CHAPTER 1
about modern Britain—or maybe just about modern Liverpool—that when I was growing up, I got way less shit for being gay than I got for being named after a hobbit. And while I’m glad my classmates weren’t homophobic, the hobbit thing did hack me off a little, especially because the hobbit I was named after wasn’t even one of the weird ones. If I’d been called Meriadoc or Fatty Bolger that’d have been one thing, but my name was Sam. Still is Sam, really. But my full legal name is Samwise Eoin Becker and so every time I started a new class, on the first day, the teacher would be reading the register and they’d call out “Samwise” and I’d have to say, “here miss” and that’d be it from then on. It didn’t help that the first set of movies came out just as I was starting primary school and the second set hit just as I was starting my GCSEs, so I had jokes about second breakfast and hairy feet from the age of five until I was eighteen. Still, you’ve got to laugh, don’t you? My dad taught me that. And it’s probably the most useful thing I’ve ever learned. For example: “Hey, Ban,” yells one of my employees. He knows what I’m really called, but this is Amjad, and Amjad is even nerdier than my mam and so once he found out I’d been named after a hobbit he
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10ThingsThatNeverHappened_INT.indd 1
SAYS
GOOD
THINGS
3/3/23 1:06 PM