being a weird looking italian kid, i got picked on mercilessly growing up in a small parochial northern town. my original curly hair was cut off by my mother into a pudding bowl style because she thought that "fitted in" (it didn't, it just made me look like a dork) i had big buck teeth which got smashed in a fight at school thus making me have broken buck teeth, and my mum dressed me in the dullest clothes imaginable, always artificial fibre *ugh*, flares when they were 5 years out of date, parkas & anoraks, plastic platform shoes (which i didn't need) and made me take a bloody flask and ham sandwiches everywhere. remember Dwayne Dibley the Cat's doofus alter ego from Red Dwarf? that was me as a kid.

bejasus, i didn't just need plastic surgery as a kid, I needed a family transplant.

it took years before i could even look in the mirror without thinking *t w a t*

bizarrely, me and Mrs Taw have always encouraged our kids to have at least some sense of style and dress with some flair and style their hair etc and what did we get? a pair of natural born doofuses; small doofus is 100% nerd, down to the anorak and flask, bizarre obsession with numerical order, and will no doubrt grow up to be a trainspotter. and I actively discourage him so that he may avoid this terrible fate!

(my mother desp wanted me to be a trainspotter and would buy me books on trains and buses and passenger airliners etc thinking that this would be a hobby that appealed to me - I was usually breaking into derelict houses and setting fire to them)

I'd have love plastic surgery as a kid, but running away and getting adopted by another family would prob have been better; but I never had the guts to run away