TOPIC 2 The one where it all kicks off

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

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Apeth (from Ota Sbees) >

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

The Return

of Supersilver

Friday March 28th, 1980

The Return of Boring Of all the unfinished stories in my first English book, Supersilver is the one I’m least interested in revisiting. But something convinced me to do it, and we’ve ended up with this. It really doesn’t look like I was that interested in it though. I derail the story immediately by realising before the end of the second sentence that Supersilver didn’t actually die at the end of the previous chapter like I just said he did, forcing me to backtrack in a painfully awkward manner. Like the previous instalment, this is based on the Micronauts action figure range, but unlike the first episode, this doesn’t convey any of the joy of playing with the toys, coming across more as a mechanical chore to fill the time before the end of the day. We do finally get to meet Lt Hyperion though, who was announced as being in the previous story but never actually made it to the page, which suggests I am at least paying some attention rather than just blindly making it up as I go along. Trouble is, blindly making it up as I went along was obviously much more fun. Unfinished Business The bit at the top of the page, written March 27th, is (I think) an example of Dictation Practice, where Mr Geraghty would read something out and we would write it down, then mark ourselves on how well we did. Obviously I’ve given myself full marks, even though I’ve spotted quite a few mistakes already. But I guess that’s what happens when a teacher delegates the marking to his own students. You might notice I’ve retrospectively penned in the suffix ‘A.D.’ next to the date for both pieces here - just in case we changed to a new year-numbering system or you thought it might be 1980 BC. I’ve only just realised I did this for every single story in the book. And not just this book, but all the others as well. From here until I leave Fairburn, there are only a handful of pieces in any of my English books which don’t have ‘A.D.’ written after the date. But obviously on this occasion, I forgot, and at some point in the future, obsessively went back through all my work adding ‘A.D.’ to everything I’d previously written. Apart from English 1, apparently. Maybe I ran out of time. And that’s it. The end of my second term. Just six months ago, I was conservative and trepidatious, writing about normal, everyday things and doing as I was told. In the past three months, I’ve outed myself as a science-fiction and comics fan of quite some magnitude, with a weird sense of humour and a passion for writing about strange, exciting worlds populated by strong characters and bizarre creatures. The caution I displayed in the first term has gone, to be replaced by a furious optimism which borders on recklessness. Whatever the third term brings, there’s no doubt that, by this point in my time at Fairburn School, I was a happy, confident kid with a firm sense of his own identity. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already over a quarter of the way through the Fairburn story. At first, we probably intended to stay a lot longer. But something would happen over the next few months to throw everything completely up in the air…

Grobschnitt’s Page Meet Grobschnitt, the dome-headed Harbinger of Mischief

Apeth (from Ota Sbees) Ritern ov thu perpal geriller

Exploring the Underworld Eight boys go exploring in a dangerous cave

TERM 3 1980 continues with the embassy siege and The Empire Strikes Back