That whole single threaded thing once again…

I’ve been thinking about this whole single threaded roots thing. I recently used the example of music. In ‘83 my mate Angus lent me a cassette of Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast Album. I listened to it, said “that’s f#$^& awesome” and have never looked back. There are a number of other placed where one person had a huge influence on me. Swearing is another one.

I’d been to football grounds and thought I knew about swearing. I though I’d heard everything, mostly prefaced with “The referee is…”, but occasionally used as a question “Are you #$&* joking!” and one or twice as a gentle suggestion (“$@#*# Get up you useless $&*#”). By this time I’d been taught there was language that was acceptable on the terrace at Aldershot that was clearly not permissible at home (and lets not tell your mum about this).

First time I heard dad swear was on the terrace. It’s one of those rites if passage, abet a minor one, but a rite of passage none the less. The game was between Woking and Dagenham, being played at Kingfield for a place in the 1980 FA trophy final. This is the biggest non-league trophy and means a huge day out at Wembley for the finalists.

I remember dad swore, very loudly and very clearly and I believe I stood there looking at him trying to process what I’d just heard. He just carried on as if nothing had happened.

I guess if this were a really ironic story (actually my new definition of irony is “Sweet home Alabama” played in a bar in Castro Valley, talk about playing to an audience of one…) I’d share about how I went home and repeated what I’d heard to mum. Dad would get into trouble for using such words in front of me and we’d all laugh about it years later. However that did not happen. While clearly my survival instincts are not the best, but even I got that repeating what I’d heard on the terrace in the house was a really, really bad idea.

A couple of years later the whole swearing thing moved up a notch thanks to my oldest friend Rob. We go back almost 30 years and he was the first of my close friends who had the right mix of foresight and vision to start playing with swear words.

Rob and I on the train heading into London to a computer show at Earls Court (this was maybe 1982, my inner geekdom has deep roots) and Rob threw out some creative swearing, he used two words that in my experience had not been put together before. As teenagers do, we were calling each other names I got hit with a “piss on you asshole” and went whoa I had never heard that combination of words. While yeah I’d heard them individually, but this was different.

I had nothing to return over the net, game to Rob and a whole new world was born. I like to think I’ve made up for lost time, and I’ve been told by multiple people that being English helps when it comes to sounding authoritative with a potty mouth, but I like to think that today my bad language can stand on it’s own two feet.

As I’ve said before, It’s quite a moment when someone knows you well enough to sit you down, say “you are going to like this” and not only be right, but be an influence for decades to come.