Tales From The Underbelly Part 1: Where It All Began To Fall Apart

 In 1985, my parents had moved to a semi rural area of Sheffield, and a large bungalow, taking with them an old neighbour and family friend who was widowed decades previously. It was a little odd, but look, I had a massive bedroom extension, newly built onto the new family manse, which I only had to share with my brother for a short while... It was massive to a 16 year old kid, measuring around 35x10 feet, meaning that I could do some serious wargaming.

You can see it here, but back then it lacked the paved driveway: 5 Josselin Court

Now, this meant that I was moving from the area I'd grown up in, to a wholly alien environment, where it transpired, there was one bus into town every hour, instead of every 5 minutes and the resulting journey was 45-60 minutes as opposed to 12 which, I thought was fucking barbaric on a Mad Max level - where I was living 8 feet from a Victorian cemetery. 

Did I mention I have had a massive phobia around death and cemeteries since I was 4? Added to which, at 14, I had a clear vision of the future, what mortality truly meant and the fear went completely off the scale so that it wasn't  just a bit of a wobbly knee sort of fear, but a complete screaming, panic attack with the whole fight or flight reaction, screaming to the heavens about the unfairness of it all,

I understood the universal joke, and wasn't laughing. 

The one other positive aspect beyond having my own Xanadu, was that several of my roleplaying buddies lived in the same area, and I was on good terms with one of the local 'faces' who made it generally known that the new Hippy in the area was off limits to anyone trying to prove themselves as a warrior (which was honoured with one exception, which we will come to in due course).

On the day we moved, it was snowing, so, when we climbed from the Landrover (which was owned by the aformentioned family friend, Bill), my best mate and constant gaming confidante, Roger and I found ourselves in a 6-residence cul-de sac, high on a hillside, in  the semi-rural hinterlands of Sheffield, and there was this fucking enormous Victorian cemetery and the beginnings of a blizzard... Once again, the universe was reaching out with an icy hand to tap me on the shoulder.

 This was the beginning of some admittedly good times, but it was also the starting point for the descent into mental darkness and a degree of what I now know was depression, that I would never recover from and that, it would shape my future right up to the day I am typing thus line.

It was the point at which my parents started to cease to exist to me, as I tried to blank them out and to survive each day, at the same time as ceasing to be the easy going and very naive teenager forever. 

But thankfully, I had about a year ahead of me in which I would have some memorable times, survive an attempted assassination  and make some serious 80s money, that I've never made in the following 40 years - all of which were as you may expect tangentially and more often directly connected to wargaming and roleplaying.

So, having set the scene, I'll continue this narrative thread alongside the 'Memory Lane' narrative, as I am sure at some stage they will merge naturally. It maybe that I cover more of the gaming shenanigans in the Memory Lane thread and reference points at which switching between the two narratives may be a good idea.

Right, I need to select my ensemble for my return to the real world and Partizan, so I'll sign off here as decisions as to which shirt, shoes and jacket I should wear, need to be made and the ironing board approached in anger.

 

TTFN