Golden Axe, Rolling Thunder, Operation Wolf and Wrestler War.
Granny’s Relish
It’s Saturday morning, and both my kids are at a local birthday party: I’m not going, because it’s a Two Party Saturday and I’ve pulled the late shift. I’ll be at Jungle Jim’s tonight, watching all the sweaty midgets get high on e-numbers before bedtime. It’s no big deal: I’m used to it.
What I’m not used to is making lunch at my nan’s house. My nan lives very close to the party location, so I’ve escaped to grab a quick bite to eat…
…except it’s not proving to be quick. In fact, it’s proving practically bloody impossible.
‘Nan! Have you got any cheese?’
‘What’s that?’
‘CHEESE!’
‘I’ve got MY cheese. It’s in the fridge. You don’t have any of YOUR cheese here: you live somewhere else.’
‘Can I have some of yours?’
‘I don’t want to go out shopping tomorrow!’
‘You go out shopping EVERY day.’
‘Yeah, well, cheese isn’t f**king cheap.’
He’s Just Not That Into You
When I finally decided that my dog had some sort of mental health issue, I didn’t mess around. I immediately splashed the cash and called in the professional: a £ 50-per-day dog whisperer called Anita who lived on the borders of Kent and claimed to offer a life-changing service for pets AND their owners. This is the email I sent her:
Dear Anita
I’m worried about my dog. Could you please come out to my house for one day (at your usual rate) and give me a diagnosis on him? His name is Jake, he’s two years old, and he has a lot of other dogs as parents: we think he’s part spaniel, part labrador, part whippet and part terrier. Here is the list of things I’m worried about:
1. He looks at me as if he hates me (can you tell if he does by talking to him?)
2. He looks at my wife the same way.
3. He doesn’t get excited by ANYTHING except other people. Even when I feed him, he just mopes over the food.
4. He’s SO happy when I go out, it’s just ridiculous. As soon as I get my coat, he goes crazy. I thought it might be excitement about going for a walk, but he gets REALLY miserable again if I actually put a lead on him and take him out.
5. I’m starting to not like him, either. Can you tell him that?
Thanks in advance,
Mr D. Stone (call me Davey)
The Haunted Tower
Dominating the Ramsgate skyline, the Granville Hotel is now a (mostly) restored and beautifully unusual landmark. To those of us who grew up in the 80s, however, it will always be that half-collapsed old ruin with Dracula’s Castle rising out of the end, sticking one MASSIVE middle finger up at the sky. I’m serious, back in the 80s, the rumours were strong: there were things in the basement at the Granville that would snatch you out of the dark and wicked old ladies in the tower offering you tea and biscuits before hitting you over the head with a twenty-pound lump-hammer.
‘My dad was once chased around the Granville for TWO HOURS.’
‘By what?’
‘EVERYTHING.’
‘Shit!’
I’d heard the rumours: I actually had an auntie who lived there. Well, I say Auntie, but in the 80s your auntie was basically whoever your nan last went drinking with. I had an uncle Len who once helped my nan out of a taxi, and apparently that was the only time they’d ever met.
Scaredy Cat
It would be easy to say that I don’t like cats and cats don’t like me, but it’s just nowhere near as simple as that. The war between the cat kingdom and me began – as many things do – in a pub.
I wasfifteen. At the time, I had a much older friend called Ricky. He lived two doors down from me, and we met one afternoon when I noticed him unpacking a Commodore Amiga computer. I knew quite a bit about computers and asked him if he’d bought any games for it. We got talking, had the same sense of humour and became good friends: he got on well with my family and started having dinner at our house. Over the next few months, we played and completed an entire crop of classic RPG games and graphic adventures like Eye of the Beholder and The Secret of Monkey Island.
Then, one rainy Friday, he leaned out of the window of his apartment and called down to me as I left for school.
“There’s a guy I want you to meet!” he shouted. “He buys and sells games, and I want to know which ones we should get!”
Moving People
When I left school, it was pretty much agreed that I wouldn’t amount to anything. I say ‘agreed’ because that was a view held jointly by myself and most of my teachers. There was nothing particularly wrong with the school I attended (St. George’s CofE Foundation in Broadstairs), but there’s only so much pushing you can do when the pupil in question doesn’t want to learn...and I didn’t.
I had three interests at school: reading, playing games and fancying every girl in a short skirt (which was just about all of them). I also held a record that, thanks to my distorted sense of values, I had actually become very proud of: 105 sessions absent out of a possible 111. I believe that record still holds, and the school was practically ancient, even then.
The headmaster was a Justice of the Peace, a local judge who was so active in court that his office was often empty. We had quite a few teachers at St. George’s who had other jobs: my maths teacher was a Wimbledon umpire during the school holidays, something that seemed hilarious to us all during her lessons.
‘What are you planning to do with yourself, Stone?’ The Head asked me on my last day.
Chasing the Dragon
It didn’t happen like this. I know it didn’t. Yet this is how I always remember it.
The year is 1989: it’s my first academic term at St.George’s Foundation School in Broadstairs, and despite having desperately waited all morning for the tannoy to announce lunch break, I am nevertheless standing in the playground, transfixed by the sight of a boy in the year above me playfully tossing a dwarf.
That’s not how it sounds, by the way. Written from the distant, lofty hindsight of 2022, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m about to intimate that dwarf-tossing was some sort of sport in English high schools during the 80s, but the dwarf in question was a plastic miniature from a now oft-forgotten game called Heroquest.
I was cold and hungry and quite determined to follow several of the girls I fancied into the lunch canteen, where a snaking line of hungry pre-teens had already meandered around the corner and past the caretaker’s office....and yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to move.
Big Boned
“Ah, young Mr Stone: do come in!” “Thanks, Doc!”
“You look good.”
“Thanks! I feel great!”
“Indeed. Do take a seat. Now....um.....your mother tells me you’ve lost six stone in two months?”
I grin at the doctor, uncross my legs and lean back in the chair like some sort of Weight Loss GOD. “Ha! And THEN some.....I’ve actually lost nearly seven stone in total! Seven STONE!”
“In two months?”
“Damn straight.”
“That’s amazing, Mr Stone. What are you eating?”
Smoker’s Paradise
I grew up in a family of smokers who smoked in between smokes. My mum was the lesser of these: she only smoked Superkings and bought them in packs of twenty at the local shop. When she couldn’t get Superkings, she would smoke other brands, but the fact that she needed to get them from the shop did at least mean she didn’t smoke constantly.
My nan smoked EVERYTHING. She started on roll-ups in the morning but by lunchtime would be lighting up any old dog ends she could find: I once saw her put a match to one of those bang snaps just because she thought it was a dog end. Yes, they were THAT small.
The Money Pit
It took my nan roughly five decades to wreck our three-floor, semi-detached house in Ramsgate. She managed this by employing a series of people she met down the pub to do jobs they weren’t exactly qualified to take on.
She employed a window-cleaner to completely redecorate the house, a task that resulted in him covering all the internal walls with wood panelling in a chaotic mess that honestly looked like the work of a deranged cultist attempting to build some sort of shrine to a dark god. The rooms on the third storey were the worst, as he clearly ran out of wood and ended up hammering random squares and misshapen cut-outs to cover empty gaps. It was like living on the inside of a jigsaw puzzle. I was once interviewed by The Times newspaper for an article called ‘The Geek Gets Even’ where the reporter described the house as a dwelling with ‘creepy wood veneer walls.’ He wasn’t wrong.