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.
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.