.UK~kid~YA.YA's Profile » Send Message | » Add to Buddy List | » Add to Block List

Bradford is a city of the 19th century. Victorian mills and built around the textile
trade; all its special and interesting features come from that era. In a fit of madness a
lot of the buildings were torn down in the 60s to be replaced with ugly and featureless
metal and glass and concrete and the heart of the city died with it. It is a city without
much identity and too much resentment. Everyone with a good job actually works somewhere
else. It’s where I was born and grew up.

I was born on December 12th 1979. Margaret Thatcher was already Prime Minister and that
really defined a lot about England at the time. I lived in a terrace (town house) for the
first couple of years of my life but can’t remember anything about it at all. We
moved to a semi detached Victorian house just after my little sister was born (Katherine)
and I lived there till I became an adult.

I started school early; I was an overachiever for a long time. Quiet, but not necessarily
unpopular. I went to a school that was majority non-white so I kind of stood out. I
enjoyed school immensely and was popular enough not to care about such concepts until I
was 13.

When I was 13 I went to a majority white school for the first time in my life and I hated
it. The people were largely scum, the teachers didn’t care and no one was expected
to succeed. I made a great friend there in Wayne and greatly enjoyed pissing off every
teacher I could while I was there. For the first time in my life I was genuinely hated by
people and I cam out of there an utter bastard in many ways. It made me more ruthless than
most people realised. Certainly than I did.

At 16 I passed my GCSEs (think of it as graduating, kind of) and went to college to study
A Levels (think of it as extra credit graduating, maybe). I loved it at college, I was
popular again, I had friends and everyone was working together towards a common goal. The
kids were mostly white but I felt like I didn’t wholly belong there. I started
softening again and I met the first girl I ever really fell in love with.

I got my A Levels, didn’t do quite as well as I should have and should have realised
that was more significant than I thought it was. I put it down to having been lazy rather
than a lack of interest in the subjects. I went to university (what you would call
college) and spent a year getting drunk and not quite fitting in or letting go. I dropped
out after a year and started a series of not very inspiring and not very fun jobs while
going to night school to study programming.

March 2001 I got a job at a company called Brand Support. It was run by a psychopath who
has since gone bankrupt. He bullied and belittled his staff, he was a crook and he ran his
company into the ground. And, as I had at 13, I found that you make your best friends
during times of stress. And, when I walked out of there after six months, I fell into a
decent job doing Technical Support at a school which was the best learning experience you
can have in this field.

I stayed at the school for nearly a year and found there is only so much one man can do
with a tiny budget. It was a bad school in a rough area and some of the stuff I dealt with
I wouldn’t wish on a social worker. I got an offer to go and work with people from
Brand Support again and jumped at it. The company started losing money after about four
months of me being there and I got fairly desperate to get out, finally leaving to
freelance but then coming with the salesman to Inox.

I just described myself as the sum total of my jobs and education and there was a lot more
than that. A lot of people whom I loved, who loved me, whom I hurt and who hurt me. I have
made mistakes and there are traits in my personality, which means I make the same
decisions over and over regardless of knowing what the likely outcome is. The main things
that have shaped me are having a little sister (who I love dearly), my granddad dying when
I was 6, being threatened with expulsion from school at 14 and dropping out of university.
Mostly it is challenges and tragedies and how we react to them that define our
characters.

I know sometimes I seem weird and distant and secretive and I hate being