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.
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.
Career Options During the 90s
When my writing career didn’t explode as I wanted it to (that wouldn’t happen for another two years), I headed into Ramsgate town to see what work was available. My extraordinary collection of GCSEs and one-week appearances at Thanet College afforded me the following three opportunities:
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.
1980s BMX Memories: The Wheelie Warrior and Childhood Adventures
The BMX Warrior: Funny 1980s BMX Memories and Childhood Adventures. A humorous trip back to 1980s Britain, featuring BMX bikes, childhood crushes, schoolyard disasters, and the fantasy books that changed everything. TRIGGER WARNING: contains offensive language.
Why We All Miss Blockbuster Video (2023)
It’s a dark and rainy Friday night in Ramsgate sometime during September 2001 and I’m running the late shift at Blockbuster Video. I’m standing at the counter facing down a monster of a guy with a chin like an anvil who I just KNOW is going to be trouble. He is GLARING at me.
‘Say that again, mate?’
Ramsgate During the 80s (2023)
It’s the late 1980s and I’m sitting outside Woolworths on Ramsgate High Street watching a man dressed as a chicken taking on Morris, the lovable town drunk, in a fight over a Kazoo.