Bio
A Boy From Planet “Irritatious”
The creature extended its rough, leathery hands towards my small neck. Eleven-year-old me remained utterly oblivious, grinning for all I was worth. It was my mum who saw the danger…
“Christopher! Can you try and look a bit more frightened?”
Evidently, I couldn’t. The sheer excitement of being almost strangled by a fearsome Sontaran, from BBC TV’s Doctor Who, was just too much for me.
*Click*
The photo was an incongruous addition to the faux-Victorian-style family album. But then, you might say that I was an incongruous addition to the family itself…
My first entry in the album was in 1971, (ten years before my brush with strangulation at the hands of the accommodating extra in the alien costume). If you looked closely enough at the picture of me in my Christening suit, you could just make out the same, slightly gormless grin forming at the corners of my mouth. But there was something else. Without any help from the wizards at the BBC’s make-up department, my face was lined with scabs.
As I grew older and my skin grew drier, the scabs massed and spread like an invading army from the planet Irritatious. They immediately disbarred me from three out of every five shops whenever my long-suffering sister, Jacqueline, dragged me along on errands for mum. Jacqueline – three years older and not to be trifled with – had rehearsed her well-reasoned retorts.
“It’s not infectious, it’s only eczema,” but they fell on the deaf ears of a succession of ‘more-than-my-jobsworth’ authority figures who didn’t want the potentially contagious creature running amok in their newsagents or greengrocers.
I didn’t entirely mind. It wasn’t nice being made to feel like a pariah from another world, but, on the other hand, maybe there was something to be said for being somehow different...
My young mind was already fizzing with stories of the real reasons for the scabs. Perhaps I was a refugee from a planet where the fading sun was kinder to my skin. Or I was a strange mutation, more monster than human, but canny, clever, and blessed with an insatiable need for chocolate!
