In my third year at secondary school, we welcomed to the class two more boys, called Martin and Vijay. They had been attending a boarding school in my home village, and had reached the age at which the school would send them back on their way.
For the first few months of the year, Tam was my new best buddy. Sometimes I’d go over to his for the night and we’d play on his Mega Drive. Sometimes he’d come over to mine and we’d play on my Amiga 500. Sometimes we’d go into the city and squeeze coins into the arcade machines. All in all, this was quite a happy time for me, as it was the first time in a while that I’d felt that I had a good friend at school.
Over the year, it gradually went from Tam and I doing things together, to Tam and Martin and Vijay and I doing things together. The same kind of stuff: sleepovers, hanging out in the city spending money and playing arcade machines, and playing Laser tag. Unfortunately, this was a time in my life when I was much more comfortable in a one-to-one situation than in a group, so I didn’t fit in as well into this new arrangement. Inevitably, in 12 months’ time it would be just Tam and Martin and Vijay doing things together.
During this year, I purchased a notebook for writing lengthier diary entries in. The writing style is actually surprisingly mature, but my approach to girls is still clearly a bit odd. As I recently mentioned:
> I didn’t have a very good idea what I wanted from a relationship, so I wasted too much time pursuing leads that were doomed from the beginning. Had I known then what I know now, perhaps I wouldn’t have been as lonely.
However, it’s clear from the progression of diary entries during this year that I was starting to figure this out, and not taking the whole thing so seriously. Instead, I moved onto imaginary girlfriends, which we can all agree is much healthier.
The majority of these lengthier diary entries are actually excruciatingly detailed accounts of trips into the city, sleepovers, etc. One quite interesting one is an entry from March, when as a change from the famous lists of girls that I fancy (which I suspect that I had probably ceased keeping by now) I write a list of “enemies”. Nigel, unsurprisingly, gets top billing with 10/10. Martin, whom I am rapidly beginning to dislike, scores 6/10 with the note *Not an enemy – annoying* ((diary entries suggest that he had a habit of scratching the paint off of my pencil tin with a compass point to leave unpleasantries – I can see how that would annoy a 13-year old me. But then a later entry reveals that I, and Vijay and Tam, once hung around during one of his tennis lessons, distracting him, so I guess it cuts both ways)). A rather butch girl called Jenny scores 8/10, though the notes suggest that even though she is intensely annoying, she doesn’t spoil my life as much as the others on the list. Also on the list are my sister with 6/10 (I guess I was in a mard with her that day) and my dad gets 3/10 (hey, I wouldn’t be a teenager if I didn’t hate my dad!).
Additionally, I think that I’ve spotted my first ever blog entry:
> 6th August
> Dear Journal,
> I just wrote to tell you that most wars are supposed to have started in August, so watch out!
> From Peter
The end of this academic year was a source of some joy for me, as I discovered that Nigel would not be returning in September.
*This is part 3 of a 7-part series called “My Teenage Years” which documents my school days between the ages of 11 and 17*
2 replies on “My Teenage Years: 13”
I want to hear more about the imaginary girlfriends.
Oh, usual kind of stuff. On at least one occasion it was a girlfriend invented to make me look cooler in front of my friends. On another occasion, it was a kind of thought experiment, piecing together the perfect woman from parts and then writing stories in which I was the star and I became an overnight stud.
Bernard’s going to be so proud of me when he reads this in *n* years.