Feckwittery

I was a geeky sort of kid.

Not quite the opening line I thought would constitute the first words to my first real attempt at a blog, but there you go. It’s hardly entering into the Blogosphere with a Blaze of Glory is it? Hardly The WordPress Fonz.

But it’s done now. I’ll settle for being an online Richie Cunningham.

I was a geeky sort of kid. The kind of kid that would pray for rain at junior school so he wouldn’t have to play football, or run around the games pitch to determine who would be striker, and who would be in goal. And I was crap at saving goals too. It’s hard to even look interested in catching a ball when you’re scared it’ll knock your glasses off and make you cry. It kinda happened a lot.

Anyway, to a chubby football-phobic 10 year old, the world seemed huge. Indeed, at one time I believed the blocks of flats I could see from my bedroom window were America. The world was full of imagination, bright ideas, creative writing and at least one Barbie colouring-in book bought by my grandmother who didn’t seem to understand the way young boys’ minds worked.

Or maybe she did – it would explain a lot, come to think about it.

To a chubby football-phobic 10 year old, imagination and the dream of a world somehow greater than Mrs Minton’s science class suggested, led to summers of secret bases, of cartoons depicting good vs evil being played out in my back garden, of adventure hiding in the secrets of every undiscovered corner of my house. I had my own personal soundtrack, the danger music which played in my head whenever I imagined myself doing the things so colourfully depicted in the comics my mother faithfully bought me every Saturday morning. The combined epic scores of Star Wars, Superman, ET and Indiana Jones (all of which seemed to sound the same to Little Me) grew in volume and scale as I tackled whatever villain my mind had cooked up that day.

I was thrilled, therefore, that one year on the way to a family holiday in Lowestoft, my mother bought me one of those movie soundtack tapes to play on my little Walkman. At last I could really play those songs in my head as the Suffolk fields raced by. But it wasn’t quite the London Philharmonic I had expected, more someone who had left a cheap Casio Keyboard on demo as the batteries ran down. You know the kind of soundtrack tie-in I’m talking about. The kind you buy in Woolworths where you imagine the conductor is winking at you over his frilled satin shirt as Star Wars reaches levels of jazz no one could have conceived possible. But amongst what purported to be John Williams’ finest, was a little track called Logan’s Run.

I only have distant memories of Logan’s Run. But I know of it’s place in Sci-Fi History. Logan’s Run started off as a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Published in 1967, it depicts a possible future where, to keep the population in line and balance with the resources they need to survive, the people are killed when they reach the age of 21. I bet they never had the debate over sex education in schools. Nine years later, the book was adapted into a film starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter. The film ended up taking something of an artistic licence to many parts of the book, with one of the main differences being the compulsory culling of the population at 30, instead of 21.

I turned 30 in March this year. Part of me keeps looking round expecting the alarms to go off and for armies of Bebo subscribers to storm through my front door and cart me off to some kind of thirtysomething Grandpa Simpson retirement castle with Duran Duran on the stereo and Supergran on repeat in the corner. I’ve started to worry already. I have four types of gravy granules in my food cupboard, because it would be wrong to have Beef Bisto with Pork. My blood starts to boil if you’re on public transport with cheap tinny earphones turned up to loud, and god help you if you’re 14 with a mobile phone. More worryingly, I woke up the other day excited because it was ‘Observer Food Monthly Sunday’.

It’s like a timer switch went off on my birthday. The Logan Crystal in my palm turned black and at Thirty years old I discovered all the secret bases had people in them who annoyed me. The type of people who jammed their hands in the lift door at work whilst they were closing, and then pressed the button for the first floor. The type of person who, when the train guard makes you put down your paper and get out your ticket, causes him to stop two rows in front of you, and buy a saver return to Aldershot for a week on tuesday while you stare on in rage.

I think the glasses came off and the innocent chubby 10 year old, instead of being killed to save the world’s resources 20 years later, suddenly realised that the world around him was full of what he came to term (in pleasant company) Feckwittery. Feckwittery is the state of the world, whose common sense seems sometimes to have left you behind; the state of the world which makes you want to beat people around the head with the wrapped up newspaper. You know the type of thing I mean.

And not only is Feckwittery to be feared, but the realisation the world is full of it is also to be feared. Especially if you’re a liberal, supposedly easy going Guardian reader like me.

And so, I suppose this Blog is not only an occasional rant at the Feckwittery of the world, but also an attempt to regain the imagination and the youthful excitement of that football hating ten year old, who’s greatest trauma was the 18-month hiatus of Doctor Who. The one who found adventure in every corner, and who went through life with danger music in his head. I’m too young to be a Grumpy Old Man. 30 is not an age to be culled. It’s an age to rediscover what keeps me young in the first place.

Because, by god, there’s only so much Richie Cunningham I can take. I want to be the Fonz again.