Growing Up & Down in Pictures (Formative Moments in the Early Years of an Author)
I have successfully suppressed the memory of this occasion, but I am clearly in the process of being traumatised. This photograph records the infliction of one of those psychological scars so essential to the serious novelist.
An early glimpse of burgeoning criminal tendencies: I attempt to mug my friend Philip in the back garden...
...shortly before toying with a career as a juvenile male model.
Fate decrees that I shall not become a cross-channel swimmer
So I flirt with the ambition of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury instead
Sport (glorious sport) remains important. Here is a rare shot of the coy and almost invisible Taylor pectorals commemorating the occasion when I lead the team to victory in the school sneering competition
University Days Part 1: The Zhivago Phase: surviving on a protein-rich diet of caribou meat and thistles, I search for inspiration in the snowy wilderness of the Fens
University Days Part 2: I abandon literature for a time and study the Rock Superstar Module
University Days Part 3: The enigmatic caption on the back of this photograph reads: "alone among the bipeds. a rare shot of the threatened composite, its dual brain co-ordinated (back view)"
Starving in the Garret, Part 1: Here I investigate whether a beard would help me write like Tolstoy, Dickens and D.H.Lawrence. The experiment was not an immediate success
Starving in the Garret, Part 2: Still bearded, I search for enlightenment, creative inspiration and really good peanut butter in fabled Kathmandu
And a glimpse of the far future....
Tom sharpens his claws on his devoted home help while contemplating a little light supper. I provide this photograph to allay the concerns of those readers who, after reading The Judgement of Strangers, are concerned about my credentials as a cat lover.
Photograph © Steve Cockayne 2004
To be continued