Teenage Revolution by Alan Davies

Author:Alan Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141964515
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Woody Allen

Thaxted, in Essex, has a fourteenth-century church, thatched roofs and Morris dancers. It may have brothels and crack houses too but I refuse to accept that. It is pretty and idyllic. Or at least it was in 1983 when the nine students on the Loughton College media studies course visited for a residential study week.

As second years, we could be entrusted with a philosophical retreat. The theme for the week was ‘Culture’. What is it? How do we define it? Is it a good thing? These questions were intentionally open-ended to generate discussion between fag breaks.

We discussed the world we actually lived in, leaving me in danger of becoming over-stimulated. We talked about, read about, and wrote about ‘Culture’ all week, with enthusiastic teachers who enjoyed the discussions, appeared to be interested in what we said, used our first names and spoke to us without being demeaning, patronizing or threatening. Sometimes the teachers laughed at the same time as the students, unheard of at the Minor Public School, which seemed a long way away.

The unexpected bonus I found in Thaxted was a little shop with a rack of books on display including a copy of Side Effects by Woody Allen. I’d enjoyed one or two of Allen’s films, like Take the Money and Run, but this book made me laugh out loud even more than Spike Milligan’s War Memoirs had done, which was saying something. Particularly hilarious were Allen’s tales of Sandor Needleman, who fell out of a box into the stalls at the opera and went back every night for a month to repeat the action, so people thought it was deliberate. There was page after page of expertly wrought comic prose, which inspired me to try and write my own, though I never showed any of it to anyone.

Inside the front cover of books I would obsessively record my name, and the place and date of purchase.

Within Side Effects it reads:

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