This isn't a happy story for the most part, so you're entirely excused to thumb the Back button on your mouse, or hit Backspace or just close the browser and move on with your life. But I thought it was about time I tried to write this one.

Go on then. We won't judge you.

Computers and I haven't had a happy time together. We've been essential to each other, but we don't really have fond memories. The first proper computer I ever had in my home was a VIC-20. It was a great thing - my mum picked me up from Prep school, and there in the car (Crystal Green Ford Granada, 2.8 litre Ghia. Never had any time for small-displacement powerplants, my mum) resting on the (plush, muted-tone Recaro) passenger seat was a lengthy silver box.

My little heart stopped. Oh, my... this was the thing I'd been dribbling over in Boots, and desperately trying to get my fingers on whenever my elder brother forgot to shove me out of the way. This was The Real One, the one which had loads of memory, and actual colours!

So we got it home, I was duly pushed aside whilst cables were trailed all over the living room, power bricks and RF modulators were plugged in, the never-before-used Channel 4 of the television was tuned until that cyan-and-white image sprang into not actually crystal clear focus, but holy crap we had a working computer in the house!

I stood there inhaling for the first time ever what I'd come to term "New Computer Smell".

It was that weekend that Mum went into hospital with cervical cancer. She'd gotten the machine to "distract" my brother and I from her impending possible-doom. Suffice it so say, that after a few fairly hideous months, doom did not descend. However, my retreat into the computer had begun. I was something like 8 years old, maybe 10, and didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. All I knew was that Mum was in hospital, the bat who was "babysitting" us was a psychotic chain-smoking harridan, and the beige thing didn't shove me aside, or yell at me, hit me, try to nick my sweets or give me grief over my accent.

The worst it ever told me was "?REDO FROM START"

A while later, my dad actually came home for a whole week from working overseas, and he brought a tiny little silver slab back with him - I do beleive it was a Snoopy Tennis Game & Watch, though I may be wrong about the title. Again, it was an utter hobnailed gobsmack of a revelation to me, these tiny little devices which could, you know, play games.

Feel that breath of air on your cheek? That's the 20-year-old echo of my last ever interest in school sports departing.

As is a recurring theme in this missive, there's bit that really started to shove me deeper and deeper into the world of technological escapism. Dad starts to blatantly philander, mum starts to drink. Deep joy. How the hell do I get sprites to work on the VIC again?

Then, ah then the Commodore 64. I don't actually recall the specifics of it turning up in our house. It may have been a christmas, it may just have been Dad buying the kids off again. It opened a whole new chapter in life, addictions which have stayed with me 'til this very day. We got ours with a 1541 floppy drive, 'cause we were The Rich Family in the village. Rich or poor, I didn't really give a shit - I didn't want anything to do with the little bastards outside the house, they vascillated between just wanting to set fire to shit and nick shit. Hardly surprising I found SIDdy goodness and sixteen rich, vibrant colours to be more enticing.

This would be about the point when Dad introduces me to his new wife. Are you sensing a pattern, gentle reader? Can you imagine this barely-formed young misfit stuffing his head as deeply into that cartridge slot as he can?

Let's skim a few years. My addiction to Paradroid is fully formed, you can't actually remove the NEOS mouse from my hand without taking skin at the least (more likely a finger) with it, and I'm dragging through my weeks at boarding school with only one thought on my mind - at the next leave-out, I get to leave these lying bastard BBC-Bs at school (they who had such promisingly high resolutions... as long as it's in black) and play some fookin' games, and listen to some fookin' Hubbard. (Twats at school think they're special and rebelling by listening to Pink Floyd. Fools. I actually got a couple of converts at one point with a bootlegged copy of Zoids, but that's another tale).

And when I came home, whether it was to my dad's, for constant flirting from his wife and being given fags for tidying the garden, occasionally getting a go on the air rifle when my brother got tired of shooting goldfish or whatever, or to my mum's for the constant reek of Benson and Hedges and Harvey's Bristol Cream), I'd get to have some time with the 64. Had to stay up 'til my brother went to sleep, o'course. A long-standing tradition of nocturnal geekery was forming solidly.

That Christmas, which by shouted argugreement was spent at dad's, there was a large parcel under the tree.

This is deadly serious, this. I sat opposite the tree one night, the only one awake in the house, and I smelled the box.

It smelled of New Computer.

I rocked back on my heels at all of 14 years old, tilted my head and thought "Oh well. Here we go again."

It was, of couse, an Amiga 500. Starglider II went into the drive on Christmas day and didn't come out for 72 hours, at which point it was fucked by my dad's wife's daughter's husband Roly trying to copy it with normal Workbench DiskCopy. The stupid cunt. The machine shipped with Photon Paint (soon to be bucked up with a hooky copy of Deluxe Paint), and my life was never the same again.

I'd love to say that I didn't really notice Dad leaving for the US with his wife the following February, but it'd be a lie. I actually went out there in the March, hoping that he'd let me stay with him.

Those two weeks from March to April were the last time I ever saw my father. I entered a full retreat into Computer Land, where things made more sense, where there weren't tempers and egos and lies and hurt, and just concentrated on painting things in DPaint, then eventually making shapes in Silver and Imagine and eventually LightWave.

Obviously the story doesn't end there, but it's a fairly predictable one. Wilderness Decade, make a few good friends. Chaos Decade spent drunk and angry most of the time. Now I'm at the start of a new Decade of my life. I've faced the demons that I've written to you about here, and realised that it's just human bastardry. I've learned to trust people again, and to form actual, real friendships. Mainly. Hell, I've even learned how to talk to girls, as long as I take my pills.

I'm planning to go back to the US in a couple of months. I'll be taking a computer with me.

We're going to do it right this time.

May 2006

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