A Mind Full of Spaceships

My mind was always full of spaceships. To contradict Arcade Fire, it was always a place where all spaceships went.

My mind first became full of spaceships aged about 5 or 6 at infants school. Buck Rogers had appeared on television, and I was thrilled with those wonderful twin pronged starfighters with their exciting double fin at the back that I could never draw at the right angle. Meanwhile, my parents met for the first time, and my now stepfather played me Jeff Wayne’s “War of the Worlds” through headphones to keep me out of the way while he made dinner for my mum.

I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard.

After that, although I couldn’t draw for toffee, let alone a curly wurly from the swimming pool sweet machine, any piece of paper I could find was filled with crudely drawn Martian tripods destroying everything. Meanwhile Buck flew overhead lasering unidentified craft out of the universe.

The Blakes 7 “Liberator” cruised through deep space, the “ball” at the back always drawn with green felt tip.

My head was then filled with technical specs for spaceships that were either taken from television, or real life, so that a Gemini capsule from the 60s could be spiced up with guns and an engine capable of “Standard by 9”. Salyut 6 acted as a base for a cast of heroic space fighters, who piloted their Firefox craft from a sort of spoked wheel arrangement of docking hubs around the Soviet era space station.

Rival and incompatible technologies were conflated together and I told endless mental stories about the whole thing. I still do, although the characters have long since been transplanted into a 50s retro tech environment flying early jets like the Meteor, Vampire and the Messerschmitt 262. My heroes also spend rather less time being threatened with the tesla-coil filled “Evaporation Chamber” from Buster Crabbe era Flash Gordon, a fate that to my childhood mind was the grimmest imaginable.

I wish my mind was still full of spaceships, and the desire to draw them, no matter how badly. But, the Tourette brain grows older, and it becomes full of the far less exciting, but far more terrible, trials of modern life.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/10/2013