The Highlanders

I haven't got "The Highlanders" on audio. I used to have the full set, but there is now a gap between the perfectly home-packaged "Power of the Daleks" and "The Underwater Menace" cassettes.

The phrase "Local Group" fills me with horror. This may be due to an unhappy experience I still relate with it, or maybe I still smart from the associated status I once courted. It stirs up thoughts of rainy days in someone's living room, of girls with big jumpers (female Who fans always seem to wear big jumpers) and studious looking asexual boys ranting on about a novel they've written that will never be published.

Back then I was a Who fan trapped in my bedroom, and wanted nothing more than to be a part of a Local Group. I finally got the chance when I made contact with an enthusiastic sounding fellow fan called Paul, who invited me to join his clan in a Colchester pub when the University term finished. It had been a busy year for on-line networking, and I'd also made contact with another fellow fan who not only languished somewhere on the same campus as I did, but also shared a home county. Although we hadn't met, we were set to soon. I had whiled away enough years in my merchandise-festooned bedroom and it was time for this fan to meet others of his kind.

I telephoned Paul when I got home, and arranged to join his Group when they next convened. But now, dear reader, comes the folly in this tale. Giddy on the success of my negotiating skills and overconfident with the idealness of it all, I did something rather reckless and naive. I invited the other, as yet unencountered fan to come to the Group meeting as well. Yes, I know now that it would have been better to meet him first. But I was young, and things were going to work out just fine.

Were someone to turn up at Tenth Planet of a Sunday and extract DNA from all the sorriest individuals in the queue, including the one with the long hair and TARDIS bomber jacket, and the one who queued up twice to meet Sylvester McCoy at Longleat, and the one who got thrown out for deploying "excessive enthusiasm" when meeting Richard Franklin, then they might create a being like the one I encountered on that sunny Wednesday evening in 1996. The hair was swept back and greasy, the glasses workmanlike and horrid, the charm and grace missing-in-action. He didn't converse; he was just sporadically very loud.

I brought along a selection of the most exciting of my missing audio cassettes, rare treasure to make me more popular. The group were a hotchpotch of an inoffensive bunch, the young blond-haired one who'd inexplicably brought all his New Adventures with him (quite a dish actually), the student girl and her big jumper, the quiet married one who wouldn't watch anything made after 1977... but they were cautiously welcoming towards me. Or they would have been, but for the bastard sitting next to me who THEY THOUGHT was my friend!

The friendly group dished out a copy of their homemade fanzine and some charming membership goodies to us both, and I loaned someone my "Highlanders" tape to return the good faith. Despite the teetotal wanker on my left and his odd mis-placed comments, things were going quite well. But then they offered to let us pay the membership fee to join the group at the next meeting, Paul adding with a smile "it's not as though we won't see you again is it?"
"You're taking rather a lot for granted aren't you!" snorted the anoraked cunt I had sunk my trust into. Were there any time in my life when I felt like sinking to my knees and issuing a "take me now" prayer to God, it was then.

I never saw them again. Shortly after that ill-fated night I got a job working a 5-8 weekday shift at Homebase and so couldn't make any more of the meetings anyway. My eyes met those of The Fan Wanker just once more, on the top floor of the Computer Science building some months later when we'd returned to Uni. He looked at me, I looked at him but neither of us spoke. Once I found Paul in a chatroom on OG, but he quickly disappeared. It was probably a coincidence.

I suppose I tried. And I learned that day not to try and run before I could walk. And they've still got my "Highlanders" tape.