me having any kind of talent. Back then, fame to me was Cilla Black and Dale Winton. It was the old legends that reigned supreme and they had worked bloody hard to get where they were.
Therefore I decided I needed to pursue a passion that might one day help me to become an actor. So I began to work enormously hard on becoming a real Shakespearian actor. I started reading his plays and attempting to act them out when no one else was around. I dreamed about being on the stage at The Globe Theatre wearing purple tights and quoting lines from Hamlet. Instead I’ve ended up making a living out of being completely ridiculous on reality TV. Funny how things turn out!
I never felt outnumbered by my mum, her sister and their friends. I still saw my dad a lot so I had a strong male role model, and I also had a lot of male friends, so I think I had a good balance, and this kept me as straight as possible for as long as it could.
Ever since I can remember I’ve hung around with people who were seemingly more mature than me (many of my best friends are now in their 50s) and school was no different. Well, the other kids weren’t in their 50s, but I was hanging around with the guys in older years so I could learn from them – especially about girls. The older boys were at the kissing/feeling up stage, which was far more exciting than our silly crushes that were clearly going nowhere. It would be years before I’d even get to glimpse my first pair of boobs.
Until then, the standard reaction amongst the boys in my year was that girls were just a bit shit – they were boring and they cried. But suddenly things had changed and they started to see girls as something other than an annoyance.
The first girl I ever properly fell for at boarding school was called Olivia. I was around nine or 10 and I remember thinking that she was incredible. She had long blonde hair and she sucked her thumb a lot so her teeth were quite goofy, which at the time I obviously thought was quite attractive. She also had a large mole above the right side of her lip, just like Cindy Crawford, who was one of my pin-ups at the time.
I was obviously very shallow back then because I quite clearly remember telling her that she could never, ever, ever cut her hair because she would no longer be pretty.
I had known her since I was born because her parents used to get drunk with my parents back in the day, but over a very short period of time she evolved from being a girl I’d run away from as fast as my lace-up Kickers would carry me to being someone I wanted to lose my snogging virginity to.
Crushes are such strange things, and more often than not, they can go horribly wrong. If I ever have kids I will tell them not to stare at someone you like, which I was guilty of. I was a fortified starer. When I was a bit older I also had a habit of drawing hearts and putting mine and a girl’s name inside. Trust me, that was cool in the 90s.
Olivia was the first girl I properly snogged, but I can’t remember it in much detail. I remember that we were in the living room at my mum’s house during a weekend break, and I was desperate to kiss Olivia. The only problem was that Ricky was also there. He was one of my best friends at the time, so we took turns going behind the sofa to snog Olivia. Which now sounds very slutty …
I was horrified that Olivia spent more time kissing Ricky than me. He had already kissed Melanie Bell three times so he should have at least let me take the lead on this one. Heartbreak number two. I blame Ricky for tainting my first kissing experience and I’m not sure I’ll ever truly be able to forgive him. I know he lives in America now, so at least he’s on another continent …
I honestly couldn’t tell you whether or not that first kiss was a good one, but I’m pretty damn sure it was awful. It’s entirely possible I’ve blocked it all out in the name of self-preservation and not to harm my ever-so-fragile ego. I suspect I used the dreaded ‘washing machine’ technique favoured by so many, or even the infamous poker kiss, or, my favourite, the face licker. These days I pride myself on being a reasonable kisser. I’ve had nearly 15 years of practice, so if I was still crap I should probably retire now!
None of us really knew what we were doing back then, so we just opened our mouths, moved our tongues around a bit and hoped for the best.
I continued to spend a lot of time with Olivia and had become so smitten with her that I even tried to ride a bike without stabilisers past her house to impress her, but sadly I would often fall off my bike and look like a twat.
She really fancied this guy called Ben Ridgeway, who was by far the coolest guy at school and I envied everything he had. His father was one of the heads of Virgin Atlantic and he had beautiful older sisters. But above all, he had a centre parting, which was the epitome of cool in the mid-90s.
If you could train your hair to have a centre parting in 1995 you pretty much had girls on tap. For the best part of a year I worked on training my hair so I could look more like Ben, and convince Olivia that I was every bit as cool as him. Annoyingly, even now, in 2013, if I let my hair fall naturally it will go straight into a centre parting, making me look like a complete bell end, because I was so persistent with training it.
Olivia went through the whole of school as the popular girl, and even though I was a loser, the fact that I knew her out of school raised my coolness stake. Even though I never did get to make her my girlfriend, we became best friends and I always loved her. When we reached our mid-teens we made a pact that we would lose our virginity to each other in a caravan my mum owns in Cornwall – it’s more romantic than it may sound.
We never did have sex. If only it had happened. Maybe then I would have been able to avoid the horror of what happened on that fateful day when I eventually had sex for the first time. I still shudder slightly at the thought of it. Don’t worry, we’ll come on to that a bit later.
Although we don’t see that much of each other now, I still speak to Olivia and she occasionally comes to stay in my flat in London, and she will always sleep in my bed. I don’t love her any more in that way. In fact, we help one another through all our relationship trials and tribulations. I can’t imagine not having her in my life, though we never discuss how much I used to love her. I’m hoping she’s forgotten about it all by now.
It’s funny how some people you meet when you’re young will later shape your future, whereas others you swear to stay friends with forever seem to disappear off the face of the earth once you all grow up. I still bump into people from my schooldays around Chelsea night clubs, and although I have done the drunken polite exchange of numbers and promise of a drink many times, we both know that the moment’s passed and we probably no longer have anything in common. Or, to be honest, we weren’t that good friends back then so why would we be any better friends now?
My tenth year was something of a disaster all round when it came to the opposite sex, as it was also the first time I ever got slapped by a girl. It was a real slap, like the ones they give out in EastEnders, and unfortunately it wasn’t the last.
The girl in question was called Hermione Little, and looking back now she was very overdeveloped for her age. Hermione had boobs by the time she was 10 and it was all the boys could talk about. We all thought she was beautiful back then, and my sister tells me she still is. I was completely intimidated by her – everyone was – but I didn’t let that put me off pathetically trying to flirt with her.
One evening before the bell for bedtime rang she was on the payphone to her mum. I was waiting in the queue behind her, feeling really homesick and desperate to talk to my own mother before bed.
Hermione
