Pen pals….

I haven't posted for a while. I could say that I've been busy, had a lot to do, or that I've not had anything much to say; and whilst these excuses reasons are true, it's mainly because I haven't had the heart. If you leave a comment on my blog you'll notice that it will require approval. I've never felt the need to do this before, but the world wide web is a big web and it crawls with spiders. There are some very self- obsessed people out there. Self obsessed and angry.

I had a pen pal once, back in those dark and distant days when you actually did use a pen and write on paper. I remember my pen was full of turquoise Stephenson’s ink and the pen had a rubber pump thing inside so that the ink could be drawn from the bottle.

How innocent the past was. I applied to an ad reading ‘Pen Pals Wanted’ that I found in the back of a comic. Think about letting your kids do that today. It wouldn’t happen for fear of who they might pen to - my God they could get anyone! Anyway, my pen pal wasn’t a forty-six year old man living with his mother and his collection of specialist magazines. No, my pen pal was nine, named Clive, and he lived in Clacton.

It soon became apparent that I had little in common with Clive. He was a great football fan and avid collector of football cards He would insist on going on about both, in letter after letter, asking me if I had any ‘swopsies’ despite me explaining that I didn’t do football in any shape or form. The more he wrote about football the more he insisted that I should follow it, get myself a team, even support his beloved Tottenham Hotspur.

I just kept writing about the books I was reading, my stamp collection and Dr. Who and as the weeks went on he got more and more irate, demanding that I get myself a team and write about football. He made all sorts of threats; he’d write to my school and tell them I was ‘one of them’; he’d tell the police I was a loony; he even threatened to stop writing to me. I only wished he would stop, but instead he wrote more frequently, two or three letters a week; goodness knows where he got the thruppences for the stamps.

Eventually his letters became really abusive, calling me all sorts of names and threatening me with violence from his dad/brother/pals/gang and after a while I stopped writing. But Clive kept up writing his no longer football-full, thrice-weekly, abusive letters until eventually I stopped reading them and threw them away as soon as they arrived. He was beginning to scare me; not the threats he made, but the rage with which he made them, simply because he couldn’t get his own way and control me.

Eventually the letters stopped, he probably moved on to abuse another pen pal. I’m sure that he went on to be one of those seventies teenage football hooligans that destroyed spectator football for a while, going to the game for the violence rather than the sport. Anyway, from what I knew of him from his letters he was totally unpleasant.

I suppose that these days that you might call him a Troll. I should have learnt my lesson that first time.