They Seek Him Here, They Seek Him There...

As a small person, young of age, dirty of face and hairy of head, I had some fairly obvious ambitions. The first one was never going to be achievable but I wasn’t going to let something like scientific possibility stand in the way of my deeply held desire to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Similarly, it was not a serious obstacle to holding a secondary ambition of becoming a Time Lord with his own TARDIS. There was, however, one ambition that was not totally outside the realms of possibility; it’s not a path that I chose to follow but it could well have been. For you see, for a brief time when I was about 8 years old, I wanted to be a spy.

I know what you’re thinking - I’d been bitten by the James Bond bug. Not a bit of it, I have to say. Sure, I liked Bond films (still do) but I wasn’t an obsessive fan as a youth. No, I had been prompted into becoming a spy by two books - The Spy’s Guidebook and The Detective’s Handbook by Usbourne books. Usbourne books were a big part of my childhood (the Puzzle Adventures and Mysteries Of The Unknown, with its horrific and terrifying illustrations, were both favourites). There was something about these two that spoke to my tiny childy mind, though.

My friends took to making secret maps with secret headquarters (clearly labelled with SECRET HEADQUARTERS in large capital letter naturally) of the playground. We would also leave in secret drop locations for each other to find - basically next to the tree or behind the bin (you’d be surprised at the lack of decent spy-style dead drops on your average 1980s playground). These rapidly came to a stop when we discovered passing secret maps by the map and embarrassingly called out in front of the class.

At one point, I desperately wanted to cut animal tracks into the soles of my shoes in order to be able to fool anyone who may be tracking me (being followed by wilderness trackers being one of the major concerns for a seven year old from Lewisham). I’m fully aware that you used to be able to get those Clarks shoes with all the different animal tracks on the bottom but, frankly, those were a joke. Who’s going to believe that all those different animals, some of which were natural predators of the others, would be walking together side by side in perfect harmony (like keys on my piano keyboard)? Pull the other one. Fortunately for my parents, this plan did not come to fruition...

As with all childhood fads (like obsessive yo-yo-ing, M.U.S.C.L.E wrestling figures and Panini sticker albums), these things faded from popularity after a brief period of obsessiveness. It’s probably for the best as, if I’d followed the page on signs for people who were suspicious, a lot of innocent but unfortunate looking people may well have ended up being harassed (especially as half of them are things that I do now).