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

TOPIC 2 The one where it all kicks off

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

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

< A Walk in Our Village

Florence Nightingale >

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

Apeth Badly-spelt high-jinks with a purple gorilla from outer space!

Captain Carnivore Gary Shepherd is hunted down by a deadly flying meteor

The Mountain Called

Tyrannosaurus Rex

Tuesday March 4th, 1980

Another appearance from my new best friend Andrew Wall, this time teamed up with Aaron Ross, so I’m tempted to think this was a group effort we made up in the playground, with me acting as the scribe. But it’s quite a complex and stupid idea, plus I spend a hell of a lot of it on my own, so I probably just made it all up by myself. Like Captain Carnivore, which must have been written around the same time, there’s a general theme of dinosaurs and time travel, our heroes able to flit between different times with ease. Not enough ease to stop us being eaten by dinosaurs though, and sure enough it’s Andrew - not me - who comes a cropper. Or does he? I’ve mentioned once or twice before that I don’t think I ever had a plan for these stories - that I didn’t think beyond the next sentence and just used to write the first thing that came into my head. But here’s a prime example of me doing the opposite of that. It’s obvious, from all the clues, that I at least had some kind of idea what was going on, and that I would reveal all in Part Two. But the second part never got written, so this is all guesswork. I think the unspoken truth about this tale is that the dinosaur, after being swallowed up by the molten lava, actually becomes Tyrannosaur Mountain, and the hand at the end which pulls me into the mouth belongs to Andrew, who clearly hadn’t been inside the dinosaur long enough to be digested. There are several fundamental problems with this - not least because it relies on us all believing that your average T-Rex was the same size as Kilimanjaro - but it seems pretty obvious that was going to be my big reveal in the next episode. This is building a worrying pattern. It’s at least the third story I’ve started in this English book and not finished. Maybe you could say it wasn’t really worth finishing, and maybe I knew that, even back then. But the likelihood is I just didn’t have the self-discipline. I was just way too keen to move onto the next new idea, which meant I very rarely took the time to build proper worlds, and the body of work I’ve left behind suffers as a consequence. You’d be right to say I’m being too harsh on the eight- year-old me. But it’s plagued me all the way through my adult life too. Maybe sometimes the new ideas are just too ambitious? Maybe I lose confidence. Maybe I just forget why I’m doing it. But it’s rare (unless someone actually pays me, in which case I can do anything, thanks very much Mr & Mrs Employer) that I’m able to finish what I started. I hope one day I’ll get over that. Then maybe my luck will change. I wonder if that’s what was in Mr Geraghty’s mind when he wrote “Good so far” in the margin at the end? It’s a rare appearance by him - in fact, it might be the first thing he’s written in this book - so he must have thought it quite an important thing to say. Apparently he also corrects my spelling now - but this is important too. The word ‘unconscious’ will crop up quite a lot from now on.