Life on Mars…

I was always good at pretending, so good that even today I'm pretending all the time I think.

When I was a kid I could instantly become whoever I wanted - the Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, Superman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Milky Bar Kid - anything I could think of and anyone I wanted to be.

I don’t remember when the pretending started. Maybe it started even before I was born, inside my Mother, inside the warmth of her body. I may have pretended to be a fish or a star or a rumble of thunder – things that I should have known nothing about. But maybe I did even then, who knows. Perhaps my pretending started before I was even conceived.

Later, during those fleeting years of freedom where each day was a wonderful opportunity to pretend be whatever I’d seen on the television the night before - Fred Flintstone, Steve Tornado, Torchy, Michael Miles, I perfected my pretending.

And then came school. By this time I was such a master of pretence that I was even able to pretend to myself that I liked it. I pretended to my teacher that I was a good pupil, and it was only after realising that pretending I knew my seven times table wasn’t going to help me in mental arithmetic tests that I gave up pretending school was fun. So, instead I pretended that it didn’t bother me if I got the answers wrong.

Because I grew fat I pretended to be funny. Of course I wasn’t. Oh, I made people laugh, but looking back it was more tragic than funny. You’d never have known it though. Pretending had become what I did. I sometimes wonder if Tony Hancock was doing the same thing, pretending to be funny when really he was tragic. Tragic inside, I think he must have been.

Later, when I’d slimmed down again and gone off to ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels I pretended to be a rebel – spouting communist doctrine and taking on the establishment by singing the Red Flag instead of hymns in assembly. I pretended that I didn’t care that the boarding boys were so privileged and looked down on me. I even pretended that I didn’t hate them.

At college I pretended to be cool, cool in a seventies kind of way – smoking, drinking, talking bollocks, for a few weeks I even pretended to be a punk, pretending that I thought it was okay to spit and have safety pins in my shirt. I even pretended that I thought the graphics course I was on was more fulfilling than the fine art painting course I gave up. See I told you I talked bollocks, even today I still pretend that I made the right choice.

College was followed by work and marriage and children. By now I was so good at pretending it was easy to appear to be everything that people expected me to be whatever the situation. I got so good at it I even began to fool myself into believing I wasn’t pretending at all.

So, washed away on a wave of pretence, I fathered and husbanded, managed and developed, coloured and chameleoned my way through my pretend life pretending to be everything I wasn’t.

So what am I pretending to be now? As it is, and because I try hard not to think where my mind wants to go, I skim over the surface or who I really am. And most of the time I get away with it. Besides pretending is easier. But really I’m still that little boy, fastest draw in the west, pretending to be a gunslinging bandit in his garden ghost town. I haven’t changed, I’m just the same.

Perhaps I’m not pretending at all, perhaps the pretend me is the real me and the me I think I am is really just me pretending to be me.

Hmmmm…

Who shall I pretend to be today?