Hail and farewell to old photos – the past making way for the present. Just as well, as most of them are pretty badly taken.

Backstage on tour with Kenickie, 1996 / 7. Some ghastly prefab Uni room acting as a backstage area. Lauren L and Marie grinning madly at the camera, Emma carrying drinks. A lot of alcohol is about. The Orlando tour bus:- thank god we got one that was effectively a long, moving dressing room, where you can walk around. You go to sleep in a bunk and wake up in another town. I think we were all surprisingly well deodorised for a bus of men, too. Here’s Momus with flowing blond hair, on the same reel of film. Orlando fans in feather boas. Including a schoolgirl Kate Dornan, of course. Again, I only keep what I consider to be the bare essentials, just enough to tell the tales. Besides, sometimes it’s more fun to make things up. Particularly when witnesses tell me I’ve got it all wrong.

From another box: a list of all the gigs I attended, May 1990 to July 1992. The band Heavenly, seen in concert 19 times. I hitch-hiked around the country to see them on tour. Notes: ‘threw flowers. Stayed at Jason’s. Stayed at Marty’s. Stayed at Amelia’s. Gave cuddly toy devil to Amelia’. Said devil then appears in a Heavenly photo shoot in the NME. Other bands, too. The Field Mice – 7 times. Brighter – 5 times. This would have been when I was at Bristol Old Vic, trying to learn a trade. What I did learn, of course, was that going to gigs and following a favourite band when you’re 19 means everything to you. Something about that age really connects with the whole fandom experience.

Here’s a flyer for a gig at Tufnell Park Dome, where an early version of Orlando is the SIXTH support to the TV Personalities. Other bands: Blueboy, The Carousel, Comet Gain, Timbertoes (TMC’s band). This would be about 1993. Fourteen years later, and I’m… supporting the TVPs in Sweden. Though this time Fosca is second on the bill. That’s progress.

Thing is, I could write a 500 word entry from the thoughts generated from that flyer alone. But there’s piles and piles and boxes and boxes of such things. I’m too young to spend my entire waking life curating my past. I must grit my teeth and be brutal, and move on. Otherwise, this will be just become a Dickon Looks Back life.

Which would be fine if I were in prison.

But… not just yet!

***

Yes, the best thing to do is throw the stuff out now. Quick notes, but say goodbye.

Best not to think of what others might say. Because you just can’t win. Some people out there might be annoyed you’ve ditched a photo, or jettisoned their letters. But others might be equally annoyed that you’ve held onto them, decades later. I recently showed a friend the first letter they wrote to me. They were appalled I’d kept it. So, one man’s doting archivist is another’s creepy stalker.

‘I kept that love letter you sent me in 1894.’

‘Oh you haven’t! I was on heavy medication at the time and wrote a lot of nonsense…’

I think I’ve said that before, haven’t I? Proof positive I need to press on with new adventures.

***

Just read – quickly – through another pile of letters. A lot are about a fanzine I wrote called ‘Studbase Alpha’, saying terribly nice things about my apparent writing talent. And now, of course, I view such work as little more than jejune, self-deluding tosh. But then, I often think that about old diary entries I’ve written. From, ooh, days ago.

What’s useful to me now is that many of these letters to me represent remote affection, however fleeting. So I note a few quotes to keep me warm in my lonelier moments.

Maybe this was the last real age of letters, the early 90s. I’ve started to write handwritten cards and notes to people recently, sitting in cafes, re-learning the art. I miss the days of real pen on real paper. The postal delay of sending and receiving. The romance of the recognised handwriting on the envelope.

***

More school reports. ‘Fantastic.’ ‘Outstanding.’ ‘An outstanding start to Dickon’s Upper School career.’ ‘Really excellent! He has a tremendous appetite for work.’ ‘A creditable success story.’

Career? No money was made. What good is a good school report if it doesn’t lead to an outstanding real career? I worked too hard, too early, and burnt myself into a nervous breakdown halfway through the sixth form. From Oxbridge potential to the dole at 17. The therapists I’ve seen always mark this breakdown as The Big Traumatic Event, from which all my failure to get on in adult life stems.

The darkly funny thing is, the day I dropped out of school and considered, well, suicide, I went into Ipswich to see the latest big movie, hoping that might cheer me up.

It was Dead Poets Society.

***

In fact, the lesson learned from today’s clutter-shifting is this:

A good school report is actually a bad school report. Because to read back on some glowing praise from teachers, you can only see your life as a downhill plunge, like a child prodigy. What you’re MEANT to get is a bad report, so you can react against it in later life. Similarly, the successful comedian is always meant to have been the class clown at school. ‘I was always telling jokes, to stop being beaten up.’

Read a recent interview with Paul McKenna, the motivational author and hypnotist.

He quotes one of his school reports which said: ‘If he carries on like this, he’ll never amount to anything.’ When, several years later, he published his first book, he sent a copy to his English teacher with ‘F— you’ written inside the front cover. ‘Very childish, I know, but also very satisfying.’

So a good report is actually a bad report. And vice versa. If not, you make up some other ‘conflict’ for the newspaper profiles. Their Struggle. So many celebrity biographies are essentially the same story. First they were not successful. And then they were. The End. From The Conflict to The Happy Ending. It’s the tried and tested template.

Whole sections of bookshops are now devoted to ‘Abuse Lit’, thanks to Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It. They all have the same typeface and the same cover: misty photo on a white background. ‘First I was not okay, now I am.’

It’s all Mr Larkin’s fault, of course. I think it was Alan Bennett who remarked if your parents DON’T f— you up, then you’re f—ed good and proper. My failure was to live the wrong way round: the successful pupil, told he would indeed amount to ‘anything much’.

But I can now fit the template. Because my ‘bad report’ phase is this state I’m in today. Not amounting to much. So (ideally!) the biography goes, ‘First Dickon won, then he failed, then he won again’. It’s a glib currency, but a currency nonetheless. Some people prefer the tried and tested path over any unknown scenic route. Not everyone, but it helps those who do. And then you take them somewhere new.

I refuse to go by Mr McKenna’s ‘f— that’, though. I prefer ‘get knotted’.

Off to the refuse depot this morning, with a minicab’s worth of possessions and bin liners stuffed with demons. I do have friends with cars, but don’t want to trouble them. They’re all getting on with their present lives and careers. It’s just me that’s literally hemmed in by the past, living pretty much as I did when those school reports were written. I even have the same TV and stereo. Until today. About time.

And all it took was the roof falling in on me, directly on the spot where my head has been ‘at’ for so long. My pillow.