rob

I must have been around four or five when I was given a Dr Seuss book entitled 'My Book About Me'. One of those books in which you scrawl in crayon your name, how many brothers and sisters you have, dogs and cats and favourite colours and foods and so on, then rediscover many years later in a cardboard box in a dusty attic and ponder upon the nature of innocence lost and the passing of time, perhaps following a recent divorce or nervous breakdown. I found it again during a clear-out a year or two ago and sat down, ready to wallow in some sentimental reminiscences.Unfortunately my 10-year old self had got in there first. I had forgotten that in the intervening years, as a grubby little boy, I had found the book in my shelves and, with a combination of embarrassment at the earnest naivete of my toddlerdom and a desire to show off, had doctored the entries with indelible marker pen!. Thus, the original touching declaration that my three favourite smells in the world were a rose, dinner and Teddy had been defiled and altered to read 'Like a fart, like a boob, like a bum' (the reason for my use of simile at such an age mystify me, though I am secretly quite impressed).So, then, has proceeded my life so far - a generally pleasing mixture of the sincere and the cynical, the polite and the rude, the abstract and the biological, and most of all, lots of random embarrassment and ballsing things up.