My childhood years

So you want to know all about me, do you? Well, let's begin at the beginning. I was born... well, I'm sure you're far too polite to ask when. Where? In a village near Guildford, south of London. I was a blue-eyed, platinum-haired angel, as you can see from the photo of me at the two-word stage (where I am resolutely refusing to say 'Baby brush' in answer to 'Whose brush is that?' on the grounds that I don't want to be given another dose of cod liver oil by some well-meaning grown-up who thinks it will cure Possessive Morpheme Deficiency). When I eventually did learn to talk properly, it was at 300 words a minute -- people mistakenly thought I was still at the babbling stage. (Some still do.) My mother never used to tire of telling the story about how a neighbour had remarked (on seeing my prominent forehead) 'He'll be a professor one day, mark my words.' Well, there's destiny for you...

I had an undistinguished childhood remarkable (from stories my mother used to tell me) only for frequent bouts of screaming and temper tantrums (Apparently I used to bend spoons more often than Uri Geller), and for the fact that whenever my mother left me in a pram outside the local shops (hoping, no doubt, that someone would come and take me away) I would rock it so much that it would tip over (thereby attracting the attention I craved). In the intervening years, I have of course mellowed considerably and undergone a complete personality transplant -- though my wife doesn't seem to have noticed and still calls me "pram rocker". OK, so maybe I'm a bit restless...fidgety...excitable, even... But hey, come on -- who on earth can stand doing the same thing for more than ten minutes at a time?

By the age of four, I'd learned to drive -- as you can see from the photo of me rescuing the American economy single-handedly by buying a Jeep and driving around in fur gloves (Fake fur, I promise). Why was I wearing gloves? Because I had delicate digits and because Jeeps didn't have electrically heated leather-padded steering wheels fully adjustable for rake and reach in those days. Acceleration was a bit sluggish -- though Tibby (my Persian cat) didn't think so when I kept trying to run her over with it. That's Tibby below -- I did ask her to open her eyes wide and smile for the camera, but as you can see she was feeling a bit camera-shy at the time. She was queuing up for her Kit-E-Kat, so had her mind on other things.

Just when I was getting used to living in the leafy suburbs of Guildford, my parents whisked me off up North, first to the Lincolnshire coast (Cleethorpes) and then to the industrial heartland of Leeds, where I attended Roundhay School (which in those days was a grammar school). This was a period of considerable lexical enrichment for me, when I acquired an extensive repertoire of expressions which have proved invaluable ever since (including my catchphrase Whaddawanka). At Roundhay I had a distinguished sporting career, being in the left-overs for cricket, football and rugby. But I did hone my sprinting skills: it was the only way of avoiding the bullies who decided that it was open season on toffee-nosed southerners.

Next, my undergraduate years.