'I used to be somebody....'

I thought I'd share this with you all. Its a memento from Barry's and my time at Romeike in Peterborough. We lived together for about 12 months or so in a shared house and we found it a rather desperate time. This would have been 1996, we had just left college and its fair to say were expecting more than life had thus far presented us. We felt trapped, and being the pompous twats that we were, thought that we were better than any of it. On reflection, we probably were, but everyone needs to start somewhere and in the end, things turned out fine. In fact, the truth was, these two arrogant young bastards, fresh from art college, probably needed a major dose of real life, and we certainly got plenty of that.

So then, this 'cartoon' for want of a better description, is a newspaper cutting with our faces drawn over it. I did this a lot at my desk, since it was my job to read the papers, source material was in abundance. Thats me in the middle, tragically harking back to a time when we had something to offer the world (actually that was probably never) and desperately trying to convince the people standing over me that I used to be someone. They're all laughing of course, I'm cutting up magazines for a living after all and such a claim is patently ridiculous. They patronise and humour the old duffer. Thats Barry, on the far left, shriveled, totally bereft, a broken, destroyed man. All he can do is stare at the floor. I'm clinging onto past glories, he's just waiting to die.

It summed up how we both felt at the time, so much so that Barry kept it and recently unearthed it. My, how we laughed. Bitter sweet. Not long after this 'moment', I moved to London for a new life and Barry moved in with Penny and a new charity career.