My Legendarily Crap Bowie Trousers

In 1981 I bought these crap Bowie trousers through a mail order advert in NME. They were really bad for cycling - you had to double clip them to stop them getting caught in the bike chain. They also had strange powers. Whenever I wore them out - to a pub or a disco - certain older heavy rocker lads would become angry. I never worked out whether this was because I looked like a controversialist twat who they wanted to punch or that they thought I was compromising the memory of the Thin White Duke.

In 1982 I passed these on to my best mate to let him get hit and bought a pair of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft black leather trousers from the same mail order company. Strangely, these caused far less of a stir with the rockers, possibly because Whitesnake's David Coverdale sometimes wore leather trousers.

The Three and a Half Mile Limit of Local Knowledge

In my home town of Market Rasen there was a three and a half mile limit of the known world. Anything further away than that might as well have been on the other side of the planet.

About the author

Tim Bradford was born and brought up in Lincolnshire.

Tim played left-half in his school team's creaking 2-3-5 formation which was cruelly exposed by the ball-playing strikers of Faldingworth Juniors (think England v Hungary in 1953 except with tiny people and East Midlands accents). At the age of 10 he already knew he would never play football at professional level.

Since 1990 Tim has been creating satirical features and cartoons When Saturday Comes. He has also been a regular illustrator for The Guardian for many years. Tim has been involved in various web projects, especially One Touch Football and WSC and Dot Two. In the mid 90s he also did weekly sports cartoons for The Observer and wrote film reviews for NME.

Tim's first travel book Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?, was published by Flamingo in 2000. The follow up, The Groundwater Diaries - in which Tim walked the routes of London's buried rivers - came out in 2003. His latest book, a comic memoir about growing up in the East Midlands, called Small Town England (Ebury Press), came out in April 2010.

Tim now moves with his family between North London and Co. Clare in Ireland, depending on weather patterns and how his trees are doing. His paintings are heavily influenced by the Doolin shoreline, Venezuelan rural art, Egyptian funerary portraits, Irish pubgoers and East Midlands skies. If pressed he would describe his work as pop folk art.