Thursday February 14th, 1980

British Skiing Events

TERM 1 A day-by-day account of Waen’s first term at Fairburn School

TERM 2 The birth of the 1980s - Blake’s 7, Blondie and battles in space

TOPIC 2 The one where it all kicks off

The Forgotten World John and Mick fall foul of some extreme potholing

Bonfire Night Waen’s first time at the annual village fireworks display

Waen Shepherd 2 Waen’s heroic antics in the far-flung future of 2007 AD!

Ward’s 7 John Ward and his band of rebels fight the evil Federation

As I’ve said elsewhere, I wasn’t really into sport. But the Winter Olympics had started the night before and, on this occasion, something about the games must have fired my imagination. Not just mine though - my classmate Andrew Wall is a core participant here and, even though I wrote the words, i’m pretty sure he must have been actively involved in the events I was describing. I’ve said before that playtimes were dominated by football. But occasionally, some of us would end up doing other things instead. I remember role-playing things we’d seen on telly like The Incredible Hulk, Blake’s 7 or Star Wars. Each of us in the group would take a character and play that role until the bell went, improvising a story as we went along. Or sometimes we’d role-play other, more down-to- earth scenarios - cops and robbers, firefighters, people having to be rescued after falling off cliffs. These things didn’t always go smoothly. Often we’d disagree about who played what. Not everyone can be Spider-Man, but that didn’t stop me trying. I always wanted to be Luke Skywalker but usually ended up having to play Darth Vader - a situation most adults would probably find quite weird, but as a kid, it made me feel quite despondent. Sometimes there’d be heated discussions about the feasibility of certain actions - whether or not the Dukes of Hazzard are allowed to protect themselves with force fields; whether it’s possible for a crocodile to fly - that sort of thing. But if we could negotiate these obstacles, every once in a blue moon, we’d improvise a scenario that was so incredibly pleasing that, when the bell rang and playtime was over, someone had to record it for posterity. I don’t know for certain if that’s what happened here. I just suspect it did, and on several other occasions too. In fact, I’d say most times I wrote about me and my friends - unless it’s about weird characters I invented or the friend wasn’t actually at the same school - I was describing something that actually happened. Or at least, something we actually pretended happened. Andrew Wall was a good boy to play with. He was into similar things - Star Wars, Blake’s 7, Micronauts and so on - and he hadn’t completely lost his soul to football like some of the other boys. So using our imaginations at playtime wasn’t a big deal. What surprises me is that the very first time I wrote about this sort of thing, we were both pretending to be winter sports stars. Except obviously, I’m writing this in my English book, so I’m the British champion, not him. That bit doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve no idea if I was the only one who wrote these things down. I’d like to think that, somewhere, there’s a book by Andrew Wall full of stories about me, which go exactly like mine except he’s the British champion instead of me, and I’m the one who has to spend longest in hospital. But I’d also like to think I’m the only one in the class who managed to fill nine English books in two and a half years. And I can’t have everything. Mr Geraghty found this one incredibly funny, for reasons I didn’t quite appreciate until he pointed them out to me. The main one being that I’d got the rules to the different skiing disciplines a bit muddled up - the slalom course was about speed and the ski jump about technique, and I’d put them the wrong way round. I don’t remember him quizzing me about the shooter’s motivations, or whether it would have been nice for someone to tell me I was the champion while I was recovering in hospital, rather than making me wait to find out several months later. But he must have thought about it. I don’t think I wrote about being an olympic medallist again, but it’s definitely not the last we hear of Andrew Wall. He very quickly became my best friend in Fairburn and, for the first year at least, the person I wrote about most.

< The Fugitive

Rescue >

The Fugitive A man runs - but who is he? And what is he running from?

The Flame in the Desert An evil fire threatens the safety of the world

Supersilver Pharoid and Supersilver fight over the Great Micromid!