About Matt
I’ve always taken an interest in the concept of identity. What is one to write in a situation such as this? Nobody else in the world could possibly know you like you know yourself, and yet the attempt to compress your being into one short page probably stands at the height of vanity; identity involves the discovery of exactly what you have to be vain about. What is it that defines me? Is it the curly hair and deep brown eyes, or are they just a window to the soul?
The facts on the right tell you some pretty basic things about me. They’re here at once for brevity and completeness, though they’re fairly uninspiring. They tell you where I live, but not how and why; they tell of my age, but by no means my maturity; they explain what I like, but paper over the little things that I love. Mulling this over, it occurs to me that such a story can only be told by starting at the beginning.
My story begins about twenty years ago. I haven’t yet had long enough to deduce the genre of story that I’m writing. The four chapters so far are coherent, but they’re not written in the same script. The first is entitled “Babyhood”, and other people wrote it for me. The second is “Childhood”, and here I began to trace over the guidelines with an unsteady hand. The third, “Adolescence”, contains lots of ink blots and rubber marks and crossings-out. And finally I’ve switched to the permanent ink of “Adulthood”, and this is the last chapter.
The first chapter is probably not dreadfully interesting to the casual reader. I was born in a hospital, and came home. I made noisy public speeches in front of dozens of cooing relatives. Then they went back to their houses, and my parents worked day and night to give me life. One day, I said something. Another day, I walked. Just like everyone else.
Your life begins when you first make choices for yourself, but it’s hard to say when this occurs. Was saying the word ‘egg’ thinking for myself, even though I don’t like eggs? What about my baffling obsession with road cones at the age of two? The start of school is probably a safe place to begin.
I wasn’t a particularly co-operative lower-school student. It took me a while to acquire the concept of doing what an unfamiliar person told me. I had a strong mind and strong emotions, and the combination was quite a struggle for my beleaguered teachers. Fortunately, they found me willing to participate in any activity which involved numbers – for maths, at this time, was my favourite subject. Vaulting over a horse? No chance. Counting how many times I’d vaulted over a horse? No problem. Even now I can be very passionate about things which I enjoy, and equally passionate about things which I dislike. Some people call it ‘intense’.
As I grew up, I made friends. My first friend’s name was Ian. Ian had a similar background to me, shared my sense of humour and was in my class at school. For the first few years we were inseparable. It’s probably to Ian that I owe the debt of music; in the heady days of the mid-Nineties, he introduced me to the finest of the Britpop era – Oasis, Blur and Pulp. It was the spark which ignited a lifelong interest. I never looked back in anger.
I probably discovered girls a bit earlier than most. I developed my first crush at the age of eight. Girls in the year above you at lower school had that unreachable aura which made them so endlessly attractive. All you had to do was maintain it by never speaking to them. If you broke the rule, she became just another girl. Silence made the loudest sound.
Moving on to middle school, I began to establish a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. I embraced academia as something which came naturally to me. I began to love writing as a way of expressing powerful emotions. I wrote the odd poem. Numbers still held a singular fascination. Yet my hands were fairly useless. Teachers killed hours in vain in attempts to dispose of my spidery handwriting. Elephants and donkeys became one under my pencil. I wasn’t particularly concerned.
I remained unaffected by the trends and fashions which plague the life of a teenager. I didn’t understand the people who tried to be individual by acting the same as dozens of others. I was well-known, but perhaps a little misunderstood. I disliked the peer pressures which forced people to adopt facades in order to become one of the crowd. But my lust for popularity was equally strong.
I became quite a good conversationalist, or at worst, a good listener. Knowing about lots of things gives you many things to talk about, and I liked gaining knowledge. I will talk about almost anything which contains a point of discussion. I can be deeply philosophical. It’s my strength and my weakness, leading to snippets of genius and civil wars in my conscience in equal measure.
I’m not keen on exams, despite always having done very well in them. I have eleven GCSEs and four-and-a-half A-Levels, and none of them help one iota with the big questions of life which land unannounced on my head some Wednesday afternoon. They’re little more than a stepping-stone.
To be continued…
