review=<b>Synopsis</b>

Again, rare as hens teeth but IÕm very proud of this book. It was partly inspired by hearing news reports about how badly off the rails young men were going, and how society was cracking up. My own son had just been born when I wrote this, and I thought that although some things had got worse, and certainly more dangerous for young men, there were some underlying effects of youthful masculinity that havenÕt changed since we crawled out of the swamp. The books tells the (worryingly) true story of the first year I spent away from my parents. I was 16 and full of it, hair down to my arse, flares so wide you could house a family inside them, and a dog called Cabbage. One year later I was taken back to my parents in the back of a police car, thinner, dirtier, but a little bit wiser.

<b>Review of Thin He Was and Filthy Haired from the Amazon.com, Nov 12th 2002</b>

Thin I Was and Filthy Haired Too! (5 stars) 

Being of the same generation as Bob I shook my head knowingly between outbursts of hysterical laughter, whilst reading the book in only three days. Apart from being relieved to learn I'm not the only bloke whose early sexual experiments were about as successful as Kryten's attempts to tell lies, I also shared his frustrations in coming to terms with Straights and their bread-head world. But far from being self-indulgent nostalgia this book captures those years in our lives when events seemed to sweep us along by their own momentum. In the company of people who likewise challenge the secure world around them, Bob finds himself caght up in a conflict between easy middle class existence and trying to be a working class revolusionary. The gate crashing of the Oxford Ball is perhaps the hardest bit to believe, but any creative license is well justified. I liked the fact that he adds an update as to the present whereabouts of the main characters at the end of the book. To be honest they mostly come across as a better crowd than the tossers I used to knock around with and now avoid like one of Rimmer's lectures on the Hammond Organ.