Whilst driving home the other night, I (mentally) stumbled upon an idea for some fun content for this blog, other than the occassional rant or my ‘Year in Photos’ pictures  - based mainly on proving what a twat I was when I was a teenager. Somewhere in my piles of nostalgia, I have two A5 diaries full of angsty teenage poems, notes to and from friends, doodles and musings by my teenage self.

Both Adam & Joe and Collins & Herring have aired some BRILLIANT examples of teenage Juvenilia on their 6music shows, so I decided I should have a go at digging out some of my own – from what I can remember I had a go at a few Haikus (though more likely rubbish limericks) during my Sixth Form days, and seeing as I spent most of my senior school days pining over a number of different female classmates, I’m bound to have a few ‘romantic’ epics in there too. So it seemed like a winning formula!

Only trouble is, I’ve dug through my ‘memory box’, through several other storage boxes and all our book shelves, and I can’t find the bloody things ANYWHERE. I’ve come to the depressing conclusion that I may actually have thrown the bloody things away a few years back, possibly in a fit of embarrassment after reading the contents in the harsh light of my mid-twenties.  What a total disaster!

I’ve got LOADS of other teenage memorabilia, but I don’t think any of it would really count as Juvenilia, since most of it was either created by or sent to me by other people. Old letters, cinema tickets, flyers, concert passes – all of these I have in spades. But none of them make for a very embarassing blog post subject.

I think I’m going to have to search for those books one more time before I call it a day…!

On a day whose highlights will include a visit to Tesco, two visits by plasterers, a trip out to look for a new oven and numerous loads of washing, I figured I probably wouldn’t get any good photos out of any of those activities. So whilst adding another toilet roll tube to the pile earlier, I snapped a picture of the growing pile, along with a selection of our bathroom reading material. Far from being offended at their bathroom placement, I would hope that any of the authors whose literature is featured here will take it as a complement – we like to have good literature on hand in the John!

The toilet roll tubes, in case you were wondering, are being collected to go in our “Crap bag” in the garage – a big liner full of boxes, tubes, cartons, scraps and other stuff that we might need for kid-based DIY projects. Maybe I’ve been watching “Mr Maker” too much, but I reckon you can never have enough junk like that to hand when you’re looking to make the next Tracy Island….!