In the beginning.

Where do you begin with these things, really?  I think there comes a time in a man’s life when he finally takes time to reflect on what he has achieved and the mistakes he has made in life. I guess I’ve reached that point. Depending on your perspective you could say I’ve had an eventful life and I’ve achieved a lot. On the other hand you could equally say that despite some successes, I’ve been pretty good at making poor choices and failed in things that matter the most.

Whatever your view. My opinion is that I’ve achieved some good things, and I’ve failed in others. All of this has lead me to where I am today. By writing everything down I might just be able to figure out who I am and what I really want. Because Christ knows, until now I’ve had no idea.

So where did I come from?

That’s a good question. I’m a child of the 70’s, born into a working class family, from Sunderland in the North East of England. Once home to the biggest shipyard in the world. Historical home to the ancestors of George Washington (the first president of the United States of America). The first place in mainland Britain to produce ornate glassworks. The Venerable Bede worked between St Peters Church founded in 674AD in Monkwearmouth and a monastery in Jarrow. It was between these two places that he invented the Julian Calendar that is used the world over, to this very day.  My family was the old fashioned type where dad was the breadwinner and mam stayed at home. There’s a lot to be said for having a full time home based parent in my view. I think the reason society is in such a mess these days, is due to both parents having to go out to work. Believe it or not, many parents would like to be at home and be full-time parents, but most have no choice in the matter. The cost of living in Britain being such that two incomes are needed merely to exist, rather than to provide luxuries like holidays and that big flat screen TV, although all the charver scum seem to have them despite being perpetually on the dole.

I’ve been a bailiff, a government official, a civil servant, a college tutor, a delivery driver, a nightclub doorman. I’ve been through redundancy, and dismissal. I’ve represented my country in the sporting arena.  I’m a son, a brother, a father and an uncle. I’ve been married and divorced. I have been as fit as a butchers dog, and as fat as butter.  I’m a left-handed atheist with an IQ of 147.

I’ve been in love three times, loved another but was never totally in love with them. I’ve slept with more women that society thinks I should have, less women than I could have, but as many women as made me happy at the time.

 

My father was a coach/bus driver until he retired. A staunch union man, all for the workers and maintaining a healthy distrust of management. He calls a spade a spade and isn’t ashamed to give his opinion, however controversial that might be. Trust me when I say that they can be as controversial as it is possible to be. I’d like to think that is a quality I have taken from him, but I know he would just say I’m an argumentative bastard. When it comes to money, and making the most of a little, there really is no one quite like him. If my dad was chancellor of the exchequer, it’s fair to say that whilst we would all have to tighten our belts a little, the country would be in a much healthier financial state. I always joke with him that we should have been called the MacThompsons. Claiming he is as tight as a Scotsman. But in reality, he is just clever with money. I remember my brother being in a particularly crap situation with debt a few years back. In stepped dad, took over our boy’s finances, took away his bank card, gave him an allowance and within 2 years had everything paid off and had even managed to put enough cash away for my brother to buy a new car. I still joke with him now about how tight he is with cash, but if I am totally honest, I am just joking. I really wish I was more like him when it comes to money. If I have cash in my pocket it gets spent. I don’t think that will ever change.

Despite belonging to a household that never had a huge amount of cash, I like to consider myself well raised. From an early age I was aware of the difference between right and wrong. That’s not to say that I always chose right, but at least I knew what I was doing when I chose wrong. I was never in really serious trouble, at least not with the law. My parents always made it seem like it was far worse than that when I did do something wrong though. My mother is a quiet woman generally so when she raised her voice, you knew you were in bother. My dad was the complete opposite. If he went quiet, there was hell to pay. I always had what I now regard as a healthy fear of my dad. If I was in trouble with mam, she would send me to my room with the threat that she would tell my dad when he got in from work. Well that was the ultimate. I used to sit terrified on my bed (or hiding under it). I remember on at least one occasion, writing “I’m sorry” on a load of paper that I folded into small paper planes and tried to fly them down the stairs and into the living room for mam to read in the hope that she would let me come down from my room and not tell dad what I’d been up to. In my young mind, this was a last ditch attempt at a way out. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Looking back I don’t know why I was really so fearful. I can only remember two occasions when dad ever belted me. To this day he denies ever doing it but I remember them well. And I can honestly say on both occasions I deserved it. Today, the bleeding heart liberal do-gooders would be aghast at this, calling for him to be locked up. Well they can all go to hell. As cliché as it might sound, it did me no lasting harm and in fact I believe it made me a better person. Thankfully, I’ve never had to raise my hands to my own kids, but then they have never given cause for me to do it. I know I could be a little wind up merchant, they aren’t. I’m glad about that because I’m not entirely certain who comes off worse.

My mother made sure that her children didn’t grow up with a strong shipyard Mackem dialect. Yes to some my accent is strong but compared to a lot of kids raised in the same environment, my English is a damn sight closer to the Queens.

So that’s where I’m from in a nutshell really.

Early years.......0 to 5

To be totally honest I don’t remember an awful lot from this period in my life. I remember living in a two bedroomed flat in Shakespeare Street on the Southwick council estate in Sunderland. It was an ok place back then. It’s a total shithole now, largely populated by career charvers, intent on sponging off society for their whole lives. Millions have been spent on redeveloping the place but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It’s money down the drain. The vast majority of people there now are neither use nor ornament.

My mam always likes to recount the story of the time when I had just gotten out of the bath, then proceeded to run down the stairs and out of the front door into the street totally naked. I don’t remember this at all. But you know what mothers are like when you take a girlfriend round for the first time. Bring out the embarrassing pictures and anecdotes. Thanks mam.

Things I do remember from this period include going on daily adventures with my cousin David who lived across the street. I remember a trip to the corner shop to fetch eggs and dropping them on the way back. My earliest complete memory was going to see Sunderland play at Roker Park with my Dad, Uncle John and David. I remember being totally in awe of the stadium. I was sat on one of the rails in the Roker end terrace with dad standing behind me stopping me from falling off. I remember vividly the noise of 50,000 people, how green the turf was, hot Bovril from my dad’s flask and the best part of the whole experience was when – at half time – people came round and threw signed ball’s into the crowd and dad caught one for me.

I attended nursery in Southwick, with David. Mam and auntie Brenda walking us there on a morning and once a week mam would take me into this little corner shop on the way home and buy me a little matchbox car. I had hundreds of them. None ever stayed in their boxes more than a few feet from the shop, although if they had done I might well be a damn sight wealthier than I am now.

I shared a room with my sister and we had bunk beds. I used to fight with Kimberley all the time. She had hair so long she could sit on it. Same as mam did back then. Long hair like that isn’t really very practical but to a five year old boy it was heaven sent. Even if I couldn’t catch big sis, I could always catch her hair.

Another big memory I have from this period in my life was having the genius idea to make mam and dad breakfast in bed one morning. I used to have two pet goldfish. My granddad had been eating kippers one day and I think that’s where I got the idea from. To me, two goldfish looked like mini kippers. So one morning I’d gotten up early and gone into the kitchen where I proceeded to take the frying pan and tried to scoop the goldfish out of their tank with it. All I managed to do was to cover the top of the water with fat, terrify the fish, and soak myself in the process. I have no idea how I thought I was going to cook them. The cooker was a complete mystery to me. To my mind, mam put things into a pan, left them on the cooker for a while then took them off, put them on a plate and we ate them. How was I meant to know she was applying heat and cooking them? I thought the cooker did it by magic.

I did break my leg at age five, the summer we were moving out of the flat. It was only a few weeks before we were moving and I would be starting a new school. I was playing with some kids who lived around the corner from my granddads house in an estate called Redhouse. It was a lovely place then and some parts of it are still decent now. One of the older kids had this inspired idea of putting an old mattress in the front garden, then climbing out of an upstairs window onto the shelter above the front door. The idea was to jump off the shelter onto the mattress. I watched all the other kids doing it before building up the courage to give it a go. I stood on the ledge looking down thinking it looked miles, then threw myself off. I must have found the only part of the mattress with no springs left in it and hit the floor with a crack. The crack in question being my right tibia, snapped, half way up. I had to wear a full leg cast for ten weeks. I remember missing the first two weeks of school, and an annual tradition was born. Every summer in the last week or two of the summer holidays, I would contract an illness or cause myself some kind of injury which subsequently caused me to miss a week or two of the start of the new term. It was never intentional but it happened that way all through primary school.

 

I remember my dad used to smoke Regal kingsize. I think every bloke in the world seemed to smoke then. One day I was on one of my adventures with David, and I’d found a tattered old umbrella. I had the idea that this would be a good present for mam and on my way home on the corner of our street I found half a cigar, still smoking. I figured as it was still lit it hadn’t been there long so the 10 second rule was applied. (For those of you unfamiliar with this rule, I’ll explain. It was a standard of hygiene when I was a kid. If you dropped some food or anything that was meant to go in your mouth on the floor, provided you picked it up within ten seconds, kissed it and showed it to god then it was still ok to eat). So having applied this important rule, I proceeded to walk home casually puffing on the cigar with the brolly up. I remember thinking this made me a real grown up. That is until I knocked on my front door and mam saw me with it. Both brolly and cigar were slapped out of my hands and I was marched up the stairs and straight to my room. This was one of the first “Wait til your dad gets in” moments I remember.

L to R: My sister Kimberley (aged 7), Me (aged 5), My cousin Alvin (aged 7)

I think my only other coherent memory from the first five years of my life was being on holiday at a caravan with my mam, sister, auntie Ann and my cousin Alvin. I had these great kiddy speedo’s and spent hours sitting in the nearby river in them. On one of the days I had decided to follow a sheep up a hill which as it turned out was much steeper than I thought, more of a cliff really. I ended up stranded on a tiny ledge about fifty feet up and mam had to get some bloke from the campsite to come rescue me. On one of the other days I slammed the caravan door, shattering the glass in it and injuring Alvin. This was the start of my career as window breaker extraordinaire. I’ve spoken to Alvin about this incident fairly recently and all he can remember is that I was winding him up about something and he had chased me to the caravan. I got there first and slammed the door. He had put up his hand to stop me and his hand went straight through the glass. By all accounts, it hurt like hell and I have been instructed to mention that I could be an absolute twat as a kid. Personally I think that’s a bit on the strong side. Wind up merchant, absolutely, twat, harsh.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure how any kid born in the 70’s survived really. There were none of the child safety devices available today. Baby cots were painted with lead based paint and as a toddler we no doubt chewed on the cot. The ten second rule was the best form of disinfectant available. We would play in the street all day then have tea without washing our hands, share pop from one bottle with the other twenty kids in the street. Our parents let us play out all day without a care as to where we were as long as we were home for tea.  We climbed trees, built dens, made bows and arrows from bits of privet hedge and elastic bands and shot each other with them. If you were lucky enough to have a bike, the spokes were covered with those square plastic bread bag fasteners and it was compulsory to have a wooden ‘ice lolly’ stick jammed through the spokes to make a motorbike noise when you rode along. If you didn’t have a bike, you make a go-kart out of three bits of old wood, a handful of nails, a bolt, four pram wheels and a bit string. Basic, but effective. Brakes were not a consideration though. I mean, after you had got up a good head of steam, why would you want to stop?

There was none of this internet, games consoles, sky sports, never-mind DVD’s, even video cassette recorders weren’t invented. We had three tv channels, music was on 7inch vinyl and the height of street fashion was Dunlop greenflash or Converse Allstars. If you were really lucky you had a Bukta tracksuit top and some Admiral shorts that were tighter than lycra (also not invented back then). There was no Nike or Reekbok. Puma and Adidas was for the filthy rich. Girls hair was long and boys hair was almost universally cut with a bowl or shaped to resemble a world war two Wehrmacht helmet. Shirt collars were too long and tank tops were too short. Busses had doors at the front and in the middle and a conductor would come round and collect your fare. Fish and chips were the only fast food you could buy. No Chinese or Indian, no KFC or Macdonalds. Although Maws used to do pie and peas. The peas, with gravy in a little plastic bag. Crisps were usually only salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, Bovril, or those plain ones with the little blue bag of salt you could add if you wanted to. If you were really lucky you could find some gammon flavour ones now and then.  As for sweets, well some very stange things were classed as sweets. Imps for a start. I have no idea on what planet you could call them sweets, concentrated little bits of liquorice that burned your mouth. Fisherman’s friends. If you ate a handful of those, you were physically incapable of drinking anything cooler than a cup of hot tea for a week. My favourite sweet back then was the Texan bar. A yellowy-orange coloured bar of chewy something or other covered in chocolate. They were massive. Curly Wurly was another favourite. They too were enormous. These were the days when wagon wheels would literally fit wagons. When Tonka trucks were made of metal and really were indestructible. Janet and John or Ladybird reading books. There were no sunbeds, no fake tan, I’m not sure that deodorant even existed back then, but my dads aftershave of choice was Cedarwood. I’m sure he had some blue stratus, old spice and such like too. In later years he would become a Paco Rabanne devotee, an incident with which, almost cost my (not yet born) younger brother his life. Noone had heard of shower gel. You washed with soap and it was usually Cussons Pearl or if you were lucky it was imperial leather. There was no Radox for a long soak. We did have Matey though and all kids loved a bubble bath (even if I did have to share with my big sis, using the water left after mam and dad had had their bath).

So that was the first five years of my life. Not a lot going on there really, but when you think about it, how much can you really remember from your first five years on the planet?