D'you wanna be in my Gang?

Someone asked me yesterday whether I had ever been a Goth. I retorted that this was a most extraordinary question for someone of my age – I’m not sure for how long Gothic has been a style choice for people, but I’m pretty sure I was already too old to make such a choice by the time it was. Well, mused my questioner, there must have been a trend of some kind that you followed at some point in your life, surely?

I thought about this for a while and couldn’t remember being a member of any particular “gang”, even in my youth. Whether by design or by accident, I never seemed to want to hunt with the pack – when my contemporaries at school were wearing army great-coats, I wore a red velvet blanket draped around my shoulders; when Afghan coats were de rigeur, I instead chose to sport an elegant (lady’s) fur coat given to me (appropriately enough, perhaps?) by the manageress of a pet shop where I held a Saturday job.

I suppose the closest I ever came to following a recognized trend was in the glam-rock era when I would adorn my face with outrageous make-up, had a blue streak put in my hair, and squeezed my small ass into skin-tight brightly coloured satin flares atop mega-stacked platform shoes. I particularly loved that era because it was the only time I’ve ever been tall; and the only time I've ever been gorgeous. It’s a pity that there are no surviving photographs to prove it (at least in my possession). Even so, this slavery to a certain style only lasted a short while before I resorted to a blend of individual anonymity that nobody else seemed to be aware of. I remember that for two whole years I wore wooden Norwegian clogs on my feet, long before they became - for a while - fashionable.

I have always been something of a mis-fit, and even when I was consciously trying to emulate Bowie or Bolan, I would still add a twist that was uniquely me - something that would quietly say: "I'm not really the same as you, it just looks like it". I identified strongly with Camus’s L’Étranger and often used to fantasise that I had been abandoned on the wrong planet by a passing space ship, or at least that I had been accidentally swapped at birth and really belonged to a family of eccentric European aristocrats living on borrowed time and borrowed money in some crumbling rococo palace in Bavaria or somewhere.

Perhaps I should re-invent myself? Maybe the next time you read this blog, instead of seeing ‘Richard Pilgrim’ at the top of this page, you will see my real name: Baron Rudolph von Piffenffeffer-Winkelstein. Yes, I’m sure that’s right.