Slice of toast, yo! Is that too much to ask?

I am typing this at ten minutes to five in the morning, having been up all night in order to get my sleep pattern back in order, on account of having slept through, well, Sunday. This happens a lot, and has done for many years; no matter how many plans I make and how many alarms I set, my subconscious has apparently decided that nine times out of ten, I am going to sleep through the seventh day.

What are you gonna do, eh?

Anyway, to business!

I've mentioned a couple of times I think, though I can't swear to it, because my memory is shot; a gentleman by the name of Bob. My cousin Ian would stay with old Bob regularly, on account of he was an old friend of the family, and when he did he would hang out with us. Much of that hanging out took place at Bob's house.

Now, Bob was a wee bit... crotchety. He was a heavy smoker, liked a drink, and spent most of his time in a pub, or a betting shop, or in his favourite chair watching the racing to see how much money he'd lost this week. He was, essentially, the living embodiment of the Northern Grandad cliche. All he needed was an allotment.

His many trips to the betting shop and the pub meant that Ian, and by extension myself and my siblings, had free, unsupervised run of his house on more than one occasion; something we never failed to take advantage of. Now don't get me wrong; we didn't run amok and set fire to his curtains and smash holes in his walls to spy on the ladies who worked in the shop behind. No no, we would never do that. What we did, as many an unsupervised child is wont to do, is make a hell of a mess and eat his cupboards bare. Until one day, he said we couldn't.

Now, such an edict would not be a big deal you might think. You might think that, but you'd be wrong. You see, when I arrived at the house Bob was nowhere to be seen, having already made his pilgrimage to whichever den of iniquity he would be patronising that day, and it was just me and Ian. So naturally, I made for the food cupboard. Until Ian stopped me. What The Deuce! He was under strict instructions not to allow me to eat anything. I took this as a personal insult and said that if I wasn't allowed any food then I was going home. Where eating between meals was a shooting offense (and meals themselves weren't always forthcoming), so yeah, I'm not sure what I was thinking there.

Of course, as all tiffs do when you're a wee nipper, this one burned out and was forgotten within a few hours. By everyone except Bob. Bob had come home and found Ian there alone. Naturally curious as to why Ian wasn't hanging out with me, he got the story from Ian who, not having developed my finely honed, and slightly ridiculous, insistence on lying through my teeth to every adult query regardless of whether I actually stood to gain anything by doing so, told him the truth.

Cut to me arriving at Bobs later that day intending to pick right back up where I'd left off with Ian that morning. I didn't even get to the door, because Ian came rushing out as soon as I got through the gate and tried to shuffle me straight back out again. It was a valiant effort, but he wasn't quick enough and lo, who should arrive on the scene, looming in the doorway like some kind of crotchety old man Colossus but Bob himself. Dude was ready to cut a bitch; Ian slinked off back into the house; I was completely oblivious and had no idea what was coming/

Long story short (shut up) I got the earful of a lifetime about respect, about the value of money, about abusing the privilege of being a guest in someone's home... all sorts of things that, really, my own parents would have taught me if they weren't utterly incompetent in the field of child rearing.

Of course, I didn't see it like that at the time; I just thought he'd gone off the deep end and sort of sullenly submitted to the dressing down before spending the rest of the day making senility jokes.

Because I was a knobhead.

Obviously.

The Jigsaw Lady: Part Deux

Who remembers the Jigsaw Lady?

It occurred to me the other day; as I was trawling through my terrible terrible memory for any bits and pieces I should mention from my Primary School years, before I finally up sticks and move on to the Secondary phase of what I laughingly call my education; that I had never told about the slightly weird (at the time) and possibly tragic (in hindsight) little postscript to my tale of the kindly old lady who did jigsaws and played Scrabble.

It was a good long while after our initial meeting with the lady in question; we had moved on with our adolescent lives and had, if I'm honest, completely forgotten that she existed. Until the day I turned up to 'call on' Ian and found the dustbins stuffed full of jigsaw boxes, and the bin alcove overflowing with them too. There were hundreds of the things.

Of course, being the intrepid Sherlockian geniuses that we were, we immediately deduced/jumped to the conclusion that they must have come from the old lady over the road who loves jigsaws. Stands to reason, am I right?

Ian's weekend guardian, the delightfully crotchety Bob*, insisted that we go and find out what was going on and why was his yard suddenly full of someone else's rubbish and also what was she doing next Friday night and did she fancy going out for an Indian? So off we trotted.

Her back gate was wide open. Her back door was wide open. Her curtains were all shut. Noises were emanating from her house; scary, bangandclash noises; and suddenly we were much endowed in the shaky scaredy-catness. I nudged Ian to go in, he backed off and nudged me forward, the curtains upstairs twitched and we both ran like buggery.

I don't remember what we told Bob; maybe we made something up, maybe we told him the truth, maybe he lost interest and never actually asked us again; but the fact is we never did get to the bottom of what had happened. We convinced ourselves that we knew; the story we told ourselves, because we were cruel little shits at heart, was that the old woman had gone senile and/or completely barn owls.**

Looking back of course, it's far more likely that she had died, and that the noises and the dumping of her beloved jigsaw stuff in neighbours yards was just her family/landlord clearing out her house (and being a bit cheeky about it); if we had looked in a few other yards, I'm sure we'd have found piles of stuff there too.

So that one very pleasant day that we had spent with her was to be our only. I wonder if she ever watched out of her window, to see if we were coming to say hello, and wondered why we never did. I hope it never hurt her feelings too badly.

* Bob is dead now. This has just occurred to me, as I was writing this post. He was in his 80's at the time, and not in the rudest of health, so yeah, he's dead now, and probably has been for some time. I don't know why I felt the need to add that here but... yeah.

** Barn Owls is TM Brendan Kingston of the Unspoiled podcast. If you don't listen to that, you most definitely should. Read A Song of Ice and Fire first though, fair warning.

The Jigsaw Lady

As utterly fantastic and chock full of joy as most of my childhood was, (What?), there is one day that sticks in the memory as being a particularly happy one, above and beyond the others. I speak of my meeting, one fine summer's day, with Jigsaw Lady. Yes, that was her name. It was!

It was near the beginning of the summer hols. Ian was staying at Bob's and as was traditional I had gone up at about 9:30 to bang him out of bed; yes, back then I would actually get out of bed before noon when I didn't have to; it was a different world, to be sure. Anyway, I roused him from his pit, and we departed, eager to discover whatever wonders and delights the world had in store for us; we were young, and carefree and the world was our oyster; anything was possible.

20 Minutes Later. We are bored. All those who say that kids today are spoiled by games consoles and smartphones and whatnot; and that back in the day we had to make our own entertainment and were the happier for it; are, not to put too fine a point on it, talking bobbins. I'd have killed for a playstation that morning, I can tell you; if I'd known what one was, or they had actually been invented. Whatever.

We could have gone to mine, but I was in the bad books because of something or other and I wanted to keep my first shoe to the head for after lunch (I'm all about the delayed gratification), and we could have gone back to Bob's but, as was his way. he was spending the day in the betting shop. Our answer? Well, we decided that the only thing for it was to trudge around the streets randomly until we got tired and then lounge against a garden wall looking all cool, like. It was the only logical thing to do, really.

We ended up, by a very roundabout route, in the next street over from Bob's. Remember that; the next street over; it may be important later. There we were, doing our best ice cool loitering and feeling very proud of ourselves, when from out of nowhere comes "What are you boys doing there? What's going on? Who are you?" Panic Stations!

You see, so conditioned were we to always being moved on by adults; almost as if they had something against scruffy urchins trespassing on their property and hurling sarcastic abuse at them; our instinctual reaction was always to run. Which is precisely what we would have done here, if not for one small, but pivotal, point; my foot was caught in the railings of the gate and I fell over. Smooth.

Luckily for us, the words which we in our pre-conditioned states had assumed to be harsh had actually been intended as a friendly overture by the speaker, who turned out to be a lady of indeterminate, but most definitely advanced, years. She cooed over me a little as I picked myself up, unhurt but mortified, from the floor, and then said the one thing guaranteed to make us friends for life; "do you boys want some pop and biscuits?"

Now, I know what you're thinking here, and you're right. But I mean, come on, POP! And BISCUITS! I never said we were geniuses. I'd like to tell you that we ate the biscuits and drank the pop on the doorstep. I'd like to tell you that, but I can't.

Once inside the house, the old crone drugged us with spiked lemonade, stripped us of our clothes and hogtied us under the stairs while the oven pre-heated. Only by the judicial use of Ian's long fingernails (I used to bite mine, NO LONGER!) and a loose nail were we able to escape our bonds and flee, naked and sobbing into the street. No, hang on, we played Scrabble, yeah, that's right.

Now, it may surprise you to learn this, but my Mother and Maurice the dickhead pseudo-stepdad were not amongst the worlds great thinkers; we owned a scrabble bard, and occasionally actually played it, too; but we didn't own a dictionary and to argue with their spellin was tantamount to shitting on the couch, so games could be a frustrating experience. This woman had a dictionary, played by the rules and actually seemed to be enjoying herself, rather than wishing for it to be over so she could watch some soaps. All in all, it was a new experience.

After the scrabble marathon; several games, of which I won but one; we retired, as is customary (?) to the kitchen, where I was greeted by a sight to blow my tiny mind. A jigsaw; but not just any jigsaw; a bloody huuuuge jigsaw, that took up the entirety of her kitchen table. (It was probably just a 1000piece one, to be honest, but it seemed huge at the time and 20piece Thomas The Tank Engine ones were about our limit at home).

As it turns out, jigsaws were this woman's life. She had, no lie, dozens of them piled up under the table, and those were just the ones she hadn't done yet; she said she had hundreds upstairs. She toddled off and came back with an armful of boxes that she said we could take with us when we left and then we sat around eating and drinking her kitchen clean while we all pitched in and worked on the puzzle. It sounds daft, but I think I had more fun in that one afternoon than any other day that holiday.

When the clock started to tick around to tea time (going home for lunch wasn't the 'done' thing, although on this day we were well fed anyway) we made our excuses and left, laden down with jigsaw puzzles and promising to go back to see her again soon. Promises that we fully intended to keep. But didn't.

It's fairly obvious now that she was lonely. Maybe her kids/grandkids never visited, or maybe she just didn't have any; whatever the reason, she latched onto us that day and didn't want to let go. So I'm kind of feeling like a shit that we never went back. Mainly because, the reason we never went back, was all down to me. Ian wanted to go back the next day, but I talked him out of it. He wanted to go the day after that, but I made excuses. And after the 3rd day, he stopped bringing it up.

You see, me being me, the 'little voices' kicked in. They convinced me that, contrary to everything she'd said, and everything she'd done, she had just been being polite, and any further visits from us would be unwelcome. It's the same thing that stopped me from sitting at the same table as my best friend at school, unless we arrived together; if he was already seated, and talking to someone, I was convinced I'd be intruding and would sit elsewhere. Such were the insecurities of my youth (and to a fair degree, my adulthood), and I'm genuinely sorry that they stopped me from bringing a little companionship into a lonely old woman's life.

The only other (semi)encounter we had with Jigsaw Lady was a couple of years later, and is the part of this tale that relied on her house being in the next street to Bob's (remember I said that might be important, ooh yes, you know I'm a proper writerer-person, with subtle foreshadowing skills like that). The old saying though, about the best state to leave your audience and containing the words 'more' and 'wanting', means I must withhold that particular tale for another day. Don't blame me; blame whoever came up with that saying (Google tells me it was Steve Lombardi, but I'm not convinced).

Join me next time. I have no idea why you would, but, you know...

Dangerous Games

One of the bigger problems you can have, as the oldest of a gang of kids, and therefore their de facto leader, is the pressure on you to always be the best at stuff. How embarrassing would it be, for example, to announce that you were all going to have a game of something, and then get your arse handed to you by a five year old? Exactly.

I had a massive problem then, in that when it came to sports of any shape, size or description, I was essentially, and I use the technical term here (I looked it up), absolutely f'ing useless. Ever the resourceful chap though, I soon came up with ways that I could capitalise on my inherent strengths and hide my weaknesses. Namely, by inventing games so that I could tailor the rules to suit myself.

I have a very high pain threshold. I say this not to brag, or to out myself as a masochist, but merely to state a fact. (I could get into why I had an abnormally high pain threshold for a little child but if you've read this blog before, or intend to again, it'll be pretty self-explanatory.)

This high pain threshold meant that if I invented games that gave the advantage to people who didn't fear pain, or could persevere through pain, I would be able to kick some toddler butt, no problem. So that's exactly what I did. It would come back to bite me.

Now, when I say that I invented these games, what I actually mean is that of course I didn't invent these games. At the time though, in the arrogance of youth, I thought I did. In truth, they were pretty basic variations of old staples.

BANKS

Like the one where you had to race to the bottom of a bank and then back to the top. Except in our version we found the steepest slopes we could (some were practically vertical) so getting down was a virtual freefall and getting back up was like climbing Everest. Add in the fact that interfering with other participants was positively encouraged, in as violent a way as you liked, and it's a miracle no-one died.

TORTURE

Or the one were you split into two teams and one team had a codeword, with each member being responsible for one letter. The other team had to capture you to get your letter. We'd done this at school, in PE, but there it was a basic 'tag and you're out' deal. In our version they had to physically restrain you and you could refuse to talk, which meant they had to torture your letter out of you. I actually nearly died once, playing this game late at night, on unfamiliar terrain. I was staying at my cousin Ian's house for a couple of nights and we introduced his friends to this game. I was being pursued down a back alley in the pitch black, completely unaware that it was used by residents to hang clotheslines. One was hanging low, I ran into it at neck height and...well, you can guess. Good times.

HUNTERS

Ah, the Daddy. In which we would all congregate in the big clearing at the centre of the woods and split into two teams, with one team having a headstart to scatter into the woods and the other team hunting them down to either capture or 'kill' them. What made this game such great fun was that we played it with guns. Actual guns, that actually shot you, with actual bullets.

Well, I say guns... What we used were air rifles and pistols that fired little lead pellets. They rarely broke the skin (only once on me, and that wasn't even while playing Hunters; it was a doped up neighbour firing blind across the back gardens) but they stung like mad if they caught you just right. Until you got used to them of course; once you'd been shot a few times you stopped feeling it so much and could often mask you're reaction and claim not to have been shot. Cheating, yes, but victory was everything, don'tcha know.

Most people wanted to be Hunters, because having the guns made them feel cool but I wanted to win and knew my strengths, so Hunted it was. I threw myself out of trees, down banks, over fences and through hedges...I came over all Rambo, with not a thought for how my body was going to recover. It's partly because of this that I'm so decrepit before my time now. Never mind though, I had a meaningless victory to last for an hour, that was the important thing.

My Mother knew about this game, as did most of our parents, and none of them tried to stop us for the longest time. Which, to put it mildly, was f*cking madness, now that I think back. Not the maddest thing about the whole affair though; no, that would be the fact that Maurice, responsible adult and de-facto Step Father, actually joined in! He regularly came down into the woods and took great pleasure (far more than the rest of us) in getting a hit on one of the kids. He even once tied me to a tree and fired over my head into the trunk; I'll freely admit, my bravado slipped that day.

We were finally forced to stop playing Hunters as a result of something Maurice did, actually. You see, as crazy as we were, in hindsight, to be doing what we were doing, we were actually careful. We shot at arms and legs (fleshy bits) and always aimed carefully. We were daft kids, but we were friends, and there was no way we were gonna risk hurting each other seriously. Maurice, it seems, had no such compunctions. During one particular game, I was being chased by him and after fording the stream and scrabbling up the far bank I hid behind a large bush. He knew I was there, but couldn't see me. Do you know what he did?

He fired blind, into the bush. Hitting me in the right temple. I'm not sure, but it's entirely possible that Maurice was an idiot.

I don't mind telling you, I screamed. I screamed louder than I'd ever screamed before or ever have again. Not even a drunken beating from my Mother at her most frenzied ever felt that bad. My vision was swimming, bolts of lightning were shooting through my head and I genuinely thought I was going to die.

We were never allowed to play Hunters again.

Shit Be About To Get Real, Yo!

Well, I promised you that with the arrival of my cousin Ian, 'shit be about to get real'. If we leave aside the fact that the phrase 'shit be about to get real' is not something I can get away with saying, ever, I was telling you the Gods honest. A lot of people came and went from our little group but none made quite the impact that Ian did.

Ians Mam was Sharon, another of my Mams many siblings. Together with her husband John she had three children; Ian, Neil and Wayne. Only Ian would really have that much of an effect on us because we rarely saw the others. You see, a few years before we moved to the village of Willington, Sharon and her family had lived there. They had moved out of the village a while previously but at weekends and on school holidays Ian, their eldest, would be brought down to stay at the home of their old neighbour, just a few streets away from us - literally a couple of minutes on foot or 30 seconds on your bike.

Bob was an elderly bloke that had formed a bit of an attachment to the family, having no close relatives of his own, and had been a regular babysitter for Ian and his brothers. After they moved away they kept bringing Ian back to stay with Bob so he wouldn't be too lonely. Looking back with todays more cynical eyes, some might think the situation a trifle dodgy looking. An old bloke, lives alone, has a young boy that's not related to him over to stay in his one bedroom home; oo-er Missus and all that. But phooey to the lot of you.

So anyway, Ian would stay at Bobs whenever we weren't at school and so was perfectly placed to join our little gang. I often wonder what he used to do with his time at Bobs before we moved in; certainly he gave no indication that he already knew any of our group and he didn't bring any other friends with him; close as they may have been I don't think it could have been much fun if it was just the two of them. Oh well.

Ian was almost the same age as me; I think there was about 5 or 6 months in it; and so we took on a kind of joint leadership role. I'll admit, he was much cooler than I was so we got a lot more active after he showed up than when I was calling the shots alone. What can I say; I'm a born loner, I wasn't cut out to be a leader. The others were tactful enough not to say anything - either that or they hadn't noticed anything and it was my paranoia convincing me that they liked him more - but I was always a little bit conscious at the start of every day of this lingering sense of being a hanger on to his gang. The feeling would fade of course, as each day wore on, but it always took me a little while in the mornings to properly loosen up and stop trying so hard. However, cousins or no, same age or no, I don't think I'd have been the one who, if asked, Ian would have described as his best friend in the group. That honour went to Wayne. The two of them became pretty much inseparable after a while. Of course, it didn't happen overnight. No, they had to scare the crap out of us all first.

I'm not the most empathetic person in the world (I remember the first time I heard a description of sociopathy and thought 'hmmm, that sounds familiar'; scary thought) so it took me a while to cotton on but there was apparently a lot of tension between Ian and Wayne from day one. Of course, it pretty soon escalated to the point where I couldn't possibly miss it; those two seemed to loathe each other with an absolute passion. I never learned the root of their antipathy but I was certainly present the day they got it out of their systems; the stains never did come out of my underkeks.

One Saturday morning we were all hanging around at the Speccy.

Spectrum Leisure Complex 'The Speccy'We were around the back of the main building, at the top of the huge grass slope that dropped down to the bottom of the ski slope.There was much laughing and joking and threatening to push the littler ones down the bank, when suddenly, from out of nowhere, BANG, Wayne had punched Ian in the face. Ian swiftly retaliated, a good hard kick to the back of Waynes leg to bring him down and then a punch to the side of the head. This wasn't wrestling around, this wasn't play-fighting; this was a proper full on fight. I was terrified; I'd never seen a proper fight before and these two looked like they were going to kill each other; at one point Wayne was smashing Ians head into the side of the building, lips were bleeding, clothes were torn; it was like something out of a Philoe Bedoe movie. Then it got really serious.

From out of nowhere, Ian pulled a pair of scissors. I genuinely thought he was going to kill Wayne. Luckily, the life or death-ness of the scene didn't last long. They wrestled for a bit, Ian dropped the scissors and they fell down the slope, punching and clawing at each other the whole way down. Then they stopped. Just like that, it was over. They both trudged back up the slope, Wayne left one way and Ian left the other and the rest of us were stood looking dumbfounded, before, as kids do, we got distracted by something else (there was a bowling match happening on the green and we ended up watching that).

We forgot about it fairly quickly, I have to say, but the that's what kids do isn't it? Looking back though, how close did I come to seeing one of my friends die? If Wayne hadn't wrestled the scissors away, would Ian have used them, and why the Hell was he carrying scissors around with him in the first place? Seems obvious that he came out spoiling for a fight, doesn't it? It's scary to think about.

As I say though, Ian and Wayne seemed to have gotten it out of their systems a bit with that fight. We were all one big group together but those two seemed to have a bond that none of the rest of us could quite get in on. I haven't seen either of them for years but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they were still best mates today. So, you know, all's well that...

Next : My first ever run in with the police. I was innocent. Well, kind of.