I've reached the fiddly editing stage with the novel (and there was much rejoicing by the money publisher), the cover art is being tweaked, and the office is closed today so I'm working from home (i.e. sitting at my desk in my jammies at 9.38am about to load a huge pile of day job writing on the PC).

So, just for once, I'm going to gak a meme, as those happening kids over on LJ would call it:

Upper Sixth Form Meme
I was 2nd year A-level college, actually - I deliberately choose A-levels that would send me there rather than to my local school's sixth form as I hated my local school so much.

1. What year was it?
   1988/89


2. What were your three favourite bands?
   The Smiths, The Stone Roses and...well...I don't really remember a third. Were the KLF gonna rock us by then? Ooh! Pop Will Eat Itself and Jimi Hendrix.


3. What was your favourite outfit?
   By night it was thick black tights, short black skirts and black tops. Yes, the main difference is the hemline has dropped.


4. What was up with your hair?
   Hey! That was the year of the One Good Perm. It was very loosely permed. I'm trying not to think "like the bloke from the Darkness" but, well...a little bit. And I had yet to decide that red was my permenant natural colour.


5. Who were your best friends?
   A couple of girls who had been at the hated school with me. I know now that we were all friends primarily because we had been shoved together by life at the hated school and that the frienships were doomed. In 1989 I moved into a rented house and met T, who has been one of my best friends ever since.


6. What did you do after school?
   Went to the pub. Worked at the local cinema so I saw films I never really wanted to see a lot. Hung out at Orcombe Point, drinking and smoking. Went to the old Timepiece club, or Boxes (then more alt than it is now).


7. Did you take the bus?
   Train. 25 minutes each way, which was perfect for reading whatever reading I hadn't done before class.


8. Who did you have a crush on?
   One of my class. We did end up drunkenly having sex once a year or so later. And I was going steady with a musician who lived along the coast a bit. He had a car.


9. Did you fight with your parents?
   Yes. I was ready to go, they were ready to let me. What with the evening jobs etc, I barely saw them.


10. Who did you have a CELEBRITY crush on?
    In '89? Perhaps a slight thing for Kiefer Sutherland (yes, then most known for being a bleach blond vampire). Johnny Depp had yet to play Edward Scissorhands...


11. Did you smoke cigarettes?
    Yep, almost everyone did. I would get especially bad whenever it was exam time.


12. Did you lug all of your books around in your backpack all day because you were too nervous to find your locker?
    This question assumes lockers were standard. And also that books were required. I tended to have a fishing tackle box full of my paints/brushes/etc*, a folder, a shorthand notebook and a copy of whatever Eng Lit text we were studying. So it didn't exactly require lugging. And I didn't have a backpack. Rubbish question!
    
    (*this was a couple of years before someone cottoned on to this and started selling tackle boxes as "art boxes". It's like using baby wipes to clean your hands - suddenly someone cottons on and starts selling the same product rebadged for adults and marked up appropriately)


13. Did you have a 'clique'?
    Not in a Heathers sense. We had a hang-out by the drama studio and, well, hung out. One of them was a chap called Rohan ("as in "riders of..."?" I asked him), which pretty much gives away that this was the time when hippy babies were becoming adults.


14. Did you have "The Max" like Zach, Kelly and Slater?
    er, what?


15. Admit it, were you popular?
    Loner in a gang of loners. Hello? I did just list my favourite band as The Smiths...


16. Who did you want to be just like?
    Katherine Hepburn?


17. What did you want to be when you grew up?
    I was grown up. I had a job, and voting rights, and could get served in pubs without an ID. And, beyond a desire to write, I was going to art college to be a painter.


18. Where did you think you'd be at the age you are now?
    Writer. But a fabulously rich and famous one who didn't need a day job. With a fabulous house with a large garden and French windows. The French windows were important.