mattus.co.uk: the website of Matt Wood - about Mattus

The Interesting Bit

You live your life, 24/7/365.

You're not bad-looking, you have relationships. You have things you hate and things you love. You leave the toilet seat down. You prefer salted popcorn. Ska music makes you want to die. Nobody else in the world could possibly know you like you know yourself.

things you hate and things you love

So you try and write about it, write about yourself. And you discover, like hundreds before you, that it's really hard. Often, you're too modest.

But that's another story. My story begins about eighteen years ago. I'm still not sure which genre of story I'm writing, so I roll with it. The story so far has four chapters. The first, babyhood. Other people wrote this one for me. The second, childhood. The third, adolescence. I've just started the fourth: adulthood. It's the last chapter, so I'd better make it good.

adulthood. it's the last chapter.

I think I'll start in the middle. Odd, but the first chapter isn't dreadfully interesting. I was born in a hospital, and came home. I made noisy public speeches in front of dozens of cooing relatives. Then they went back to their houses, and my parents worked day and night to give me life. One day, I said something. Another day, I walked. Just like everyone else. Your life begins when you first make choices for yourself.

It's hard to say when you first start to think for yourself. Was saying the word 'egg' thinking for myself, even though I don't like eggs? What about my baffling obsession with road cones at the age of two? The start of school is probably a safe place to begin.

I wasn't a particularly co-operative lower-school student. It took me a while to acquire the concept of doing what an unfamiliar person told me. Rolling around on the floor was much easier! Perhaps I was a tad immature on the emotional side, but mentally I was all there. Teachers found me willing to participate in any activity which involved numbers. Vaulting over a horse? No chance. Counting how many times I vaulted over a horse? No problem. Even now I can be very passionate about things which I enjoy, and equally passionate about things which I dislike. Some people call it 'intense'.

some people call it intense.

As I grew up, I made friends. My first friend's name was Ian. Ian had a similar background to me, shared my sense of humour and was in my class at school. For the first few years we were inseparable. It's probably to Ian that I owe the debt of music; in the heady days of the mid-Nineties, he introduced me to the finest of the Britpop era - Oasis, Blur and Pulp. It was the spark which ignited a lifelong interest. I never looked back in anger.

I probably discovered girls a bit earlier than most. I developed my first crush at the age of eight. Girls in the year above you at lower school had that unreachable aura which made them so endlessly attractive. All you had to do was maintain it by never speaking to them. If you broke the rule, she became just another girl. Silence made the loudest sound.

Moving on to middle school, I began to establish a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. I embraced academia as something which came naturally to me. I began to love writing as a way of expressing powerful emotions. I wrote the odd poem. Numbers still held a singular fascination. Yet my hands were fairly useless. Teachers killed hours in vain in attempts to dispose of my spidery handwriting. Elephants and donkeys became one under my pencil. I wasn't particularly concerned.

I wrote the odd poem.

I remained unaffected by the trends and fashions which plague the life of a teenager. I didn't understand the people who tried to be individual by acting the same as dozens of others. I was well-known, but perhaps a little misunderstood. I disliked the peer pressures which forced people to adopt facades in order to become one of the crowd. But my lust for popularity was equally strong.

I became quite a good conversationalist, or at worst, a good listener. Knowing about lots of things gives you many things to talk about, and I liked gaining knowledge. I will talk about almost anything which contains a point of discussion. I can be deeply philosophical. It's my strength and my weakness, leading to snippets of genius and civil wars in my conscience in equal measure.

As a matter of course, I took exams. They gave me eleven GCSEs, four A-Levels and two areas of interest. I love History because the past repeats itself. I love German because he who has two languages has two souls. As a rule, I dislike exams because they possess no soul at all.

University is a big change. On one hand, I'm enthralled at being able to study my favourite subjects in greater depth, following up my own lines of interest. On the other, it signals how I teeter precariously on the edge of maturity. I have lost candy floss, bouncy castles and Blue Peter. I have gained independence, words spoken and heard with the head and with the heart, and true friends with whom to watch timeless sunrises.

If I've learnt one thing, it's that change and variety are the essence of life. These, along with knowledge, are the paradigms of this web site. I hope you like it.