How can misanthropy be so perky? How come it sounds so much like a rolling stone? I am still loyal enough to ‘I am a rock’ to remind you its recording predates Dylan’s by a couple of months, but the days when I printed the lyrics and framed them on my wall are long gone. Nowadays I find it a little less affecting than of old. It’s a morning mantra: none of your Nirvanic layabout lie-ins for Mr Simon. Yet despite the embittered, hermitic lyrics, the music has the rise and shine qualities of a Christian summer camp. ‘ I am a rock’ is every only child’s anthem, and was almost too true to be real when I was growing up: ‘hiding in my room, safe within my womb, I touch no-one and no-one touches me’. Simon and Garfunkel were buttered muffin music for me as a teenager – comfort food to binge on. I’ll just sit on this bench here in my anorak, put my earphones in and listen to Simon and Garfunkel in defiance. Bugger them, I thought, I won’t even bother to bang the windows. But I didn’t have the energy for fireworks. There appeared to be a human barricade at work they were probably hoping for some kind of wig-out on my part. During a loo-stop at a service station, I found myself locked out of the coach in one of those fine drizzles common to Pennine parts, to a chorus of schoolboy laughter from inside. By the time our minibus got to Gargrave, I was conjuring up the smell of a roasting joint to get me through I knew I would never curse home again. It had been trial by Trangia, a miserable weekend of petty squabbles and running jokes, usually at my expense. We’d just finished our Duke of Edinburgh’s Award practice expedition in the Yorkshire Dales. Fifteen was a pretty awful age, and I hit the very bottom of it sometime in the spring of 1996.
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