36 years and counting. I cannot figure out how I came to be in the game I'm in. The game of compassion. I won't say I fell into it, people don't fall into things, not things like this anyway, however much it may resemble a hole. No, it was a conscious decision, made as a teenager, prompted by a well meaning but dopey bastard brother.
I left school 2 days before my 16th birthday. The proud owner of nothing. Not a single CSE, not that I was a failure, I was a non participant. I hadn't been entered for a single exam.
It was a glorious summer, the summer of Denis Howell's rain dance and in late July it seemed as if it would last forever and I was utterly free of care. I had no qualifications and no job to look forward to. I had visited the careers teacher and told him I'd like to be a journalist. He found it impossible to suppress a smirk as he suggested that I set my sights a little lower and advised me to seek employment as a lorry drivers mate. I was happy with that.
Sadly, openings for lorry drivers mates turned out to be rather thin on the ground, so I had to settle for a late summer of sunbaked indolence, sustained by whatever the weekly dole was then. Which was fine by me.
It wasn't like the summer holidays though. My mates had all got jobs. The brainy ones had managed to get apprenticeships, proper ones, not Micky Mouse ones, and were on the way to becoming brickies and mechanics and carpenters and plumbers The not so brainy ones were in warehouses or were on the lump or were factory fodder. Those were the days, when there were factories and they needed fodder. Then there was me.
It was a pretty humdrum existence, There was no daytime telly, not any night time telly either after about half ten, and I couldn't even enjoy the sun all that much, as I was living in a tower block and didn't have a bastard garden. So I got a job, in a carpet warehouse in Saltley. The first job I had been offered was to accompany a gentleman into a cubicle in a shithouse in town for a fiver. It all seemed a bit unsavoury and I declined the offer.
The warehouse job was alright. they'd get you doing stupid, backbreaking things just to prove to you how stupid you were but it was alright. I only needed money for beer, football, records and gigs and it provided sufficient for that, and I made a bit extra, by cutting a few extra foot 'for the stairs' The managers there were OK when they weren't being all psychopathic and Mancunian. They were all from Manchester. One of them, no doubt meaning it kindly, accused me of being shy in such a way that I feared he would kick my head in if I didn't become more loquacious. Mind you, I wasn't that shy that I wouldn't ask a customer if he'd like me to cut him a bit extra.
The best thing about the job (any job)was the breaks. We had an hour for dinner and would go, without fail, to a boozer across the road.The place had a pool table, a decent pint of mild and proper cheese cobs: a crusty cob, unrefrigerated, unwrapped, in the middle of which resided a half inch slab of cheddar. It was the dogs bollocks. The only downside was the jukebox, which seemed to have only one record on it.....Abba's 'Fernando'
It all came to an abrupt end. Blues had a six pointer against Sheffield Utd, in Sheffield, on a Tuesday night. Obviously, I had to be there, and be there I was, although not before being refused permission to take the afternoon off to go. Blues drew. I lost. Sacked. Without ceremony.
