LITMIR.BIZ

       DIANA

      You came to Devon today

      You opened a leisure centre

      You pressed a button and turned on the flumes

      You played snooker for the press

      And then you went walkabout

      You walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencers

      People gave you flowers

      And they sang happy birthday

      I waited behind the barrier

      I waited

      I reached out

      You touched my hand outside the Wimpy Bar

      And then you were gone

      His poetry is diabolical too.

      I was in Exeter with Jarvis that day. No drawings from me though. Or poems. I could write one now I suppose.

      DIANA

      You came to Devon today

      You opened a leisure centre

      You pressed a button and turned on the flumes

      You played snooker for the press

      And then you went walkabout

      You walked about past Milletts, past Marks and Spencers

      People gave you flowers

      And they sang happy birthday

      Jarvis waited behind the barrier

      He waited

      He reached out

      You touched his hand outside the Wimpy Bar

      Where I was eating a Spicy Beanburger

      With chips

      And then you were gone

      I don’t feel good about it now. I know I missed out on a big local occasion and being a part of history, especially with what would happen in Paris and all that, but I wasn’t really a big Diana fan and certainly not a super-fan like Jarvis was. Jarvis loved Diana, worshipped her, and after she touched his hand in Exeter when he was fourteen he thought she probably loved him too.

      I had just become a vegetarian at the time though, and Wimpy had recently launched their Spicy Beanburger – they were the first UK burger chain to sell a veggie burger. Teenage vegetarians living in small Devon villages in the nineteen eighties didn’t get a lot of opportunities to eat veggie burgers. So while Jarvis waited patiently for his princess to come, I ate like a king. A burger king.

      It was a busy day in Devon for Diana. She opened the leisure centre and a supermarket and a library. She turned on the water in the swimming pool, setting the flumes and wave machine in motion. She played snooker: being applauded by all the patronising local big cheeses and yes-men for holding the cue the wrong way and making a foul shot. Then after that Diana had lunch at the Guildhall, watched a pageant depicting one hundred and fifty years of the police service, before finally going on a walkabout, culminating in her touching local dignitary Jarvis Ham outside the Wimpy.

      When Diana opened the leisure centre she unveiled a plaque, the plaque would later on mysteriously disappear. It was a big local news story. People were outraged. The plaque was never found.

      Yes that’s right, you guessed it. I found it in the shoebox.

      Not really. I didn’t. God knows where the plaque went. It has nothing to do with this story.

      By the way, when Jarvis wrote about his birth and glued the newspaper cutting about Tutankhamun into the scrapbook I imagine it wasn’t done at the actual time. The language he uses is pretty childish – it’s a writing style that Jarvis will stick with for most of his life – his writing may come across at times like it’s being dictated by a child who’s just learning to read out loud in front of the rest of the class. Expect quite a lot of And there was a man. And his name was Roy. And Roy had a dog. And it was called Rover. And Roy had a stick. And Roy threw the stick. And Rover fetched the stick. That kind of thing. Sorry. Don’t shoot the messenger.

      Anyhow, the way Jarvis has written about his birth may be childish but the cutting out and the gluing is beyond the abilities of a nought year old. The same goes for the bit about his first acting job.

      The Diana poem, however, happened live. Jarvis wrote it when he was fourteen. And the drawing. He showed me them both at the time. I remember lying about how good they were.

      It was the same day that Jarvis had come out to Ugly Park with me to talk to my evil stepfather Kenneth about him perhaps getting a job or doing the washing up once in a while, or better still, getting out of town so me and my mother could return to the single parent/only child domestic bliss that we’d been perfectly happy with before he’d shown up.

      Ugly Park – okay, Ugbury Park – was a small council housing estate on the outskirts of Mini Addledford, the village where Jarvis and his parents lived. It was like a theme park – its themes being urban decay and inner city depravation. At weekends and on Bank Holidays people from the surrounding villages would drive out to Ugly Park to ooh and aah at the dogfights and the graffiti and to film the boy racers on their camcorders as they bombed around the estate in their stolen cars before crashing them into a wall and torching them.

      That’s not true. I’m exaggerating. But for the six months that my mother’s boyfriend Kenneth moved in that’s what it felt like. It felt like this:

      And what I really wanted it to feel like was this:

      I would have loved to have had a mother who made costumes for me and a father who baked cakes and wasn’t drunk in an armchair all day long, burning holes into the upholstery while he fell asleep watching the horse racing with a fag on.

      And then there was the bullying.

      I’ve compiled a typical week’s worth of Kenneth bullying episodes into one fun-packed omnibus edition to illustrate.

      It was a Tuesday. I came home from school, mum was at work and Kenneth was in the front room, drunk, sitting in his armchair – that used to be my armchair – and shouting abuse at Basil Brush. I went into the kitchen and made an elaborate sandwich from the ingredients I’d bought on the way home from school (there was never any food in the cupboards at Ugly Park). I took my sandwich into the front room and as

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