As a sort-of introduction, here is something I wrote in 2004. One particually boring Sunday I whacked this one off ( no rude comments please) and ended up using it for a GCSE folder piece for English.. well it got me a decent grade..

“I never chose to live in Thanet, it was imposed upon me at a young age. My mother and I lived in a large flat in Deal. I liked it there except for when the bells rang in the morning and I can remember screaming at them for silence sometimes when I was feeling especially daring. When I was young living in Deal was fine to me. My nan, grandad and uncle also lived here and often visiting them gave me some of my favorite memories as a child, including those I can’t even remember (I guess that doesn’t make them memories but oh well)
For instance my grandfather for a time lived in a flat on the parade, and after being particularly excited to see him one day I ran into the road, whilst a large articulated lorry headed right at me. My mother had probably never had been so white, yet I remember nothing of that. I suppose it’s for the best. Also I remember opposite his flat being where the visiting fun-fair made it’s home for two holy weeks of the year, and then myself single-handedly zapping my mum of money with rides on rickety old car tracks and those stupid balloons with toys in that you could bash up and down really fast and they’d make a ridiculous noise, explode and deposit the garishly coloured (usually Barbie Girl pink) teddy into the over-trodden wet mud. I loved those balloons and I won a lot of them over the years, usually by attacking a plastic duck with a large hook, yet at this pre-education age it was probably a life skill I needed to learn sooner or later. It makes you think now how you can no longer win these gaudy balloons but instead can take your pick from fake Disney lookeylikeys or plastic replica machine guns. Just shows what the world is coming to.
Deal at a young age can seem quite interesting, especially when my uncle would jazz up stories with anecdotes about people being thrown through the window at the Clarendon Pub or a drug-fueled car chase, but most of the time I reckoned he was lying, just like my nan’s boyfriend whenever I asked him where he was going. He’d always reply,without fail, “I’m going to see a man about a dog”, which worked the first 100 times but when he used to come back with no pedigree chum and smelling distantly of the aforementioned Clarendon I started to get suspicious. Sometimes he’d take me out, usually to do manly things he enjoyed. For instance Brian was an avid Fisher and regularly took me to the pier, which I found rather scary really because I wasn’t sure about the stability of the thing, and Deal can get quite windy at certain times of the year. Yet I forgot all this when we reached the end and could eat greasy bacon rolls and milkshakes which my mum never seemed to give me. I remember her giving me lots of beans though and anyone who knows me well enough knows I hate beans, almost as much as Ruby Wax in fact, but not quite. He’d also take me to watch the local football team play which I found very boring, for reasons I will explain later.
My nan was a completely different experience all together. She’d shop in brick-a-brac shops and look for “a nice bit of beef for dinner” for us to eat while Brian was out obviously looking for Lassie. I didn’t mind though because when I was younger I was resist ably cute and people would “aww” in the street. I think part of the appeal was when I refused to wear clothes when I was about 2 and a half and would just wear a nappy and run about with a duster and a miniature Hoover trying to help out. My mum probably thought this was a sign that I was going to grow up and be really helpful, but boy did I show her.
My nan worked in a cafe-come-garden centre which I spent quite a lot of time in. There was this old man, who looked a bit like a salty sea dog (whatever that is) used to trick me into thinking he only had half a finger which amused my tiny mind hugely. I also remember Painless Geoff the tattoo artist being mentioned a lot. This name was obviously given with irony, and I have heard from a reliable source that when he is drunk he works better that when he is sober. I think I’ll just take their word for it, rather them than me. My mother got a couple of tattoos from him but she isn’t sure why.
I’ve noticed that it is a common fact that the older you get the more you hate Deal. This makes me imagine old ladies having trolley rage in Sainsbury’s on Saturday afternoon fighting over broccoli for Sunday lunch. That would be funny. Yet seriously, the nearer teenage years the less scope there is for abstaining from a rough lifestyle. Deal is filled with council estates and subsequently these are filled with play areas, a desperate and hopeless attempt at stopping kids smashing up greenhouses or playing with fire. They usually just set alight to the park and this keeps them happy. The play area outside my nans house has had the roundabout replaced three times and the seesaw and giant slide removed all together. I had two friends who lived up the road from my nan and their favorite hobby was riding down the slide in a plastic milk crate then smashing their heads in at the bottom and repeating until the crate broke or they had to go in for tea. These friends were two brothers, one was quite short and must have been a good four years older than me, his bother nearer my age but massive in size who always had a knack for losing my frizbee. One of them may or may not have been called Shane.
One day I was happily playing in my wendy house when all of a sudden I was in a van with Amy the cat, transporting stuff to an alien planet as far as I was concerned. The man driving the red postman pat van I’d met before somewhere. And then it clicked. It was the man who took me to the zoo the week before and we were going to live in his house. Little did I know at the time but this man was going to be my Dad, but at the time I was more worried about where Fluff and Teddy Demoiyer were. Odd name for a bear but that’s me really. The first thing that struck me about the strange man’s house was how big it was. There was television in the dining room held up by videos and Thomas the Tank Engine was playing so I shut up and watched it despite not understanding where the hell I was. All I knew for about a year was that I lived in Broadstairs. Well I didn’t actually live in Broadstairs but I could never remember Cliftonville so I said that instead. There was no park and certainly no plastic crates down our road and so that was an improvement. Or maybe I was deprived…Yet there was no stupid church bells so that was an improvement at least. “