Are we sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Many, many years ago, when I was young and, if not innocent, at least less cynical about the world than I am now, I was sat in a religious education lesson at high school. As so often happens in such tedious classes, our attention wandered, and I provoked quite a storm by suggesting that you could, in fact, do something without having to have a rational reason for it. This split the class neatly into two warring factions, and the school was never quite the same again. My side formed into an organisation called 'PARM' - the People Against Reason Movement. The opposition just looked at us in a funny way.
I can't remember who it was now, but it was suggested by someone (probably the inimitable Jenny Barrs, to whom PARM owes most of its existence) that perhaps we should have a magazine, called (originally enough) PARM Tree. I scouted around a bit, and eventually scraped together enough contributions to make a decent magazine. It went down pretty well. Well enough, in fact, to provoke people into writing more articles for the next issue that I was apparently going to edit. Several more issues followed, each one becoming successively weirder and more surreal. The future was bright, and it had penguins in - oh, I nearly forgot; we had a mascot, Perci the Penguin - who to this day sits in the corner of my room with a red scarf and hat on.
When I moved on to sixth form college, many of the original members and contributors left for pastures new. With them, the original essence of PARM died out. However, the magazine was to live on, in a new guise as a subversive 'alternative' college magazine (balancing the editing of this magazine and the official school magazine became quite a challenge, as being the only person in the school who knew how to use a DTP package, I ended up doing both). And so, this continued for a few more issues, with fresh new contributors and a new, funky A4 format. However, the end of VI form came, and the team was once again broken up.
Several attempts were made to bring the magazine back to life at University - free 24hr email made this a little easier, and a certain amount of success was had. One edition of the magazine was published on the internet, but since then PARM as an idea, magazine and all the rest has all but vanished. I've given up on the idea of ever resuscitating it, and the internet edition of the magazine has been left to grow cobwebs in a forgotten corner of the net many miles away...
Quite a few people have asked me why I use the alias 'parm' for all my netty stuff, when in fact PARM is theoretically an organisation. The reason is this - I set up an email address for PARM on a BBS, under the alias 'parm'. This BBS also had a chat facility, and other BBSy things, for which you were referred to by your alias. So I became known as 'parm' on the BBS. It seemed a natural thing to do to use it as a general alias, although it does tend to cause a bit of confusion, not least because it also turns out to be an Indian female name.