ANOTHER TRUE STORY from the ADOLESCENCE of the COLUMNIST with no NAME
Unlike today's teenagers with their fabulous designer Nike sports bags and their tantalisingly stylish Gino Ginelli holdalls with multitudinous pockets, all myself, our Columnist With No Name and every other kid of our generation had to carry our books, PE kit and other belongings to and from school was a humble canvas rucksack. Readers of a certain age (ie: those born in the late 1950's) will no doubt remember the vogue among secondary schoolkids in the early seventies for adorning their bags with the name of their favourite singer, band, brand of condoms (only kidding... knowing most of my year at school, they wouldn't have had any need of them until their final term at University... at least!), or football team. As I recall, some of these bags could be real works of art. The more gifted or patient students would take, say, a band's logo from an album cover and spend hours lovingly redrafting it on the top flap of their sack in a lurid day-glo. Well, our Columnist With No Name was neither gifted or patient, but he did have the name of a football team painted on his rucksack. In his formative years, when he wasn't writing on walls, as well as Barrow he used to support Liverpool (he's grown out of it now, he assures us). So it was all the more bewildering that, displayed across his bag in his inimitable calligraphic style (translation: scrawl) was the word 'Everton' in a faded blue on white. And more than one of his schoolmates came away completely perplexed when he tried to discover the explanation behind this unfathomable mystery. A typical conversation would go something like this... Unsuspecting Schoolkid: Hi there, Give 'Em Beans! future Columnist With No Name. I didn't know you supported Everton. Columnist With No Name: I don't; I support Liverpool. Unsuspecting Schoolkid: So why did you paint 'Everton' on your bag then? Columnist With No Name: Because I didn't have any red paint! Exit unsuspecting schoolkid, literally reeling with bamboozlement. In the David Cronenberg adaptation of this scene (we've just sold the movie rights to him), the kid is so flustered his head explodes, but the story seems to me to have more in common with some of those old episodes of Star Trek... you know, the ones where Kirk causes the computer to explode by telling it something illogical or contradictory. So if you can't follow the line of argument in our Columnist's section of this site, it's probably safer not to think about it too much! Issue 020 - August 1994