…I woke up at 7am and read Adrian Mole until about 8.20am.
Then I got dressed and went downstairs and watched the usual TV…
…After lunch me and Dad went to Dad’s office in the university.
Since our typewriter broke I have to do all my typing there.
Have I ever told you what Dad’s office is like?
Printers, computers, typewriters, modern telephones, swivel chairs:
generally snazzy.
I’ve been there many times before.
This time when we tried to use the photocopier something went wrong
and one of my sheets got crumpled but all the rest were all right…

I taught myself to type. This was something that amazed one of my teachers when I got to secondary school. But then he was an idiot, who pronounced the word “gig” as “gigue” and used to do hip-hop gestures in class in an attempt to make himself liked.

We’d had an old electric typewriter in our house for years. I must have started using it when I was seven or eight, initially out of curiosity. I was soon typing out lists of things I owned, like books and records. I then graduated on to producing my own copies of the latest Top 40 and, yes, fantasy programme billings. Inventories of the Bond franchise, Doctor Who episodes and even Carry On films came next.

All of this was tirelessly indulged by my parents. I suppose they thought it preferable to, well, just about anything out of doors and out of earshot.

But I’ve no idea just what was so vital that it needed to be completed right now, this INSTANT, which involved my dad going to his office on one his days off and which resulted in one of the key motifs of late 20th century western civilisation, the photocopier jam.

I suspect the truth is probably too embarrassing and is best left in the dustbin of history, carbon copy and all.