Bi-Ography-ish Part 1

It has been said, on more than the odd occasion that we married too young and in truth they were probably right, twenty, twenty one is young, especially when I talk to twenty one year old people now. When I say talk I don’t literally mean talk, you cant have a conversation with people who are constantly Ee’d, you talk, they just mumble, agree and tell you your beautiful, which believe me, I know that someone telling me I’m beautiful stretches any sense of reality there is. Looking back I honestly didn’t think we were that young and immature, though I wouldn’t discount it, it’s a scary thought and thank God I never touched ecstasy.

She was a catholic girl, notice I didn’t say shy! I lived in a two-bedroom miner’s cottage with my parents (plural, we were posh, I had a named father), brother and sister, we wanted our own place so we decided to marry, simple as that. As things stood we would have had more privacy if we moved into Edinburgh Airport. That is if, only if we could have shaken off my little brother, who to the casual observer seemed joined at the hip to the future Mrs. He used to sit out side the toilet having conversations with her, trying to talk through the gap under the door. Come to think about it he still does and he’s thirty two now, that’s no surprise from someone who still practices crying in front of a mirror, he could put Sir Lawrence Olivier to shame! (Is he dead or alive? god if the poor man is dead I’ll feel guilty for using present tense.)

The council allocated us a three bedroom flat in the village, top floor, left hand side and even using the Estate Agency language saying it was in need of a little modernisation is underestimating the place, it was a bloody black dirty hovel.

The keys were collected three months before we were due to get married, every day of those three months were spent re-decorating and de-lousing the place. Us two, an assortment of friends along with gang pressed family stripped, skipped, papered, painted, sweated and laughed our way through until it was habitable. We used more paint than a squad of worker’s on the Forth rail Bridge do in a year. If the place had went on fire it would have burned for six months and the story would have made national television, planes on route to America, would have been diverted around a plume of smoke resembling the fall out from Mount Etna.

Decorated, de-loused and finally furnished, we thought it was a palace, we even had a balcony overlooking the local pit slag-heaps, we called it our very own Penthouse. Charcoal grey carpets, a black leather-ish couch and a black ash sideboard, which at the time didn’t seem quite as gothic as it sounds now. A black Phillips twenty four inch telly in the corner and in front of the coal fire lay a sheepskin rug, why Anne Summers don’t sell sheepskin rugs is beyond me, or coal fires.

Cheap coal bought from local alcoholics and the stones it contained turned the living room into a war zone, firing out hot bricks who just didn’t want to burn at great speed meant the sheepskin rug only lasted about six months but it was fun while it lasted. In the end it looked like it was the first to land at Normandy, burnt and bald.

Happy days indeed, people say they would not go back to a coal fire, they loved the glow and the heat it gave out but they couldn’t be bothered with the cleaning out every morning. Well it was a chore that did not bother me, I didn’t let the thing go out, it just kept burning for six moths at a time, thus eliminating the need to set it every day. I also enjoyed bargaining with the local alcoholics who delivered the coal, coal they liberated from the local quarry in the early hours.

“How much a bag?”
“Three pound.”
“I’ll give you a pound.”
“Bugger off, two pound.”
“One pound fifty.”

At this point in the delicate negotiations I always opened a can of beer, cruel I know but it never failed, they took the one pound fifty and went to the pub. I felt like Donald Trump closing a million pound deal. Of course, this meant more stones the following week and a game of tit for tat that no one ever won, still it was worth the valuable lesson in bargaining skills.

Days long ago when we were happy enough to stay in on a Saturday night, mates used to phone asking if we were going out, club, pub, wherever.

“Alright, what’s the plans this weekend?”
“Nothing, were staying in.”
“Get real.”
“No, we just fancy a quiet weekend.”
“Yer Arse.”
“Honest man, we just want to stay in.”
“What’s wrong, are you skint?”
“No, we just want to stay in that’s all.”
“I’ve got money here if you need it.”
“For gods sake, we just want to stay in.”
“Fifty, Sixty, will that be enough? I’ve got more if you want it.”
Beeeep

Imagine wanting to stay in now even if you have money, sacrilege.

Yes, we even had spare money, money was no object and we lived like royalty, we went to the ice cream van every night. Then our cosy we world fell apart, brought crashing down with a visit to Boots and three small pink lines.