It was suggested to me yesterday, by a close friend, that my blog contained a lot of negative stuff, to which I had to agree. I started thinking about something positive that I could write about, there was quite a few I came up with, however, they all needed further explanation. I then read ‘The Lindbloom Chronicles‘ written by a friend of mine Alan Gunner Lindbloom, rather than explain about Alan, may I suggest you read the Chronicles yourself, the link is there, anyway, it was reading Alan’s story that has inspired me to write mine. If I start at the beginning and work my way through my life in words then I can leave it for you to decide on the positives. So!! I hope you enjoy the ride. Debs, Laura, Grace, Donna, Sara, Kerryann and not forgetting Lesley, plus my children and grandchildren, thank you all for being in my life and getting me to this point. One more year left of my licence. Smashing it!!!!!!!!!
I was born into a fairly large family. I was the youngest of six. I have three sisters and two brothers. The order actually went girl, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy. My parents were both in their forties by the time I turned up. Not so significant now but will become so later in life. To be honest I don’t really recall much from my younger years and there are hardly any pictures of me back then, so I don’t have much to evoke my memory bank. I have glimpses of a few things, like eating ice cream from a saucer at my Nan and granddads’ guest house they ran in Nelson Crescent, Ramsgate or riding in the butlers lift between floors, I also remember watching the carnival, across from the guest house, and chucking half pennies and pennies onto the floats as they made their way down the coastal road. One of my favourite views in Ramsgate is looking back from the beach at night, and across the harbour, at the curvy drop that accompanies the road.
Love that view, where all the blue lights are in the arches is where I sheltered one day in the summer of 1976, that summer it hit 32.2°C somewhere in Britain every day for 15 consecutive days. Dubbed the best summer ever. In 1976, the average price of a house was £12,704. The average wage was £72 a week. A pint of beer cost 32p. A loaf of bread was 19p. Half the population owned a telephone, landline of course. The year also my memories start. One funny moment from that year that will always stick in my mind for lots of reasons. Our local park, Ellington Park, had every year, over the August Bank Holiday, a fair called the Phoenix Fair. Some of the local kids, once a year, got to help out, the older I got the more responsibility I got. I’m proud to say that one year I even ran the coconut shy. Anyway, back to the incident. On the last day of the fair they would have a huge fireworks display, it was always an incredible show. So! the next day was therefore the final clear up day, a friend, I’ll just call him DC which are his actual initials, and me were clearing up the empty firework cartridges, we noticed that there was still gunpowder left over in some of them. We started to empty the contents into a hole in the ground, can you see where this is going, we couldn’t haha!!. So, we had quite a bit of gunpowder but no fuse to light it, I honestly do not remember whose great idea it was to throw a match down the hole while watching. The ambulance arrived just after our mums and they accompanied us to the hospital. I ended up the fortunate one because it was DC that lit and dropped the match. I didn’t get as much as the blast as DC, but then I suppose we were both fortunate as there was no long-term damage. I had lost my fringe, my eyelashes and my eyebrows with some minor superficial burns, DC virtually lost all the hair on his head and face plus some burns which weren’t disfiguring. A lesson learnt one should think and rightly so, but there is another firework incident later on in my life, just as stupid ergo just as funny.
There was another thing about that summer of 1976, it was the end of my innocent childhood years and the beginning of the rest of my life. That year also saw the start of a few harsh consecutive winters, and a few harsh years for myself culminating in contracting Meningoencephalitis in 1980 which I apparently got from my brother who had mumps.
1976 also saw the year a family moved in down the road from my house, and they had a son my age with whom I became good mates with, PD, I’ll just leave it at his initials as well, for reasons that will become apparent in the next installment. I hope you enjoyed the opening chapter and are eager to come back for more. You can always click on the follow button and receive an email each time I upload a blog. Until the next time. Laters.
Journey of a reformed man 