Jelly Beans

All of this craziness was set, of course, against the backdrop of school. I hated school because I never understood why I had to go there. On my first day of school, at the age of five, my mum left me in the playground and went home. I thought she had left me there because she didn't love me anymore or something like that. I don't know why I felt that way, because I had previously been to Play Centre, and she always gave me jelly beans on those days. But now there were no jelly beans, they weren't allowed, and I had to go in a room with lots of other children, and some of them were smelly. I could already tell the time by then, and this annoyed the teacher enormously, because I just kept telling her what the time was, and checking over and over again what time mummy would be coming back. After a few weeks, the teacher suggested that I be removed from school and brought back the following year. This, however, did not come to pass. Instead, I had to learn to deal with it, and join in with the other kids. I had to drink milk from a bottle that had been sitting in the afternoon sun for an hour, and, like all English children, I had to eat creamy cheese, cabbage and lumpy potatoes. Funnily enough, I now have an inexplicable hatred of anything creamy, yoghurty or cheesy, except for cream, yoghurt and cheese themselves. I get around this problem by pretending to be a vegan, whereas in reality I'm only a vegetarian.

Around the age of six or seven, I developed a phobia of thunderstorms, which seemed to occur at least once a week in those days. This I can only attribute to a caravan holiday we had in a place called Camber Sands, where I was treated to a full scale electrical storm while lying in bed inside a metal box-on-wheels in the middle of nowhere. To this day, if I find myself alone at night during a thunderstorm, I have to change my underpants.

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