My Girdle Is Killing Me!

Prologue: Portrait Of A Class Nerd

I was born in January 1964 in central Scotland – a first and, as it turned out, only son to Jim and Moira. My parents were “working class” – my mum worked as a shop assistant and dad was a builder and labourer – and we lived in a council house on the edge of the great central belt concrete jungle. It was far from picturesque, but it was all I knew until I left home in my late teens.

A little over two years after I made my entry into the world my sister, Donna, appeared on the scene. The two of us attended the local primary school, where neither of us achieved anything out of the ordinary. But even back then I wasn't “one of the gang” material – I didn't so much run with the pack as run from the pack. I would get picked on now and then – nothing major, nothing serious, just casual taunting – but it was an early sign of things to come.

When the subject of bullying ever came up, my dad was completely unsympathetic to my status as victim. He had this macho tough-guy mindset that was typical of that environment – in that regard his mentality wasn't too far removed from the bullies themselves. His solution to my problems was to tell me to stand up for myself and fight back, as if that were ever going to happen. From an early age I learned that there was going to be little support coming from that direction – a realisation that played no small part in influencing the hard decisions I had to make in my teenage years.

When my unexceptional primary school years came to an end, I transferred to a high school a few miles away. I was perfectly happy with the change of school, as there was nothing about my primary school that I would miss in the slightest. And a small part of me naïvely thought that a new start would see an end to any bullying problems. I was soon to be disabused of that notion.

It might have been a new school for me, but the same mentalities ruled in the playground. The gangs of low intelligence predators were there and always on the lookout for fresh meat. An influx of new kids from the nearby primaries each year gave them plenty to choose from and, being a quiet kid, that gave me a head start. I also had other characteristics that proved an unwanted attractive force for bullies:

Not long after starting secondary school, I started to emerge from the pack academically. New subjects turned up on the timetable – physics, chemistry, French and, a bit further down the line, German – and suddenly I was in my element. I was pretty much hopeless in any class that required any kind of manual skill, but that was fine by me, as the sciences were what I envisaged going on to study at university. Even then I was a dyed-in-the wool geek.

I was also a bit overweight. Chubby rather than fat – but I had that puppy-fat look about me that was an open invitation for every fat jibe going.

“Who ate all the pies?”
“When did you last see your feet?”
“Hey fatso, get a girdle!”

I had no idea at the time where that last one was going to lead.

Finally, the pièce-de-resistance. The thing that capped it all. The great big maraschino cherry on the cake – I had a medical dispensation from gym classes. Technically, being asthmatic shouldn't have seen me exempted, but my parents kicked up such a relentless fuss about it that the school must eventually have decided the whole affair was a damn sight more trouble than it was worth. I dare say these days there would be lots of bureaucracy and officialdom involved, but back then it was all dealt with on the fly. I would head off to the library to spend the time with my nose in a book, while everyone else ran about in all weathers running, jumping and chasing a variety of balls. It didn't win me many friends, though. I was definitely not Mr Popularity when, on a wet January day, I'd be inside in a warm library while they did a cross-country run through mud and rain.

All these factors contributed to putting a great big target on my back.