Once upon a time I got sold a dream: I would grow up - big and strong - marry a blonde (my mother was convinced of this), and live happily ever after in a big house, with children of my own, whilst I held down a job as an astronaut. Or a train driver. Or a fireman. And this wasn't a maybe - something to aspire to – this was my god given right. This is what was going to happen if I did nothing else about it. It was mine for the taking, all I had to do was wait.

Not that I was very good at waiting. I'm still not very good at waiting! I wanted this idyllic life now, at the tender age of six, or however old I was. I certainly didn’t want to wait until next week or some other some distant point in the future.

I would tell my parents this and they would smile, nod sagely and tell me not to be in so much of a rush. As I got older this advice was refined, and tailored until what they would actually say, to use their words, was this: “schooldays are the best days of your life.”
I beg your pardon? Did you say “schooldays”? You mean the days I spend at school? The days I spend trudging to and from school in all sorts of weather? The days I spend sitting in boring classes? The days I spend dodging projectiles, hiding from the big kids, being chased, getting into fights? The days I spend looking at Melanie Jones or Lisa Jackson from across the room – wishing either one was my girlfriend – sending them notes – watching them smooching with the same kids who’d taken my sandwiches earlier that day and thrown them over someone's fence – those days? Those are the best I'm ever going to have?

I didn't believe them. They had to be mistaken. Though I loved my parents dearly I naturally assumed that when they glazed over and talked fondly of “schooldays” they were recalling their own distant childhood when days at school involved sitting around a camp fire, outside a mud hut, listening to stories of dragons. Their schooldays certainly didn't involve a mixture of daily humiliation, bullying and boredom. They couldn't do. Because if they did that meant that for schooldays to be the “best” days they would logically have to be following by “something worse.”

Then I got older, and things got worse.

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