Today I'd like to complain about emoticons. Mostly because they look stupid and they give me neck ache turning sideways to try and fathom them, but also because they're getting more and more ridiculous.
I suppose :-) is an understandable and simple way of expressing happiness, and perhaps >:o is just about excusable, but somewhere down the line they became little more than geek art and their purpose was lost entirely. Let me introduce you, for example, to someone you might know:
*<|:{)}
In case you haven't recognised him, that's Santa up there. Obviously having a lie down.
I'm ¯\(º_o)/¯.
Maybe I'm just too old, but to me they're the chat room equivalent of when people who work in offices think they need to be posh, so they refer to the person they're talking to as 'yourself'. I've met quite a few people like that, and I even did it myself once or twice before I realised how silly I sounded. I think people do it because they hope it makes them sound professional, when really they'd sound more intelligent if they used 'yee' instead. Likewise, when people are interfacing in chatrooms and want to fit in they use emoticons, no matter how inappropriate and randomly placed. They also use LOL as a general sign of acknowledgement, even though it stands for Laugh Out Loud, which they're probably not doing.
Don't get me wrong, despite generally being the model of linguistic perfection even I'm prone to the odd conversational anomaly, like overuse of the word 'actually', but the 'yourself' thing really makes me LOL. In fact, office language in general is bizarre.
I once worked at a notable Regional Development Agency with a group of very pleasant but equally dull people (apart from one or two of them) whose jobs involved working with businesses in the North East to improve the regional economy. It seemed that they were basically employed to schmooze with Mr Tsukashiro-san, who had worked 16 hours a day for 25 years in a feng shui cubicle with no shoes on while forming a relationship with a west-facing pot plant, faithfully standing up at ten past every hour to recite the company motto and pledge to die for the cause of good quality ball-bearing lubricants, all the while dreaming of one day getting a larger cubicle, a more exotic plant, and Nissan branded slippers presented to him by the Assistant to the Managing Director in recognition of his silent and efficient service to the company.
To Mr Tsukashiro-san, good business etiquette is more important than Kylie Minogue Night at The Karaoke Express, so he's not going to take any slack talk from some Geordie roustabout over his Nescafé and sausage-on-a-stick in the planning meeting. Faced with this scenario, Modern Office Man casts aside his roots and makes a left turn into Cliché Terrace, a street where the f-word has an ASBO and a choice metaphor resides in every house waiting to liven up even the most mundane mind-mapping session. And he lives there, it seems, for the rest of his career.
During my time at the RDA, I was in a meeting, sorry, touching base with some of the key players from the Executive Corporate Regeneration Strategisation Value Added Protocols Monitoring Department to discuss primary target objectives and, no word of a lie, someone said the following:
"We'll have to tread carefully here because this is the biggest elephant and it's only got one toenail."
Well, exactly. If I hadn't been half asleep I would have choked on my crust-less salmon and goat cheese sandwich. I know that to be absolutely true because I was so gobsmacked when it was said that I wrote it down so I could remember to tell people. What could that possibly mean? I also recall someone talking about "finding the tumour and removing it rather than having to treat the cancer later" and "reading the black box after the plane crash." If we'd been doctors or pilots, fair enough, but we were plebs in polyester suits from Ciro Citterio talking about a spreadsheet and a pie chart. 3D, mind. But please.
Why? Why say 'close of play' when five o'clock will do? Why 'bounce ideas around' when you could talk, or even chat? Why should I 'put that on my radar?' I don't have a radar, and if I did I'd use it for something cool like spotting RAF Jet Fighters from my desk, not keeping the time of the next PowerPoint presentation on.
But in the cut-and-thrust world that exists between 9am and 5pm in tile-carpeted rooms up and down the country, image is everything. So, if your tie is from Next like everyone else's, the only way you can get ahead is via a bit of metaphorical wizardry. Who knows, a well placed USP suggestion might just be the ticket to metallic paint on your next Mondeo. Keep it up and in 15 years time maybe, just maybe, there'll be a de-badged BMW 318i waiting for yourself in the company car park.
Now that's living. ;-)
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Perfect Monday
My church are beginning a 40 day media fast on Monday and I'm concerned.
To explain, the church are instigating a fast from all secular media for 40 days from this Monday, meaning no TV, DVDs, newspapers, magazines or, controversially, video games. Controversial because a friend of mine was actually heckled during our service on Sunday for asking, mid-sermon, whether Playstation games were included in the fast. I wasn't there, but I'm told he was actually booed from a large section of the congregation, something I've NEVER heard of before. Quite an accomplishment. His reasoning was thus; where do you draw the line between playing scrabble and playing Tiger Woods 2006? And you can see his point, but let's not get into that.
The reason for the fast is simple - to sanctify the church. For every minute reading Hello, watching Desperate Housewives or listening to Pussycat Dolls, we could be doing something to edify our spirits and bring us closer to God. Like another good and wise friend of mine said recently, it's the dog you feed that wins the fight. He also said something about a hill and a frog, but I didn't understand.
My very first thought when the fast was announced was, 'great, now I can pray more', until about half a second later, when I realised that 40 days is a long time and I still had about 36 episodes of 24 to watch if I was to finish Bruce's box set before Monday. 40 days without CTU Agent Jack Bauer and President David Palmer? Not sure about that. Then, I thought, what will I do when I'm eating my tea? If I can't watch the telly I'll have to listen to music, but there are only about four Christian songs I actually like, so that'll wear thin pretty quickly. Then...My PSP! Burnout Legends wasn't made by Christians, was it? Probably not. What on earth am I going to do with myself?
And that wasn't it. I actually study media, I realised. I'll have to get a note from the pastors to get me out of assignments or something, because how can I write an essay on gender stereotypes in American sitcoms if I can't watch them?
Which brings me to my point, that it's a heart issue, and my heart's probably in the wrong place most of the time. It's impossible for many people, including me, to avoid all secular media completely, but the fast is still absolutely feasible and will be massively beneficial. The purpose of it is not to switch off from the world entirely just to look different to everyone else, but to fill myself with good things - things from God - with my time. If I'm honest with myself, and now you, I've spent more time watching 24 over the last month than I have praying, much more, and that can't be good at all.
For that reason alone this fast will be one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I love having stuff like this to focus me, like when I ate one too many steak bakes and decided I needed to to lose six stone. I had a dream and I worked out a plan (running up muddy hills and eating flavourless green stuff, as it turned out) so I could accomplish it. This is the same, except there'll be a few hundred other people doing it with me and the goal's much better. I can only imagine what it'll be like after 40 days if I stick to this and feed my spirit with only good stuff.
I'm the type of person who needs everything to have a definite start point. It's actually a bit weird, and quite hard to explain, but I tend to build things up into mini dramas in my mind. Sort of like people who always stuff themselves with cakes over the weekend so they can start their diet on Monday, rather than starting right away and just doing it. I'm always looking for that perfect Monday, the day when I wake up completely changed and begin to be the me I've always wanted to be - best husband / drummer / writer / dancer / whatever. The problem is, it never really happens that way, and when it does I find I've waited for months for it to arrive, for no real reason. That's why it took me a year of talking about it before I actually gave up smoking, and the same for losing weight.
Ironically, in an Alanis Morissette sort of way, this fast is offering me an easy 'perfect Monday,' yet at the same time an end to that way of thinking. I really believe that loads of Christians, and non-Christians for that matter, are kept down and ineffective by this thought pattern. It's very stupid, but very hard to get out of, and the only way it can be overcome is by giving it to God like everything else. What I'm saying is that this fast starts on Monday, and no matter what my frame of mind is I'm starting it that day with everyone else, providing me with an amazing opportunity to give everything I have to God and come closer to him than ever before, which will change me completely. This will end my old way of thinking.
It's interesting, and entirely unsurprising, that the more time I spend with the Holy Spirit, the more sensitive I become to things I've thought normal for ages. It freaks me out a bit, but there are some things that are intrinsically part of who I am that I'm becoming quite uncomfortable with. A recent and seemingly trivial example is Friends, which for years has been my favourite TV programme. My wife and I have most of the 200 odd episodes on DVD and, sadly, I know most of them line-for-line from being a student with too much time on my hands, then later 'working' from home. However, it recently dawned on me that this is a programme about six blasphemous twentysomethings whose lives basically revolve around finding people to sleep with. The problem is that it paints this type of life as completely normal, admirable and moral, and it's actually very, very funny, so I can excuse it. This is freaky for me, because I find myself on a moral high-horse about a show that 99 percent of non-Christians (and maybe even some Christians) would find perfectly normal. Maybe some people will find my views a little hysterical, and I've never thought of myself as like that at all. The thing is, I was watching Friends today, so what does that tell you?
I need this fast.
What scares me and excites me in equal measure is that there'll be a load of things that I do, think and say that I currently have no idea are not right, but being closer to God will highlight them and make me do something about it. In all this, I'm aware that I sound like all God wants from me is to take the things that I enjoy away, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Everything that God highlights to me as a problem, he does so for my benefit, to replace those things with blessings. Being in close fellowship with God is what I was made for, so cutting out things that get in the way of that and replacing them with Godly things will allow God to reveal his perfect (there's that word again) plan for me. I've seen this over and over again. Everything I do within the will of God for my life gives me real joy, not just pleasure, but purposeful joy.
It's like the difference between performing in a band and playing for God, or worshipping. It was only when I properly understood that my playing was from God and should always be an offering to God that I experienced real joy through it, rather than just enjoying it for the purpose of adulation or whatever. As you can probably tell, music has always been a big deal in my life and I'm really grateful to God for keeping me close to him through it and giving me the opportunities I've had so far, as inconsequential as they may seem in the grand scheme of things.
I will rarely get as good a chance as this fast to get as close to God as I've always wanted to be. Let's see what happens...
To explain, the church are instigating a fast from all secular media for 40 days from this Monday, meaning no TV, DVDs, newspapers, magazines or, controversially, video games. Controversial because a friend of mine was actually heckled during our service on Sunday for asking, mid-sermon, whether Playstation games were included in the fast. I wasn't there, but I'm told he was actually booed from a large section of the congregation, something I've NEVER heard of before. Quite an accomplishment. His reasoning was thus; where do you draw the line between playing scrabble and playing Tiger Woods 2006? And you can see his point, but let's not get into that.
The reason for the fast is simple - to sanctify the church. For every minute reading Hello, watching Desperate Housewives or listening to Pussycat Dolls, we could be doing something to edify our spirits and bring us closer to God. Like another good and wise friend of mine said recently, it's the dog you feed that wins the fight. He also said something about a hill and a frog, but I didn't understand.
My very first thought when the fast was announced was, 'great, now I can pray more', until about half a second later, when I realised that 40 days is a long time and I still had about 36 episodes of 24 to watch if I was to finish Bruce's box set before Monday. 40 days without CTU Agent Jack Bauer and President David Palmer? Not sure about that. Then, I thought, what will I do when I'm eating my tea? If I can't watch the telly I'll have to listen to music, but there are only about four Christian songs I actually like, so that'll wear thin pretty quickly. Then...My PSP! Burnout Legends wasn't made by Christians, was it? Probably not. What on earth am I going to do with myself?
And that wasn't it. I actually study media, I realised. I'll have to get a note from the pastors to get me out of assignments or something, because how can I write an essay on gender stereotypes in American sitcoms if I can't watch them?
Which brings me to my point, that it's a heart issue, and my heart's probably in the wrong place most of the time. It's impossible for many people, including me, to avoid all secular media completely, but the fast is still absolutely feasible and will be massively beneficial. The purpose of it is not to switch off from the world entirely just to look different to everyone else, but to fill myself with good things - things from God - with my time. If I'm honest with myself, and now you, I've spent more time watching 24 over the last month than I have praying, much more, and that can't be good at all.
For that reason alone this fast will be one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I love having stuff like this to focus me, like when I ate one too many steak bakes and decided I needed to to lose six stone. I had a dream and I worked out a plan (running up muddy hills and eating flavourless green stuff, as it turned out) so I could accomplish it. This is the same, except there'll be a few hundred other people doing it with me and the goal's much better. I can only imagine what it'll be like after 40 days if I stick to this and feed my spirit with only good stuff.
I'm the type of person who needs everything to have a definite start point. It's actually a bit weird, and quite hard to explain, but I tend to build things up into mini dramas in my mind. Sort of like people who always stuff themselves with cakes over the weekend so they can start their diet on Monday, rather than starting right away and just doing it. I'm always looking for that perfect Monday, the day when I wake up completely changed and begin to be the me I've always wanted to be - best husband / drummer / writer / dancer / whatever. The problem is, it never really happens that way, and when it does I find I've waited for months for it to arrive, for no real reason. That's why it took me a year of talking about it before I actually gave up smoking, and the same for losing weight.
Ironically, in an Alanis Morissette sort of way, this fast is offering me an easy 'perfect Monday,' yet at the same time an end to that way of thinking. I really believe that loads of Christians, and non-Christians for that matter, are kept down and ineffective by this thought pattern. It's very stupid, but very hard to get out of, and the only way it can be overcome is by giving it to God like everything else. What I'm saying is that this fast starts on Monday, and no matter what my frame of mind is I'm starting it that day with everyone else, providing me with an amazing opportunity to give everything I have to God and come closer to him than ever before, which will change me completely. This will end my old way of thinking.
It's interesting, and entirely unsurprising, that the more time I spend with the Holy Spirit, the more sensitive I become to things I've thought normal for ages. It freaks me out a bit, but there are some things that are intrinsically part of who I am that I'm becoming quite uncomfortable with. A recent and seemingly trivial example is Friends, which for years has been my favourite TV programme. My wife and I have most of the 200 odd episodes on DVD and, sadly, I know most of them line-for-line from being a student with too much time on my hands, then later 'working' from home. However, it recently dawned on me that this is a programme about six blasphemous twentysomethings whose lives basically revolve around finding people to sleep with. The problem is that it paints this type of life as completely normal, admirable and moral, and it's actually very, very funny, so I can excuse it. This is freaky for me, because I find myself on a moral high-horse about a show that 99 percent of non-Christians (and maybe even some Christians) would find perfectly normal. Maybe some people will find my views a little hysterical, and I've never thought of myself as like that at all. The thing is, I was watching Friends today, so what does that tell you?
I need this fast.
What scares me and excites me in equal measure is that there'll be a load of things that I do, think and say that I currently have no idea are not right, but being closer to God will highlight them and make me do something about it. In all this, I'm aware that I sound like all God wants from me is to take the things that I enjoy away, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Everything that God highlights to me as a problem, he does so for my benefit, to replace those things with blessings. Being in close fellowship with God is what I was made for, so cutting out things that get in the way of that and replacing them with Godly things will allow God to reveal his perfect (there's that word again) plan for me. I've seen this over and over again. Everything I do within the will of God for my life gives me real joy, not just pleasure, but purposeful joy.
It's like the difference between performing in a band and playing for God, or worshipping. It was only when I properly understood that my playing was from God and should always be an offering to God that I experienced real joy through it, rather than just enjoying it for the purpose of adulation or whatever. As you can probably tell, music has always been a big deal in my life and I'm really grateful to God for keeping me close to him through it and giving me the opportunities I've had so far, as inconsequential as they may seem in the grand scheme of things.
I will rarely get as good a chance as this fast to get as close to God as I've always wanted to be. Let's see what happens...
The Canteen Strike
As I stood in the aisle of the Newcastle City Hall surrounded by a lot of people much taller than me, I knew I was doing the right thing. I was only seven, but I knew that God had chosen me. I knew there was a reason I was standing there and asking Jesus into my life, and it wasn't just that Billy Graham said I should. I don't recall whether I felt any different afterwards but I distinctly remember knowing I'd found the truth, even at that age. My parents were Christians so it was probably a relief that their 7-year-old eldest son had decided to turn his back on the wild rock and roll lifestyle he had become accustomed to. In those days I was the Ozzy Osborne of the St Peter's Primary School playground, except that I chose Jelly babies over bats.
As you would expect, my decision to follow Jesus didn't make a dramatic difference to my day-to-day life at that age. It wasn't until I reached secondary school that my choice began to make an impact on me, but even then not as much as it should have. I went to the controversial Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead - controversial because it was overtly Christian and was heavily financed by a local Christian businessman, and more recently because Channel 4 have just broadcast a program made by an embittered journalist lambasting their teaching of Biblical creationism. But I'm not here to start a science debate, and I'm a monkey who came from nothing anyway so I wouldn't be very coherent.
You'd think that the combination of good Christian boy and nice Christian school would work a treat, but you'd be wrong. More wrong than the freak who created the 'Hawaiian' pizza. As keen as I was to follow Jesus, and as much as I wasn't afraid to reveal my beliefs to anyone who cared, it's fair to say that I didn't allow God to form my being into the angelic vision of academic perfection I am now. I'm entirely sure, in fact, that the good people of Emmanuel CTC thought I was sent by The Prince of Darkness himself to cast the school into disarray.
I remember my entry interview well; the pleasant gentleman who interviewed me was charmed by my unwavering devotion to church, finely honed violin skills, selfless community charity work and general academic superiority. They couldn't really refuse, could they?
But they quickly regretted their decision. I was never a sinister person at school, but I quickly gained a reputation for laziness and cheek. Nothing out of the ordinary, but not entirely a pillar of the Christian community either. For example, the year following my arrival at Emmanuel my brother was accepted into the school, but by the time my sister came to apply in 1997 there was a large black mark on the file named 'Nichol' which saw her bypass our wholesome establishment and head straight up the road to the local comprehensive. I say comprehensive, I mean detention centre. And not a very good one at that. The type of detention centre that can't actually detain anyone, leaving them to freely terrorise the surrounding community armed with ten Lambert & Butler and 84 hours community service left to do.
My favourite game at Emmanuel, apart from hiding Marlboros in every crevice of my blazer, was winding the teachers up for fun, and there was no better wind up than The Canteen Strike.
See, Emmanuel liked to appear posher than the other schools, even though they were slap bang in the middle of Blaydon. We even got our tea in genuine fake china cups with a saucer. One of the devices they used to make us look slicker-than-your-average was to make us all play rugby, despite the fact that we all wanted to play football and we thought rugby was a game devoid completely of any skill for which you had to be either fat or fast and nothing else. But Royal Grammar School played rugby and they were 'geet posh like', so even though our judgement of the game turned out to be absolutely correct, we had to do it too.
The first time I experienced the joy of rugby I found that, despite hating it more than I hated 2 Unlimited, I was fast enough to occasionally run past some of the more festively plump kids, and I suddenly found myself charging forward with the ball and nothing between me and the try line...
At that moment I briefly stopped hating rugby as the whole world seemed to slow down and Chariots of Fire resounded in my head. I was lost in a world of champagne, fast cars and insurance company sponsorship deals as I sprinted to glory. As I passed the line I threw the ball down to the floor and, in a fit of gleeful abandon, embarked upon an American football style celebratory dance, kind of like a chicken pretending to be MC Hammer after he says "break it down". So, as I'm flapping my arms and legs about like it's Hammertime, I turn to bask in the praise of my pals, eagerly anticipating the joy of my newly earned hero status.
Sadly not. Glee turned to surprise, then horror, then embarrassment, as a barrage of insults rained down on me like I'd just messed up an omelette for the queen in Gordon Ramsay's kitchen. Because the rugby ball was kind of squashed like an American football and I'd played John Madden on my Megadrive I assumed that running past the line alone was adequate. Throwing the ball down was part of the celebratory ritual. I'd scored a touchdown, right? Er, no. It turns out I had to place the ball down for a try, not lash it down while doing a bad moonwalk. Needless to say, my team didn't get the points and I must have really upset them because nobody would lend me any of their Lynx Africa after the game. But hey, rugby's stupid so I don't care. I stand by my judgement.
Anyway, The Canteen Strike. In an effort to be, again, just better than everyone else (or, if you're not cynical, to give us kids some decent food) Emmanuel had an in-house catering company called Sutcliffe Catering. Come lunchtime, when most kids were feeding on filth accompanied by filth on a bed of pure filth, with chips, us Emmanuel kids were sucking at the teat of real professional catering. The vegetables, believe it or not, looked like vegetables. The food was all properly cooked and as I recall there wasn't a single outbreak of salmonella during my entire time there - quite an accomplishment. They even called the cheese on toast Welsh Rarebit. However, all this superiority didn't come cheap; dinner could cost up to 1.50 per day, which is about 1.84 in this day and age.
So, bored, ungrateful and looking to cause chaos, I decided it would be funny to do something about this injustice. How dare the school charge so much for food. We could go to Macdonalds for just a little bit more. Or, if the zookeepers would let the animals out, we could go to the chippy over the footbridge where we could smoke snouts and flirt with Angie and Pauline to get free batter. Why should we be forced to pay so much without being given an alternative? It went against all the ethics of healthy competition. Sutcliffe's culinary dictatorship had been price fixing for far too long and it was time for a revolution. They wouldn't let Microsoft get away with this, so why should Sutcliffe?
As a joke, a few friends and I discussed the idea of having a strike for one day and, if we were lucky, maybe a few people would join in. If we were really lucky the whole year group would. I think we'd been listening to Rage Against The Machine a bit too much, but it sounded like fun so we decided to spread the word. We'd tell everyone in our year to bring a packed lunch in on the day assigned as strike day. Michael Moore would be proud.
I printed up a couple of posters to advertise the event in the common room. It was a win / win situation really; if the posters stayed up we'd get plenty of free advertising, if the fascist dictatorship regme took them down, word of mouth would take over because of the controversy. I should confess that my posters contained a picture of Hitler and alluded to a similarity between The Third Reich and a Gateshead secondary school, which in hindsight was perhaps a little strong, but what followed ranks as one of my greatest achievements to date.
We kind of knew as the date grew closer that a few people had cottoned on to it, but when the day came we couldn't believe what was unfolding. Somehow, the whole school had decided it was a good idea. Reams of people, including first year students, brought packed lunches in instead of eating their normal school meal. I'll never forget the sight of dinner ladies just standing there, doing nothing, absolutely perplexed at what was happening. The vice principal, Mr Wiecek (vee-yen-seck), stormed into one of the canteens and unleashed a lifetime's worth of rage as the dirty little rebels all sat there, packed lunches open wide. He said we were 'threatening jobs' with our insanely well executed strike (well, he didn't actually say the 'insanely well executed' bit, that was me) and gave us the whole 'starving kids in Africa' thing that your mam gave you if you left a couple of beans on your plate. I know you shouldn't really joke about that, but mams always say it, don't they? If I remember correctly, it turned out that the school staff had discovered the strike a few days before it happened and warned people not to get involved, which was free advertising really. They may as well have made our sandwiches themselves as tell us not to get involved in the strike.
Despite covering my tracks well, I thought, I was fairly quickly cited as a ringleader. I was enraged. I mean, I was the ringleader, but that wasn't the point, was it? They had no proof at all but they immediately pointed the finger of blame at me without any evidence. The fact that they were right was neither here nor there. So I found myself having to justify why I did it. Hmmm.
A meeting was set up with me and 'my cronies', the Vice Principal and the manager of Sutcliffe Catering. What started out as a joke became a major political hot potato and we found ourselves, just for fun, demanding that Bob Sutcliffe (or whatever his name was) justify his high prices. How could he possibly get away with charging 50p for a small bottle of cola? We were no longer prepared to be ripped off and we had to make a stand. Now, I don't remember whether anything changed as a result of that meeting, maybe they took 2p off the price of a portion of chips or something, but this was about the most surreal and funny situation I'd ever had the pleasure of experiencing. The 'jobs on the line' speech was, at the time, about the funniest thing we'd ever heard.
About three years ago I was approached by a friend of mine at church, who hadn't gone to my school, and asked if I was the one who'd started the Canteen Strike at Emmanuel. How cool is that? It's also, I believe, posted on Friends Reunited somewhere. My greatest achievement to date. Better still, I recently found out that the Evening Chronicle wrote a two page feature about it at the time. I wasn't interviewed for it and I didn't see it, but I'm trying to find a copy so hopefully I'll find out soon.
Fight the power.
As you would expect, my decision to follow Jesus didn't make a dramatic difference to my day-to-day life at that age. It wasn't until I reached secondary school that my choice began to make an impact on me, but even then not as much as it should have. I went to the controversial Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead - controversial because it was overtly Christian and was heavily financed by a local Christian businessman, and more recently because Channel 4 have just broadcast a program made by an embittered journalist lambasting their teaching of Biblical creationism. But I'm not here to start a science debate, and I'm a monkey who came from nothing anyway so I wouldn't be very coherent.
You'd think that the combination of good Christian boy and nice Christian school would work a treat, but you'd be wrong. More wrong than the freak who created the 'Hawaiian' pizza. As keen as I was to follow Jesus, and as much as I wasn't afraid to reveal my beliefs to anyone who cared, it's fair to say that I didn't allow God to form my being into the angelic vision of academic perfection I am now. I'm entirely sure, in fact, that the good people of Emmanuel CTC thought I was sent by The Prince of Darkness himself to cast the school into disarray.
I remember my entry interview well; the pleasant gentleman who interviewed me was charmed by my unwavering devotion to church, finely honed violin skills, selfless community charity work and general academic superiority. They couldn't really refuse, could they?
But they quickly regretted their decision. I was never a sinister person at school, but I quickly gained a reputation for laziness and cheek. Nothing out of the ordinary, but not entirely a pillar of the Christian community either. For example, the year following my arrival at Emmanuel my brother was accepted into the school, but by the time my sister came to apply in 1997 there was a large black mark on the file named 'Nichol' which saw her bypass our wholesome establishment and head straight up the road to the local comprehensive. I say comprehensive, I mean detention centre. And not a very good one at that. The type of detention centre that can't actually detain anyone, leaving them to freely terrorise the surrounding community armed with ten Lambert & Butler and 84 hours community service left to do.
My favourite game at Emmanuel, apart from hiding Marlboros in every crevice of my blazer, was winding the teachers up for fun, and there was no better wind up than The Canteen Strike.
See, Emmanuel liked to appear posher than the other schools, even though they were slap bang in the middle of Blaydon. We even got our tea in genuine fake china cups with a saucer. One of the devices they used to make us look slicker-than-your-average was to make us all play rugby, despite the fact that we all wanted to play football and we thought rugby was a game devoid completely of any skill for which you had to be either fat or fast and nothing else. But Royal Grammar School played rugby and they were 'geet posh like', so even though our judgement of the game turned out to be absolutely correct, we had to do it too.
The first time I experienced the joy of rugby I found that, despite hating it more than I hated 2 Unlimited, I was fast enough to occasionally run past some of the more festively plump kids, and I suddenly found myself charging forward with the ball and nothing between me and the try line...
At that moment I briefly stopped hating rugby as the whole world seemed to slow down and Chariots of Fire resounded in my head. I was lost in a world of champagne, fast cars and insurance company sponsorship deals as I sprinted to glory. As I passed the line I threw the ball down to the floor and, in a fit of gleeful abandon, embarked upon an American football style celebratory dance, kind of like a chicken pretending to be MC Hammer after he says "break it down". So, as I'm flapping my arms and legs about like it's Hammertime, I turn to bask in the praise of my pals, eagerly anticipating the joy of my newly earned hero status.
Sadly not. Glee turned to surprise, then horror, then embarrassment, as a barrage of insults rained down on me like I'd just messed up an omelette for the queen in Gordon Ramsay's kitchen. Because the rugby ball was kind of squashed like an American football and I'd played John Madden on my Megadrive I assumed that running past the line alone was adequate. Throwing the ball down was part of the celebratory ritual. I'd scored a touchdown, right? Er, no. It turns out I had to place the ball down for a try, not lash it down while doing a bad moonwalk. Needless to say, my team didn't get the points and I must have really upset them because nobody would lend me any of their Lynx Africa after the game. But hey, rugby's stupid so I don't care. I stand by my judgement.
Anyway, The Canteen Strike. In an effort to be, again, just better than everyone else (or, if you're not cynical, to give us kids some decent food) Emmanuel had an in-house catering company called Sutcliffe Catering. Come lunchtime, when most kids were feeding on filth accompanied by filth on a bed of pure filth, with chips, us Emmanuel kids were sucking at the teat of real professional catering. The vegetables, believe it or not, looked like vegetables. The food was all properly cooked and as I recall there wasn't a single outbreak of salmonella during my entire time there - quite an accomplishment. They even called the cheese on toast Welsh Rarebit. However, all this superiority didn't come cheap; dinner could cost up to 1.50 per day, which is about 1.84 in this day and age.
So, bored, ungrateful and looking to cause chaos, I decided it would be funny to do something about this injustice. How dare the school charge so much for food. We could go to Macdonalds for just a little bit more. Or, if the zookeepers would let the animals out, we could go to the chippy over the footbridge where we could smoke snouts and flirt with Angie and Pauline to get free batter. Why should we be forced to pay so much without being given an alternative? It went against all the ethics of healthy competition. Sutcliffe's culinary dictatorship had been price fixing for far too long and it was time for a revolution. They wouldn't let Microsoft get away with this, so why should Sutcliffe?
As a joke, a few friends and I discussed the idea of having a strike for one day and, if we were lucky, maybe a few people would join in. If we were really lucky the whole year group would. I think we'd been listening to Rage Against The Machine a bit too much, but it sounded like fun so we decided to spread the word. We'd tell everyone in our year to bring a packed lunch in on the day assigned as strike day. Michael Moore would be proud.
I printed up a couple of posters to advertise the event in the common room. It was a win / win situation really; if the posters stayed up we'd get plenty of free advertising, if the fascist dictatorship regme took them down, word of mouth would take over because of the controversy. I should confess that my posters contained a picture of Hitler and alluded to a similarity between The Third Reich and a Gateshead secondary school, which in hindsight was perhaps a little strong, but what followed ranks as one of my greatest achievements to date.
We kind of knew as the date grew closer that a few people had cottoned on to it, but when the day came we couldn't believe what was unfolding. Somehow, the whole school had decided it was a good idea. Reams of people, including first year students, brought packed lunches in instead of eating their normal school meal. I'll never forget the sight of dinner ladies just standing there, doing nothing, absolutely perplexed at what was happening. The vice principal, Mr Wiecek (vee-yen-seck), stormed into one of the canteens and unleashed a lifetime's worth of rage as the dirty little rebels all sat there, packed lunches open wide. He said we were 'threatening jobs' with our insanely well executed strike (well, he didn't actually say the 'insanely well executed' bit, that was me) and gave us the whole 'starving kids in Africa' thing that your mam gave you if you left a couple of beans on your plate. I know you shouldn't really joke about that, but mams always say it, don't they? If I remember correctly, it turned out that the school staff had discovered the strike a few days before it happened and warned people not to get involved, which was free advertising really. They may as well have made our sandwiches themselves as tell us not to get involved in the strike.
Despite covering my tracks well, I thought, I was fairly quickly cited as a ringleader. I was enraged. I mean, I was the ringleader, but that wasn't the point, was it? They had no proof at all but they immediately pointed the finger of blame at me without any evidence. The fact that they were right was neither here nor there. So I found myself having to justify why I did it. Hmmm.
A meeting was set up with me and 'my cronies', the Vice Principal and the manager of Sutcliffe Catering. What started out as a joke became a major political hot potato and we found ourselves, just for fun, demanding that Bob Sutcliffe (or whatever his name was) justify his high prices. How could he possibly get away with charging 50p for a small bottle of cola? We were no longer prepared to be ripped off and we had to make a stand. Now, I don't remember whether anything changed as a result of that meeting, maybe they took 2p off the price of a portion of chips or something, but this was about the most surreal and funny situation I'd ever had the pleasure of experiencing. The 'jobs on the line' speech was, at the time, about the funniest thing we'd ever heard.
About three years ago I was approached by a friend of mine at church, who hadn't gone to my school, and asked if I was the one who'd started the Canteen Strike at Emmanuel. How cool is that? It's also, I believe, posted on Friends Reunited somewhere. My greatest achievement to date. Better still, I recently found out that the Evening Chronicle wrote a two page feature about it at the time. I wasn't interviewed for it and I didn't see it, but I'm trying to find a copy so hopefully I'll find out soon.
Fight the power.
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