How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read Online Free

debating point with a stultifying lack of potential.
    Quite why I decided it was time to phone in, I have no idea. Boredom is the only explanation I can offer. Boredom, with perhaps the added spice of fiddling with my brand-new Marantz stereo cassette-radio player in an attempt to record my broadcast debut. I unpeeled a brand-new TDK C-90 cassette, and slid it into position, then closed the door and pressed the record and pause buttons simultaneously. Now I was ready and I could phone in the station.
    To my astonishment, I was put straight through to the studio, where they kept me on hold. Once the production team had established that I was simply a precocious little twerp who meant no harm and was unlikely to swear in the middle of the afternoon to the Chiltern Radio audience, I was told to stand by. I clutched the receiver, sweaty palmed with anticipation (a frailty that still affects my microphone hand).
    The music faded down. ‘OK, that was Daryl Hall and John Oates,’ said the DJ. Probably.
    â€˜Now, what about the roads in Bedford?’ he went on. ‘What about the state they’re in? And just what is the council planning on doing about it? That’s the topic for the phone-in this afternoon, and we’ve got a caller on the line. It’s Ned, from Bedford. What have you got to say, Ned?’
    The roof of my mouth went suddenly very dry. ‘Hi,’ I struggled to get the word out. A displaced feeling started to overwhelm me, as if I was watching myself from a perch on the ceiling. From this elevated position, I looked down upon myself about to make my first broadcast. This is perhaps the only time that Chiltern Radio has ever been known to replicate the effects of LSD.
    â€˜What do you think about it, Ned?’
    A fatal, short, and very telling silence. Then I recovered, and began.
    As soon as the telephone conversation was at an end, I hung up, and sat cross-legged in my bedroom, my white Solidarnosc T-shirt hanging loosely over a heart still beating hard from the stress of the encounter. After a minute or two, and feeling my pulse return to something approaching normality, I was able to rewind the cassette, and play it back.
    It was horrifying. I wince to remember it.
    The only other time I can recall a similar feeling was the moment I first discovered the size of my ears. On that occasion, I had been taken for a haircut at the Italian barbers in Foster Hill Road. The comforting hair flaps which, in keeping with the spirit of late seventies boyhood fashion, had kept my ears hidden for a decade were about to be hacked off by an indifferent middle-aged Sardinian barber, wielding a sharp pair of scissors in one hand and a John Player Special in the other. I was struck dumb by the sight of a mildly pornographic calendar and the proximity of a box of condoms. This was a man’s world, and I was about to receive a man’s cut.

    It was only when I got home that I dared to study my reflection in the mirror and analyse fully the extent and significanceof this new, extraordinary fact: I had really quite large ears. Things would never be the same again. I could now see me as others saw me.
    And so it was when I first heard my voice played back to me. The shock of hearing yourself as others hear you! My voice astonished me; odd, and at the same time intimately familiar. What was indisputable was that I desperately needed my voice to start to break. Dave Taylor’s and Jim Briscoe’s had gone two years ago, while I still sounded like someone doing an impersonation of my mother. It was humiliating.
    I can remember with surprising clarity the gist of the phone call, and there’s one phrase in particular, which I can recall verbatim. My sister can too, and she still takes some pleasure in reminding me of it.
    â€˜I get around quite a bit . . . by bike.’ Like a young Don Johnson from
Miami Vice
. I get around quite a bit. Honestly. In my mind’s ear, I can almost hear