Religion and science can’t agree on much, but aside from the fundamental opinion that old men are right about everything, one of the few areas where they do concur is that the human animal is a social animal. Like otters, termites and wildebeest we are stronger in groups, working in unison to do everything from building igloos to delivering a third quarter earnings forecast. Banding together is how we managed to fight off the velociraptors and dominate this planet to a degree that even the members of our species stupid enough to appear on reality TV aren’t picked off and eaten by mountain lions.

Unfortunately, our success comes at a psychological price, and I don’t just mean the indignity of people from TOWIE using up valuable oxygen. Unlike otters or wildebeest my gigantic human brain has a lot of spare capacity, and in the absence of wild predators a lot of that anxiety bandwidth goes to thinking about how uncomfortable I am with the thronging millions of my own species. We’ve been so successful at building a safe, modern society that I’ve learned to survive with minimal interpersonal contact, and as a result my basic social skills have gone the way of my tailbone and appendix. I seldom need to team up with strangers to bring down a mammoth, and so have little opportunity to get used to those strangers’ weird smells and irritating mannerisms, perhaps even to come to love them. Although I’ve always contended that being a misanthropic loner should be a legitimate and respected life choice, if I’m being honest I’d admit that the quickest way to a successful existence really isn’t far removed from lining up to eat ticks out the armpit of a bigger monkey.

Fake it til you make it

This would paint a sad picture, except unlike wildebeests humans have also evolved a thousand ways to pretend that we like other people – even when we don’t want them to have sex with us or give us money. I’ve studied these extensively, and am now confident that I can feign not to be appalled by humanity, moving through your birthdays and weddings without anybody guessing that I’m about as interested in hearing about your children as one of the murderous androids from Blade Runner. Perhaps even less interested, because the androids from Blade Runner weren’t forced to add you on Facebook in order to fit in at the office. I’m like the Terminator, if the Terminator was only programmed to pretend it was having fun at your Christmas party before going home and drinking half a litre of amaretto.

Diversify your personal portfolio

The only thing you need to worry about is making sure that you evolve more than one strategy to prevent people from realising that you’re a creepy introvert with a freezer full of stolen house pets. This is a rookie error, but a surprisingly widespread one – the most obvious example being people who mistake non-controversial gender-based interests as being an adequate substitute for a convincing personality. That phrase sounds like the kind of thing my psychologist used to put in reports (before he went missing in those woods), but in regular English I’m talking about people who think that building their “personal brand” exclusively about one interest is a substitute for any personal depth. The most obvious example is obsessive sports fandom, which takes all the complicated aspects of physical competition and replaces them with a lifestyle based around chuntering out dull statistics and pointless opinions about whether one bunch of millionaires can kick a ball further than the other. The only positive thing I can say about conversing relentlessly about sport is that there’s a certain grim irony in lazing about, hammering your body with booze and pork scratchings whilst prattling on about an activity that was designed to keep you fit.

Stepford wife swap

In some ways it’s easier to pretend you have an acceptable personality if you’re a woman, perhaps because there are so many men out there who won’t pay the slightest attention to anything you think or like if they can be persuaded you’ll listen to them talk about themselves. Even our supposedly liberal western societies have such low expectations of women and girls that few people notice if your personality entirely consists of talking about babies (and sometimes cats). You can be interested in other stuff, but only to the extent that other stuff plays a role in the singular purpose of nurturing babies (and cats). A convincing identity can be constructed from a thousand images and anecdotes about your children, or just random children you made up, offering a smooth facade of bland, tedious normality that very few people will question. If she loves cats and babies so much, why does she live in an unlit apartment full of gin bottles and shoes? Nobody thinks to ask. This is why all the serial killers who get caught are men.

Graeme Norton American Psycho

Sadly I couldn’t pull that one off, because no amount of conditioning can obscure my innate revulsion to nappies, “kids say the funniest things” rubbish and how your “little ones” are doing at nursery. If I see you have a Baby on Board sign on your people carrier I instinctively start driving more dangerously. So, my winning strategy for social camouflage has been to avoid focussing on one area, and instead develop a surface personality where I pretend to be slightly interested in a wide variety of things, when really all I’ve done is mined social media for a broad spectrum of unchallenging positions to take on things. I’m like a chat show host, a smiling parasite that thrives amongst you and distils polite banter into the poison sacs incubating in my subterranean lair. Like Jonathan Ross I can be your best friend for up to seven minutes, which is usually long enough to lull people into a false sense of security if I need to chat to you at a cocktail party or are simply looking for a fresh body for one of my monthly feeds.

So, have I managed to find a way to fit into our society? I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s been an unqualified success, but I think I manage a fairly convincing impersonation of a human being. I might not be top of anybody’s list to be a godparent to their child, but neither will I be the last person allowed onto the lifeboats. You can talk about sport and babies, whilst I’ll be busy working out who I’m going to try and eat as soon as they get sunstroke. See you at the Christmas party!

If a tourist had asked me 15 years ago whether Jersey had much of an urban music scene I would have laughed and suggested they turn right around and do the robot dance back onto the ferry. There were enough people to pack out a small nightclub, but if you saw somebody rapping onstage instead of in a dingy basement it was probably part of a touring theatre group trying to get kids from St Mary to stay away from the drugs. Since that time a few things have changed. Jersey has shifted even further away from the Black & White Minstrels to a diverse timetable of weekend festivals, one off parties and other events that aren’t exclusively pitched at people who learn about music from the Radio Times. I’m glad that middle-aged cabaret still has an underground scene (like Fight Club with bingo wings) but Jersey’s young people were in dire need of age appropriate entertainment, and now they have it, even if we’re still a bit closer to Butlin’s than Brooklyn.

Straight Outta Longueville

Although Folklore and Groove De Lecq do an amazing job of catering to the hippy crowd, and Jersey Live reliably beats V festival at its own game, as an ageing man with a large collection of futuristic running shoes I am most excited about the type of music promoted by newer events like Blkout and Reasons. I am 30% deaf and 100% down with the kids, so I like to hear music with plenty of bass and the occasional rude word. This used to mean exclusively hip-hop, but these days there is a wide variety of sounds grouped together under the slightly cringey euphemism of “urban music.” This descriptor starts with rap music, but has come to encompass garage, grime and the sort of drum and bass that you can’t use as background music on Grand Designs. It would just be more honest to say that it’s music that originally came from urban-based African-American and Afro-Carribean people, but there’s nothing the music industry likes more than a confusing genre name and dislikes more than racial politics.

Whatever you want to call it, what you can definitely say is that Jersey still doesn’t produce very much of it. We’ve got enough acoustic strummers that we’ve started exporting them to Sark, and a faceless army of studio knob twiddlers pumping out SICK BEATS, but not much in the way of MCs rapping about sea lettuce and traffic on the inner road. Yes, I am aware that Jersey’s ethnic makeup drastically reduces our chances of producing the next Kendrick Lamar, but Macklemore won the Grammy for best rap album and he’s from the mean streets of Seattle. Calvin Harris produced most of Rihanna’s last album and he was weaned on Irn Bru. Dare to dream, people of Jersey, which is exactly what I did when I falsified the musical biography of my area in order to try and get my L’Etacq based garage crew a spot on X Factor. It didn’t work, but if enough of us commit to editing Wikipedia we can finally establish street cred for Trinity breakdancers and the badman rudeboys of Maufant Village.

Shook Ouens pt. 2

I’ve realised that nobody is going to be interested in somebody who raps about seagulls, so if Jersey is going to get any respect we need to imply an atmosphere of danger, similar to how Bergerac made it look like you couldn’t walk down King Street without being knocked over by an international jewel thief fleeing from MI5. It’s not that far off from how Ice Cube went from being an architecture student to writing music about how he’s killed more people than malaria and is not on great terms with the police. To mythologise the troubles with your neighbourhood is traditional, although more along the lines of what the Wu Tang did for pre-existing social conditions in Staten Island, rather than trying to convince people that First Tower is a warzone where haters are out to jack you for your paycards.

Still, trouble sells. In the 90s, mainstream audiences around the world learned about America’s regional rap scenes through the public conflict between MCs from New York and their counterparts in Los Angeles. Known as the “East coast / West coast beef,” it helped shift millions of records but also culminated in the tragic deaths of 2pac and the Notorious BIG. Apart from the platinum selling records, international fame and senseless murders, I often tell people that Jersey is not that different: I myself learned about the code of the streets by seeing what happened when some boat shoe-wearing punks from Gorey Village tried to walk up in Le Braye car park and disrespect my homies from the west coast. It was nasty; they got back from buying Cornettos to find somebody had drawn a wang in the dirt on their BMW. Since then, I’ve lived in fear of reprisal and have been careful never to be caught trapping at St Catherine’s pier without a lobster permit.

Mo money, mo problems

It is a terrible stereotype to say that rappers only talk about violence; many of my favourite artists are much more interested in talking about money. There is also a strong tradition of using rap music to communicate social injustice and philosophy, but this is not the time for me to talk about the feds who oppressed me for overstaying in Sand Street car park. I admire rappers who boast about accumulating fabulous wealth from dubious sources, because I feel this is an area where Jersey people don’t need to do a lot of work. Artists like Rick Ross have made careers by telling people of the millions that they earned by bending the law, so maybe there’s a gap in the market for a man from St Mary who tells gritty stories of insider trending on the stock market, or the mortal enemies they made doing armed hold-ups on the honesty box near Val De La Mare. I aspire to be the Gucci Mane of Quennevais Precinct.

Talking about it will only get me so far, so I’ve decided to funnel some of the proceeds from my life of crime (aka Grandpa’s trust fund) into an extravagant series of music videos showing that it’s possible to ball (relatively) hard in a place that’s only nine miles by five. I plan to show that my community is behind me, that Jersey is a neighbourhood where OG potato farmers are proud that a young man escaped poverty and bought himself a tractor with diamond-covered wheels and a pimp stable of prize winning cows. I’m going to have girls pole dancing on the steam clock, Humphrey the lion holding an uzi and plan to melt down the Bailiff’s mace to make myself a new set of teeth. All I need is some criminal notoriety, so if the police are reading this, please be fully aware that I have no respect for the law and will not be cutting my garden hedge until you do something about it. I am not afraid to ride a horse on the beach before September, and regularly purchase things online without paying GST. If you think you can take me alive (and on camera) – come and get me.

Although the arrival of dial-up internet in St John means that all of the parishes have technically joined the electronic age, Jersey is an old-fashioned place where passing information quickly and accurately is no substitute for the pleasure of telling a good story. You could report the facts, or you could savour the telling of a tale that gets more exaggerated as it winds its way through every muttering corner of the village. It probably explains how our community managed to survive for a thousand year period where the only entertainments were playing petanque, reading the Bible in Latin and trying to meet somebody who isn’t your cousin. 

It says a lot about people that urban legends continue to flourish in an age where it should only take fifteen seconds to disprove most of them. If anything, the existence of the internet has made rumours and falsehoods proliferate to a degree where humanity’s collective store of unlikely stories probably outweighs our actual knowledge. Future generations will know little about our daily lives, as our historical records are more likely to contain tales of the time there was a finger in our hamburger, or a list of the different things that hospital doctors are rumoured to have removed from our bottoms.

I’ve done my bit for posterity by hand-picking some of the finest rumours from my own childhood. I did come up with at least a hundred, but by the time I’d removed all the ones that were libellous or simply too unpleasant to print this article was all that was left. Call 01534 811100 if you want to have a good time.

Dye of embarrassment

I could write a book of tall tales that revolve entirely around Fort Regent from 1980 onwards, but a personal favourite has to be our local variant on the myth that swimming pools contain a special dye that shows when you’ve peed in them. This isn’t and has never been true, but that didn’t stop Jersey kids circulating terrifying tales about the time a kid from your brother’s class lost control during Pluto’s Playtime and was socially ostracised for leaving an orange/purple/lime green disaster puddle in the water next to the blow up sausage. Logically, this would have meant that the small, suspiciously warm, kids pool would have been bright purple most of the time, but logic has no power over somebody who absolutely swears on their mum’s life that they saw a kid get decapitated on the eggs once. However, the rumour that the swimming pool foot dip was radioactive did turn out to have an element of truth – the States only built the cavern under the Fort as a safe place to house foot mutants, lurgy sufferers and kids who got locked in the ghost train at closing time.

The a-peel of illegal drugs

The “war on drugs” had many fronts, incorporating efforts to put kids off narcotics via messages on the title screen of Golden Axe, the scary villain in the Michael Jackson Moonwalker movie, and the continuing existence of hippies. The anti-drugs campaign was also strengthened by the power of the urban legend, leading to numerous lurid schoolyard tales about the misadventures of various kids from your estate, older classes at school or just old enough to own a motorbike. Some of these undoubtedly had their origins in real tragedies, but the most memorable will always be the sad tale of the boy who took so much LSD that he thought he was an orange and tried to peel himself. If only he’d stuck to “soft” drugs, like banana skins and the cannabis-scented joss sticks that your cousin got cautioned for shoplifting from Horseplay.

E-numbers were developed for chemical warfare

You didn’t necessarily need illegal drugs to go crazy, as rumour had it that even the aisle of the local newsagent contained hidden multitudes of lethal, mind-altering substances. Long before parents were willing to excuse their badly-behaved offspring by self-diagnosing them with ADHD, poor behaviour was attributed to the presence of artificial additives in many children’s foodstuffs. Many of us will remember the kid who ate NERDS and ran under a bus, or the numerous perils said to proceed from scoffing too many Wham bars, fizzy Astro Belts or the MSG in a Chinese takeaway. According to some parents, effects of food you saw advertised during Emu’s Pink Windmill could range from causing cancer in rats, making your hair fall out or gluing up your insides so you gradually starved to death – given these warnings from our elders, it is amazing that any of us lived to be old enough to copy them and move to using factor two sunscreen and smoking unfiltered Silk Cut.

Nightmare on King Street

The moral panic over so-called “video nasties” was right in one respect, in that the wide availability of VHS horror movies would have an irreversible effect on the children who got access to them. It didn’t transform us into serial killers or Satan-worshippers, but it did lead to a generation of twelve-year-olds who believed that spiritual corruption and gruesome murder were things that regularly happened to people in our community. It was a slippery slope: first you watch a bootleg copy of Hellraiser (ideally the X rated one where people actually died filming it), then you start talking to spirits in the mirror, within weeks you’ve bought a Ouija board and have made a pact with the devil by drawing a pentagram and setting fire to a picture of Cliff Richard. Your inevitable grisly death would serve as a moral lesson to future sleepovers, even if nobody could remember your actual name.

My cousin has nunchuks

and a bo staff

You could say that frightening stories about drugs and the supernatural are a logical response to a barely-understood social menace that children feel powerless to doing anything about. Luckily there was one threat which you could prepare for: the epidemic of gang-related street violence was the problem, and the solution was ninja weaponry, martial arts training and sometimes the finishing move of WWF wrestler Jake “the Snake” Roberts. Even in Jersey, we were reliably informed that innocent bystanders were being stabbed outside discos and shot in back alleys like Batman’s parents. Some people chose to cower away, but some people (my cousin) were inspired by the Karate Kid to train so hard that within a matter of weeks they could break an opponent’s neck with a single roundhouse kick and were unanimously agreed to be toughest in juniors, possibly even including year 11s. After training at the Dojo, you then need to register your hands and feet as a deadly weapon, but whatever you do, do not tell the police about the nunchuks and ninja stars you brought back from the secret Japanese shop in St Malo. The police don’t like criminals, but for some reason they also don’t want you to have the power to defeat a gang of five bikers just by yourself – probably because the cost of having them all in intensive care is very high. I am your sensei, and if you pass this technique on I will be forced to kill you. Hai!