Mr Redgrave was the headmaster of my first school. His face was crumpled, he smoked cigars, and his office had a scratchy carpet the colour of a kingfisher. A visit to this room and its fuggy air usually meant only one thing: you were in trouble. That was not a place I wanted to be.…

I never knew if I was being hazed or if this was how it was. At the end of the 90s, I did editing shifts on a big Sunday newspaper. I was a hamster in a cage 22 floors up London’s Canary Wharf tower, waiting for a pellet to drop down a chute. The pellet…

When the newspaper came out last week, I realized we’d left my name off an article. All those wonderful words written by Anon. This year, through a series of (un)fortunate circumstances, I find myself back in the newspaper world. These days I’m writing and editing and checking and selling … and melting ice outside the…

One day when I was about seven years old, our next-door neighbour put a boat on his front lawn. There it sat, marooned with – most critically – its propeller-end sticking out into our driveway. What was it doing there? I have no idea – except it caused much discussion around our kitchen table. (Mind…

I fear I was my violin teacher’s worst nightmare: a scratchy, screechy, stinky teenager who never picked up his instrument between Tuesdays. “Did you practice this week?” she would ask. “Yes,” I would say. But we both knew the truth. It’s not that I didn’t like the violin. Indeed, I was something of a classical…

One Christmas, when I was six years old, I had a massive – existential – argument with my parents. I was sobbing on a stool in the kitchen while the turkey was roasting and the Brussels sprouts boiling. I was tear-shooting upset at the injustice and indignity of a fight I deserved to win. From…

I first heard of Margaret Thatcher when I was in the Downing Primary School playground and someone referred to her as an “old bag.” I didn’t know who she was, but I worked out that it wasn’t good to be an “old bag,” which was worse than being a “new bag,” but probably not as…

When I was six, I wanted to be an elevator operator. There was excitement in buttons, sending cabled box to basement and roof. (I graduated to escalators, hitting the emergency stop in Debenhams, pushing shoppers into a Christmas Eve avalanche.) My teen years coincided with the “loadsamoney” 80s, when loud boys in wide jackets got…

“Look at that bird, he’s so sweet.” I remember my dad saying that, pointing at a close-up he’d taken of a bird in our back garden. The photo was so sharp you could see the fluffiness of its feathers and the shininess of its eye. Dad was a keen photographer while I was growing up.…

Last Tuesday, Dave (not his real name, let’s protect the guilty here) assured me he was happy in his job. Two days later, he quit. And that caused a problem, because the business I co-own had no one to run it. It also caused considerable anger: he had committed to stay until the end of…

About 30 minutes from my childhood home was the Minsmere bird reserve – a marshy oasis of salty brackish water on the eroding Suffolk coast. I went there on a school trip and we were shepherded into one of the hides – those crouching sheds that get close up to the birds. Inside it was…

I remember joking to my brother once that the only reason the two of us got out of Ipswich was because we used an orbit of neighbouring Bury St Edmunds as a slingshot, like the Voyager space probe, to give us enough momentum to escape the gravity of our hometown. Ipswich, we had come to…

One year the school photographer, instead of asking us to say “cheese”, asked us to say “sausages.” The result was I looked like a fish about to suck in a dragonfly. That picture didn’t make it onto the living room wall. Plenty others did, however. Apart from the school pictures, there were photos of my…