At the back of my Letts Senior Schools diary from 1982 is a list of all the girls I went out with that year.
It is long enough to suggest I laboured upon my romantic conquests with a level of dedication conspicuously absent from all other areas of my life at that time beyond the acquisition of heavy metal albums.
The girls whose names appear on the list would have made the top ten ‘Most Wanted’ of any young buck in Stevenage’s state education system at the time, yet here I was, all of 17 years old and punching well above my weight for a whole, dizzying year.
My teenage mind was a heady and dangerous cocktail of testosterone, wild fantasies about girls’ naked breasts and desperate and urgent prayers to God that He might one day let me touch one.
I wish I could say the title I gave to this list and from which this collection of journals takes its name was at least a little ironic. But it isn’t. It’s just the product of youth’s strutting arrogance and the unswerving self-assurance that is the province of all teenagers.
The boy who wrote these diaries was, as is clear from their contents, thick on swagger and a little thin on substance. But I love him still. I envy him his confidence and his blind faith in his own immortality, and I miss his eternal optimism that everything would turn out all right in the end.
I may still believe in carpe diem, but he lived it.
The dubious and unironic honour I conveyed upon the eight - count ‘em - girls whose names appear on that list was to anoint them as Lucky Ladies.
This collection of half-remembered events that span my life in the Fifth and Sixth Forms at Alleyne’s School between December 1st 1980 and June 18th 1983 are their stories and the stories of others, told through mine.
I went to Alleyne's School in Stevenage - a high-achieving all-boys comprehensive that had been a grammar school up until only a year or two before my first year in 1976. It’s now a less-than accomplished co-ed.
Everything you read in this blog is based on real entries in real diaries which I discovered, along with a few photos from those days, in my attic a few years ago. I don't remember all the people mentioned in them. I don't remember some of the things that happened. But I've tried to relate the events I do remember as truthfully as I can, whilst also adding some observations from the perspective of close to 40 years’ distance.
If you were at secondary school in the 70s and/or 80s, I hope some of this chimes with you. The blog titles are, almost without exception, taken from my diary entries, they all start with a lyric from a song that was in the top ten on that day (when such things mattered, of course) - and yes, I have changed some of the names to protect the innocent!
