When your imagination goes into overdrive...

HEED-STORIES. Eh? Aye, heed-stories. We all make stories up in our heads. Constantly, often instinctively and usually without consciously realising we are doing it. We never stop.

From my own experience, it’s how we rationalise the unseen or unknown world which might otherwise threaten us; sort of joining the dots to try to make sense of things.

The problem is that we can’t write our tales from the heed on a blank bit of paper or from an objective point of view; we only see stuff though our own little set of peepers, along with the baggage that makes up our unique world view.

It can make life fun or it can drag us lower than whale droppings.

I remember a great heed-story episode one dark, late-autumn evening many years ago.

I was walking my two big, daft and utterly soft Labrador dogs on the final part of their nightly poo patrol which took me out in the sticks (don’t worry, I had my pockets stuffed with industrial amounts of poo bags – unlike those ignorant, selfish tramps who fecklessly let their dogs dump all over the place).

I admit I wasn’t at my most elegant – well muddy, a bit unshaven, wearing a black, rolled-up ski mask, Doc Marten boots and a combat jacket I’d pinched from my time in Aldershot.

As I neared my house, I had to nip down an alley by the side of some garages and, I’ll admit, I always felt uneasy about them.

This place had been sparking heed-stories since I was at school. It still irrationally triggers them now.

Suddenly, at some deep level, I was 13 and walking back from the youth club. It’s a bit isolated here – nobody could hear you scream – and anybody could be around that corner. What if the Lobley Hillers or the Stan Army were waiting for me? These aforementioned groups were the bogey men of my mates’ and I’s youth – vintage 70s-style heed-stories of imagined hordes of rampaging Viking-like punks and skinheads. Unsurprisingly, they never actually appeared back then either. However, as I ventured deeper through this cut by the garages, two figures suddenly stepped out of the blackness to stand motionless under the weak yellow light of the solitary sodium street lamp.

I could just make out a couple of young lads who were clearly loitering there.

My heed-story writer went into overdrive; these yobs were up to summat; why weren’t they moving on? Drugs – that was it!

They were waiting for their dealer down this Satanic shortcut and, once they were off their faces, I was going to be their sport for the evening!

I couldn’t go back – and by now my heed-story was borrowing terrifying images of juvenile street thuggery from all those awful videos I watched as a teenager – The Warriors, The Wanderers, Mad Max, Death Wish and a dozen others of that dismal genre.

Think! I tried to look hard, squinting and walking as I imagined Jean-Claude van Damme or Arnold Schwarzenegger might do in this situation.

Yet all I achieved was the look of a post-op hernia patient – I was doomed!

Suddenly, one of the lads waves weakly and mumbled ‘hiya’ – it was Dan, a friend’s son. I nearly hugged him with relief. You couldn’t meet a nicer kid. Now I felt daft.

As a postscript, I later found out that the reason that Dan and his mate were loitering under the streetlight was the fact that they were terrified of the ‘rough scary man in the combat gear, who was blocking their path with his big vicious dogs.’

When heed stories collide ...

Suddenly, at some deep level, I was 13 and walking back from the youth club