Owen Croft Filth

Born in the middle of 1970 in a damp, pokey back-to-back stone terrace house in Mossley, Greater Manchester – the sort of house where the toilet was outside, the wallpaper peeled itself in protest, and the front door opened straight onto a cobbled hill steep enough to give a mountain goat vertigo. School? Nah, not for Owen. He clocked early that it smelled like cabbage and stale farts, so he gave it a swerve. Instead, every morning he’d be at the gates flogging gingernuts, gobstoppers, flying saucers, and knock-off Wham bars to the same kids the teachers were trying to “educate”. Made more money before registration than the headmaster earned in a week. Considers that his proper education – supply, demand, and how to hide contraband in your socks when the dinner lady’s on the prowl. While other lads were doing detention, Owen was at home hammering out stories on a battered Imperial 66 typewriter he’d nicked off his uncle for a fiver and a packet of Jammie Dodgers. Poetry, filthy limericks, half-arsed sci-fi, shopping lists that turned into novellas – anything and everything got written down. He’s still got boxes of the stuff mouldering in his attic: spiral notebooks full of teenage smut, margins packed with doodles of tits and monsters, and one epic 398-page fantasy novel written entirely in green biro when he was fifteen. Life got in the way for a few decades – factory shifts, dead-end jobs, hiking the Pennine hills in all weathers just to stare at sheep and clear his head, the usual northern rite of passage. But he never stopped writing. The notepads piled up like unpaid bills. Typewriters gave way to knackered laptops that smelled of lager and joss sticks, yet the words kept coming. Now, finally, in his mid-fifties and with the patience of a man who’s watched too many sunrises over Saddleworth Moor, he’s dragging the best (and filthiest) of those decades-old manuscripts out of the cupboard, dusting off the sheep shit and the sarcasm, and actually publishing the bastards. First came the notorious BUMBLECOCK books – the ones your mum pretends she hasn’t read in the bath. More are stacked up behind them like planes over Heathrow. Owen still lives within spitting distance of where he was born, still walks the same accent you could scrape off a mill wall, still allergic to authority, still convinced school is a brainwashing factory (now with Wi-Fi). These days he splits his time between writing depraved comedy, trudging up hills in the pissing rain, and occasionally frightening tourists by shouting “NOW THEN” at them in the local Co-op. He has no qualifications worth mentioning, no literary prizes (yet), and no plans to start behaving himself. Just a lifetime of stories, a typewriter that still works if you hit it hard enough, and an industrial-grade contempt for taking anything too seriously – especially himself. Welcome to the mad bastard’s library. Mind the language. It bites. Owen Croft.. Don’t blame me! OWEN CROFT’S FILTHY DISPATCHES