This story was requested by Philip J Naylor. He asked us to tell the story of his life to his close friends. When we arrived at the Watershed bar and told his friends this was about to happen, they seemed delighted; Philip having always been something of a ‘closed book’. Byron read the non-italicised bits (the facts - largely unedited) and Molly read the bits in italics which relate to her experience of writing this story. We were quite nervous before this one, due to the verity of the subject matter and the intimate nature of the telling.

I should begin this with full disclosure. We picked this submission largely because the man who submitted it is called Philip J Naylor. My dad is also called Philip J Naylor. I love a coincidence. He told us he wanted us to tell his friends the story of his life, warts and all. This was promising. I liked the idea of these (hopefully) metaphorical warts.

I then spoke to him on the phone and asked him to send me some details about his life; the story that he wanted us to tell. A week later, and I was staring at a very, very long email. The story of someone’s life.

I was suddenly a bit daunted. How should I tell this story? It wasn’t like the other submissions – it wasn’t fiction. There seemed no point adding fiction to this (although P J Naylor had pretty much given me free reign to do what I liked) as some of it you just couldn’t write – it was bonkers and beautiful and sad and funny. Plus, there was this sense that we should stick to the truth, as per the original request. I felt strangely privileged, as if I was the only person in the world who knew all these things about PJ. And I thought about secrets. The way that they’re not necessarily secrets because you mean them to be secrets but because you can’t tell everyone everything about you all the time. You’re busy. You have to live.

And that’s what P J Naylor has done. He has lived. Because that’s what life is for. So I’m not going to add fiction to this. I’m just going to tell you, because that’s what stories are for.

This is a story about a man. But it’s also a tiny bit about a girl – who had to write a story about a man.

This is a man born in Bristol in the sixties. He was named after PJ Proby – a pop singer renowned for splitting his trousers on stage.

He watched the moon landings - on his sister’s second birthday. They got to stay up half the night watching TV (more green & white than black & white) with a tin of Quality Street.

When I read this part, I believed that this man - this boy - on watching the moon landings said to himself – I want to do that one day. I want to be an astronaut.

This is a man whose school reports described him as a disruptive influence - finishing work quickly then distracting other kids by chatting to them. He developed a fascination with insects, ants in particular. He realised at a young age that church is all just stories to get people to play nice.

This is a man whose Dad was sent to Hammerfest for six weeks in the middle of winter, to fix a broken packaging machine in the fish factory.

This confused me quite a bit. The only Hammerfest I was aware of is Hammerfest, the metal festival in North Wales. I’ve never been, but a quick look at the website told me that ‘Thor’s supernatural Hammer casts the first drum and brings every Metal Berserker from the oath-sworn into this dark metal hall for 120 decibels of pure Heavy Metal at its best’. Really? P J Naylor’s dad was a metal head? Then I discovered the other Hammerfest. In Norway. Not Wales.

This is a man who grew up thinking Norway was the most exotic place you could go.

This is a man who grew up not particularly well off – who went on many, many camping holidays, and whose TV got put in the attic to save on the license fee. Him and his sister were told it was broken.

This made me think about my TV growing up. When I was little, TV, films and books were my escape. It’s part of the reason I grew up seeing myself as the lead role in a film. I was always lost in fictions. I wondered at this point what would have happened if someone had put some of those fictions into the loft.

This is a man who has scaled many mountains. He climbed Snowdon with his Dad. As a teenager, despite not actually being depressed, he was prescribed anti-depressants which made him depressed. This goes on for four years and he stops having much to do with anyone.

He fancies a girl, Vicky, but never gets up the nerve to do anything about it.

He starts writing to NASA, and getting back pamphlets/books about their work.

I punched the air at this point. I was right! He did want to be an astronaut! With this in mind, the next detail I read made me momentarily, unspeakably sad.

This is a man who experienced the dawning realisation that he is too tall to ever be an astronaut.

Luckily, the next detail cheered me up no end:

This is a man who was in the audience for a recording of ‘Think of a number’ with Johnny Ball.

This is a man who considered himself destined for scientific work. He wanted to do Art at school, but it clashed with German which was considered more useful.

At this point I’m reminded of the thing people occasionally say about politicians – those who want to go into politics should immediately be precluded from doing so. Maybe it’s the same with art. Maybe scientific rigour is something that the art world lacks. I’m not entirely convinced I didn’t get into being a ‘creative’ because I’m rubbish at getting up in the mornings.

This is a man whose parents met bell-ringing (Campanology being renowned for its aphrodisiac qualities).

This is one of my favourite facts about P J Naylor. Someone whose parents met bell-ringing is destined to have a story to tell. When I read about this, I lost half a day to Googling bell-ringing. It’s not something I’d ever considered before. Now, in my house in Norwich, I hear the bell-ringers practising on a Tuesday and instead of thinking SHUT UP as I used to, I wonder if any of them are falling in love.

This is a man who took up bell-ringing himself, at Henbury.

This is a man who represented the school on a quiz team (and once accidentally at triple-jump), but failed his spoken English O’Level exam. He has to do a German oral exam with tonsillitis. Schwierig (German for difficult).

The German tonsillitis thing, whilst being impressive, was overshadowed for me by the idea that anybody could end up triple-jumping accidentally.

This is a man for whom the stand out incident during A Levels was finding someone had scratched ‘Phil Naylor is gorgeous’ and ‘yes he is’ on one of the desks in the 6th Form library. He had no idea who it was and considers this the high point of his love life.

This makes me laugh because it reminds me of my dad, and how I once saw ‘I heart Phil Naylor’ scrawled onto the back of a pub toilet door in our home town of Falmouth. I’ve always secretly hoped that it was authored by my mum.

This is a man who has had two jobs which necessitated him jumping up and down in a skip with rotting food in it. The first was at Gateway on Henleaze Road - with special responsibility for all the pyramid displays around the store. An appropriate use of his skills when you consider that…

This is a man who went to King’s College London to study Physics with Astrophysics. He studied during the early days of video jukeboxes and remembers him and his mates walking out of the pub whenever Bruce Springsteen came on for a second time.

This is a man who lodged in Uxbridge with a bell-ringing family (it’s clearly genetic). A family of cat lovers. The landlady’s son’s girlfriend would make everyone breakfast in bed. This is a man who’s not a morning person, so would often wake to the sound of a cat sucking the milk out of his cornflakes.

This is a man whose many lecture notes were unintelligible due to him falling asleep - often in the front row. Apparently this is a man who can write in his sleep; which is a skill, regardless of legibility.

This is a man who had two stints working at the Coop department store. It’s the second job where he had to jump up and down in a skip with rotting food in it. An appropriate use of his skills when you consider that…

This is a man who graduated at the Albert Hall in front of Princess Anne.

I hoped at this point that between this and the skip incident, he’d had a shower.

This is a man who got two intriguing offers after graduating - writing software for targeting air-to-air missiles at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, at Farnborough, or doing an MSC in Radio Astronomy at Jodrell Bank.

You should know at this point, that when I graduated from a Drama degree, I also had two offers. One was from the Wetherspoons on the high street who were looking for bar staff, the other was from the cafe in town who were looking for waitresses. Maybe I should have tried harder at Science GCSE? I would have, but my teacher pronounced ‘skeleton’ wrong and I lost all respect for her after that.

This is a man who despite taking rubbish notes somehow managed to get a first class degree, and decided to go to Jodrell. He wasn’t squeamish about the missile job, but wasn’t sure if a life of research was for him. Plus, Jodrell Bank was about as close as he was going to get to the space race.

This is a man who thinks about space a lot.

This is a man who spent a year at Jodrell Bank, living with other students in an old farmhouse on the edge of the site, miles from anywhere. A concept that years later would be plagiarised by Endemol, for popular ‘reality’ travesty, Big Brother. Only instead of behaving like a twonk on national television, Phil learned everything you need to know about building and operating a radio telescope.

This is a man who survived a car crash.

This is a man who was offered a PHD place to do southern hemisphere pulsar survey in Australia. He passed it up so that the guy who’d built the survey equipment could do it instead. It worked out well for this guy; in the end he got his own edition of ‘The Sky At Night’.

This is a man who was nicknamed ‘pigeon’ because of his initials appearing regularly on
the top scores for the games on the MSC office BBC Micro, and because there were signs up around the site saying ‘do not feed the pigeons’.

This is a man who developed an appreciation for quite how insignificant everything on Earth actually is and probably wouldn’t bother getting up in the mornings if he wasn’t so bloody minded.

This is a man who attended an International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium at The University of Maryland – and finally got to visit NASA.

I wanted to celebrate at this point, but I was alone in my office. I considered going out into the street and high-fiving a stranger. Shouting ‘P J NAYLOR GOT TO NASA!’ into their confused face. I did not do this.

This is a man who started working as a Unix Systems Administrator as part of working on a program to simulate imaging radar systems for the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern.

I loved the way he dropped this one in like it was an every day event. It was as if he’d written ‘no biggy’ underneath.

This is a man who moved to a shared house in Mile End. He’d get into the occasional habit of spending the afternoon at the cinema when things weren’t going well at work, and then heading back and working late. One time he decided that a glass of wine at lunch might spice up a shitty morning, and ended up quaffing the whole bottle. He decided that being drunk didn’t help, and stood out on the fire escape in the rain to sober up. He then had to spend the afternoon working in his boxer shorts, while his clothes dried out on a radiator - in an office shared with seven other people.

This is a man who had a candlelit dinner for two with an Eastenders actress, while they did a piece of work for the MOD during the first Gulf War.

Out of all the information, I’m embarrassed to say that this detail excited me the most.

This is a man who organised a bell ringing tour of Cornwall.

Now, I’m not sure what happened on this bell ringing tour of Cornwall, because he shares no details of it and just writes NEVER AGAIN in capitals. I supposed what happens on a bell ringing tour of Cornwall stays on a bell ringing tour of Cornwall.

This is a man who usually tells people that he got fed up of being on short term contracts and didn’t want to give up on the job applications that he’d put in (which is true), but the other reason for giving up his academic career was to follow Ruth to Bristol in the hope that she’d change her mind about him.

This is a man who then spent nine months out of work. He moved back in with his parents and turned down a job on the south coast with the Admiralty Research Establishment working on software to track incoming missile using infrared cameras. He eventually got a job as a Unix system administrator at the University of the West of England.

This is a man who did more bell-ringing at Filton with Ruth, and through Ruth got into seeing folk bands at the Fleece & Firkin.

This is a man who at work set up one of the first World Wide Web servers in the UK.

Again. No biggy.

After four years Ruth decided to start dating another tall, dark, skinny guy with glasses. P J Naylor stopped doing anything artistic at this point.

This is a man who realised then that he didn’t really know anyone in Bristol outside of work and Ruth, so took up ballroom dancing. The class was filmed learning the Samba for HTV’s ‘Time Out West’. Very much like snaking hips, television cameras don’t lie. So at this point he was forced to confess to his parents that he wasn’t actually bell-ringing on Tuesday nights anymore. They filmed the dancers from three different angles using one camera, and didn’t sync the soundtrack after editing - so two thirds of the time it looked like they couldn’t keep time with the music.

This is a man who was contacted by Radio Bristol, who needed an expert to explain how the World Wide Web works on the Breakfast Show. He’s not at all sure if anyone wound up any the wiser.

This is a man who went to Scandinavia by train - Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo. After two nights on a sleeper train he woke up clutching the sides of his mattress - even though he was now back in his own bed.

This is a man who broke the world sand-castle building record at Weston-super-Mare.

I found this particularly impressive as my experience of Weston-super-Mare is that there’s no actual sand there, only mud. I got stuck in it recently and had to use a frisbee as leverage to heave myself out.

This is a man who decided he needed to go on an adventure, so went dogsledding in Greenland.
He vowed to go back and see it at different seasons.

He began doing regular pub quizzes with the researchers from work – they were pretty successful and had to organise regular cheese and wine parties to drink/spend their copious winnings. This is a man who, it turns out, has a knack for recognising photos of D-list celebrities.

Probably cause he’s had candlelit dinners with them.

This is a man who made a fool of himself on Radio 4’s ‘Genius’, trying to convince Dave Gorman and Neil Innes that using helium filled bubble-wrap to save on postage is a good idea.

This is a man who spent an Easter in Paris with his pen-pal Maude and decided it was much like London, but with more cigarettes and dog crap.

This is a man who finished as Tower Captain at Horfield.

This is a man who gave oration at his Uncle’s funeral.

This is a man who is starting to get into genealogy – which is somewhat hampered by the fact that most of the family have not been on speaking terms for years.

This is a man who recently got the ferry from Newcastle to Bergen, then went on a Norwegian Coastal Voyage and finally got to Hammerfest, (Norway, not Wales).

This is a man who has:

Flown a glider.

Thought he was going to die.
Hurt himself in order to be able to feel something.

Given all the money he had on him to someone who needed it more.
Listened to a stranger talking through tough times.
Made his own clothes.
Been in a white out on top of a glacier, miles away from anywhere.
Watched the northern lights.
Worked all night, then watched the sunrise while listening to ‘Morning Mood’ from ‘Peer Gynt’.

I wondered at this point if there was anything P J Naylor had not done. He immediately answered this question:

This is a man who has not:

Learned to drive.
Kissed a girl.
Done anything just for the sake of scaring himself.
Spent enough time thinking about what he wants.
Decided what he should be when he grows up.

After I read everything about P J Naylor, I began to think about my dad. My Philip J Naylor. I think about how I don’t really know that much about him, I thought I did but this level of detail has sent me reeling, and it’s all I can do not to get on a train to Cornwall and run to my dad with a notepad and pen – tell me everything.

This is a man who has lived.

This is a man who doesn’t settle or stop.

This is a man who used to want to be an astronaut (and I believe that he still does).

This is a man who doesn’t want to be the kind of person who gets out one of their famous anecdotes at every opportunity. This is a man who DOES NOT WANT TO BE THAT GUY.

This is why we are here.

This is a man who understands that you can’t tell everyone everything about you all the time. You have to live.

I am glad we picked P J Naylor, on the strength of a name. A coincidence. Now I know more about bell-ringing, that Hammerfest is a place and not just a festival, and the height requirements for going into space. And I’m going to send a letter to my dad. There are a few things I’d like him to fill me in on.