He sat to write

He Sat to Write

If you know me and you are reading this, you must act as though none of the below is true.

Chapter 1

I am Joachim Schramm I am eighteen. I own four or five really cool pairs of shoes including a pair of white high top Nike trainers which on reflection are perhaps slightly too large for my feet, even though these feet are size 10 and are rather on the fat side. I suppose when looking at my poetry it may be of some interest to understand that I once dreamed of becoming an actor before I realised that perhaps I already was and therefore looked for something different. I have one sister and that is it as far as siblings go, she is lovely and doing just fine in life with a view to doing truly great, and I am quite sure she will. However something that at times has kept her back is her and my father, he left and now lives in a different house. I was six and so do not have particularly vivid memories of when my father lived in the same place as we do, however my sister does and it does not lay well with her, fair play really, but overall she is pretty strong and is fine. I have a mother, which will not come as a surprise as everyone has a mother. Mine is quite normal really, despite her uncanny ability to eat anything and everything and still stay skinny. She is a lovely woman and she regularly makes me smile. I owe much to her, including £258 for some burnt wires that where fixed in my Volkswagen Polo recently. This leads me to my stepfather, who is also quite normal, despite professing to be rather a master car man but still declaring that my Volkswagen Polo was a good buy, before being proved quite, quite wrong. However this can be forgiven, as for the most part he is perfectly lovely and makes my mother smile almost continuously. Also he did once replace the gearbox in my Polo, which was quite a job.

So far it appears that my Volkswagen is taking prime position in this piece of writing, I don’t know why, but so it is. Therefore I shall tell you the story of how my gearbox broke and this in itself will introduce another important character in my life.

I had brought two tickets for the Latitude festival, a festival of the arts, I had booked a hotel room for two nights, it was going to be the perfect weekend for me and Louise, second name Margaret (a fact that I still find amusing), last name Aston. A beautiful girl, small at around 5 foot 2 inches, but perfectly formed, she stole my heart. It perhaps was not love at first sight, but from the time when she stood up from her bag in the corridor of our sixth form (she was relatively new to the school at this point, a year below me and only having joined for the first year of sixth form, whilst I had been there since year 7), so she stood and her hair was wild in front of her face, but there was still enough showing for our eyes to meet before we laughed without stop for the next three minutes. Well from this point I knew she was special, different from any other girl. She places much importance on her appearance, which for me can be a put off as it just annoys me when that is all people care about, but with Louise whilst she cares about it, it is hardly her sole care. It just means that she looks nice, but she is not at all afraid to laugh at herself and others. And as for me, I love to laugh at others, which is what lead to her standing laughing at herself and me too standing laughing at her in all her incredible beauty. So we are taking a trip for the weekend having been together for about four months at this point, everything is fine. John, my step dad feels confident that the car will at least make it to Suffolk if not back, and that is all that matters to me. Louise’s father has lent us his sat nav for the journey and we are packed and ready to go. Bidding my family farewell we head off for our first ‘holiday’ together, smiles pasted quite stupidly across our faces and we don’t care.

The sat nav directs us through London, at this point I should explain that I live in Surrey in a place called Ockham, which is hardly even a village as there is nothing there except some houses, and only some at that. It is near-ish to Hampton Court, which is quite close to where Louise lives and the only recognisable landmark that I can think of at this time. It is the other side of London than Suffolk and so the sat nav sends us straight through the centre of the capital. Soon I realise I should, as usual, have listened to my mother and taken the M25 as going through London is very slow and you have to pay the sodding congestion charge. Eventually however, with smiles still upon our faces, even if our brows do suggest a slight weariness, we exit central London and enter a horrible place named Chelmsford and that is were we stay for quite a few hours. A scraping noise from the car causes me to pull over, eventually, once it is even drowning out the highest volume songs which pump from my below par stereo system. I call the AA, an incredibly helpful gift, given by my mother and stepfather, and we sit in the Chelmsford college car park in my car, which I have managed to drag there kicking and screaming. The AA say they will be there in around an hour. Around two and a half hours later they appear, me and Louise are still laughing and smiling, that’s one of the reasons I love her, I’m never, not ever, unhappy when I am around her, even if I am angry that my car is crap, I am not unhappy. The AA man asks ‘can you drive it at all’ I reply, ‘yes’, so we get in, I start the engine, move the car a whole half a meter, whilst something within the tin awakens and yelps and the AA man asks me to stop, informing me that ‘there is no way I can drive this car anywhere.’ Before long we are sat alongside the AA man on our way back to Ockham with the Polo attached behind. Not an all-together successful holiday, but we have fun that weekend in any case, creating our own festival named Ockitude, which consists mostly of a dog walk on the local abandoned airfield.

Another person who has been in my writing a lot recently is my mother’s godfather who died today, about eleven and a half hours ago. I think that this is because this is the first time I have ever really dealt with the death of someone who I knew. I mean I only knew him for eighteen years of his eighty-four year life, and for probably about six of those eighteen years the things I said meant fairly little to anyone as children’s words usually do, if I am honest. However I did know him, and I really liked him, so it isn’t at all nice to think that he isn’t here anymore. But death appears to be a part of life, and I am slowly learning that. My cat scallywag (I named her myself) died fairly recently and that was a lot sadder than I had expected, I even cried a tiny bit, and although I talk of tears a lot I actually very rarely cry anymore, I think I used most of them up when I was younger, crying over grazes which looked horrible but never actually hurt. She was a stupid cat to be honest and she used to breath far too fast and have a big flabby belly and a tiny head, but she was actually quite lovely in her own way. But now she doesn’t sit on the radiator anymore and her tiny head doesn’t droop to sleep as though it were too heavy, although that was surely impossible unless she was secretly harbouring a huge brain within that little skull, unlikely I unfortunately feel. And soon her sister Fossil will go as well, and possibly before that our seventeen-year-old cat Parker. He is a fantastic cat, I somehow can’t imagine him ever dying, he is a fighter who for the entirety of his life has returned home late with scratches all over him. Nowadays he has turned into a dirty old man, who despite being neutered humps just about anything he can get his dirty paws on and bites or scratches anything that tries to stop him. But somehow this can’t stop you from loving him, he is full of character.

Much like my Grandfather for that matter, an incredibly large man, mainly due to his Alcohol consumption, although I do like to think that his large belly is, in fact, due to the infinite number of stories that appear to dwell within him. He has lived quite a life according to these stories. He recently celebrated his 80th birthday and stated that it was ‘a wonderful occasion, as he had never expected to get this far.’ Sure he has some dark secrets but he also has a great sense of humour and a fantastic appetite, for pretty much anything, from food to alcohol to women. He was a police officer in like the 50’s and 60’s, need I say more?

His wife, and therefore my Grandmother, is a good woman, although she has at times taken a dislike towards me, for instance the first 14 years of my life where I was solely referred to by her as ‘that boy’. She has had six children, including my mother, and we are all led to believe that they are by my Grandfather. Her first child came when the pair were twenty, forcing them to marry, and for my Grandmother to stop in her quest to become an actress (she was at Bristol Old Vic theatre school, a place where I auditioned and was unsuccessful, therefore leading to me not turning up to my RADA audition). The sad part of this tale has not come though, as their first child died six weeks into its life, a life of so few breaths.

Their next son, Richard, my uncle, is a slight odd ball, he currently is married to his third wife, a Philippine woman who is a maid to singer Chris Martin and actress Gwyneth Paltrow, but he still lives with his parents. He has two children by his first wife Terry, who is now wheel chair bound, suffering from a horrible affliction called Multiple Scirosis or M.S. Their son Mark was fifteen when she was diagnosed and bravely dealt with the situation, whilst his older brother Joshua now an extremely admirable married man of twenty six failed to deal with the situation and instead burnt all the furniture in their fairly horrible house in Reading. This led my mother to buying him a Futon from Ikea so that he was not sleeping on the floor. I believe he may have subsequently burnt that, but who can blame him? Living alone with your younger brother at the age of seventeen in a run down house in Reading is not even marginally desirable and so it is a blessing and a wonder that he is now one of the nicest, most together young men you will ever meet.

The next child born to my grandparents is Paul, he is the only of my grandparents children who has never been divorced. He is married to a Japanese lady named Midori and they have a daughter by the name of Sayaka. Nowadays he is a very quite man, but it is interesting to note the circumstances of his birth. For he was born on the same day that his grandfather died. His grandfather, and therefore my great grandfather was a priest and was living in Africa at the time of Paul’s birth. The telegram was received only hours before Paul’s birth and this was therefore a day of very mixed emotions. It is at this point where I stop and wonder if I slightly mixed up some details here, as I seem to remember my mum saying she knew her grandfather who was a priest and so I feel that it was indeed the other grandfather on my grandfathers side who died. I do not remember what it is that he did, a farmer? Anyway it makes a good story. Another interesting note on this particular uncle is his drug habit when he was slightly younger than I am now; it was apparently so severe that he had to undergo some painful and terrifying ‘Cold Turkey’. This perhaps explains the slightly haunting silence with which he now operates, turkey it appears, is only good served hot, and even then I do not enjoy it much.

Both of the above Uncles are now bald, I would take this as a bad sign but my father has a fantastic head of black hair and he is now into his fifties, so that is one of only a few things that I hope I have inherited from him.

Next came my mother, Jennifer, eighteen years an illustrator, ten years a teacher, now she lives in a beautiful home with a loving husband and teaches classes at the dining table in the kitchen whilst the three chickens occasionally move there way in to the kitchen next to the AGA, prompting John to joke that ‘One day I will put one in that oven’ to which we all laugh (I believe the laughter may be more to do with the delivery of this line). She went through a lot of shit with my Dad who it now appears had been cheating on her for some years and was a horrible violent drunk. Do not worry though, she dealt with it, she is fantastic and strong and she got us all through it unscarred and now I and she and, I believe, my sister are really quite incredibly happy people.

My Aunt Anna now lives in Cornwall; she is, as far as I can fathom, completely odd. I fathom this by the fact that she chooses to live in Cornwall, a place lovely for holidays, but having lived in Kingston; near London I wander how she was able to abandon life so utterly. However it was apparently due to love, although she is now, of course, divorced. (Perhaps I should not have called this a short biography but instead, 5 divorces, lots of children and a funeral or two. Although that does sound a bit like something starring Hugh Grant, and if anyone is going to play me it isn’t him. I would have Leonardo DiCaprio, the finest actor of my time, although he is considerably too old. Maybe he could play someone else and I could star? Although I would be perhaps too star struck to star alongside him? No I am not gay, I just have a slight man crush on Leo, boy can he act. Don’t believe me? You clearly haven’t seen Aviator or Romeo and Juliet or What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.) Anyway she is divorced and has two kids by her husband Peter, who since the divorce has had very limited contact with his kids. She also has another child, George, born of a Cornish idiot by the name of Pete, no not Peter, Pete. He has tunnel vision and is fat and poor and is almost twenty years my aunt’s junior. He is now also out of the picture and my aunt now lives with her two boys, George and Scott, while her daughter Rose has migrated back to civilisation and is at Kingston University.

The last (I should hope) of my Grandparents children is Patrick. He too is divorced with two children from his first wife Alice, and has two more children from his long-term partner Kate. His life however does not have too many remarkable moments which therefore make him the most normal and without doubt my favourite, apart, of course, from my own mother. He has been an avid Fulham supporter from the age of fourteen when a boyfriend of my mothers introduced him to the football club in an attempt to impress my mother, he was promptly dumped. However Patrick had instead found a love, which he passed on to me at the earliest opportunity. I was around four or five at the time of my first Fulham match, I attended with Patrick and my father, it was bitter cold and it was at the time when standing was still allowed. Fulham, at the time where in the second or third division and so where pretty awful. I do not remember whom we played or what the score was, all I remember is being very upset as I witnessed the hot dog, which my dad had queued for many minutes to acquire, shoot down the stands at an alarming rate leaving me with simply a bun. For some reason I went back, and have loved the cold Saturday’s at Craven Cottage (and a for a short time at Loftus Road) ever since. Patrick or Pad as he is known has been like a father to me as I believe that first game is the one and only time my actual father has ever been to a match, he did not enjoy it, perhaps because he spent most his time queuing and the rest with me on his shoulders as I couldn’t see.

Louise’s parents are also divorced. One day I would like to write down everything from her family, having discovered the other day that her Dad apparently had two guns hidden in his part of the house whilst he lived there. I am sure there are some tales to tell there, but perhaps they are not mine. One thing I can tell you, as it involves me is the difficulty that me and Louise had once we knew that we liked each other, for it came to our attention that her sister, a wonderful girl by the name of Elizabeth who was in my year at sixth form decided she did not want me and Louise to be together as she had some feelings for me. Now you can imagine that this was not altogether an easy situation, but you can also imagine two star-crossed lovers, not allowed to be together due to their families, well you know the rest. So it simply had to be, and whilst it was horrible, as Elizabeth was and now thankfully is once again a great friend of mine, it is also the most fantastic thing in my life as Louise does truly make me smile from ear to ear without fail every time I lay eyes upon her. It has worked out well, is what I am trying to say, despite some original difficulties.

Above you will see the difficulty of writing anything, it always appears self obsessive, but this is because it feels impolite to write about others when you have had no involvement, and plus it is very difficult to write something well when you have no first hand experience. Not that I would suggest for one minute that this is written well. Although I would hope it is written slightly better than the best selling author since whoever it was that wrote the bible, J. K. Rowling who writes as though she had trotters for hands. Hell of a story though! Sorry, that was perhaps a slight Holden Caulfield-ism, and as Ferris says during his infamous day off ‘Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself' therefore, being quite the fan of this film I shall avoid isms as much as is possible.