25th April 2003
I’ve been home from Granny’s for two days. My grandparents are so annoying! Especially my grandad, who told me I’m too fat and I eat too much. He can go fuck himself, to be honest.
Oh wow. This I do remember, because my grandad was a giant rude asshole (ask my mum, she’ll tell you – for once it wasn’t just teenage crabbing). I went OFF at him in the way only a 16 year old who already has no self-esteem to speak of can, and my furious mum had to intervene.
In those days I lived in dark-wash (or black) jeans, and usually a black t-shirt or top of some kind. My favourite at the time was a Fine one with French Kitty on the front which I’d recently bought (and still have at my parents’). Here it is a few years later, when I took this mirror selfie to send to a guy I was trying to hook up with on MSN. Check out that quality mid-2000s poker-straight hair (I had ceramic straighteners by then) and centre parting.
I should also point out I was chubbier in this photo than I was then, after two years of beer, pizza, cheesy chips, overpriced ramen, and sleeping all day at uni.
Grandad had a habit of criticising what I wore at the best of times and if I grabbed an apple or a yogurt or (heaven forbid) a chocolate biscuit or bag of crisps between meals and he happened to see it, he’d make all kinds of shitty comments about “she’s eating AGAIN”.
It really is no wonder my mum and I both have issues with food (namely, eating enough of it), between him and my nan, who spent most of the time from my late teens up until she died when I was 28 being shady about my weight at every opportunity, even when I was a size 6.
My mum does it now, so that’s fun and in no way makes spending time with her an exercise in restraint.
He’d asked as I was sitting on the couch reading the TV Times or whatever, next to his Chair (which he sat on like it was the Iron Throne) what was on the front of my shirt because “you can’t see it for the rolls”.
Joseph and I had been going to the gym of late in preparation for the ball, and I was a size 12 at best (14 on a bad day or if I bought something from Jane Norman, which ran small, to have a nice carrier bag to keep my folders in for school, as was the style at the time). This went down like a lead balloon filled with spiders and liquorice.
I took one look at him and said “excuse me, what did you just say to me?”
After all, everyone has rolls when they sit down even if they have hardly any fat around their waist at all, it’s just how fat distribution works. But between all the needling me about “eating again” and hitting me where he knew it would hurt, I saw several shades of red and a whole torrent of angry-tears teenage How Dare You Say Something Like That To Me You Have No Idea How Rude You Are Oh My God followed, which brought my mum in from the other room to ask “Father what the hell did you do?”.
Grandad claimed I’d taken it out of context and I was making a big old fuss about a “joke” (which says a lot about the type of person he was) but mercifully my mum was wise to his shit and knew that, even though I was a stroppy teenager, for me to do anything other than roll my eyes and Kevin at him, never mind be actively crying, he must have said something atrocious, and she bitched him out hard.
I’m related to such nice, reasonable people who in no way have more issues than Vogue. There is a very good reason I live 250 miles away from the vast majority of them.
I actively avoided being in the same room with my grandad unless it was absolutely essential (mealtimes, etc) from then until he died in 2008, and the last time I ever saw him was the only time he was genuinely nice to me, which is how I knew he was dying.
And anyway he can talk, he’s super fat and eats giant slabs of chocolate all the time in his room when no one can see what he’s doing. So he’s a giant hypocrite for criticising me.
This was absolutely true. Dude weighed like 17 stone at his heaviest, because he’d eat his dinner, try and minesweep yours, then polish off your leftovers and anything my nan was daft enough to leave out, then inhale a 1kg slab of Fruit and Nut to himself in one sitting while watching TV in his room, and swearing at it like Father Jack.
He was also 5’2″, so he looked like Mr Creosote.
I really have known a remarkable amount of narcissists in my life, it’s quite horrifying. That projection, grandad.
I’m going into Leicester tomorrow with Joe to go shopping; I need ankle boots and new lipgloss. I don’t have a lot of cash at the moment because I bought a wrap for the ball, and an evening bag.
I always had a pair of black ankle boots with a heel for the winter, and wore them under my trousers for school.
The lipgloss was more than likely Maybelline Watershine Liquid Diamonds which, in addition to being sticky as hell, like all lipgloss was at the time, also had gritty bits of glitter in it. Caramel Pearl was my fave, always worn with frosty eyeshadow to match, and oh so much black eyeliner.
I went to the gym yesterday to use the weights and the other machines. It was good to know I’m one step closer to being thin.
That whole thing with my grandad was doing wonders for my commitment to the gym, because I wanted to stick it to him the next time I saw him.
Spite is a great motivator when you really need one, as I’ve discovered many times since.
I haven’t heard from Davey or Joanne in like a week but I don’t really care because Matt is back from India and there’s a new series of Will and Grace. I’m not going to hear anything about anything else if I do hear from them and it’d be really fucking annoying.
David and Joanne were very much one-trick ponies if I did hear from them. I’d already stopped watching Will and Grace because David’s obsession with it was doing my head in, and he’d grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me, telling me I “MUST” watch it, so I also just wanted to be contrary if I’m honest.
And Joanne was the most self-absorbed creature on the planet at the best of times; her go-to phrase for anything I wanted to talk about was “good!” in the most disinterested shut-up-Autumn-we’re-talking-about-ME tone.
Smeagol is such a dick. He’s always coming to me to show me stupid things (like spiders – and he knows I’m scared of them) or to tell me he drove to school today. Why does he think I care? And what I do is none of his business either! Someone ought to smack him and do the world a favour.
WORD.
I cannot adequately explain in words just how much of a douche Dr Kessler was. In addition to his looking like Smeagol, telling us really inappropriate stories about tying up his wife and how he wore a skirt at weekends (which fell down “when he was wrestling with his daughter”) and how he was a naturist (not joking), and teaching us equally inappropriate things like how to say “lick my arse”, he had a sixth sense for where you were in the school at any given time and would seemingly apparate out of the wall with a “ah ja, hier bist du” and something inane he needed to tell you about or show you RIGHT NOW.
These ranged from a cartoon about the Berlin Wall with a disembodied erect penis called “Hart an der Grenze” (= close to the border, where “hart” is a pun on “hard”), which I’m pleased to say has been lost to the ages and doesn’t exist on the internet, to tracts of Goethe (which had nothing to do with what we were studying) to the music of Georg Kreisler, who was the German Tom Lehrer or something (which had even less to do with what we were studying).
Behold, Poisoning The Pigeons In The Park in German:
Although Joseph was happy to humour him for fuck knows what reason, I very early on learned to dread these encounters and the accompanying “look, Autumn!”. One day I was loitering outside one of the classrooms on the ground floor waiting, I think, for Mrs Grayson, who had something for me, and I became dimly aware of Smeagol in my peripheral vision, approaching me like a shark in sandals with his usual inane grin plastered all over his face.
Just as I was hoping I wasn’t the droid he was looking for, a piece of paper towel containing the world’s most colossal house spider (I swear, I could see its fangs and the glint in its frankly excessive amount of eyes) was thrust under my nose, as he crowed “look, Autumn, I found a SPIDER!”
I absolutely hate spiders of any kind (in part because my dad didn’t think letting six-year-old me watch Arachnophobia would ever end badly). If there’s a spider in my house, it dies. I dread spider season when they all come out and try to take up residence in your house. I cover my eyes for the bit with Shelob in Return of the King. Do not show me those peacock spiders or jumping spiders and tell me they’re “cute”. Still a spider.
Motherfucker knew this because we’d been learning how to say we were afraid of things “ich habe Angst vor $thing” a few weeks previously.
I screamed like I was being murdered, because this gargantuan nopebeast was about three inches away from my nose and could very easily, like, climb onto me, or get in my hair or something, and ran for my life, Smeagol’s stupid chuckle echoing in my ears.
Fuck that guy. From orbit, with a laser.
Ridiculous Teenage Diaries 
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