In that same autumn 1976 term as the ‘dustbin and barrel sketch’, five Four Pint Can Club members visited Cambridge for a party. Nick Eastwell had invited just me, but Keith drove Simon, Shaun, Paul and myself down the A45 to the calm and cloisteredTrinity Hall buildings.

Predictably, we got drunk. Less predictably, Nick insisted that I leave the party in his college. Our behaviour included raiding the kitchens and beginning to cook a meal, and probably several worse types of general obnoxiousness. Barred from the blue bloods, it was decided to go for a curry. We wandered in an alcoholic miasma, and I found myself on a street corner with Paul, destiny tying us together again.

A group of Cambridge students were milling around several yards away. I felt frustrated on multiple levels. Hearing something something condescending about our accents and general demeanour, I decided to throw a punch. It seemed to my befuddled mind that the biggest would be the best, bravest target. It is chilling and shameful to recall how I strolled across and lamped the poor guy in the mouth, and then sprinted away around a corner when it became obvious that I had inflicted damage.

Paul and I ended up in an Indian restaurant where the other three had already gathered. Blood from my knuckle had stained my Can Club shirt. Meal finished, the plan was to find the car and begin the sobering drive back to Brum. However, as we walked back to the town centre, the lads that I had accosted were still standing around. “There’s the blighter – nab him” said one of them. A memorable phrase. I legged it again, only to see a police car approaching from the direction I was taking. The door opened, and I slowed down, walked across and got in. There was blood on my shirt and at least six witnesses. A slam dunk.

Cell number 5 in Cambridge police station was my resting place. I felt as sick with worry as my drunkenness would allow. It transpired that the punchee belonged to Magdalene College, and had a top barrister for a dad. I had broken his tooth, and they charged me with Actual Bodily Harm. They took mug shots and fingerprints, and told me that I would need to return in a few weeks for the court case.

My misery was broken slightly by the sound of the lads piling into the police station and asking if they could take me home. On the long journey I vowed to give up violence. And never threw a punch again at anybody.

The punishment three weeks later was a £30 fine, and the fear that either my university or parents would find out. Fortunately, neither did.

My eye was caught a few days ago by a headline that just 2% of British adults put a “great deal” of trust in journalists to tell the truth. The research by Yougov and Cambridge University surveyed over 2,000 adults and found that 16% said they had a “fair amount” of trust in journalists to tell the truth, while the vast majority (77%) said they had little to no trust in journalists. In fact, journalists were found to be distrusted roughly as much as people who run large companies, UK government ministers and senior US government officials.

No surprise. There was a fact-free story in The Guardian earlier this week entitled “Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy”. The story contained zero proof for its central claim that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort met multiple times with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The plot holes in the narrative were gaping, with no efforts by the journalist to flesh out anything beyond “sources say”. Throwaway, rubbish reporting.

I was a Guardian reader for decades. Even though it has managed to maintain an image as a respectable mainstream outlet which markets itself to the political left, its biases in recent years have, for me, made it unreadable. If Donald Trump coughs, the Guardian reports it as some form of attack on minority groups. Its Russia conspiracy drivel, vicious undermining of Jeremy Corbyn and non-stop pro-war propaganda against Syria have all increased since its booting out of the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger several years ago.

The bottom line, for some time now, is that mainstream media globally, covering the full span of demography, is owned by a handful of billionaires, who have staffed their editorial boards and teams with establishment figures. The Media Reform Coalition found in 2015 that just seven corporations owned 71% of the entire UK media establishment. This not only has a serious impact on what stories are covered, and how public opinion is shaped, but it has made it professionally precarious for journalists to present ideas contrary to that status quo. As John Pilger found out.

I still go to the Guardian for its headlines. If a story interests, I will see what a range of other commentators have to say. Then form my own opinion, which may or may not agree with the thrust of the story. The journalism I look for tells truth to power, wears its opinions openly but ensures that it distinguishes them from arguments of fact. Putting names and dates to quotes, and backing contentions with facts.

 

 

 

Last night’s dream carried a warning of sorts. I drove a vehicle from one area to another, along a connecting road. On the way back, the road had deteriorated, and was punctuated by two identical notices across the road, maybe 50 yards apart: ‘No Public Access’. I went around them and carried on.

Consequently, I have attempted some circumspection in this blog. And will caution that parts might seem horribly distasteful, to some eyes.

Setting off a few days early for the new autumn term, in my second year at university, I sat on the coach from London Victoria to Birmingham with enormous pent-up energy. September 1976.

I had a room of my own at last, sharing a newly-built self-catering apartment with four other lads. Ray, Simon, and two unknown guys – John and Ian. Maple Bank, the collective name of the flats, was a stone’s throw from High Hall.

The excitement and anticipation were churning my guts. Paul (of course), Don, Johnny Price and Mark were next door, and our Geordie mates Shaun and Andy were in another block, nearby. Martin Dyer and Mark Armstrong opposite them. Ray’s geography female mates Jane, Allyson and Fiona and their friend Fran in a flat at right angles to ours, one floor up.

I was all shadow and light. No middle point equilibrium or calm. Every sense and instinct said the air balloon of drunken fun was poised to climb to towering new heights.

Andy and Shaun had introduced and talked up the concept of “sketching” in year one. This verb came to dominate conversations over the next two years. “What a sketch”, we would howl, either as the particular daft activity was taking place or as we sat around the next day, analysing every move the night before, like Lineker and Shearer on Match of the Day.

A natural leader emerged that autumn and winter, the one and only Neil, the Mancunian that we tagged Big Dad. A mature student of around 24, who shared with Shaun and Andy. Dad was our mentor, providing fathomless wells of stories and jokes, as well as a random series of disappearances lasting for several days. These added to his enigma, already hinted at by stories of a broken marriage.

Big Dad founded the ‘Four Pint Can Club’, a loose affiliation of idiots who wore a sack of blue rugby shirts dug up by Neil.

The club’s raison d’etre was epitomised one Sunday afternoon at a soccer match. We decided to go and watch Ray play in goal. His description of our arrival, over the brow of a hill, remains a classic. “First of all I could hear a load of singing in the distance, rugby songs and the like. Then you could see these cases of beer, which seemed to be moving towards the pitch under their own steam. In a second, you could see that the beer was being carried along on peoples’ heads, like the women do in Africa. Then there was this sea of blue rugby shirts rising towards us, over the brow of the hill, and you silly bastards wearing them and singing your filth.”

We stood and drank can after can of Breaker, or some equally potent lager. Then our Liverpudlian wild man, Keith, decided he needed a wee. He stood casually at the side of the pitch, splashing the legs of an unfortunate running down the wing. The day went on in this fashion, paid for by taxpayers and parents. The transgression stirred something in my soul, and was just a warm up for some fantastically mad and sordid behaviour in that first term.

The most royal tale, which was to spread far and wide in the following weeks, came on a cold Saturday night after Keith reported to us that he had crashed his car into a parked equivalent on the way home from Bournville Rugby Club. Undaunted, he staggered from Selly Oak over to Maple Bank, and suggested, on arrival, that it was time to nick a barrel of beer. Off we piled in a car, under cover of darkness. Like an SAS raid, we were in and out of the entrance to the back of the chosen target in less than 30 seconds, with the number plates covered in case anyone had seen our move.

We lugged the barrel into our flat, set it up next to the kitchen sink. Someone produced a blue dustbin as a temporary form of toilet for those deciding that the loo was too far. I was already in the land of uncontainable glee. I think most of us knew that this evening was legend in the making. There was an elated pride that nicking barrels was becoming our craft. (In fact when Keith was once questioned about the fallout from stocktaking, he boldly announced: “We’re taking the stock!”)

The Geordie lads worked on getting the barrel open, while we drank whatever else was in the room. Punctuated by several lads having a slash in the empty dustbin, the evening accelerated away at breakneck speed, bringing faces old and new into the room and two girls who hid behind the curtain every time somebody whipped out a cock for a pee. The second element to the brew was inevitable. Keith offered a lead. He regurgitated a chicken madras in the sink and then proceeded to pull out the fleshy bits and re-eat them.

No sooner had he cleared away his second-hand poultry than we filled the sink with the un-imprisoned beer and filled our mugs again and again, ignoring the floating bits. The songs started. We played a drinking game, where the forfeit was an item of clothing. More flesh came into display. Bacchanalia was us.

As the dustbin gradually filled with piss and, increasingly, puke, events unravelled at a speed and in directions that nobody had anticipated. One minute a group of friends were chewing the fat on a Saturday evening. Within a short period we were all out of our heads, half-naked.

Somebody knocked into the dustbin, but the air was so thick with cameraderie and delight that few saw it topple. A wave of indescribable liquids cascaded out of the bin and engulfed the floor, covering our feet and swilling round the room. Like being in one of those family swimming pools where the tide machine simulates a minor sea storm. Lapping from wall to wall.

These Dionysian rites would not have suited all tastes. We piled out of the room, and fought shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway, using brooms to hold back an ocean of bodily wastes.

Alchemy was at work. Deliciously, wildly drunk and bonded, we floated on a plateau where nothing could defeat us.

Then somebody suggested a mass streak. Off came whatever clothes still adorned us. A group ran bollock-naked into the now sub-zero November night, halting cars, eventually performing a can-can on a hillock. A photographer for one of the official university magazines captured the sight for posterity.

Phenomenal social glue, lasting a lifetime. Even now the recollection brings tears of laughter. Nobody had ever intimated that such outrageously delightful behaviour was possible. A proper coming of age, throwing off past shackles.

 

PS. Maureen observed that this was Birmingham’s own version of Burning Man. She also had to read some of it with her eyes closed, she said. That’s clever.

 

 

I didn’t appreciate Bill Hicks at first. Several friends recommended him about 15 years ago. I borrowed a DVD. Watched it late at night and usually fell asleep. Maybe it was his Georgian drawl, or just the beer. More likely I had yet to realise how few clothes the emperor has.

A few weeks back, listening to a podcast, the lightning bolts finally flashed. The last 30 minutes consisted of excerpts from some of Bill’s shows. I hadn’t paid him any serious attention for a decade or so. It was delightful to witness somebody lampoon power and call out bullshit with such bravado.

I think it’s interesting. The two drugs that are legal, alcohol and cigarettes, do absolutely nothing for you at all. But the drugs that might open your mind up to realize how badly you’re being fucked every day of your life? Those drugs are against the law. He-heh, coincidence? See, I’m glad mushrooms are against the law, ’cause I took ’em one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, “My God! I love everything.” Yeah, now, that’s a hazard to our country… how are we gonna justify arms dealing if we know we’re all one?!

 

Comedy that makes you sincerely consider the possibility that everything you believe is a lie while you piss yourself chuckling.

This needs to be said: there never was a war.

“How can you say that, Bill?”

Well, a war is when two armies are fighting. I guess what surprised me the most was the discrepancy in casualties: Iraq, one hundred fifty thousand casualties, USA…seventy-nine! So you can see, right there, there never was a war.

Watching a missile fly down an Iraqi air vent, pretty unbelievable, but couldn’t we feasibly use that same technology to shoot food to hungry people? You know what I mean? Fly over Ethiopia: “There’s a guy that needs a banana!” “Thank you, thank you…” The stealth – banana. Smart fruit!

 

The balls and the skills to tell the audience it’s all bullshit, while clearly articulating why it’s all bullshit and still making them hoot.

You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know. During the Persian Gulf war, those intelligence reports would come out: “Iraq: incredible weapons – incredible weapons.”

“How do you know that?” “Uh, well … we looked at the receipts. But as soon as that check clears, we’re goin’ in. What time’s the bank open? Eight? We’re going in at nine. We’re going in for God and country and democracy….. Get motivated behind this, let’s go!”

 

Biting humour that rips the rug out from underneath everything being sold.

We live in a world where John Lennon, was murdered, yet Barry Manilow continues to put out fucking albums. God-dammit! If you’re gonna kill somebody, have some fucking taste. I’ll drive you to Kenny Rogers’ house.

 

Listening to this stuff was like medicine. No respect for the political correctness that has infected modern stand-up comedy.

Now we have women priests. What do y’all think of that? Women priests? [scattered applause] Yeah. I think it’s fine, women priests, you know. So what? Now we got priests of both sexes I don’t listen to.

Or…

I guarantee you Satan’s gonna have no problems on this planet, ‘cause all the women are gonna go:  “What a cute butt!”

“He’s Satan.”

“You don’t know him like I do.”

“He’s the Prince of Darkness.”

“I can change him.”

 

 I love this one.

You ever notice how people who believe in Creationism look really unevolved? Eyes real close together, big furry hands and feet. “I believe God created me in one day.” Yeah, looks like He rushed it. 

 

Fearless in his commentaries about Bible Belt America.

The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. That’s the message we’re brought up with, isn’t it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.

 

Scratching the itches that most comics dare not with their lukewarm fluff.

You know it’s true that politics does make for strange bedfellows. I read a quote from Saddam Hussein two days after the [Clinton] election, we had to wait two days for him to quit gut laughing. “Aaaahahahahaha, the elephant is dead,” Saddam Hussein says in his quote, “we have nothing against America, we just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccerball.”

And I thought: that’s so weird, ’cause … that’s what I wanted to see! Wow, me and Hussein, we’re like this! Who would’a thunk it?!

 

What’s the most daring thing you’ll see most comics do at present? Make fun of Donald Trump? Slag off Brexit? Bill didn’t do sitting ducks. He would go off on his anti-southerner rants to redneck audiences, remarking on how the locals would bring shotguns to UFO sightings, and how abduction in such a gathering was by far anybody’s best option.

You know how in many parts of our troubled world they are yelling ‘revolution! revolution!’

In Tennessee they are yelling ‘evolution . . . we want our thumbs!’ The thing is they see people with thumbs on T.V. all day, boy that’s got to drive them hog-wild huh? [mimics monkey] Trailers are shaking.

 

 I was in Nashville, Tennessee last weekend and after the show I went to a waffle house and I’m sitting there and I’m eating and reading a book. This waitress comes over to me (mocks chewing gum) ‘what you readin’ for?’

…wow, I’ve never been asked that; not ‘What am I reading’, ‘What am I reading for?’ Well, goddamnit, you stumped me…I guess I read for a lot of reasons — the main one is so I don’t end up being a fuckin’ waffle waitress. Yeah, that would be pretty high on the list. Then this trucker in the booth next to me gets up, stands over me and says [mocks Southern drawl] ‘Well, looks like we got ourselves a readah’

Aaahh, what the fuck’s goin’ on? It’s like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume or something. Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here? I read, there I said it. I feel better.

 

Few stones unturned with Bill. Not just notions of white supremacy, but corporatism, oligarchy, genocide, police militarization and, of course, mass media.

Wouldn’t you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition? Perhaps? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Just for once?

“Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

 

Bill died in 1994, aged 32. Just my opinion, but more of this comedy, which helps people see the world differently, would be so welcome. Frankie Boyle has a go, a guy called Lee Camp is having a go in America.

Hicks would have a field day if he somehow came back.

I visualise him slowly leaking the air from the tyres of the whole ‘Russia is more evil than Mordor’ nonsense.

I see him tearing into the US and British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and the estimated 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five that starved to death between April 2015 and October 2018 as a direct result.

And wouldn’t he rip apart the Julian Assange shenanigans. Assange, who founded an innovative leak outlet on the grounds that corrupt power can be fought with truth and transparency, opposed by powerful people who need to be able to lie to you and hide information from you without being inconvenienced or embarrassed by WikiLeaks.

To finish, a grand-scale Hicks thought.

Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

 

 

Every now and again a piece of fiction stands out. This one was written 25 years ago, as the first in Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy.

So good that I finished it at around 6 a.m. this morning. Adventure just after the end of WW2 involving two 16- and 17-year old Texan lads who cross into Mexico by horseback, without a plan, and secure employment at a large ranch. The descriptions of the land, and the animals, are exquisite.

All of the characters are physical and practical, no abstract notions getting in the way of staying alive in a generally hostile environment. Foreboding and violence never far away. Nothing comes easy. Some challenges cannot be met. The joy of eating after days of hunger, and the unsurpassed feeling of sunshine on skin, jump out of the pages.

The main character John Grady adores and understands horses. Fairness, equity and an eye for opportunity run through him, bouncing back the plentiful decency of strangers along his paths. When under threat, his pragmatic violence flows just as naturally.

Some of the clipped dialogue was reminiscent of Hemingway at his best, particularly the romance. Plenty of simple Spanish is thrown in, where the meaning peeks through to the uninitiated.

Pages just kept getting turned. What’s next? How can he endure?

Cars and radios and oil derricks were dotted across the last pages. Social changes afoot that will eradicate deeply embedded American skill-sets.

Easily the best thing I’ve read for some time.

I wonder what went through my head on that Santa Ponsa doorstep. The recollections of others are that I was rather proud the next day. “Gleeful” in fact.

More than anything the bloke above didn’t want to upset or disrespect the Irish girl. But sitting alone, drinking away my gloom and wandering off was hardly an answer. Perhaps the depths of my bowels were handing out a gigantic ‘fuck you’ to the third-rate protocol loosely guiding our mores and behaviour.

The whole boy-girl business was difficult. With no help from peer narratives which were rubbish descriptions of critical rites of passage. “What did you get off her?” “She fucking loved it.” “Goes like a train.” “Frigid cow.”

For me, these hollow gems were about as helpful as Sun headlines – Gotcha! Nailed her! – in describing what had always felt like complex experiences. A crucible where falling angels might bump into rising apes. Not a game of skittles.

Adrift, I would have seriously benefitted from a wiser, older mentor in trying to set my emotional compass to true north. But even my little brain could figure out that you stayed stuck in the southern lowlands if emotion and depth of feeling were absent. The Blog 52 line captures it: “I wanted a good-hearted, loving, attractive woman to open up like a flower for me, on a permanent basis.”

Yet, in my burgeoning roster of jokes, I was captive to the peer narratives. They were the pivots on which the foreplay and punchlines swung.

Having rolled these themes around today, I keep returning to my inability to negotiate. Couldn’t lay down, and then shift my boundaries without tugs of hesitance, fear and shame. And so couldn’t sit with the Irish girl and talk plainly. Never allowed by Eric to debate any house rules in the formative years, and punished physically for transgression. Maybe ripples of huge held-in sorrow and frustration from that handicap undulated down the years to Majorca. Where a piece of the pipe was perhaps unblocked. Bill apparently remarked that “even a St Bernard wouldn’t do one that big”.

The bloke below has moved along. He is still learning to be honest, and take the trauma that can come with exposing shames. But it has gradually become clear that he is his own best storyteller and sole rule-maker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things had changed at home when I arrived back in Essex in summer 1976.

While I was in Birmingham, Eric had blagged himself a new job. As the secretary of the golf club where he had been a member, Maylands, in Harold Park, Romford. After the slow decline of his scrap metal business, other metals sector jobs had proved unsatisfactory, so this was quite a coup. The Bowers Gifford home was sold, and we had a new family home in the course grounds, living in a flat above the professional’s shop. .

We inherited a new dog, Suki, and a feral cat, Clay, that would curl up with Suki each night, and terrorise our cat Fred. I played a few rounds of evening golf, always gratis, but lacked the skills of my brother, dad and mum. Phyllis now worked in the Basildon offices at the cosmetics manufacturer Yardleys, and kindly got me a job for a month or so to fund another holiday in the sun.

Majorca, this time, with the Southend crew. No Paul Seligson. From left to right, Bill Butcher and Paul Spracklin, John Madden, Nick and myself in the pic below, which Al took. The observer of layers, which we needed in the rain.

Honestly, I didn’t rate this holiday as highly as some of the others did. Picked up a tan, some OK memories and a couple of rough hangovers. We stayed at Nick’s uncle’s flat, within an apartment block in Santa Ponsa, half a mile or so from the beach.

My best memory is probably dancing freely to Bowie’s ‘TVC 15’ in a local club on our first night. Flailing around and letting it hang out. Nick and I were joined by a little blond girl called Jane, who pulled me …… and then changed her mind on the beach the next day when she saw Bill. Jane’s younger sister Jessica got cosy with Al at some stage. We stayed in Santa Ponsa most evenings, after one pricey trip to the clubs of Magaluf.

The days were relaxing. Tanning up nicely in the heat. Reading in the shade. Long swims. Keepy-up soccer. John hanging by his legs from trees and performing beach handstands. Burgers, paellas and cold cokes for lunch. John and I worked long and hard to perfect a stunningly handsome look where we closed one eye and bent our bottom lips downward. Bill didn’t want to play.

The holiday is remembered by some for an evening when I disappeared and then pitched back up at the flat in the early hours. We had befriended a group of Irish girls the previous night, and I had kissed one and then changed my mind in the cold light of day. Like Jane did!

It was awkward. Always aware of others’ feelings, I tried to make it clear, with kindness, that I wasn’t interested. And ended up drinking alone in a bar where the others sat outside. After that, who knows? I returned to self-awareness some time later in the dark at the back of a restaurant, somewhere near the beach, with a mangy dog sniffing around me. Walked back uphill to our residence, but for some reason relieved myself by the front door of a nearby flat. One turd deposited neatly on the doormat. I was told this was mine. Nick was livid, while everybody else cracked up laughing.

Worth noting that Paul Spracklin diced with death or serious injury a couple of times. He climbed over the flat’s balcony some 4 floors up, in an existential exploration of gravity and space. Having survived and returned, he also veered off the side of a road at one stage, maybe dropping 15 feet before his fall was broken.

All pleasant enough – unless you were the doormat owner. Once back in Essex, I was itching to return to Brum. It felt as if there was something big in the offing.

 

 

 

At some stage during the last term at High Hall, Keith from Liverpool and Simon from Wigan entered my life. Biology students who knew John Noble.

One early summer evening they parked their motorbikes outside and came up to 1016, stating that they had a ‘sketch’ in mind. They undressed, and returned to the lift with just their motorbike helmets. Jon and I looked down from the window to the car park, watching them don their helmets and mount their bikes. Passers-by were smiling or frowning or looking shocked.

And off they went, cruising around the Vale Site, which contained three halls of residence. Evening breeze wafting through their chest hair and pubes.

I thought this was daring and marvellous. Tears of joy and laughter rolling down my cheeks. They returned in 5 minutes to cheers from the 1016 window. Back up in the lift they came, and reclothed in our room, with Keith happily proclaiming himself the possessor of the larger dick.

In the next couple of years, as my Enlightenment proceeded, “getting your gear off” became quite a theme for our group.

 

Two earlier school holidays also came to mind. Even fewer bullet points.

 

1971: Trip to Leningrad and Moscow in Russia.

*Leningrad Hermitage. The outside looked stunning beyond compare.

*Our Russian teacher Pete Walkley grilled our tour guide about a Christian church.

*Looking out of the train to Moscow, seeing peasants in the fields.

*An older lad called Will Deboux became hugely drunk, and insulted the teachers.

*Seeing the Kremlin/Red Square/Lenin’s mausoleum.

*Leaving the Bolshoi Ballet during the intermission, bored.

*Talking with a drunken homeless man on a bridge over the River Moskva. A free, cynical man.

*Walking through the Gum department store in Moscow. One of us dropped litter, and a soldier trained his rifle upon us.

 

1973: Cruise on Germany’s River Rhine.

*Rooming with Paul Seligson, of course.

*Beautiful views from the famous Lorelei rock.

*Exploring Hamburg’s Reeperbahn red light district, wide-eyed.

* Meeting a group of East London schoolgirls.

*Drinking a litre of lager in Cologne.

* Stealing a tape from a German shop: The Best of Cream.

 

 

 

 

In the summers of 1974 and 1975, I holidayed in the South of France with school friends. My memory of these trips to the Giens peninsula is very poor, no better than 10 bullet points for each:

1974

*Al, Nick and Paul were the companions. They did the planning, I fell in line.

*Train from London to Dover. Ferry to Calais. French train to Paris and then down to France’s Mediterranean coast. They pointed, I followed.

*Nick’s family had stayed previously at the campsite, near Hyeres, on the Giens peninsula.

*We were horrified at the price, before Nick realised the old guy was using the pre-1960 franc. Division by 100 sorted us out.

*The toilets and shower block smelled equally of shit and soap.

*My companions talked more than was natural about shampooing, drying and styling their hair.

*The heat was fiercer than anything I had known. I burned up atrociously. Had to wear a white tee-shirt on the beach. My shoulders were scarred for months after.

*Large dragon flies zoomed around our evening campfire.

*Vesta meals were the staple.

*We stopped off in Paris ‘en retour’. Found a cheap boulangerie somewhere on the Left Bank to feed ourselves.

 

1975

* Same destination, but this time with Si Gaze instead of Paul. Si couldn’t speak French, which upset him at times.

*We travelled down in Al’s Saab car, with its column change gearstick. The car needed tender handling, and we bailed out on at least one big hill.

*More beer was drunk than in 1974. One evening we almost ended up in a bundle with a large group of leather-jacketed French lads.

*A group of French girls befriended us on the beach. Keepy-up football passed the time.

*The girls lived fairly locally. She who fancied Nick invited us to her house. We got pissed and drove the family’s mopeds through the town like lunatics, crossing the main road from narrow side streets with no view of the oncoming traffic. The police were called out to stop the English madness.

*Another drunken evening I was translating from the French, for Si, and for some reason repeating it all back in French to Al.

* We shopped at the first hypermarket I had ever seen. A Carrefour? Huge.

* My holiday trademark, as we drove through France, was to shout joyfully out of the back window. “Otez les cacks” was my favourite, translating roughly as ‘take off your pants”. Even now, I’m chuckling at that wit. What a cultural delight the English are.

*Another favourite insult was “branleur” (‘wanker’). I tried that on a hard-looking bloke pacing the street in Marseilles, who came racing after the car. Scary.

*On the way back we traversed Grenoble, and camped by Lake Geneva, where the saltless water required more effort in swimming. We also drove through Luxembourg, and maybe some of Belgium.