THE TEAM

Nathan Davies

Hazel Marshall

Stuart Macdonald

Oliver Moor

Jim Johnson

James Skinner

Jess Wynn

Sam North

 

• Jim Johnson 2001 Hackwriters

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I didn’t really enjoy reading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It wasn’t in any way a bad book, but it cruelly exposed the weaknesses of vinyl junkies and pop music fans like myself. Friends confirmed that I had worryingly similar traits to the book’s central character Rob, or even worse, one of his record shop staff. Before then I had always felt quite happy with my obsession and enjoyed its many benefits, which include: being a useful person to have in a pub pop-quiz team and the ability to impress friends with compilation tapes drawn from an extensive collection.

Hornby, although with some sympathy, had shown us pop addicts to be rather inadequate. Forcing me to accept that I had been devoting too much of my life to record fairs in Church halls, searching for that ever-elusive Charlatans 12” single (the one with the wrongly pressed B-side).

I’ve just spent five years at a plant biotechnology company, working on the genetic modification of crops. It was quite an unusual experience to work in an industry that is so negatively perceived by the public. It is no surprise however that this hostile climate exists. Consider the findings of a recent survey showing that the majority of people in the UK believe that a tomato doesn’t contain a single gene. With this low level of understanding, stories about ‘Frankenfood’ will easily persuade concerned citizens to ‘say no to GMO’. I’m still interested in Science, even though I’ve temporarily moved away from it. I had to leave, not because I found my work ethically questionable, but because looking down a microscope, shifting bits of plant from plate to plate, day in day out, gets a bit boring after a while.

I love playing sports, several times a week if possible. I think this comes from studying a GCSE in PE at school. This meant that for two years we had sport every day. Even now I start to feel unhealthy if I haven’t been doing much exercise, almost feeling the cholesterol starting to clog up my arteries.
Disappointingly, PE was done as a mixed class, which meant we couldn’t just play football all the time. The lesson the boys all hated was known as ‘Olympic Gymnastics’, a very grand title considering our ability. Imagine trying to teach 16-year-old boys, most never really mastering the headstand, the complex discipline of Olympic standard gymnastics. We’d all seen handsprings and somersaults in Kung Fu movies but had no intention or capability of trying to replicate these stunts. So Olympic gym days for some strange reason, routinely started with a flood of sick notes from boys in particular. Many of whom, including myself could be seen miraculously healed of their sprained muscles and torn ligaments just in time for basketball club at lunch.

Not that I’m still bothered by trivial matters such as these, but I don’t suppose anyone would know where I could get hold of a copy of that Charlatans single?

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