Twenty Five Years On

A quick spot of juvenilia.

Only a quick one this week. Yesterday would have been my beloved Agnes’s 37th birthday, had she not unexpectedly and devastatingly left us in June last year. I’m away by the sea for a few days, with the intention of walking the dog and reading some books and generally letting myself relax a bit, and just letting the events of the last few months wash over me a bit.

The problem with relaxing after a long period feeling tense, though, is that your immune system sometimes does the same. By Haywards Heath, as I hit send on my last work email, I had a sore throat. By the time I was in bed, a mere two hours later, everything hurt, and attempts to leave my overpriced hotel room and actually see any sea have felt about as pleasant and enjoyable as clambering up Kilimanjaro.

Agnes always enjoyed a hotel for its own sake, and used to get annoyed with my demands that she dedicate more time to coming out and actually seeing things. Perhaps I should see it as a tribute. 

Anyway, here’s one I made earlier; as it happens, quite a lot earlier. A terrifying 25 years ago this month, I finished my A-levels and left Brentwood, the school I’d attended since the age of seven. The Upper Sixth¹ that year produced a leavers book, in which each of us had our own page. I was also asked to write the introduction, a fact that still feels somehow flattering even now. 

Here it is. Shocking and reassuring in equal measure to see how little I’ve changed.

Moving On

It’s almost eleven years since I first arrived at the prep school, complete with maroon cap so large that I couldn’t see out, and shorts, so that for three years of my life I thought blue was the natural colour of my legs. The kids in the main school all looked about seventeen feet tall with enormous bags and the privilege of wearing trousers. I think I mentally dumped them in that category labelled “adult.”

So, four years later, it came as a shock to realise that, at the grand old age of twelve, you are anything but. Wandering around, getting lost among huge red buildings, in an itchy grey shirt and that suit that always smelt of decomposing animal flesh whenever it rained, I remember seeing sixth formers and thinking: They look so mature, so grown up.

Last term. Boy comes running out of common room carrying a shoe, before locking himself in the toilets with it. Girl missing a piece of footwear hobbles out, hovers in a forlorn manner by the door, and proceeds to ask anyone in possession of a Y-chromosome to go in and retrieve it for her.²

Looking back now, I was a very naïve child.

At every step, every time we’ve been pushed up into the next level of the system, it has felt to some extent like coming of age, growing up. At every stage, that feeling has passed and I’ve realised I’ve been deluding myself.

Well, here we are. It’s the real end this time. Strange as it may seem, by legal definition, we’re grown ups now. On May 6th, those of us who don’t live in Greater London (which, for reasons best known to Ken Livingstone, is on a different electoral cycle to the rest of civilization) even get the opportunity to vote. In half a decade, the UVIth will have miraculously turned into lawyers, and doctors, and businessmen, and ex-arts students who have no idea what they’re doing with their lives. Everyone’s going to be wandering around delivering babies, or organising divorces, or desperately trying to break into TV or film. Somebody may even succeed, if someone at the Beeb makes an administrative error. There’s at least one of us who I’d put money on becoming a Conservative MP³ - you can’t win them all, I suppose. 

This is the end.

This school has been a part of my life for most of it. Come September, all that’s going to be over, and we’ll all be plunged head first into the real world, full of total strangers and unknown quantities. After July 7th, things will never be the same again.

There are people here who I’ve got used to seeing almost every day of my life, who I may lose contact with forever. There are more than ten people, some of whom I consider to be very close friends, who I’ve known since I was seven, who I’ve grown up with.⁴ There are three members of staff I’m planning to thank when I finally get around to winning the Booker Prize.⁵

I’m used to it here – terrifying as it is, I’ve known nothing else since well before puberty. I can now predict with some accuracy how everyone will be acting first thing on a Monday morning. I know where everyone will be standing at the next party at the Old Brentwoods⁶, and what they’ll be drinking, and who they’ll be talking to. I’m used to the fact that on Saturday morning, the major topic of conversation will be Saturday night. (Come to that, the major topic of conversation on Monday morning’s likely to be Saturday night as well, if it was any good). I’m used to being able to go out at the weekend, and having a fair chance of meeting someone I know. And I’m used to knowing how the year divides up into its various little crowds, and who’s friends with who, and who else is not friends with who.

And as begrudgingly as I admit it, I think I’m going to miss all that.

Jon⁷ Elledge, of the Slightly Peeved Your Men

Please rest assured that the other piece of writing I recall from that period, a terrible poem about NATO’s air strikes on Kosovo which gloried in the title “Essex New Town, April ‘99” will not also be bothering your inbox.

Just one more thing

No nimby watch this week because I’m on holiday. Here are some other things to click, though:

1. “We might as well not have bothered. It’s been a great time for columnists and podcasters and anyone else promising you a path through the chaos. It’s been a bad time for everyone else. All the while, the country was breaking.” This week’s New Statesman column is in praise of political tedium.

2. I was also on Tuesday’s Oh God, What Now? talking with Ros Taylor, Seth Thévoz and Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Rámirez, about the US election and Keir Starmer’s reset in relations with Europe.

3. John Boughton, who writes the excellent Municipal Dreams blog and even more excellent accompanying book, has written a guide to some of the highlights you can find on London’s newly minted Green Link Walk, from Walthamstow to Hackney.

4. A car dealership in New York state is promoting itself through a series of videos that are basically a take on The Office – called, inevitably, The Dealership – and has wracked up millions of views on TikTok. Sure. Why not. Twitter thread explaining it all here.

5. Forum poster completes 11 year ban, immediately relaunches argument he got banned for back in 2013.

6. Professor Maria Sobolewska has an interesting theory about Labour’s underperformance in the recent election (which I’m not promoting purely because it fits my priors, though that clearly helps): perhaps it was reverse tactical voting.

7. And finally, the late Barry Cryer tells a joke about a parrot.

1.  Year 13: it was that kind of school. Originally I wrote “Upper VIth” and got told off by my editor for not being self-deprecating enough.

2.  I don’t recall at this distance the identity of the boy. The girl, though, was named Tessa, and I had quite a substantial crush on her – which, being the age that I was, I had absolutely no clue how to deal with.

3.  He didn’t. Though I googled him, just to check, and was delighted to learn he’s now a politics professor.

4.  Oddly reassuring to read this line in my 40s and consider the unlikely fact that I still retain a dozen friends from my school days, several of them very close ones. These include the Reuters correspondent Peter Apps, with whom I share both an agent and a publisher, and whose biography of NATO appeared earlier this year. 

5.  Ouch. One of the staff, though, was almost certainly Mike Willis, who taught me history and politics as well as being my sixth form tutor. I googled him recently and was saddened to learn he’d died in 2021; but his influence on my later career cannot be overstated.

6.  The Old Brentwoods Club, a bar/sports clubhouse kind of place which, despite being both rubbish and miles from anywhere, a stream of people insisted on renting out for 18th birthdays. I didn’t, I just went to the pub, but later that evening went on to Jason Fleming’s party at the aforementioned club where I dimly recall being drunk enough to make something of a scene.

7.  Yes, just the single “n” at that stage. I sprouted the second approximately six months later when I found myself on a nerd mailing list containing at least three other Jons. I pretended late that it was to make my byline more distinctive when writing for the student paper, but this was a lie.