Below is the first chapter of a novella set in Stockton in the 80s and today, that will feature in First XI.
Enjoy...
Colin opened his eyes but it was only marginally lighter than when they were closed. He strained his neck muscles to a higher angle to see over the pillow. A pair of wide, red LCD eyes stared back at him. He strained further and saw the dreaded 6: next to them. He shifted his weight carefully so as to slip out from under the duvet softly and not disturb the large warm mound next to him. He looked back anxiously as he tiptoed to the door but the mound settled itself without any further movement. He edged out of the door toward the bathroom barely registering the loud fart that emitted from the mound.
Colin turned on the bathroom light which blinded him momentarily with its stark intensity. He preferred the low intensity energy-saving bulbs that dotted the house. It was almost the law now according to the media and the government and while he was less bothered about climate change and the Environment than your average marmoset but when Wilkinsons were selling them three for a pound then he became part of the solution. That said, you did need one a light that worked in the toilet. Even David Attenborough would have to admit that there was no virtue to be had in pissing in the dark.
He showered, toweled himself off and filled the sink with warm water while he lathered up to shave. He shaved quickly with his latest space-age razor. Colin didn't need to shave every day. He was one of those lucky lads who hadn’t reached full maturity until he was well into his teens and didn't fully appreciate this money saving gift until later in life, if ever. You paid a high price, literally, for a chest and chinful of hair.
He did like buying space-age razors advertised by football superstars however. Money was tight. Always tight but he allowed himself this one extravagance. All the whiz-bang gadgets, aerofoils, vibrating buttons, superfluous blades at odd angles, all secretly thrilled him. "If its good enough for David Beckham" he always thought to himself. Good enough to have a permanent red stubble rash anyway. After drying himself off fully, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. A 38- year-old man with a reddish face, steely blue eyes and a receeding, graying channel of hair, in the middle of his head, the grain leading away from him. If Colin had been living in 1957 then his hairstyle would be ultra fashionable. As it was 50 years later, he wished he looked less like a young Mike Baldwin, from Coronation Street, and more like his grandson, Jamie. He didn’t know the actor who played him but he did have an impressive mop of hair. Like all men, Colin was sensitive about his receeding hairline. Even more so when one of the warehousemen at work said he had a “V-neck” hairstyle. That was the first of the now, frequent jibes. “Baldwin” was another and he was glad that Steve Maclaren, the previous Middlesbrough manager, had left his post recently because the chant “Two Steve Maclarens” to the tune of “Guantanamera”, used to ring out from between the massed stocks of chocolate bars, crisps and soft drinks when he passed through the warehouse.
Colin edged himself into the spare bedroom at the front of the house. He always laid out his uniform the night before. Despite his laid-back attitude, he was quite fastiduous and always liked everything to be neat and tidy. Embroided navy polo shirt? check. Black slacks? check. Black Nike trainers? check. Calvin Klein boxers? check. Homer Simpson socks? check.
He also didn't want to move around the main bedroom in the dark for fear of waking the mound. Not worth his while. Not worth his while at all.
Colin edged downstairs and into the kitchen and flipped the kettle’s ON switch. It was already filled as part of his routine from the night before, this saved him valuable seconds. He went through to the front room and opened the curtains in front of the patio doors that faced onto their back garden. The threadbare state of the lawn reflected the carpet. Almost a mirror image at times of tuft and bald patches, with two plastic chairs and a flyaway plastic table secured with a brick resting on the middle of it. Colin knew scams when he saw them and mentally saluted the man who first moved his rickety old chairs outside and had the cheek to call them “garden furniture”. There was plenty of it on the estate – bikes, cars, the odd fridge. Not quite what Alan Titchmarsh would have in mind he was sure.
The grey semi-dawn that greeted him over the back, razorwire lined fence was the same colour and brightness as the curtains he had just pulled back. He closed them then opened them again to prove to himself that his mind wasn't playing tricks on him. But no, the translucent grey curtains didn't block out the light at all. They just limply hung around, their presence unnoticed unless you took particular care to look, like an old man in Ladbrokes the day before pension day.
It had been windy the previous night, not just in the bedroom, and the lawn had attracted a smattering of damp brown leaves.
Colin had always liked Novembers. His birthday was on November 4th and he always combined his celebration with Guy Fawkes Night so it felt like two birthdays. Like so much else in life, it was better, or seemed better, when he was younger. Novembers provided the odd burst of excitement early on before a long fallow period, generally building up to something or somebody else more exciting elsewhere. Colin was definitely one of life’s Novembers. Unfortunately for him, and everybody else, it was January.
The worst of all the months. As far away from Christmas as can be, the nearest event of note being Valentine’s day, everybody skint or cutting down on tabs and booze and making you feel like a lightweight or a turncoat if you hadn’t. Colin didn’t really care less but he did feel the pinch. The January squeeze was useful camoflauge for the tight and poor alike.
He poured the hot water carefully into his favourite Middlesbrough FC mug. Slightly chipped on one side and with the handle repaired where it had once broken, it still proudly boasted "SUPER BORO - 1st Division 1988/89" in faded red letters on the front. He always tried to keep enough water in the kettle to reboil it, in case he needed it to thaw the windscreen of his van.
He took his tea into the front room – he would never have referred to it as a sitting room or, heaven forbid, a lounge - and sat down to enjoy his precious ten minutes of Colin time. The ten minutes at the start of the day, the ten minutes before he had to leave for work, the ten minutes he shared with his mug and his breakfast bar - Fruit and Fibre today - when for just ten blissful minutes he was once again the master of his own destiny and therefore, the universe.
He exercised his power wilfully, flipping between GMTV, Charlie and Lola on Cbeebies and Georgie Thompson on Sky Sports News. Those precious minutes that seperated 6:50am and 7:00am, the minutes filled with last nights goals and reaction, pre-school cartoons and the daily worship at the altar of celebrity, those ten minutes could almost certainly be described as the best, most positive minutes of Colin's day. They were his and his alone.
With mournful inevitability, Mickey Mouse's oversized hands pointed to both 7 and 12 so Colin finshed his tea, carefully deposited the mug on top of precarious pile of crockery that grew from the sink and fastened his fleece up to his neck before he went outside of the house.
Their semi-detached home didn’t have a driveway so he always had to park the van outside of the house. This was out of the necessity of security as much as convenience. Tilery was a rough estate in a rough town and even though Colin and his family were known on the estate, it wasn’t above the malice or general boredom of a pair of little chavs to smash a window or pry open the back doors to see if they could have anything away. He used to himself when he was their age.
The van always took too long to warm up when he started it in the winter. He often resolved to rise 15 minutes earlier to allow himself the luxury of starting the van and letting the diesel engine run for a while to warm it up. The trouble was that this would take about 15 minutes and would interfere with his precious Colin time, so he made do with the standard issue warmth of his company fleece instead.
Colin was a delivery driver and vending machine operative for Loughran and Sons vending services limited, Stockton-on-Tees.
It took about 20 minutes to drive to the industrial unit where they were based by which time the heater had woken up and was beginning to heat the cab just as he parked and turned the engine off. Colin was too poor for irony so it was filed under ‘Bloody Typical’ – Teesside’s unofficial motto.
Colin had been with the firm since 1987 when he was 18 and was good friends with Paul Loughran, the eldest son of the owner, John Loughran. They had known each other at school and played for the same football and hockey teams. They got on well and Paul put in a good word for Colin with his dad to secure him the job. Competition was tough and Colin was grateful to get a job of any kind at all. Unemployment was in five figures in the town at the time and the local council would, unbelievably, advertise this figure on a hoarding above the High Street. Updated weekly, some people wondered if this was Marxist dogma run amok or a flawed but well-meaning attempt to show the miniscule progress being made in reducing the figure in the Borough. Most observers thought it was just stupid.
Paul wasn't the sharpest tool in the draw but he was a grafter. He knew his limitations but he got his head down and worked hard. Colin was the opposite. He was smart enough without being intellectual and whilst he had some naturally ability his overriding trait was laziness. If some people can be described as driven, Colin was a passenger. Intent to drift through the week from Monday to Friday with overtime on Saturdays, intent to drift through life with no particular plan or goal. So long as he had enough to go out on a weekend and a week in Spain every summer, then life was enough.
When Colin started with the firm he and Paul were both drivers and stockers. Driving the vans and produce round a set list of companies with Loughran vending machines. They had to check the stocks within the machines, replace out-of-date stock with fresh, total up the cash received by the machines and remove excess so that all the machines had was a maximum £20 float in change so in the not-so-rare event that they were knocked off, there wasn’t much cash for them to get away with. The work was easy enough and got you around various Teesside workplaces and several opportunities to chat up the numerous receptionists and cafeteria girls you would inevitabely come across.
Paul worked a similar round to Colin but was more punctual and conscientious. He had to be, as the eldest son in the family run business. His younger brother Gary was still at school and his experience of the business was limited to coming in on a Saturday, riding on the forklift in the warehouse and hanging out in the office, enjoying the perk of being the cute bosses son, which allowed a seemingly never-ending supply of chocolate bars and cans of pop, in the days when the worst they would do to you was give you excess wind.
Paul was also diligent and precise. It took longer for him to stock the machines, cash up, checking and double checking the take but he got their in the end. The added pressure of expectation, being the next in line to the Loughran throne drove him. Whether he liked it or not, he was the heir. “Appointed by god” his dad had told him, half in jest, whenever Paul had suggested an alternative career path. He now realised that it was best to keep these occasional thoughts to himself.
As well as learning at the sharp end of the job, Paul had the omnipresent John to advise, lecture, tell, cajole, bully, impart, show, suggest, persuade, threaten, and demonstrate the finer points of running the business. John was a mans man and patriarch before the term entered wider public use. Not that anybody who knew him would use the word anyway. John was suspicious of unnecessary syllabuls and those that used them. Once the youngest of seven children, now the youngest of four, John had begun work at the huge ICI plant at Wilton aged 15 and had not stopped since. John was that worst of self-made men, poorly educated and chippy with it, he displayed his disadvantages as a badge of pride. He was successful because of his ignorance, not despite it. His relative wealth and success insulated his insecurities and his reputation became his public armour.
He never had time for smart-alecs and baloney merchants and now he had the money to back his mouth up. His life view had prevailed and it was his duty to spread the creed. Education was a free babysitter until 16 and then he had new employees. The schools and the women did their job of preparing his workers whilst he did his of making sure that their was work for them.
Paul loved his father, as all sons do, but couldn’t bring himself to admit that he actually liked him. Aware he was in a losing competition with him since his birth, he realised that he was also in for a tough fight with his younger brother. Clearly his dad’s favourite, more for his close resemblance to him and his attitudes, Paul decided to plough the safe path of least resistance that was the firm ground of family succession. He suspected that Gary would be able to break out of the birth-to-grave cycle of the firm if he so wanted, a choice that had evaded him, so Paul began his arduous journey.
After finishing his rounds, he spoke to his dad about the days and weeks trade. Whenever he was able, John took some time out of his own schedule to teach him the finer details of the trade. They studied the firms books, orders, purchase ledgers and agreements. Paul learned about margins, cashflow, balances, perishable stock, rightoffs, trade discounts and lots of other words that washed over Colin in the shoptalk and the morning business reports like the surf washes over the pebbles on Saltburn beach.
Paul got Friday afternoons off to go to the local technical college and study for a business certificate. Although this went against John’s ingrained philosophy, he got a grant from the local Teesside Training and Enterprise Council for Paul and Colin to go. In fact, by writing this off against tax, John was actually making money from it. And if there was one thing he enjoyed more than disparaging education then it was getting one over on that very system.
While Paul went to the college to study, Colin found a better use for his sanctioned time off. He told people he had a regular appointment with his speculative investment consultant, Mr William Hill. It usually took them about 20 seconds to realise that he meant the bookmakers of the same name. He placed his regular weekend wagers of such varying degrees of complexity that a maths graduate would struggle to be able to fully explain the differences between a Yankee and a Canadian. Not that it mattered though because he had a 99.9% failure rate. The joke amongst the other gamblers who worked at Loughrans was that Colin’s luck was so bad that if he fell into a bucket of tits, he’d come out sucking on his thumb.
After this, it was onto the Garrick pub just off the High Street to drink and play pool with his pals. The pub was actually on Yarm Lane which joined the High Street opposite the renowned Swallow Hotel, where Larry Grayson had once stayed, no pun intended. This section was 100 yards long and contained two pubs, The notorious ‘Theatre’ being the other one, ‘Rileys’ 24-hour pool and snooker centre, two framing shops, the local office of the Evening Gazette newspaper, a minicab firm and no fewer than 15 kebab shops, takeaways, eateries and associated shithouses. At least you were guaranteed of being able to get a decent Parmo.
The Parmo was Teesside’s contribution to world cuisine. Short for Parmesan, the Parmo was invented in Middlesbrough in the 1970s. A flattened and grilled chicken breast, coated in bechemelle sauce and breadcrumbs then baked, comes in two sizes, large and regular, also known as a ladies Parmo which was a half portion. It was a phenomenal success and attained the same cultural significance that the deep fried Mars bar enjoys in Glasgow. It’s perverse popularity bolstered because it was so unhealthy. Only real men ate Parmo’s so the talk went.
Like most of the food served in Yarm Lane, the taste improved incrementally with the amount of lager drunk.
The average Friday for Paul saw him come down to the pub after he had finished his course and gone home for his tea. Later on, he would get the 62 bus to meet Colin and their other mates Bryan and Vic who had also been drinking with Colin since early afternoon. Although he had every reason to resent Colin for not attending the course and cribbing his notes from him, Paul was under no illusions that he was the straight man in the partnership and took it in good humour. Along with the nicknames. ‘Linford’, ‘Lightning’, or just plain, old ‘Daft C**t’. Paul had raised his objections to the last one on occasion after a few pints and got a swift backhander for his trouble. Whilst nursing his jaw he was told “Shuttup, daft C**t” so didn’t raise it again. Insult was literally added to injury. The worst thing you can do was react to a nickname and show people that it affected you but Paul could testify that one of Bryan Cooks straight rights was worse.
They preferred to play pool in The Garrick. Despite being over the road from a proper pool club, The Garrick had its advantages. The Hoffmiester was £1 a pint in the happy hour that started at five and lasted several more and the jukebox was stocked with the latest tracks from the likes of Rick Astley, Madonna and Whitney Houston, none of the old album crap that cropped up in some of the other places. It also had the best pool table in the whole of Stockton.
It was a regulation sized pool table but covered in a red beize. Even more unusual was that it had yellow and blue balls to complete the novelty. As well as this and the obligatory disco lights and TV, the walls unusually had a nod towards art-deco style. There were ones of European models looking moodily off into the middle distance, a picture of a locomotive that had failed to stop at a Paris station and ploughed right through the other end and down onto the street in 1899, and on the opposite wall was Colin’s favourite.
A black and white poster from the 1950’s which featured a young blonde French woman standing up on a big dipper at a fairground. Her skirt was billowing up as the dipper was about to descend at speed and you could see her knickers as a result. Apart from the fact that she was quite attractive, the up-skirt shot was Colin’s own fetish of choice.
Whenever the funfair came to town, he would loiter opposite the ride he dubbed the "white triangle". A row of 12 people would sit on a long bench. The bench was attached to an arm at the end of a circular pivot which would turn and force the bench sideways and upward, rocking back and forth, gently at first and then faster until the bench reached the top of the circle and then it swung back down to the bottom before repeating the process another four times. Every time it swung on a downward pass, gravity would take hold of the skirts, and more often than not he got a glimpse of the elusive "white triangle".
The lads knew the landlord, Davie, quite well. They turned out for the pub team in the Teesside and District Sunday League third division and entered the regular pool and darts competitions he would organise. Once a month, or when the mood took him, he would often let them in for a much-missed afternoon lock-in. This was when pubs had to shut after lunch and remain shut until teatime by law. The curtains, windows and doors had to remain tightly closed during the not-so-secret sessions that abounded in the town. 24-hour licensing is a mixed blessing to the country. Yes, you can get a pint at almost any time of the day or night depending on your circumstance and location but where’s the thrill of keeping the noise down and begging the landlord to let you OUT of a pub in mid afternoon so you could return to work?
They stayed in the Garrick until about 8pm before beginning their circuitous route of the many High Street pubs. Despite the close proximity of many eating venus, food was never a consideration for them until after closing time. "Eating's cheating" was Bryan's motto and it wasn’t difficult to see why. A ginger bear of a man, Bryan stood over six foot tall and must have tipped the scales at 16 stone. He had a barrel chest and a six pack stomach but this was a measure of capacity as opposed to description. If eating was cheating then he was the most dishonest man on Teesside. He was also a useful centre half, where the main attributes were height, strength and a violent disposition. Bryan was their colossus. A better player than his build and reputation suggested, his fondness of beer, cigarettes and takeaways had begun to take their toll and what little pace he had was beginning to deteriorate. A disciple of the one-legged school of defending – “nobody runs past you if they only have one leg”, he remained the only member of the team ever sent off for crunching into a member of the opposition during the warm-up before kick off.
They were playing a team from County Durham in the prestigious FA Durham Cup competition, like the FA cup for North East Sunday league teams. They hadn’t heard of the opposition but they looked a decent proposition before the kick off. They all had matching socks. One particular forward was the spitting image of Charlie Nicholas, the popular Arsenal forward of the time. Even down to an earing in his left ear and the Farrah Fawcett-style flick hairstyle.
This was compounded by wearing the hair long at the back in a tight wet perm. Every football team group photograph from the mid 80s has three or four members that looked like they could also have taken part in Crufts.
The Garrick’s back four had a conference between themselves and watching the opposition warm up confirmed their fears that anybody who was brave enough to turn out in the rough Durham Sunday leagues looking like that must be a bit useful and he was definitely quick. Whilst the teams were sorting themselves out and chatting before the referee emerged from the changing rooms Bryan tripped Peterlee’s answer to the “Cannonball Kid” and for good measure grinded his studs across his prone kneecap. When the referee emerged from the tin shed changing room he was faced with a scene from “The Wild Bunch”. A full-on, 30 man brawl in the centre circle witnessed by three kids who had stopped pulling wheelies on their BMX’s to watch the spectacle and an old man with a disinterested greyhound.
By the time the referee had established order and got a version of events, one of the subs had got changed quickly and taken Bry’s position in the heart of the defence whilst Davie managed to con(vince) the referee that Bry was only his assistant manager. Thus the team started with 11 players instead of 10 and went on to win 3-1. Bry got a month long ban and an £80 fine for his trouble but the lads had a whip round to cover it.
Vic was Bry’s polar opposite. Skinny, with a nervous disposition and standing only five foot six inches tall. He was the natural victim of the group. In fact the first contact they had with Vic Slack was when they used to pick on him at school. As well as general beatings, wedgies, and running at a pole, groin-first, each holding one of Vic's limbs, he was also a victim by proxy.
Before leaving school Bryan was the feared school bully. Even then, the lads liked to keep him onside, realising that a happy psychopath was a good psychopath but like a maladjusted gorilla kept in a garden shed then let loose in park full of noisy children, he could easily turn and they could find themselves in as much danger as any regular civilian. Colin, of course, had the most elegant and cunning solution. He and the others would grab Vic by the scruff of his Rawcliffes jumper and march him towards Bry shouting "Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!" before pushing him into the bully and making good their escape. Sometimes they hung around to watch the inevitable but otherwise did the sensible thing and ran.
Time is said to heal all wounds and the time elapsed since his schoolday humiliations, coupled with Vic’s natural stupidity, timidity and comatose ego now meant he was a fully fledged member of the group. Albeit still the runt of the litter.
Paul and Colin were the same height and build but Colin was fair whereas Paul was swarthy and dark. Neither were in great shape but nor were they ever in danger of troubling Bryan for his heavyweight crown.
They drank up and left The Garrick to begin their Friday night route. They liked to start at the opposite end of the High Street from the pub to give themselves some fresh air and chance to check out the talent tottering around on its white stilletos.
They walked past the post office next to Barclays where Colin and Paul stopped to queue up outside the cash point to get their money for the night. £20 would generally cover it. Twenty years later, £20 would barely cover a round.
Bryan and Vic had their accounts with Lloyds and the Midland respectively so had to walk further to use their machines. People soon forget the sheer folly and inconvenience of not being able to use their cashcards in other machines. A party of four could have to walk half an hour to visit all the cash machines they needed to.
‘I had a new machine to fill today, mate’ Paul said while Colin was typing in his pin. 1969 was his year of birth and despite the banks advice, he wasn’t that good with remembering numbers so stuck with it. Unbeknownst to him, this was Paul’s pin number too for exactly the same reasons.
‘Oh aye, where?’
‘Only in The Waterfront!’
‘Never! Really?’
‘Aye. Went in there this morning and filled the tab machine upstairs. They’ve also got a Downing 11 series over the way from the cloak room just as you come in on the left. It’s in a storeroom so its just for staff at the minute. I asked them if they were going to bring it out for everyone but they didn’t know. I think they are on about doing food upstairs so they might lay off it for now’.
‘Cool. £30 out mate. Purple and Brown means we’re on the town!’
Their route took them to The Mulberry Tree at the opposite end of the High Street. The MulberryTree was a recently renovated pub with brand new monogramed windows and a bunch of crazy crap on the wall. It wasn’t an Irish themed bar but it had taken the "after the tornado" motif to heart. As a Guiness fan, Bryan had been to Ireland before and had reported back, with some surprise, that the pubs in Ireland were just normal pubs. No bicycles or tin baths hanging from the ceiling or roadsigns nailed to the wall, just grizzled old boys drinking the black stuff.
Before it became The Mulberry Tree, it was the North Eastern and it had a reputation for toughness and extreme violence, which in Stockton was an achievement and a selling point. Vic's uncle Tommy had actually died in the back bar from a mixture of alcoholism, nicotene addiction and possibly boredom. A lot of people died of natural causes in the town, booze, tabs and fighting included, but at least a quarter of those had just given up. This was before the days of Trisha Goddard and Jeremy Kyle’s morning Circus so after “This Morning” there was a big hole in the day before the pubs opened at three. Even this was too much for some people, like Tommy.
Despite this, Vic still drank in there partly because he liked it but also out of a sense of family loyalty. Being Tommy's nephew used to carry a little social cache within, and the odd free pint.
The boys had returned to drink there reluctantly. They had boycotted it for three months after the relaunch because it had been reopened by Kevin Keegan, the manager of Middlesbrough’s hated local rivals Newcastle United. Such acts of petulance might seem trivial to the outsider but in the North East, the intricacies, customs and rituals surrounding football and the rivalries between the various teams and supporters made the disparities between Iraqi Sunni’s and Shia’s look like the rules of Snakes and Ladders by comparison.
Fitzgeralds was next on the list, situated over the road from the Mulberry Tree, it was a strange bar full of lager lads and older real ale buffs enjoying the guest beers. The lads deliberately kept themselves on a leash in Fitzys because of 'Crusher'. Nobody knew his real name but Crusher was as tall as Bryan but with not an ounce of fat to spare. Shaven headed and with more than a passing resemblance to Popeye, it was rumoured that he had once killed a man in the ring and only a fool would put this reputation of martial prowess to the test. Fitzgeralds was alone in all of Stockton in that it was virtually guaranteed to be trouble free. The lads weren't fighters as a rule but they weren't above backing up their mouths on occasion. Especially Bryan. If it was going to kick off then Big Bry would be at the centre of it. Only the month before, they had been kicked out of The Mall, the biggest nightclub in the town, because Bry had smashed a stool round the head of a bloke he swore was looking at him "funny". The fact he had his back to him at the time was neither here nor there. After drinking up they turned left out of the door to head for the Royal Oak where Colin's grandad drank on his trips into town. If they had turned right they would have been at the Lambton Castle which was known as a lesbian bar. They never went in there as "even the pool table doesn't have balls" according to Bry.
After the Royal Oak, They continued down the High Street, past at least four charity shops. Stockton’s only growth industry. They turned left into an alleyway opposite the Victorian town hall to visit the Courtyard Hotel. This was Colin’s contribution to the crawl. The decor in the bar was dark but warm with old move posters advertising "The Grissom Gang" with Shelly Winters and an early Sean Connery film called "City of Fear". Faux glamour in a real dive.
Colin mainly dragged the gang there because it served Carling Premier which was his rare drink of choice. They then walked across the Georgian courtyard known as Green Dragon Yard to the Green Dragon pub. This was their warmup before the club because the jukebox was laden with the kind of tunes they all liked. The Clash, The Jam, The Smiths, Bob Dylan, The Stone Roses, Guns N Roses and many many more. It made the Samuel Smiths beer the pub served just about tolerable. An independent Yorkshire brewery, Samuel Smiths beer was famously rough. Vic swore he once saw some twigs and leaves in a bottle of their Nut Brown Ale. They tended to stick to lagers but Bry was a big Guiness man. Colin used to drink Guiness and Newcastle Brown Ale but at Paul's sixteenth birthday he beat his personal best of ten bottles and was as sick as dog for three days afterwards and hadn't touched the stuff since. No wonder it was nicknamed “Dog” – you either felt like one the next day or woke up next to one.
After an hour in the Dragon, they made their way out of the pub and down the embankment toward the river and The Waterfront.
The Waterfront was an Indie club that overlooked the River Tees. There weren’t many nightclubs in Stockton but it was the least towny and the only one that would let you in wearing jeans and trainers. The club was divided into two parts, an upstairs with a central bar in the middle that allowed you to walk all the way around it. The rear part of the bar was housed in a conservatory with a balcony overlooking the Tees. On warm nights (and even cold ones) the balcony was packed with drinkers, dope smokers, speed takers, snoggers and the cream of Stockton’s intelligentsia - the kids who went to the 6th Form College. Hardly any glasses were returned to the bar from outside as it was far easier to hurl them into the river. This often turned into a competition which saw Bry clean up on occasion with his patented over arm spinning bottle throw. In the distance, the recently completed shopping and cinema multiplex called Teesside Park was shining out like the Emerald City with the cinema marquee at the base of a tower in the car park with a flashing light at the top of the 60ft tower like a particularly flimsy lighthouse. On the other side of the river were a new development of flats and canals being built along with a new college campus. The flats had a gothic design to them so it wasn't too hard to imagine a dark cloaked figure leaping about them in the moonilght. It was said that the development would breath new life into the town and kickstart the economy with an influx of new families and jobs. Bry was more sceptical: "No Chance. This place is buggered. It'll be like giving an asprin to an AIDS case”.
They didn't make too much effort on Fridays as they were the undercard for the main event of the week - Saturdays. In all reality, they were just the same as Friday’s but they started drinking earlier.
To everybody else, Colin was perfectly pleasant and at ease with his situation but like everyone in their late 30's who hadn't achieved anything like what they believed was their true station in life, he pretended it was all down to him and part of their grand plan. The van started on the second turnover and as Tiffany blared loudly out of the speakers he began the same drive he had made six days of the week, for the last 20 years.
Dear Doctor...
1) A papercut on the ballsack
3) A dog's skeleton
Did anybody see this on ITV-1 on Sunday night? I watched it last night and was struck by a few things.
Idiocracy is the latest film from Mike Judge (Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space). It stars Luke Wilson as an average army soldier who is coerced into taking part in an experiment where he is cryogenically frozen and awakens 500 years in the future.
Below is the first chapter of a novella set in Stockton in the 80s and today, that will feature in First XI.