History Repeats...

As have my stomach and bowels over the last few days, uncomfortably frequently.

Today though I find a piece of history in my email inbox; a picture of me (centre left) photographed in the local paper when I was about 13, some 17 years ago. It was sent to me by my friend (centre right), who's mother had found the clipping recently.

It got me thinking, this is possibly the first evidence of my determination to work in the media. My friends and I had entered a national competition through the school, or rather a competition one of our nicer teachers had let us know about and encouraged us to enter. It was called the BT Young Consumer of the Year Award and we had to produce a short 5 minute film on a consumer issue.

What we came up with was 'THE BIG RIP OFF', a short film which highlighted how much packaging was wasted and left unrecycled on consumer products. We had the support of the local supermarket chains Woolworths, Co-op, Tesco and Gateway. We even managed to convince the local art college to let us use their video editing facilities, there we have it 1989 first evidence of me in an edit suite!

Well time went by and I had forgotten about the competition, then out of the blue I get a phone call from the school saying that we had come 2nd in the competition, to which I responded 'regionally?', my teacher replied 'no nationally!'. After hearing the news we each received a hand-written letter from Sebastian Coe (now Lord!) who was MP for Falmouth at the time, congratulating us on our achievement. I was quite chuffed.

So what you see in this picture is my friends and I being presented with a cheque for a whopping £75 towards school video equipment - we bought a radio mic as I recall! So thank you Matt and your mother for reminding me of where it all began, and how awful my hair was.