1980s | Daniel Seery

…my latest piece is about imagination.
Have a listen to it on Arena here or read on…

imagination

Imagination

I used to read dinosaur books as a kid. Everything about them screamed big. The oversized hardback covers and colourful illustrations. The lengthy prehistoric periods. Even their complicated names warranted the shouty ‘all-caps’ font.

GIGANTOSAURUS. TITANASAURUS. DOUBLE-MOCHA-GRANDE-SAURUS!

When it came to highlighting their magnitude, one thing that struck me was how these giant reptiles were always compared to the African elephant. In general, I’d never encountered that many elephants. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure the elephants I’d met were actually African. A person might believe it would make more sense to measure against commonplace objects, things that a child of the 80s could easily relate to. BMX bikes or space-hoppers, the fact that the Tyrannosaurus Rex weighed five-and-half-thousand Nintendo 64s. Or was as long as one-hundred-and-twenty Caramello bars. But the great thing about imagination is the ability to fill in the blanks. This skill of picturing objects or situations never experienced is a key element to creativity and something that’s widely considered to be a rarity in the animal kingdom.

dino2

Although limited in other species, we humans certainly know how to take it to the next level. Think entrepreneurship, advances in technology, the evolution of the gadget and the scope of stories in all their forms. For me it’s truly captured in our ability to build concrete worlds out of imagined foundations. Take the simplicity of something like the air guitar. There was a time when it was confined to the privacy of one’s own home, something the old man did after one too many glasses of stout. These days, not only is it common to see someone pretend to play a guitar on a night out, it’s even led to an annual air-guitar championship, where people converge from all over the world to showcase their skill at strumming the breeze.

The idea of pretending is something I see all the time with my own kids. The mundane transforms to a setting. Household objects become characters. I’ve been roped into countless worlds but in truth, it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was running around the park as a child myself. We were soldiers. Explorers. Cowboys. There was never a character of office worker or IT consultant. You wouldn’t catch any of the lads acting out the part of lab technician in a supervisory capacity. And perhaps it is the destiny of most to end up in the shallower end of the imagination pool. But sometimes, when I meet an old friend from school and we talk about our jobs and the economy, house-prices and bin charges, all the boring things that grown-ups are expected to talk about, I can’t help but shake the feeling that for some of us, the pretending never really went away.

Team A

Picture the scene. The sun is beaming. The air tastes of cut grass. Huey Lewis and the News are rolling from a boom box. There’s a bunch of teenagers break-dancing on an old piece of lino. And some skinny kid is standing next to a BMX just off to the side. That kid was me. But don’t think the get-up of ball cap, khaki trousers and black converse runners was casually thrown together. Not at all. It was completely inspired by my hero at the time, Howling Mad Murdock, the unhinged helicopter pilot from action adventure series, The A-Team.

A group of us kids were obsessed with that TV programme. To the point that B.A. Baracus’ words of wisdom infiltrated our daily vernacular. Everything was to be pitied. I pity the fool who’s never seen the Teen Wolf movie. I pity the fool who never tasted no ‘Catch chocolate bar’.

And I aint visiting no Granny’s today, fool.

Of course there were other heroes over the years. Marty Mc Fly inspired me to try to build a flux capacitor out of a remote control car. There was Knight Rider, Luke Skywalker and even the Hobbit guy from the Goonies. But Murdock was my first inspiration.

It’s difficult for my heroes in adulthood to compare. Of course there are other writers and people who I respect and admire. One in particular influenced my writing a great deal and although I’m a massive fan I don’t think she’d be too impressed if I started to imitate or wear the same clothes as her.

I suppose a lot of people can relate to the admiration of a favourite teacher when young and the craving of recognition from them. This need to impress can even remain when schooldays have long since passed. I’m no different and that’s why I was especially pleased to spot an old maths teacher at a production of one of my plays a few years back. He was a man who inspired me in many ways and I was pretty eager to hear how he rated the play.

Tangent

‘So, what did you think?’ I caught up with this teacher immediately afterward.

He scratched his head for a bit, raised an eyebrow.

‘Do you know when you were talking about that guard fella,’ he said.

I knew he was referring to a brief scene in the play where one character’s posture is compared to “three sided shapes and tangents or any number of the trigonometric theorems that were drilled into a child’s head in school.”

I nodded in acknowledgement and wrung my hands expectantly. My maths teacher leaned in close. He then steadily tapped me on the shoulder, exactly like he had done when I was in secondary school.

‘I think,’ he grumbled. ‘You might be confusing the tangent line in geometry with the tangent function of trigonometry for that part’.
And without any further hesitation, he rambled off to talk to someone else.
In typical Irish fashion, I was quickly brought back to earth.