suggzy

Recently, I found myself at my local Jobcentre Plus, signing-on. Not something I had done in the better part of 20 years, but that’s where we are just now, with me having accepted a severance agreement from my former employers at the tail end of last year. Whilst it’s been a big adjustment, I do at least have a little time and some resources to rebuild a bit and see what I should do next. One thing I promised myself on New Year’s Eve 2015 was that I would at the very least try and write something entertaining for this blog on a monthly basis. So, here we are again.

The Jobcentre has changed somewhat in the last two decades, and not just through the addition of the very positive ‘Plus’ word in the title. As I have commented to others, the feel of the place was like something between the modern bank, and its lounging areas and espresso machines, and a slightly quiet Costa/Nero’s/Starbucks. Chaps wore ties, and I was called ‘Sir’ on several occasions. Lord alone knows why. My new ‘coach’, who is polite enough, shook my hand most effusively. I don’t think he really knows what I am for (he suggested I should apply for a Head of Architecture post when last we met), but his manners are impeccable. I have to go back there this week (that nice Mr Duncan Smith is always watching) for a group workshop called ‘Futures’, which might promise to take the edge off these uncharacteristically bright feelings of mine. Time will tell. I shall report.

Anyway, the last time I found myself ‘resting’, the business of signing on was not so convivial. Even in Cambridge, where one never met the same person twice, and alcohol and cigarette smoke hung thick in the air. At 8.30am. But it was vastly worse in Queen’s House, Queen Street, Ramsgate, where I had to sign on as a UB40 tourist one week by dint of visiting my parents. Here I met with actual violence, on the top floor.

Anyone who knows me will be aware that whilst I am at turns grumpy and irritable, that’s really only ever something directed inwards. I am certainly not a violent man. I’m a lover not a fighter, and am more likely to be wielding a bunch of flowers rather than a bunch of fives. Therefore, as a blameless fellow, I was surprised to find myself on the end of an angry right hander from a departing client. A Scotsman who was puce in the face, and not minded to suffer his fellow man after he left the building after what had evidently been a rather unsatisfactory tete a tete with his advisor. I was really too stunned to register how much it hurt, as I staggered into the job noticeboards. Just unlucky, I suppose. But still, an injustice had been served. I won’t do that line about rays of sunshine and Scotsmen with grievances. Oh, whoops, I have.

All this is not without irony, for only three years earlier I had been the deliverer of a violent miscarriage of justice myself. Curiously, this then led on to two of the great friendships of my life, that still endure to this day. Indeed the other parties involved may very well come to read this. Hope so.

I was just into my third year at College, and now firmly established as one of the resident bar flies. And what a wonderful, battered old youth club of a bar it was. Grubby, noisy, full of silliness, and with puddles of beer sticking to one’s trainers.  Jukebox blaring out Another Brick In The Wall; always a source of amusement to a juicer-full of trainee teachers. Out the back, a unisex toilet, where a range of activities happened, frankly.

At my elbow that evening, my dear little chum Andy, who I came to dub ‘The Pocket Genius’ when, after what one can only be described as an up and down career as an undergraduate, he popped off to the library for a couple of weeks just before Finals and somehow emerged with a First class degree. I can’t say the same, but then I never really went to the University Library much. It was a dreadfully confusing place, where I often got lost. The dust played havoc with my asthma and the reading matter was most dreadfully dull. The odds were against me from the start, frankly. ‘TPG’ was and is a man of unlimited intelligence and wit, but, like me, struggled to apply himself.  And so there we sat, sluicing down £1 pints of lager, talking utter nonsense and generally making merry.  Joining us for the evening was an ‘up and comer’ first year, our friend Nicholas. Now a bald, teetotal vegan, he was at that stage a beefy 19-year-old with a mop of curly ginger hair and a line in baseball caps, good humour and a prodigious capacity for sinking beer. You’ll perhaps remember from my earlier meanderings that he and I visited Prague and Warsaw together? Everything was going increasingly swimmingly, but the atmosphere was to change in mere minutes.

I excused myself for a time, and veered off to the loo to siphon off some of the evening’s complement of Fosters (yes, I know, I know). I was having a nice time.  As I opened the door and ducked ‘round the cigarette machine towards my seat, I saw a most unexpected sight. This appalling young upstart cracking TPG under his chin, and rocking him back on his bar stool.

To my shame, I did not wait for explanations, and waded in without ceremony. I made for the blighter, and clocked him with a good one. Cheeky young bastard, hitting my little chum like that! Devil was he thinking of? Perhaps, in retrospect, I suppose I might have bothered to ask him. Instead, I stood there, beerily enraged at the ruins of the evening, with my future great friends staggering around rubbing their bruised faces. At which point, the contretemps came to an abrupt end, through the good citizenry of our friend Tall James. Something of a warm-spirited giant of a man, he, like a number of patrons, had cut short his conversation as the brief flurry of right handers played out. He then ‘stepped in’, and deposited each of us to different parts of the bar with an instruction to generally “calm down lads” a bit. To our credit, we did.

After a time, ever the instinctive peacemaker, I recharged our glasses, offered a few handshakes, and asked of my quarry precisely what the fuck he thought he was doing clobbering a fellow who must have weighed nine stone dripping wet? I asked him this, just as he had asked me why it was that I had struck him. Of course, because my friends were at that stage on the lunatic fringe, they had, it transpired, decided to embark upon an impromptu ‘punching in the face competition’ whilst I had been busy at the porcelain. As polite young men do, right? The rest of the evening passed in a not disagreeable but slightly wary fashion, it being impossible to ‘un-punch’ someone. Time passed, bruises went down, and a less pugilistic triumvirate we became. Frankly how we ever emerged into any of the positions of considerable responsibility we have each held, I have no idea. Many unwise incidents of japery and misadventure were to follow, down the years. I’d like to stress, though, that I am not currently ‘at leisure’ because I ever hit anyone at work. I’ve certainly had to mull over some murderous thoughts in the last year or so, but as my fifth decade goes on, I find myself ever more drawn to pacifism as a credo for my existence.

Let us then cycle forward to, I think, 2006. Closing in on married life the first time ‘round, I was living a cosy existence in a West Norfolk cottage, and generally enjoying life with Sarah the First. A slight curiosity of our domestic life was that the local Council did not seem to really believe in the recycling of bottles. So it was that we found ourselves loading up the motor every few weeks and driving the empties up to our local bottle bank, in the Morrisons car park. This was a duty we both took to with great gusto. The joy of slam-dunking the plentiful number of empties was most cathartic.

So we were on just such a mission, early one cold morning. One box each, one bin each, and off we go. Glass shattered pleasingly, and all was going well, for a time. And then my fiancée let one go from a greater height and with more gusto than usual. And, alas, it rather ‘lipped out’, to use a golfing term. She caught the edge of the opening, and the bottle bounced back out, arcing through the air, only to catch me squarely on the chin at a rate of knots. I was not a little stunned, and the pain was memorable. Very much in love, and great friends as we are, we found it only to be moments before we were bawling with laughter at the accident. Slapstick at its best, of course. But still, I looked at her in good humour and said “I owe you one for that..”

Which would have been funny, if I had not just a few months later repaid her debt in a most unfortunate way. It was highly memorable, and indeed it was that lady who encouraged me to write about the incident.

So, let us cycle forward to that Summer. Off we did go to the family seat, in Ramsgate, for a couple of nights before taking the early Eurostar to Brussels. Initially, a quiet time was had by all, but then, as ever in my experience, on the night before a quite early start towards horizons new, there was chaos.

We took the parentals down to their local, for a couple of sharpeners. All jolly good and well, before returning to the homestead for a two-course meal. Lovely. Trouble is, my Father and I have never been much out of mutual love for the good services of a corkscrew. So it followed that, much in the manner of an episode of Downtown Abbey, the ladies parted the scene in favour of a good night under the duvet, and the gentlemen (using that term advisedly) chose to fight on.

I have a dim recollection of the hour chiming midnight, and a firm mutual commitment on both sides that we should finish the bottle and head to bed, for the waking hour was c.6.00am. No, no such luck. A brace of Bordeaux onwards, closing in on 3.00am, we were struck by the unmistakeably angry tones of Mother dearest, asking us quite what the fuck we thought we were doing? We had no real answer to that, beyond extinguishing cigs and hurriedly tidying the scene of the crime. The good lady popped down to lead the head of the family to the WC, pausing only to give me a rather long look. I woozily thought at that point that her holiday gift really should be a good one, after all those years of hard labour. I returned to the bedroom of my childhood and collapsed, very drunkenly, into the environs of my then partner. I can lack charm when drunk, and drunk I assuredly was.

Next thing I knew? The hour chimed six, and there came a none-too-gentle prod in the eye from my bedmate. All was not so well in pre-marital land, but I had no real sense of that, through the gift of still being really quite memorably drunk. Indeed, I was full of beans!  There was coffee, the finalisation of packing, and off we went to Ashford as my partner in crime slept on, the bastard. Except, and this is where the whole scheme fell to the ground, the very same old bastard had the indecency to come to, suddenly feel lonely and, for the first time ever in his life, thumbed away at his mobile, to contact his wife of 39 years, to demand she returned to pick him up, to see us off.

Back we went. The game was up. He struggled into some clothes and then, as Mother of mine drove to Ashford International at only just under the speed of light (we were now running late, but no one was going to question her style at the wheel), he stumbled upon the story of Adolphe Sax, and his accidental invention of, well, the saxophone (there is a Sax Museum in Brussels, we failed to attend it). He also tells me that he also told us a very rude joke about Andrew Lloyd Webber. I can’t recall that, and he won’t allow me to repeat it on my blog, so his e-mail address is lordpegwell@aol.com. Good luck.

Onwards to our point of departure, and the last memorable act of violence of my life.

Freed of my emboozed co-conspirator, we dragged our bags over to the station. There was coffee and bacon, at non-bargainacious rates, and then we whipped up through passport control and onto our platform.

And then we waited. And quite how wobbly I still was became clear to both of us. We were now oddly early but, after a while, our steed rolled in. Taking sympathy on me as she swung the door open, my then fiancée asked if I’d like help getting aboard? “Ho ho” I (jokingly) responded, and swung a fake punch at her.

And time slowed down, as it does, on the advent of something singularly appalling.

The punch impacted with a level of force one could never imagine. Bless her, we were to marry only a few months later, but the good lady’s head went back as if she had been hit by a train. Once I gathered her to the vertical, I was most effusive in my apologies. One my lower moments.

We found seats. All was quiet save for Sarah I periodically pointing out that I had “just hit her in the face”. I could not stop for apologising, of course, but, amidst it all, the terrible hell of it all, my hangover started to emerge… and as it did she actually laughed.. but one had the clear impression that reparations would need to be made.

Now, if I might be allowed to make a customary digression?

Mine have not been the most awful punches thrown in the history of humanity. They belong to a man who very briefly went to prison. His nom de plume is ‘Andy Stoke’ (AS hereafter). I met him only once, in my nineteenth year, in Crewe, where he was studying with a once friend of mine.  Tall fellow, at least 6’2”, he ate once a day, and a ‘meat’ Vindaloo on each occasion. He was, with the associated bowel movements we can only begin to imagine, a scrap of a fellow. Fortnightly, he would fold himself into his elderly mini and pop back home to watch Stoke FC play at home, after a customary pint or 8. Ordinarily to only rarely bad effect, but, at that point in time, to set himself up for the once-a-season face-up to Port Vale in ‘the derby’. Where most home fixtures would only get our new chum outside of only 8 pints between 12-3 pm, he most especially threw down 10 when it was ‘The Vale’. Derby. Etc. You understand.

And so he and colleagues weaved towards the ground. As described, all was well in the procession before he suddenly received a violent strike to the shoulder. Assuming that this was an interloper from the opposition Vale fans, our man turned and chucked a double hander. Into the forward  flanks of a police horse, alas. The horse, nonplussed, and uninjured, laid no charge. The Peelers popped him away for the night. Final score? Unknown. See? I’m not that bad.

And so we got to Brussels. Eventually. I left the equine brethren unmolested, but I was most indecorous in order. Having assured the good lady that I was in suitable order to direct us to our lodgings, I was found sorely wanting, I’m afraid. We wandered endlessly through the Eurostar station, found ourselves at the Metro, and back out again, and, ultimately, on the street again, where an incensed Sarah I took charge of the map and silently forged onwards in the right direction. Had my brains not have been leaking out of my ears for the duration of the train journey, I might have made a better study of the map.

Finally we arrived, and I was forced to taking to my bed for a while, apologising all the while, but chancing my life with a back-reference to the incident when I had been ‘bottled’. This lightened the mood, and on waking, I found the mood had warmed and we struck out for a few days of good fun.

And good fun we most certainly had. It’s true that we began most days with a certain amount of tut-tutting at the youthful co-residents from the USA, and their habit of grabbing every single bread roll to make sarnies to keep them in sustenance for the day. However, we ourselves were in good funds sufficient to keep ourselves going. The hotel also had a really quite frightening lift, sort of open on three sides, such that one observed what appeared to be the walls going downwards.. I found I had to take the journey with my eyes closed.

Brussels was rather nice. Idling in Grand Place, eyeing  up impossibly expensive artisan chocolates. Marvelling at the impossibly small and pointless Mannaken Pis (which one read had been stolen and returned many many times; it took a good ten minutes for an unenthralled crowd to part so one could take lewd photographs of it. A gentle reintroduction to alcohol in the form of delicious Belgian beer, and the discovery of a new food favourite in the form of Stoemp, a rural mashed veg. Creamy, tasty, bloody marvellous. I’ve made it myself since, but it’s not the same.

We had a couple of lovely evenings comparatively shopping for restaurant meals on Rue De Bouchers (a sort of Brick Lane of Euro-nosh, where endless waiters attempted to usher one in by making magician-like sweeps of their arms over caskets of fresh meat and fish). We went all out on the penultimate evening in a place that had an amazing double winding staircase at the back. Fizz, oysters, steaks wrapped in bacon. A little wearied by the excitements of it all, we insisted on a photo with some of the staff. This being before the era of the selfie, the photo has the look of an oddly-conceived five-a-side football team.

We visited all the EU complex, didn’t make it to that odd structure that looks a bit like a section of the Watson and Crick double helix DNA design, and eventually rolled home, without further incident. I forget what I bought my Mother. I bet it was good though, cos’ boy was she cross that morning. Father had recovered, and I gifted him a small Manneken Pis bottle opener, which still sits on a shelf in their downstairs WC, oddly appropriately.

Back next month, then? Not sure what the subject matter will be. I shall ponder. Nice to be back and writing again though.