5 Things

January 3rd, 2007, By Duncan Gough

I’ve been tagged by Matt Webb, so here goes.

Five Things Most People Don’t Know About Me

1. I had a beard at about age 18. I played guitar and seriously thought I could ‘make it’. For one band I formed in college, our first gig was at the 100 Club. I can still finger pick (not well enough) and I haven’t played in standard tuning for years. If you didn’t know any open tunings I probably wouldn’t speak to you. I started young, too. I used to play bugle in a marching band. I learnt how to play Last Post but never played it in public. We used to play Enola Gay happily enough though, before I knew what it meant.

Despite being naturally shy I could get on stage and play fairly happily. My funniest/scariest memory was a soundcheck at the Garage on Highbury Corner. I walked into the gents and almost fell over a police investigation – everything was taped off, a couple of bobbies were scouring the floor for evidence with pre-CSI style forensic gloves and masks on. The night before had been lively, by all accounts.

2. I was thrown out of school. Bearing in mind that it was a Grammar School, it was a polite, middle class throwing out that resulted in me taking my exams and leaving. I still don’t know what I did that was so bad as to warrant expulsion, but it was the best thing that happened to me at that age.

3. I’ve written three books. Using the Joni Mitchell idea of crop rotation, I’d write one until I hit a block then switch to the other. One of them got picked up by a publisher (having sent it to every publisher in the writers and artists yearbook). They promptly got bought and my manuscript was dropped (which was fair, it wasn’t complete by a long stretch). I wanted to be a guitarist first, author second and I had no step three. Shit. I wrote about existential, silent drama but i really wanted to write about the sinewy facts of life like Cormac McCarty.

4. I’ve had my leg stretched. When I was younger, my left leg froze up and I ended up in hospital with weights attached to it, hooked over the bed post to stretch it back to normality. It still twinges and sometimes collapses underneath me, mid step. This can be quite a pain at certain times. Crossing the road, for example. I love walking and the outdoors but I can’t walk as far as I’d want to. A few years back my wife and I went to Barcelona. We arrived and loved everything we saw. We walked and walked and walked, taking it all in, until, of course, my leg gave up and I had to hobble back to the hotel.

5a. My Dad died this year. Everything, since then, is filtered through this experience. He was a Merchant Seaman for years, and traveled everywhere. Quite literally, everywhere. He spent a very long time in the Middle East and seemed to have lived a lot like a Graham Greene character in far flung places before cheap air travel. He didn’t talk about it much, but I know that he spent months at sea, on cruise ships, liners and tankers.

Not wanting to finish on a downer, here’s 5b. I can bowl a googly. He taught me that.

Now, where to pass this on. How about Christopher D. Chapman, Andy Driver, Bob, Derek and Jim?

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