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 A Potted Personal History (1980-1985ish) Playing with Lego certainly gave me a huge amount of satisfaction and allowed my creative side to flourish, but it probably didn’t do my social skills much good as it was a solitary activity and largely confined to my bedroom. I didn’t really come out of my shell fully until I started my first full-time job in September 1989, a life-changing experience which made me realise there was a whole other world outside my own limited existence. My inherent shyness both as a child and a teenager was compounded by the fact that I was also not really interested in girls. In reality, I did show an interest in the opposite sex when I was around 14 or 15, the extent of which included sticking Page 3 pictures on my bedroom ceiling, but I soon realised that I was simply going through the motions in order to satisfy everyone around me, and to confuse my muddled mind even further my mum ordered me to take all the pictures down and told me not to be ‘so disgusting’. I was struggling against my real feelings, and as a result over compensated to try and make myself ‘normal’, only to be reprimanded for doing so. In my subsequent state of total confusion about my sexuality, I finally gave in and admitted to myself that I was gay, and finally ‘came out’ - albeit gradually - in 1994. I won’t try to analyse why I turned out like I did, as to be honest I’m not really that interested, and there has already been much discussion on the subject by experts and amateurs alike. To elaborate on the subject would also be irrelevant to these posts, although it’s certainly true that there’s an awful lot of Doctor Who fans out there who are gay, but again I can offer no explanation for this phenomenon.
Next Episode: A Personal Potted History (1985 – 1990ish)
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In
1980 my mum entered into a relationship with an West Indian anaesthetist
whom she had met whilst working at St. George’s Hospital in Tooting, and
after a short period he and my mum rented a flat in which we all lived,
which was across the road from my grandparents’ home, and it’s at this
flat that I remember watching Tom Baker’s regeneration in the final
episode of Logopolis on 21st March 1981). By this time I had moved from
the primary school in Southfields to a middle school in Raynes Park, a
small district on the other side of Wimbledon. This made my journey to
school a fairly lengthy Tube, train and bus ride, which was a bit of a
jolt to my system compared the relative ease of walking to school for the
previous four years. It was whilst at this school that I first met Andrew
Clancy, with whom I was to become best friends a few years later. Andrew
has always maintained that he remembers me in attendance at the same
primary school as him in Morden, though I haven’t a clue where he got that
idea from - maybe there was just some other dashingly handsome and
talented kid in his class that he was thinking of? Although I had watched
Doctor Who since I was a child and loved the programme, it was Andrew who
converted me into an ‘official’ fan of the show, but this period will be
dealt with in depth in later posts. My mum and her partner were married in
1982, and after living in Southfields for a further 18 months or so, we
moved to Lower Morden in Surrey where my mum and stepfather bought a
three-bedroom house. This was an exciting period for my mum and my sister
and I, as we had never lived in a house before, and this was the first
property that my mum had ever owned. Unfortunately – or I should say
fortunately looking back on the situation with hindsight – my mum and
stepfather separated and subsequently divorced in 1988. The house was sold
shortly afterwards, and I then moved with my mum to a two-bedroom flat
that she had bought in Sutton, about 3 or 4 miles away. By this time my
sister had also started training as a nurse, and was living in student’s
quarters near the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.