What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
Anyone who says anything different from the title was either very good at sport, very lucky or one of the many bullies that make everyone else’s life a misery. I hated pretty much every minute of my seven years and looking back, I got through it because I had no choice. Music helped of course and I really started to make it my main passion in my teens. Scouting helped at the time by providing me with a place where hatred and mockery were absent from my life. It’s interesting that I looked at my fellow scouts as exceptions to the rule because they were actually decent people, whereas I internalised the fact that my tormentors at school, both students and teachers were fully representative of the male condition. I have been incredibly wary of males ever since and regard them as unpleasant unless proven otherwise. To be fair it’s a pretty sound approach to life as the bulk of males I have met outside of teaching have never encouraged me to reassess my view.
Single gender schools were extremely common in my school days and I think they were part of the reason for the bullying. There were no checks on behaviour because getting through bullying was considered to be a right of passage for all children. Bullies were considered to be the alpha males and were given free rein. If you complained you were ignored or regarded as weak. As many of the teachers at my school were also bullies, the students learnt from them. With the exception of the non white students I had pretty much the hardest time imaginable. Even right near the end I could be completely humiliated. A snide little bully called Tim Mercer was doing an assembly about our class and its seven years at school and he dedicated one section to the weird things I had done in our earlier years at school. I don’t think I have met a more unpleasant human being in my 60 years, but life being what it is, he has probably carried on bullying people and having great success in his life, because one thing I know is that bullies never change and that their behaviour is never called out.
I suppose you could say that I have risen above it all but I shouldn’t have had to. School days are definitely the worst days of your life and I don’t think many people would disagree unless they are from the three categories I mentioned at the beginning.
What’s a book you think deserves a sequel?
The idea of a sequel to a well-known book should, except in a very few cases, only come from the original author. In my years of reading I have come across only two stories which have been successfully expanded upon by someone else.
One was Night of the Triffids by Simon Clark who took the world and characters of John Wyndham’s original in a new direction whilst keeping the integrity of the creation intact. I came across the book in the main public library in Hong Kong and tracked down my own copy many years later having sent a message to the author on his website. What made this sequel work was the way in which he had allowed the characters to age and change subtly.
The other occasion on which this worked were the Barbara Havelocke books Estella’s Revenge and Estella’s Fury the second of which you can see reviewed at the link. The stories feature the beautiful but damaged character Estella Havisham from Great Expectations. In these sequels she takes her education in darkness and uses it to even the score for women in particular in a society where men treated them as objects and possessions not human beings. Plus ca change as they say! What makes Estella’s continuing journey work so well is the complete understanding that Havelocke has for the character combined with her willingness to push that character to extremes. Every action she takes is in character but we as readers don’t know exactly what action it will be until it happens because Estella is such a complex character. I have never cheered on a character performing evil acts in the same way!
Outside of these two I have read two books expanding on A Christmas Carol. The first, a prequel about Jacob Marley was just about readable but added nothing to the original and was instantly forgettable. The second, a sequel about Bob Cratchit, was an absolute abomination! The whole family had characters which were diametrically opposite to the Dickens novel and I gave up in disgust after 45 pages, annoyed at being dragged in by such an appalling piece of writing.
I had a similar reaction to a completely unnecessary sixth book in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series written after Douglas Adams’ death and containing characters with familiar names acting in ways that indicated that the names were all they shared. I got about 75 pages in before giving up on that one!
It is a very difficult task to write a sequel to someone else’s story and, I would think, it’s not that easy to write a good sequel to your own. Looking at my bookshelf I can see a few books which have successfully taken us on a journey with a character over a number of novels. They were all written by the original authors with the two exceptions I have mentioned, so we need to leave it to them.
What are you most excited about for the future? For me, the future started on June 20 2025. That was the day I packed away my last few items from my desk, took a bag of presents and left my job of seven and a half years. It was the longest time I had spent […]
What’s Next?
This is an extremely interesting blog post for me to look back on, a year later. It shows that my original thoughts were pretty much on the money. Yes, it’s still a work in progress and I am still finding out who I am, but I seem to be getting there.
What villain actually had a good point?
I think every villain in popular culture has a view of the world which is, to some extent at least, understandable. This is because they are based on the more negative version of ourselves. It will come as little surprise to regular readers that my choice of villain is the initial version of Ebenezer Scrooge from my favourite book, A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge is told by his fiancée, when she returns the ring he bought her ‘when we were poor and content to be so’, that ‘you fear the world too much Ebenezer’. When you look into Charles Dickens’ early life of poverty and hardship you realise that he too feared the world. He tried to defend himself by building up as much money as he could from his skill as a writer to avoid the poverty he had experienced as a child.
Scrooge becomes a ruthless businessman in order to do the same. He regards the rest of the world as a threat to his fortune and therefore his security and it’s hard to argue with that. In Christmas Yet to Come he finds himself a pariah fit only to be plundered in death. It was precisely what he feared in life and it showed that in the area he chose to concentrate that his fear of the world comes from a place of reality.
When you look at business and politics these days it’s perhaps even more money grabbing and more full of evil people than it was in Dickens’ time. What Scrooge did to poor people in his small area of London, his successors are doing to the whole world thanks to modern communication. The difference is that none of our current businessmen and politicians started off poor. They don’t fear the world, they see it as there purely to serve them and they see subjugation of everyone else in it as their birthright. Scrooge, by comparison, is actually a pretty decent human being even at the start as the root of his villainy has a real basis in human nature. His successors are not human beings in the sense that they have feelings of love and affection that have been squeezed out of them because they never had them in the first place.
Many of us, like Scrooge, tend to fear the world and, as it turns out, with just as much reason, if not more these days. Yes, Ebenezer definitely had a point!
Thinking back to when I was 35 – quite a feat of memory these days! – I am aware of a feeling of almost constant change. Family, friends, job and country all changed in and around that age, so I was ready to find that there were clear alterations amongst the participants. What did I […]
7 Up TV Series Re-view Part 5 35 Up
2026 is the year of the final Up programme, 70 Up, which brings the most incredible documentary strand ever made to a close. I reviewed the first 5 and then stopped. Well, it’s time for me to start again and a perfect time to revisit the blog post.
