My childhood was spent growing up in a quaint, country town on the south coast of England. By far the most important\u00a0\u2013 and the most exciting\u00a0\u2013 event in my 13-year-old life was being paid every month for my weekly paper-round. Not because I enjoyed receiving the veritable fortune of \u00a335 for hauling half a ton of newspapers and hiking what felt like a thousand miles every week…but because\u00a0it coincided with the last weekend of every month when I could catch the train to the nearest city, Southampton, which to this wide-eyed young\u00a0boy felt like a virtual metropolis.<\/p>\n
It would take an hour or so to reach the city centre and then another 20 minutes walking to reach my destination: the biggest newsagent I had ever seen in my life. If I was travelling with friends, they’d never be able to keep up and chances are I had lost them far behind me by the time I reached the\u00a0shop door. It didn’t matter, they all knew where I was racing to. It’s location on the infinitely long shelves that stretched to the back of the store and beyond was burned into my memory. I could spot it a mile away. There, tucked in and surrounded by other anonymous glossy magazines, was my salvation:\u00a0Starlog<\/em>. I would sit and read the entire issue cover to cover in the shop even before buying it.<\/p>\n Here was my last hope. It seemed other people, lots of other people\u00a0\u2013 somewhere in the world, in a distant, faraway land \u2013 appreciated science-fiction and fantasy. I knew one day I would have to travel to this country and find them. My sanity, even my life depended on it. Within the pages of Starlog<\/em> each month were insightful interviews, features on films I had never even heard of and pages of classified adverts offering blueprints of every Federation starship ever designed. This was my only means of contact with a different world that I longed to be part of. Every day for the next month I would read and re-read the whole magazine until, four agonising weeks later, payday arrived once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My childhood was spent growing up in a quaint, country town on the south coast of England. By far the most important\u00a0\u2013 and the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1805,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/1805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottsnowden.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}