My main interests when I was 16 were football, poetry and girls.
I was playing a lot of football, I had a trial for Preston North End. But throughout that year I was getting into writing poems and getting interested in the opposite sex, so football began to slip away. I was pretty shy and I went to an all-boys grammar school. I wrote terrible, miserable poems about unrequited love. But in real life I didn’t do too badly with the opposite sex, I had a few relationships. It seemed to be, growing up in rural Yorkshire, things got going fairly quickly. I think I was just 14 when I first went to the pictures with a girl. My sex life began probably before it should have.
The 16-year-old me would have found ridiculous the idea that one day I would write about my family.
I was trying in 1993]. He just didn’t get the point of reading, which I was increasingly into, because if you’re reading you’re sitting down – you need to be doing stuff. You need to be out there mowing the grass for me or helping me wash the car or... just get off your arse was his attitude. He was quite an overbearing man. I was closer to my mum. I was my mum’s only son. I felt close to her. She was a quieter, more self-effacing person than my dad. I felt I could emotionally open up to her in a way I couldn’t to him. But in general I definitely felt I needed to get away. Poetry was an escape really, from my family.
