Not sure that this story has anything to redeem it, bar telling the truth. Forcing the shadow further out into the light.

Harking back to my teens, I built up a thick emotional armour. By the age of 17, I was able to wield humour as the easiest technique for avoiding confrontation and pain. Protection for as long for as the humour could be maintained.

A massive over-use of sarcasm was another method. A third was pretence at aggression, by developing a ‘tough’ look for those situations where instinct said you might blag it.

Like most teens, I lacked self-knowledge, context and perspective. The most articulate explanation for these barriers, the best that I could have spat out, on a good day, would be that others had hurt and shamed me in formative years. And that nobody must ever again be given the chance to repeat this.

The absence of somebody to whom I could unload anxieties, without feeling shame, was always a crippling handicap. It felt hopeless to even think of asking for it from males, despite the excellent friendships forged in Birmingham. My father and school had put paid to that. Women were an obvious source of sanctuary, and Saxon’s affections had cleared up the notion that I might not be lovable. But trust? I could never begin to tell her fully about a problem that steadily yanked up my worry levels.

I was gradually losing my hair. Had been since the age of about 15. I had a thick thatch of auburn locks, shoulder length, aligning comfortably with the early 70s’ fashion. But hair would fall out when combed, or washed, especially the hair above my forehead. It was so thick that a centre parting generally hid the recession eating into either side. But, by the time that I was 20, the worry that my receding hairline would eventually open up new vulnerabilities had begun to form.

The word “baldness” carried distinct stigma at this time. A minus from your masculinity.

Real men were hirsute, in the culture and myths I moved in. Exceptions, such as Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas, were sparse. I lacked their confidence, or any bluffing skills. Fitting in was the aim. But it didn’t work out.

Some fine people were fucked up by the challenge, not least Bobby Charlton, whose reputation as a footballer was almost matched by the image of his hair parted somewhere below his left ear, and swept across his bonce. Bob would run with the ball, his hair flapping in the wind about a foot above his head. Ralph Coates at Burnley, and then Tottenham, was the same.

To have been born two decades later, when it had become perfectly fashionable to crop your hair close, would have been such a comfort. By contrast the blokes sporting a ‘number one’ in my second decade were making one statement alone – you’re going to get your head kicked in, pal!

Punk began to redress this angle to some extent, although bald heads were still seen as a sign of over-intellectualism. At the other end of the scale was Buster Bloodvessel, the frontman of ska revival band Bad Manners, whose cropped scalp spoke of mind-less violence.

It took until the age of 20 for somebody to notice and point out that I was going bald. A German guy in a bar in Spain, who enjoyed a minor chance to put down a Brit. I gave a brave smile, but felt a surge of inner panic. What taunts would people dream up when this became more apparent?

My unease had made me visit the doctor some months previously. He said, in admirable frankness, that some people developed pattern baldness, and it was untreatable. Not good enough, doc. My incipient hair loss was mentioned a second time in a pub, back in Brum. Again, I feigned nonchalance, masking fragility and the fear that I was headed for new upsets to compare with the serial teasing endured as a young teenager.

Generally, the problem stayed sealed in my head. Occasionally people would enjoy a little mickey-take, not knowing the anxiety they stoked. I would ask barbers and hairdressers if they had ideas that might combat new inroads into my self-esteem. To a man they said – some guys go bald. Nothing you can do. I even ventured my fears to Saxon once, which brought the reply that I would look sweet with a bald head. Not the reply I wanted. It should have been, but deep-seated dreads were at work. Fears of inadequacy.

After my 21^st birthday, I saw an ad for a trichologist in Birmingham. A well-named profession. I paid a visit to a salon in town, where the promise was held out that my situation could be halted, even reversed, with a palate of lotions and potions, and a £5 consideration each week.

For about six months I tried this. Without noticeable effects. Didn’t tell a soul, of course, to save myself a mocking. Steve Hudson-Parker upped the ante. He used to rifle though my drawers while I was at work in the summer of 1978, and found said lotions. He was well aware of the embarrassment I felt, and let others know.

Looking back, I can see that I became quite mentally ill due to what some others would have considered a trifle. I stopped having my hair cut, because my forehead seemed to grow incrementally larger each time. I was 21, then 22. Times of youth and strength. Instead I stopped going swimming, as this was another ‘give-the-game-away’ activity. It got worse. I started to fear the wind, for its ability to blow my hair all over the shop and expose my worst secret.

The best thing would have been to stroll into a barbers and have the lot cut off. Instead I stumbled on, even standing Saxon up on a Northern Soul evening as I stepped out of the front door and felt a gale scatter my fringe (Blog 8). It was an agonising time, all the more so as I felt unable to share the problem.

Have you ever felt that if just one matter could be taken care of, taking away the pain, the rest of your life would fall into place? I was heading fast for a fall, which came in the shape of a tabloid advert for hair transplants. I cut it out, wondering what it would entail. Eventually, curiosity prevailed, and I asked the company, based in Ilford, Essex, to get in touch with me.

Arriving home from a lecture one afternoon, shortly after finishing with Saxon, I found a guy waiting outside the house. Chain-smoking Gauloise cigarettes, he promised to fill in what I had lost. For £500. I was unprepared for the visit, and agreed too quickly, failing to ask basic precautionary questions.

At last I told somebody – my parents. But only because I possessed just half the money required. I was impressed by my dad’s non-interventionist attitude. He simply said: ‘Handsome is as handsome does. But if you really want to go through with this, we won’t stop you.’

A week or so before my finals, I turned up at the clinic in Ilford. I departed a couple of hours later, on a boiling hot day, with a bobble hat on and new rows of (my own) hair implanted in the front of my head, either side of the widow’s peak. Sitting on the train home I felt insane.

Back up to Brum, where I wore the same hat to take each of my final exams, so that none of the transplant work could be seen. I had not thought this part through, and so had to find a reason for the hat, a reason that might convince friends. There was no way in the world that I could admit my cowardice over losing my hair, and so I invented a story.

A can of weed killer had fallen on me in a shed at the golf club, and taken away large patches of my hair. Only a transplant would put this right, medical experts had said. Even now I shake my head, wondering how I could have come up with such a crock of shite.

While others anticipated their degree ceremonies, I went home to Essex and waited for the new hair to grow through, and for a second lot to be put in place. I lived in a kind of threshold world, where one day in the near future I would look the way I wanted to once again. I would re-enter society, be strong again. All would be well. Jesus.

The key issue was waiting for the new hair (taken from the back of my head) to grow long enough to blend in with the rest of my barnet. My parents must have gone through hell watching their son’s distress. Mum was anxious about me in hitherto unwitnessed ways. Dad asked if I fancied working at the golf club, out with the green staff and behind the bar. Money was still a requirement, so I said yes please.

Making things more traumatic, I was quickly disappointed with the operation. I took the view that more transplants were needed to provide an optimally authentic look. But that would cost. I felt let down and misled by the clinic’s slick sales techniques. At a deeper level, however, I knew that responsibility for my own actions was essential.

Worse, it was dawning that as my hair continued to fall out in the coming years, I would need even more work done to maintain the facade. A circling nightmare of my own making, with no easy exit. That said, it was also a time of great kindness from many people. Some had obviously been told by mum and dad, and hardly anybody indulged in piss-taking. And when I eventually started socialising with friends again, people limited their references to my troubles.

As my new purchases settled down, three options were available. Let them grow, and leave them alone. The downside being that they would look ridiculous as I got balder. Second, pay somebody to somehow take the implants out. But I couldn’t be sure that whoever did that would take the care to provide a smooth job, with minimal scarring. In the end, I asked my local doctor if he could arrange an operation to remove the transplants. He said no way, and proceeded to give me – and later my mum – a lecture on my folly.

Thirdly, to shave my transplants. As the years went by, I increasingly chose this option, and used a masking cream to hide the shaven hair and the scars left by the operations. Plagued by considerable self-loathing, I wrote a letter to all of my best friends a few years later, telling the truth about the whole procedure. But I could never really shake off the feeling of having placed myself at the social margin, a freak who fucked up and tried unsuccessfully to hide his errors.

Eventually, after I had begun to feel particularly low again in my late thirties, Maureen phoned an electrolysis specialist in Wickford, who agreed to see me. Then painstakingly removed my implants over the course of about six months. She carried out an excellent job, for which I remain grateful. For the first time in my adult life, after nearly two decades, I finally lost the self-consciousness about my hairline.

Coming out on the other side of the process perked me up inestimably. Ordinary, natural things became huge joys. No more fear of the wind. Letting the sun tan my head without worry. Cycling and running. The boost was phenomenal. It made me hungry for company, and more interested in the world. It also helped me to step back from the story. A big plus, as John Madden pointed out, was that the main victim of my folly was me.

The whole escapade was so bizarrely mad that I wonder if it was meant to be.

I have been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea Quartet’. The mesmerising tales of Ged, a goatherd lad from a rural community who comes by strange powers over nature and attains the knowledge of ancient ways.

Ged’s story has none of the gooey cleverness of Harry Potter, or the quasi-Biblicality of Lord of the Rings. It unfolds the exhausting, lonely, dangerous path of a magician. Told beautifully and sparsely by the author, the narratives feel like they have been pulled from deep inside mountains and stone circles. Wet, cold skies, foreign lands, and hardships. Fires to warm by, and seas to cross. Hunger never far away. Gratitude for small mercies. Surviving while making a difference. Knowing when to accept kindness, and when to press on.

And outcomes. The first story, Wizard of Earthsea, takes an archetype running through our DNA – that we fuck things up and then redeem ourselves – to the very ends of the world. As a rookie magician, Jed lets his vanity get the better of him and unleashes magic of such power that it separates him from his shadow.

The shadow is evanescent, hard to define, increasingly evil, and difficult to outwit. But it will run amok with growing power unless he can reintegrate with it. The effort nearly kills him. But his life can never be whole again without such effort, and so he lets his instincts take him to the darkest places, where it will show itself. And where he can face it head on, embrace it and process it.

This story bangs my gong. Resonates up and down my chakras.

Hello Jung. Greetings art therapy. Welcome in, psilocybin.

Howdy writing out one’s story.

Maureen fried some of our home grown Brussel sprouts with bacon at the weekend, providing a brilliant accompaniment to a lentil and vegetable stew. You plant the crop in good faith. But brassicas can be infested by up to 49 different species of pest insects, which cannot always be controlled.

That’s my oblique foreplay to saying that the next period in my life, from summer 1979 onwards, was so traumatic that I have sometimes wondered if I were its sole author, despite all the evidence that it was self-induced. To be more precise, was the destination pre-destined?

That destination was to feel more isolated than I had ever known. However the motivation was the converse aim. To fit unobtrusively into the world.

Why do we do things? What is the outcome? Maureen and I moved to the small mid-Essex village of Great Waltham in October 2014 because our existing landlord was useless and manipulative in equal measures. The new landlords had no problem with our six cats, and welcomed our pledge to “cherish” any new home which was included in an advert placed in a local newspaper. Boxes ticked.

Yet the real outcome was finding a rural setting, surrounded by nature, where I have begun to find my psychological bearings for the first time in four decades. Walking, cycling, gardening, writing and contemplating quietly. I anticipated none of that, yet cannot imagine how I have lived without it. Was I steered here?

Similarly, I started this blog in autumn 2018, intending to ward of the Seasonal Affective Disorder that has darkened autumn and winter days for a number of years. A very effective equivalent to the therapy of letter writing practised so regularly in Birmingham. Also to leave an account of this life for Lauren, Josie and Rory, our children.

Again, boxes ticked happily. But the bigger picture is that I find myself borne along a narrative river, simultaneously heading upstream and downstream. The enjoyment and self-actualisation is phenomenal. I wake each morning contemplating the next instalment. Its background presence provides an ever-widening meaning, quickly available, while day-to-day quandaries come and go.

The gardening efforts, out under the wide Essex skies, are one of the many things that I am meant to do. The sprouts can turn out good or bad.

A few other memories stick out from the Birmingham years. I will clear the decks.

Strangely, my first taste of cheesecake, at a city centre wine bar, at the beginning of year two, in the company of Ray, Paul, Jane, Fran and Fiona. The girls were raving about Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ album.

Then discovering at about the same time that my flat mate, Ian Selby from Swindon, was a law student by day and punk by night. The transition included precisely-applied layers of make-up, and was eye-grabbing. Ian loved the Damned, in particular. He also possessed a photographic memory, put to good use in exams.

Over in Shaun and Dad’s flat, a crowd tried to convince me that gravity could be outfoxed, and that levitation was real. I cried with merriment at this madness. Laid on the kitchen table, I felt myself lifted by six or so fingers. They told me to be quiet and relax, which would help me stay afloat when their digits were removed. The bump back to the table brought more laughter.

A year or so on, Shaun raided the cloakroom at Lake Hall for numerous coats that he continued to put on until he could no longer move his arms. And then whirled around on the dance floor, like a cross between a fat scarecrow and a Michelin Man gone bad, until he fell over with drunken dizziness.

Shortly afterwards, a drive up to Market Drayton, in Shropshire, to drink and stay overnight in the pub run by Mark Armstrong’s parents. With Shaun, Martin and Neil. Literally drinking myself under a table, beneath which I slept. Awakening for a piss in the night and hoping that the wolf of an Alsatian behind the bar had discovered no way to leap across and devour me.

A month or two later, turning up with a few friends at a Sunday night drinking event in the Chemistry department. A bunch of first team rugby players in attendance took offence at something Johnny Price said. He got a light beating and the rest of us were under threat. What stuck in the craw was that our mates Mac and Mark Armstrong (both in this elite corps) were saying that they might “have to” join in against us. We escaped intact, and still able to think for ourselves.

Sometime after this, arriving early for a seminar in 19^th century English literature. Just myself and the tutor, David Lodge, the author of several fairly well-known novels. He talked about Charles Dickens voyaging to America, where he observed that spittoons in the US bars were often loaded to the brim with phlegm.

The following year, an unplanned trip up to Billingham, near Middlesbrough, with the chemistry department. Hosted by ICI, who were scouting for graduate talent. A last minute withdrawal had created a place for me, Big Dad explained, even though I was an arts student. Nice food, decent hotel, moderate beer and the furthest north I have ever ventured. Cold and bleak. And reinforcing my growing suspicion that corporate life was insane, a fiction.

All through the four years, letter writing was a critical part of my life. Armed with a cup of tea, music on the turntable or John Peel on the radio, off I would scrawl, often penning three missives of an evening to friends or family. So enjoyable.

Birmingham days were often a magical time, especially the middle two years. The end academic result, a 2:2 Bachelor of Arts degree, with honours, was fair, given my low level of application.

I was notified of my grade in August 1979. By then I was in real trouble.

Women tend to know when men’s emotions point in new directions. There was a party held at Saxon’s house somewhere around Easter 1979. We had begun to argue, and she pointed out with bitterness at the end of the evening that we had not danced.

The trouble had been working itself up. In a conversation some weeks earlier she had asked me if I loved her. I said, truthfully, with no hesitation, that I really liked her, and had always loved her company, but that I didn’t feel in love. I have a horrible feeling that I even said something along the lines that I knew I would move on, sooner or later. Ouch!

In retrospect, a more lyrical, heartfelt reply would have included how the bliss of belonging had soothed me, and how wonderful it was to feel somebody’s arm around me at night. That I had wanted this so much, and would always be truly grateful to have met her. But still not the three magic words.

We had stagnated. Hardly unusual. Drifting apart, by infinitesimal degrees. Stuck in a routine, so that I increasingly wanted more time with male friends. Still emotionally raw and vulnerable following her dad’s suicide, she felt herself being pushed away.

We had another argument, when I had forgotten a promise to call around at her house an hour earlier than usual. I mulled things over while working the production line at Davenports, and decided that was it. The fun and the lustre had gone.

Our parting racked me with guilt, especially as we had arranged a holiday in Greece together. One of the last things that she said to me was “you’re not made for this world”. Maybe she had a point.

Geordie lad Gav and I rolled up to a party a month or so later. She was playing the piano for some kind of singalong. I walked back out and never saw her again.

An iconic symbol jutting out from my four years at Birmingham University was Mick’s Café, in Dawlish Road, Selly Oak. A ten minute walk from the campus, Mick’s was a place where students and locals could fill their bellies on a mountain of good, cheap, fried food. Jon Marks and I would often dine there in year one.

Service was so quick that you couldn’t read through the copies of the Sun and Daily Mirror scattered around the tables. The food was capped with magnificent portions of chips that were five or maybe six inches high. Plus a big mug of tea. All fully inserted within my size 28 waistline. Ketchup use was massive. Staying awake in afternoon lectures presented challenges.

Mick’s was immortalised by an annual charity event for students known very simply as the Mick’s Café Race. Participants drank a pint of Guinness in the Mermaid bar, ran the mile or so to Mick’s and ate a ‘belly-buster breakfast’. Then ran back for a second pint. Vomiting was usually a consequence.

The mythology impressed me. Toying with the idea, I tried a practice run. Halfway through the meal, my guts were saying ‘not for you’. But then I could never down a yard of ale. Two and a half pints of lager in one, massively-extended gulp. Big Dad and a few others could. Most of my attempts ended up down my shirt.

The other dining memory from Birmingham, is, inevitably, its Indian restaurants. The best curries I have savoured were served in in the so-called ‘Balti Triangle’ zone of Birmingham, encompassing Sparkbrook, Sparkhill and Balsall Heath. But those were enjoyed post-university.

My curry virginity was sacrificed somewhere in Selly Oak, where the very air was perfumed with odours that were utterly foreign to a boy from Basildon. Wasn’t a great fan at first, but curry house ‘sketches’ were steadily woven into the litany of tall tales. Big Dad had the worrying notion that toilets in such establishments were best deprived of their ballcocks. Andy fell asleep with his face in a vindaloo. A few mad buggers attempted to eat the hottest option, with phal sauce. Shamefully, the idea of ‘doing a runner’ was something that most of us tried out.

A more ethical method of eating but not paying was engaged in by John Madden and I in Manchester. In a Moss Side Indian establishment, where staff were in short supply, we sat upstairs waiting for somebody to take our order. We were pissed. We noted all the leftover food on the tables that had yet to be cleared away. The same light flickered in both brains. It was still warm. Every mouthful a taste of free glee. Nobody seemed to notice. Then off for more beer to neutralise any invasive bacteria.

It remains my favourite food. There came a day 43 years after my first curry when Maureen was away. I tucked into curried breakfast, lunch and dinner.

One of the odd pleasures of blogging is that now and again complete strangers subscribe. The biggest source has been the baking fraternity, presumably lured in by the Biscuit Factory title. I’m assuming that the more faint-hearted utilisers of flour have drifted away, confronted with that image of the overflowing Maple Bank dustbin or the besmirched doorstep in Majorca.

One guy that has shown some nice thumbs-ups goes by the name of astijake John, who writes his own blog called ‘Willing Yourself To Win: Life, love and destiny.’ It’s worth a read. His latest blog, The Chicken Men, can be found at https://astijake.wordpress.com/2019/01/03/the-chicken-men/

I mention astijake due to his conviction that our lives follow a path bordered by high fences of fate and destiny. The path goes where it goes, and you had best learn to relax and trust its destinations. Apologies astijake, if I have wrongly paraphrased your ideas, but that’s my impression.

The notion that the power of human free will may be vastly over-rated certainly made me pause for thought. When my eldest daughter Lauren was a child, she was attempting some task or other, and, unusually for her, failing. “It doesn’t want me to,” were her words. The suggestion that kids can see things that adults cannot is not new.

The reasons behind my interest in magic mushroom experiments include the countless testimonies that they reveal a life-force at work, guiding human beings.

Among other fascinating hypotheses I have encountered in recent years is a theory that what we believe to be our three-dimensional, physical universe is in fact a construct created out of non-physical, digital information. An astrophysicist, Craig Hogan, postulated in 2014 that our world is like a “four-dimensional video display”. One year earlier, Germany’s GEO600 gravity-wave detector found evidence of the ‘pixilation’ that Hogan had suggested would exist if the universe was a hologram. Another scientist, Nick Bostrom, has indicated that we may all be existing in a computer game of our own lives, which could have been created, centuries ahead, by our descendants, who would be able to use computing power unimaginable to 21^st century dwellers.

Can’t get my head around that. I’m more inclined to stick with the simple questions. Is the ‘Butterfly Effect’ a product of chance or destiny? Or what really happened in that Norfolk field, in Blog 22? What am I? What is this world? How can I provide maximum benevolence and goodness?

What do you think? Steve Lowndes reckoned that we live in “the land of fuck”, where grasping pleasure whenever available is a duty that provides meaning. The more complex view of the early Christian Gnostics is that man is in a lifelong exile on a planet which is a prison for all mankind; he or she lives in a body which is a prison for the soul; and that the provenance of he or she is a lost and invisible world.

Most humans would probably struggle to see that as our inheritance because we use the nineteenth-century premise of materialism to consign this context as an artefact of primitive minds. But materialism consistently falls apart when under the microscope of quantum physics.

A parallel to the Gnostic notion is that the Creator in a higher dimension wanted to experience lower dimensional existence, and split its magnificently unified and integrated non-physical being into zillions of quadrillions of tiny particles that form our universe. And that our sole job here is to report back on our minute shard of consciousness, to fill in the Creator’s knowledge gaps.

Maybe that explains my blog. Fucked if I know. But I do like to know about the theories.

Neil was blazingly good company when we lived together in the first half of 1979, seeing out our last six months at Birmingham University. He would emerge from his pit in the morning wearing a splendid silk robe, just about covering his vitals. A decent cook, he could rustle up exotic-looking curries using a barrow load of the interesting vegetables found at the many Asian shops around the city.

Big Dad had a way of holding a pint against his heart, for all comers to see where one of his greatest loves lay. Apropos of nothing, he would declare: “I’ll be glad when I’ve had enough!”

On other occasions, he would explain aloud to anyone in the vicinity that “for all the good those suppositories did me, I may as well have shoved them up my arse”. It was such a pleasure to be in his company. He referred to the barmaid in the Sir Harry as “the piece”.

If you got to know him well, he would pull out a picture of himself kneeling bare-chested in a field, grappling with a wild boar, holding a knife that he was thrusting down towards the beast’s neck. Or tell the tale of a rugby club tour, when a stag’s head and antlers was lifted from a clubhouse in France. The driver of the mini-bus would somehow strap on this upper fauna kit to make it look as if the vehicle was being driven down the motorway by a clever deer.

His best story could hold a group spellbound. It went something like this.

You think this winter is cold. One time back in Manchester my knackers were frozen for about three months solid. Some nights only a piping hot curry would get you warm.

I remember this one night when me and some mates got rat-arsed down the local. The lads had to be up for work in the morning, but I knew where I was headed. We had this little local curry house that did takeaways. I fell through the door, and told Abdul that I wanted this curry to be a hot bastard, as fierce as the fuckers in the kitchen could make it. I said I wanted it so hot that it would make a vindaloo taste like a vanilla yoghurt.

“You sure boss?” asked Abdul.

“Have you been outside? I need megatons of heat. Now get that order in.”

Abdul shook his head, and disappeared. I could hear the bastards laughing in the kitchen, and sat for 10 minutes listening to the noises coming out through the connecting door. Bubbling and steaming sounds that made me start to think about what I’d done. Fuck me, every time that door opened the windows of the shop fogged up. Abdul emerged in a while, looking scared, and handed over a carrier bag that seemed to be twitching of its own accord.

Anyway I took the fucker home. Got some funny looks from passers-by at the noise my supper was making. Gurgling and fizzing sounds that were really starting to worry me, like all the chillies were walking around inside the container. I got indoors, emptied it out on a plate, and tried a mouthful. Jesus fuck it was hot. I was hopping round the room, and realised I needed a slash.

So I emptied my bladder, washed my hands and got myself back to the table. That’s when I thought I was hallucinating. The plate was empty. And there was the bloody cat, sitting next to it, licking its lips.

“You little fucking bastard!” I shouted. Grabbed the little shit by its neck, picked it up and opened the back door. Tore the top off our water barrel, shoved the cat in, and banged the top back on. “Serve you fucking right, you greedy bugger.” There was enough in there to drown it umpteen times over.

I was fuming. What the fuck was I gonna eat? In the end I fried up some sausage, egg and bacon, but I couldn’t get over how the bastard fuckpig had stolen the bloody curry. Opened a beer, turned the telly on, and was about to tuck in when there was a knock at the back door.

“Who the fuck’s that at this time of night?” I was getting more and more pissed off with things.

Opened the door, looked out, but nobody there. What the fuck? Was about to bang it shut when I looked down ….and there was the bloody cat, looking up. “Fuck me, what do you want, you little bastard?”

“Have you got any more water please?”

My last Birmingham residence, from September 1978, was a draughty, linear house on the Pershore Road. It looked like this place.

The landlord, Mr Nicholson, belonged to a spiritualist healing church. Keith was in the room next door, but a more academically focused and less hedonistic Keith, who was engaged, ambitious and had enrolled upon a post-graduate M.Sc course. Two other house-mates were either first or second year males, who had their own friendship groups.

Within a few days of moving in, Steve Hudson-Parker had squirted his venom my way. It made me feel wretched, for the first time in my four university years. Things got to me more easily. I grew to be nervous of all kinds of stuff that had washed over me before. As the term wore on, Hudson-Parker was getting into bigger and bigger scraps with everybody in his orbit. Every tale that reached my ears spoke of a fully-fledged psycho. The strange thing was that I never saw him more than once again in my life. On the other side of the road, glaring at me.

That last year – the 4^th for me, and 3^rd for her – saw Saxon and I increasingly using each other’s company to get through the days. Her dad’s suicide blanketed everything darkly. We began to plod. Imperceptibly. When it became clearer, months later, neither of us wanted to pinpoint the trouble, thus avoiding the discomfort that would cause.

Odd memories stick out. Particularly the snow that winter. Standing freezing at bus-stops while Ian Dury’s ‘Hit me with your rhythm stick’ sailed around my cerebellum. Watching the Deer Hunter with Dad and Shaun, who returned every now and again from his Amersham job to stay with Fran. And a healthy diet of casseroles. Lashings of liver, bacon and root vegetables, that would last me four days. Academically, I did quite well in a 20^th century Italian history module. Such a waste that I remember little else.

Keith introduced me to Bournbrook rugby club. I trained and played a few times, but it wasn’t for me. A few soccer games here and there for the History department were equally uninspiring. Things perked up after Christmas, when Big Dad came to live with us. He usually had a tale or quip to cheer, but was also a little battered, after achieving only a pass in his Chemistry finals, and desiring another year for a retake.

The nearest pub, the Sir Harry, is not recalled with massive fondness. Lagers, chitchat, and a nice barmaid, but no ‘sketching’. I generally shied away from the old drinking sessions, with the exception of the awakening in the snow. These were just a pale imitation of former days, I told myself, when hearing of the ongoing exploits of drinking pals who were still around, like Mac, Nigel and Biff.

It was noticed by visiting friends that my appetite for life seemed to have paled. In truth I lacked the bravery and techniques to look into myself. The notion that I might be depressed was unthinkable.

I worked for three short periods at Davenports brewery, beginning in summer 1978. Part of Birmingham’s industrial history, the family brewery dates back to 1827. The company website tells that the company started a ‘Beer at Home’ service in 1904, expanding rapidly and establishing a distribution network across the country. Presumably Thomas Shelby and his Peaky Blinders took a cut of the profits.

My first spell at the place in the picture above involved lots of 6 a.m. starts, which was a first. Alarm clock set for 5 a.m, and a bleary-eyed bus ride. I toiled out in the yard where the empty barrels from the incoming lorries were washed down. Breaks took place in what was little more than a tiny, dark hut. I shut my mouth for long periods so that my work did the talking. Any sign of intellect was jumped on, but I had enough crudity about me to feel at home within a week or two. Slid in the odd joke when the opportunity arose.

Was Harry deluded? The oldest guy in my section used to tell me about the good old days, when the women in the factory were regularly shagged over barrels. I never disputed it, being the new boy. Harry used to try and drink two halves each Friday, when all of the factory was allowed to sample one half of the week’s newly-brewed beers. Another character was Ian, a muscular lad from the tower blocks out at Yardley. He reckoned he and his wife had copulated so many times one morning that he came blood. I did my best to look impressed. Merv, a stylish young man who played bass in a local band, was immensely likeable.

Despite the wider society switch to drainpipe trousers, a surprisingly amount of employees wore baggy jeans to work. With football socks underneath. This allowed one to accommodate four beer bottles above one’s footwear on the way out. Did I ever do that? Damn this memory and its holes.

I think I worked about eight weeks at the brewery in July and August, so that there was a few quid in the pot for September and the next term. Although glad to depart, I went back for a couple of weeks doing part-time evenings at Christmas. And then again in Easter 1979, as finals were looming. I needed the dosh, and made a good friend in Mike, a Brummie who came down to a party in Essex two years later. We used to stand and talk all day while watching out for damaged or dodgy beer bottles as they came out of the wash.

Not too long afterwards, in 1986, capitalism had its consolidatory way. Greenall Whitley bought the company, and the Bath Row site above was progressively decommissioned over the next few years. Empire Star then purchased the Davenports brand as part of the Highgate brewery.

But the name and brand lives on. Shaun sent me this picture on Boxing Day, taken in a new pub at Five Ways. Cheers.