1988 - Jesmond - Mum

I'd be lying if I said mum and I had a good relationship. Things seemed to take a nosedive around the time my sister was born, which was just before I started middle-school, and when I became very very unhappy. Our bad relationship came to ahead around now.

1988 - Jesmond - Ciaran

I met Ciaran somewhere between 10 and 11. I'd already started playing D&D with Niall Patterson... and Ciaran became my closest roleplaying buddy. He lived down the street from my parents house, and had a fantastic two story bedroom in an extended part of the main house. Decked out in yacht varnished wood, the upper level was open to below, with a balcony that ran the length of one wall. Ciaran and I went from D&D through to a complete school summer holiday of Gamma World, played off a tiny yellow formica table in his room... an entire summer... the Red Redemption... and all sorts of cool music from Metro Radio... then came 1984 and our discovery Call of Cthulu. I remember buying the boxed game set in Games Workshop in town. I'd also bought Eurythmics Touch Dance. Ciaran and I went to his blood-mother's house, where we listened to my new album whilst I devoured the rules of this new horror-investigation roleplaying game. My life would never be the same again.

1988 - Jesmond - Ciaran

Things developed. Ciaran became heavily involed in RPG. Tunnels & Trolls. And other game groups. For me, the term milliput and extravagantly painted figures were endemic of a visit to Ciaran's pad. He gathered a fabulous group of players and I recall many excellent sessions sitting at the large table in his parents dinnining room / conservatory, playing Cthulhu.

1988 - Jesmond - Ciaran

Then our friendship changed (around 1986)... abruptly it seemed that Ciaran and Alex were inseperable. A lot to do with the Tyneside Theatre company and a buzzing social scene. I don't know. I'm struggling to remember exactly why or even if I fell out of favour with my childhood buddies...

1988 - Jesmond - Alex M

Alex was the first person I ever met when my parents moved into the new house in 1980. Alex was in our garden, with Hamilton, stealing some rope. The next day Alex appeared on our front door, on a bike, asking if I wanted to come for a ride. We were both 9.

1988 - Jesmond - Ciaran

1988 - Jesmond - Lucille

Next door neighbour and mother of my childhood mate Alex. Very French.

1988 - Jesmond - Robin

Next door neighbour and father of my childhood mate Alex. A strict disciplinarian. I remember Alex being chased around the garden before getting "marmaduked", usually for such things as bowling under arm instead of over arm during our games of back garden cricket.

1988 - Jesmond - Stu, Pete, Lucy

1988 - Jesmond - Djr, Megan

1988 - Jesmond - Djr

This is just after my A'levels.

1988 - Jesmond - Djr

17.

1988 - Jesmond - Tonka

I met Chris at middle-school. He was one of those kids popular with everyone, from the hard lads right through to the freak geeks like me. He came over to the UK with his family when Rhodesia changed over to Zimbabwe, and always held a close link with rural life. I remember wandering around department stores whilst he browsed for ceramic cattle (part of his collection)... remember spending lunchtimes in rec room of Number 8 playing these cheap Steve Jackson type games (Dracula etc)... playing ZX spectrum... shooting airrifles at the bottom of his parents garden in Benton... remember him getting hammered on pepermint schnappes and crashing at my parents house, us both trying to cover up the fact the reason he was being sick was because he was drunk. Learning to drive in my dads car ... Chris and I driving around listening to Pat Benetar. Working (briefly) silver service at the wheatsheaf... going to the gym... and then he went to Australia and came back a year later a different Chris. More serious. We started to learn to ride motorbikes together but I got knee-capped in 1991, which killed that for me. Chris went on to pass and buy a lovely bike. Then we moved to Bristol, which is when we grew apart.

1988 - Jesmond - Niall

I'd known Nial since starting Middle school, from the age of 11. Ironically, Niall was the person I first started roleplaying with. Ever. You might look at roleplaying as a geeky waste of time and perhaps you might be right, but I have to state here that roleplaying is probably the biggest influence on my entire life. It all began with a damp autumn turning to winter day, on the Metro heading home from Tynemouth (school) to Jesmond. There was Alistar Luvy with a pad of lined graph paper on his lap, a bag of bizarre looking dice and some cool lead figures. I asked him what it was for. Alistar Luvey enlightened me to Dungeons & Dragons. That weekend I was down the bottom of the garden and I asked my dad for some money so I could go and buy this cool game. I can recall my dad mulling it over. What would have happened to my life, and what course would I have taken, if he'd said no. As it was he said yes, and the rest is history. I began nighly forays to Niall's house after school - only a few minutes down the road (Manor House Road at the time) but for me, being 11, it was quite a trek... particularly when I had to walk past the spooky mist choked swamp of St Mary's on the way back. So.. I have a distinct memory of playing the firstt dungeon scenario that I bought with the rules, with Niall.

Niall and I then became UFO freaks. We'd spend whole nights up on the town moor with a pair of binoculars and a flask of hot oxo. He and I were once convinced we'd seen a UFO come down near Osborne Avenue.

Then came 1985 and we all started drinking. Usually booze pilfered from my parents cabinets.

Come 1987 / 1988 I was heavily into Masks of Nyarlathotep and playing that massive Cthulhu campaign with Nial and some other geezer when I should have been revising. Didn't stop me getting my A'levels and was certainly more fun.

1988 - Jesmond - Alex M

This is from a memory of the time Alex and I snuck into an abandoned BT building behind Nial's house in Jesmond. I think it's now a posh housing estate.

1988 - Jesmond - Sarah L

The Girl Next Door. My family life was still shit, and I spent a lot of time with Sarah. Mum thought Sarah was a drug-addict-whore-with-aids and regularly tried to ban me from seeing her...when she wasn't trying to stab me with a kitchen knife.

Memory: getting jumped in my parents street, somebody runs up behind me, pulls my coat over my head and yanks it down, pulling me forward, at the same time they drive a knee up into my face, when I got home and tried to clean up the mess that was my face my mum just bitched at me for getting blood on her towels.

1988 - Jesmond - Sarah L

1988 - Jesmond - Squirt, Katrina

Squirt was seven and I picked her up from school most days - we were intensly close.

1988 - Jesmond - Squirt

1988 - Oslo, Norway - Djr

This was my first time back "home" since Christmas 1982.

The journey began in Bergen after a 24 hour boat ride across the North Sea: I'd met a Norweigan girl called Annelin that summer, at a party in Newcastle, and I spent a couple weeks with her at her mum's house, on a hillside in Bergen.

Then I took an 8 hour train ride to Oslo and hooked up with my cousin Oystein and his family; he's the same age as me and we had been good friends since 1980. I spent a few weeks with him and had some great nights out with his mates.

After Oslo, I caught a 29 hour train ride up to Fauske in the Arctic Circle to see the rest of my family there.

1988 - Bergen, Norway - Cousin Kenn-Ole Moen

It was really great staying with Kenn. I'd always had wonderful and fond memories of him since he stayed with my parents whilst studying art in Newcastle...

1988 - Oslo, Norway - Djr, Cousin Oystein, x

Actually, this is the party that took place whilst Oystein's parents were away (my Aunt & Uncle)... and left Oystein and his mates with 500 empty bottles of beer to dispose of.

Do you know what they did? They dug a trench in the bottom of the garden and buried them. All very well, except 15 years later, my Uncle Erling is digging up a flower bed and his garden fork strikes a bottle... he digs down to pull it out and finds another, and another, .... so 15 years after the crime, Oystein is called to account.

1988 - Oslo, Norway - Djr, X

Winter 1988

I'd gone to Norway almost directly after my A'levels. Coming back from Norway after 3 months, I found myself joining a double-glazing firm with Chris Tonka. The training course was a week of intensive brain-washing at a castle, some place outside Manchester. Chris and I both managed to get in some Acid House raving.

Coming back from the training course, work began in earnest. This involved sitting in a dank cigarette smoke choked cupboard of an office with a number of middle-aged men who chain-smoked like cigarettes were going out of fashion.

We'd spent all day there, waiting for a lead to come in, which normally didn't happen until after 6pm. I then had to drive to places like Darlington and Bishop Aukland, along fog-bound motorways..I'd end up in somebody's house who was only expecting me to arrive, measure the windows and give a quote, then leave. Uh-uh. No. The intensive week long training course taught us how to lie and manipulate the situation, that we were to stay there a minimum of four hours or until the customer signed a contract "just to get us out of there". It was shitty work. It was more like robbery.

So 1988 began with me still in 6th form college, I spent the Spring playing Masks of Nyarlathotep, doing my A'Levels, the Summer & Autumn in Norway, and Winter in a double-glazing job.

1988 - Newcastle - Djr, Penny Wallace

Penny lived in student halls of residence, that resembled some kind of Sweedish prison complex. This photo was taken at a "Fat Person" party, where we all had to stuff towels into our clothes.