Reminises: Taking Tramps for Dinner

When I was about twenty seven and a half I took two homeless men to dinner in Chinatown, London.

I met them in Leicester square one Friday evening. We were sharing the lawn and they started chatting to me, as tramps tend to.

I had just been paid and so a few "starter cans" of Stella in it was like "I'm hungry, do you guys want a Chinese". (I had recently finished reading Songlines where the narrator does the same, only in the Outback (In Australia not the Franchise Antipode bar))

They accepted. I remember one was called just "Billericay" and he was, you got it, Oirish.

I assume the cause of their acceptance was the sound of a free meal rather than any desperate need to spend more time with a lanky "student twat type" (My quotes) but nonetheless, as a trio, we did go.

Hing Loon’s was our destination, it’s still there and remains my fave - I was there last time in London. I had been going there for years with friends and family and, on that summer in the late 90s, two pissedup tramps. Both of whom, in the confines of a building it was revealed, stunk like they had been living on the streets for decades.

We sat on a big round table.

We sat under a drizzle of uncouthness that gradually, by the time the Won Ton's had arrived, increased to an embarrassing torrent of uncouthness.


I don’t think the tale needs the details.

It was a truly educational experience. One I was keen to end fast (I think we skipped the ice-cream with Lychees) and even more keen never to repeat.


Don’t ever take drunken tramps for dinner.

Reminiscences: Easter Island Skull Find

When I was five my parents took me to Easter Island -even today not the most common of holiday destinations. I have lots of memories about the place, all united by a tangible sense that we were in some place weird.

The airport was a shed. The customs was a trestle table. There were no trees and lots of just… crazy statues.

But the key memory I have of this trip, and one that I think has shaped me to a degree, was as follows (I’m going to write the memory down first and then ring up my folks to compare):

There was a kind of cairn thing. A pile of rocks in the middle of nowhere. At the base of this cairn was a cave, a small opening that a child, but not an adult, could enter. I crawled inside and there, in the dim, was a collection of bones. I seem to remember a pile of skulls but I can’t remember how many. I do remember taking a skull and backing off out of the cave to show my parents.

I guess they were a bit freaked out by their little boy emerging from some chthonic nook with a human skull in his hands. That’s all I can remember.

…… I just called my folks.

This is what they remember….

Pretty much as described but. It was an altar on the north side of the island… underneath a plinth. I wanted to take the skull home… they wouldn’t let me… I had to crawl back in and put the skull back.

That’s all they can remember…. To my dad, a far more prominent memory of that trip wasn’t his son finding a skull but him losing his briefcase.

Reminisces: Last Night's Wig

Last night Mark and I were Drinking in a pub. A bad punk cover band was on. (This is two punk references in this blog in less than a week. I am SOOOOO not punk...) .

I was standing at the bar waiting to get served. Mark pops up and asks the question, with volume and clarity:

"Would you ever wear a wig?"

I thought about it..... for a second or three...

"No." I replied, and turned back to the bar.

Then we both noticed him starring at Mark. The guy besides us. The guy who looked angry but unsure what to do. The guy with the most obvious and ill thought toupee this side Elton John's worst bad hair day.

We didn't say sorry. We didn't say anything. We walked back to the stage area and hid behind a pillar to laugh like naughty school boys.

Reminisces: News Years Eve Erection

News Year's Eve in 1992. I was 21 and I had my girlfriend of the time staying at my parents house. Tina. My first ever girlfriend.

My parents were out at a bash. We were expecting them back late.

So... there we were. Young lovers under the duvet of my single bed. Kerrrrnnnnoooodling. Naturally, I had just taken her way past 7th heaven and into the high echelons of total sexual bliss when there were lights in the drive. PANIC!

I got dressed so fast into my jeans and shirt, I guess forgetting underpants and socks. Slightly flushed, I led the way. Descending the stairs just as the front door opens. I am at the bottom of the stairs. Tina is behind me.

"Happy New Year Mum!" I say, kissing her on the cheek.

"Happy new Year Dad!", I say, shaking his hand.

The immortal words (Thanks to blogger.com's eternal backup policy) follow from my father:

"Happy New Year Mathew. I think you had better put that away."

The four of us looked down to see the glistening shaft of my all consuming embarrassment.

Reminisces: My first punk rock and roll concert.

My Dad's musical taste pretty much stopped at the White Album. They had a slight augmentation when my cousin Adjoa brought him Bob Marley's Exodus on cassette at some point in the 70's. Nonetheless there has never been much diversion from the "movement of Jah people picking up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" sphere, ever since.

In 1978 I was 7 and my sister was 9. The tune of the year was Ian Dury's "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" which my dad loved. It had the quirky out of the blue quality that dads and pub punk rockers the world over were digging.

So, My Dad though it would be a great idea to take me and my sister to see him in concert at The (local) Coliseum.

Like most major or first events in ones life, I can remember this well. the excitement, the anticipation, the weeks long build up (I seem to recall it being an Xmass pressie). We got there way too early. We hung around amongst the punks and the rockers and a bunch of people who knew my dad but didn’t expect him to be there. Equally they didn’t expect two gappy kids to be there; getting primed for the mosh pit. We checked out official Ian Dury merchandise (I can picture to this day an analogue square wristwatch with "Blockheads" written on the watch face).

Perhaps there was a band before. I can’t remember. But I do remember the moment when Ian Dury And The Block Heads came on. At the time I didn’t appreciate that the lead singer’s punk swagger was the result of childhood polio but, with backdrop of smoke and the lights and the crowd, this was momentous.

He didn’t start with "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick". He didn’t start with a song. He started with a story. A long drawn out diatribe. I just did a quick lyric search for it but couldn’t find the song. So, to paraphrase five minutes of live punk rock and roll into one paragraph of typo-laiden Blog:

He came home from somewhere. He walked into his house. He looked around. He went into his bedroom. There was a woman on his bed. She shouted - I don't swear in this Blog so this is a quote – She shouted, "Fuck Me!".


I remember looking up at my dad. He looked concerned. This wasn’t what he was expecting and it certainly wasn’t what me and my sis were expecting. Where were the comical references to Tiger Bay and the Sudan? Where was the Franglaise and the addictive foot-tapping-beat?

We didn’t stay much longer. We definitely didn’t stay to hear my Dad’s favorite song of the decade.

That night held the moment that I knew there were things and events outside of the adult world
I was familiar with.

Computer Reminisces 1982: My ZX81

This is the one that started it all for me. I was 11. It was Christmas or maybe a birthday. Now It was Christmas. For my birthday I got the 16k Ram expansion pack. So, a 1k machine... think back to that. I haven’t thought about it for years until now but 1k... that’s 1000 letters... is a tiny tiny amount of memory. I spent a few weeks copying programs from the books and magazines. They might take an hour to do and then maybe (for me at least) a day to debug... going through the code bit by bit. My bugs were all typos. I have made many mistakes in my life, most of them are typos.

I remember my dad spent a night typing up the program to play chess that he found in a magazine. Chess in 1k yikes (Here it is! http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/).... I cant remember how it played but Deep Blue it wasn’t.

At some point I started writing my own programs. I did a game of Jaws where you had to get to "Cable Junction" while being chased by the eponymous shark. I don’t remember if it was good I am guessing it wasn’t. Then I made "Dogfight" the graphics of which were some kind of cross hairs in the middle of the screen, to make the enemy plane was this little collection of characters:

--=*=--

Pretty realistic, na?

"Fruit Machine" was the game I tried to get published. If I remember rightly you could print awesome graphical characters using special codes for things like a Spade, Heart, Diamond.... and these formed the heart of the game. With all the ingredients for excitement a game needs this was destined for great shakes.

I sent it off to a ZX81 magazine and waited for the reply. Aged 11 or 12....it came. I can remember really clearly opening the envelope from the publisher. It was a school day. To paraphrase it said something like:

"Dear Matthew, Like you, we may only have 1000 bytes to play with…but if you think we are going to publish that travesty of an excuse for home entertainment in our prestigious magazine you have another thing coming, sonny."

They were probably nicer than that but you get the drift.

Once I moved up in the world to 16,000 bytes (with the monolith of a plug-in expansion pack) the world was my oyster. With 16 Kilobytes I could.... well.... do more. I cant remember what though. It was a difference of kind not degree but it was not that tiny code and concept space that started me and thousands of others off. Once you got into that space and out of the binary straight jacket the world would never be the same.

(FYI This post is just under 2k.)