Laments on Gazzetta Della Grog - Part 1

If any of you might think I'm still a little immature I'd like to offer the below link as proof that I am improving, slowly.

http://www.geocities.com/gazzetta_della_grog/

I'll give you some pointers as to what is especially worth a butchers in the second part but for now let me give you a brief history of how Gazzetta Della Grog came about ... and you can humour me by nodding and going “yeah, yeah ... oh really? ... how interesting ... fancy that” and suchlike.

So it's 1997 and Tony Blair is still ace, in fact he's still got that Obama-esq 'anything is possible' glow about him, but some teenagers in Staffordshire are thinking, “this is all fine and dandy but where can I read some badly worded made-up gossip about my teachers and libel my fellow pupils?” Meanwhile I, Greg Sammons, was going through a phase where my friends would insist on giving me a different nickname each week – many of them had the same root, Grog. Being a bit weird I decided that I'd waste my parents inkjet cartridges and create a newsletter for my mates using Microsoft Publisher 95. Being even weirder I decided it paraphrase the name of an Italian football rag and call it Gazzetta Della Grog.

It snowballed. For every one copy I sold to my mate for less than it cost in ink to print another 5 or 6 people would read it on the school bus or between lessons. Even some of my teachers read our efforts and a number of my mates became regular contributors.

However one fateful evening I was typing up the latest issue and my mum decided to lean over my shoulder and read the handiwork. She wasn't particularly impressed that I'd once again ripped into the school scapegoat, an unfortunate 'friend' of mine called Matthew Pickford, and in the next sentence cast aspersions over a number of my teachers. Being a crazy mad woman (when you start to realise how bizarre my mum is you start to better understand how I turned out as I did) she grassed me up to my head of year.

The next day three friends and I were escorted into the head of year's office and asked to explain what we'd been up to. After a passionate missive on the right to free speech the poor teacher had no idea what to do with me ... other than hate the fact that a pesky thirteen-year-old had beaten him in a debate. Hence why later that day we're called into the Head Teacher's office. He makes up some gubbins about copyright, libel and various other things that were designed to scare and confuse four cheeky youths, with the bottom line being that we can't continue to let copies appear on school grounds.

And with that a silly little newsletter died and a legend was born.