HOBBIES AND STUFF

I’ve never understood the idea of ‘pastimes’ and other activities that people devise so that they can waste their lives away.

The notion that you have to find something to do that helps to while away the long winter nights has always been an alien concept to me. The plain fact is that there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me and I have always considered that these contrived hobbies were just a waste of time.

I’m not saying that I have never had a hobby; in the days before I became a teenager I had a go at most things. For a while I was an avid stamp collector but I am not really of the collecting persuasion, the collector has to be obsessive about the things they collect, they have to believe that their collection maters and they have to be completely bereft of any idea of their own mortality. This is why royalty are avid collectors, they are not individuals, just some small part of a dynasty and the hive mentality that it engenders means that they believe that they can do great things for the sake of their lineage.

I never actually considered sport, I’ve never had the sport bug, I’m not tribal and the idea of chasing a ball around a muddy field never really appealed to me. Imagine football; you get twenty two individuals, twenty of whom chase a ball around a field, and as soon as one of them gets within range of it he kicks it as far away from himself as he can and he, and everyone else chases it again. So, I never became a sportsman.

My dad loved sport and up until he was in his late thirties he was the goalkeeper for our local amateur football team. He spent years trying to get me interested in football, but it never seemed to assuage the boredom that football, or any sport induced in me.

I never seemed to have any hobbies, I watched a bit of television, I read a lot and for most of my life I have surrounded myself with books. I listened to the radio, especially offshore (pirate) radio from the 1960s to the mid 1980s and like almost every schoolboy I ‘discovered’ the comedy of Kenneth Horne and the Goons which seems to come around to enthral each new generation of schoolboys.

I used to listen to all manner of pop music. Almost everyone I knew was into soul music and especially Motown, but it left me totally cold, in fact I found it positively depressing. I spent hours listening to stuff on the radio and most of it was a lot more interesting to me than soul music could ever be. I was very aware that I was not ‘into’ any particular musical scene; I just seemed to like loud guitar music with a bit of a beat to it. I was well into my late teens before I discovered that there were types of music that I preferred as well as the ones that I could not stand.

I just thought that I had a liking for lots of different types of music so the realisation that I had an overwhelming fondness for the heavier kind of rock music came as something of a shock to me, but not to anyone else. Perhaps the denim jeans, the waist length hair and the guitar were a dead giveaway to the rest of the world, but it never seemed obvious to me.

The great thing was that I had started to know who I was at last; even I just knew that I was a guitar obsessed rocker.

As I think about this, it is still very much the same. I was walking my dog and a group of teenagers on pushbikes pulled up by me at the side of the road and one of them asked me if I knew where they could get some guitar strings. I told them and as they made to go on their way I asked why they had picked on me to ask about the whereabouts of the local guitar shops. One of them looked back at me as he peddled away and said,

“Well, you look like a bit of a rocker mate.”

Someone had recognised who I was at last.