Bed time story, Mr Ashcroft? ((screened Dan only))
I can't actually bare to have written this and not have anyone see.
At least. That's the excuse, Mongleader, and we are sticking to it.
It comes in parts. This is LIFE B.A
There’s been a lot of men. There’s been a good few women as well. But very few good women. And the ones that have been that took my interest, grabbed it off of me and made me theirs completely. They were not good. They pretend to be perfect, and loving, and saintly. Kind, caring, divine.
They are anything but.
The reality of the situation is that these women think the world is there for them, and every body in it. They don’t take into account that they are one in a million for a number of reasons.
But here is the first one who meant a million in one.
Back when she was perfect, before going away changed her.
The first time I fell in love with a girl was when I was 14 years old, she was new in the village and beautiful, golden skin and mad wild hair, she wore blue contacts and it was just… It was strange in our village for there to be a family that wasn’t Caucasian (except their mother was, but her father was from Nigeria originally) as it was but she was like some sort of mythical creature, she wore glitter eyeliner and thousands of wooden beads and bangles, she wore ripped skirts one over another and strappy tops with no bra and ran around in bare feet and I loved her so much, she was perfection, absolute perfection and I never understood how she ended up in my village. Katrina was her name, and she had two sisters, Kenya, and Amandine, and a baby brother, Edward, and she would look after them and take them for walks past my house and I’d watch her from the apple tree in my garden and there was one time I fell out and I was so embarrassed, her sisters laughed but she shushed them and patched up my knee and they stayed in my garden that day and she told me to call her Kat and I said meow and she laughed and it was the happiest moment of my life up till then.
I remember being 15, she was trying to teach me how to play bongo drums and I couldn’t pick it up properly, because she was wearing this yellow strappy knee length summer dress, all chiffon and silks, and she kept leaning over me and my little heart was fluttering in my chest so hard that I thought it was going to break, and she kept laughing at me with her strange and beautiful voice, a mixture of her parents accents, and she grabbed my hands and told me to stop thinking about everything so hard, to stop thinking like everything mattered, to just be in the moment. So I leaned forward and I kissed her, only I didn’t know how properly and our noses pressed together before I hit her lips and then I did kiss her I was kissing her and the next thing I knew I was running really fast away from her and she was calling to me to come back.
Because I was running away from my own house.
I stayed away until after dark and I got the belt from my father for worrying my mother and no dinner but as I lay in my bed that night the back of my legs stinging and my tummy was aching but I had the BIGEST smile on my face and my brother complained he could see my teeth in the dark glowing but he didn’t mind really case he was 18 and he knew what it was and thought it was funny. He’d had OVER TWO GIRLFRIENDS by this time and was wise to the world.
In our 16th summer she told me I was her boyfriend and she changed my hair and my clothes, I wore t shirts and cord jackets instead of pullovers, and flares instead of turn ups and we were just mad empowered hippy children two decades too late, and the first time we ever had sex it was drunk on local cider, and she’d stolen condoms from the chemist cause I was too shy to buy them, and it was under that apple tree that I had fallen out of so many summers ago. After she carved our names into it, Kat and Jon, and she put a star around it because love hearts bored her, and stars were symbolic to her faith, and stars were symbolic to my faith, and I said but mine has six stars and she told me not to worry, not to fret over things like that, and that I didn’t need to have six points, I didn’t even need three, I only needed her and me and soon I would know that, because she would show me the way.
When we were 17 we ran away. We ran away to Brighton and suddenly everything was different, and we didn’t wear shift tops or cardigans or bootleg jeans anymore I wore tank tops and whistles and combats and she wore electric blue hot pants and gold belly tops and we put litres of hairspray in our curls and she painted neon strips across our faces and we went to parties where older kids would feed us pills and she would sleep with boys we didn’t know but only look at me and I would only watch her face as some girl would unfasten my belt and we’d smile cause this was what living in the moment was, you couldn’t feel regret or remorse if you just kept living in the future, and we did and it was magic and she got my name tattooed to her inner thigh only it wasn’t a name my parents gave me it was her name that she had made up in her secret heart and I couldn’t know it but she could show me the symbol of it and she asked if she had a secret name too and I said yes because I didn’t know what else to say and sometimes I didn’t always understand what she meant because English isn’t my first language and I wasn’t as spiritual as her.
We were caught and brought back home after a few months, and she didn’t get to see me for a while.
When we were 18 we both went to Cardiff university and I did photography and she did sculpture but I was meant to be working on an oil rig and everyone in my family was so angry that I didn’t want to; I wanted to take photos of her moments so that maybe she would let me look at them because they weren’t really memories they were images of the moments and she liked that idea so I became a photographer and then there was a boy in my class…
And he had black hair and green eyes and stood just a bit taller than me and smelt of oranges and burning firewood and he was called Deiniol and that’s a funny thing because it’s a welsh name that means attractive or charming and so I told him and he smiled at me and said was that what I thought of him and I was almost knocked out because it was and I just looked at him wide eyed and the blood all rushing to my head and he laughed and carried on developing his film and I needed to sit down.
I found Kat in our break and told her and she thought it was brilliant.
Deiniol and Kat and me went about for a bit, and it was really nice, but they used to laugh a bit at me cause I was still so shy and stupid around people, so they fed me up with lots of pills and dripped acid on my tongue until I forgot all about being nervous and forgot all about my brother and my father on the rigs and my mother back home and no one called me Jonathan anymore they called me J or Jon or J bird cause I was always tweeting away and I wasn’t Jewish anymore because religion was the opiate of the masses and I didn’t speak Welsh I spoke English all the time and I didn’t eat I drank alcohol instead.
And Deiniol used to kiss me and tell me I was his own special boy but Katrina was his favourite, Katrina was always everybody’s favourite. Because she was perfect
Deiniol got a different boyfriend who didn’t like Kat very much but liked me, and Kat said I should go with him for a bit but it made Deiniol and him (Stuart, hazel eyes and mousey hair) not see each other anymore so Deiniol came back to us but he didn’t want speak to me much anymore and we would only kiss and touch if it was all three of us now and I was never really sure what I had done wrong.
But I was Katrina’s favourite and she didn’t like to see me sad so he stopped staying with us and she would only go and see him once a week for a while and then she didn’t see him she saw a girl (Melanie, pale skin and red hair) and Melanie was lovely but she didn’t like boys that way at all so that was just for Kat but that was ok as well, and if Melanie was coming to a party with us then she would grab a boy and tell him to fuck me and he would and I’d go along with it cause it made her happy to see me with other people because it was all about love now, and showing as many people as you possibly could that you loved them and they were important and I was quite often made to feel very important, maybe too important but I was never quite as important as Katrina but she was like fire, she burned through all the parties and everyone knew her and everyone knew I was hers really, and she was mine, and we went as a pair really unless she found someone she wanted to love for a little while that didn’t like boys.
I found another girl once, and she was called Emily, and she was really nice and quite quiet like me, she had big grey eyes and black hair and small hands and she liked writing, and she taught me about grammar and- the best part- punctuation, and she taught me ways of spelling tricky words. She encouraged me to write about things I cared about; She thought I should do more than only go to the parties. She was so bright and she spent so long teaching me about playing with words, about how one thing could actually mean several and I think I almost loved her too but we had to split up.
It was around the time that I met her that Katrina decided we should be a bit more excusive, she thought it would be best if I was her only man, and she was my only girl, and I thought this would be good as well because… I didn’t like seeing her with other boys really. I know that’s stupid and petty and jealous, the sort of thing that she would have hated, but I never let her know.
I was sad to end it with Emily though. She told me I was too sweet, and when I asked her for what she told me the world. She was another one I never quite understood.
When we were 20 her family moved to London and she went with them and I thought my heart would never stop breaking, I had another year of uni and she said she would set up a nest for us in London for her and her J bird and then one night, before she went, when we were back home from the City We lay under the apple tree that started this all and we talked about how simple everything had been when we were children, and she told me that I was her childhood, the only bit she ever thought mattered, and I kissed her and this time we didn’t bump noses at all, because he were in sync, Katrina and I, one person, and then I moved in her, like I had so long ago under that tree but this time it was perfect and slow and really meant something, not like when you’re just a kid and you don’t know what you’re doing, and then after in the sleepy haze I asked her to marry me one day and she said she would and I made her an engagement ring out of some daisies and we slept out there under the stars.
When I got to London she’d already made a tonne of friends like I knew she would and they were all really excited to meet me because Katrina always talked about me and that made me feel so good but she wouldn’t let me talk to them at first she wanted it just me and her and the next she had made us and that was fine by me because I hadn’t, really, not for a whole year unless she had come for a visit, and for days we just lived inside of each other and she told me every thing she’d done in London ad it was so much that it made my head spin and then we met her friends properly and they were good but they made fun of the way I spoke because it was a bit too different for them and they started calling me Jon boy like out of the Waltons cause they live in the country too and I tried explaining that it was cause I was from ANOTHER country I sounded like that but then Katrina was calling me that as well now so it didn’t really matter and we had so much fun, so so much fun and Katrina and I would stay up late in the room of the communal flat that was ours and plan our wedding and plan our family and we were safe in our little bubble and I never wanted it to change.
It changed when she said she wanted to see the world.
I had already seen mine.
She left August 12th, 1997.
I didn’t think I would last a week.
Turns out I didn’t have to, because on the 14th A girl we both know turned to me and said Jon, this is Dan Ashcroft, look after him for a bit yeah he’s new in London.
Next time… tune in for the remarkable tale of North meets West. Lions and Dragons. Roses and er… Leeks. (daffy-dills, its ok I’ve not forgotten my roots that badly)
But that was Katrina.
My girl.
If I could have grown
All upon my own
If I could have grown
I grew
If I could have grew
I do
If I had a throne
You could call it home
If I cry my tears are yours
To open any frozen doors
Hey let's do it like we're friends
Let's do it do it
Hey let's do it like we're friends.
At least. That's the excuse, Mongleader, and we are sticking to it.
It comes in parts. This is LIFE B.A
There’s been a lot of men. There’s been a good few women as well. But very few good women. And the ones that have been that took my interest, grabbed it off of me and made me theirs completely. They were not good. They pretend to be perfect, and loving, and saintly. Kind, caring, divine.
They are anything but.
The reality of the situation is that these women think the world is there for them, and every body in it. They don’t take into account that they are one in a million for a number of reasons.
But here is the first one who meant a million in one.
Back when she was perfect, before going away changed her.
The first time I fell in love with a girl was when I was 14 years old, she was new in the village and beautiful, golden skin and mad wild hair, she wore blue contacts and it was just… It was strange in our village for there to be a family that wasn’t Caucasian (except their mother was, but her father was from Nigeria originally) as it was but she was like some sort of mythical creature, she wore glitter eyeliner and thousands of wooden beads and bangles, she wore ripped skirts one over another and strappy tops with no bra and ran around in bare feet and I loved her so much, she was perfection, absolute perfection and I never understood how she ended up in my village. Katrina was her name, and she had two sisters, Kenya, and Amandine, and a baby brother, Edward, and she would look after them and take them for walks past my house and I’d watch her from the apple tree in my garden and there was one time I fell out and I was so embarrassed, her sisters laughed but she shushed them and patched up my knee and they stayed in my garden that day and she told me to call her Kat and I said meow and she laughed and it was the happiest moment of my life up till then.
I remember being 15, she was trying to teach me how to play bongo drums and I couldn’t pick it up properly, because she was wearing this yellow strappy knee length summer dress, all chiffon and silks, and she kept leaning over me and my little heart was fluttering in my chest so hard that I thought it was going to break, and she kept laughing at me with her strange and beautiful voice, a mixture of her parents accents, and she grabbed my hands and told me to stop thinking about everything so hard, to stop thinking like everything mattered, to just be in the moment. So I leaned forward and I kissed her, only I didn’t know how properly and our noses pressed together before I hit her lips and then I did kiss her I was kissing her and the next thing I knew I was running really fast away from her and she was calling to me to come back.
Because I was running away from my own house.
I stayed away until after dark and I got the belt from my father for worrying my mother and no dinner but as I lay in my bed that night the back of my legs stinging and my tummy was aching but I had the BIGEST smile on my face and my brother complained he could see my teeth in the dark glowing but he didn’t mind really case he was 18 and he knew what it was and thought it was funny. He’d had OVER TWO GIRLFRIENDS by this time and was wise to the world.
In our 16th summer she told me I was her boyfriend and she changed my hair and my clothes, I wore t shirts and cord jackets instead of pullovers, and flares instead of turn ups and we were just mad empowered hippy children two decades too late, and the first time we ever had sex it was drunk on local cider, and she’d stolen condoms from the chemist cause I was too shy to buy them, and it was under that apple tree that I had fallen out of so many summers ago. After she carved our names into it, Kat and Jon, and she put a star around it because love hearts bored her, and stars were symbolic to her faith, and stars were symbolic to my faith, and I said but mine has six stars and she told me not to worry, not to fret over things like that, and that I didn’t need to have six points, I didn’t even need three, I only needed her and me and soon I would know that, because she would show me the way.
When we were 17 we ran away. We ran away to Brighton and suddenly everything was different, and we didn’t wear shift tops or cardigans or bootleg jeans anymore I wore tank tops and whistles and combats and she wore electric blue hot pants and gold belly tops and we put litres of hairspray in our curls and she painted neon strips across our faces and we went to parties where older kids would feed us pills and she would sleep with boys we didn’t know but only look at me and I would only watch her face as some girl would unfasten my belt and we’d smile cause this was what living in the moment was, you couldn’t feel regret or remorse if you just kept living in the future, and we did and it was magic and she got my name tattooed to her inner thigh only it wasn’t a name my parents gave me it was her name that she had made up in her secret heart and I couldn’t know it but she could show me the symbol of it and she asked if she had a secret name too and I said yes because I didn’t know what else to say and sometimes I didn’t always understand what she meant because English isn’t my first language and I wasn’t as spiritual as her.
We were caught and brought back home after a few months, and she didn’t get to see me for a while.
When we were 18 we both went to Cardiff university and I did photography and she did sculpture but I was meant to be working on an oil rig and everyone in my family was so angry that I didn’t want to; I wanted to take photos of her moments so that maybe she would let me look at them because they weren’t really memories they were images of the moments and she liked that idea so I became a photographer and then there was a boy in my class…
And he had black hair and green eyes and stood just a bit taller than me and smelt of oranges and burning firewood and he was called Deiniol and that’s a funny thing because it’s a welsh name that means attractive or charming and so I told him and he smiled at me and said was that what I thought of him and I was almost knocked out because it was and I just looked at him wide eyed and the blood all rushing to my head and he laughed and carried on developing his film and I needed to sit down.
I found Kat in our break and told her and she thought it was brilliant.
Deiniol and Kat and me went about for a bit, and it was really nice, but they used to laugh a bit at me cause I was still so shy and stupid around people, so they fed me up with lots of pills and dripped acid on my tongue until I forgot all about being nervous and forgot all about my brother and my father on the rigs and my mother back home and no one called me Jonathan anymore they called me J or Jon or J bird cause I was always tweeting away and I wasn’t Jewish anymore because religion was the opiate of the masses and I didn’t speak Welsh I spoke English all the time and I didn’t eat I drank alcohol instead.
And Deiniol used to kiss me and tell me I was his own special boy but Katrina was his favourite, Katrina was always everybody’s favourite. Because she was perfect
Deiniol got a different boyfriend who didn’t like Kat very much but liked me, and Kat said I should go with him for a bit but it made Deiniol and him (Stuart, hazel eyes and mousey hair) not see each other anymore so Deiniol came back to us but he didn’t want speak to me much anymore and we would only kiss and touch if it was all three of us now and I was never really sure what I had done wrong.
But I was Katrina’s favourite and she didn’t like to see me sad so he stopped staying with us and she would only go and see him once a week for a while and then she didn’t see him she saw a girl (Melanie, pale skin and red hair) and Melanie was lovely but she didn’t like boys that way at all so that was just for Kat but that was ok as well, and if Melanie was coming to a party with us then she would grab a boy and tell him to fuck me and he would and I’d go along with it cause it made her happy to see me with other people because it was all about love now, and showing as many people as you possibly could that you loved them and they were important and I was quite often made to feel very important, maybe too important but I was never quite as important as Katrina but she was like fire, she burned through all the parties and everyone knew her and everyone knew I was hers really, and she was mine, and we went as a pair really unless she found someone she wanted to love for a little while that didn’t like boys.
I found another girl once, and she was called Emily, and she was really nice and quite quiet like me, she had big grey eyes and black hair and small hands and she liked writing, and she taught me about grammar and- the best part- punctuation, and she taught me ways of spelling tricky words. She encouraged me to write about things I cared about; She thought I should do more than only go to the parties. She was so bright and she spent so long teaching me about playing with words, about how one thing could actually mean several and I think I almost loved her too but we had to split up.
It was around the time that I met her that Katrina decided we should be a bit more excusive, she thought it would be best if I was her only man, and she was my only girl, and I thought this would be good as well because… I didn’t like seeing her with other boys really. I know that’s stupid and petty and jealous, the sort of thing that she would have hated, but I never let her know.
I was sad to end it with Emily though. She told me I was too sweet, and when I asked her for what she told me the world. She was another one I never quite understood.
When we were 20 her family moved to London and she went with them and I thought my heart would never stop breaking, I had another year of uni and she said she would set up a nest for us in London for her and her J bird and then one night, before she went, when we were back home from the City We lay under the apple tree that started this all and we talked about how simple everything had been when we were children, and she told me that I was her childhood, the only bit she ever thought mattered, and I kissed her and this time we didn’t bump noses at all, because he were in sync, Katrina and I, one person, and then I moved in her, like I had so long ago under that tree but this time it was perfect and slow and really meant something, not like when you’re just a kid and you don’t know what you’re doing, and then after in the sleepy haze I asked her to marry me one day and she said she would and I made her an engagement ring out of some daisies and we slept out there under the stars.
When I got to London she’d already made a tonne of friends like I knew she would and they were all really excited to meet me because Katrina always talked about me and that made me feel so good but she wouldn’t let me talk to them at first she wanted it just me and her and the next she had made us and that was fine by me because I hadn’t, really, not for a whole year unless she had come for a visit, and for days we just lived inside of each other and she told me every thing she’d done in London ad it was so much that it made my head spin and then we met her friends properly and they were good but they made fun of the way I spoke because it was a bit too different for them and they started calling me Jon boy like out of the Waltons cause they live in the country too and I tried explaining that it was cause I was from ANOTHER country I sounded like that but then Katrina was calling me that as well now so it didn’t really matter and we had so much fun, so so much fun and Katrina and I would stay up late in the room of the communal flat that was ours and plan our wedding and plan our family and we were safe in our little bubble and I never wanted it to change.
It changed when she said she wanted to see the world.
I had already seen mine.
She left August 12th, 1997.
I didn’t think I would last a week.
Turns out I didn’t have to, because on the 14th A girl we both know turned to me and said Jon, this is Dan Ashcroft, look after him for a bit yeah he’s new in London.
Next time… tune in for the remarkable tale of North meets West. Lions and Dragons. Roses and er… Leeks. (daffy-dills, its ok I’ve not forgotten my roots that badly)
But that was Katrina.
My girl.
If I could have grown
All upon my own
If I could have grown
I grew
If I could have grew
I do
If I had a throne
You could call it home
If I cry my tears are yours
To open any frozen doors
Hey let's do it like we're friends
Let's do it do it
Hey let's do it like we're friends.