They called me Polo because my ex boyfriend shot me in the chest with an air rifle and it left quite a decent size hole.
Well, I say ‘shot’ but it was an accident I suppose. He was sat opposite me with the rifle laying across his lap, pointing away, when – for no other reason than to make some noise and break the boredom and because he knew he shouldn’t really just point the thing without taking aim – he squeezed the trigger. Only the pellet hit a metal rivet in a stone post and ricocheted straight back into my chest.
It’s lucky I wasn’t a bony child or it would have hurt like a MF. As it was it stung enough to make crying in front of the boys a reality. When the wound started dribbling blood all over my clothes, making the whole incident even harder to hide from my mother, fear dried my tears.
Mam worried about me and my sister so much it’s a wonder she got any sleep. As it was, she would lie in bed at night imagining horrific ‘what if’ scenarios where my sister and I met with a gruesome end at the hands of a deranged maniac, or under the wheels of a lorry, or trapped in a torrid house fire. She loathed to let us out of her sight (and out of the protective circle of her arms) and would have fainted or choked or threw the most almighty temper tantrum if she knew just what we DID get up to. If I came home sporting a gunshot wound, my mother would have enough reason to ban me from going outside for the rest of my adolescence.
Eventually the wound healed and the scab fell off and, through some clever dressing, my mother was none the wiser.
My mates had great fun for a few months calling me polo and, on any flat surface they could find, drawing pictures of a short, fat, round girl with a hole in her chest . I especially liked it when they used permanent marker and wrote my name next to the drawing with a big arrow pointing at the fatty.
Happy days.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
Fashion Fuck Ups
I made so many fashion fuck-ups growing up that I think it’s permanently altered the part of my brain that sees reality; the part that’s called judgement and makes you team up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that do go together and discard the long wrap-around skirt, chunky trainers, ratty old T-Shirt and winter cardigan (in the middle of summer no less) that don’t. Truly, the instances of getting it seriously wrong were so numerous that any ‘fashion sense’ potential was muddied until buried somewhere deep and dark, never to surface again. They say that if you do a thing 35 times or more, it becomes a habit. Well, I’m a habitual fashion f-up and I blame my teenage years.
But then, I did grow up in the Eighties, so the blame can’t be entirely mine. Anyone escaping the 80s with fashion sense unscathed is a rare and special thing and should be on display in a museum.
So, yes, back to the fashion disasters. There was the whole wearing Dad’s diamond-pattern-Sunday-afternoon-in-the-pub cardigan with jeans and black patent shoes, then the animal print two pieces (not leopard print or zebra print or anything like that but little dogs or cats in a zany pattern with bows on their heads and on their tails). But the biggest, boldest and sustained for the longest fashion f-up was cycling shorts with everything. Didn’t matter what the occasion was, or the weather, me and my sister would be wearing cycling shorts and trainers with thick white ankle socks. Teamed with either a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt or a unisex jumper.
My cycling shorts were black and had a black and white checked panel down the outside of each leg. My sister had orange detailing on her cycling shorts. We used to colour co-ordinate as much as possible, so she was always looking for something black or orange to wear with them. I liked to match mine with something red. Black, white and red; me and the Nazis very fond of that colour combo. I had one particular T-shirt that I used to wear all the time with my cycling shorts, even in the freezing cold. What can I say? I was daft back then.
Anyhow, wearing cycling shorts and a T-shirt in February meant that my nipples were permanently hard, earning me the nickname of bullet nipples.
But then, I did grow up in the Eighties, so the blame can’t be entirely mine. Anyone escaping the 80s with fashion sense unscathed is a rare and special thing and should be on display in a museum.
So, yes, back to the fashion disasters. There was the whole wearing Dad’s diamond-pattern-Sunday-afternoon-in-the-pub cardigan with jeans and black patent shoes, then the animal print two pieces (not leopard print or zebra print or anything like that but little dogs or cats in a zany pattern with bows on their heads and on their tails). But the biggest, boldest and sustained for the longest fashion f-up was cycling shorts with everything. Didn’t matter what the occasion was, or the weather, me and my sister would be wearing cycling shorts and trainers with thick white ankle socks. Teamed with either a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt or a unisex jumper.
My cycling shorts were black and had a black and white checked panel down the outside of each leg. My sister had orange detailing on her cycling shorts. We used to colour co-ordinate as much as possible, so she was always looking for something black or orange to wear with them. I liked to match mine with something red. Black, white and red; me and the Nazis very fond of that colour combo. I had one particular T-shirt that I used to wear all the time with my cycling shorts, even in the freezing cold. What can I say? I was daft back then.
Anyhow, wearing cycling shorts and a T-shirt in February meant that my nipples were permanently hard, earning me the nickname of bullet nipples.
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