I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

I wish I'd have been one of those kids that excelled at school, or even enjoyed it. As it turned out I was destined to mediocrity. 

At primary school I was always the smart kid, the one who would eventually do well, though how you recognise that in a seven year old I couldn't say. My grandpa used to say "When you get a place at Oxford I shall pop up from my grave and cheer!"  As it turned out I never went to university and thankfully Grandpa did not rise from the grave.

In order to facilitate my success my parents began by turning into masochists. They did this by insisting on my brothers and I wearing a school uniform at junior school despite there not being one. Uniforms in their opinion were the key to academic accomplishment so they forged ahead and invented their own uniform for us - black shoes, grey slacks & jumper and blue shirt. The other kids wore jeans or cords, tee shirts, wildly coloured sweat shirts with the A Team on them or a random year emblazoned across the chest. We wore polycotton knitted jumpers from Tesco with flannel trousers and because of that stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. Thus began the lifelong labelling of being posh and a snob - words that still linger now through no fault of my own.

I rebelled against the invented uniform in the only way I could at the time - with DayGlo socks. One pink and one blue, or maybe one orange and one sulphur yellow. I'd secretly put them on under my regulation grey socks when I got dressed in the morning then, once at school, whip the grey ones off revealing my true personalty through the medium of hosiery.

When I think about Greenacres County Primary School there are a handful of things that spring to mind. The odd embarrassing moment such as getting overexcited in school assembly and making a show of myself by shrieking "Let's sing Lord of the Dance Miss Wilson!"; taking a year out after a car crash when we lived with my grandparents and went to a school near Preston instead; the scandal when we got in trouble with Miss Wilson, the head mistress, after Michelle Henshaw accused me of fingering my friend Rebecca; and the thrilling moment when Rebecca and I told our mums about it and taking umbrage, they stormed into school to give Miss Wilson what for. 

My mum's irrational hatred of Miss Sutton, the snotty school secretary; a school trip to Castleton when chicken soup leaked into my bag and made it stink forevermore; and the time Lisa Jackson smashed all her teeth out on the ice in the playground - an event which led to the banning of slippy curries. A slippy curry was a patch of ice polished to a high sheen with the soles of trainers and, in my case, sensible black lace-up shoes, which children would hurtle towards and slide across the concrete on, for no other reason than it was fun. Health and safety didn't exist in the eighties.

 

Primary school whizzed by in a blur of Wham!, Christmas parties, scandal and milk bottle tops and was reasonable I suppose. Neither sensational nor unexciting, just ordinary. I didn't really pay much attention to it until the end bit when all talk turned to secondary school. 

My contemporaries were mostly headed for the local comprehensive, Breeze Hill, a school which had troubled times ahead but in the late 80s was merely just a bit rubbish. 

Some tried earnestly to get into Blue Coat, the church school with the good reputation in the centre of town. Often their parents would begin taking them to church on a regular basis a few months before decisions were due to be made in order to get a letter from God and ensure a prosperous future. 

One poor girl ended up at Grange School whose good reputation was a hangover from the sixties and by the late eighties was undeserved. No matter, Cheryl, her brother and their parents did the only sensible thing when faced with the fallout from such a calamitous decision, and moved to Australia after her first year there.

We'd moved house by the time it came to choosing schools and left behind Greenacres' neighbour, the deteriorating Clarksfield. Like most of Oldham it was made up of street after street of red brick terraced mill houses, built when that's what the town was known for. As my parents both drove and had cars, a rarity in those days in that part of town, they'd had the fortune to be able to move us to Strinesdale on the edge of Saddleworth. The house was essentially the same - two bedroom, red brick terrace, but the outlook was completely different as we were surrounded by fields rather than rooftops and people playing the trumpet a la Coronation Street.

Strinesdale fell into the catchment area of Counthill School but also, at a push, Saddleworth School - even then you'd have to assume the admissions board were in a very good mood, or high, if they were to let you study there when it was a half hour drive away compared to a fifteen minute walk to the other.

My parents however had other plans. Across town, about as far away from where we lived as was possible, was a two hundred year old grammar school called Hulme and they had this set firmly in their sights, after all I was clever and they couldn't possibly waste all my brainpower on a comprehensive. 

Hulme had an entrance exam for pupils, the equivalent of the old eleven plus, which tested verbal reasoning, maths and English, and ensured they only took on the kids most likely to succeed in this old fashioned, university focused, highly academic school. It was important, it seemed, that pupils knew at what speed the train on the southbound track would pass the train on the northbound track if it was going at fifty miles per hour with a headwind of two miles per hour.

In order to brush up on these skills I embarked on a series of excruciating private tuition sessions with Mr Abrahams. My folks clubbed together with a bunch of other high sighted parents to afford group classes and we'd get together on a Saturday afternoon to cram like our lives depended on it. 

I hated every second, after all why couldn't I just go to Saddleworth school with my next door neighbour Damian? I'd be happy there, it would be easier for everyone and I wouldn't have to waste my weekends sitting in someone's dining room with a slightly inappropriate private tutor with a wandering eye and an unseemly turn of phrase.

On the morning of the exam I trod in dog shit - an omen if ever there was one. Someone called out 'Muck for luck!' and after scraping the worst of it off my sole I trudged into the school, stinking. I passed the exam with flying colours, earning a scholarship and saving my grandparents (who'd kindly offered to pay the fees) a bunch of money. 

And so my fate was sealed and my resentment began. Hulme Grammar School for Boys beckoned with a curly finger and a crooked eyebrow.

The trouble with being a high flyer as a young kid is that when your pushy parents send you to a school full of clever children you're suddenly not so special any more. I'd been taken down a peg or two and I did not like it one bit. Practically overnight I'd gone from the golden child to a bit of a disappointment, and feeling like a letdown is not conducive to academic excellence.

I was still good at stuff it's just there was always someone much better than me. In a maths class my fellow students might be working out what X squared plus Y squared equaled, while I was left mulling over what 'my resentment' plus 'their disappointment' was and how I would describe it as a quadratic equation.

These were different times though and you weren't encouraged to talk about things, let alone how you felt about something. Emotions were best left to Americans. 

I'd sometimes find myself walking down a corridor between classes and, upon spying a teacher walking towards me, breaking into a maniacal, wide eyed grin, only to revert to a sullen frown and protruding bottom lip the second they walked past me. I must have looked mental.

I didn't have a gang or group at school that I hung out with more than another and I floated between friends. Some of them clever and destined to a gleaming career, others like me, bobbing along with the flotsam and jetsam of academia, desperately trying to make it through school without fucking up completely and incurring the wrath of out of pocket parents keen for a return on their investment. 

I didn't hang out with the cool kids but that was never a source of regret - they weren't half as cool as they thought they were anyway. I'd usually find myself with the interesting boys. The weirdos, the ones with something to say, and the funny ones. Granted I might have to dodge the odd Dungeons and Dragons game and put up with some out-there music but on the whole I chose good friends. 

Going to an all boys school had it's own specific set of obstacles to manoeuvre. Hulme Grammar had a girls school too but I rarely saw any of the girls in question. The two schools occupied the same building and were separated by an enormous wooden door, across which hung a heavy piece of fabric. The purpose of this was to stop horny teenage eyes from spying their quarry in the other school, through the door's glass panes. I have no doubt whatsoever that the iron curtain, as it was known, was solely responsible for significantly reducing teenage pregnancy rates in the school. That sort of thing didn't happen at this sort of school you see.

As far as I was concerned, from the ages of twelve to seventeen, girls only existed behind glass panels. Other than Rebecca, who, despite Michelle Henshaw's protestations, I did not finger, and my family, girls just didn't feature in my life for at least five years. I'd see them sometimes, pressing their noses up against classroom windows or squashed inside a bus near the school gates, while I waited to be collected by my mum after school, but there was never any reason for our paths to cross and they didn't.

The biggest problem about attending a boys school in the late 80s and early 90s was the potential to labelled gay. You could throw bleach in the eyes of a beloved pet, dismember a popular sibling or burn a busy orphanage to the ground and still expect to be forgiven at some point in the future but to be gay, or even suspected of it, meant absolute and swift excommunication, followed by relentless bullying and quite possibly the risk of being hanged, drawn and quartered on the steps of the town hall.    

This made it tricky when, like me, you weren't really sure who you fancied, and more so when you were curious to see what some of you teenaged classmates looked like with no clothes on.

The easiest way of diverting suspicion was to accuse other poor lads of being deviants, thus pointing the finger away from yourself, which shamefully I did on occasion. Mostly though I just kept my head down and every now and again make lewd comments about female celebrities that I'd definitely 'do'.  Michelle Pfeiffer and Julia Roberts were my best friends. 

This worked well for a long time and it wasn't until I was fifteen that my school world almost came tumbling down. I spent a weekend at my best friend's house while his dad was away, we got drunk, and one thing led to another. The first time I'd ever done anything sexual with anyone and it was with a lad - I did not expect that. 

I won't go into detail about what happened. Suffice it to say we didn't go all the way and with neither of us having any experience, we weren't very good. I learned at an early age that oral sex and fixed orthodontic braces were not a marriage made in heaven.

The next day my best friend stopped speaking to me, obviously regretting what had happened. He clearly didn't know how to handle it (bad choice of words) and, as emotions were for Americans, he opted for silence instead. I left his house, with mixed feelings. I was thrilled that it had happened, but I was confused too, and upset that he'd blanked me all morning. I didn't know it then but our friendship, which had been a close one, was over. An experience that went on to influence decisions for years to come.

Back at school, after the weekend, trouble began to brew when a mutual friend of ours told me, "Bob* says you get a bit gay when you're drunk. What's that all about?" (* name obviously changed to protect the not so innocent.)

With such incendiary suggestions I knew I had to take decisive action so I tracked down Bob*, put on my best threatening voice, and told him in no uncertain terms that if I go down (again, there's probably a better choice of words) then I'm taking him with me. 

It did the trick. The rumour was stopped in its tracks, Julia Roberts helped reestablish my heterosexual credentials, and Bob* and I had no more contact till we left school. He is now happily married with children - or something, I can't really tell from Facebook.

I hated sports when I was at school. I've never been competitive and didn't see the point of chasing balls simply for the sake of it. Despite my earlier mentioned curiosity to see some of my classmates with no clothes on, the absolute worst part of Wednesday afternoon games was the changing room. 

I would go to any lengths so as not have to undress in front of other people. I wore my sports kit under my school uniform all day to make sure my precious body was kept hidden from prying eyes when it came to getting ready for football, then as soon as the class was finished I'd dash back to the changing rooms, stick my head under running water to make it look as if I'd showered, and be back in my flannel trousers and blazer before anyone else appeared.

I disliked games and the changing room experience so much that, when later in my school career I had the opportunity, I swapped games for what was termed Community Action. 

Community Action was similar in many ways to Community Service. It wasn't exactly voluntary, more of a trade off, and you'd often find yourself in a humiliating situation for the benefit of others.

It could vary from spending one afternoon a week in the school library filing books in the Dewey Decimal System, to going out to the actual community to offer a helping hand.

I volunteered at a local primary school to begin with rocking up one afternoon with no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I soon found myself sitting in a room full of toddlers helping them jam different coloured plastic shapes into the wrong holes and point at books with very thick pages. 

Children, even as a teenager, were not my bag. I didn't have the patience required for what I regarded as lesser intellects. I was frustrated by how dim witted the kids were and how they prattled on about nonsense all the time. Needless to say I didn't last very long in that part of the community and I don't think the children noticed my absence when I eventually jacked it in.

Faced with a return to the library, or worse, the hockey pitch, I took my final option and volunteered at an old folks' home down the road. It was a grand old Victorian building next to a park on Manchester Road, converted for elderly inmates and imbued with a sense of calm and barely subdued dread. 

Nobody wanted to be there, not me, not the staff, and certainly not the residents. I took it upon myself to inject some fun into my weekly visits in an effort to bring the place to life after what appeared to be decades of decay.

"Hey everybody! My name's Richard, let's play bingo!" I announced enthusiastically in the communal lounge on my second visit.

"Get out!" shouted Victorine, a wizened old crone at the back of the room. 

This wasn't a response to be taken personally. I'd learned on my first visit that Victorine sincerely believed the residence belonged to her and she had no idea what all these dribbling and mumbling strangers were doing in her house. Furthermore the entire contents of the building were hers, from furniture to flowers, the pictures on the wall to the carpets on the stairs. 

Victorine was clearly a skilled seamstress as she claimed too that she had crafted her dress with her own fair hands and knitted her elaborately patterned cardigan to boot.

I persevered and began what was without doubt the longest game of bingo in human history. Every now and again one of the staff would pop into the room and prop up a resident who was slowly but surely sliding out of their high backed, winged chair, or wipe up a bit of drool that was making its way down an unsuspecting chin. 

It was evident that none of the contestants gave a shit about bingo and I wrapped it up as quickly as possible resolving to consider something less taxing next time, like a beetle drive.

As I was packing things up after the game of misery-bingo, one of the staff came in to attend to a resident who needed the loo. 

"Give us a hand would you love?" she called over to me. 

Willingly I stuffed the last of the bingo stuff into the box of sorrow, ready to go into the sideboard of suffering, and went to offer my assistance.

"He needs a poo. Will you help me get him to the lav?" 

As we lifted him out of the seat the slack-jawed, elderly gentleman unwittingly let one go. The immediate area was filled with a brown cloud of filth and I gagged.

"Derek! You dirty bugger!" reprimanded Susan cracking a smile at me.

Soldiering on we got him out in the hall, to the nearest toilet. I was fully prepared to relinquish my disgusting charge and escape for the day when Susan said, "I'll just wait here while you sort him out."

"What?"

"You can tek 'im in there, you'll find everything you need."

"What?" I repeated, I was panicking now.

"It's dead easy, just make sure you hold him up under his arms while he's doing it so he dunt fall off the toilet."

"I can't do that!" I exclaimed, "I'm only a schoolchild!" I may as well have fluttered a fan and clutched my pearls.

"Your face!" Susan scoffed, "I'm kiddin' yer!"

With the revelation of her joke a wave of relief flushed my through body. It took every ounce of my being not to say 'You bitch!' but I held it together and escaped for the day.

I continued to visit the old folks' home for a number of weeks. Anything rather than reveal my teenaged body in the changing rooms of the sports hall. I never saw Susan again though; I sincerely hope she met an untimely end. 

With the promise of bingo and toilet visits I eventually talked my new best friend into coming along to visit Victorine et al as a way of evading sports classes. The novelty soon wore off though when we realised there was little communication between school and the care home and that by taking your school tie off you could get away with going in some of the local pubs to drink beer.

And so a chunk of my final year of school was spent in a pub near the entrance to Alexandra Park, a long way from the heady heights of invented school uniforms and not fingering my friend Rebecca.

The People of Roebuck Lane

I grew up in the countryside on a narrow and windy lane called Roebuck Lane on the edge of Saddleworth. At one end of the lane was the Roebuck Inn, a typical country pub, well known in the eighties for the quality of it's restaurant (sadly not so now) and at the other end was a little shop owned and run by Joan Greenwood. Between the two were ten houses.

Starting at the pub end there was a lady whose name slips my mind but who kept to herself and was kind enough to give us 50p one bonfire night towards food and fireworks; on the other side was an old farmhouse which had been converted into two residences - in one side was Vinny and Mad Mary (so named by my mother for her tendency to feed sliced white bread to the cows in the field behind our houses and the fact that they kept chickens in an old broken down ambulance) and in the other side was Jean, Frank, Christie and Damian.

Next along the lane was a terrace of five houses the first of which I lived in with my brothers Robert and Matthew and our parents Hilary and Howard. We lived at number five. During the time that I lived there I remember three sets of next door neighbours, the first Kevin and his wife Lorraine. Kevin was, I believe, the tour manager for the Grumbleweeds - a comedy and music act. Next to move in were Howard Jones the sign maker and Brenda who shouted a lot at each other and on whose wedding night introduced me to the word bonking through a sign on their front door which read 'Do not disturb - all night bonking in progress.' I think he made the sign himself but I can't be certain. As family tradition dictated they were both given nicknames, Brenda was the poisoned dwarf and Howard was affectionately known as the ferret - but never to their faces...

The Molloys lived there next. Steve was a professional rugby player who played for Featherstone Rovers and Paula was a nurse who according to my youngest brother had a huge arse. They also shouted at each other a lot.

Clara and John lived at number nine with their grown up kids. Clara and Jean from number three, were good friends and I used to go with them and Damian on shopping trips to such wild and adventurous (to a young child) places as the Mosley Mill Shop with it's fascinating aquarium shop full of the biggest and ugliest fish ever to have graced a tank and Ashton Market where Damian and I wandered between the stalls while Jean and Clara shopped and where twenty years previous Brady and Hindley had picked up that poor Kilbride boy and taken him to the moors. For me, through my childish eyes, Ashton Market was not about that, it was about Cornish pasties and my ever growing keyring collection.

Number eleven was an odd one. Brenda lived there with her husband who I only ever knew as China man. They would spend a long time abroad every year and then we would see Brenda and their daughter for a few weeks before they were off again. I might have seen China Man once a year if I was lucky but he was very elusive.

On the other end of our little block of five lived Jimmy and Elaine. Jimmy was known as Mr Angry after a rather unfortunate instance of trespass on my and Damian's part.

Next along the lane was George Groves's farm. He always had a dog tied up in the yard at the front of the house. This dog liked nothing more than barking incessantly and went particularly wild when someone walked past. It was the most terrifying dog I had ever encountered. I used to try sneaking past the farm to avoid the rabid outbursts of this devil creature and woe betide you if the dog wasn't tied up! Grovesy was accused of feeding our dog Dylan rat poison. The poison made Dylan's stomach bleed and cough up blood before he would try to cool down in a bog in one of the fields across the road from our house. We had to have him put down. Grovesy never denied having rat poison on the farm, what he did say was that Dylan must have gone in one of his barns to get it and he shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Whizbang, our cat, was also ill with what we suspected was poison but he recovered. Our next dog Skipper, another Dalmatian but this one with liver colouring rather than black, also died from rat poisoning. Needless to say that we didn't have a great relationship with George Groves and as a young child he was almost demonised in my eyes. It was years until we got another dog and when we did we took great lengths not to let him out of the house without a lead.

Further along the lane was a little stone cottage in the corner of a field. This is where Connie lived. I couldn't begin to start telling you about Connie, all I can remember is that because hers was the nearest house to Joan Greenwood's shop she became know as her near Joan's which over time and with the assistance of Oldhamers' accents morphed into something altogether more unpleasant. Connie tragically adopted the name Hernia Jones and was known as such for ever more.

Finally we follow the lane around the corner and down a dip and reach Joan's shop. A right old treasure chest of goodies and necessities. Sweets of course were there in abundance. Great big jars of chewing nuts and midget gems weighed out and served in little white paper bags. The penny sweets in the glass counter which would make up our traditional 10p mix (an occasional treat for going to Joan's for your parents,) the cans of pop - the ever elusive cherry pepsi which I asked for relentlessly for years and years and she never sold, shandy bass, giant cans of coke the size of a lager can and briefly when i was a teenager, the nasty but fascinating Tab Clear; chocolate bars - Fry's chocolate creme, Terry's Pyramint, Hellas Bars. I don't know why I wasn't the size of a house.

Joan didn't just sell sweets and drinks. Damian's mum used to send him to buy her cigarettes there - something my mum tried with me on a couple of occasions rather unsuccessfully as Joan was not at all happy about selling cigarettes to children. She did though. There was a big bacon slicer in the corner, you could buy potatoes, cleaning products, wine, cat food, fire lighters... The list goes on. Joan had a real community shop. When the lane was cut off by snow in the winter, which it was most years, she stayed open for those brave souls that could make it through the snow drifts (usually us kids) until Holroyd, another local farmer, would dig the lane clear of snow with his tractor. Even when the snow brought power cuts with it she'd be there with candles burning on the counter helping us to get through it and of course flogging us the boxes of household candles that we'd invariably run out of the previous winter.

Joan was in the paper once. The Oldham Evening Chronicle (the chron) ran a story about her shop being robbed. Joan was threatened with a gun which the thieves shot into the ceiling (something I looked for every time I went in there afterwards but never saw) and cleared her till out. I seem to remember that they didn't get very much cash - bad timing on their part. From that day on Joan always peeked through the little glass pane in the door between her house at the back and the shop at the front before she came in to serve anyone.

Roebuck Lane was a good place to grow up - despite the guns, the poison and the scary neighbours - it's a shame that I don't have a reason to go back there any more but I suspect if I did I'd be disappointed so I'm happy to leave it where it is - in my childhood.

Playing out

I grew up in the countryside on the edge of Oldham where it becomes Saddleworth. My house was surrounded by fields which were brilliant to play in. No street corners for me.

In the front field there were the remains of an old house - now merely a cellar open to the elements in the side of a hill. This was one of our many dens. My friend Damian and I cleared it out, put a roof on it made out of old plywood boards covered in grass and finally installed the piss pipe so we could urinate inside and it would drain outside. Very civilised as far as I was concerned. This den met an untimely end when one of the stinky goats decided that it wanted to eat the roof and promptly fell through it.

In the same field there was an old shed which we also made into a den. We found lots of old wire grates which we used to construct a run around for a local jack russell - I'm not sure how pleased he was with it but it entertained us. There was also, strangely, an overturned wooden boat which had briefly been used as a den by Damian before I was on the scene. It was on top of this boat one summer evening that I told my cousin Peter a horror story. The story naturally involved the boat itself and a thunder storm and was so clearly terrifying that Peter burst into tears and ran back to my folks house.

Continuing on the den theme there was also the cellar of my house. Originally accessed from a trap door under the stairs in my house however by the time we moved in a door had been put on the outside of the house and the stairs down into the cellar had been bricked up. Damian and I slowly but surely over a number of weeks removed a few bricks from the bottom of the stairs and managed to get into what was the old stone staircase. This is where we stashed porn magazines liberated from the local tip as well as other treasures. In the main body of the cellar there were old stone shelves built into recesses in the wall which had originally been a cold store for meat and other produce pre refrigerators. We however covered the front of these openings with wire mesh and connected this, via a dodgy old transformer, to the mains electricity. The reason for this was so that we could contain ghosts, behind the wire, once we caught them. Sadly the outcome was a couple of electrocutions and no ghosts.

In one of the fields at the back of our house was another derelict farm building only revealed by a hole in the ground which was a cellar entrance - do you see a theme here? When you ventured down the hole you found yourself in a brick room with rubble on the floor and a curved ceiling above. This place didn't last long as a den because it was a bit too spidery for us. We did have fun burning the spiders though.

The least successful dens were in the corrugated sheet metal garage at the back of my house. One was rubbish because it was actually on the roof of the garage - I wouldn't recommend it. No shelter from rain, a bit blowy and on a slope. Crap for a den really. The other was in the back of the garage. Damian and I set a fire in there one afternoon. My dad, upon seeing billowing smoke spewing forth from the front of the garage, ran in to rescue us without realising that we had escaped through the secret loose back panel once again to safety. I think he nearly died putting out the fire... He wasn't best pleased either way.

You're so vain

I've done some terrible things to myself over the years. Take for example the time that I plastered my hair with blue boot polish so that it matched my electric blue PVC trousers for the last Flesh night at the Hacienda. If anybody had have lit up near me I'd've been a gonna. What's worse is that this isn't the only time that I boot polished my hair. Other crimes to my bonse include dying it black - again this has happened a few times. Why I didn't learn the first time when my boss told me that I looked like Marc Almond I don't know. It has been bleached a couple of times too - once successfully, once not... 

It has been long and short, cut professionally, hacked with a pair of scissors and even plaited over night in tiny little braids so that it was wavy the next day (this was a very very long time ago...)

Besides my hair there have been other faux pas. I have been pierced - once in my nose at the corn exchange in Manchester, once in the nipple at the ink pot tattoo studio in Oldham (who incidentally allowed me to be tattooed when drunk with the world's worst tattoo) once in my upper ear at a back street hairdressers in Blackpool and when that reacted badly and blistered my ear I removed it - with scissors and a pair of pliers - waited for it to heal then did it all over again at a chemist in Lanzarote. I sound a bit rough don't I? I'm not I can assure you... The last time I was pierced was in my ear lobe. God knows what possessed me to do that at the age of 31 but there I was - Chelmsford town centre on a busy Saturday afternoon, sitting on a high stool in the window at Claire's Accessories whilst Chantelle, who was wearing deeley boppers or bunny ears - I forget - put holes in my ears. Come to think of it... it wasn't long after this that I last dyed my hair black - another mistake.

Fashion-wise I have already mentioned the blue PVC trousers (can you imagine? Jesus Christ what was I thinking?) but beyond there I can reveal such beauties as the leopard print jacket, the odd socks - one luminous yellow and one luminous pink - the beautiful black and white trousers which looked like television interference which I wore with plastic, slip on shoes and of course my staple of the 1990's night club - the tartan trousers. Three pairs.
As far as footwear goes there have been some gems. The Frankenstein boots which I bought in Ibiza, the replacements which I bought in Manchester after leaving the originals at a friend's house in Cardiff. There were the burgundy patent leather loafers, the blue spoon shoes, the red nubuck leather rockabilly shoes and the blue suede boots. I am truly a style icon.

Before I finish, I hasten to add that this is not the end... Besides the glow in the dark liquid which I used to paint patterns on my face with and the sweetie necklaces that I would wear whilst clubbing there have been ever more weird and wonderful accessories and I'm sure that there will be more in the years to come.

PS Oh oh oh oh! I just remembered whilst reading this back - the necklace with letters on it which read the legend SLUT. That was dead classy. Enough now...

China In Your Hands

When I was a youngster I would regularly go with my neighbour Damian, his mum and another neighbour Clara, to Ashton Market (see picture of market hall on fire Tues 25th May2004) My enduring memories of Ashton Market are peppery Cornish pasties, a grey tee shirt with netting sewn onto it as an over-layer which was possibly my first venture into fashion, a key ring with a little white, rubber Scottie dog on it and a stall which sold cassettes of famous songs re-recorded by not so famous, anonymous artists.

In comparison Tommyfield Market in Oldham felt somewhat less glamorous. Having said that I loved the sparkly floor of the inside market and also the chip shop which was in one of the permanent huts around the edge of the outside market which sold the best chip muffins in town.

I once spent a very long afternoon helping out my girlfriend Michelle on the pound stall. Three thousand toilet rolls for a pound, Two million AA batteries - a pound love. One hundred biros - that'll be a pound my dear. Eight hundred and fifty thousand blank videos - just one pound my lovely. Ta very much. I once bought a soap on a rope and a T' Pau record for my dad from Tommyfield Market.

I always loved Camden Market on a Sunday morning - especially when it was cold. I re-discovered Aretha Franklin's Until You Come Back To Me whilst milling about Camden Market sipping warm spiced cider - I also discovered the mad lady with pink wire in her hair at Cyber Dog on the same day. Still in London Spitalfields was always worth a visit - if only for the falafel - and down on the south bank the best place to get a free lunch, Borough Market.

It was outside Borough Market one night that I met Big Mo from Eastenders. I'd been on a tour of pubs with my cousin Rachael starting at Embankment and ending up - rather messily - in a pub very close to Bridgette Jones' flat. Well Big Mo was there and we said hello before she drove off in a mini. On the tube afterwards we started a debate (based on a news story about a Thai zoo) and got everyone on the carriage to vote, with a show of hands, as to whether or not they would eat giraffe burgers. I don't remember the final count. Sadly, this is all completely true...

http://www.oldham-chronicle.co.uk/