Growing up I loved comic books, hell, I still do love them.

When I was younger it was a way to escape reality in a way, to put aside any insecurities  and worries I may have had and delve into the world of Superman or The Green Lantern.

It was more fun to see the Incredible Hulk struggle to control his inner rage and anger than actually deal with my own. I much preferred reading about the Flash losing his powers and money and ending up homeless than worry about the financial strains our family was under.

Mainly I loved them because they were fun and exciting and just a wee bit cheesy but that was the appeal, where else could you see a man in a Bat suit beat a psychotic clown and a crazy fat guy with a Penguin fetish? I don't know about you but those kind of people weren't usually walking around in the neighborhoods I grew up in ( well maybe in 'Maritzburg ).

Every school holiday Matt and myself would have great fun creating our own comic books and comic characters and we created some pretty good ones and some decidedly BAD ones. Some of the award winning creations were "Hoverman"( who basically just floated a foot off the ground); "Pepperman ( who exuded pepper and... *drumroll* made people SNEEZE! Yeah...move over Thor and your almighty hammer this dude can make people SNEEZE!) and ForkLift (who's mental powers allowed him to basically only lift a fork with his thoughts - I'm hoping that was a joke character). As pitiful those characters were, we did have some good ones and I've always wanted to create our own comics using these characters and storylines.           Like my other childhood passion, wrestling, comics are pure entertainment, pure fun, you boo the villians and love the heroes (or if you're like me love the villians) and I really feel sorry for the people who turn their nose up at the comic book art form.

In our early life we needed the escapism and joy that comic books bought with them and in our stressful hectic adult life we may just need them even more.

I never had a best friend growing up, we moved around to many times for that to be possible, I attended 8 different schools before I turned 13 so I never really got time to find a best friend , well, except for my brother Matt.

Matt was 5 years younger than me and that age difference suited me just fine. I wasn’t ready to “grow up” (I’m still not) so playing with my brother let me act like a kid for a little bit longer.We would spend holidays creating our own super hero characters for our own comic books , we have several hundred characters and story plots still in a file somewhere, most of them pretty cool but others haven’t survived the test of time.

I will go into these characters in future blogs, they still mean a lot to me in a strange way.The number one thing that Matt and I got up to though was, cricket, mainly backyard cricket.

As anyone who has ever played backyard cricket will tell you, there are specific rules that have to be obeyed:

1. One hand one bounce catches are allowed

2.  Catches are allowed to be claimed off a roof or a tree IF caught one handed.

3.  Electric wickets apply

4.  If, heaven forbid, you go out first ball, you are allowed to request a “do over” using the “ ahh c’mon I wasn’t ready”  excuse ( this rule  doesn’t work from the 2nd ball onwards)

5.  The 6 and out rule applies

However we added a few “special rules” in our matches, such as (and now all SPCA members please turn away briefly, thanks) if you managed to pin any moving pet with a cover drive you instantly got 25 bonus runs but the main rule, the NUMBER ONE rule when we lived in Hilary outside Durban was that if you hit the ball down The Rise you were out AND you had to fetch the ball.
Thinking back on it now though, I would climb The Rise 20 times just to play a backyard “Test” again, it was great fun. Ok, maybe, 2 times…..that hill was steep……

Now that may sound fair enough but The Rise was a hill spawned in the pits of Hell , a hill so steep you needed to hire one of those Himalayan Sherpa’s to climb the dreaded thing.

The Rise was situated on, in cricketing terms, our leg side (we were both right handed) so we never ever played any leg side shots, ever! The ball could pitch 12 inches outside leg and we would either: A-catch the ball ; B- shoulder arms and not play a shot or C- shimmy across , like Fred Flintstone playing 10 pin bowling, and attempt a straight shot or a cover drive.However there were those dreaded times where I would accidentally hit the ball down The Rise and with eyes lowered, shoulders slumped and head bowed ,I would manage a meek “ ….damn it…..” from my now quivering lips and begin the ghastly decent down the hellacious hill trying not to think of what lies ahead when you try get back up.

We had a few fun times on that farm but the incidents that stick in my mind involve cows and those pesky pain in the rear (so to speak) goats.

The farm had quite a few cows but the main man on campus, the big daddy of the Bulls was a huge muscular Bull that we nicknamed “Steroids” his neck was the size of Volkswagen and he looked like he had been engineered by a mad scientist bent on a quest for revenge against Ronald McDonald and his fellow burger merchants.

He was a scary Bull and we made it a point to avoid him at all costs.
Not all the cows were that petrifying though, we made a small light brown calf our unofficial pet and we would feed him lemons from our lemon tree almost every day, we named him, Cornelius , only God knows why we chose that name.

We had trouble with the animals breaking into our garden and eating all our plants and usually one of the farm workers would come in and herd all the cows out of our garden and back to the fields where they were meant to be but on one sunny day , the cows broke into the garden and were demolishing all the plants and flowers but the farm workers weren’t coming. I watched from our “stoep” as the cows went along merrily chewing up our garden and I kept peering around the corner to see if any of the farm workers were coming to the rescue, they just were not coming.Eventually I had had enough so I called my brother Matt and said “c’mon we’re going to get these cows out of our garden” and we both marched out our front door to confront these bothersome bovines.Our feet stepped onto the grass with all the determination in the world , it was like a scene from those old western movies , the two cowboys standing akimbo , chests out , eyes set fast on their enemies. We meant business and these future t-bones had better do as we say or else they were in for a world of hurt.We both stepped forward in unison, these walking burger patties were intimidated by this show of manliness we thought but just as that macho cerebration was reaching a crescendo everything suddenly went askew.

As we had stepped forward, the cows all turned to us and seemingly began chewing a little faster and with their big eyes fixed on our, now nervous, little eyes and also stepped forward. Well, I would love to tell you that we were unmoved and confronted those malicious milk makers with the steely grit of a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood but I am afraid I can’t, you see as soon as those cows took that step forward , Matt and me turned to each other, eyes as big as saucers and without ever having to communicate verbally , we both turned and ran , like those old cartoons we took off…..our legs moving so fast I am sure there was a cloud of dust bellowing behind our heels. We ran so fast even Barry Allen would have come a distant third on that day; we dived over the 4 foot high wall surrounding our “stoep” without a second thought, our bodies crashing onto the hard concrete floor. We sat against that wall composing ourselves expecting those crazed cattle to be bearing down on us in any second.After a few seconds we gathered our courage and peered over the wall with great trepidation, what we saw next made my stomach drop and question my manliness, the cows hadn’t even budged , while we were running like headless chickens and diving head first over walls those cows had just carried on eating and no doubt chuckling amongst themselves.I looked at Matt , he looked at me and again without having to communicate verbally we agreed to never talk of this day again.

Cows however were not the only animal that broke into our garden, there was one set of beasts that I despised and that was, The Goats. There’s a reason that the Goat is often used to symbolise Satan, they are, in so many ways, hell. The little buggers would break into the garden and wreak havoc, I was not a fan of the walking disposal bins, so one day we saw an entire army of the little buggers in the vegetable batch and we decided to scare them off. So arming ourselves with a few of the lemons from the lemon tree we began doing a few warming up exercise like the cricketers do before going on to the field for a Test match.We lobbed a few lemons into the bunch of bastards and that scared off the majority but a few still lingered , holding out to get a few more bites, so we aimed a little more precisely and began bombing the areas right next to the guzzling goats , this scared the daylights out of them and they bolted. After all the dust settled and the sounds of bleating subsided , we came to the startling realisation that there was still one goat eating his heart out as if he was at all you can eat buffet.

I looked at Matt, shook my head and slowly pulled my arm back grasping the last lemon tightly in my hand. Now what happened next has gone down in folklore amongst us smith kids, I took aim and like Zeus throwing down a lightning bolt, I thundered that lemon towards that goat.

We watched the lemon, as if in slow motion, spiral through the air hurtling towards the clueless beast, it pitched about 8 inches behind the goats hind legs and bounced with great velocity and much to our absolute shock , lodged itself straight in the goats bum. I could not have made this up if I tried, we watched as that goat sprinted out of that garden like a bat out of hell, the lemon stayed lodged in there for a good 50 metres.

Matt and I, of course found this to be the funniest thing of all time , that story always pops into my mind when I see any goats I happen to see , I always imagine they look at me and then the one goat will whisper to his buddy “hey, that’s the guy uncle Billy was telling us about” , the second Goat will bleat back, “who??” and I imagine the goat saying back “ you know…that dude who sodomised Uncle Billy with a lemon”

We lived in many different houses, flats, garages and places through out my childhood but one of the most memorable was a farm just outside of ‘Maritzburg.Like most farms it was teeming with all sorts of animals but mainly cows and, my arch nemesis, GOATS.The ride to our house at the end of the farm was an adventure in itself , you had to drive on a very uneven gravel road under a lush covering of tree’s , it was like a scene from Indiana Jones but without the Nazi’s and the giant rolling ball, I remember you had to drive up a big hill and then through the farm itself to get to our small house at the back end of the farm.

I was born on the 11th of February (which strangely enough is also my birthday, uncanny, I know) in the beautiful city of Durban. I cannot recall the day personally ( hey, it must have been traumatic , I mean you start the day IN SOMEONES STOMACH and then some strange person yanks you out this tight space into the bright , cold air of a hospital room and then instead of consoling you, they smack your butt and then CUT OFF your food supply cord thingy… so , you will excuse me for blacking out that day , thank you very much) but from what I have been told it was a beautiful day and everyone was pretty happy by the end result. I didn’t have fifteen toes or a third nipple or anything so that was a good thing and in any case I didn’t come with a 30 day warranty so they HAD to keep me.

I will spare you the details of my early days which lets be honest probably consisted of sleeping and soiling my nappies so not exactly exciting stuff however I have been told I pisse……ummm….urinated in my aunt Jenny’s face when she was changing my nappy ( why is it that only the most embarrassing things are remembered by family members , I mean I have countless pictures of myself peeing in public pools and disturbingly more than a few photo’s of myself in my cousin’s dresses….and I sadly looked quite at home in the frilly frocks but I digress )I had a good childhood and was loved by all my family, my mom’s mom we called Georgie and she was the loveliest grandmother you could ask for. Georgie had remarried after the death of my Mom’s Dad and her new husband was our grand dad, we all called him Friendy (we had more nicknames than a cheap '60s mafia film, I petioned to have a cool nickname but that request is still pending.. ) , Friendy was this lovable and very cool Irish man who I really loved and I have many great memories of visiting Georgie & Friendy in Durban North, we would always go down the road and buy ginger bread men and i would hunt those scary blue headed lizards in their garden however my top hobby was to watch the electric meter which i was convinced was a tiny train riding around and around its track, I had a pretty vivid imagination so I could keep myself occupied at most times.

My Dad’s parents were both Scottish (which is where my affection towards my Scottish heritage is from) my grandmother we called Nana and she was the very description of what a Grandmother should be, very sweet, loving and kind and I really loved her , Grandpa was your typical mans man and a Scottish man at that, think Alex Ferguson and you would have a good idea of what my Grandpa was like ( although he never gave me the “hairdryer treatment” or kick a boot at me) I enjoyed a few years of being an only child but I can remember I was very excited when my Mom gave birth to my sister Helen. I was very ready for my new role as big brother however my sister Helen was born with a hole in her heart and sadly she was not with us for long  I do wonder what life would have been like if Helen had lived but I am sure in the long run it was for the best as her life would not have been easy and she would have had to spend most of her life in hospitals. Helens death did affect my parents quite a bit , I could sense it even at that young age , so it was for the best when my mom fell pregnant again and on the 12th of July , my brother, Matthew Bruce Smith was born as was our “tag team” which we named The Smithology…..