Ma & Pa & Me

I was looking at an image of myself last night taken about 24 years ago, a couple of weeks before I was due to leave the army.  That was an exciting time, a new feeling of complete freedom, new civilian friends, new job (hopefully!), new home back in my beloved Lancashire, new experiences, and it was all quite scary.

Without knowing it I had been mollycoddled by the armed forces, they cooked me all my meals, paid my rent and kept me healthy, that was now all my responsibility and things were going to go wrong for sure. 

During my last year of Army service I had met a group of ‘Groovy’ people who all had a fondness of what we used to call ‘Indie’ music.  It felt very hippyish to me and I liked it.  Whenever I was on leave I would meet up with them as often as I could, it felt pretty cool to be among them.  There was Blacky, a coy Morrissey/Goth kind of character with a long head, Claire Baldhead (which was cruel really, should have been Claire Thinning!), some mad guy who fancied Claire, Chris and his Goth wife, Rob, Simon, Gaz Gal, Kevin, some fat bird who Kevin fancied, my best mate Rick who was also in the Army and various other characters who came and went.  They dressed alternatively, which seemed fascinating to me coming from a uniformed environment, knew about bands that weren’t being played on the radio (with the exception of John Peel!); they smoked drugs and thought controversially.  This is where I met my first vegan!

I was due to leave the Army and Kevin and the fat bird decided to move in together and asked if I wanted to share the house and split the rent 3 ways.  This sounded very exciting and it was quite a nice house too.  I moved into the living room on the ground floor and this became my room.  I put up all my coolest posters, The Smiths, New Fast Automatic Daffodils, Neds Atomic Dustbin, The Wedding Present and The Cure.  Kev and the fat bird called each other ‘Ma’ & ‘Pa’, I started playing in a band and practised in our garage, everything was going harmoniously well.

I lived off toast for the first month and soon developed a bad case of piles.  If it hadn’t have been for my hippy learned friends I may have developed scurvy in another month.  And I’m not calling Ma & Pa friends here either, by this point in time they were doing my fucking head in.  She was the first vegan I had met, and was a special type of vegan, a Nazi vegan with a hint of shyness (cowardice!).  Once I had learnt to supplement my diet with foods that weren’t bread and spread I began eating proper food, including vegetables, fruit and meat.  This didn’t go down well.  She used to ask me deep philosophical questions about ‘choosing to be a carnivore’ like, “Have you not listened to the Smiths album “Meat is Murder”? I’ve got the poster in my room”, and then to provide a solution to my meat eating ways she offered to put the poster in the communal dining room.  She wasn’t confident talking about the finer points of being a carnivore versus being a vegan with me, so she used to talk to Pa, and then Pa would talk to me.

One night when just he and I were in the house together Pa was getting very flowery.  We were listening to the record player (Jesus!), probably “Meat is Murder”, and he was talking about Morrissey and telling me about all the things he would say to him if he met him.

“Wouldn’t it be brilliant?”, he said, “I’d tell him how beautiful he is and put my arms round him and hug him.  He’s just like me you know, he just needs a friend and someone to listen to him”.

“Sounds a bit gay Kev!  Have you shagged Debra yet?” (I think that was her name!), I said.

“I love your bluntness, you just come right out with it don’t you”, and then he touched my arm.  “No, not yet.  She’s gorgeous isn’t she?”

I didn’t answer that but secretly hoped my silence would answer the question for me.  My silence was actually saying, “No, I don’t think she’s gorgeous.  She’s proper ugly like a witch, like a witch on Halloween that’s been burnt and mangled a bit.  There is no way she’s a vegan, it’s impossible to be that fat as a vegan, even if she ate the Amazon rainforest she wouldn’t be that fat.  Her accent is fucking awful (She was from the midlands!), she never gives a genuine smile and her personality is fucked!”.  I didn’t want to burst his bubble.

“You know something?”, he said.  “If I was gay I think I’d go for someone like you”.

There was a pause.  There needed to be a pause.  I like to think of myself as a free thinker and spirit but I’m not as free as I think I am.  I allow my mind and spirit to wander as free as it likes but within the confines of an area surrounded by a huge perimeter fence c/w machine gun posts, barbed wire and dogs.  And he really wasn’t my type anyway!

“Fancy a sausage butty?”, I replied.  ‘O God, I hope his doesn’t think this is a euphemism’, I thought.

“No, I’m vegan too now”, he claimed.  “Do you not fancy it?”

‘O, fuckin ell’, I thought, ‘he’s not still talking about bumming is he?’

“Veganism?  Fuck no!  Look Kev, you’ve been a fucking vegan for 2 days and it’s only because you want to shag Deb.  Eating meat has been part of our evolution, this is partly why we’re here today, I like eating meat and I don’t give the slightest fuck if you eat meat or not.  If you wanna shag her just tell her, don’t be shy about it.  Listen to Morrissey, he said “Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you want to”.  Now do you want a sausage butty or not?

“Yeah, go on”, he said, “but don’t tell Ma”.

I smiled.  “And whilst we’re talking about it, you know at the end of that song it says, “And if it’s not love then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together”; it is “the bomb” not “the bum”!”.

Using Morrissey to deflect gay advances, brilliant!

I left the Army with about £2,000 in my pocket, I felt like one of the richest men alive for about a week.  But it was becoming very apparent that I needed a job soon.  I had been going for loads of interviews and actually got offered a job packing curtains.  The hours were 7a.m til 5p.m. with half an hour for lunch, but on the first day you only had to arrive at 8a.m.  I awoke on the first morning at 8.30.a.m.  In a complete panic I rushed to get dressed and ran to the bus stop feeling most ashamed.  Whilst waiting for the bus I thought, “What the fuck am I doing here?  Late for a fucking curtain packing job!”.  And I don’t mean to disrespect any curtain packers here, it’s just that I wasn’t designed to do that job.  So I went home and straight to bed.

One day I returned home to find the door locked with a message on it.  The message read, “Dear Mick, we don’t want to live with you any more, our ways are different from yours.  We have left the living room window open so you can get your things”.  I was furious!  I went straight into the garage, grabbed a bag containing approximately 300 6” nails and spent the next hour or so nailing my door to the frame from inside my room using every nail.  Next I grabbed some epoxy resin and used it to fill the external locks of every door I could see.  I also glued the letterbox and put a bead of glue between the door and the frame.

Whilst I hammered Kev shouted from the other side of the door, “Now come on, you’re not impressing anyone with this kind of behaviour.  I’ll come outside!”.

“I’ll tell you now Kev, I’m going to save one of these nails.  You come outside and I promise you that I’ll hammer this nail through your cock to this door”.  He didn’t come outside and I have never seen Ma or Pa since this day.

That night I became homeless.  I say night, it was only for a few hours, because as I lay on a bench feeling sorry for myself my good friend Jade walked by.  I spent the night at his house and then the very next day I got offered a respectable job.

Funny how life is init?

"Young Me, nearly a civilian"