Carl Spickett

I met Carl at a Nursery group at about age 3. Of course I don't recall him from that long ago but I remember being part of the same social group as him and Topher at Coombe Hill Infants. There we played Transformers and discovered that red ants sting.

At the Juniors we got into top trumps and combat cards in particular. This was a Games Workshop product that was like Top Trumps only quicker, because cards died instead of being trading back and forth... the "dead pile" as I recall. I remember being shocked to realise that nowhere were there rules written about the "Three-card choice" which is known by all schoolchildren, whereby you can choose which card to use once you only have three or fewer cards left. We invented a whole variant of the game where both players would divide the cards into masses and masses of three card choices, each tougher than the last. We played Combat Cards to death- quite literally in the case of some cards. This actually made me for once in my life vaguely popular for a few months to a year in Junior school. I kept playing them for maybe five years on and off, before selling them to classmates at Tiffins. I really regret that now. Never sell anything you've had for that long.

Carl had brilliant orange hair and, like all the other boys except me, was really into football. Beyond a certain age I spent a lot of time waiting for him to get bored of a game and come and do something else.

Another thing we did a lot of was drawing "Computer Games". Basically this meant drawing a map for some imaginary platform computer game. There were spikes to fall on, jelly to bounce off, falling rocks to run past, slimeade (a coinage by Daniel Ieronymedes' father to make us more enthusiastic about Limeade) to make you stronger. Lifts marked the beginning and end of each level, often guarded by fearsome monsters. I wish I still had that kind of an imagination.

We fell out regularly as young children do (one particularly disasterous occasion being when I told the people in my year that Carl was interested in tomboyish Delphine Adburgham, which he had told me himself- apparently not seriously), but I considered him my best friend for most of the Juniors. We had a lot of sleepovers, along with Daniel and various others. This carried on for a few years when I went to Tiffins and he went to Sutton Grammar, but our meetings grew fewer though I never completely lost touch. Now Carl is at King's College London along with me. He's studying Biochemistry and I see him occasionally when he strays from his department.

A nice guy though I feel that perhaps we don't have as much in common as students as we once did as children.