Ah to be a teenager in Love. In Mid-1985 I was 14 and pushing 15. Girls were becoming an increasing interest but my Dragon (and Computers in general) were still my main leisure time activity. So it was that 2 major incidents would occur on the same, very wet day of April 1985.

I met Elaine (Skilbeck) at a Methodist Youth Club event in Wetherby, North Yorkshire. This was October 1984, she was 15 and llovely. Pity that two of my best mates at the time thought the same. You know the scene, a darkened School style disco event, you and your mates standing at the edge leant against the wall trying to look cool (yeah right !!). She was with her friends dancing to something of that era, Wham! perhaps. Then the glances started. Obviously when a girl looks in the direction of a group of you and your friends, you assume she's looking at you and not them We couldn't be sure, so logic dictated the following operation. Each of us in turn would walk to another part of the room, then rest would then look to see if said girl looked in that direction. What a waste of time that was, everyone of us that went over got looked at. Stupid teenager logic !!

Anyway to cut a long and dreamy story short, it ended up with 3 of us going to meet up with her in York. This was after exchanging letters (remember them ??) with her over the previous 6 months. The most rememberable part of the time in York was how awful the weather was and the fact that I bought a Garfield book. None of us got off with Elaine, it would never have worked, she lived 50 odd miles away and at 15, you can't drive and you ain't got lots of money to take the train to York every weekend. I still recall it fondly though.

So that was major incident one. What of incident two. Oh yes, after I had left for the train station our postman had deposited my copy of Jet Set Willy through the letter box. So on return from York looking like a drowned rat I soon perked up again and loaded it up. Yup it was Jet Set Willy, no I wasn't really that amazed. Lets face it the Graphics are basically Manic Miner, and on the Dragon this meant Black and White. Music sounded quite good tho. More amazing was the code protection. It was huge, the cassette inlay folded out about 5-6 times over so locating the correct square of 4 colours was a bit of a task. I even took it with me to our Youth Club night that evening to show off, hmm, are you worried for me yet, as I write this, I am !!

The day after all this happening my interest in the Dragon Version of Jet Set Willy sky rocketed. My mate (yes one of the Elaine fanciers) Jon Parker came round. He was a Speccy owner and wanted to see JSW on the Dragon. Again he wasn't impressed either, until we found a stairwell near the Boat (or Ship ??) at the left side of the game map. Certainly it wasn't there on the Spectrum verision. Where did it lead ?? Damn a new Room, 'The Cavern' !! But it was not the only one. You could walk all the way to the right hand side of the map through all these Dragon only levels (i'm guessing only the Dragon version has them, really must look into this). So the puny 32K Dragon had 15 more rooms than the 48K Spectrum version (that's 25% more). Because of this I did something i had not done then or since, yes I draw a map of the game on WhSmiths Graph paper. I'm pretty sure I no longer have this, 3 house moves have probably but paid to that

This is 18years ago, what a great time of life being nearly 15 was

Coming soon:
Part Three - College was not a Waste of Time

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