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  Yet, before my very eyes on this warm Leicestershire night, the very same phenomenon I had dismissed as myth and make believe was happening before my very eyes. As I had strode to the stage a woman had grabbed my arm and stroked it along its length whilst looking longingly into my eyes. Perhaps she was the catalyst for what was to follow. Perhaps what she had decided she wanted they all wanted. Who knows ?

  Half way through the act I perform explosive one handed press ups whereupon I swap arms mid-air. I’m not a dancer. Dainty moves are not my forte, power moves are. It is designed as a dramatic gesture, but it never got this sort of response before. After a few explosive press ups I pause for effect and look up slowly. The entire front row of women were swaying gently, unsteadily. Three of them at least looked close to fainting.

  When I went walkabouts into the crowd (totally naked), I was pawed at like a god. Usually, some jealous, bitter, ugly or superior type has a few crude expletives to expunge in my general direction. This is the price that is paid for not attending to every single woman in the room combined with a form of self loathing on their part that requires a frustrational outlet for their ire. The stripper is often that outlet. On this occasion however, mass hysteria had taken over and they all worshipped the very ground on which I walked. I could apparently do no wrong.

  I finished the act, picked up the box into which I had erotically disrobed my garments and made my way for the exit door (at the back of the hall and through the expectant throng). A slim, twenty-something brunette barged some of her fellow hysterics out of the way and made a mad charge in my direction. She jumped on my back and wrapped her hands around my neck. She gushed sweet nothings into my ear:

  ‘Shag me – I’ll wait for you out the back, we can do it against the wall’

  ‘Later’ I replied desperate to escape the madness and discover the pheromone they had all seemingly been poisoned with. If I could bottle its effect I’d be a millionaire…

  The next day I was late arriving at Blackpool. I had telephoned ahead to notify the club of my traffic problems. As I walked through the door the DJ recognized me and announced over the tannoy “ladies and gentleman the stripper has entered the building”. A cheer erupted amongst the gathered throng and a sea of bodies parted like the biblical red sea. A couple of slaps on the back later mixed with a cry of “get in their son” and I had reached the sanctity of my dressing room. A wry smile crossed my face and I couldn’t help but think how my new life beat the hell out of wearing a suit and working for a living.

  ===============

  My parents settled on a place called Llantwit Major, a picturesque little village on the South Wales coast. It was about 20 miles from Cardiff with very little in between. Llantwit was very different to Little Lever. Although, they were similar in overall size, Little Lever was part of a huge conurbanation that stretched for miles, and a total population that exceeded two million people. By way of contrast, Llantwit Major had about 10,000 people and was surrounded by fields and the sea. I can visit there today and it always seems quite nice; a place of almost idyllic tranquillity. In 1984 it became my hell on earth and remained so until 1992.

  On December 2nd 1984, I left Little Lever in the back of a car. It might as well have been a prison van transporting me to jail to begin my sentence. I remember clearly my last day at school. I felt strangely emotional as a line of my friends were waving goodbye at me as I walked away across the school field. I also remember not feeling very well a couple of days prior and the teacher had said something about maybe it was because I didn’t want to move. It could have been upsetting me a little, he hypothesized.

  Two months before leaving Little Lever, my mum had finally succumbed to the pet pressure. For years I had wanted a dog and never been allowed one. So had my dad. With the imminent trauma of the oncoming move, was the timing a coincidence ? Without Jasper, my Rottweiler, the Llantwit years may have been too much.

  My parents sold their house in Little Lever and moved into a bigger house in Llantwit Major. Real estate wasn’t worth much in Little Lever then and I don’t suppose it’s worth much now either. Property prices in Llantwit are hardly the most expensive when compared to many locales, yet when compared to Little Lever they are decidedly upmarket. My parents took on a far bigger mortgage and again times became difficult for them financially.

  The area was noticeably more affluent and my mother adopted a distinct ‘keep it up with the Jones’ ’ attitude. Suddenly, I was allowed to bring friends into the house without asking because all the other mothers in the street allowed their offspring this freedom. I guess Llantwit just didn’t have the same number of uptight, pregnant, teenage single mothers that Little Lever had. The tension in the parents wasn’t quite as evident.

  Initially, things didn’t seem too horrific. The new children at my school were polite and cordial. They after all, had been taught much better manners that their Little Lever counterparts. However, their initial niceties could not hide their falsehoods. I was horrified to note that nobody really seemed to like football. My new classmates seemed to label football as a ‘girly game’ whereas rugby union was the ‘manly game’. To this day I despise the union code. Rugby league I have a lot of time for. My opinion on rugby union however has never changed. Rugby league is a working class game played by professional athletes, where the ball stays in plays for over 60 minutes of the average game. To me, rugby union is an upper class game played by beer swilling rodheads, where the ball stays in play for approximately only a quarter of the game (20 minutes). Although, this may be considered an extreme view and certainly won’t be a popular one in England, the facts support themselves. Just look at what has happened whenever rugby league teams have met rugby union teams. The first time a league team was allowed in a flagship union contest, the Middlesex sevens, the league team won it when playing under union rules ! The league teams were not allowed entry again for several years after this embarrassment. Having stolen all the best players from league the union authorities thought that the time was ripe to prove union’s superiority. The league team won it again!

  Aside from the debate over whether rugby union is a sport for non-athletes, my point was that I wasn’t even remotely interested in rugby union. I wanted to play football, my dream was to be a footballer.

  I joined the local town team, but things didn’t go well for a number of reasons. Firstly, the team already had a striker and the ‘coach’ was unwilling to try me in that position. Furthermore, he hadn’t heard of wingers. Due to my propensity to put myself in positions and situations that most people are unwilling to consider, they instead preferred me in the role of goalkeeper, particularly given that it was a weak area for the team. The coach was willing to try me in every position except up front (where pace hurts the most). Perhaps most importantly, I wasn’t exactly settling in with my new team-mates. As an Englishman in a Welsh team the tension was sometimes evident and the anti-English jibes used to hang over me like a terrible odour.

  It wasn’t long before I decided I was wasting my time (even at the age of 11 I was very decisive) and told the coach I wouldn’t be coming to his sessions anymore. His reaction was to visit my house and try and use my mother as a battering ram in an attempt to persuade me to return to training, even promising that he would play me up front in future. A mixture of stubborn pride and ominous foreboding made me stick to my guns and I told him I wouldn’t be coming back to play for them. After attempting to change my mind for about an hour he left the house, defeated. The verbal abuse soon began from my mother about how I had been so rude to him and how it was wrong to talk back like I had.

  This was perhaps the turning point when things really went downhill for me. My former team-mates used to come up to me in the school yard and tell me how they were better off without me and that ‘they didn’t need me anyway’. The anti-English jibes began in earnest and it was not simply confined to my fellow pupils. I distinctly remember once being lectured by a teacher on how the Welsh weren’t like ‘you
English’.

  My reaction to all this English baiting was to react in the worst way possible and return fire in equal measure. I became anti-Welsh and would mock my Welsh compadres on the subject of their unfortunate place of birth. I fully realize now that this was the wrong thing to do. I have nothing against Wales or its people. Indeed, since visiting as a stripper, Wales has left me with some very fond memories.

  Yet, I never saw it that way when I was young. If my parents had moved to Cardiff, things would probably have been very different. Cardiff is a big, cosmopolitan city with a lot more tolerance to groups and situations. Instead, they moved to Llantwit Major, a small country retreat with a very parochial feel to it. Issues were made of small things and I paid the price.

  I began to retreat into myself, but I wasn’t going to go down without making a fight of it first. I sought out another football team who were based about six miles away. I attended one training session. In order to attend that one training session, I was picked up by one of the coaches on the team. He very graciously drove to Llantwit to pick me up and drove me back again at the end of it. However, without transport to their training ground I was unable to attend their training sessions. I was unable to drive at 12 years old and I was essentially defeated by logistics.

  I complained bitterly, repeatedly and loudly about how I didn’t like my new world. My parents just repeated the same old tired line about how I hadn’t given it enough time and how everything would be alright in the end. I remember complaining that the school didn’t even have a football team until you reached the final year (and then albeit sporadically). I will never forget the comment that came from my sister. With venom that would have made many a drag queen proud she stated “it won’t matter by then because you will be no good anyway”. If words could kill, then they were them.

  I retreated completely into myself. My footballing ambitions had been wiped out, by forces seemingly out of my control. I had no close friends. They were all Welsh and seemed to hate English people. I went from being a very confident kid to completely lacking in self-belief. Jasper, the pet Rottweiler became my rock. Every day we would go off together on our solitary walks where I would tell him all about my despair and dismay and how I longed to return to Little Lever. The long summer holidays would pass by without any visitations from other people. Jasper and I would walk and muse about the problems of life and how to fix them.

  My school work seemed to suffer also. Call me paranoid, but I am convinced that teachers sensed my alienation from the rest of the class and played/preyed upon the fact. If there was something that nobody in the class understood, I was always the one to ask the question. Invariably, I would be shouted at for not having listened the first time. In the first year of comprehensive school, I was demoted from the top maths class because I got all the answers right in the exam. No, you didn’t read that wrong. I was extremely gifted at mental arithmetic. I could compute the answers faster than someone with a calculator and didn’t need to show the workings. Because I hadn’t shown the workings the teacher marked my answers wrong even though they were right. When I pointed out the paradox, she accused me of cheating ! To quote her “I can’t work those sums out in my head therefore you can’t work them out in your head”. I responded by pointing out that I had in fact worked them out in my head and I must therefore be better at sums than you (the teacher) are. I was immediately sent from the room and told to stare at the wall for an hour. I wasn’t very big at the age of 12. I only weighed about five stone and so I did as I was told.

  I ceased to make the effort at school and was happy to drop down the classes in the various subjects where they graded on ability. My school reports were laden with comments about how my ability far outweighed my performance. However, my current association with societal misfits was already beginning to manifest itself. I found that those in the lower classes were less judgemental and egotistical. They often possessed learning difficulties of their own and as a result were also to some degree ‘outcasts’. I remember another time in a games class whereby I jogged around the 1500m giving encouragement to another ‘outcast’ who was struggling. The teacher gave me detention.

  I also remember another time when I couldn’t do games because I had broken my leg (playing chess ironically). The games teacher didn’t seem to buy my excuse despite the fact that I had a huge plaster on my leg and I was walking around on crutches. Apparently, I needed a sick note and I didn’t have one. Another shouting session ensued.

  I hated secondary school and I guess my experience is not too much out of the ordinary. I am sure many people share my sentiments. After all, are schools not simply training grounds for the workplace ? You get up in the morning, attend school, get told what to do all day, get given work to take home with you and you are shouted at even when you are right. You learn the essential lesson that you are but one little irrelevant cog in a much bigger wheel. I would also argue that it is a pre-cursor to the slave nation principle. That is, it teaches you to work very hard for little or no reward. This in turn prepares you for the world of work, where every employer seeks employees that will work very hard for as little remuneration as possible.

  I didn’t like this form of indoctrination and I have never accepted it to this day. I always have and always will be my own person. I have never conformed just because somebody else did or because somebody else wanted me too. At school they labelled me Tracksuit Man, because I only ever wore tracksuits outside of school. For some reason this seemed to offend my school colleagues who reasoned that I should instead wear more fashionable garments. I on the other hand, still live true to the motto ‘form follows function’. That is, if an accessory doesn’t have a functional reason to exist then it shouldn’t exist. Therefore, if we take the example of the tracksuits, I took and still take the view that tracksuits are comfortable and practical. Therefore, I like to wear tracksuits. Everyone else seems to take the view that they are not pretty to the eye and should therefore not be worn. I however, care little for such unpractical views and don’t care one iota what other people think of my apparent nonchalance on the subject. If you don’t like tracksuits don’t wear them. However, don’t tell me not to wear them because you will get short shrift.

  This stubborn refusal of mine to accept regularity and bend to societal norms, did not aid my general sense of well-being during this period. The whole world seemed to be against me. The only one who listened sympathetically was Jasper. I used to cry myself to sleep at night. The last time I remember crying in front of my parents, I was 11 years old. After that, I confined it to my pillow at night. I remember once coming home at lunch time (the house was near the school). I had been rowing with the maths teacher again and I let myself in with the key as usual. I was feeling frustrated and helpless after losing yet another unfair fight. I couldn’t possibly win the argument even though I was clearly correct. The tears had been welling up in my eyes on the walk home and the minute I stepped through the door Jasper came to greet me, wagging his stump as usual. I sank to the floor in despair threw my arms around him and the tears came in floods. Jasper seemed perplexed, concerned almost by my reaction to his greeting. At least he seemed to care.

  During the Easter holidays I would sometimes go and visit my grand-parents in Salford. My wise, old grand-father (on my dad’s side) was the one family member that I could seemingly relate to. When I told him how much I hated living in Llantwit, he seemed to sense my pain. He also used to drive me to Little Lever and leave me there for the day, picking me up in the evening. I could at least attempt to go and visit some of my old friends.

  It wasn’t as if my parents weren’t frequent visitors to the North. They used to regularly go and visit their parents on the weekends (every few months or so). I used to ask my mum to take me to Little Lever every visit, bit there was often an excuse. There was never enough time and she even said outright once, with apparent disgust ‘what do you want to go there for’. I had been clearly talking to deaf ears for some time.

>   Football had gone from my life and I had become freakishly insular in my outlook. I still had sporting ambitions and my attention began to turn to more individual sports. Boxing had always been a favourite of mine, even when football was king. I remember hitting someone in the playground and after that incident people used to ask me ‘Nick, will you come and Sugar Ray Leonard so and so’ (I hit him with a bolo punch). Marvin Hagler was my god. I remember watching Alan Minter butcher Vito Antuofermo when I was five years old. I took an instant dislike to Alan Minter. When Marvin Hagler destroyed Minter for the world Middleweight crown in 1980, he instantly became my favourite.

  As my situation became more and more desperate, my thoughts shifted from wanting to be a professional footballer to wanting to be a professional boxer. However, my mother would again interfere with my ambitions….

  When I am into something I don’t do it by halves. I am in it to win it. I began to do my usual thing with boxing. It became an obsession. I persuaded my parents to take me out a subscription to boxing news. I read it cover to cover each week. My boxing knowledge became encyclopaedic, almost unhealthy. I first said I wanted to join a boxing club when I was 11, but my mother told me I wasn’t allowed. I pushed a lot harder when aged 14 and 15. This time she threatened to throw me out of the house if I ever went to a boxing gym! It is quite possible that logistics would have again intervened to thwart my plan, but my plan was ko’d even before I could enter the ring. The best I could manage was a bit of shadow-boxing, in my bedroom mirror. I watched the tapes and tried to imitate those I admired. However, I did this with a very hollow feeling. Slowly all my confidence ebbed away.