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.
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.
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.
Don’t Talk Garbage (1987)
During the 80s, there were many reasons to hang out at Ramsgate Pleasurama that didn’t involve queuing up for Golden Axe or Double Dragon. One of these was to trade and collect something so priceless and valuable that you didn’t even need to name it: you simply stood there chewing the free bubblegum that came with each pack and waited for somebody to wander up with the question, the ultimate question, the question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
‘You got Oliver Twisted?’
‘Sort of: I’ve got Dizzy Dave?’
‘NO. NO. NO. That’s totally different.’
‘It’s the SAME card.’
Dear Geoffrey
I found a letter in my attic the other day: it was written by me, aged either five or six. The spelling wasn’t great, but when corrected, it basically read:
Dear Geoffrey from Rainbow,
I am worried about you because I watch you every day and you are my friend and I have to tell you that there is a man inside Bungle did you know this do not say anything to Bungle in case he gets angry and the man comes out I never want you to die
Love David Stone from Ramsgate
The Boys Brigade
‘Anyone can play the drum: you just hit it.’
This seemed like a really stupid argument, especially if you were talking about a drummer in a band... but the guy in question was talking about ME, and the band in question was the 1st Ramsgate Boys Brigade.
In the late 80s, there were two Boys Brigades in Ramsgate, imaginatively titled 1st and 2nd Ramsgate. We were 1st Ramsgate, and our brigade captain wanted to be the best: the best figure marchers, the best athletes...and the best musicians.
The Tamagotchi Test (2018)
“Daddy? I want a hamster.”
“You’re not having a hamster.”
“Why?”
“The ant died.”
“The ant wasn’t even REAL.”
“It was real.”
“It WASN’T!”
“Look – if you put something down on the floor and it runs away, it’s real.”
Haunted Ramsgate (2023)
It’s hard to imagine now when you look at the sheer size and magnificence of the Granville Hotel…but for most of my childhood, half of it was quite literally a pile of old rubble. When I say rubble, I’m talking about the sort of mess you get in a Marvel movie when the Hulk goes rampaging through downtown New York. I guess there’s a good chance it was war damage, but as kids we just thought it was an awesome play area.
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?’
The Early Crowd (2023)
Are you sleeping comfortably? Then I’ll begin….
There’s a community in Thanet that you probably don’t know anything about: I say that with some confidence because I’m a member of that community, and there’s only about twenty of us.