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.