No stranger to the P45

There is no chance that this will ever be a

SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

No stranger to the P45 by

Dan W.Griffin “It’s not shit - it’s Art!” - Marvellous Malcolm “Buy this book! (or else)”. - Andy McNab, Author of Bravo Two Zero “Dan, you should be in prison”. - Mrs H.Downing

*

FOR AWARDS CONSIDERATION PURPOSES ONLY. (Ha, Ha Ha!)

Hello and thanks for downloading this promotional excerpt from my book, No stranger to the P45.

This is the complete part of the book describing the three years I spent at university and the jobs and antipreneurial endeavours that I had during that time.

I hope that you enjoy it and I’d be delighted if you’d like to make a comment via the website.

Thanks again and have a fantastic day.

Dan W.Griffin

Copyright Š Dan W.Griffin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The rights of Dan W.Griffin to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Downloading of this file is subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be reproduced, stored in an alternative retrieval system, transmitted elsewhere or otherwise circulated in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. This document is for single machine viewing purposes only.

Curriculum Vitae

Name

Dan W.Griffin

Date of birth

June 26, 1972

Address

NA

Marital Status

Single - surprisingly!

Contact

info@nostrangertothep45.com

Driving Licence

Full

Experience

Page University of Sunderland

6

Ashbrooke Hall

16

The Cat & Hammer

26

Resident Tutor

31

GYMYCs Inc

55

Vodafone

64

McDonalds

72

Blackpool Pleasure Beach

78

Curriculum Vitae continued...

Experience Page LNT

95

The Student Times

102

Comic Relief

126

Welcome to Danland

YOU LOOKING AT ME?

The University of Sunderland 1992 - 1995

I didn’t choose to go to Sunderland. Some may call it chance, others fate. I call it what it was: a smack in the face with a sack of turkey giblets and hammers from my old friend Sod as he looked at me, smiled and said, “There you go, Dan. Have some of that!”

For somewhat obvious reasons, today I’m not altogether sure of the application process for going to university. Back in 1991 however, there was a book listing all the universities in the UK and the courses that they ran. It was from this book that one would select four choices of university to go to and note the applicable course too. One would then enter these choices in order of preference on a form and post it somewhere to await the inevitable rejections and associated disappointment.

For my choices I put down Oxford - it was worth a punt, I thought. I listed Bristol too. And Manchester for some reason. But stuck for a fourth I quite literally put my fate in the hands of Sod. I closed my eyes and flicked through the pages of the book and through the blur of the many thousands of possible career paths I stabbed into it with my finger and opened my eyes. Sunderland. ‘Never heard of it,’ I thought, ‘that’ll do.’ Looking then at the list of available courses I found geology. It sounded quite like geography, one of my A Levels. I noted down the reference number and posted away the form. Sometime

later, having received rejections from my first three choices I received an unconditional offer from Sunderland. After visiting the city to check it out soon after I concluded that that unconditional offer, well, it didn’t surprise me in the least.

For some time I’d been thinking that I’d quite like to study criminology. It was a subject that greatly intrigued me and had done for a while, although perhaps for quite the wrong reasons. Despite the fact that I’d already made my selections I thought that if I wished I could always postpone the ‘off’ for another year and do criminology instead. I was in no rush. I had plenty of time to make myself a future. I like to think, however misguidedly, that even now I still do.

At that time there was only one place in the entire country that ran a criminology course.

Quite appropriately, considering the predilection of many of the local youths with wearing tracksuits and stealing cars, this was Teesside University in Middlesbrough. Knowing that Middlesbrough and Sunderland were fairly close to one another, one day I travelled ‘oop north’ to chat to one of the lecturers about the course and have a look at the place.

Sadly - albeit arguably in many respects - I was disappointed to learn that the majority of the course was to be spent learning about criminal rehabilitation and

such. Since I was far more interested in the psychology of the criminal act; contemplating a possible career as a criminal mastermind to achieve world domination with my base of operations on a small island in the Pacific, an army of armed guards all wearing red jumpsuits and a huge pool of Piranha fish in my office in advance of the odd visit from Mi6 - and, of-course, coupled with the fact that Middlesbrough was a cold, depressing, industrialised hell - I was subsequently convinced not to pursue that direction in life. I settled with my original decision of geology.

I decided to travel to university in style... sort-of.

Having made my preparations I bought a first class train ticket and I arrived in Sunderland on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon to begin my new life. Surprisingly for me, I had a rather unconventional start to it: After the first weekend of meeting my fellow students with the customary, “Hello, I’m (Dan), so what A Levels did you get?” I spent the Monday of the following week; the first day of term during which every first year student was inducted into their course with a day’s presentation on the component seminars and lectures of their chosen degree, on the entirely wrong course having gotten my directions muddled up. Sitting through almost a day’s worth of engineering presentations it was at about three in the afternoon when I realised that there was a very

good reason why nothing actually made any sense to me.

I guess I should’ve been paying more attention but was too busy looking at girls and meeting people to ask the question as to why my chosen topic had yet to be mentioned. On realising my error and quite embarrassed at my idiocy I shuffled out of a packed lecture hall accompanied by the sound of a great deal of amusement.

It would not be the last time that I found myself sitting in a lecture theatre for any period of time before discovering that I was failing to learn something completely irrelevant to my chosen subject. Those latter occasions were however, almost always down to the fact that I was hung -over, or in fact, still monumentally pissed from the night before. The first time that I was ever locked into a nightclub was at university.

It was at a club called The Blue Monkey, a fantastic place that was regularly being closed and burnt down by the council and the club’s competitors - allegedly. I’d had a great night as far as I could remember but come the end of it my friends had thought that I’d gone home and after a couple of moments of looking, left too themselves.

I woke up at about half past four in all but pitch darkness with the emergency lighting casting an eerily faint wash of blue light across the floor. I was in the gentlemen’s toilets - although it took me a good few moments to

realise that. I was alone. I was cold. And I was still pretty pissed.

Being locked into a nightclub after everyone’s gone home is a rather surreal experience. Since I was still in a state of vague inebriation, although I found the incident a little funny I was also concerned that I may have set off the silent alarms and would soon be bundled into a police car to have an extremely unpleasant time indeed. I needed to get out and I needed to do so rather quickly. I didn’t fancy a pint.

Each of the exits were locked with chains making them even more secure. They were also padlocked and as I zigzagged from one to the next confusion gave way to a certain amount of booze-induced panic. How I’d explain myself to the Old Bill as they tackled me to the floor, cuffed me and hurled me into the back of a van to be caged like the criminal scum they’d regard me as, I simply didn’t know. I just had to hope that somewhere there was an exit without a padlock. It seemed a longshot, but since leaving me asleep in the toilet as the staff had closed the club was not a good demonstration of efficient security, so perhaps that inefficiency would come good for me. It did.

It took me a few minutes to find the one door that the staff had simply wrapped a chain around because they’d run out of padlocks. It was the one door that the staff

least expected anyone to attempt to get into, obviously not considering the reverse of that notion. It was the door that led to the backyard full of empty beer barrels and plastic crates and in less than a minute I’d stacked enough to scale the eight-foot wall - from the top of which I fell off into a small tree and limped painfully but quietly away to safety.

I had two similar experiences the following year at a different club and one was such that I had to break open a lock because the staff had been a little more efficient than they had been previously - albeit just a little. In the second experience, rather than being left alone in the club I was actually discovered at the very last minute and handed by a very polite and courteous doorman to a couple of part-time lesbians who had been chatting to some of the other staff, and who took me home to their place. They were a lovely couple of girls who, after giving me good reason to sober up perhaps far more quickly than I have ever done in my life, entertained me thoroughly for the rest of the night.

Of course, being a student was not all about getting drunk and locked into nightclubs or waking up with my head in a half-eaten cheeseburger with chips, ketchup sachets and strips of onion strewn across the floor. There was a serious side to being at university too. It involved

studying. Studying was something that I failed to take as seriously as I perhaps should’ve done (see Book).

Like I said, I originally went to university to study geology because it sounded like geography and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. But beginning the course and discovering that week-in and week-out I had to spend two hours from nine o’clock on a Monday morning listening to one of the most boring people on the planet monotonising about stratigraphy (the study of rocks and shit), I soon realised that there was not a chance in hell that I could continue it for the next three years. I decided to change my course.

It was not an uncommon thing to do. Many people realised that they had made an error in their first choice of course and changed subjects. My problem was that I really didn’t know what to do instead. I thought long and hard about it. It wasn’t enough.

In addition to studying ‘rocks and shit’ for two hours from nine every Monday morning I also attended - a somewhat loose and inaccurate term - chemistry lectures.

I enjoyed these mostly because I’d become smitten with a girl in jodhpurs. I figured that I’d change to that.

Unfortunately, my usual lack of consideration and foresight ever present, I had actually neglected to consider the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about chemistry. At school I had chosen to work - another

loose and rather inaccurate term - towards GCSEs in biology and physics because prior to that selection I’d spent the majority of chemistry lessons toasting bacon sandwiches on the Bunsen burners. Still, I’d recently seen a Channel Four programme about the subject and fancied myself as a Nobel Prize-winning chemist; against the odds coming up with the new Penicillin or something.

I convinced the head of the chemistry department to let me give it a go. It was perhaps not the smartest of things that I have done (see Book, again).

In my second first year I went all-out to try to learn to be a chemist. While I found the A-Level refresher and the post-A-Level first semester of the course a challenge, I found it quite surprisingly not as impossible as I’d originally feared. It was only in the second semester that the subject became so alien to me that after two more months I had to admit defeat. Besides, I’d already managed to get off with the girl in the jodhpurs and so, once more I elected to change my course and do a third first year.

For my third and final choice I decided to give Business Studies a go. At least I had a vague idea about the subject, what-with Dad having run one for quite a while. I’d hoped that some of his business acumen would have rubbed off on me. It hadn’t. Throughout those two first years I had failed to learn the one fundamental thing

about being a student: to do a course you had actually to turn up to at least half of the lectures and do something that resembled studying. As a result of this I failed to achieve anything significant with business studies, too.

It wasn’t all down to the fact that I was simply a crap student. There is a significant possibility that I would have actually remained at Sunderland and completed the course had I not had to flee the city for fear of my legs being snapped by the henchmen of a local gangster. But that was three years in the future. Long before that; long before chemistry; before my frolicking with jodhpurs and before my ill-fated change of career direction from rocks to test tubes and things that went BANG, I arrived at the University of Sunderland and moved into Ashbrooke Hall.

There I took a job in a position of trust - which I subsequently abused to fleece my fellow residents out of a couple of hundred quid.

Thirteen-year-old fuckwits, ping-pong bats, and traffic-directing gibbons aka Ashbrooke Hall

I moved into halls for my first year and into a large thirty-plus bedroom, converted end-of-terrace named Ashbrooke Hall. It was set in the area of Sunderland known as Ashbrooke (funnily enough), an area which, I hate to admit, was actually a rather pleasant part of the city. It was about a ten-minute walk into town and a two minute one to the student union bar named The Carlton.

It was about the same to Clifton and Westfield Halls, too a couple of all-girl halls of residence that I would eventually get to know very well indeed. Thirty seconds away was a small corner shop staffed by a very pleasant and well-mannered couple, and about a minute or two beyond that was a park. Trees lined each of the roads and many, if not all of the residents in the area kept their driveways and their gardens tidy and free of shopping trolleys and burnt-out cars. Ashbrooke was clean and one could actually walk the streets without a bottle being hurled at one’s head. Like I said, it was a rather pleasant part of the city; civilised, and considerably at odds with many of the other areas that regularly felt like Beirut.

That contrast between Ashbrooke and some of the other areas of Sunderland could actually be quite startling. On the rare occasions that the sun was ever sufficiently bold to reveal itself from its regular hiding place (behind the clouds of despair and misery), and was one ever to feel like taking a walk from Ashbrooke to the Page 1

beach to meander among the discarded cans of lager, the takeaway wrappers and the plethora of miscellaneous filth, one would pass from one area to the next almost as if quantum-leaping into another dimension.

A few minutes’ walk and one would be picking-up pace, trying to avoid catching anyone’s eye as they passed the boarded-up house of the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels. The shutters on the windows of a nearby shop were permanently closed, its rolls of razor wire failing to mask the graffitied obscenities and the hieroglyphic markings of gang territory. A glance down a side street and feral children in tracksuits would be setting fire to things. A wild dog would be barking from the roof of an abandoned car.

Gardens overgrown with weeds, scattered with plastic bags and piles of bin liners probably full of old nappies, most of the trees had long since uprooted themselves.

Anyhoo.

Like I said, Ashbrooke Hall was a large, thirty-plus bedroom, converted end-of-terrace.

Its rooms accommodated either one, two or three students and it had a common room, a games room, a laundry and two kitchens in the basement. A pleasant little garden at the rear with a lawn, some trees and a barbeque occupied us during the summer months, and one at the front with more trees, a short gravel driveway and a hedge did so

too.

When I first arrived I discovered that I’d been

allocated a bed in a twin room. about that.

I wasn’t very happy

My roommate was a guy named Ian from Doncaster.

On the whole an extremely pleasant chap, he had the rather disagreeable tendency to arise at seven in the morning, turn on the lights and bang around with little consideration for the fact that I didn’t wish to do any of those things. Not wanting to cause a scene at this early stage of studentdom; a confrontation that may have led to something of an uncomfortable year, I decided to pay a visit to the accommodation office and behave like a child: holding my breath and threatening to sit there until I was allocated a room all to myself. A day or so later and I moved into one of the largest rooms in the hall on the first floor and with a small balcony from which I could quaff glasses of booze and watch the local Police helicopter pursuing thirteen-year-old fuckwits joy-riding stolen cars about the city.

As a hall of forty-eight students Ashbrooke had quite a good mix of people within it. We all got along pretty well, often venturing en masse to the Carlton to indulge in excessive booze consumption and dribbling back at obscure hours of the morning with road signs and various other trophies to clutter-up the main entrance and the fire

exits.

Our resident tutor, the person paid by the

university to ensure that we didn’t burn the place down or set off the fire alarms too often, regularly became very upset with us about that.

Within a week or so it was decided that we should put together a kitty to hire a communal television and buy any other things that we may need. We also decided that we wanted to make use of the rather dilapidated pool table in the common room and the table tennis ... er ... table, too. We figured that we’d elect a committee to represent us as a hall (our resident tutor had suggested this) and for some reason that I have yet to fathom, I was voted in as treasurer. Certainly, no one there knew me too well.

Perhaps it was the fact that I was the only student in the hall to own a mobile phone. Perhaps it was that my bank manager, continuing to anticipate my salary from BT, would extend my overdraft whenever I called and said ‘Please’. Maybe it was the generosity I would extend buying rounds at the bar, mostly on account of the subsidised drinks and my being foolishly flash. Whatever the reason, my co-residents all bought into my misguided confidence in my ability to manage other peoples’ money.

They really shouldn’t have done that.

As treasurer my first mission was to hire the television and the video that we all so desperately craved. I sort of

bought a television licence too (but that’s another story), and purchased some balls and sticks for the pool table and some ping-pong bats for the table tennis ... er ... table. That done, there wasn’t actually anything left on the list and so what remained of the kitty simply sat in its account, goading me to spend it. occasions I actually did.

On a couple of

About two-thirds of the way through the year and a couple of months before some exams that I had no intention of sitting - on account of them all (bar a maths one) being irrelevant to my new course and my second first year - the committee decided to organise a trip. Still under the delusion that I was capable of normal behaviour, organisational responsibility was handed to me. Somebody suggested a visit to a nightclub in Newcastle. The nightclub was on a ship. For reasons that should already be rather obvious, the nightclub was known to all as The Boat.

Back then The Boat was one of the busiest and most well-known nightclubs in the North East (of England). I think it still is. It’s real name was the Tuxedo Royale, something that inspired particularly inaccurate images in my mind of black-tie formality, baccarat tables and beautiful women in flowing silk cocktail frocks. But this was Newcastle. Monte Carlo was not only a world away but in another dimension altogether.

Similar to the kind of nightclub found in almost every town and city throughout the country, The Boat was tacky and tasteless and featured far too many mirrors and a carpet that continually tried to attach itself to your feet. Its weekends attracted the pencil-necks and the platoons of shrieking hen-nights, the acidic pungency of Lynx deodorant, cheap perfume and hairspray creating a nasal nastiness that one could well imagine taking but a simple spark to set off an explosion of unparalleled entertainment - sequins, white trainers and denim raining down upon the city for days thereafter. It’s busiest nights though, were Mondays.

It was on Mondays during the university terms when the club held students-only nights during which freepouring of gin for a quid was just one of the promotions designed to incapacitate the clientele. All draught beers were a quid, too, and I remain surprised to this day that during those nights, to my knowledge not once did I or anyone else find themselves flipping bleary-eyed and backwards over the railings and into the River Tyne. It could be argued that on occasion that may have actually enhanced the experience of The Boat.

Aside from the cheap booze and its busyness, the incentive of which being the opportunity to be appealing to a member of the opposite sex and never have to see them again, one of the other things for which The Boat

was infamous was its revolving dance floor. It was about the size of an extremely large circular rug and as the words suggest, it did indeed revolve. It was one of the club’s gimmicks; a novelty. It was as much a gimmick and a novelty as a blow to back of the head with a bag of cabbage. I placed a call to the club and booked a coach to take us there on one of those Mondays.

In making that booking I’d figured that everyone would want to go first to a pub on the quayside to take advantage of offers of cheap cocktails and the many opportunities to behave a little less disgracefully than they would later on.

I had, therefore, agreed an entry fee with the club on the basis that we’d all arrive at about half-ten. Telling the committee of this I was immediately berated and instructed to arrange for us to arrive at the club for about nine instead. This I did, and arriving with similar inevitability both Monday and the coach appeared, Ashbrooke Hall soon piling into The Boat full of excitement at the prospect of hurling cheap drinks down their throats as if their lives depended on it, eager to stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the famous revolving dance floor like a colony of penguins freezing on a rock, and wobble about to the dulcet tones of Oasis like a giant academic jelly with a hundred arms waving in the air like gibbons directing traffic... or something like that.

Anyway...

And so, we had arrived just before nine in the evening, a time when The Boat had literally just opened its doors and lowered its gangplank for the night ahead. I immediately set off for the manager’s office to pay up and then swan about in the VIP room feeling rather smug. As I headed up the stairs however, my eyes fell upon something very interesting indeed.

It was a flyer promoting the club’s Monday nights. And it caused my mind to race.

Promoting Monday’s student nights the flyer detailed the special drinks promotions and the fact that the Boat was the ‘North East’s Premier Student Night’. It also detailed the entry fees and this was what I’d found so interesting. This small piece of paper presented an opportunity of wondrousness that could, I thought, make me a significant wodge of cash. It declared that because we’d arrived before half-nine in the evening, entry to The Boat was free.

Now, of course, what I should have done was tell everyone that the entry fee I’d negotiated was no longer applicable. I should’ve given everyone a refund there and then. But I didn’t. For a fleeting moment I determined to pay the money back into the kitty and report back the following day of our account’s reversal of fortune. But I didn’t do that, either. I simply kept schtum and bought everyone a drink instead, forgetting about the remaining

monies still in my wallet and having a thoroughly pleasant time indeed.

Because everyone had accepted that there had been an entry charge no one queried anything. And while some friends and I quaffed a free bottle of cheap sparkling plonk (I’d previously told the club that it was my birthday to get a better price on the entry fee), I silently justified my vague-fraudulence to myself, later getting so plastered that I forgot all about it anyway until the following year when I established GYMYCs Inc with my friend and once more transported students to The Boat to get fucked-up on cheap booze and vomit off the revolving dance floor.

The Cat & Hammer aka barman

Finding myself in bed with the wife of the pub’s landlord meant the beginning of the end of my employment at the Cat and Hammer. It wasn’t the smartest of things to do, particularly considering the fact that the landlord - a revolting Irishman who looked like a bulldog chewing gravel - saw himself as a bit of a gangster. Fortunately though, that night he’d gone away and so he never found out about his wife and I. I guess my writing about it won’t help matters, much.

The Cat and Hammer was a large pub close to Sunderland’s city centre, a little up the road from the main university campus and somewhere near the beach.

Mostly down to the fact that its clientele consisted primarily of nutters and chavs and had a food menu featuring mainly things with chips in baskets, it was similar to the Horn and Trumpet in Bristol where I’d had a job some time back. It was managed by a guy named Ron, a massively fat pig-slug of a man resembling a landfill site. I despised him much like a house-proud obsessive compulsive would despise having to clean cheesecake out of their carpet.

The pub itself was pretty nondescript and not a tremendous amount took place throughout the short time that I was employed there. There are, however, two things that stick in my mind when I think about my work

there and the first is Ron himself.

Ron was the kind of guy who would break into a sweat walking up a short flight of stairs. He had a bald head and a stupid-looking moustache similar to that worn by Hitler. Although he thought of himself as something of a gangster, he wasn’t. Ron would simply pretend to be very secretive; rarely discussing ‘business’ openly but preferring to look like some seedy pikey in the corner when someone would turn up to talk to him. He spoke proudly and frequently of fighting; as if it was some fantastic skill and endearing character trait rather than the pathetic boasting of a complete pillock. But there were other reasons why I loathed him and not least because he was crude and foul-mouthed and mannered.

He bullied everyone, including his wife. And to his staff he was particularly demeaning and offensive. Often he’d be scornful and critical for no reason other than he felt that he could and on occasion, without a word he would hand forth his repellent spectacles for one of us to clean.

He enjoyed exerting his authority; never once offering a single word of appreciation or gratitude for anything.

He’d guzzle Guinness as if it was some kind of hourly fuel and he’d regularly instruct the female staff to reach for things unnecessarily so that he could make lurid jokes to his equally-vile friends as they stood at the end of the bar. There are very few people on this earth that I

genuinely wish pain upon and Ron isn’t one of them - but I’d quite enjoy watching his turnip-like head explode under the wheels of a truck.

Anyway, the second thing that I recall is the night that Ron was away and his wife and I sat up drinking the pub’s stock and getting rather pissed. I got on well with her on account of her sparkling wit and our mutual dislike of Ron. It was a Sunday evening and I’d spent the day working behind the bar. We’d had an after-work drink that had swiftly turned plural and I had a lecture in the morning. Since it was about half-five when I actually remembered it, so ‘Mrs Ron’ suggested that I get an hour or so’s sleep there rather than walking home and then back into town. She led me into a bedroom that I assumed was set aside for guests, but it actually turned out to be hers and Ron’s. I learned this when she climbed into bed beside me, giving me the shock of my life and very good reason to turn up to a lecture on time for once. I didn’t stay working at the Cat and Hammer for much longer because I began to fear for my personal safety. Fortunately though - and like I said - Ron never found out.

I did wonder whether there could ever be any repercussions from writing this, but after a great deal of thought - well, a couple of seconds at least - I decided

that if there is to be it would just go to show that I was absolutely right about the kind of character described.

Besides, I’m pretty sure that Ron can’t read anyway - so it doesn’t really matter.

Identity theft, a claw hammer, and a lump of boiled cabbage aka Resident Tutor

I was halfway through my first of three years of deluded optimism; that I was actually going to get a degree. My friends and I had just finished moving the entire contents of a fellow resident’s bedroom out onto the street, fashioning a rather accurate representation of it on the pavement, and moments earlier our resident tutor had stormed out to berate us for behaving like children, his Spock-like ears turning redder by the second as we continued to find it all rather funny. I was curious about his role as our resident tutor and decided to placate him somewhat by asking about it. I’m so very glad that I did.

Our resident tutor was a third year student by the name of Chris. Like I said, he had rather Spock-like ears but also a round bauble-like head with massive eyes and jowls that made me think of the children’s television character, Pob. This was his second year as a resident tutor. Through no fault of mine it was also his last.

Having thus diverted his attention from shouting at us all about the bedroom outside on the pavement, by asking about his job I learned that a resident tutor was not the toughest of roles that one could ever imagine considering the role’s title there was no tutoring required whatsoever. I also learned that, in essence, all that Chris had to do was ensure that the students in the hall didn’t burn the place down or anything. He did much of this

‘ensuring’ lark from the relative comfort of a flat on the ground floor of the hall and aside from that there was very little else he had to do to fulfil his duties. In the most part he was left to his own devices; the university having placed sufficient trust in him to ensure that things simply ran well and without too much in the way of aggravation.

I’m now trying to think of a description of how he actually performed his job, but despite having lived for a year under the pseudo-authority of his resident tutorship I can’t. It seems instead that the only comparison that I can make is one involving a troll living under a bridge.

This is not the most accurate of comparisons (see Book), but it’s the only idea that has so far popped into my head when thinking about the fact that we rarely saw him. On the few occasions that we did, much as in the same way a troll would climb out from under the bridge and up and over its ankle-height wall to demand who there goeth subsequently chomping the head off those travellers whose reasons for wishing to cross he found displeasing so Chris would appear and dampen our spirits for setting off the fire alarm again, or removing the labels on all the tins of food in people’s cupboards. It is, therefore, perhaps not the greatest of comparisons at all (see Book, again) - although it is now an image that I fear will not leave my mind for quite some time to come.

Anyway. Payment-wise, Chris didn’t receive anything resembling the vast wodge of cash that I’d like simply to get out of bed of a morn, but he did get to live in that flat.

He got to live in it with a greatly reduced rent and it was those two factors that compelled me to wonder just what qualifications someone had to possess for the university to offer them such a job. I listened with increasing intensity and excitement as he told me that to become a resident tutor someone didn’t need to possess any. I thought: even I was sufficiently qualified for that!

The following day I awoke early and went straight to the personnel office. There I completed my application form with just one, or maybe two slight deviations from the truth, and was soon offered an interview, which I attended a few weeks after that. How I managed to convince the head of the personnel department that I was sufficiently responsible for the job I’ll never know, but convinced he was and a few weeks later I received a letter offering me the position of the following year’s Resident Tutor of Ashbrooke Hall. I was quite pleased with myself about that.

I returned from my summer vacation a week before the beginning of my second first year to attend an induction into my new job. It was to be my first year of my new course too (the chemistry one that I’d chosen to replace geology and to assist in my wooing of the blond

girl in the jodhpurs).

I immediately settled in to my

luxurious new flat eager to behave responsibly all over the place, bury my head into chemistry books and stay in nights to study. I wasn’t particularly successful at any of that.

My first responsibility was to welcome each of the new residents to Ashbrooke. They were all first year students - collectively known as ‘freshers’ for reasons that continue to escape me - and for most it was the first time that they’d been away from home. I’d been told in my induction to let each of them know that I was on-hand to help with any issues that they may have and this I did as I cast my eye over my new residents to see if any of the girls were attractive. They weren’t.

Being me - as I am - I’d naturally had the idea that as a resident tutor I’d be looked up to by my new residents.

This was important in my hopeless, ongoing pursuit of long-lasting platonic friendships with girls. I’d hoped that Ashbrooke would that year have an influx of attractive ones all keen to get to know ‘the real me’. It didn’t.

I recall that first evening of the previous year almost to the day. It was after the steady trickle of arrivals, a day spent greeting the other students in the hall with the question, ‘So, what A-levels did you get?’ It was an evening that involved all forty-eight of us sitting in the common room and feeling rather shy and uncomfortable

while Chris tried to get us all to become firm friends. Now it was my turn. I like to think that it went rather well even though it didn’t.

I must confess that I’m not particularly good at hosting parties. I’m not greatly fond of social occasions during which I’m required to plaster on a fake smile and tell falsehoods in answer to questions about the direction I’m taking in life. Rare is the occasion that I’m seen holding court (so-to-speak); cracking jokes and being interesting all over the place. And it is a distinct impossibility that you’ll ever be witness to me giving an after-dinner speech, particularly one in which the audience hangs on my every word and occasionally breaks out into uncontrolled hysterical rapture. I was once asked to be a friend’s best man. My launching a mouthful of Kronenbourg across the table in response (in surprise, more than anything else), soon convinced him that he’d made an error in judging that I’d be remotely suitable come the speech at the end of his fiancé’s Special Day lunch. They decided to get married in Jamaica instead. Anyway. The point is: in the scenario in which I had to demonstrate my responsibility as a resident tutor to nearly fifty students on the first night of their new life away from the comfort of their family homes, so I tried to appear both responsible and cool at the same time. I

tried to be enthusiastic but I was like an embarrassing dad. I tried to crack jokes that I thought were funny but clearly weren’t and as eyebrows were raised all around me, so I simply felt like a Christian trying to be persuasive in an argument about the existence of God... again. Someone suggested a visit to the pub. I agreed, and soon found myself clambering over everyone else equally as keen to escape my welcome patter as me. I may be wrong (see Book), but I have a feeling that it was that evening that I became acquainted with my long-term friend Jon. If I am (wrong - see Book again), then it was not long after that.

Jon and I met either on that first night or not too long after. It was certainly close to the beginning of the term and we’d been out at the local student union bar - the Carlton - for a considerable number of drinks. We’d all returned to Ashbrooke to plunder the fridges and the food parcels sent by other students’ parents and after an hour or so had found ourselves alone in one of the vast kitchens drinking coffee and discussing our mutual contempt for pretty-much anything but girls. As I wave my flag of self-indulgence around me, and shout its brand over the roar of the wind of convention, I proudly declare my fortune at having a number of very close and dear friends. Jon is most certainly one of them.

Jon is about a year younger than I.

He’s a keen

sportsman and is in possession of a sense of humour almost as vile and twisted as my own. He manages to hide it rather well though; his being unable to occupy the positions of corporate responsibility that he does, were it to be widely known. He’s a very successful individual carrying the weight of ten million pasties on his shoulders (he works for Ginsters - or at least he did until the shareholders read this), and by way of a demonstration of just how good a friend he is he once sat (and passed) a maths exam on my behalf because I knew that I was going to fail it. I returned the favour by typing one of his essays that he’d left a little late and for no reason whatsoever, at a couple of completely random points I inserted the word ‘rhubarb’ into it. Since the subject of the essay was something about communications acquisition, a subject of which I have absolutely no clue, his lecturer was rather bemused (to say the least) and gave him a particularly poor mark for it. Despite this and like I said, Jon continues to be one of my dearest and most trusted friends. Oddly, he’s still married, too. I like to think that the Kronenbourg played at least a small part in that.

When it came to attractive girls Ashbrooke Hall could never have been compared with the Playboy Mansion the image of which I now have in my head to replace the

troll. It would be a similar comparison to one between this (see Book) and the works of ... [insert name of good writer here]. And as you imagine this and thus mop-up your tea from your lap, so imagine then that Ashbrooke was a mixed hall and Clifton and Westfield were not.

Both Clifton and Westfield were, in fact, all-girl halls and as I mentioned previously (in the piece about being the treasurer of the Ashbrooke residents’ kitty) soon enough Jon and I would get to know them both very well indeed.

On the whole, that year the ugly tree had had a rather bumper crop, its sticks having been wielded with wanton disregard for my own standards and desires. Neither the terms ‘bingo wings’ nor ‘gunt’ had yet been invented, however, if they had they would describe with uncanny accuracy the aesthetics of much of Sunderland’s student populace. Still, needs must and all that... Fortunately for Jon and I though, many of those sticks had not been wielded with as much ferocity in either Clifton or Westfield as they had elsewhere. The blond girl in the jodhpurs lived in Clifton Hall.

Anyway.

The resident tutor of Clifton was a rather aesthetically pleasing woman by the name of Nicki. Under the ruse of ‘resident tutor business’ I soon established a rapport with her and introduced her to Jon, my professionalism forbidding any amorous advances on my part - so I like to

tell myself. Introductions thus made, we began to visit the place on a fairly frequent basis. Our plan was to become acquainted with as many of the more attractive residents of the hall as possible and then advance forth to Westfield. It was a simple plan and, as it happened, quite an effective one.

As one could well imagine and both Jon and I soon observed, within days of arriving at Clifton the girls had each discovered and settled into their own little cliques. I suspect that this was true of all of the halls throughout the university campus but our focus was primarily on Clifton. For Jon and I it was simply an interesting observation and based upon it we launched our campaign taking advantage of something that I’d actually paid attention to at school: geography. The first of these cliques was located in the first set of rooms reached after entering the front door. With deliberate irony it was a clique that I nicknamed The Crazy Gang. Needs must and all that, we thought.

The Crazy Gang were each genuinely pleasant and warm-hearted individuals (think: knitting and baking cakes) and we got to know them all rather well. Our campaign was off to a good start and we were soon regular visitors, often meeting for lunch or evening meals and drinks at the Carlton.

It was through our acquaintances with The Crazy Gang that we managed to

introduce ourselves to the other cliques in the hall and the girls within - many of whom I’d fail miserably trying to pull, one of whom would fall frighteningly in love with me, and almost all of whom would, one night in a club known as Annabel’s, decide to pour all their drinks over my head. I think it’s very likely that I deserved that.

Now, as a resident tutor I was considered as someone responsible and possessing integrity. I wasn’t - obviously - but that was the way in which I was considered; by those who didn’t know me.

Like I may have mentioned previously (but may have not), within the area of Ashbrooke there were five halls of residence, only one of which was self-catering: ours. The other four all had small kitchens with kettles and a toaster and their residents’ parents had each paid considerable sums of money to have meals provided for them in the university canteens. One of these canteens was next door to Clifton Hall and it was there that twice a day (lunch and dinner) those residents from Clifton, Westfield and Park Halls (and the other one that I don’t remember the name of) would congregate to stand solemnly in line and await their turn to have their gruel slopped upon their plate. Once some kind of matter had been slopped upon the afore-referred to cuisine conveyance, the student

would then wave an identity card at the cashier, thus confirming that they were entitled to dine for ‘free’.

One day I was having coffee with Jon and The Crazy Gang. Having finished, we got up to leave and as we did the kitchen manager approached me. She’d been handed two dining cards that had been accidentally left by their owners and asked whether I, as a resident tutor and therefore a ‘responsible’ person would be so kind as to make sure that they were returned to their owners, lest ‘Fraser MacDonald Gurvin’ and ‘Christopher Something-or -other’ starve to death. “Of course” I replied, for obvious reasons. Jon and I immediately went home, located our own passport-sized photographs and a laminating machine and substituted the images of Fraser MacDonald Gurvin and Christopher Something-or-other with our own.

Given a reasonably close inspection our new cards looked exactly as though they’d simply had another photograph re-laminated onto the old one. Neither Jon nor I were ever going to become expert forgers creating fake passports for hitmen and the like, but this was too good an opportunity to miss. Fate had dangled a couple of rather large parcels of food before us. And Jon and I had lunged for them with great enthusiasm.

Despite having had Jon sit my maths exam for me previously a rough calculation in my head determined that if we got away with it we’d save ourselves many

hundreds of pounds in food bills. Being students this was a rather appealing thought; freeing-up monies that could otherwise be spent on booze-induced incidents and the inevitable regularity of failure to be appreciated by girls.

It far outweighed any issues of morality or legality, neither of which actually registered as any more than a tiny inaudible blip on our respective consciences. We both knew however, that since our new cards would not stand up to any scrutiny at all we’d need to be at least a little cautious in our use of them. Thus, with a vague awareness of behavioural psychology we set about a plan to safeguard against being exposed as the fraudsters that we were and without ceremony being thrown out of university. It was a simple plan and, as it turned out, quite an effective one. At least it was until I had an accident involving a lump of boiled cabbage.

Our plan was simply to get into the confidence of the kitchen staff. This we achieved by getting to know them and gaining their trust so that they wouldn’t feel compelled to look too closely at our cards. We’d use distraction techniques that included simply asking about their day; things that could otherwise be described as polite conversation. And while this worked rather well it was a plan soon jeopardised by Jon’s embarking on a fairly short-lived affair with one - it being an affair on account of her being married. Fortunately though, it had

quite the opposite effect of being a hindrance to our deception. cabbage.

And then I slipped on the lump of boiled

It was with much insistence that I was okay despite the blood dribbling down my forehead that I managed to avoid revealing my fraudulence by filling out the accident book. It was nearing the end of term anyway and from then on we both deemed it too dangerous to continue using our cards. Still...

In all we’d enjoyed a good few months of food courtesy of the University of Sunderland and the parents of Fraser MacDonald Gurvin and Christopher Somethingor-other. We were both quite pleased with ourselves about that.

Because Sunderland was about three hundred miles away from my parents’ I didn’t go home that much.

When I did I would normally get the train on a Saturday so that I could pay an extra fiver and travel first class, thus avoiding any screaming children in the other carriages. On the few days I’d make the journey midweek however, I’d either catch the bus or on a couple of occasions thumb a lift or ten.

It was - I think - the Easter vacation and I’d decided to save the train or bus fare and hitchhike from Sunderland south to Bristol. I got a lift to the slip road on

the A19 and stuck my thumb out, waiting (accompanied by my old friend Delusion) for a beautiful woman in a Ferrari or any other exotic automobile to pick me up and drop me the following day at my mother’s front door.

After about ten minutes or so a car pulled up a couple of yards down the road. I threw my bag over my shoulder and walked quickly up to it but with my hand less than six inches from the door handle it suddenly pulled away with two faces laughing at me through its rear window. The eardrum-perforating howl of the articulated trucks thundering past subsequently drowned out the various expletives I emitted in their wake.

My first lift was from a trucker, a rather pleasant chap who had mastered the art of rolling a cigarette and brewing a cup of tea at the same time - and at sixty miles an hour on the M1. I was dropped at a service station some fifty miles south and stood quite happily on the slip road waiting for lift number two. I didn’t have to wait long. A Mini pulled up alongside within a few minutes and offered me a lift further south. I hadn’t even shut the door when the driver, a man in his early twenties hit the accelerator pedal, spinning the wheels and hurling me face-first into the back seat. Within minutes we were travelling at over a hundred miles an hour and then, suddenly, the man in the front passenger seat turned to his mate and said something I couldn’t quite make out.

An argument erupted between them and in what seemed to be the heat of it the man in the passenger seat turned around to face me waving a claw hammer in the air. In a second the driver grabbed him by the wrist, shouted something like “fucking leave it!” - presumably referring to me - and I experienced a rather unpleasant bowel movement. I have very little recollection of the next few miles but somehow both the driver and I managed to avoid my head being caved in by the hammer-wielding psychopath - in the backseat of what they informed me was a stolen car.

I guess I should’ve learnt my lesson then but you know me: I hadn’t. I decided to make the return journey back to Sunderland also-hitching and was dropped at the M5 slip road by my mother (I’d elected not to tell her about the trip down lest she had a heart attack).

I was picked up within a couple of minutes by a certifiably-mad Irishman who, after warning me not to ‘try anything’ and showing me a ferocious looking knife just in case I did (whatever the fuck he thought I was going to ‘try’ I’ve no idea, nor do I have any idea why he picked me up in the first place), then took me on a sightseeing tour of Moss Side in Manchester and dropped me in the middle of it. Although I had no clue where I was in terms of the location of the train station or anything resembling a main road or thoroughfare,

fortunately, thanks to my tour, I did then know fully-well where to buy guns and crack - places to avoid when asking directions to get me out of there and back enroute to Sunderland.

The remainder of the journey north, having gotten a lift with another trucker as they seemed far safer, was pretty painless but unfortunately the truck was only going as far as Carlisle and so the driver dropped me at the train station. Since it was then almost midnight and I had just missed the last train to either Sunderland or Newcastle I slept on the platform with a flock of pigeons and an alcoholic bag lady, getting the train back the following morning with the beginnings of a cold to find that over the Easter break some local toe-rags had broken into my flat and fucked-off with my stereo. I was quite annoyed about that.

As I have mentioned previously and will do so again, I despise and detest the most uncivilised of scumbags and chavs. I find it a real challenge to entertain thoughts of even mild acceptance of their existence, and rather than theorise on the subject or make any serious attempt at justifying myself or my opinions I’ll simply describe something that occurred over the duration of a few weeks during this time (of my being a resident tutor, obviously).

I don’t recall with a great amount of ease the time of year of which I’m about to write. It could have been early spring or even winter. Then again, it could just as easily have been a month in early summer, but it’s not all that important anyway. I can’t recall whether this was before or after the Easter vacation but what is important is that there was a period of time - a few weeks - during which a vicious gang of scumbags and fuckwits decided to terrorise a great many students in the area of Ashbrooke.

It was a gang that varied between fifteen and twenty in number and they would frequently loiter around the traffic lights of a junction on the main road, a place almost exactly halfway between the halls of Ashbrooke, Westfield, Clifton and the Carlton bar. Almost all of them wore tracksuits and baseball caps and they varied in age from those in their mid to late twenties down to some whom appeared to be about four.

At the beginning their harassment included simply the hurling of insults and miscellaneous verbal abuse, but it soon advanced to physical violence with at least a dozen students falling victim to the idiots as they did nothing but pass them by as they walked in and out of town or between the halls. It was no surprise that over those few weeks a tremendous atmosphere of fear and nervousness built up with many students reluctant to leave the halls

for fear of unprovoked confrontation. Something had to be done. I didn’t expect that something to involve me.

Once again, like I’ve previously mentioned and acknowledged throughout the pages of this book (see Book), I’m a complete and utter coward. I have no inclination whatsoever to have the knuckles of anyone pushed with any haste into my nose. And the idea of such an occurrence fills me with dread; tears of a threeyear-old almost certainly appearing moments before I’ve had a chance to turn on my heels and run away screaming. To be honest, I simply don’t see the point to it all and would far rather occupy my mind with enjoying a nice glass of booze with friends while failing to be appealing to girls, or perhaps sipping at a cup of tea at home while gawping at a movie or enjoying some writing time in a café. Not once has it occurred to me that loitering about in a gang of fuckwits and trying to terrorise individuals simply carrying on their own business of walking from one place to the next could be remotely entertaining. Like most people capable of independent thought I believe that not only should violence be avoided wherever possible, so the freedom to walk from one place to the next without harassment or fear should be a given rite. I don’t think that I’m entirely alone in this.

I don’t know the reason why these scumbags decided to loiter about and terrorise the student populace. It

wasn’t something that I wished to bring up in a conversation, particularly one that would, more than likely, result in my having any number of knuckles pushed into my face. Many of us surmised that it was simply because these people were thick. I remain content with that summation.

Anyway.

With this atmosphere

of

fear

and

nervousness present it was the responsibility of the resident tutors to try and do something about it. Sure, the police were called each time something occurred but on every occasion the gang dispersed and in all practicality there was nothing that the Old Bill actually could do. Despite some of these bags of wretched filth occasionally being spotted wielding makeshift weapons there was not a single one spotted by a patrol car and the police were, in effect, powerless to do anything. They simply suggested that the students remained vigilant and called them when anybody saw something that they could actually deal with. It took two incidents within an hour or so of each other to finally put an end to the problem.

Both incidents took place on a Friday evening and I was off-duty enjoying a cup of tea with Jon and the Crazy Gang. There was suddenly a violent and desperate thumping of the front door of Clifton Hall and Jon answered it to a couple of students from one of the other halls, bloodied and breathless having been assaulted by

some of the repugnant feral garbage. The police were called but after a half-hour of driving around the area none were found. Sometime later, believing that all the nonsense was over with, a group of us decided to go to the Carlton for a drink. And then the fun began.

Actually, it wasn’t immediate. We’d been in the bar for about an hour when the door was suddenly flung open and another student appeared. He was out of breath having just been pursued down the street by the same gang of scumbags that had earlier assaulted the other two. Someone looked outside to see them loitering about and throwing things in the direction of the door. Another person called the police. Almost every single student in the bar then spontaneously decided to go out and play.

The thing is: we’d all had enough. This latest incident was simply the last straw and so we all piled out of the bar and began to round them up. The scumbags tried to disperse but there were too many of us for them to contend with and it still makes me smile to think of the surprise on their faces as ‘one went in and sixty-plus came out’ - although it’s doubtful not a single one could count.

The police arrived within minutes and each idiot was then encouraged with surprising efficiency to climb into the various vehicles that they’d brought along with them.

One or two accidentally tripped over a blade of grass and

then fell into a lamppost a couple of times, and another ran head-first into a wall and then hit his teeth on my friend’s shoe. But with admirable restraint we each assisted the police to whisk them away to refresh their minds as to the lack of appeal of a police cell. Not surprisingly, there was not a single evening’s trouble again after that.

In one sense - that of the eyes, I guess - I think that I should perhaps crowbar the next piece of this dog-awful scrawl directly in here because it refers, in part at least, to the business that I established - a somewhat loose and inaccurate term - with Jon. It was the business that we began during my time as resident tutor and it followed on from the delightful discovery that I made at the Boat when I was treasurer of the Ashbrooke Hall residents’ kitty. Like I said, in one sense I think that I should perhaps crowbar the next piece of this dog-awful scrawl etc. The thing is: I’m not going to.

I’m not going to because there’s more to write about it and it was also a separate ‘thing’. It was a different job; an antipreneurial endeavour in its own right and that fact secures its role (pardon the rather shit pun) and is thus deserved of its own section. Besides, much as in the same way that a good book may entice its reader to continue on to read the next chapter, so I hope that you,

my solitary reader and champion of literary magnificence (or bored sociopath carrying in your hand a whole big sack of crazy) may want to read the next bit, too.

Anyway, I also think that I should describe, with all the inaccuracy that that particular term conveys, the incident during which the girls of Clifton and many more folk who just happened to be in the same club known as Annabel’s, decided to pour all of their drinks over my head. It was a Wednesday. And this is only slightly relevant.

It was the week after I’d asked the DJ of another club we were in to dedicate a song to The Crazy Gang. It was a song that I thought to be appropriately inappropriate: ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs, and delighted by my consideration the following week they returned the honour by requesting a song for me: ‘Never going to get it’ by someone I can’t remember the name of. That night I was having a rather fun time conversing with a reasonably attractive girl by the name of Sarah, I think.

In my mind the conversation was going rather well but it soon became apparent that in her mind it was not.

Evidently I said something that she regarded as inappropriate and inspired by her feelings of frustration she threw her drink in my face. As I stood somewhat struck-dumb by this novelty, so Sarah leaned toward her friend and repeated whatever it was that I’d said to her.

Her friend immediately launched her drink towards my face too and moments later someone else did the same.

Less than a second after that and one of the girls from Clifton decided to join in the fun. Less than a second after that, and so did everyone else.

In a matter of moments what had been an innocently inappropriate comment had become something of an opportunity for every student in the vicinity to throw their drinks at my head. Pints of cheap booze rained down upon me as I stood a victim to this onslaught, unable to escape the barrage of beverages being passed across peoples’ heads for those nearest to dump on to mine.

With nowhere to run I simply stood there, a bemused expression on my face as I empathised with any cat recently removed from a washing machine. Although I am unable to remember just exactly what that innocently inappropriate comment was, given my behaviour of late and the prophecy of that song I have little doubt that I deserved it.

And so, that was my job as the resident tutor of Ashbrooke Hall. I like to think that I carried it out rather well because no one died. Sure, one student had a nervous breakdown and another set fire to the kitchen.

But if they couldn’t stand on their own two feet by then, I thought, when will they ever?

Rhubarb, coaches, and a piece of chocolate cake aka

GYMYCs Inc

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“The surf” “The surf, who?”

“The surface temperature for a sphere of plutonium at steady state can be estimated by using the semi empirical relation for free convection coupled with radiative heat transfer.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Err... Sorry about that.

Being something of an almost-regular Sunday morning, it wasn’t particularly surprising that I awoke draped in my own jacket on the living room sofa of a member of one of the most well-known bands in the world - one that almost shares its name with an international movement of power-hungry, elitist psychos intent on world domination. It was even less surprising that I awoke on that sofa alone, having earlier failed to get-off with an attractive girl despite having employed a somewhat innovative strategy of endearment that involved the offering of a piece of chocolate cake. The fact that I’d fallen down a half-flight of stairs the previous evening too simply caused me to shrug my shoulders, remove the bottle top that I’d noticed embedded in my cheek, and all-but blind myself as I stepped out into the

blazing sun of a mild November’s morn. I needed coffee.

Oddly enough, even though the metaphorical jackhammer was working overtime in my ears and head, that morning I felt good. I felt as though the fog of uselessness had cleared; as though the tide of foolishness had turned and the flood of self-loathing and delusion was subsiding. Coffee seemed like a good idea to assist in the writing of this: yet another piece of dog-awful scrawl in the mangled sludge of words and stuff of No stranger to the P45. In my Sunday morning café of choice, less than a metre from my table the waitress sneezed and threw my coffee across the floor. The day was shaping up quite nicely, I thought.

The previous evening had been a friend’s birthday party at a basement bar in town. Another couple of friends had brought their band along (not the worldfamous one), and a jolly time had been had by all. All of these friends were some of my close friends that I hadn’t seen in some time and it became something of a blowout involving a great deal of free booze and food. When the bar that we’d visited afterwards closed at about 3am, so I found myself with a group of complete strangers, all of whom were perfectly pleasant, entering the living room of what transpired was the home of the member of the world-famous band. It was a rather nice living room, yet, I’d have been none the wiser had the job-title of its owner

either not been mentioned, or been something entirely different. On the wall hung some ‘Art!’ Here, prettymuch, endeth its relevance...

The cake had been for the birthday celebration but the flow of booze had distracted us all from actually eating it.

It was an idea to present it sometime later but Tom - the friend whose birthday we were celebrating - was way-too squiffy and went home and so I decided to use it to endear myself to the most attractive girl in the bar instead. Moments away from actually doing so, I turned to speak to another friend only to turn back to the girl shortly thereafter and see her getting-off with someone else. Nice. So much for chocolate cake, I thought. And tried to be appealing to someone else. I wasn’t.

Like I said, that morning I felt good (etc.). I felt as though I could actually complete this piece without too much aggravation and as I received my replacement coffee with the sweetest apology for the whole sneezing episode, so I began to think about how to begin. As you can probably tell from the way I’ve written this in the tense of the past, I couldn’t. Soon enough then, the jackhammer became ever louder and a herd of bison stampeded over a corrugated iron bridge somewhere between my nasal passage and the back of my head. It was followed by a steamroller and some rhinos on pogosticks. What-with the previous evening’s vol-au-vents,

some quiche, a few sambucas and a chicken drumstick dancing a merry jig in my tummy, I felt it was something of a constructive idea to go swiftly home to submerge myself in a tub of self-pity.

Anyway.

It’s a couple of days on and here I sit watching a preposterous-looking poodle being walked down the street. It’s now time to get on with writing this piece about the business venture that I embarked on with Jon the one that began as a one-off rip-off while I was Treasurer of Ashbrooke Hall’s residents’ fund. It was then my first, first year and I thought nothing of doing another coach trip until I met Jon. I met him in my second first year over a cup of caffeine-flavoured cynicism and thorough disappointment. By then I’d become a Resident Tutor. Fuck only knows how I managed that.

The night Jon and I met we spoke at length and mostly about girls. It was not too-long after that; during the typing of his essay (the one in which I’d inserted the word, ‘rhubarb’ for no other reason than I thought it’d be funny) that I told him of the previous year’s trip to The Boat. Like me, Jon appreciated the idea of making cash and like me too, he appreciated it even more if we could make it doing something that would enable us to meet girls. We established GYMYCs Inc for precisely those reasons (i.e. to make some cash and to meet girls). We

also established it to have fun. We had lots of that.

Our most popular trips were the ones to Newcastle’s Tuxedo Royale, the nightclub otherwise known as ‘The Boat’ (on account of it actually being one). It was a huge white ship moored to the south bank of the River Tyne and while its nautical history was of little importance to us, what was key - if you’ll pardon the poorly-clever, albeit unnecessary and incorrectly spelt pun - was that The Boat was the venue for one of the busiest student nights across the north east of England. It was busy for a number of reasons and its drinks offers of vast measures of spirits and pints for a quid was certainly one. Another was the revolving dance floor that had witnessed many a drenching with vomit, and yet another was the fact that it had at least two separate dance floors playing completely different types of music. In addition to this, were the many places to escape to for contemplations and regrets of any recent romantic indiscretions that could otherwise turn out to be very uncomfortable indeed.

The fact that The Boat was the venue for one of the busiest student nights across the north east of England was one major reason for it proving so popular with Jon and I. It was a perfect place for us to begin promoting our new business, something that we named GYMYCs and refused to tell anyone what the letters stood for.

We promoted GYMYCs with the unwitting support of

the University of Sunderland and a number of its departments that provided us with printing facilities for our posters and flyers. Additionally, because few - if any - students had their own computers back then, befriending a security guard or two assisted us greatly with access to facilities for the designing of the aforementioned posters and flyers. Even if I do say so myself, we came up with some very good ones and either Jon or I could well have eventually had quite promising careers in graphic design - had either of us actually studied it. And, of course, had Jon’s career not rocketed up into the corporate stratosphere while mine rolled and bounced like a giant boulder down a mountainside leaving a trail of devastation and disappointment behind it.

Aside from the student union’s own nightclub, The Boat was a far safer environment in which to socialise and get drunk than the town centre of Sunderland. Every Monday was a student’s-only night and so the hundreds of lager-swilling chavs - those familiar to the audiences of ‘Most Shocking Pissed-up Morons on Weekends in Town Centres ‘4’’ and guests of Jeremy Kyle - were engaged elsewhere channelling their propensity for violence in an altogether different direction; one towards each other, rather than us. This was nothing but a good thing for our little enterprise and so whenever we ran a coach to The Boat it was always packed with shrieking students

dressed in inappropriate attire and expressing themselves all over the place. Sure-enough, it soon made us very popular indeed. Not even abandoning fifty of them in the city one night put a dampener on that. Okay, so maybe it did... just a bit.

I’ve no idea just how much it costs now but back then it was roughly eighty quid to hire a coach to take us all to Newcastle for the night. The price was subject to a number of conditions and one was that the bus would leave no later than half-two in the morning. On this particular night we’d hired six coaches and three hundred students had piled on them in Sunderland, piled off them in Newcastle, and then thrown themselves about The Boat screaming and guzzling gin and tonic. At two in the morning the music stopped and most crawled out and onto the bus. At half-two it was brought to our attention that fifty or so students were yet to board and nowhere to be seen. Someone asked whether we should wait and I looked at Jon. He looked back at me. Knowing exactly what the other was thinking we smiled and said, ‘Nah!’ And the coaches returned to Sunderland. Although not a single one of those fifty (or so) students were, quite a few of Newcastle’s taxi drivers were very pleased with us for that.

Throughout the year Jon and I mostly ran trips to The Boat.

We also organised a trip to a club in Middlesbrough, one that I can’t remember the name of. I do remember it being a rather famous venue but the main thing that I recall about it is Jon’s payback for the ‘rhubarb’ incident. Come the end of the night and the time that we had to pay the pre-agreed sum to the club (for entry), Jon fucked off on the coach and left me there.

I had to escape by climbing through the club’s toilet window and got a taxi back. Apparently, neither the manager nor a single one of the club’s doorstaff were at all impressed with us for that.

Lobster, mugs and council tax aka Vodafone

When the founder of the mobile phone retailer Phones 4U was interviewed by the television news, shortly after he’d sold his company for over a billion pounds, I felt a bit sick. I felt as though I’d swallowed a half-pint of Castrol with a raw egg chaser and had then had my head pushed into a bowl of snot. In turn, each of the BBC’s Dragons then carved the word ‘loser’ into my forehead with a compass and what little self-belief, respect and confidence I had left suddenly evaporated leaving a clear film of pointlessness upon my existence. Any hope and dream, any aspiration or inkling thereto quickly followed; siphoned-off by the esteem-guzzling Sod. I’m not a great fan of Him. My feeling was not simply one of envy; of the fact that John Caudwell had made himself such a vast amount of money and would, therefore, never, ever (ever, ever, ever) need to work again. And it wasn’t because he could then afford to feed himself, his family and pretty-much everyone in the phone book on lobsters every day of the week until the end of time. Never again would he raise so-much as a shrug when he received a bill for his council tax. No. It was because, back-when I was trying to be a student in the grim, graffitied and industrialised hell of the north I tried to establish my own mobile phone business.

Similarly to my attempts to be a student, I failed in that, too.

You may be disinterested to recall that some time ago I wrote about applying for and getting a job at the BT shop when I was living in Bristol. I mentioned then about my interest in telephone technology (an interest that didn’t extend to my dribbling on the windows of the Carphone Warehouse) and I described with a certain selfcongratulatory arrogance and misplaced superiority how, in my first, first year at university I was one of only two people there to own a mobile telephone (the other was a Chinese student that, if memory serves me correctly, had a BMW and a rather large head - but neither fact is particularly relevant). Anyway, for me at the time it was an ego and status thing and there were many who enquired just why I needed one. The truth was that I didn’t yet I tried to make out that it was because I was something of an über-yuppy. It wasn’t long before I was rumbled. I think that my being skint with a shit dress sense had something to do with that.

Unlike the subject that I’d gone to university to study I had a knowledge of, and an interest in the telecommunications business. ‘course, my knowledge didn’t extend to anything technological, but I did have an understanding and awareness that the mobile industry, particularly the retail side, was in its earliest stages of development and was soon going to explode, so-tospeak. More and more people would be viewing the

mobile phone as both a status symbol and a rather useful device for communicating with others and I was certain, therefore, that were I to get in on the action (so-tospeak), I could make myself a significant wodge of cash and loads of friends all keen to enjoy my company for my winning personality and charisma. Probably. I began to explore the idea by carrying out some market research.

It didn’t take very long.

In Sunderland there was a shop just-outside of the town centre. Amongst other things such as car radios and speakers and the like, it sold mobile phones but it only stocked a couple of them and they represented a very small part of the business. Since it was the only shop for miles around that sold them I determined that an opportunity existed for me to start my own. I figured that this would be a good thing to pursue. It was - albeit for someone else.

With my comprehensive market research plan thus complete I made a call to Vodafone and asked how one set-about beginning a business dealing in mobile phones.

It surprised me that they were not only prepared with a special introductory pack for dealers containing everything I needed to know, but they despatched it without so much as a credit check. Before they did however, they asked how much merchandising I would

like. “As much as you can give me” I replied. And nipped off down to the Carlton bar for a pint.

Because I was still a resident tutor at this time I was continuing to fail to do my job properly and hanging out at Clifton Hall with Jon and the Crazy Gang. I was continuing to accidentally miss lectures too and I was at Clifton when I received a call from Olie. “Uh...Dan? Your Vodafone stuff has arrived.”

“Great.” I responded, with obvious enthusiasm.

“Would you be so awfully kind as to put it in the corner (next to the door to my room)? I’ll be back in a bit.”

“There’s not enough space.”

“Oh. Can you just leave it in the hallway?”

“Um. No. There’s not enough space.”

“Oh...? Can you get the driver to put it in the common-room, then?”

“They can’t. There’s not enough space.”

“They?”

“Yes. There’s three of them. And three vans. And about two hundred boxes.” “???!!xx&*%£!???”

Oops.

There weren’t quite two hundred boxes; it was more like a hundred and fifty-something. Even so I returned home to find the common-room and hallway all-but stacked to the ceiling with huge Vodafone-branded boxes.

Taking a look at the packing note I saw that there was something like eighty boxes of leaflets, flyers and posters and about twenty boxes of customer contracts. The remainder contained the actual promotional stuff. There was a lot of that.

It consisted of Vodafone balloons of which there were at least fifteen hundred and about five hundred mugs.

There was enough bunting, it seemed, to circle the globe and there were pens. There were lots of pens. There were thousands of them. Okay, I thought, now I need a shop.

It could be argued that I should have had that thought sometime prior to receiving the arsenal of promotional material that was then jamming up both the commonroom and the hallway. It would be a fair argument, but, considering that it’s me, I didn’t. Along with the finding of a shop, I also should have ordered a number of phones to sell; something that retailers have been known to describe as ‘stock’. This would have allowed me to sell said stock to friends and then buy more stock to sell to acquaintances. Then, once that was achieved I could buy more stock to sell to the masses; all of whom I was not acquainted with. And then I’d be the one interviewed by the television news (not having to worry about my council tax).

Thinking back to the time of my inability to start a multi-million pound mobile phone empire, I still get that same feeling of a ‘half-pint of Castrol with a raw egg chaser, my head pushed into a bowl of snot’ just as I did when I watched the interview a couple of years ago. As I do, though, now I try to find genuine and acceptable reasons and excuses for why I wasn’t able to make it happen; reasons and excuses that my mind’s eye can interpret as a spoonful of sugar; a strawberry-flavoured Yop, perhaps - something to wash down the Castrol and the egg.

There was the obvious one: money (and lack thereof).

And while this played a significant role due in no small part to the fact that my bank manager was no longer prepared to humour my overdraft, I know that there are other reasons too. One is ineptitude. Another is lack of focus.

I was a student still living a carefree and irresponsible life (see Book). I had no experience of starting up a business, especially one without any money whatsoever, and I simply hadn’t made any plans or given my project any real thought. I quickly became distracted by an attractive girl whose heart I didn’t win over with a Vodafone mug and time ticked by. I moved into my third first year and out of Ashbrooke Hall. Weeks, possibly a couple of months later and I’d begin writing for the paper

as Marvellous Malcolm. Phil (and his merry band of thugs intent on snapping my legs like Twiglets) would soon compel me to leave Sunderland altogether and I’d then (very-nearly) get myself shot on a golf course by the US Secret Service. Time would continue to tick by but nomatter what the reasons and excuses for my failure, forget the Castrol, the egg and the bowl of snot, there is always a positive to take away from the experience. This one is no different...

For years, those few people that I knew that stayed behind me, didn’t have to buy another mug or a pen again.

How hard can it be? aka McDonalds

“Three cups of tea and some jobs please!” I asked with feigned enthusiasm, my head thick with the gunk of post alcohol excess. I tried a smile, hoping that it would help. It didn’t.

From behind the counter the teenager stared at me, his expression first blank as he attempted to compute my order. Slowly, at a speed similar to the rising of a winter’s sun something then began to register across his face. It was bemusement.

A dim light flickered in his eyes and his mouth twisted slightly on one side moments before he turned to scan the menu on the board behind him. Turning back towards my friends and I he pensively bit his bottom lip.

His expression now registered a deep concentration; one battling utter confusion and bewilderment. For a second time he turned to scan the board. I looked at my friends beside me who both looked back, shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyebrows, simultaneously opening the palms of their hands at their sides as if welcoming some kind of impending doom. They weren’t far off. Moments later the teenager again turned to face us. The expression of confusion remained for just a fraction of a second longer before it disappeared altogether and returned to its default state. With eyes seemingly devoid of hope he asked, “Would you like fries with that?”

A couple of friends and I had decided to spend our summer holiday (from university) working in Blackpool.

It was as good an idea as any other.

We chose Blackpool because we each had other friends there and on the day of our arrival we found ourselves a place to live: in a squalid bed-sit next to the football ground. It was a vile place; a bit like living in a skip only considerably less civilised and for a moment I thought about changing my name to Grover (from Sesame Street). The moment soon passed and so I didn’t.

Understandably the rent was very cheap but we were students. We were broke and in urgent need of cash. To get some of it we needed jobs. Spectacularly hung-over from a night’s free boozing in Blackpool Tower (courtesy of a friend employed behind one of its bars) we went for an early lunch in McDonalds. We left with three offers of employment and our tea. I had some chicken nuggets, too.

At first, for reasons impossible to recall and irrelevant anyway, we were told that we couldn’t begin our jobs for another week. Our financial situation was particularly bad and so, because I was feeling a little more resourceful than the others I asked whether there was anything else that we could do in the meantime to get some cash.

Foolishly, the manager told us that there was. He told us

that he had some painting and decorating for us to do. I was quite apprehensive about that.

It must be recognised at this point that I’m not particularly adept at home improvements, let alone business ones. I’ve never so much as put a piece of selfassembly furniture together without either discovering at least one leftover bolt on the floor (and said item later collapsing into a heap of disappointment at half-four in the morning), or myself in a state of recovery from a momentary bout of fury-induced amnesia having smashed a shelving unit into a million pieces because I’ve not read the Pidgin-English instructions. I’ve barely zero hours of experience painting and decorating and I can’t recall ever taking a roller in-hand or - as would soon become rather obvious - using an industrial belt-sander to ready some fire doors for repainting. That said, we agreed to the jobs immediately and while my two friends were handed some brushes and pointed in the direction of the staff room, I was handed the industrial belt-sander and pointed in the direction of the fire doors.

Now, in experienced hands such a device can make light work of preparing each of the huge, rather expensive fire doors for a re-paint. Since mine weren’t in any way experienced however, I’d simply thought: hey, how hard can it be? And carried on regardless. It was, as it turned out, very.

I simply couldn’t get used to the sensitivity of the trigger of the device which, despite my caution would launch the machine - with me in tow - up the entire length of the door, gouging out a rather unsightly chunk of MDF in the process. No matter: eight hours later and I was standing back and admiring five of the restaurant’s fire doors, each of varying thickness, hanging pitifully throughout the corridor while a burgundy-faced manager stood dumbstruck with what appeared to be smoke billowing out of his ears.

Possibly, it was his own stupidity at asking me to do the job in the first place that was the reason I wasn’t immediately fired. As for him, it was certainly going to be a while before he’d get anywhere near to redeeming himself for the eleven thousand pounds that he’d taken the best part of an hour to explain to me that they were going to cost to replace. I was then rota’d on to the counter and to asking “Would you like fries with that?”

Not altogether surprisingly, I didn’t last much longer as an employee of McDonalds.

Despite my efforts to be as professional as possible I quickly got the impression that the manager wasn’t my greatest fan. This became apparent when he discovered that I’d given away about a hundred free cheeseburgers because I’d failed to check the closing date on the vouchers. It was an oversight that I learned only when

he yelled something particularly morale-destroying at me across the restaurant. Realising then that there was no way that I was ever going to get my five stars of professionalism to wear on my silly red shirt I handed in my notice and got myself a job crippling celebrities at Blackpool Pleasure Beach instead.

The Pleasure Beach surely a contradiction in terms aka The Pleasure Beach

Having left the delights of burger-flipping and still in need of cash I wandered along the seafront in search of my next victim (nay, employer). I didn’t have far to go because as I looked up, The Big One; The Pepsi Max; the newest, highest and fastest rollercoaster in the world - it was to keep that record for about twenty minutes towered above me and beckoned me in to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. I secured a job almost immediately as a ride operator and was swiftly posted to The Avalanche, a simulated bobsleigh run based in a large Swiss chalettype building in the park.

I arrived for my first day of work with genuine enthusiasm and an optimism that I would never again have to ask anyone if they’d like ‘fries with that’. The Pleasure Beach offered an entirely novel and new experience for me. Given the name of the place I figured that I might actually enjoy it.

On arrival I was first handed a bright yellow shirt.

Although not a great one for uniforms (since they tend to make me feel as though I must immediately conform to the grand scheme of convention and actually behave myself) I put it on and was pleasantly surprised by the absence of feelings of deflation and what I thought would be a resignation to months of belittling by idiots in cheap suits with inappropriate and misplaced attitudes of superiority. I felt comfortable, the enthusiasm and

optimism continuing to make me feel as happy as a nice cup of tea.

The majority of that first day consisted of paying attention to training things and we viewed health and safety videos featuring recognisable faces from Blue Peter and the like. We were then handed a multitude of booklets, brochures and forms, the latter of which mostly indemnified the park from any responsibility whatsoever should anything disastrous occur such as me crashing a ride or something. I didn’t think that crashing a ride was in the slightest bit likely for me since all that I’d be doing was guiding punters on and off the ride. It would be a good few weeks until I realised that I was very wrong indeed about that.

Posted to The Avalanche I arrived to meet my three co -workers: John, Rich and Dave. John was in his early thirties and possessed the kind of lightning wit that were it not for his thorough enjoyment of his less than taxing vocation could have made him an excellent game show host. He was the ride manager. Rich was slightly older with a mop of orange-red hair like a wig without a tartan cap. He had a sense of humour perfectly in synch with John’s while Dave rarely spoke, often preferring to answer any questions directed at him with a grunt. That said, he still fitted the little team perfectly. He was the more technically-minded of the operators of The

Avalanche, often climbing around the maintenance bay with a spanner in his hand and a couple of screwdrivers between his teeth.

Because working as a ride operator was an entirely new experience for me I had no idea what to expect. I wasn’t sure what my colleagues would be like and whether or not I’d fit in. I’d been told that the teams on each ride tended to be rather close-knit and as I walked up the stairs to the platform at half-nine that morning, so despite my enthusiasm and optimism I felt a little apprehensive about the whole thing. That apprehension soon vanished as I entered to see John and Rich drinking tea and playing catch with Dave’s lunch. They all greeted me warmly and made me feel instantly welcome and part of the team. I got the impression that these next few months were going to involve a great deal of fun indeed.

I was quite right about that.

In order to best describe the layout and setup of The Avalanche one should first imagine the aforementioned Swiss chalet. One should also imagine then that it’s rather large and on two floors, and thus divided into four rooms. The platform on which the passengers would queue for the ride was in the area that was one half of the first floor and below it, on the ground floor was a gift shop. The other half of the first floor was actually

combined with the other half of the ground floor and made up the maintenance bay in which a huge system of cranes and pulleys and rotary things could be operated to change the trains (the ride itself) according to what work need to be done on them. To further resemble that Swiss chalet or even an Alpine train station, much of the building was built and decked out with wood. Across the track from the main waiting platform was another onto which the passengers would step off the ride, and a control booth in which sat John, Rich or Dave (and I, eventually) staring at dials and gauges and video screens and pressing buttons to make the ride start and stop.

Accordion music looped continuously throughout the day.

Oddly, I didn’t find it half as annoying as I thought I would.

The ride consisted of a train with six or seven cars each accommodating two people. One would be seated behind the other and both would be secured with a safety bar that would be lowered onto their lap prior to the start.

With the assistance of a pulley the train would then travel out of the station and up a steep incline. There, Newton’s purpose in life would be proven fair as gravity got involved in the whole thing and the train would thunder down a twisting and turning track. People would scream with both delight and terror and then spend a small fortune on useless plastic junk from the gift shop. Many

would also purchase an image of themselves in midscreech as well; taken as they hurtled down the ride.

Before opening The Avalanche for the day ahead each of us had to carry out a range of maintenance and safety checks. Because of the nature of the thing (the ride, that is) it was something that we all took very seriously, only relaxing and beginning our day of fun once every one of the tasks and procedures had been carried out. Although the entire system was supposedly fool-proof with computers monitoring each of the systems, prudence dictated that we double-checked everything.

This included a walk of the track itself and then sending the train around once empty and then occupied. Since I’m quite a coward and dislike fairground rides because of a fear of it going wrong and my being smashed into a million pieces of thorough aggravation, I avoided this latter job at all costs.

During the days we’d regularly rotate our duties.

There were three - plus Dave’s maintenance things - and the first was the actual operation of the ride. This job required someone to sit in the control booth, monitor all the stuff and press the start button every few minutes.

The other two jobs involved the primary and secondary safety checks on the bars securing punters into their seats and only when the secondary check was complete would a thumbs-up be given to the operator in the booth.

Like I said, only once the safety stuff had been dealt with would we settle into the routine of thorough enjoyment of our time on The Avalanche. Each day involved a lot of laughing at rubbish jokes and observations, and a great deal of silliness often involving the punters as they awaited their moments of terror and delight. This was despite my discomfort and the usual displeasure I get from spending any time whatsoever with the mass populace. At The Avalanche I simply didn’t have to deal with any one member of it for any prolonged period of time and so I could dismiss them from my mind the second they stepped from the platform and away.

Besides, there were many girls to gawp at - and to attempt to be appealing to, too. It soon became clearly apparent that I wasn’t very good at the latter bit.

Have you ever had that experience of having your elbow on the bar one minute and it suddenly slipping-off leaving you feeling like a bit of a twat? I have. Worsestill, as it slipped I tried to correct it to lessen the embarrassment in case anyone had seen - and then punched myself in the jaw. Everyone had. And they all found it very funny indeed. It happened not so long back and really was quite an embarrassing moment. It was, however, no more so than one I had on The Avalanche...

When my mother was eighteen or so she was crowned the Beauty and Carnival Queen of her home town in Gloucestershire. She is a beautiful woman. I was probably adopted.

Once more it was a busy day.

The platform was

packed with punters eager to enjoy their moments of terror and delight and Rich and I were conscientiously checking and double-checking the train before giving John the thumbs-up to send it out on its run. As usual we were in high spirits and as per another perk of the job, seeking out attractive girls to flirt with. We’d just finished our check and the train had left when I noticed a woman standing in line. She was a woman as beautiful as my mother in an old photograph taken the day she was crowned Carnival Queen.

To say she was beautiful was an understatement. She was captivating and I was monetarily struck with a sense of oddness; a kind of déjà vu with a twist of awe. Aware that John had noticed her too I walked over to the control booth and quickly recounted the tale of my mother’s crowning all those years ago.

This sense of oddness continued as I realised that despite her beauty I didn’t fancy the woman at all. There was no Oedipal thing going on but I still had an overwhelming urge to do something. I had to say something. I had to compliment her because she was

beautiful and she had made my day just that little bit more special. I had to share the moment with her and without a second of further thought I hopped across the track.

I had no idea what I was going to say. I had no time to prepare a thing. This was a unique event and I was being compelled by an unknown force toward her. She saw me walking across and her expression registered an almost quizzical ‘something’. I reached the gate (keeping the passengers a safe distance from the track) and stood directly before her. Still unable to think of anything to compliment her with I opened my mouth, hoping that the words would appear assisted by that same unknown force that had brought me across to speak to her. For a second before I found my voice I simply gaped at her like a fish; struck-dumb with shyness and intimidation. And then the words came out.

“Er...

Excuse me” I stammered, “I just wanted to tell you that you look like my mum.”

Now, there are moments when one is in a place packed with people one doesn’t know. Sometimes in that particular place one wishes to say something just for the ears of an individual, but, as one begins to speak the entire area suddenly falls quiet and before you know it everyone has heard what ‘one’ had wanted to say. This was one of those moments.

At precisely the wrong time the platform fell silent.

Even the cheesy accordion music playing continuously in the background had finished and was automatically looping around to begin again. Those who’d seen me cross the track were intrigued. Because they’d fallen silent, everyone else did so, too.

The woman pondered for what seemed like an age.

Five hundred pairs of eyes burned into my head. Looking first to her friends to her left and then to her right, she looked back at me. Pausing a moment more for even greater effect, with the sweetest smirk she looked me straight in the eye and said, “That has to be the corniest line I have ever heard in my life.” And then, along with the music, the laughter began.

I was immediately miniaturised into a mouse-size version of my former self; my ego obliterated, my selfconfidence gushing out of my shoes and down through the cracks in the floor. I looked over my shoulder and back at John, optimistically pleading for some kind of emotional support. But no. On his face I saw not help but a contortion of pity, sorrow and stifled hysterical laughter. I looked instead at Rich whose head was shaking in his hands. Dave was doubled-up, too. Red as ketchup I stuttered something about going on my break, shuffled away and hid downstairs for the next thirty minutes, praying for the earth to open up and for Sod to

come and call me home.

It was an embarrassing

moment and one of two events I recall featuring specific punters. I feel even worse about the other...

There is a certain well-known individual: a celebrity, if you can call them that - even though I despise the term.

He somehow began his career on the comedy circuit and was recently on your television screens practically each and every week. This person is extremely well-known and so, for reasons of prudence I think it’s best not to mention his name lest he decides to rain lawsuits down upon me or half-drown me in a bucket of porridge and then beat me to death with a croissant. For the sake of personal safety therefore, let’s call him Mr E. Good eh?

One morning before work I was at a friend’s house watching TV. There was some kind of breakfast show on and the screen cut to a piece about this ‘celebrated’ entertainer, Mr E. I’d never heard of him.

Mr E was credited as a comedian. It was a description that I immediately considered deeply offensive to anyone with even the slightest hint of a sense of humour and I watched with increasing fury as he cracked the most pathetic of jokes and ventured a number of utterly inane anecdotes. A rage built inside of me similar to that when I get a parking ticket.

Moments later the camera turned to what I’d hoped would be my relief. It wasn’t. Instead the screen filled

with the show’s presenter congratulating Mr E on his comedic genius.

I was furious and thoroughly disheartened at the failure of humankind to spot this humourless fraud. Seething, I went to work to alleviate my pain and suffering.

The next few days were pretty busy and the platform was consistently full, a steady and continuous stream of punters seeking their twenty seconds of terror and delight. About four days after the show I think it was a Saturday. I was on the platform with Rich, John was in the control booth and Dave was dangling from a pulley and gnawing on a spanner. Rich was performing the primary check on the safety bars and I the secondary. At some point in the morning as I began my check I looked along the length of the train to see if there were any attractive girls in any of the cars. There wasn’t. Instead, who should be sitting in the last car but Mr E. Memories of that morning’s TV show instantly came flooding back. This blight on comedic culture - says I, somewhat hypocritically - was sitting in the rear car of The Avalanche. There sat this offence to comedians the world over spilling crap jokes and anecdotes to anyone who would listen, whether they wanted to or not.

Vengeance. Here was my opportunity; my time to make a stand. Here was the antichrist of comedy and

now I was going to release my unforgiving wrath upon him.

Having checked each of the cars in front I arrived at Mr E’s. Reaching down I pushed upon the bar just a little more than I normally would and took note out of the corner of my eye of an almost imperceptible grimace.

“How’s that, Sir?” I asked “Uh, it’s a little tight” Mr E replied with a wheeze.

“I’m sorry. It has to be tight because we can’t have you falling out.” I gave John the necessary thumbs-up and watched with my own sense of delight as Mr E’s head snapped back against the headrest.

Dashing to the control booth to view the monitors I watched as each of the punters came into view, a mixture of fun, fear and anticipation on their faces as the train ascended the incline. And then Mr E’s face appeared: a mixture of nervous fear and anticipation… and pain. Oh joy of joys; the sweetest of revenge. I watched with utter delight as Mr E’s face, wracked with fear and pain hurtled down the track.

Half a minute later and it was all over. The train rolled back in to the station, the bars were released and Mr E an odd expression of confusion, pain and relief across his face - limped pitifully off the platform and away.

Today, I do indeed feel a little bad about my behaviour and I occasionally wonder whether I was perhaps just a

little harsh. Today, after all these years I feel a minute connection with Mr E. I’ve recently seen him act in some quality drama on the screen and in my opinion he’s really not at all bad. He appears to have quit comedy and has now found his true niche and for that the world is a better place. Good fortune Mr E. I really do mean that.

Anyway.

On occasion I would receive instructions to spend a day working on a different ride. This was always extremely dull. One day I’d spend it on the log flume and on another the Mouse Trap - possibly the oldest, most rickety death-trap rollercoaster in the world.

On one of these days word came for me to take Second Operator position on The Revolution, a rollercoaster that performed a loop-the-loop in one direction and then did the same in reverse. My job was to sit in the secondary control room and when the train came to a stop at my end press a button to release the brake and send it back. I’d have to push the button about once every five or six minutes but apart from that there was nothing else I had to do. Oddly, someone had left a magnifying glass in the control room along with a Mills and Boon book and so I spent the majority of that day using the power of the sun to improve it. This, considering that the control room was made almost entirely of wood was probably not the smartest of things

to do. Back on The Avalanche a day later John decided that he wanted to work the platform and asked me to take over the controls in the booth.

Now, The Avalanche had a fairly complex braking system and the first brake was in the station itself.

Known for rather obvious reasons as Brake One, pushing a button in the control booth would release it, start the pulley and the train would be taken up the incline towards the start of the Avalanche’s run. As it hurtled down the track at speeds in excess of 50mph, thus confirming that Newton was indeed quite a smart bloke, Brakes Two, Three and Four would slow the train all the way back into Brake One and to its final stop.

It was about eleven in the morning and the punters climbed from the platform into the cars. John carried out the primary safety check and Rich began the second.

Dave dropped a hammer on his foot.

I glanced at the dials and the monitors and the lights as each of the ones that were supposed to turned green.

I confirmed the thumbs-up with Rich and pushed the start button. The train pulled out of the station. A minute or so later it returned and the process began again.

About half an hour had passed and we were all enjoying ourselves thoroughly. Once more the train was occupied with punters, the lights on the control panel turned to green and I’d gotten the thumbs-up from Rich.

I pushed the start button, the train departed and I watched the monitors and the panel as it left the pulley and thundered down the track. The train slowed through Brake Two, a little more through Brake Three and then, suddenly there came the most almighty BANG and the whole building shook. I hit the Emergency Stop button and our safety training kicked-in. The queuing punters were evacuated out of the building while Rich and I checked on the passengers. John telephoned the park office and set in motion the standard practise of calling ambulances and someone from the local Health & Safety Inspectorate. With no passengers hurt we helped them back onto the platform where I overheard someone say “We can get compensation for this.” Suddenly five people had whiplash.

Within minutes The Avalanche was swarming with officials from medical personnel to structural engineers, technicians and - of course - the park’s resident lawyer.

Once all the passengers were safe and out of the building to pursue various claims and receive free Pleasure Beach rides for life I became thoroughly preoccupied with the cause of the incident. Of course, so was everyone else. But I’d been the one at the helm. I thought back over my actions and then repeated the process again and again. Was it my fault? Had I been negligent? Had I overlooked something or not seen a

warning signal that I should have? Was I going to be sent to prison and experience things very unpleasant indeed? I couldn’t actually think of anything that I’d done wrong, but it didn’t stop me from worrying that I had.

Two hours later and the investigators gave everything the all-clear. A technical fault, unnoticed by the back-up systems that were supposed to be fool-and-even-meproof, had caused the penultimate Brake Four simply to lock itself. The parts were replaced, I was exonerated and The Avalanche was opened again.

For the rest of the day the mood on The Avalanche was particularly sombre. We were all relieved that there had been no injuries and also that we weren’t at fault.

We were a little surprised at the speed of the investigation but confident that the Health and Safety Executive were happy for us to reopen. Relieved, I spent the rest of the day in quiet reflection. Bloody typical, I thought.

And so, that was my job at The Avalanche. Much to the hilarity of John, Rich and Dave in respect of my fear of being smashed into a million pieces of aggravation as a result of the ride going wrong, on my last day I was manhandled into the train and sent out on a half-dozen runs of absolute terror. I returned to Sunderland to begin my third and final first year and got a new job in which I

attracted my very own stalker.

At first I was quite

flattered, but I soon became rather disturbed about that.

Driving Miss Crazy - my very own stalker aka LNT

My driving test to become a Student Union minibus driver required me, quite literally, to know how to start the engine of a Ford Transit. Since the first time I’d done this was at the age of three with a screwdriver, it didn’t represent too great a challenge. After driving less than a hundred yards without leaving second gear I was delighted to be told that I’d passed the test and was now a member of an exclusive club of Union Shuttle and Late Night Transport (LNT) drivers. Though the pay was pretty shite, I’d soon spend my evenings driving between the union bars ferrying drunken students about. It made a nice change to actually being one - I had been far too frequently over the previous two years.

Admittedly, being a shuttle driver was not the most challenging of roles that I have ever had yet I didn’t find it all that dull. Sometimes I’d get to pop over to Newcastle airport to pick up a visiting lecturer, which was quite fun, or occasionally a foreign student which, considering the language barriers, simply wasn’t. But the best job? Now, that was the LNT. The LNT was the student union’s minibus service exclusively for women. It operated each night of the week from about six in the evening into the early hours of the morning and it was great fun mainly because I’d get to meet lots of girls. It was far more entertaining than the shuttle because drunken girls tend to be quite funny,

whereas drunken blokes generally aren’t. In fact, driving drunken blokes across town on a Friday or a Saturday night - or any other night of the week for that matter was, particularly in Sunderland, perhaps akin to driving a Variety Club Sunshine Bus - under a ladder during a full moon. It was on the LNT that I met Emma.

I’d collected Emma and her friends from the Carlton Bar to take them to the main student union bar named Wearmouth (on account of that being the building in which it was located). She sat up front with me and we had a little idle banter en route. It was the same when I collected them all from Wearmouth to take them to Manor Quay, the student union’s nightclub. This time, being a little drunk, as she was, she was also somewhat more animated, or, one could say: flirty.

It was probably about half-one when I arrived back at Manor Quay just as Emma and her friends were boarding the shuttle. When she saw me she decided to hop in my bus instead, despite my not being scheduled to leave for twenty minutes and ditching her friends for the journey home. This time she was far more animated - although not that drunk, as I seem to recall - and asked me if I’d like to meet her for a drink the next evening.

Now, Emma was quite attractive and I found that rather appealing. I agreed to the date with a reaction probably not too dissimilar to that of a dog starved of a

choc-drop and the next evening I went to the Carlton Bar to meet her. I walked there with considerable doubt in my mind that she’d actually turn up. It surprised no one more than it did me, when she actually did.

Now, as a man I have little willpower when it comes to women. I can, I guess, at times be quite shallow, too although at least I’m deep enough to admit it. On this occasion however, I had high hopes that the evening would go well; that it would be one of scintillating conversation and laughter; dough-eyed gazings (eyes filled with dough) into each other’s eyes as we strolled hand-in-hand along a moonlit path, shared a tender kiss goodnight at her door and then planned to spend the next day picking out curtains. Alas, four hours later and we were in bed.

I learnt a number of things about Emma over those four hours. None were quite so troubling as the things I learnt after that: First, I learned that my ideas of romantic intimacy were not ideas shared by Emma because she immediately set-about demanding that I bite her in places far too disturbing to mention. Second, I learned that she was thick. Soon after arriving back at my room she looked at me and asked, “What’s your name again?”

If I’m honest I was a little hurt but I determined to discover whether or not she was joking, forgetful or

simply very dumb. “I’ll give you a clue” I said, “It begins with ‘D’ and ends with ‘N’.”

“David?” she asked.

“Uh…no. It begins with ‘D’ and ends with ‘N’. And there’s three letters.”

She thought for a moment “Darren?”

“No. Three letters: beginning with ‘D’, ending in ‘N’.

And there’s an ‘A’ in the middle” I said, becoming a little irritated.

“Damien?”

I gave up and told her my name. The situation then really started to go downhill.

Soon-enough Emma had decided that we were now going out with each other despite the fact that I’d swiftly determined otherwise. In as polite a way as possible I’d tried to convince her that I was not the man for her: I used the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line. It only made things worse. I saw no option then but to lie (again): “I have a girlfriend back home.” I said. And she slapped me across the face.

She sat silently for a short while as I got dressed. I made a number of attempts to be subtle about not wanting her there anymore but I shouldn’t have bothered being subtle; getting rid of her was like trying to get chewing gum out of a carpet.

It was the end of May and I’m crap at remembering birthdays. On the wall of my room that I’d decorated with Poll Tax demands and court summons, I’d also fixed a sheet of A4 with the date ‘3rd June’ written on it to remind me of Dad’s upcoming birthday. As I was helping Emma with her coat she noted this and pondered it for a moment before enquiring, “3, R, D June. Who’s June, then? Is she your girlfriend?”

After a couple of attempts I gave up trying to explain to her that I’d forgotten my years previously and needed a - and decided to get a friend give sufficient credibility to a

father’s birthday the two reminder - hence the note named Tim out of bed to ruse that I had to be in

Newcastle for 7am. Only when we got in his car and turned the corner did I emit a sigh of relief.

We remained in Newcastle for the rest of the day, principally in case Emma decided to remain at the house and await my return. She did. At about half-four we returned to find Olie in the doorway looking very annoyed indeed. Emma had been there all day. In tears at times and being passed between my friends’ rooms and the kitchen. One minute sharing her joy at being my girlfriend, at the next her devastation about my supposedly already having a girlfriend and at the next expressing her determination to get her brothers (one of whom had apparently just been released from prison) to

come over and tear off my face. Of course, I did then what any man would do: I went to the pub.

Not surprisingly, Emma had left when I eventually rolled back home at about 3am. She had however left her number on a Post-it note attached to the fridge with a ‘Call me’ message followed by so many exclamation marks as to send a shiver of fear through me. And so, somewhat foolishly the next day I did just that - only to apologise for upsetting her and not telling her sooner about ‘June’.

It was a poor effort. Two days later as I began my shift on the LNT Emma climbed on and sat next to me.

For the next four hours she hardly said a word - although she did shed a few tears and once more mentioned her brothers’ propensity for extreme violence. She visited the house a couple of times over the next few days but fortunately I was never in. After that she stopped and I never heard from her again.

I quit driving soon after but not because of Emma. I’d had a brainwave and decided that I was going to make my fortune by setting up a nightclub in seven days flat.

And giving all the money away to charity.

Mozart, a Steinway and some strippers aka The Student Times

I once saw three not-particularly-attractive girls in the garden of a pub and I thought: ‘If you took the head off Girl A and put it on Girl B, then took the legs from Girl C and put them on Girl B as well, the result would be that Girl B would actually then be particularly attractive’. I was drunk at the time - surprisingly - but not sufficiently so as to mention it to the girls concerned, thus avoiding [a] numerous drinks thrown in my face, [2] numerous kicks to the groin and [iii] having my teeth pummelled out of my face by their boyfriends. Anyway, one evening at The Boat I was quite happily minding my own business, sipping a glass of booze when, for what was apparently ‘a laugh’ Jon thought he’d place me in a somewhat difficult position by introducing me to someone and then fucking-off somewhere else. Her name wasn’t Louise but it’ll do. Apparently, since my selling to her of the ticket facilitating her presence at The Boat that night she’d taken quite a shine to me.

Now, sadly, ‘Louise’ wasn’t much in the way of an appealing A, B and C combination - more like a cross between Mrs Potato Head and Augustus Gloop after a good ole pummelling with a four-by-two plank of ugly wood. Because I was a little less than sober though, I thought: Needs must and all that. And thenceforth embarked on a half-hour of alcohol-induced intimacy.

Brought to my senses with a good thwack to the back of

the head with the reality bat I then managed to escape to the relative safety of the VIP room. Earlier in the evening Jon had had a discussion with ‘Louise’ in which she’d mentioned her interest in becoming acquainted with me.

Fully aware of the discomfort that this would present, he had then brought her forth, introduced us and immediately disappeared. Since I was not in a state to be remotely decent, with complete cowardice I got off with her and then, at the first opportunity escaped and hid for the rest of the night. A week later and back in Sunderland it was the Christmas Ball.

Sunderland University’s festive events were always good fun. Christmas was especially so because everyone was in tremendous good humour and eager to visit Santa’s Grotty for any number of romantic altercations.

For me, it was my opportunity to meet and once more fail to identify the Phantom Festive Ball Beauty. This was an extremely pretty girl who would, at some random point in the evening at each one of the university’s Christmas, Valentines and Summer Balls - including the first ‘So, what A-Levels did you get?’ disco - appear behind me, tap me on the shoulder and then give me an extremely passionate kiss as I’d turn. Literally seconds later she’d disappear leaving me extremely flattered, albeit thoroughly bemused. This occurrence regularly surprised no one more than it did me.

Aside from the obvious weirdness of this actually happening to me (see Book), one of the odd things about it was that I remain absolutely convinced that this girl was the same person on every single occasion. In my mind I can see the glint in her emerald eyes even now. I regularly question whether I imagined it but on each occasion I would swiftly notice a friend nearby who would immediately verify that I wasn’t entirely insane via their expression of slack-jawed astonishment. Often, it was an expression that accompanied mine; of bemused flattery, rather well.

It wasn’t until the fourth or the fifth festive event - the summer ball of 2003, I believe - that I actually attended consciously hopeful of her appearance. However, since each event before and after involved us all striving to achieve a level of intense inverse sobriety, at that event and all others subsequently I actually dismissed that conscious hope soon after my arrival, continuing on with the task of being drunk all over the place and failing to be remotely charming. At some point the Phantom Festive Ball Beauty would appear and tap me on the shoulder.

We’d share that all too brief kiss and in a squint of an eye she’d then disappear into the smoke and nonsense of the evening. Once I’d ceased gloating I would set off to try and find her in an effort relive the experience, but I never ever could.

Now, given the levels of booze that we reluctantly consumed instead of being at home studying books and the like, one may be inclined at this stage to doubt the veracity of this tale. The thing is: it is most definitely true. I have long questioned many things about my past in the consideration of this book (see Book), yet the occurrence remains clarified by something that happened at the final festive event that I attended.

It was the week following the last trip to The Boat before the Christmas break - the one during which I’d reacted with some cowardice towards the advances of ‘Louise’. It was the university’s Christmas Ball held in the Manor Quay and Jon and I had arrived with Olie and Tim and a few other friends having already spent a few hours trying to explode our own kidneys. I’d failed to be appealing to any girls at all so far, but I was making the best of things by repeatedly walking into inanimate objects and trying to remember my own name. At a time that it’s not possible to recall the Phantom Festive Ball Beauty appeared and in a bleary, one-eyed squint, disappeared into the smoke and nonsense. Feeling flattered-yet-bemused I then began my traditional objective of trying to find out who she was, the plan being to explore the possibility of further flattery without the bemusement. Because I couldn’t find her I soon gave up and met with Jon to get considerably more unhinged than

I already was. I’d forgotten about ‘Louise’ for the most obvious reasons when I received another tap on the shoulder. Turning carefully so as to not hurl myself into a table I was pleasantly surprised to see (a loose and somewhat inaccurate term) an attractive and quite reasonable A, B and C combination of a girl. I soon recognised her to be Louise’s friend and smiled. She didn’t. With nothing but pure unpleasantness in her eyes she said, “You’re name’s Bastard, isn’t it?” And Jon spat his drink on the floor.

I did feel a little bad about Louise after, but not enough to fail to persuade her friend to join me in Santa’s Grotty for a festive moment. She threw her drink in my face for that.

Being Sunderland, as it was, there were many bars and clubs within the city centre and many held studentnight promotions during which the booze was cheap and the possibility of being set-upon by a half-dozen illiterate chavs was at a minimum. Mondays was traditionally Chambers’. Now a strip club (or at least it was when I was dragged kicking and screaming to convince a friend not to get married not so long ago) back in my student days it offered pints of booze for 50p. I don’t remember Tuesdays but Wednesdays was Annabel’s night.

Annabel’s was actually two clubs in one.

The

downstairs was known as Idols while upstairs, Annabel’s held a Seventies night hosted each week by the rather comical DJ, Brutus Gold. Idols was more a club for alcopop-swilling chavs and it occasionally held a series of wet-t-shirt contests. While not directly promoted to students they were, of course, utterly disgraceful and deplorable due to their degradation of women. Had I not been ordered to attend by the editor of the paper for an article that I had no intention of writing I would, naturally, have otherwise remained at home with my nose stuck in a chemistry book... probably. Anyway. Thursdays was Bentleys’ night.

Bentleys was your typical mass-market club of mass tack and naffness with nothing going for it but a sticky carpet and a particularly rubbish DJ. But since it was one of the largest, if not the largest club in the whole of Sunderland, on Thursdays it attracted students like flies to the carcass of a dead dog. Fridays and Saturdays were mostly spent at the student union’s very own nightclub, the ridiculously-named Manor Quay, mainly to avoid the attentions of the aforementioned illiterate chavs who’d prowl the town centre on the weekend eager to guzzle bottles of alcopops and beat the living crap out of one another.

Anyway. It was Friday and the morning after I’d been rescued from being locked into the club by the two part-

time lesbians. I’d met up with my friends, Jon, Olie, Tim and Keith in the canteen of the main university building with little intention of attending lectures that day. Blearyeyed and feeling a bit sick we were each struggling to make sense of a copy of the student union’s newspaper, a rag known as the Student Times. It had only just been passed around and we were each about to give up trying to understand it when Tim closed the paper and sat back in his chair. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m feeling rather unrepresented.”

“That’s a new way to describe the nausea and headache of post-alcohol excess” said Jon, I think.

“I mean here - ” explained Tim, opening the paper again and pointing to a page within. “This women’s column. Why isn’t there a men’s one?”

“Oh” said Jon. “I think my head’s about to implode” followed Olie.

Tim’s observation of the paper’s lack of editorial balance was not explored in any further detail. It was one of those discussions that simply disappeared into nothing because not a single one of us had the ability to function particularly well. It was however suggested that since Tim was the one ‘feeling quite unrepresented’ and clearly concerned by this lack of editorial balance, so it should be he that went to the paper to make his feelings known. He couldn’t be bothered.

I don’t recall the reason why, but before heading home Jon had to make a stop at the office of the paper.

It was there that I was introduced to Ken, its editor.

Ken was a big man and a Geordie. He reminded me of the wrestler, Giant Haystacks even though I’d never in my life watched a bout of wrestling. He had a lion’s mane of almost-red hair and sitting behind his desk he looked like a balloon pressed between a table and a wall. When he laughed everything shook. It was like an earthquake only less-so. We got on immediately and I decided to take the opportunity to enquire about the paper’s lack of a men’s column as previously observed by Tim. “Because no one’s written it yet” Ken explained in quite-sufficient detail. Without giving it any thought whatsoever I offered to be the ‘one’ to do so. Ken accepted my offer immediately. I now had a new ‘job’.

I was unsurprised to learn that writing for the paper in any capacity was a voluntary thing. It was something that students did for their cv’s or to expand their music collections. Since I had neither ambition, for me it immediately became about having a voice to rant on about anything I felt like. It was also a fairly effective ruse for getting into clubs for free and trying to get off with girls. Thus, it seemed like a good idea. Besides, I enjoyed writing (see Book). And I had a certain amount of experience with newspapers back when I was

photographing pensioners sucking on boiled sweets and smelling of cabbage. Okay, so it wasn’t that relevant, but it’d do, I thought.

I initially thought about writing my column well and exercising some caution in my tone. I thought about how, if I wasn’t careful certain things that I wrote may not reflect too positively on me and could, perhaps, be somewhat detrimental to my possible new career path as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. I thought about presenting current affairs programmes on the BBC, hosting political talk shows with my opinions valued and respected by the discerning British public. I thought about breaking political scandals, destroying the careers of high-profile politicians and meeting sources in quiet pubs in the East End and refusing to reveal them even in the subsequent books and movies of my work. I thought about being paid huge sums of money by national newspapers for a couple of hundred words every other Sunday. And, for a fraction of a second I actually thought about taking the whole thing seriously. But I didn’t. I simply dismissed the thoughts almost the instant they arrived in my head - each one disappearing in a massive puff of smoke and nonsense.

Perhaps the only sensible thing I did was to opt to write under the pseudonym of Marvellous Malcolm and I chose to do so for two reasons: one, because I didn’t

know anyone with the name Malcolm, marvellous or not, and [b] because I’d recently seen the movie Independence Day and the term ‘plausible deniability’ had sprung to mind. I launched into my first column with all the journalistic expertise of a damp firework. As I recall it featured a rant about the price of a plastic sieve, a piece about a union vote that I’d subtitled ‘You Lazy Bastards’ and a congratulations message to a couple of friends who’d just got engaged but had already split up by the time the paper came out.

That first piece got under a few people’s skin but not as much as those that followed. Soon enough there was talk in the office that both the paper and I were about to be sued - an idea that Ken and I found hysterical. He took a couple of calls from the office of the Vice Chancellor, which he dealt with as diplomatically as a man like Ken could, and every so often the President of the Students’ Union would storm into the office and shout burgundy-faced while we laughed so hard that I thought his head would explode with rage.

I took it upon myself to abuse my position as much as possible and shortly after the Emma incident I decided to write a column on student fashion which, of course, I knew absolutely nothing about. I simply used it as an excuse to go out and get extremely drunk and, armed with a photographer get pictures of me posing with each

and every attractive girl at a considerable number of pubs and nightclubs throughout the city. I never did get around to writing the piece up but it was a thoroughly enjoyable night nonetheless.

‘Marvellous Malcolm on birds and stuff’ High upon the stage they sat as though a panel of High Court judges, lording over the Emergency General Meeting that they’d called to discuss yours truly. Henry, presiding President of the University of Sunderland Student’s Union turned and with the sound of the rustle of a rat in a bag of crisps, a vague attempt to cover his mouth with his hand failing, whispered to his Vice President who nodded gravely in accord. I looked around me at my editor who sat to my right, at Jon seated behind me all-but twiddling his thumbs and at the vast expanse of vacant chairs placed in naïve and foolish anticipation of the hundreds of students who sure-as-shit couldn’t be bothered to turn up. Of the few who had, two were the type of students who’d turn up to any meeting, whatever the subject, and one was a guy who lay back dozing in his chair on the other side of the dining hall.

This was the hall that had hosted our first ‘So, what A Levels did you get?’ disco, the stage on which had once performed the Utah Saints and possibly, because I can’t actually remember, Rolf Harris. It was the largest available space for a meeting of such supposed-

significance which, deserted but for the six of us, served the opposite purpose to that intended: it simply made the student executive committee look very stupid indeed.

Henry looked at each of his fellow committee members in turn, his expression so serious, never faltering, and one by one they slowly nodded in agreement. His eyes met mine and he seemed to shift nervously in his seat. His hands clasped together, he placed them on the table and leaned forward upon them.

“Dan,” he asked, “is there anything you’d like to add to these proceedings?”

I composed myself. Yearning for a recreation of the scene between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men I was itching to shout, “You can’t handle the truth!” But I didn’t. Instead I rose slowly to my feet. I thought of the furore of the last couple of days; of how Ken and I had played Noughts and Crosses at his desk while ignoring Henry as he stood red-faced and enraged and shouting about how irresponsible we’d been - and then all but rolling around on the floor in hysterics before he’d even slammed the door shut behind him. I thought about this committee in front of which I now stood and how not a month before they’d been caught bang-torights leaving the scene of an accident. They’d been on an official union trip, crashed the minibus and then fucked-off leaving its bumper embedded in another car.

Forgetting the fact that the minibus had ‘University of Sunderland Student’s Union’ emblazoned on its side in huge, bright green letters, they had then had made a pact not to mention it to anyone, only to receive a telephone call from the car’s owner asking if they’d like their bumper back. I thought about this and looking Henry straight in the eye I did what anyone else in my position would do: I burst out laughing. some weeks before...

It all began

As I’ve already mentioned, my Marvellous Malcolm column was causing rumblings not only within the Executive Committee but also, I’d heard, within the offices of the Vice Chancellor. In some corridors there was even talk of legal proceedings being brought against me for some defamation and libel issues (see Book).

These came to nothing but I was quite happy with the fact that certain people were being made particularly angry by the inane nonsense I was churning out in my column - mainly because I would be honest and not a little bit scathing about the incompetences of the Executive Committee. It was then that the writer of the women’s column, a student by the name of Erica Something-or-other wrote an article and printed a questionnaire to follow it. The piece was entitled, ‘Thoughts on being a woman’ and being the fair and rational man that I am, it bugged the living crap out of

me.

Erica’s article led with the line, ‘Being a woman is harder than being a man.’ It went on to say ‘women have to endure being seen as sex objects by men’ and continued in that vein throughout, attempting to argue that ‘we women really do have a tough time of it, don’t we?’ The questionnaire that followed asked questions such as, ‘Should it be up to the woman to provide contraception?’ and was all-in-all an extremely one-sided, feminist rant on how all women are treated badly by all men. This was, in my opinion, utter clap-trap (pardon the pun) and so I decided to respond with my column in the following issue.

Now, I don’t know about you but contrary to the image that I may have conveyed on occasion within this book (see Book) I am actually of the opinion that men and women are, in fact, and aside from the obvious, equal; equal in terms of morality and responsibility and all the other stuff that goes along with living a reasonably civilised life. Everyone has their own troubles and their burdens etc. but on the whole we’ve all got to do the best we can to get along. And so I wrote my response: a fairly balanced piece (see Book, again) that addressed each of Erica’s points and answered each of her questions in turn.

I then presented it to Ken to ‘edit’. A couple of days later the paper was distributed around the campus. And boy;

did that cause trouble or what!

Admittedly, perhaps I shouldn’t have entitled my column ‘Marvellous Malcolm on birds and stuff’ but I thought no more about it until Henry stormed into the office ranting about my irresponsibility as a writer and Ken as an editor, to which we immediately exploded in hysterical laughter at his ludicrous bias - i.e. he didn’t see any problem whatsoever with Erica’s questionnaire but my ‘fairly balanced’ argument was blatantly sexist and offensive to all women and, for some reason, him. It was shortly after that that Ken and I received notification of an Emergency General Meeting (EGM) being called to debate what was going to be done about it. The meeting was, I think, to be held a couple of days later.

In the short time between then and the meeting itself posters went up to notify anyone interested enough that this EGM was taking place. Wrongly assuming that people actually cared, the Executive Committee then filled the dining hall with what they thought was a sufficient number of chairs. Obviously, the only people to turn up were every member of the committee, Ken, myself and Jon together with the two students who clearly had nothing better to do with their time and the guy who fell asleep moments after arriving. The three of us had decided that we’d simply listen to what they had to say so that we could take the piss later on and sat in the middle

of this vast expanse of vacant chairs laughing at the pointlessness of it all. outcome.

Not one of us predicted the

As Henry seethed at our total disrespect for him and his Executive Committee, they put to the vote whether or not we should be forced to issue an apology in the next edition. We’d already decided against this for reasons of freedom of speech and the like. The alternative course of action, so the Executive Committee said, was to withdraw that issue of the paper from circulation. Considering that about six thousand copies had already been dumped throughout the university campus we felt this was something of an overreaction. I remember thinking once the vote had been passed and they had decided on the latter plan: morons.

As we sat in the pub laughing at the seriousness with which they’d taken the whole thing and enjoying the fact that this was indeed a first: no-one had ever, to Ken’s or anyone else’s knowledge, caused the paper to be withdrawn from circulation, we raised our glasses and drank a toast to the Executive Committee - much as in the same way that it’s often traditional to drink a toast to a vanquished army, only, in this respect, it was a toast to their idiocy. It was then, at that precise moment that I had a thought and made a spur-of-the-moment decision: I decided to become a member of next year’s Executive

Committee. I could have a lot of fun with that.

It was fortunate for everyone that the year previously I’d failed to submit the relevant form for my intention to run for the post of Treasurer of the Students’ Union ontime. What with my inability to manage other people’s money, I perhaps would not have been the most sensible choice to hold the purse strings of the union’s millionpound budget. It would’ve been fun, don’t get me wrong, but I’d have probably ended up getting fired at the very least, if not incarcerated having justified to myself why the student’s union needed to buy me a Porsche. And so, having failed to get the form in on-time I carried on failing to study anything at all and the next year, following the nonsense with the paper decided with Jon to run for posts within the Executive Committee.

I guess it was the fact that the post of Treasurer carried with it far too much responsibility for my liking that I decided against running for it. Jon decided to go for Entertainments Officer, a post I think I would’ve liked, while I wasn’t able to think of anything that didn’t present too much of a distraction. In my wisdom I opted for the highly inappropriate position of Union Chairperson. I had no idea what it meant that I’d have to do.

Having submitted my form of intent and before the deadline this time I then began my campaign for election.

Through my column I championed both Jon and I and slagged off our rivals.

I designed some rather imaginative posters and T-shirts and got my campaign team, consisting mostly of members of The Crazy Gang, to distribute them across the campus. About a week before the election I got bored and decided to build a nightclub instead.

“Dan, I need your help, mate. I think I’ve just killed someone” There is a common perception that Northerners are generally very nice, friendly people while we Southerners tend to be mostly stuck-up and rude. In my experience, having endured life both in the relative civilisation of the South, which is generally quite clean and tidy and pleasant, as well as in the graffitied industrialised hell of the North, which isn’t, this is a fairly accurate perception.

Of course, there are contradictions and crossovers - afterall, there are many folk ‘down south’ (i.e. south of the Cotswolds) whom one could describe as being particularly nice and pleasant and not in the slightest bit stuck-up or rude. And similarly, there are some folk ‘up north’ who are generally unpleasant. For the sake of discussion, let me describe ‘generally unpleasant’ generally-thus: Thick, tracksuit-wearing, ill-mannered plebs incapable of comprehending logic or reason; chavs who enjoy fighting and football, often simultaneously, and spending

the weekend drinking lager, stealing cars and getting sixteen year old girls pregnant. I think that pretty-much sums it up.

Today; now; this morning, I’m enjoying an inoffensive and peaceful respite in Bath’s Pump Rooms. I’m sipping tea and listening to Mozart performed by the Pump Room Trio of a violin, a cello and one of the most beautiful Steinways I’ve ever heard. It’s a far cry from a land strewn with litter, burnt-out cars and Cash Converters and one of the reasons why I’m thinking about hooligans, yobbos and the ping of fruit machines right now.

Since leaving Sod’s Party Palace I’ve often had cause to reminisce (see Book) and on occasion it has occurred to me that my views on the north-east of England are a little harsh; perhaps, even, somewhat over-the-top. It is, after all, an entire region of this country. Am I possibly making a massively offensive generalisation of the place? Well no, actually. I’ve been back there a couple of times and most recently a couple of years ago when I went to see Jon in South Shields.

Jon invited me to stay and keen to spend some time with my friend, I accepted the offer graciously. It was on the second night that a group of tracksuit-wearing scumbags tried - for no reason other than they were tracksuit-wearing scumbags - to smash his front door

down using next door’s For-Sale sign as a battering ram.

Riding the Metro into Newcastle (perhaps the only remotely respectable place in the entire region), each day my face would grimace at yard after yard of litter and wall after wall of graffiti. Gangs of tracksuits and trainers would loiter on the streets seeking out proper-looking people (i.e. anyone not wearing a baseball cap) to harass and intimidate with jeers and remarks and the odd shove and push. The sun would stay away for fear of having a bottle thrown at it. A cold, dreary mist of despair hammering home to all that the north-east of England is a place without hope, without aspirations and without dreams. I’m thinking of submitting this to the tourist board.

Jon lived in the posh part of South Shields but despite it being one of the smartest places in the entire North East and with a view out across the sea - the North Sea admittedly, but the sea nonetheless - it was only justbarely clean; still dreary and still awash with illiterate chavs. It reminded me of one night many, many years ago.

A student, soon to be leaving for St Andrews to verynearly drown in the ocean and possibly get shot by US Secret Service agents, I was at home asleep. There was a heavy and rapid knocking on the front door. It was about 3am. “Dan. I need your help, mate. I think I’ve

just killed someone” Mark had been walking home from his girlfriend’s house when a gang of six or so “little fuckers” had started following him. He’d done nothing but walk past them while they were loitering on a street corner. One had asked him for a light for a cigarette that he was clearly too young to have and Mark had said that he was sorry but he didn’t smoke. He’d quickened his step ‘just in case’ but it was pointless. They’d begun following him, hurled some abuse and then a bottle that just missed his head. One of them then pushed him from behind.

Mark didn’t want to fight because not only did he think it pointless, pathetic and the behaviour of ill-educated chavs, he was tired and wanted to get home. The fuckwits took umbrage with that and in less than five seconds two of them lay immobile on the floor. Being thick, they’d failed to consider the possibility, however remote, that Mark may have been schooled in a few aggressive moves of his own (as taught by Her Majesty’s Royal Naval Service). And so he’d fled to avoid further confrontation to the nearest place he knew: mine.

After he’d told me what had happened we called the police and met them at the site of the fracas. I was expecting, possibly hoping to see a couple of broken bodies on the floor; ‘Umbro’ trainers and baseball caps littering the pavement, maybe a football scarf or a thick,

single-carat gold-plated bracelet hanging from the branch of a tree. But I didn’t. There was a little blood but nothing else. Just that and the broken bottle. Relieved that he wasn’t about to be charged with manslaughter although a defence on the grounds that it was a bunch of little tossers who’d serve society far better were they to be used in laboratory experiments, would be pretty strong - we returned to our respective homes and to sleep.

Mark is from a town just outside of Newcastle. A bloke with a lightening wit and a couple of years in the Royal Navy (he was, I think, thrown out for spiking a mate’s drink with bleach - “it was just a fookin’ laff”), Mark’s not only banned for life from shopping in Burtons due to an incident involving a range of pink clothing and a salesman with a mullet, he’s a prison officer now. God help ‘em.

One tough bastard A few years ago Ken fell ill and recently he passed away. I would like to take this opportunity to write the following: Without Ken this book would not exist. I would not have had some of the stories to tell without him and neither would I have so many fond memories of sitting with him in his office in varying states of hysteria.

It has been an honour to have met and to have known

him and the strength and courage with which he faced his later years has done nothing but humble me. I am so pleased to have had one last time to drink tea with him.

I miss Ken and all the laughter and I miss the mane of almost-red hair and him looking like Giant Haystacks. He was, and he remains to this day, an inspiration.

Dear Reader, please raise a glass to Ken Davidson, former editor of the Student Times, nemesis of Henry and the Executive Committee. My friend and One Tough Bastard.

To you, Ken. Rest in peace.

Egg and pig bits, some lawyers, a Spitfire and a fax aka The Paradise Club

I once had a dream in which I was pursued by a Spitfire. There was no explanation as to why it was pursuing me - it being a dream and all - but because it was, so I was running away. Clumps of mud and grass filled the air as a thousand rounds of aggravatingly hot lead thumped into the ground and ripped it asunder.

Screaming in terror and waving my arms in the air I ran as hard and as fast as my pudgy legs would allow. What was probably a molehill then exploded in my face. In a moment of semi-conscious clarity I pondered just how odd and unreasonable this entire scenario was. Then thinking that it would help I dived into a hedge. As I scrabbled through the undergrowth like a frightened mole I had a third semi-conscious thought: I considered just how fortunate it was that I’d travelled back in time to the Second World War; for had the plane been some kind of stealth bomber I’d surely have been quite a bit fucked. I awoke shortly thereafter with the taste of many dandelions and dirt in my mouth.

As I recall this dream so I also recall the feeling of abject terror as this masterpiece of aviation technology pursued me across a meadow. It was that same feeling of abject terror that I also recalled on the day that I heard that a man named Phil wanted to have a word with me over a small matter of five hundred quid. In my mind’s eye Phil was the Spitfire, his team of psychotic henchmen

the bullets. Scotland was surely the hedge.

Some six weeks before and two weeks prior to the biannual Comic Relief, once more I was hung-over and sitting in a café by the name of Capers. It was the best place to go for a greasy fry-up and a mug of tea for a quid and there were four or five of us tucking into eggs and pig bits that morning. The previous evening we’d been out on the campaign trail for the election (of Jon and I to the executive committee of the student union).

I’ve no idea whether I disgraced myself that night. But I imagine that I probably did.

Over breakfast and through his own bleary one-eyed squint of post-alcohol excess, with a mug if tea in one hand and a copy of the Student Times laid out across the table in place of his polished-clean breakfast plate, a friend named Ben was thumbing its pages and trying to come to terms with his own fragility. Stopping at a particular page in the paper he began to read aloud a piece about the forthcoming Comic Relief event and the fact that a few students were planning activities to raise funds for it. Pondering this, together we chewed over the idea (along with a second round of toast) and decided that we’d quite like to raise a few quid, too. Someone suggested dressing-up as clowns and waving buckets about, someone else suggested a parachute jump. I said, ‘Let’s build a nightclub!’

In my mind (still full of booze-related bubbles and other nonsense) the idea was a simple one. It wasn’t - as I would soon realise - and with hindsight I’m altogether astonished that not a single one of my brunching companions attempted to have me sectioned right there and then. Since no one so much as spat out their tea either, so I was encouraged to expand on my suggestion as though it was a viable and perfectly feasible thing to attempt. After finishing the last of my ketchup-laden pig bits I took a sip of tea and set-about trying to explain it.

That explanation wasn’t half as difficult as I thought it would be, particularly given the fact that I hadn’t thought it through one bit.

The idea was to attempt something along the lines of the old television series featuring Anneka Rice, a series entitled Challenge Anneka... I think. I seem to recall the shows featuring Ms Rice either building or doing ‘something’ and I remembered - possibly a somewhat loose and rather inaccurate term - that one of these shows featured her building a playground. Another featured her publishing a book. What the book was I’ve no idea but I do remember that it was published by Butler and Tanner in Frome, the owner of which I’d mown lawns for back when I was about ten. One particular thing that struck me about the show was that although it gave the impression that the projects were achieved in just a

couple of days, the entire operations actually took a couple of weeks. This was rather relevant to my thought processes - another loose and somewhat inaccurate term - as I sipped tea and chomped on my toast and pig bits.

Spending many years of my younger life in and around the small Somerset town of Frome I was more aware of the existence of Butler and Tanner than someone living somewhere else may have been. Since a television show involving the company was being produced in the town, so the news spread like a small ineffective virus. In Frome, because nothing really interesting ever occurred, the production of such a show constituted news. In my mind therefore, I determined that because the show had managed to produce ‘something’ within two weeks, so we could build a nightclub. Through my booze-related bubbles I figured that with this unique nay dumbfuck idea we could whip up a great amount of support and thus not be particularly concerned that we lacked of any resources whatsoever (compared to those of the production company of the show). Confident that I’d sufficiently planned the idea in the space of about thirty seconds I presented my pitch to my brunching companions. “We’ll find an empty building and then prey on the goodwill of the local ‘everyone’ to encourage them to pitch in. We’ll beg, borrow and steal everything we need and then operate the club for a week

and give all the profits to Comic Relief” I declared. “It’ll be fun.” Oddly, my brunching companions had still not dismissed the idea as entirely absurd, although a couple did glance at me as if I was mad.

Back at home we telephoned newspapers and radio stations and were interviewed live on-air. We prepared a pitch for the student union and nearing the end of the first week a hundred-plus volunteers were chomping at the bit to get involved. We were offered a defunct Lazer Quest building to put the whole thing together in and I telephoned the press office of the Nissan car plant and collected two brand new vehicles in which to do some of the running around. In the meantime the executive committee of the student’s union met and decided not to help out and late on a Wednesday afternoon I arrived at the estate agent’s office to collect the keys to the building. Things seemed to be going rather well. About twenty minutes later and they rather abruptly ceased doing so.

We were about fifteen feet from the entrance of the defunct Lazer Quest building with the keys in-hand when my phone rang. Given my activities of the previous few days it was not a particularly novel occurrence and so I answered it, thinking that things were progressing according to the non-existence of my plan. The call was from the estate agent who had moments earlier received

an urgent fax from the lawyers of the owners of the building. Within it the lawyers had used a number of fairly strong and unambiguous words to communicate the owners’ change of mind about letting us use the building (on some spurious grounds of not having any insurance or something), and they continued on to suggest that should I actually enter the building rather than returning the keys immediately, please, they would then be delighted to sue the living crap out of me. It was the first, but not the last time that I would ever receive a threat of legal action from a very angry firm of lawyers.

As I tend to do in these situations, I became quite concerned about that.

It was then the day before the elections and having not done any campaigning whatsoever, somehow I was neck-and-neck in the polls with someone named Paul.

Right up until that telephone call I’d been thoroughly enjoying myself trying to build a nightclub out of nothing but the goodwill of others. Many people were actually taking me seriously for once and as I blundered and barged from one issue to the next, so things appeared to fall into place without too much aggravation. We had pledges of support from students and a half-dozen of the union’s clubs and societies. We also had responses from the interviews with the local radio stations with offers of assistance and support from local businesses to provide

electricians, joiners and other useful things. It was all beginning to feel like something of a snowball rolling down a hill; picking up mass and velocity as it bumbled, bounced and barged its way forth. Suddenly, with the communication from the lawyers the snowball then smashed into a wall and my dignity disintegrated across the floor.

With no alternative but to return the keys to the estate agent, once again we found ourselves in Capers trying to figure out what to do. We needed a new venue in which to focus all the ‘stuff’ and we needed to find it very quickly indeed. By my calculations we required at least five days of actually being in a venue for each individual or organisation to do their bit, whether that be nailing some wood together to build the bar or trailing a few wires around to make some lights flash. That gave us about forty-eight hours to find such a place. Having exhausted all other sensible possibilities other than forget the whole thing entirely, on impulse I did exactly what I’m sure anyone with a similar problem would have done: I hopped in one of the Nissans and drove to London to gate-crash Channel Four’s Big Breakfast. ... ?

Ben was eighteen but looked about twelve. I can’t remember which course he was studying but he too was standing in the elections for a post on the executive

committee.

Like me, he didn’t take it particularly

seriously either, and was instead keen and excited about this ludicrous idea to build a club. Taking this new direction more seriously than he perhaps should’ve done, he climbed into the second of our Nissan run-arounds and we convoyed through the night south to London.

It was a fairly interesting journey during which Ben ‘lost’ the front wheel of his Nissan. He was then arrested because the police thought he’d stolen the car.

Apparently, their logic was that he looked too young to drive and despite his protestations and showing of his licence didn’t believe he was entitled to drive the car anyway. Back then there was no automatic tie-in with the DVLA and insurance databases etc. and so checks had to be carried out at the nearest police station. That done, they let him go and we carried on south, arriving in London at about half-five the following morning.

Given the absurdity of the thought processes (or lack thereof) that had so far gone into what we were trying to accomplish, it was no surprise that we weren’t allowed on the show. We did however, enjoy a particularly pleasant breakfast in the green room of Lock Keeper’s Cottage and I briefly met Dawn French while Ben tried without success to pull the daughter of the week. With nowhere left to turn for help after a brief trip to the offices of Comic Relief had proved less than fruitful, we began the drive back to

Sunderland and stopped off at one of the service stations on the M1. Continuing the absurdity of the day I met an extremely distant family relation whom I hadn’t seen since a funeral some five years before, and we were moments from rejoining the motorway when we noticed four girls standing on the slip-road dressed in pyjamas.

They were each carrying a bucket and as we approached them one thrust her hitch-hiker’s thumb into our path. I figured it would have been rude not to stop. And so I did.

The girls were undertaking a sponsored jailbreak to raise money for Comic Relief. It appeared that they had actually attempted something feasible and so rather than not accomplish anything whatsoever, both Ben and I decided to give the girls a lift to Sunderland. Stopping barely long enough for a cup of tea we then decided to make the most of Nissan’s generosity and aid the girls in their challenge by driving them to Edinburgh. We then returned them back to their university in Leicester that same day, attended the post-jailbreak party and fell asleep.

I lost the election but it was a close-run thing. As it turned out I was seventy-four votes short of that ‘someone-named-Paul’ who had a thousand and three hundred and something to my thousand and two hundred and something else. I wasn’t disappointed, though.

Instead I was far more concerned about what Nissan

were going to say about the fact that none of the nightclub things had happened, we’d lost a wheel to one of their cars and put almost two thousand miles on them both in just under a week. happy about any of that.

They really weren’t at-all

Phil was a local gangster and owner of a small number of nightclubs in the city. His reputation preceded him but it didn’t stop me from getting very excited when he telephoned the office of the Student Times about a week or so after the botched Comic Relief thing and asked if there was anyone we knew who wanted to promote his bar. It was a couple of weeks late but it didn’t matter: we had our venue and it didn’t even need to be built.

Ben was as keen as I was to take on the project and so we met with Phil and a couple of his henchmen that very same day. They all seemed perfectly palatable then.

Ben and I agreed to promote one of his clubs and take a percentage of the door fees to donate at first to Comic Relief and then, with it out of the way, earn ourselves a few quid, too.

Ben and I split the responsibilities. My job was to do all of the behind-the-scenes organising which included arranging a band and decorating the place according to our new ‘Seventies’ theme. Ben’s job was to run around with posters and flyers and the like and for the next

couple of weeks we busied ourselves on all manner of activities relating in no way whatsoever to studying. I’d found a barely-used room in the new ‘business’ campus of the university. It had a coffee machine and so I adopted it as my office. With an overhead projector, telephone sockets and stationery cupboard it was very useful indeed.

I had a friend who had a Sunday night show on Wear FM, one of the local radio stations. I decided to visit him and plug our new venture on-air. Just why he allowed me to all-but hijack his show I’ve no idea but he did and having written relentlessly about the upcoming event in my column too, we were getting very excited indeed about our opening night.

Immediately after the publication of my latest column promoting the event I received another letter from Henry, the president of the students’ union. Within it he embarked on a rather extensive rant regarding the fact that I’d appeared to have broken about a half-dozen articles of the National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct. Ken published it together with my ‘open’ response in which I pointed out that since I wasn’t a member of the National Union of Journalists I didn’t actually care. He wasn’t in the slightest bit happy with me for that but I was far too focused on our opening night to concern myself in any way with his pettiness.

The band that I’d hired was called Love Train. It was a Seventies tribute band that I’d met while gatecrashing the NUS conference some weeks before and I’d negotiated a price of a few hundred quid to get them to travel from London for our opening night. Phil appeared confident that he’d cover the cost with the hundreds of students that we all anticipated would be turning up to the show and as the band warmed up, so Phil and I chatted about our plans for the next few weeks while we waited for Ben and the punters to arrive. They didn’t.

And neither did Ben. Today I am fully aware of the fact that I failed to take proper control of the night and the promotions. I failed to keep myself aware and up-dated of the distribution of the flyers and the posters and I am aware that I should have played a much greater role than I did. Eventually getting hold of Ben an hour or so after the supposed start of our opening night I learned that instead of running around frantically drumming up support and possible attendance figures he was actually half-pissed in a bar across town and had been somewhat overconfident in his assessment of just how effective his promotion efforts had been.

These are the reasons why, when I heard that Phil had wanted to have words with me about the money that he’d had to spend in advance of the evening, I had that feeling of abject terror. A number of people told me that he was

very displeased with me indeed, and he told me so himself when I telephoned him a day or so later to apologise. It didn’t make any difference and so I figured that since I really had been a particularly crap student and really didn’t want to be snapped in two by any of his psychotic henchmen, I decided to dive into the hedge. I hired a car and drove to St Andrews to visit my sister for the weekend. I stayed for six months, took a couple of jobs and tried to write a book. I also fell in love, became a gambler and almost died... twice. I quite enjoyed St Andrews.

for more excerpts from the book plus videos & games including one about an ostrich and another about a yeti thwacking a penguin with a bat - please visit....

www.nostrangertothep45.com