In fact, until a few days ago I knew virtually nothing about it. We were simply driving through Devon on our way to Lyme Regis when a roadside sign caught my attention.
Goose Fayre.
Now, as a Nottingham boy, I have certain proprietary instincts where those two words are concerned. Admittedly ours is generally spelled Fair, rather than Fayre, but that’s beside the point. Goose Fair is Nottingham. Seven hundred-odd years of history, the Forest Recreation Ground, fairground rides appearing on the skyline, mushy peas with mint sauce, and the annual certainty that it will rain at some point.
So seeing a Goose Fayre advertised in Devon was enough to make me wonder what was going on.
Then another sign appeared.
Colyton — Devon’s Most Rebellious Town.
Steady on.
Now they’re nicking Nottingham’s other thing.
Because Nottingham likes to think of itself as a rebellious place too. Robin Hood provides the largely mythical version, but there is plenty of real history behind it: kings and castles, Luddites and Chartists, and the very real rioters who burned Nottingham Castle during the turmoil surrounding the 1831 Reform Bill — assorted people, in other words, with a tendency to become rather cross when someone tells them what to do.
Two signs had lodged themselves in my head.
We carried on to Lyme Regis, and had a lovely day!
And I subsequently disappeared down a rabbit hole later whilst chilling out.
So why is Colyton rebellious?
It turns out Colyton has considerably more justification for the boast than I had imagined.
The answer takes us to 1685 and the death of Charles II. His brother succeeded him as James II, giving England something that made a substantial part of the population deeply uncomfortable: an openly Catholic king.
One possible alternative was James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.
Monmouth was Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son. Protestant, charismatic and popular in parts of the country, he had no legitimate claim to the throne unless you accepted disputed claims that his parents had secretly married.
Monmouth decided that he did.
On 11 June 1685 he landed with a small force at Lyme Regis, raised his standard and called upon people to join him against James II.
Which was the point at which I realised that our destination that day wasn’t merely incidental to the story at all.
We’d been travelling towards the place where the rebellion began.
And just a few miles away, Colyton answered Monmouth’s call in extraordinary numbers.
One hundred and five men and boys from the town joined the rebellion.
For a small community, that was an enormous commitment. Colyton had a strong tradition of Protestant Nonconformity and religious dissent, and when a Protestant challenger to James appeared almost on its doorstep, a significant proportion of its able-bodied men apparently decided that overthrowing the king seemed like a reasonable use of their summer.
Suddenly Devon’s Most Rebellious Town didn’t seem quite such an extravagant claim.
Unfortunately for them, it didn’t go well.
Monmouth’s improvised army marched through the West Country before meeting the royal army at Sedgemoor in Somerset on 6 July 1685.
The rebels were defeated.
Monmouth was captured and executed.
Then came the retribution.
Judge George Jeffreys presided over the proceedings that became infamous as the Bloody Assizes. Hundreds of captured rebels were condemned to death or transportation.
Colyton paid heavily for its enthusiasm.
Seven of its rebels were eventually executed in the town itself.
The rebellion was over.
James II had won.
For about three years.
Which is where Nottingham comes back in
At this point my two roadside signs had already provided a perfectly satisfying little historical diversion.
Colyton had its Goose Fayre. Colyton had its rebellious history. Nottingham had ours.
Nice coincidence.
Except the more I looked at the rebellion, the more the two places began to intertwine.
To explain why requires going backwards before going forwards.
In August 1642, Charles I came to Nottingham.
There, on what was then known as the Castle Hill, he raised his royal standard. It’s now called Standard Hill, it has a plaque and everything!
It’s traditionally regarded as the symbolic beginning of the English Civil War.
The symbolism is slightly complicated by the fact that Nottingham itself was hardly a dependable Royalist stronghold. The town subsequently sided with Parliament and Nottingham Castle was held for Parliament by Colonel John Hutchinson.
Still, the image remains: a Stuart king raising his standard at Nottingham and calling upon his subjects to rally to him.
Forty-three years later, his grandson Monmouth raised another standard at Lyme Regis.
This time the call was to rebel against Charles I’s son.
And the men of Colyton answered it.
Charles I had been executed in 1649. His son Charles II had eventually been restored to the throne. Charles II’s brother James II succeeded him. Charles II’s illegitimate son Monmouth then tried to overthrow his uncle.
The Stuart family tree was not exactly conducive to peaceful government.
But the symmetry gets better.
Because although Monmouth and the Colyton rebels failed in 1685, another attempt to remove James II followed just three years later.
This one succeeded.
Back to Nottingham
In November 1688, William of Orange landed in England.
The event we now rather politely call the Glorious Revolution was underway.
James’s support began to collapse, and uprisings broke out in his opponents’ favour.
One of the places where they gathered was Nottingham.
On 22 November, the nobility, gentry and common people assembled there issued a declaration complaining that their religion, liberties and properties were threatened by James’s government and declaring their support for William.
Nottingham became a rendezvous for the Midlands rising.
Even more remarkably, James II’s own daughter Anne fled her father’s court and ultimately joined his opponents there.
Think about that sequence for a moment.
1642: Nottingham.
Charles I raises his standard, summoning support for a Stuart king whose authority is being challenged.
1685: Lyme Regis and Colyton.
Charles I’s grandson raises his standard against Charles I’s son. More than a hundred people leave one small Devon community to join him.
They lose.
1688: Nottingham.
Opponents of that same son of Charles I gather in the place where his father had raised the royal standard.
This time James II loses.
The Nottingham declaration supported William of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law, and James’s own daughter joined the opposition.
Within weeks James had fled England.
The men of Colyton had backed the wrong rebellion by three years.
Of geese and rebels
None of this answers the question that started the whole thing.
What was a Goose Fayre doing in Devon?
The slightly disappointing answer is that Nottingham does not, in fact, possess exclusive historical rights to geese.
Autumn fairs involving livestock were once commonplace, and geese were traditionally driven considerable distances to market at the appropriate time of year. Nottingham’s Goose Fair is extraordinary not because nobody else ever had one, but because ours survived and evolved into the enormous event it is today.
Colyton’s modern Goose Fayre is a community revival of its own old fair tradition.
So there doesn’t appear to be some lost historical connection between the two Goose Fairs.
Which, actually, I rather like.
Because the connection I thought I’d spotted wasn’t there.
Instead I found a much better one.
A Devon town’s claim to a Goose Fayre caught the attention of someone from Nottingham. Its claim to rebelliousness made me look twice.
Then I followed that rebellion back to Lyme Regis, where we happened to be going in the first place, through the catastrophically dysfunctional Stuart dynasty, and eventually all the way back to Nottingham.
He didn’t leave them to me. After he died, I found them among the things in his house after his belongings had been picked through by fairly distant relatives.
I couldn’t bear the thought of them simply disappearing. They were wrapped in waxed paper, tucked inside a small, battered cardboard box marked OHMS.
I knew they must have meant something to him.
So I kept them.
More than twenty years later, I found myself looking at them properly.
There are two: a Defence Medal and a War Medal 1939–45. Unlike the First World War medals I’d been looking at as part of some family-history research, neither has its recipient’s name stamped around the edge. But the box does have a name and address:
Mr A. Naylor 67 Fernleigh Ave Westdale Lane Mapperley Nottingham
Which is odd.
Because Mr N lived at number 71.
Which naturally prompted some questions that I just can’t help trying to unpick.
We moved to Fernleigh Avenue when I was a child – probably around 8 years old – and my earliest memory of the Naylors involves a guinea pig.
Ours had escaped and, exercising the sort of navigational judgement you might expect from a guinea pig, had ended up next door.
Mrs Naylor was lovely. Larger than life, certainly compared with her husband, and wonderfully welcoming as we attempted to retrieve our fugitive pet from her garden.
Mr Naylor was much quieter.
In fact, in those earliest memories he was almost a supporting character to Mrs N. He was just Mr Naylor, although over the years that became shortened to Mr N.
I don’t think I even knew Mrs Naylor’s first name back then.
I do now.
She was Dorothy.
Dorothy Naylor died in 1988, which means it can’t have been very long after we moved to Fernleigh Avenue. And with her death something changed. Not immediately or dramatically, but the quieter half of the couple next door gradually became somebody we knew much better.
Mr N became a fixture.
He was a Derby County supporter, which was unfortunate given that he had moved into a Nottingham Forest-supporting household’s sphere of influence.
He particularly enjoyed asking about the football when Forest had not done very well. These enquiries were invariably delivered with an innocence that fooled nobody. His calm delivery belied a wicked sense of humour.
As it turns out, he had earned the right.
Mr N really was from Derbyshire.
His full name was Archibald Naylor, and he was born on Christmas Day, 1906.
That was something else I once knew and had forgotten. Mr N’s birthday was Christmas Day.
The records put his birthplace at Ilkeston. His father, Henry William Naylor, came from Loscoe and was a self-employed confectioner.
In 1921, Archie was fourteen.
This is where researching somebody you actually knew becomes slightly peculiar.
The Mr N of my memory is an old man. I can picture him perfectly well in his house next door. I can hear the mischievous enquiries about Forest. But until now I’d never had cause to imagine fourteen-year-old Archie Naylor.
He had a job.
He was an errand boy for a hairdresser called W. Annable.
There is something wonderful about discovering such a completely mundane fact about somebody decades after they died. I knew Mr N for years. I knew what football team he supported and what he thought constituted an adequate Sunday dinner.
I had absolutely no idea he’d once been a hairdresser’s errand boy.
By 1935 he’d moved into another phase of his life. Archie married Dorothy Shephard that year.
Four years later, the 1939 Register finds them together on Fernleigh Avenue. I suspect they may have moved there as newlyweds, possibly even into a newly built house, although that’s one part of the story I haven’t yet managed to prove.
Archibald Naylor, born 25 December 1906.
Dorothy Naylor, born 26 September 1902.
Both had the same occupation:
Hosiery cutter.
Perhaps that’s how they met.
I don’t know that, and records can’t tell us. Nottingham and its surrounding towns were built on hosiery, so two people working in the industry finding one another was hardly remarkable.
But I like the possibility.
What we can say is that in 1939 the young Mr and Mrs N weren’t at number 71.
They were at 57 Fernleigh Avenue.
At some later point Mr N’s address was number 67, because that’s where his wartime medals were sent. By the time I knew him, it was 71.
Fernleigh Avenue was still developing around them, with new houses appearing and numbering changing. Exactly when those numbers changed — and whether every change represents renumbering rather than a move a few doors along — is something I haven’t quite untangled yet, I’m pretty sure they never moved house though.
But the little cardboard medal box suddenly made something I’d never thought about before visible.
Mr N had been on Fernleigh Avenue for a very long time.
The medals themselves raise more questions than they answer.
The two I have are the Defence Medal and the War Medal 1939–45.
I have a vague recollection that Mr N’s war was spent at home, perhaps in something akin to the Home Guard. I certainly don’t remember him talking about serving overseas.
But memory isn’t evidence, and I don’t know.
That’s one of the strange things about this exercise.
Why didn’t I ask him?
The obvious answer is that I was a child and then a teenager, and Mr N was an old man who lived next door. Although, like plenty of teenage boys, I went through at least a passing obsession with the war, which makes it slightly surprising that I never thought to ask.
People don’t generally introduce themselves to children with an eighty-year autobiography.
And when somebody is part of your everyday life, you tend to know them in the present tense.
Mr N was simply Mr N.
His lounge had decorative plates on the wall depicting Bill Sikes and Fagin. I remember those.
He had an elephant door knocker. I remember that too. In fact, the elephant survived him, migrating next door and spending its retirement in the garden room at Mum and Dad’s.
I remember his football team.
I remember his dinners.
I don’t remember ever asking what he’d done to earn the medals.
As he got older, Mr N increasingly relied on Meals on Wheels.
There was, however, a flaw in the system.
They didn’t deliver on Sundays.
So Mum started plating up an extra Sunday dinner and we’d take it round to him.
The first time we did this, Mr N inspected what we’d brought and asked about pudding.
We didn’t habitually have pudding.
This apparently constituted a serious failure in the service we were providing.
Mum frantically improvised something.
Thereafter, we had pudding on Sundays.
Thanks, Mr N.
Eventually somebody reached the fairly obvious conclusion that if we were cooking Mr N a Sunday dinner anyway, carrying it next door was unnecessarily complicated.
So instead of dinner going to Mr N, Mr N came to dinner.
And then Christmas.
I hadn’t thought until doing this research about the fact that every Christmas Mr N spent with us was also his birthday.
Christmas Day 1906.
I must once have known that. Perhaps we even marked it at the time. But it had disappeared somewhere into the enormous collection of things you once knew and didn’t realise you’d forgotten.
The record gave it back to me.
There was one occasion when I got home from school before Mum and Dad.
The phone rang.
It was Mr N.
He wasn’t very well.
I was old enough to understand that something needed doing, so after popping over to him and finding him struggling, I called an ambulance.
Unfortunately I wasn’t quite smart enough to reliably calculate which direction house numbers went.
We lived at number 69. Mr N lived next door, so in my youthful wisdom I subtracted two and confidently told the emergency services operative that he was at number 67.
He wasn’t.
He was at 71.
Mr N, despite being ill enough that I’d just summoned an ambulance for him, had to correct me.
I find that particularly funny now.
Because sitting in front of me today is a cardboard box addressed:
Mr A. Naylor 67 Fernleigh Avenue.
I was right.
Just several decades too late.
Archibald Naylor died in the first few months of 2004.
He was 97 years old.
That number surprised me even though I knew he’d been well into his nineties. Ninety-seven years is an enormous amount of life.
And what follows is an almost comically inadequate summary of one.
He had been born before the First World War.
At fourteen he ran errands for a hairdresser.
He married Dorothy in 1935.
They cut hosiery for a living.
He lived through another world war and undertook some form of service during it, although I still don’t know exactly what.
He spent decades with Dorothy.
He lost her in 1988 and lived another sixteen years without her.
And that’s about it.
Ninety-seven years compressed into a handful of facts gathered from forms filled in decades apart.
I don’t know what Archie was doing on his twentieth birthday. I don’t know where he and Dorothy went on their first date, or whether they had one. I don’t know what they did on Saturday nights, where they went on holiday, what frightened them, what they argued about, or what made them laugh.
I don’t even know what he did during a world war whose medals are sitting on the desk in front of me.
But I do know that, much later, he expected pudding with his Sunday dinner.
And perhaps that’s the strange bargain between records and memory.
The records can tell me things about Mr N that I never knew. They can introduce me to Archie: the Derbyshire boy, the fourteen-year-old hairdresser’s errand runner, the hosiery cutter, Dorothy’s new husband, the man already living on Fernleigh Avenue before the Second World War had begun.
But the records don’t know about the Bill Sikes and Fagin plates.
They don’t know about the elephant door knocker.
There is no box on the 1939 Register for enjoyed enquiring about Nottingham Forest after a defeat.
And nowhere in the official record of the life of Archibald Naylor will it say that an elderly widower once asked where his pudding was and consequently changed the Sunday dining habits of the family next door.
Those are the bits we get to keep.
Between the records and the memories, perhaps we can see a little more of him than either could preserve alone.
Not a 97-year life. Not even close.
Just fragments of one.
For more than twenty years, two of those fragments have been sitting in a little cardboard box.
I kept Mr N’s medals because I knew they mattered to him. I still don’t know exactly why.
But they made me curious enough to ask.
And perhaps that’s what telling somebody’s story really amounts to.
Not recovering everything.
Just making sure that a little more of them survives.
Title irresistibly pilfered from the excellent Gaz Brookfield’s ‘Limelight’
I’ve always hated the term “Hell Hounds”.
For the uninitiated, it’s a name adopted by some of the more dedicated followers of Ferocious Dog. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. People like belonging to things, people like having names for the things they belong to, and if calling yourself a Hell Hound makes you happy then you should absolutely crack on.
But it makes me cringe.
Worse still is anything along the lines of “a proper Hell Hound would…” or “all Hell Hounds think…”
Ugh.
The early days: lots of familiar faces, ridiculous amounts of travelling and a community I was very happily part of – whatever anybody wanted to call us.
A warning before we go any further: this is going to be an unusually self-indulgent post.
Most things I write here might start with me, but generally wander off fairly quickly towards a place, a memory, a bit of history or whatever other rabbit hole has caught my attention. This one is, unapologetically, about me. Almost entirely.
I’ve recently been rummaging through an extraordinary amount of detritus left behind by younger versions of myself – old fanzines, university records, ancient websites, forum posts and blogs – and somewhere along the way I realised I’d inadvertently assembled something approaching a thirty-year archive of how I thought, what interested me and where I chose to spend my time.
So naturally, rather than doing anything sensible with this information, I decided to conduct an amateur psychological investigation into myself.
What could possibly go wrong?
The starting point for this particular bout of navel-gazing was something I’d previously filed away as just another one of my quirks.
Why does something as innocuous as “Hell Hounds” irritate me quite so much?
And in trying to answer that, I stumbled into a much bigger question about something I’ve done for most of my life.
I’m not sure I’m very good at belonging.
Which probably sounds ridiculous to anybody who knows me.
I’ve spent huge chunks of my life immersed in communities. As a teenager I was involved with my brother’s Nottingham Forest fanzine, Forest Forever. Later I helped establish the Lost That Loving Feeling forum and became part of the community that grew around it. I wrote anonymously about Forest for years on another blog. As football gradually became less important to me, music increasingly took its place and I spent years travelling around the country and beyond watching Ferocious Dog, started Ferocious Blog, acquired another sprawling collection of friends, a life partner, and eventually even ended up playing in a band myself.
Alongside all of that, in various incarnations, domains and bits of increasingly obsolete internet technology, I’ve maintained a personal website or blog for most of my adult life.
So I’m hardly a hermit.
And yet there’s a pattern here that goes back much further than any of those things.
Clique hopping
At secondary school I was a serial clique-hopper.
I had friends in lots of different groups without ever feeling completely embedded in one. I probably never fully penetrated the genuinely cool groups, and certainly not the particularly sporty ones, but I was generally on good terms with them. I could move between groups reasonably comfortably.
At the time I don’t remember thinking there was anything significant about this. Why would I? They were just my friends.
Exhibit A: My secondary school tutor group. I’d intended this to illustrate my teenage clique-hopping, until I noticed I wasn’t in the photograph, I was outside the group documenting it from behind a camera. Of course I was.
Looking back, though, I’ve sometimes wondered whether there was a strategy buried in there that I didn’t consciously understand.
If you’re friendly with everybody but never invest your entire social identity in one group, nobody can completely reject you.
Was that what I was doing?
I genuinely don’t know.
There’s an obvious danger when rummaging around inside your own childhood from the vantage point of several decades later. Memories aren’t data, and it’s remarkably easy to retrofit an elegant explanation onto behaviour that was actually just a teenager wandering around talking to whoever happened to be there.
But the pattern didn’t entirely disappear.
I’ve continued to move quite comfortably between groups of people throughout my life. I can become heavily involved with a community without ever quite planting a flag and thinking: these are my people; this is where I belong.
Or perhaps that isn’t quite right either.
Maybe I don’t have a problem belonging.
Maybe I have a problem claiming that I belong.
Know your place
I notice it particularly around people who attract attention.
If I know somebody who happens to have a crowd of people wanting to speak to them, I will almost invariably concede the space.
There are perfectly reasonable motives for that. I’ve probably had plenty of opportunities to talk to them before. The person waiting might not have. Their time isn’t mine to monopolise.
But if I’m being completely truthful, there’s another calculation going on too.
Who am I to assume they particularly want to talk to me?
And perhaps even more revealingly: I absolutely do not want the people around them to think I’m hanging around simply because they’re somebody worth hanging around.
Which can create the slightly ridiculous situation where my relationship with somebody is being influenced by the imagined judgement of complete strangers who know neither of us.
To assert I actually know this person feels hideously self-important, even when it is simply an unremarkable statement of fact.
So I tend to step back.
The other person may not be conducting any of these calculations whatsoever. They might simply see me and think, there’s Al.
Meanwhile I’ve convened a committee meeting in my head to establish whether I have sufficient standing to say hello.
A proper Hell Hound
Which brings me back to those bloody Hell Hounds.
I don’t actually dislike communities. The evidence against that proposition would be overwhelming. I’ve spent much of my life joining them, helping to create them and documenting them in frankly unnecessary levels of detail.
What I really dislike, I think, is what can happen when membership becomes an identity and the identity starts acquiring rules.
A proper fan would…
People like us think…
You can’t call yourself a real supporter if…
Something inside me immediately responds:
Who the fuck put you in charge?
This turns out not to be an entirely unexplored psychological phenomenon.
In 1991, psychologist Marilynn Brewer proposed Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. In extremely simplified terms, it describes a tension between two social needs: we want inclusion and belonging, but we also want to retain our individuality. We therefore negotiate a comfortable distance between being part of the group and being swallowed by it.
That struck a chord.
I want to be able to love a band without having to love every record they make. I want to disagree with other fans without having my credentials checked. I don’t care how many gigs somebody has attended, whether they were there “before they got big”, whether they know members of the band or whether they bought the limited-edition commemorative tea towel.
And I certainly don’t think doing any of those things gives me the right to tell somebody else how they should enjoy the same thing.
Belonging is fine.
Terms and conditions apply? Not so much.
An accidental longitudinal study
The problem with amateur self-analysis is that it’s incredibly easy to talk yourself into whatever conclusion appeals to you.
Fortunately – or perhaps unfortunately – I have something most people don’t have when attempting to work out whether they’ve behaved consistently over several decades.
I have an absolutely ludicrous amount of evidence.
I have been leaving bits of myself lying around on paper and the internet since I was a teenager.
There are forty-one issues of Forest Forever in a box in the shed. There are old websites, forum posts, cartoons, abandoned domains, blogs, comments and articles. Some were written under my own name, some under usernames and one entire Forest blog was deliberately written anonymously.
Exhibit B: Forest Forever, from Issue 1 to Issue 41. Apparently I’ve been leaving evidence for the prosecution since the early 1990s.
My personal website has existed in one form or another throughout most of it, quietly accumulating whatever happened to interest me at the time.
More recently I’ve been digging through some of this detritus.
It’s an odd experience.
Normally when we remember our younger selves, we do so through the filter of everything that has happened since. I can tell you what I think I was like at 30.
But occasionally I can also ask 30-year-old me.
And he left several thousand words explaining himself.
The superficial story is one I’ve sometimes been slightly unkind to myself about.
I flit.
Forest Forever ends. Later there’s LTLF. Then an anonymous Forest blog. Then Ferocious Blog. Subjects change, platforms change, communities change.
There he goes again.
Another enthusiasm. Another project.
Can’t stick at anything.
Except the closer I’ve looked, the less convincing that interpretation has become.
Forest Forever largely ended because my brother went away to university. My first significant withdrawal from football coincided with the teenage discovery that girls were considerably more interesting than Nottingham Forest. My later disenchantment with Forest coincided both with increasing unhappiness about football and the club’s ownership and with music becoming an increasingly important part of my life.
Ferocious Blog eventually slowed down for different reasons again. Its original purpose – essentially to shout Ferocious Dog are brilliant and you should probably go and see them – became increasingly redundant as rather more people started doing exactly that. Covid disrupted the social world around it, the crowds grew, familiar faces became less ubiquitous and my own relationship with the band and scene changed.
Meanwhile I hadn’t stopped writing.
The personal blog was there throughout almost all of it.
It never really had a purpose, which might be precisely why it survived.
Same bloke, different subject
Something else became apparent while reading the old material.
The subjects change considerably.
The person writing about them rather less so.
Exhibit C: actually quite selective different websites, different subjects, different centuries in web design. Annoyingly, much the same bloke behind them.
My anonymous Forest blog contains endless examples of me worrying away at group consensus. Why has everybody decided this manager is an idiot? What do we actually know about this owner? Why are we assuming that player is motivated by greed? Where did this rumour come from? Why has everybody repeated it until it became true? Why does disagreement online so rapidly turn into abuse?
At the time I thought I was writing about Nottingham Forest.
Reading it years later, there’s an awful lot about crowds, identity, conformity, communication and the way groups construct their own versions of reality.
Then I wandered away from football and started writing about music.
Different subject.
Many of the same preoccupations.
Who belongs? Who decides? What makes somebody authentic? How do relationships change as a community grows? What happens when a loose collection of people starts acquiring labels, hierarchies, rituals and rules?
Apparently I’d changed obsessions without changing all that much.
Did university do this to me?
There’s another layer to this which I’m not sure how to untangle.
In the late 1990s I studied Communication Studies at Nottingham Trent University.
Exhibit D: did I choose subjects like these because I already thought this way, or did studying them teach me to? Answers on a postcard.
Recently I’ve also been looking back through my old academic record, and the subjects I chose and enjoyed now seem suspiciously familiar: Culture and Society, Sociolinguistics, Mass Media, Psychological Perspectives and various excursions into identity, language, culture and the ways people make sense of the world around them.
So which way round did that work?
Was I drawn to those subjects because I was already the sort of person fascinated by groups, identity and how people construct meaning?
Or did spending three years being encouraged to think about those things permanently alter the way I looked at the world?
I suspect the deeply unsatisfying answer is: both.
Perhaps university gave names and structures to questions I was already inclined to ask.
Or perhaps I’ve simply read my own subsequent history and retrofitted another convenient pattern onto it.
There’s a lot of that going on here.
An unreliable sociometer
Another idea from psychology made me slightly more uncomfortable.
Sociometer theory, developed by psychologist Mark Leary and colleagues, proposes that part of the function of self-esteem is to monitor our perceived relational value – essentially, how much we think other people value having us around.
If that’s even approximately right, I suspect mine may occasionally be calibrated a little pessimistically.
There seems to be a recurring tendency for me to demand more evidence than should reasonably be necessary before accepting positive conclusions about myself.
I’ve described myself as suffering from imposter syndrome at work.
Something similar happened with writing.
When I was heavily involved in Forest websites and forums, people occasionally told me they liked things I wrote. Rather than simply accepting this perfectly pleasant information, I wondered whether my established presence in those communities was influencing their reaction.
So I started an entirely anonymous Forest blog.
Looking back my anonymous foray into Forest writing was actually very productive!
This was, although I didn’t describe it this way at the time, essentially an experiment designed to remove the confounding variable of me.
People read that too.
Quite a lot of them, as it happens.
Apparently confronted with evidence that contradicted my hypothesis, I responded in the traditional scientific manner by quietly moving on and finding other things to doubt about myself.
The bigger the crowd, the smaller the world
This also gives me a different way of thinking about my changing relationship with Ferocious Dog.
In the earlier years I could walk into a gig and recognise a ridiculous proportion of the people there. The same faces appeared everywhere. Gigs were gigs, but they were also reunions.
Then the band became more successful and the crowds became bigger.
This was obviously a good thing. I’d spent years writing a blog whose barely concealed purpose was to encourage precisely this outcome.
The bastards eventually listened.
I’m in there somewhere with Ella, at Devil’s Arse, Derbyshire in August 2026.
But something changed for me.
A room containing a thousand people who like the same band as me ought logically to contain more of “my people” than a room containing a hundred of them.
It didn’t feel that way.
There were fewer familiar faces proportionally. Less of the feeling of walking into a room and immediately knowing where you fitted. Covid accelerated the change. People came and went. Lives changed. Mine did too.
For a while I’ve explained that simply as losing some of my passion for the band, and there’s undoubtedly truth in that.
But perhaps something else diminished too.
Not membership of a fanbase.
The density of relationships within it.
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Belonging, but not too much
So where does all this leave me?
Annoyingly, without a diagnosis.
I don’t know whether teenage me moved between friendship groups because it reduced the possibility of rejection.
I don’t know whether my reluctance to assert my place in adult relationships comes from the same place.
I don’t know how much is self-doubt, how much is politeness, how much is independence and how much is simply a personality that quite enjoys wandering between different groups of people.
I don’t even know whether I’ve discovered a pattern here or constructed one because humans are extremely good at finding patterns once they start looking for them.
But I do think I’ve been slightly unfair to myself in describing some of this as an inability to stick at things.
Look beneath the changing interests and there’s actually a surprising amount of continuity.
I’ve been writing and publishing things for most of my life.
I’ve repeatedly sought out communities and formed friendships within them.
I’ve repeatedly been interested in how groups behave.
And I’ve repeatedly resisted allowing membership of those groups to dictate what I’m supposed to think.
Maybe the clique-hopping schoolboy, the Forest fanzine cartoonist, the university student writing about culture and society, the anonymous football blogger, the reluctant Hell Hound and the middle-aged bloke writing increasingly self-indulgent essays on his personal blog aren’t quite as different as they initially appear.
Perhaps I’ve simply spent my life trying to find a comfortable distance from the groups I care about.
Close enough to form real attachments.
Far enough away to retain my independence.
And, sometimes, perhaps rather farther away than necessary because I haven’t quite trusted the evidence that other people actually want me there.
I’m not sure I particularly want to change the first two.
Goddammit 
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