The Book

Glastonbury 1999 (age 16)
We had just moved into our fourth proper house since moving to Somerset four years earlier, I say proper house in that it’s not a holiday cottage. If you include the holiday cottages that we stayed in then the actual number of houses would be eleven in four years. My mum loved living in holiday cottages, probably because she didn’t need to sign a tenancy agreement – no tenancy agreement means more moving.
Plus when I say since we moved to Somerset, what I actually mean is since we moved to Somerset, sold house number two, moved to West Sussex (where I attended school number 12 or 13, I’ve lost count), before moving back again. Good job we only ended up going to West Sussex. If plan number one had come together then we would have been stuck in Colorado and if plan number two had come together then we would have been in some country on the other side of the world. Not that plan two ever would have become a reality. My mum, her mental health issues and her three kids travelling round the world would have been a big recipe for disaster.
Anyway so proper house number four since moving to Somerset is just your standard shoebox four bedroom house on a very quiet residential street in Glastonbury. Well it was very quiet until we moved in. After a few months, everyone on the road got together and complained to our landlord who had us evicted. They probably would have done this if what I am about to tell you happened just once but it happened a lot more than that.
It’s Friday night, my siblings are at my dads for the weekend and my mum’s out. My front door is open and there is music blaring out of it, there is someone jumping out of my bedroom window to a crowd of cheering people below before running back upstairs to do it again, the mini roof that you can climb onto from my sisters window is full of people smoking spliffs and the inside of my house is full of drunk teenagers. I am stood on the kitchen table dancing to The Rolling Stones (I Know It’s Only Rock And Roll). Then all of a sudden, everyone went quiet and I looked up to see my mum stood at the back door, it was one of those moments where time stood still. In my drunken state I remember trying to think what to do next and ended up shouting, ‘RUN!!’. Everyone made a mad dash for the door including myself and my mum just stood there letting everyone out until it got to me, at which point she……..

This is a little taster from my autobiography.

If you read my post about why I blog then you will know that I don’t class myself as a ‘writer’, the main reason for this being that I have absolutely no qualifications or experience. Between taking my GCSE English exam and starting this blog three months ago, the only thing I have written (apart from shopping lists and birthday cards) is my CV.
However since starting my blog, I have fallen in love with writing, I love emptying my head of all its thoughts and trying to construct them into a story.

I recently went up to stay with my Dad for the weekend who has my younger brother and sister living with him and we got onto the subject (as we normally do) about how crazy our lives had been growing up. I am the eldest by four years and was witness to a lot more of the utterly bizarre goings on that led to me flying completely off the rails as soon as I hit 13. I have been so busy lately that I had forgotten about all of the things that my siblings were reeling off to me but after an hour of us all in absolute hysterics, we decided that I should write a book about my crazy life. I say hysterics, this is the way we look back on it now, it wasn’t that it was particularly funny at the time. Especially not for my brother, who ended up with an empty video collection after me and my friend sold them all to the local junk shop for ten quid.

Now you might have read that and thought, ‘oh yeah, a houseparty, no big deal’.
But that was just a taster, if you fast forward two years to house number five then it gets far far worse! By house number seven (eight for me as I was chucked out to go and live in a bedsit for six months before moving back to babysit while my mum went to live in Canada for a while) things were even crazier. Thats before all the other events are mentioned as well, sugar thrown over kitchens, furbys swinging from windows, bedrooms full of stolen toys, phones through letterboxes, drug houses in the corner of carparks, my mums crazy boyfriends moving into attic rooms, cheating boyfriends, sisters being wheeled home in trolleys, there was never a dull moment!

My mum is a woman who of her own admission has ‘issues’ and who doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. She tried her best but her ‘issues’ and the fact that every decision was made with only herself in mind meant that by the time we had moved to Somerset, we had already lived in around 30 houses (not including holiday cottages), at least 10 areas of the country and I had been pulled out of school to be sent to a different one about once a year.
As soon as I hit 13, I rebelled, I was so angry and if I think back to my behaviour now then I am shocked, but in my defence, once you hear the full story then I think you will begin to understand why!