BarryHutchison

On the day before the 250th blog post we’re taking a look back at the very 1st one. It was written on my mobile phone, using a tiny bluetooth keyboard, as I travelled to Glasgow to meet Kathryn Ross, who would soon after become my agent. Back then, Invisible Fiends was still called Imaginary Friends Reunited, and had yet to be sent to a publisher. I had written Beastly! for Egmont, but hadn’t yet done any of the now-too-many-to-count Ben 10 books.

I wasn’t yet engaged, my daughter, Mia, hadn’t been born, I slept more… So many things have changed since that first post, so why not remind yourself of a simpler time by reading it now?

As for today’s thing that scared me…

I’m not sure if I was ‘scared’ by this so much as sickened by it. Let’s see what it is first, and then I’ll explain why it had such a horrible effect on me.

Holy two-way communication device!

In the 1960s Batman TV show, the Gotham City Police Department elected not to summon Batman by projecting his Bat-Signal into the sky, but rather just to call him up on the Batphone, as depicted above. It’s a much more sensible option, not only because of the money saved on electricity – high-powered searchlights cost a fortune to run – but also because the Bat-Signal only works when it’s cloudy. Also, it only works at night, and since Batman battled evil during the day in that show, the Bat-Signal was all sorts of pointless.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I had a part time job at a local supermarket. Every Saturday morning, I’d be awoken by my alarm at 5am, so I could get up and get ready to start work at 6am. Being a teenager, I had no idea 5am even existed until I started that job, and so when my alarm screeched out at me as the rest of the world slept, I often felt like crying.

It was made worse by the fact that A) the job was terrible, and B) my immediate superior – and the only other person on duty with me at the time – was a 19 year old half-wit with a curly mullet (the hairstyle I mean, not the fish). Those early Saturday mornings were among the least pleasant of my life, and it was always with a heavy heart that I dragged myself out of bed to walk – through the dark and the wind and the rain – to work.

What’s any of that got to do with the Batphone? The noise the Batphone makes when it rings is the exact noise my old alarm clock used to make when it went off. As a result, whenever I catch an episode of Batman and the Batphone rings, my heart sinks and I am transported back to those agonisingly unpleasant mornings from 17 years ago. I feel my chest tighten and my breathing begin to race, as I suffer what can only be a mild panic attack.

So that’s yer lot for the Countdown to 250. Join me tomorrow, for a special 250th blog post, on the day the winner of the first ever Author Blog Awards is due to be announced at the London Book Fair (assuming anyone can get there, what with the volcano an’ that). I’m not going to win it, obviously, but it has been fun to be in the running all the same. My money’s on Neil Gaiman, but I’ve been known to be wrong before.

Once.

A long, long time ago.