Chapter 01: Moving to Sheffield

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n Wednesday the 10th of January 1990 I arrived in Sheffield with a fortnight’s dole money and all my worldly possessions which, with the exception of my guitar and the clothes I stood up in, could just about fit inside two medium sized rucksacks.

Lincoln born and bred, I’d been thinking of picking up and heading for pastures new for quite some time and for a number of reasons. There was the abysmal nightlife for a start which meant that, whenever possible, my friends and I would go out of town to get our kicks. Generally though, I’d always found the place stifling and always despaired of the Royston Vasey-esque ‘are you local?’ mentality common to the population in general and to the patrons of the Cornhill Vaults pub – which was the nexus of what passed for Lincoln’s rock/alternative scene - in particular.

I was (and still am) convinced that what I called ‘the Lincoln attitude’ was rooted in the city’s geographical dislocation. Lincoln was too far north to be in the South, too far south to be in the North, too close to East Anglia to be in the Midlands and too close to the Midlands to be in East Anglia. This was reflected in the odd sounding Lincolnshire accent which to a Southerner sounds northern and to a Northerner sounds southern. There were no arterial roads passing through or nearby Lincoln and rail connection to the rest of the country was via a neglected spur of the central network which meant travelling to Newark or Retford before you could pick up a train to any of the big cities. The cumulative effect was to engender something of an identity crisis cum inferiority complex within the civic psyche which, I think, largely accounted for the chronic insularity and reflexive suspicion of anything unfamiliar.

I also think it helps to explain why the natives had such a staggeringly impressive capacity for alcohol and were so sexually promiscuous. There really was nothing else to do in Lincoln apart from get mindlessly drunk and fuck around.

Lincoln’s municipal torpor had been deepening as the Eighties drew to a close and, what’s more, none of those lively characters who had made it worth going out seemed to be around anymore. In the summer of 1989 a guy called Andy Macklin, who owned a record shop I hung out in when I couldn’t afford to drink in the Vaults all day, said something that got me thinking.

“Have you ever wondered,” he asked me one afternoon, “why we keep finding ourselves knocking around with an ever smaller, ever younger crowd?”

I told him I hadn’t but now he mentioned it I did suppose it was a little odd. He enlightened me.

“It’s because anyone with anything about them has fucked off out of this hopeless dump by the time they’re in their mid twenties.”

I was in my mid twenties and liked to think I had something about myself, so I figured it was about time I fucked off. After all, most of my time and energy was spent pursuing drunken debauchery so it made sense to live in a place where that was to be had rather than have to travel there every weekend. It boiled down to a choice between Nottingham and Sheffield, which were the two favourite big night out of town destinations of the more gregarious Lincoln crew.

The principal hang out for the Nottingham metal heads was a nightclub called Rock City which hosted an always packed out rock night on a Friday which was, arguably, the best weekend bash of its kind anywhere in the UK. However, I could never get on with the way the home crowd was so rigidly stratified. On top of the pile you had the unapproachable, rock and roll peacocks of the city’s premier league metal bands, underneath them were their various entourages and groupie pools, then mid-echelon people like my friends and I and finally, the anonymous jeans and tour t-shirt clad punters. There was little, if any, social interaction between the top and bottom two of these factions and that things seemed to operate on a far more equitable basis in Sheffield was what swung it for me.

The main attraction in Sheffield was a massive, 2,500 capacity nightclub called the Roxy which was perched on top of a multi-storey car park in the city centre. The Roxy’s huge, red neon sign shone out like a beacon when approaching Sheffield at night, even if it wasn’t working properly a lot of the time and appeared to say ‘RO_Y’ or ‘_OXY’.

Over the weekend the club was your typical low rent townie dive - one of those places that specialised in catering to all the moustaches in Burton suits who were too pissed up and rowdy to get in anywhere else.

On a Wednesday there was the world renowned student night which, as far as I’m aware, was the largest of its kind on the planet. According to local legend both the university and polytechnic (as it was still known in those days) arranged their timetables to account for the fact that most of the student body would be nursing monster hangovers the next morning.

Thursdays saw the over 25’s do, the infamous Grab-a-Granny night. This drew a capacity crowd of ropey old dolly-birds with no self-respect and sexually frustrated lads who couldn’t get laid anywhere else. The former would trowel the make up on and shoehorn themselves into skimpy outfits for the occasion and wobble about the dance floor before being picked up and taken into the car park for a joyless knee-trembler by the latter. It was an outright admission of desperation to even consider going to one of these nights and there was an associated saying: ‘It’s been so long since I’ve had a shag that I’m just about ready to walk the ramp of shame’.

The ramp of shame being the walkway up to the Roxy’s entrance.

But of more concern to us was the celebrated rock night which took place every second Monday and knocked Rock City right into a cocked hat. People would travel from all over the country for this and, as far as the rock/metal scene in late Eighties and early Nineties Britain went, it was undoubtedly the best night out to be had. The annual Miss Glam Rock beauty contest, which featured as part of the rock night calendar, was good for a laugh too. In 1989 an American stripper and porno actress, who had married a guy from Lincoln as part of a scam to get him US citizenship, set a precedent by going into her act when parading across the stage. After this eye-popping spectacle you could guarantee at least one impromptu strip show in every heat.

There was a smaller club in the city called Rebels which was located next to the indoor markets on Dixon Lane and hosted nothing but rock dos every night except Sunday and Tuesday. While it wasn’t in the same league as the Roxy, was only a fraction of the size  (the official capacity being only 600) and looked like it had been decorated by someone on dirty protest, it did have a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere and served as a hub around which the Sheffield metal crowd’s social scene revolved.

As for the pubs, there were four main watering-holes the rockers frequented. At the weekend and on some weekday nights it was the Yorkshireman’s Arms on Burgess Street or a subterranean bar called the Wapentake1 (the Wap - pronounced ‘Wop’ - as it was more commonly known) just around the corner on Wellington Street.

On Saturday afternoons both the Wap and the Yorkshireman closed between three and seven so, finances allowing, it was up to the Frog and Parrot on Division Street which stayed open all day. The Frog was famous for selling the strongest draught beer in the world, a terrifying concoction called Roger and Out which was brewed on the premises and dispensed in third of a pint measures. Roger and Out had the consistency of treacle with the kick of a tequila slammer and customers were presented with a certificate after they’d drunk a full pints worth. A visit to any student household invariably revealed a wall plastered in these certificates and it was something of a rite of passage for each year’s university intake to drink themselves insensible on the stuff during their fresher week.

On Roxy Monday nights the favoured pre-club hang out was the Mulberry Tavern, just over the road on Arundel Gate. The front window afforded a clear view of the Roxy’s main entrance, which was handy for keeping an eye on the size of the developing queue and thus gauging what time to make a move over. It was crucial you arrived at the right time; get there too early and you risked looking seriously uncool, too late and you were stuck in the queue for ages.

Having settled on Sheffield I started spending the odd afternoon in the place perusing the local paper, checking out accommodation agencies and generally sussing out the housing situation. It didn’t take long before I discovered that there were three main areas you wanted to live; Nether Edge, Ecclesall Road and Crookes. These were all student neighbourhoods which meant there were plenty of rental properties available, particularly single rooms in shared houses, they were conveniently located with regard to the city centre, they were affordable and you didn’t need to worry too much about getting mugged, burgled or having to clamber over comatose junkies to reach your front door.

Crookes and Ecclesall Road were your typical student quarters, just like you’d find in any university city in Britain, but Nether Edge had an altogether more peculiar quality to it. On the surface it was a pleasant arboreal suburb just south of the city centre consisting of large 19th Century townhouses but for some reason it was also home to a vast population of hippie and trustafarian types. This first became apparent when browsing the room to let adverts in shop windows which more often than not stipulated that only vegetarians need apply (and they seemed to be able to tell when you lied about it - perhaps they failed to detect that air of sanctimoniousness which clings to such people like an unpleasant smell). Other times it was the terminology that gave it away. I was constantly coming across adverts for rooms in ‘collectives’ and ‘intentional communities’ and one for a ‘living space’ in a ‘non-doctrinal household’ – whatever that was supposed to be. Even when replying to adverts that were free of such tell-tale parlance you could more or less guarantee that the door would be answered by either a dreadlocked crusty who stank of cider (such people were known locally as ‘Nedgers’) or some Alan Parker: Urban Warrior clone brandishing a copy of Socialist Worker. Having a rather strong aversion to these kinds of people I concentrated my efforts in the Crookes and Ecclesall Road direction.

As well as the more desirable districts there were others you wanted to steer well clear of, particularly some of the big council estates which were virtual no-go areas. This was partly the legacy of mass unemployment and the social pathologies that follow in its wake but the problem had been exacerbated by the criminally irresponsible housing policies of the city council who were one of the most enthusiastic practitioners of what became known as loony leftism.

That people are determined by their surroundings and are incapable of making moral choices is an item of faith where this creed is concerned and by such lights anti-social behaviour is regarded as a logical - if not inevitable - consequence of a substandard environment. Ergo to remedy such behaviour all you need do is improve said environment. With this principle as their guiding star the council’s housing department had shifted as many ‘problem tenants’ as they could out of their entirely suitable sink-estates and into, up until that point at least, reasonably decent neighbourhoods.

Of course this had entirely predictable results and in no time at all even more of the city’s housing stocks were transformed into drug and crime-infested wastelands.

Consequently it was pretty easy to get a council place in Sheffield; you could walk into the housing office, fill in a few forms and, provided you weren’t bothered where they put you, come back the next day to collect the keys. But getting somewhere in one of the more desirable areas took just as long as it did in any other city.

As it happened, the opportunity to move over presented itself in Lincoln, and in the Vaults of all places, on Christmas Eve 1989 and in the form of a guy called Barry Pointer.

I knew Barry in a ‘sit with if there was no one else in the pub’ sort of way as we had both been dragooned onto one of those silly job training schemes in the summer of 1988 and at the depot where we were based he had achieved a certain notoriety after screwing a girl known as Special Needs Sam who worked in the canteen. Barry was, I discovered as we exchanged a few words, now based in Sheffield and when I happened to mention my plans in that direction he offered to put me up until I found somewhere permanent to live. Needless to say I jumped at the opportunity and arranged to move over just as soon as I got my first dole cheque in the New Year

“There’s one thing I need to ask you.” Barry said as he left the pub. “Do you like a smoke?”

“Not particularly,” I replied, “I don’t really do mellow.”

“You will after you’ve stayed at my place for a while.” He assured me.

Barry was a bottom rung dope dealer, every second Friday he would visit the guy who was one step up from him and use his dole cheque as a down payment on a few ounces of resin. He would then knock this out in eighth and sixteenth deals which paid off the balance and generated just enough profit for him to stay permanently wasted and to run a clapped out Ford Escort van which he drove like a maniac.

Like a lot of permanently stoned malcontents who had seen the ideological light after reading the liner sleeve of a Chumbawamba album, Barry thought he was an anarchist. But he wasn’t an anarchist, he fell at the first hurdle in being unable to appreciate the glaring contradiction in renouncing the state and all its works on the one hand while being entirely dependant on it, in the form of welfare payments, on the other. What Barry actually was, if we want to dignify it with a title, was a fairly typical dope-addled idiot-hippie. Anyone who has been a student or is familiar with the world of bed-sit bohemia should know the type.

If you haven’t or aren’t, imagine the personality of a spoiled, self-centred, endlessly demanding and obnoxious eight year old brat transplanted into an adult body and you’ll get a pretty good idea.

Something else I found endlessly amusing about Barry was that he would tell people in Sheffield he’d been in jail and would use any excuse to mention so. He would constantly preface remarks with the words, ‘when I was in nick…’ this or ‘when I was inside…’ that in an affected matter-of-fact way. This was total and utter bullshit, he might have spent a night in the cells once or twice but he had never done time because I would have heard about it. Lincoln’s boho set, to which Barry and I had both belonged, were a pretty cloistered bunch as well as being irrepressible gossips and you got to know everything that went on. Someone getting banged up would have been front-page news and neither I - nor anyone else I asked in Lincoln - had heard anything about it. When pressed on the subject Barry was always rather vague about exactly what it was he had done to warrant a prison sentence, whereabouts he had been incarcerated, for how long and when. As far as I could see the whole act was intended primarily to impress some of the more naïve first year students who comprised his customer base - and in plenty of cases I’m sure it did.

But we’re getting a bit too far ahead of channelling ourselves here, let’s go back to Lincoln for a while.

That Christmas of 1989 I had just got back together – for the umpteenth time - with my on-off girlfriend of the previous two years, a girl called Sally Spencer. Now I’m sure anyone who remembers our tempestuous affair would scoff at the suggestion but I had really intended to make it work this time.

Sally had done her A-levels the previous June and was working a year out in a vegetable packing plant while she made up her mind about what to do next. I was hoping that my move to Sheffield would prompt her into applying for a degree course at either the university or polytechnic which would have fitted in nicely with such plans as were beginning to ferment in my mind. One of the things I’d noticed when I’d been looking around the place was that most of the further education colleges offered fast-track university entrance courses and I intended enrolling on one just as soon as I was settled. Typically enough, these plans were to come crashing down about my ears.

The Thursday before I was due to leave Lincoln I’d been boozing in the Vaults for most of the afternoon and had ended up drunkenly ringing another on/off girlfriend - we’ll call this one Jo - to ask whether she might like some company that evening. I started having guilty second thoughts - not to mention an uncomfortable feeling that it would all end in tears - the minute I walked through the door.

I was always very fond of Jo and always felt bad about the unpleasant way we’d split up; it’s difficult to explain but I always felt I’d let her down somehow and that she was worth more than that. However I’d be a colossal liar were I to suggest that my motivation for calling on her was any nobler than a simple desire for sex. And sex – at least in a couple of specialised departments - was where Jo enjoyed a distinct edge over Sally.

I wasn’t very proud of myself when I woke up (with a hangover) the next morning and as an added complication a guy called Dicko, who had been chasing Jo for the past few weeks, had just turned up. I got dressed and sneaked out, reassuring myself that Dicko wasn’t likely to spill the beans because it simply wasn’t in his interests to do so. He knew perfectly well that Jo still carried a torch for me and that I would be much less of a potential threat being safely involved with Sally.

I also like to think he was honour bound not to say anything. A couple of years earlier I’d gone home with a casual acquaintance and had discovered Dicko in bed with her flatmate - this while he was still married to an old school friend of mine - and I kept quiet about that.

When nothing was said over the following weekend (well, except for Dicko winking and making exaggerated tutting noises at me as I passed him in the pub) I really thought I’d got away with it.

So the big day came and as I waited outside Sheffield train station with a bulging rucksack slung across each shoulder, Barry screeched to a halt in front of me in his un-insured, un-taxed, un-MOT tested pile of smoking junk.

His flat was in the attic of a house on Metcalfe Street, which was on the western edge of the city centre right next to the inner ring road. Walking through the front door I instantly got a bad feeling about the place because from what I could see it was absolutely tiny. As we got to the top of the stairs it became clear that the ‘flat’ was actually a bed-sit and consisted of just two rooms not counting the landing; a combined living room and bedroom with a sofa-bed in it and a kitchen with a single mattress shoved under the table which it suddenly struck me was where I was going to be sleeping. The bathroom was on the next floor down and was shared with the occupants of two other bed-sits.

The temptation to turn around and head back to Lincoln on the next available train was overwhelming. But I resisted it, I figured that as I’d come this far I might as well stick it out and at least I had a strong incentive to find my own place.

That night Barry and I went for a drink in the Yorkshireman where I was introduced to a guy called Tony Wilkins who was one of the more recognisable faces on the Sheffield rock/alternative scene. Tony was something of a frightening sight - a pushing seven-foot tall, bow-legged missing link sporting a mullet that would have made a pro wrestler gasp in awe - but appearances can be deceptive and he was friendly enough when you got talking to him.

“Wanna buy a computer mate?” He said, fishing a battered BBC Micro out of a plastic carrier bag and waving it cheerfully in my face.

I told him I wouldn’t know what to do with a computer.

“No problem,” he continued, “I’ll see you around,” and went loping off to try his pitch on some of the other people in the place.

For the whole time I knew Tony he was trying to sell that computer and he seemed genuinely puzzled why nobody wanted to buy the thing. When he was after borrowing money he’d say,

“Can you lend us a tenner until I get my giro?”

You’d tell him you couldn’t really afford to and he’d come back with,

“I tell you what then, I’ll pay you back tonight if I manage to sell that computer down the pub.”

Like it might happen or it would change your mind.

If I’d known there was a spare room in Tony’s flat, or he’d known I was looking for a place to live, it would have saved a hell of a lot of hassle.

On the Friday night of that first week I set out with the express intention of ingratiating myself with the locals and finding some people to knock about with. Both mission objectives were accomplished beyond even my most wildly optimistic expectations.

It was about half eight when, full of alcohol induced bravado courtesy of a bottle of cheap red wine and with a major buzz on from a wrap of particularly good speed Barry had sorted me out with, I walked into the already heaving Yorkshireman. I got a drink and leaned up against the bar scanning the room for the grooviest looking gang in the place who I spotted straight away in the far corner of the pub. I made my way over to them, put my drink on the table and introduced myself.

“My name’s Dom,” I slurred, “I’ve just moved over here and I don’t really know anyone. You lot look like you know how to have a good time, mind if I join you?”

That was how I fell in with the best crowd I could have ever hoped to meet, who were, in no particular order, Liam I, Danny O, Mikki D, Jeff W and Bez…, something or other – I don’t think I ever found out his surname. They were all just as drunk as I was and by the time I’d shown them my bangle trick2 it was like we’d known each other for years. After a few more drinks we hit the Wap and eventually went up to Rebels where I had an absolutely superb time. I was introduced to so many people during the course of the night that when I came out on Saturday I found myself being greeted by name and was spoilt for choice who to hang out with.

The affability of people in Sheffield was one of the things I always loved about the place. Had a stranger to Lincoln walked into the Vaults and done what I did in the Yorkshireman they’d have been totally stonewalled and most probably thrown out.

So let me quickly introduce everyone.

Liam had perhaps the cruellest sense of humour I’ve ever come across and he sneered with such delicious relish that you couldn’t help laughing. Practically as soon as I’d introduced myself a guy with a mane of peroxide-blond hair had wandered past.

“Alright Harry,” Liam called over, “I see you got your hair done, it looks well good mate. It really suits you. See you up Rebels later on yeah?”

The moment the guy was out of earshot it was all,

“What a knob-head, what a fucking knob-head. How stupid does he look with that rubbish hairstyle?”

I liked Liam immediately.

Danny was the guy I ended up spending most of my time with. He was great fun to be with and looked just like one of the Dogs D’Amour. Danny drank like a fish and I’ll always remember one Roxy Monday when he turned up at my place shortly after ten in the morning with two bottles of sherry and a crate of 24 cans of cheap lager.

“Are we gonna get started then?” He asked.

Unlike Barry, Danny had been inside; shortly before I met him he’d finished a three-month stretch for assault. A gang of thugs who lived on his estate had, as part of a long running feud, jumped Danny one night and slashed him across the face with a craft knife. Understandably annoyed about this, he had later kicked one of these guys senseless in revenge and, British justice being what it is, Danny was the one who did the time. As a consequence of his slashing Danny had been left with a scar which ran diagonally across his mouth and made him look as if he was permanently pouting.

Danny had a girlfriend called Tina who I always thought a bit of a party-pooper but then fidelity was hardly his middle name and most of the time he managed to get rid of her before we hit Rebels. You could always tell when this was going to happen. Danny and Tina would arrive in the pub and announce that they weren’t bothering with Rebels that night and would be going home when the pub closed. By about ten o’clock, Danny would have decided that actually he did want to go to Rebels and would break the news to Tina who’d sit there with a face like thunder until he put her on the last bus home and rejoined the rest of us.

Mikki was the one I felt the most affinity with. He came from the same kind of lower middle-class background that I did and was sharp witted, articulate and well read. He was also prone to the same brand of subconscious snobbery and would often decry Danny for his ‘proletarian sensibilities’. Although technically on the dole Mikki was attending evening classes at the university and picking up credits toward a combined studies degree.

Jeff worked in the sex shop on Division Street, which thrust his sleaze metal credibility right through the roof. He didn’t come out as often as everyone else but was a good laugh when he did. Jeff was seeing a girl called Suzy who I really liked and she used to hang around with another girl called Nancy who I liked as well.

Nancy had an adorable two-year-old daughter called Abigail and sometimes, on afternoons when Nancy and Suzy went shopping, we’d get to entertain Abigail until they came back. We would take her to the café (as was) in Orchard Square where there was a wishing well containing a mechanical crocodile that opened its mouth when you threw pennies at it. Abigail couldn’t get enough of this and would sit there giggling with delight. It was quite touching, or so we were often told by people who happened to spot us, to see a gang of philandering drunks making such a soppy fuss over a little girl.

Bez had hair that fell in natural ringlets and made him look amusingly like the Viz character Terry Fuckwit. He was seeing a well fit girl called Bobbie who worked behind the bar in the Wap and who developed a real crush on me, even whispering what she’d love to do to me one night, ‘if only it wasn’t for Bez.’

One of the few principles I rigidly adhered to in those days was a total refusal to take sexual advantage of anyone in my peer group’s girlfriend – or recent ex. But if I’d known I was going to fall out with Bez in early 1991 – something to do with never getting back any of the money I could ill afford to lend him in the first place – then I’d have been in like a good ‘un. And Bez was always skint, he never had any money and on a night out would spend the whole time grovelling drinks off everyone else. I was always suspicious about his alleged poverty, partly because he made such an overcompensatory song and dance about it but mainly because at the end of the night he would be just as plastered as the rest of us yet always seemed to be able to afford a taxi home to the enormous mansion ten miles away on the Derbyshire border where he lived with his parents.

That Sunday afternoon I went back to Lincoln to pick up my guitar and a few other odds and ends I hadn’t been able to carry when I first came over. I was in pretty high spirits on the train back seeing as after less than a week I’d found a really great bunch of people to hang around with in a fantastic city with loads going on - even if I was currently sleeping underneath the kitchen table in a stoner hippie’s tiny bed-sit. I couldn’t wait to tell Sally about it all and arrange for her to come over the next weekend. I was due to meet her in the Vaults that evening and headed down there as soon as I’d collected the stuff from my parent’s house.

I sensed something was wrong the minute I walked in the pub. Sally was conspicuous by absence and the other people from our circle of friends were looking extremely uneasy.

“Did you go round to Jo’s the other Thursday night?” One of the girls asked me as I sat down.

“Why do you ask that?” I said, defensively and knowing perfectly well what was coming next.

“Because Sally seems to think you did, she was fuming about it last night.” She replied.

I’m still not entirely sure how Sally found out. The official explanation was that a mutual friend of Sally and Jo’s, a girl called Kiera Jones, had accidentally let it slip but this always had a hollow ring to it and I was never quite convinced. I caught Kiera out in a sneaky double bluff soon afterwards, so I knew it wasn’t her.

In which case who the hell could it have been?

Jo would never have said anything because it wasn’t in her nature to do something like that and even if she had, she would have admitted so when I tackled her about it later.

Dicko, who by now was officially Jo’s boyfriend, wouldn’t have said anything either – and for the same reasons I outlined earlier. But then he might have mentioned it to someone who would have, which a nagging voice kept telling me must have been what happened.

I’d hung around in the Vaults until shortly before the last train left hoping Sally might turn up, but she didn’t and I went back over to Sheffield with a really uncomfortable feeling that this was finally it. We’d split up and got back together countless times before but there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on telling me this was different.

When I saw the letter addressed to me in Sally’s handwriting that landed on Barry’s doormat the next morning I knew exactly what it was going to say. Something I noticed straight away was that Sally had torn the envelope open and then sealed it back up again with Sellotape. Obviously this was supposed to be some kind of statement (she thrived on such melodramatic touches).

Just as I suspected the letter was a lengthy diatribe about what a bastard I was for screwing Jo and how Sally had finally seen me for what I was and how everyone in Lincoln was on her side etc, etc which she’d signed off with the line,

‘I think I deserve someone who’s going to treat me a little bit better than that, don’t you?’

I remembered that for its irony and we’ll come back to it in a minute, just as soon as we’ve gone through my reaction.

Which was that I went absolutely stark raving mental.

I immediately scribbled my own furious rant by way of reply in which – when I wasn’t hurling every low-blow and insensitive insult I could think of in Sally’s direction - I told her that I couldn’t care less what those, ‘boring, hopeless wankers’ thought about me, as I’d made ‘more friends in Sheffield over the course of one weekend than in a lifetime of living in Nowhereville’.

Sally paraded this letter around the Vaults when she received it, gleefully highlighting the above comments, and it took quite a concerted public relations effort to put right the damage she did to my good standing in the place.

Granted, in my mature wisdom I’m perfectly well aware that Sally held the moral high ground here (if we want to view it in those terms) and that I had no right getting so bent out of shape. I had cheated on her and not exactly for the first time. I can fully accept that now, but was I prepared to back then?

Not by the hairs of my chinny chin chin.

I never could handle rejection, but I could handle anger by turning it into motivation which I did before the day was out.

That Monday was a Roxy night and I picked up some girl who I fucked bent over the back of her living room couch. Her flatmate had come walking in on us halfway through and sat there casual as you like until we’d finished – which was something I found an incredible turn-on. While I was catching my post-coital breath I drunkenly asked this girl if she fancied going next. Without saying a word she walked over, dropped to her knees and went at me, to use a charming local expression, like a starving dog eating hot chips. Mr Woody obligingly put in his second appearance of the evening and shortly afterwards I marked up another one on the scoreboard.

I’m sure I must have thought that this would teach Sally a lesson.

I found some excuse to go back to Lincoln the next day, the real reason being that I wanted to see if there was any chance of patching things up with Sally and I needed to see how she would react to me in person.

This time Sally was in the pub and we sat on opposite sides of the room shooting withering glances in one another’s general direction yet carefully avoiding full eye contact. Everything about Sally screamed ‘fuck you’ with a resolve I’d never seen in her before.

As I left the Vaults I kept telling myself fuck her, she’s nothing special anyway, just some small-town plain-Jane. I remember it was a windy night and as I made my way to the train station some grit must have blown in my eye because I felt a tear run down my cheek.

This might be an appropriate juncture to make something crystal clear. Sally and I spat a lot of venom at each other over the next year or so, our constant attempts at one-upmanship could get quite childish and it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that either of us was any more petty and infantile than the other. However, I’m the one narrating the tale so there are no prizes for guessing who’s going to get all the best lines.

And speaking of the best lines, what about that comment Sally signed her letter off with, the one about deserving someone who would treat her better than I had done?

The next time I was in Lincoln was maybe five or six weeks later when, after eventually having found a place in Sheffield, I went over for the weekend to catch up with everyone and let them know my new address.

To save money I decided to hitchhike back rather than take the train and set off shortly after nine on the Friday morning expecting to hit Lincoln sometime in the early part of the afternoon. This turned out to have been a wildly optimistic estimation. It actually took me the best part of twelve hours and I ended up walking a good two thirds of the distance – and with an icy gale blowing in my face for most of it. I didn’t arrive at my parent’s house until nine in the evening, exhausted, soaked to the skin, chilled to the marrow and with nothing on my mind other than taking a hot bath and getting my clothes dry.

By the time I’d sorted myself out it was too late to go down the Vaults so I headed straight to Lazers, which was a seedy nightclub that opened its doors to Lincoln’s rockers over the weekend.

I’d been in the club maybe ten minutes when Sally waltzed in hand-in-hand with probably the only guy from the Vaults/Lazers crowd with whom it was considered more dangerous to get emotionally involved than me; a guy called Stu Llewellyn who I already despised with an intensity bordering on the pathological.

Sally was perfectly well aware of my feelings towards Stu, as indeed he was, and although I’m neither arrogant or paranoid enough to imagine that this was the attraction (even if it did cross my mind), I bet they both found it amusing.

It might also be worth mentioning that Stu had been sniffing around Sally for a couple of weeks before she and I had got back together and that he worked with Dicko and was quite pally with him. This, as far as I was concerned and in the absence of anything more plausible, pretty much cleared up the mystery of how Sally found out I was at Jo’s place that night.

Sally spotted me and immediately steered her new suitor onto a bench directly opposite, sat on his knee and launched into a graphic demonstration of advanced heavy-petting techniques, pausing only to take the occasional glance in my direction to make sure I’d noticed.

Sometime towards the end of the night Sally came swaggering over and sat herself down next to me.

“Hiya, how are you?” She said, before fixing a plastic smile on her face and staring not-quite directly into my eyes.

I was taken a little off-guard by this and it didn’t help that I was roaring drunk and in a filthy mood.

“What the fuck do you want?” I spat back at her.

“I just want to make sure we don’t part on bad terms.” She replied, maintaining exactly the same expression.

This was reasonable enough you might think – even if it was delivered in the most infuriatingly condescending tone possible. But I knew Sally a little better than that and I could tell what she was really saying.

“It’s a bit fucking late for that.” I sneered. “And besides, it’s not what you want to do at all; what you want to do is to stress that I’m out of the picture and you’re settled in another relationship.”

I could tell I’d scored a direct hit by the way the strained grin on Sally’s face instantly vanished so I seized the moment, leaned across and whispered into her ear,

“When he fucks you over, and he will do, I’ll be gloating about it, just remember that. And now you can fuck off, because I’ve got nothing else to say to you.”

Those were the last words we’d exchange for the next sixteen months.

That Stu would fuck Sally over was a fairly safe bet. Stu was a seriously nasty piece of work and anyone who ever had anything to do with him ended up getting burned. He was one of those people – and I’ve known maybe a dozen or so in my time – who were utterly incapable of relating to others on anything but an exploitative level. Stu didn’t have friends the way you or I do, what he had instead was a series of convenient acquaintances who were made to feel trusted and valued while they were useful to him and were discarded as soon as they weren’t.

This was nowhere more evident than in the way he treated his women. Stu’s girlfriends generally got a run of about nine months to a year before he’d start knocking off the next one. The two would overlap for a few weeks until the incumbent was unceremoniously dumped – and more often than not, cruelly humiliated into the bargain - before the cycle started over again.

Something I found really creepy about this was how Stu’s exes always seemed to have had some kind of emotional essence sucked out of them - like he was some kind of vampire and it was something he fed on - which meant you could normally write them off as damaged goods for years afterwards.

Even so, if you met Stu I guarantee that you’d like him; you’d find him witty, charismatic and devilishly charming. You’d also dismiss the occasional whiff of sulphur you kept picking up on as nothing more than your senses playing tricks on you.

Even though I was heartbroken about losing Sally there was no way I was ever going to admit it, either to myself or to the world at large, and the more I tried to deny it the stronger the desire to find some way of getting back at her became.

Unfortunately there wasn’t one.

But then being in Sheffield I never saw Sally or anything to remind me of her so it wasn’t too difficult to cope with - out of sight out of mind as they say. I wasn’t exactly going through a sex famine either; it would be an exaggeration to say I was getting more women than I could fuck but as the new kid in town and latest face on the Rebels/Roxy scene I certainly wasn’t short, so sexual frustration never became an issue to turn my attention back in Sally’s direction.

However, when I visited Lincoln it wasn’t so easy and it made for a very uncomfortable atmosphere when me, Sally and Stu all happened to be in the pub at the same time. As I’ve mentioned before, the crowd I hung out with in the Vaults were insular to a fault and they tended to congregate around one of the larger booths in the pub. That is except for when I was in town, when they would subtly polarise into two distinct groups, one lot sat with me, the others with Sally and Stu and with our mutual acquaintances flitting between.

For my part I was content just to snub Sally but she wasn’t so accommodating and would insist on going into her ‘look at me, aren’t I just the centre of attention’ routine. This was amusing enough to begin with but it became very tiresome, very quickly and every time we would step through the same routine. I would walk into the Vaults, Sally would spot me and immediately raise the level of her voice several notches before steering the conversation around to some aspect of her and Stu’s sex life which she would bellow out for my benefit.

Of course I was mortified to discover there was a sexual element to their relationship - it never would have occurred to me otherwise.

On other occasions Sally would find excuses to announce that she’d ‘grown up’ (which was obviously some nonsense Stu had put into her head) and by doing so demonstrate the exact opposite. Whenever anyone mentioned events that had occurred before she had started seeing Stu – and in particular ones that had occurred while she was still seeing me - she would, with much melodramatic emphasis, deliver the line, “Yes, but now I’ve grown up”.

The implication presumably being that only someone who was hopelessly immature would want to get involved with me. This was almost as hurtful as discovering that Sally was involved in another sexual relationship.

Having the kind of myopic perception Sally had, she was completely oblivious to the fact that she was, much more than anything else, simply letting me know that I still bothered her.

The same, however, couldn’t be said of Stu who was no fool and could tell perfectly well what was going on which would elicit a good deal of alpha-male posturing from his direction – snarling, muttering threats, barging into me as he walked past and suchlike.

Sometimes it got rougher, and usually at Sally’s behest (she could be a nasty little cow when she wanted to be), which would get me feeling rather nervous. Stu was a particularly vicious bastard and you really didn’t want to be on the receiving end of anything physical from him. I’d seen the bloodied mess people ended up in when this happened so I resolved to just stay out of his way as much as was practically possible.

But we’re going back to Sheffield now, and we won’t be bumping into Sally again until September.

By the end of the second week at Metcalfe Street Barry and his gang of doped-up imbeciles were really starting to do my tits in. Finding somewhere to live turned out to be a lot trickier than I ever imagined it would and I found myself stranded at Barry’s place for the best part of five weeks. Sunday afternoon was the worst time, when a host of creepy misfits would arrive and proceed to get stoned and talk dope-fuelled nonsense.

I don’t like stoner hippies and I reserve a particular odium for the kind of babbling cretins who think the world is more astutely observed through a cloud of dope smoke. Contrary to what such deluded nitwits like to believe, cannabis is not some magical herb that brings about enlightenment, nor does it facilitate ‘meaningful’ interaction, expand your consciousness or enhance creativity - unless you think that pulling a series of stupid faces while arhythmically hammering away at a set of bongos constitutes creativity.

The active element of the cannabis plant is a chemical called delta-9-tetra-hydro-cannabinol. THC as it’s more commonly known. This is an intoxicant which works by suppressing those areas of central nervous system that control not being a stupid fucking hippie. It impedes motor functions, disrupts cognitive processing and makes you think and talk like an arsehole - an insufferably boring arsehole at that.

And eventually it fries your brain.

Not that any good ever came of pointing this out. Once or twice, and on the rare occasions when Barry and his cronies were lucid, I asked whether they had any concerns about the effect smoking so much dope might be having on their mental health. The answer was always the same.

“It’s natural man, it grows in the ground, how can something that’s natural do you any harm?”

Okay then hippie, what about rabies, bubonic plague, ebola, leprosy, syphilis, malaria, typhus or dengue fever? They’re all natural. Earthquakes are a natural phenomenon, as are tornados, as are tidal waves, as are volcanoes, as was the meteorite responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. Wasps are natural, ditto tsetse flies, pubic lice, cockroaches, tapeworms and scabies mites. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that the candiru fish, which can swim up a stream of urine and lodge itself in the urethral tract using a pair of spines, wasn’t genetically engineered by Weyland-Yutani’s bio-weaponry division.

From a detached perspective it can be fairly amusing to mock such buffoons; unfortunately, staying as I was in a two-room bed-sit with a dope dealer, my perspective was anything but detached.

Some of it was just annoying, the fetishistic rituals surrounding the preparation and consumption of spliffs, for example, were a constant irritation. As was having lumps of resin and bags of weed shoved in my face every ten minutes – even when I’d explained countless times that I wasn’t interested in smelling the fucking stuff..

Then there’s annoying way of talking stoners always adopt – you know, the hoarse, breathy whisper delivered in three syllable spurts. Likewise the painfully irritating wreck-head laugh which comes in three main forms; the staccato, nasally enunciated ‘hih-hih-hih-hih’ noise (which was how Barry laughed); the screeching ‘ehhhhhhhhh’ sound with the pitch wavering up and down wildly (which is the one I find most annoying of all); or the baritone ‘urghhhhhhhhh’, which is repeated in short bursts and ascends one step of a minor scale on each repeat.

When Barry had the rest of the Manson Family round to watch his Cheech and Chong videos I got a pretty good idea of what Bedlam must have sounded like during a full moon.

There’s also that occult/Masonic all-seeing eye symbol that hippies are always drawing pictures of.

What’s the deal with that, is it some kind of covert signifier for the benefit of other hippies, something like the early Christians and the sign of the fish?

Then there were other things, things that went way beyond annoying and on more than one occasion it was only the delicacy of my housing situation that stopped me from kicking Barry’s face off.

By far the most testing of these was when he thought he was entitled to raid my section of the larder whenever his gang got the munchies. Even though pilfering a flatmates’ provisions was far from unheard of in my poverty stricken circle, the pilferer would always offer grovelling apologies, would always replace whatever they took at the first opportunity and would never, and I mean never, take anything if doing so meant that the pilferee would have to go without.

Hippies weren’t constrained by such reactionary scruples and just helped themselves to whatever they liked, whenever they liked. To add insult to injury they would try to make me feel like some kind of unreasonable skinflint should I have the temerity to object – usually by trotting out some leftist cliché.

“Barry, have you seen that shopping of mine?”

“Hih-hih-hih-hih, hih-hih-hih-hih. I’ve got a confession to make. We got stoned and ate it. Hih-hih-hih-hih.”

“So what am I supposed to do until I get my dole then?”

“Chill out man, we had the munchies. It was only a loaf of bread and some sausages. All property is theft anyway.”

Barry was forever pulling stunts like this and I often wondered how chilled out he would have been if I’d cooked a meal but found I didn’t really feel like eating it and had smoked his stash to stimulate my appetite. But then I daren’t kick off in case I provoked him into throwing me out on the street.

I was just about at my wits end by the time February was half way through and had more or less decided to move back to Lincoln when I noticed a card in the local newsagent’s window advertising a room in a house in Crookes. The advert hadn’t been there when I’d walked past half an hour earlier so I dashed to the nearest phone box to see if the room was still available; it was, and within ten minutes I was yomping up to Grigson Road to check the place out. As was usually the case with places I ended up living it turned out to be the scruffiest house on an otherwise well-kept street, but it was in a nice area, it was on the best served bus route in the city and it was cheap. The landlord was also willing to forgo the deposit until such time as I could prise some money out of the social security people so I told him I’d take the place and arranged to move in that Friday.

The relief I felt was close to rapture and the incident which closes our first chapter fully restored my faith in a just God.

Barry was visiting Lincoln that weekend which meant I didn’t have a lift with my stuff and had to shift everything manually. When I was unpacking at the other end I realised that I’d left the book I was reading (Firestarter by Stephen King if you really want to know) on the bathroom windowsill back at Barry’s place and made a mental note to go pick it up on Sunday evening when he would be back.

When I called round Barry answered the door looking a proper mess with both eyes blackened and his face absolutely covered in cuts and bruises. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened and just mumbled something about having fallen down the steps in the Vaults when he was stoned. I knew immediately that someone had given him a serious hoofing and, burning with curiosity, called a few people in Lincoln to make further inquiries.

When inmates are released from Lincoln nick they get a dole cheque and a one-way train ticket back to wherever they came from. Given the reputation the Vaults enjoyed - which it never really deserved - and because of its location just around the corner from the train station, newly released prisoners would often call in looking to buy some blow for the journey home.

Barry was in the Vaults and was mouthing off about his imaginary spell in jail when one of these guys turned up. He overheard Barry and, after scoring a deal off him, asked where and when he’d been inside. Unfortunately for Barry, when he gave his answer it turned out that this particular ex-con had been in the same prison at the same time. He told Barry he couldn’t remember him and asked which wing he’d been on.

Barry should have done his research a little more thoroughly because the wing he named in his reply was the segregation wing – the one where all the nonces were kept.

I’d have paid a lot of money to have witnessed the kicking Barry got - apparently it took three of the bar staff to drag his assailant off - but just knowing it had happened was enough to make me smile for a long time afterwards.