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aving established myself in Sheffield with a permanent address, a regular dole cheque and a reasonably secure larder I could at long last start to organise my finances properly. Budgeting on the dole and making one payment last the full two weeks until the next was something of an acquired skill – and a skill best acquired quickly if you didn’t want to spend the last few days of the fortnight with nothing to eat. And I was good at this, very good; I could make just £15 cover my food and sundry household items and, using a little imagination, still manage to have a reasonably healthy and varied  diet.1

Certain household consumables you could get for free. Like toilet paper. I can distinctly remember the first time I actually paid money for toilet paper and in many ways I like to think of it as a threshold moment marking the transition from feckless youth to responsible adulthood. But that wouldn’t come for another few years and in 1990 toilet paper didn’t exactly top my list of spending priorities - not considering its fate and when you could quite easily steal the stuff. A few minutes foraging in either the bus/train station or MacDonald’s loos would leave you equipped to cope with a medium sized dysentery epidemic. In emergencies you could always fall back on the free papers, flyers and other junk which perpetually cascaded through the letterboxes of houses in student areas, but this wasn’t something you wanted to make a habit of, not unless you wanted to end up with a seriously chaffed nipsy.

Most other toiletries you had little option but to buy. Like soap. Occasionally you might find public toilets with actual soap bars in them but these were extremely rare and for the most part they were fitted with the more commonplace liquid dispensers. You could fill a suitable container from these if you wanted but it was always too much hassle for me and I’d just buy the stuff. Toothpaste, shampoo and deodorant also had to be bought, as did hairspray, which probably accounted for the biggest toiletry expenditure of all. The gravity defying hairstyles my friends and I favoured demanded ozone depleting weapons grade lacquer and Boots Essentials simply didn’t pass muster. To be sure of a confident long lasting hold that wouldn’t let you down you needed to apply up to half a tin of either Shockwaves Hard Rock or Insette Spikey and neither of these were cheap.

The vast majority of my shopping was split between the two indoor markets on Castlegate and a scabby supermarket called Lo-cost. In early 1990 we didn’t have Netto (neither had any of the other major supermarket chains introduced their ‘Value’ and ‘No Frills’ ranges as a response to the competition.), the first UK branch didn’t open until December of that year in Leeds and its chief competitors, Aldi and Lidl, wouldn’t make an appearance until 1991 and 1994 respectively. Nevertheless, Lo-Cost catered for much the same demographic and had the same kind of sales ethos. Lo-Cost was lo-cated opposite the main bus station on Pond Street in the same block of buildings as the Roxy nightclub and the entrance was adjacent to a covered alcove that tramps used as a combined bedroom and toilet. Consequently there was a permanent and stomach-churning stench of piss hanging in the air. On a hot day this was so overpowering you could actually taste it and necessitated holding your breath while walking in and out of the place.

My bi-weekly shopping expedition, or rather the groundwork for it, would begin on a Wednesday morning immediately after signing on when I’d call at Lo-Cost on my way home; not to buy anything, but to stroll up and down the aisles furtively squashing the cans and tearing the packets of items I intended to purchase when my giro arrived. This was so that when I came back two days later I could get most of my stuff off the ‘benefit-buffet’ – that being the rack of shelves you find in most supermarkets on which anything with damaged packaging or an imminent sell-by date is dumped and sold at a hefty discount.

Lo-Cost was where I’d get my packaged groceries from – stuff in tins and packets, frozen food etc - everything else – meat, fresh vegetables and such - came from the markets.

The shopping proper started once the fortnightly giro arrived when you would set out with the express purpose of buying exactly enough provisions for fourteen main meals. After that, you were free to spend the rest of your money on booze and socialising.

Chilli con carne and spaghetti bolognese were two major staples of the doley diet. To make spaghetti bolognese you’d use a pound of mince, a large onion, two tins of tomatoes, a tube of tomato puree and prepare the whole thing in a large saucepan. To add some colour and make it a little less bland I’d bung in half a dozen mushrooms and a diced pepper (and if I was really pushing the boat out, a splash of red wine). This would provide enough for three generous meal-sized helpings. One immediately after preparing it and the other two in freezer bags for another day. Chilli con carne was exactly the same except that you’d add a teaspoon of chilli powder and a tin of kidney beans and serve it over rice or boiled potatoes instead of pasta.

That took care of six of the fourteen meals straight away.

Corned beef hash was another cheap & cheerful void filler. With a tin of corned beef, an onion, four or five potatoes, a couple of carrots, a tin of peas and a couple of Oxo cubes/heaped tablespoons of gravy mix all simmered together for half an hour, four of you could royally stuff your faces. Mind you, this was chiefly a communal meal as one person could never eat that amount in one sitting and it didn’t keep very well meaning that you usually ended up binning half of it.

Chickens were good value too, you could get a medium sized chicken for a little over a quid in the markets and this would account for the main part of two more meals; a substantial roast with one half and a generous curry with the other. If you could be bothered (I never could) there was nothing to stop you using the bones and other leftovers to make soup.

Most of the other meals tended to be rice, pasta and curry based affairs (or chips) for the simple reason that they were reasonably tasty, easy to prepare and, more importantly, cheap. I always did have a talent for culinary improvisation and came up with several recipes which proved a big hit with my peers - my bacon-bits, vegetables and rice stir-fries chief among them. In fact I was often able to blag a meal by offering to prepare it if someone else paid for the ingredients.

The Sheaf and Castle markets were an absolute Godsend for doleys, pensioners, students or anyone else on a limited budget. But there was something unnerving about the markets, namely the odd looking people you encountered there. It was as if the chorus line from Deliverance: The Musical had all decided to go shopping at the same time. You never seemed to see these people anywhere else either - perhaps they lived in caverns beneath the markets and had a limited tolerance to daylight.

However, i was far more concerned about how much - or rather how little - stuff cost.

Vegetables could be had for next to nothing. The stalls in the markets were cheap enough to start with but you could make them cheaper still by keeping an eye out for bruised and damaged items which you could get for a token fee. Peppers, for example, might normally go for thirty pence each, find one with a bruise, point it out and you’d get it for five pence. Okay, you might have to cut off and throw away a large chunk but you were still quids in. And if you left it until late on a Saturday afternoon things would be even cheaper than that as there was always a last minute rush on the part of the stallholders to get rid of anything perishable.

Mind you, there was a danger in going shopping on a Saturday afternoon. As it was giro week the chances were you’d have been in the pub since midday and would be a little pissed. This could cloud your judgement somewhat. One time I’d gone staggering off to get some mince for a chilli and, through a drunken haze, had seen a stall flogging the stuff for ten pence a pound. Not realising this was pet mince, made up of I shudder to think what (slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails…), I bought a 5lb bag convinced I’d got a real bargain and duly went home to prepare my evening meal – all while still very much inebriated.

I thought something had smelled a bit suspect while I was cooking the thing but had dismissed it and just added more chilli powder to compensate. After heroically wrestling down about half a dozen mouthfuls I felt it coming back out – and a hell of a lot faster than it had gone in.

It was a good job I’d done a toilet roll raid that afternoon because for the rest of the evening - and most of the next day - when I wasn’t heaving my guts out of my mouth they were doing their level best to make an equally spectacular departure from the other end.

There was one stall in the markets, Scoop & Save, which I would never have survived without. Scoop & Save was one of those places where everything was sold loose out of plastic tubs. They had all kinds of rice, pasta, sugar, coffee, tea bags (although these tended to leave a suspicious looking film on the cup), powdered milk etc. In fact just about anything that could be sold loose out of plastic tubs was sold out of plastic tubs Pound for pound the place wasn’t a great deal cheaper than the packaged stuff you got in a supermarket but the advantage of it was the convenience; if you needed some rice and you only had seventeen pence then you could weigh out exactly that much.

There were other ways to reduce the grocery bill too.

During the early part of 1990 MacDonald’s was running a promotion themed on the Trivial Pursuit board game and with every sale would give away a general knowledge scratch card with which you could win items off the menu. Most of the time this would just be a small portion of fries or soft drink but every so often you’d hit the jackpot with a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder. A student called Adrian, who was another Lincoln émigré, worked part-time in the Furnival Gate branch of McDonalds and, after I’d made various appeals to his better nature, he would occasionally forget to issue these cards. When Adrian finished work for the day I’d meet up with him and receive a huge wad of the things which he’d accrued during his shift.

Courtesy of Adrian, MacDonald’s and – when I wasn’t sure of the answers - the reference section of the public library, I could pig out on junk food at least three or four times a week. This meant I didn’t use all the groceries I’d bought on my last shopping expedition and would spend less on the next one.

This didn’t last though, the promotion came to an end and MacDonalds also began running that cringe-making TV commercial (perhaps you remember it, the one that was subtitled ‘A Day in the Life’) which put me off eating there for years afterwards.

Another money saver was to hop over the wall at the back of Sainsbury’s, which at this time was in the Atkinson’s building at the bottom of The Moor, and raid their skip. It was a friend of Barry’s (i.e. a hippie) who first told me about this. When it came to sell-by dates Sainsbury’s had a policy that erred very much on the side of caution and they would throw out literally tons of stuff which was still perfectly edible. Mind you, even though I was pretty shameless in those days there was a limit to what I was prepared to do and spending my Sunday afternoons grovelling in a skip looking for food went well beyond it.

I never resorted to shoplifting either, partly because I didn’t have the required skill or nerve but mainly, I like to think, because I had foresight and sense enough to realise that it was hardly worth getting pinched and saddling myself with a criminal record for the sake of a tin of beans. Saying that, I had few qualms about getting people to nick stuff on my behalf. There were a couple of ne’er do wells who hung around in the Wap and who would shoplift to order, charging half retail price. As a keen reader I found them very useful for supplying me with the books I’d never have been able to otherwise afford. I would rationalise such ethical issues as arose by insisting my orders were only stolen from major retail outlets and not smaller establishments - a kind of politically correct thievery that I could just about convince myself was a form of wealth redistribution (larder raiding stoners weren’t the only ones who could pitch worn out leftist clichés to justify their actions).

I still smoked in those days and that was a big expense, although real cigarettes tended to be a treat largely reserved for giro weekend Saturday nights and Roxy Mondays. The rest of the time I would satisfy the cravings with a pouch of rolling tobacco and when that ran out by smoking dog end roll-ups made from the contents of pub ashtrays and those in the communal areas of the house (I have actually witnessed fist fights break out over who had rightful access to the contents of the household ashtrays).

In a place like Sheffield it was always a good idea to get hold a student union ID as a hefty part of the city’s social scene was geared around, or subsidised by, the fact that there was such a large student population2. In those days student union cards weren’t even laminated and simply consisted of a stamped passport photo stuck on a piece of blue card and were a doddle to forge. Once acquired a student union card could provide reduced admission to nightclubs and cinemas and get you all kinds of bus, train and other discount passes. It also got you into the student union bar where the drinks were considerably cheaper than regular pubs. Unfortunately, what it didn’t get you was every credit facility the financial sector could provide, which is the principal monetary difference between life on the dole and life as a student..

Realistically, you can’t live on dole money and you don’t; you survive on it. Just - and even then only provided you never buy clothes, don’t pay utility bills and don’t stay unemployed for more than a few months.

So you have to supplement your income, often in rather dodgy ways.

In the kinds of houses that were routinely let to the unemployed it was unusual for tenants to stay more than six months and there was always mail arriving for people who no longer lived there. Whenever one of those ‘You Have Already Won £100,000’ junk mail circulars arrived in a former tenants name you were on to a potential gold mine. Those things were invariably come-ons for club books and ripping them off was a high-reward, low-risk venture (how else do you think I could afford a boom box that cost more than a months worth of giros?).

Similarly there was household insurance fraud. Even though burglary hadn’t quite sunk below the police radar in 1990 there was very little they could realistically do about investigating it. One student house I knew of had got burgled and one of the tenants, whose parents insisted he took out insurance, made enough to replace everything he’d lost and to also treat himself to a top of the range stereo and TV/video set up. His flatmates couldn’t believe how easily the insurance company had coughed up and had all subsequently taken out policies and faked the next break in. This time they went on a Mediterranean camping holiday with the profits. While they were in southern France someone robbed their tents – or at least that’s what they told the local police. Having arrived back in Britain they duly filled out the forms to claim on the substantial holiday insurance they’d taken out before departing. In one case – and I believe the guy was a business studies student, which would make sense as they’re always shameless crooks - the insurance company refused to pay out, considering the amount being claimed as excessive. He took the company to court and won.

The daddy of all dole scams, which I seriously doubt you could get away with these days what with computerisation and such, involved assuming the identity of a dead person. I knew a few people who managed to pull this off but was never anything like brazen enough to attempt it myself.

What you did was to go for a stroll around the local cemeteries looking out for the graves of people who would be about the same age as you were they still alive but who had died before they reached their teens. This meant that there was a record of their birth but that no national insurance number had ever been issued. From such a headstone you could glean the name and date of birth of a real person which would bear casual official scrutiny. The fact that no national insurance number had been issued would have the social security people running in circles for about three months or so until they figured out that there wasn’t one and became suspicious.

The next thing you needed was an address for your correspondence and dole cheques to go to. Ideally this would be an established squat or a traveller camp or somewhere like that where there were people who could be relied on to aid you in your endeavour. You had to count on eventually being sussed out so it made sense to be registered as living at a place with a transient population. That way, when the authorities came a-knocking you could rely on someone telling them – and having it believed - that you’d been pretty much of a loner and had moved out a couple of weeks ago and no, they didn’t know where you’d gone. Sorry.

Having done the groundwork you’d then go to the unemployment benefit office and make a fresh claim using your nom de guerre, telling them that you had never worked or signed on before because you had rich parents who gave you all the money you needed but that they had now gone to live in Australia or somewhere suitably distant. The chances were that after the initial interview you’d be put straight on income support, be given a signing on time and also get some kind of emergency payment there and then. You could get away with this for anything up to six months and, provided you had the cheek, there was nothing to prevent you making multiple claims with multiple identities acquired in the same fashion - particularly in a major conurbation like the Sheffield, Rotherham, Chesterfield and Barnsley area where there were countless different dole offices and where interdepartmental communication was lax to say the least. There were even stories of people who ran this scam being issued national insurance numbers and being able to assume totally new identities (although when I e-mailed the very helpful editorial staff of the anarchist publication Class War they reckoned such stories were almost certainly apocryphal).

But once the money ran out, and it always did, you needed to learn how to cope with boredom, which for our purposes can be defined as that which is experienced between spending the last on one dole cheque and receiving the next. And coping with boredom is one of the biggest challenges of life on the dole.

First of all you become nocturnal. I never really understood the physics of it, but time seemed to pass by much quicker when you reversed the normal sleep cycle, going to bed at dawn and only emerging from beneath the quilt when the Steve Wright in the afternoon show started on Radio 1.

I spent many of my waking hours lost in books. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever read so voraciously as during that first half of 1990 and would visit the library at least once a week. As well as the predictable literary diet of the heavy metal fan - Stephen King, Robert R. MacCammon, James Herbert et al plus innumerable sci-fi and horror anthologies - I discovered Tom Sharpe and became a lifelong fan, I happened upon Joe Pistone’s Donnie Brasco well before the movie was ever thought of; I devoured Vengeance by George Jonas, the account of the Mossad mission to assassinate the Arab terrorist bigwigs responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre (recently adapted by Steven Spielberg as Munich); I read William Shirer’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; I re-read Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 - as well as several collections of his essays - and this time around I actually understood what he was saying.

There were other uncharacteristically wholesome activities I’d indulge in too. Sometimes I’d go and visit the pigs at the Heeley City Farm. I've always had a soft spot for pigs and whenever I did my shopping I’d keep an eye out for spoiled apples which I’d take for my porcine pals as a treat – especially for the Vietnamese pot-belly who got bullied by the two other (slightly less cute) pigs in his pen.

There was a kid with Down’s Syndrome who worked at the farm and the way he quite clearly loved his job and took such pride in it was really something to see. In fact it was such a wonderfully life-affirming sight that even a jaded misanthrope like me couldn’t help feeling all warm inside.

As well as killing time at the City Farm there was the old Victorian graveyard on Cemetery Road, which I’d come across when I’d been escaping one of Barry’s Sunday afternoon stoner gathering. There was a charming serenity about this old graveyard and whenever I was stressed out about things I found it soothing to spend a couple of hours wandering around the place.

But these were all solitary activities and as human beings are principally social animals you’d soon begin to yearn for the company of like-minded others.

Perhaps the favourite way of killing time was to spend the afternoon (no one was out of bed much before then) doing ‘the dole stroll’, which is the meandering amble you would take around the city centre shopping precincts, looking in at all the pubs, cafes etc along the way to see if anyone was about. In Sheffield the focal point of this was the Peace Gardens.

The Peace Gardens was an oasis of greenery in the paved city centre consisting of an elliptical lawn bisected by a central path and all surrounded by a perimeter of bushes and flowerbeds. Just about everyone who was doing the dole stroll would pass through the place at some point during the day and if you loitered around for long enough you were bound to see someone you knew.

It was also tramp central - as such places tend to be (an alternative name for the Peace Gardens was ‘the Blue Hotel’ because of the hue of the residents on winter mornings). I imagine there’s an equivalent in practically every city and large town in Britain.

The twenty or so regular ‘Peace Garden Drinkers’, as the local paper occasionally referred to them, illustrated the full gamut of dereliction. At one end of the scale were people who were more drunken wasters than fully fledged down and outs; forty-something unemployables who were too old to pass off their boozing as laddish exuberance but who didn’t quite have both feet in the gutter just yet. At the other end, devolving by degrees along the way, were the purple-faced basket cases who stank of piss and spent all day either unconsciously drunk, having arguments with themselves or standing on street corners screaming obscenities and shaking their fists at passing traffic.

Our pal Tony Wilkins seemed to be a semi-permanent fixture in the Peace Gardens and was also on conversational terms with a few of those regulars at the more coherent end of the spectrum. Through Tony I discovered a few of their names as well as a few of their histories3.

One of them was a sullen, brooding nutcase known as Orinoco who had been certified after he sliced off one of his testicles with a razor blade. The reason he did this was apparently because he wanted to see what the inside of it looked like.

Another was a wild-eyed maniac called Harris. A few years earlier Harris had been convicted and heavily fined for urinating in public and had considered the presiding magistrate - who was a socially prominent figure in the village Harris lived in - so pompous that he decided to teach him a lesson. One afternoon Harris left a ‘bomb’, which he’d made using an alarm clock, some red and blue wires and a large blob of plasticene with six inch nails embedded in it, on the magistrate’s doorstep. He’d also left his fingerprints and was seen by scores of witnesses so it didn’t take the police too long to figure out who was responsible. This time the courts weren’t so lenient and sent him down for eighteen months and by the time Harris came out of jail he was madder than a yodelling gerbil.

There was also Garry the skinhead who had particularly messy homemade facial tattoos including teardrops at the corners of his eyes and a crude oblong block on his forehead. The story was that he’d meant to tattoo the word

but had been looking in a mirror when he did it and it had turned out saying,

which he’d blotted out once he’d realised – or rather once someone had pointed it out to him a few days later.

And yes, he really was that much of a moron.

There were others for whom I invented my own names - like Mr Lippy.

This guy had a pretty ordered routine to his day which involved sitting by the side of the path in the Peace Gardens, sticking his bottom lip out and cultivating a look of distressed helplessness until he’d begged enough money for a bottle of cider whereupon he’d go lurching off to the Gateway (now Somerfield) supermarket on nearby Pinstone Street to get one. As soon as he’d drunk that he’d repeat the process until he eventually passed out.

The female equivalent of Mr Lippy was Cider Woman. Cider Woman never made an appearance much before late afternoon and looked like she’d come straight from the comedy bag-lady department of Central Casting as she staggered into the Peace Gardens, waving her bottle of cider about, yelling and swearing at the top of her voice. She would often flirt with the male tramps and one time she’d been rolling around on the grass when her skirt had ridden up to reveal a pair of enormous baggy period knickers which were stained dirty yellow at the front and even dirtier brown at the back.

That image stayed fixed in my minds eye for weeks afterwards.

Hanging around with Tony and the tramps wasn’t something I liked to spend too much time doing as it was depressing and my inner snob always got the better of me. I never could disguise feelings of contempt and was always betrayed by the snotty expression which would form on my face.

Tony could spot this and would often reprimand me for it.

“You shouldn’t look down your nose at people like them.” He once snapped at me as we were walking through the Peace Gardens. “Some of them choose to live on the streets; they find it less stressful than regular life. You might be surprised to learn that David used to be a university lecturer, he’s actually very well educated and cultured.”

“Which one’s David?” I asked.

“Him.” Said Tony, pointing to a gurning catastrophe with a puke-matted beard who was, in full view of the lunchtime passers by, squatting in the bushes taking a shit.

Knee-jerk snobbery aside, I always did have something of a crisis of conscience regarding the issue of homelessness. A part of me does despair over the plight of these people but then the awkward reality of the situation – which no one lobbying on behalf of the homeless, or who is in a position to do anything about it, wants to accept - is not that there is a shortage of affordable housing. In 1990 Sheffield council had enough empty properties to house every rough sleeper in the British Isles several times over. Nor is it, as some blinkered Marxist throwbacks still like to believe, that the capitalist system conspires to keep a certain percentage of the population destitute as an example to the rest. The real reason the homeless are homeless is because half of them are clinically insane and utterly incapable of looking after themselves and the other half are hopeless alcoholics and/or drug addicts who will rip out and sell the plumbing of any property they are accommodated in before turning the place into a crack den.

In the case of the former my heart does go out to the poor, confused wretches. In the case of the latter I’m not so sympathetic. Substance abuse is a vice, not a disease or something foisted on the individual from above and if you make your bed then you should be prepared to lie in it – even if that is a piss-soaked mattress underneath the railway arches.

The Peace Gardens was given a full makeover in 1998 as part of The Heart of the City regeneration project and now looks nothing like the 1990 version. These days there are fountains, landscaped water features, multi-level flowerbeds and all the tramps have been banished to the much smaller Fountain Precinct opposite the John Lewis department store where, as far as I’m aware, they languish wanking in the shrubbery and drinking paint stripper to this very day.

The dole stroll was a very good way to make friends and meet people. You would often recognise folks from nights at Rebels, the Roxy etc and more often than not you’d end up talking to them or there would be a mutual acquaintance around to introduce you. This would snowball as the people you were introduced to introduced you to others, you’d introduce them to your crowd ad infinitum – a kind of bargain basement networking.

One person I met had actually heard of the band I’d fronted a couple of years earlier. I’d been chatting with a gang of people in the Peace Gardens when one lad had told me that he couldn’t place my accent and asked where I was from. When I told him Lincoln he said,

“Did you ever hear of Badd Haddöck, they were a heavy metal band from Lincoln?”

When I told him that yes, I had heard of them, in fact I’d been the singer and rhythm guitarist his jaw practically fell into his lap.

“You’re Dom? Oh my God I’ve heard all about you!” he exclaimed, “I know Andy, your old bassist, he was in the room next to me when I was in halls in my first year at university. He told me some right stories.”

“Our bassist wasn’t called Andy,” I replied quite baffled, “he was called Stu, he’s always lived in Lincoln and he certainly never went to university.”

After quizzing the guy for a while I figured out who this Andy was. He’d been a minor figure on the Lincoln rock scene who was infatuated with, and constantly pestering, my then girlfriend’s younger sister when we’d first started the band. I remember her expressing relief when he’d gone to college in Sheffield in 1986 and that, up until the above exchange took place, had been the last I’d heard of him.

That someone had been masquerading as a Badd Haddöck veteran - presumably to impress girls and enhance his heavy metal kudos - was something I never knew whether to be annoyed or flattered about.

Jeffrey the Raving Bender was often to be seen when doing the dole stroll. If you were ever out and about on the South Yorkshire/Midlands rock scene in the early 1990s you would have noticed him – you couldn’t have failed to. When I first arrived in Sheffield Jeffrey was just another mildly androgynous glam rocker, throughout 1990 he got gradually into cross-dressing and when I last saw him, which was in 1992 shortly before he had his sex change operation, he looked like some kind of heavy metal Widow Twanky. Oddly enough Jeffrey was tolerated by even the most loutish of Sheffield’s rockers although I think this had rather less to do with any kind of enlightened liberal attitude than with a fear that he might infect them with gayness if they hassled him.

Another instantly recognisable local personality was the Snakeman who wandered around with an enormous python draped about him. This guy enthused about snakes to such an extent that you got the distinct impression something wasn’t quite right upstairs. Snakes were all he ever talked about and he had a talent for being able to steer any conversation in a snake-ward direction which made you feel pretty uncomfortable after a while.

That said there was one afternoon in the Frog & Parrot when I really felt like shaking his hand. Some dreadlocked Nedger girl had come in the pub carrying a hamster cage full of young rats and had gone table to table asking if anyone wanted one for a pet or knew of someone who did.

“I do,” said the Snakeman, who had sneakily hidden the python under his jacket “I know loads of people who want pet rats, so many that I’ll take the lot off you.”

“I hope they’ll be taken care of properly.” Said the girl.

“Don’t worry about that,” hissed the Snakeman, sounding for all the world like a pantomime villain, “they’ll definitely be appreciated.”

I half expected a clap of thunder to ring out and for him to start cackling manically.

Someone I had been especially anxious to be introduced to was a girl called Zoë. I seem to recall that it was Danny who eventually obliged me. Zoë was an eighteen year-old heavy metal goddess with a husky voice, a willowy figure and the most gorgeous almond shaped eyes that gave her a distinctly oriental appearance. I had noticed Zoë at the Roxy a good six months before I moved to Sheffield and, for me at least, it had been a case of lust at first sight. Unfortunately she had a boyfriend, albeit a somewhat distant boyfriend; they never seemed to speak when they were in the pub, they arrived and left separately, he hardly ever went up to Rebels and you wouldn’t have known they were seeing each other unless someone had told you. He was also a lot bigger than me, so caution dictated that I didn’t pursue the matter too openly.

Zoë had trained as a hairdresser somewhere along the line and supplemented her dole money by attending to the split ends of Sheffield’s heavy metal fraternity. Thinking this might be a good excuse to ingratiate myself I had arranged for her to trim mine, which were starting to get a little frizzy.

It was a Saturday morning sometime in early March when I turned up at her place, which was deep in Nether Edge in a large four storey terraced house that had been converted into half a dozen separate flats. Upon arrival she had ushered me into the ground floor apartment which was rented by a friend of hers called Terry. A couple of other guys, Nick and ‘Shaky’ Bob, were having their hair done too, so Zoë had decided to use Terry’s front room as it was a lot bigger and better lit than hers.

Nick, who was considered a major heart-throb by the girls on Sheffield’s rock scene, was a tall, well-toned, good looking lad a couple of years younger than me who always wore a distinctive blue and white bandana. You immediately warmed to Nick, he was a witty, charismatic and friendly guy who seemed to carry a cheery atmosphere around with him. From what I understood he was also some kind of martial art expert which made it additionally handy to know him.

I have no idea how Shaky Bob came by the handle, although I do remember someone saying that perhaps it might have been because his surname was Stevens (you work it out). He came from Norwich originally and was more of an indie-kid than a rocker, with bad teeth - even by British standards - and a penchant for brightly coloured, floral patterned shirts.

Although I’d seen these two around often enough we’d never actually spoken. We got on famously as it happened, and gelled immediately upon discovering that we shared a similar aversion to stoner hippies.

As the snipping commenced we engaged in nondescript chitchat. Bob seemed to know a little of my back story in that I’d recently moved over from Lincoln and using this as common ground kicked off by asking for my impressions of Sheffield as a place to live. One of the things he asked me - which seemed utterly bizarre at first - was whether I’d noticed the subliminal sex and drugs references in the names of the city’s bus companies. I never had, but once he explained it I realised that we also shared the same kind of leftfield, not to say infantile, sense of humour.

One of these companies was called Sheaf Line, which might have suggested they gave condoms away on their buses; there was also City Clipper (spoonerise it to get the joke). By far the largest though, was an outfit called Mainline (in drug culture parlance ‘mainlining’ is the practice of injecting substances rather than smoking, swallowing or snorting them). The sexual connotation to compliment the narcotic one being that - and I swear I’m not making this up – the company had dubbed the twenty five seat mini-buses which they had recently brought into service ‘Eager Beavers’, which was painted down the side in three foot tall lettering. Better still, they had run an advertising campaign under the slogan ‘Eager Beaver Fever’, which is as good a title for a porno movie as I can think of. Somebody in the copy writing department must have been having a laugh with that one.

We were getting along famously and I already knew that I liked them both when Nick suddenly started sniggering. As I followed his line of sight my eyes came to rest on a framed picture of the all seeing eye which was propped up against the fireplace. I looked up at Nick and then at Bob, who had noticed the picture too. As we exchanged glances a ripple of deeper understanding passed between the three of us and we all burst out giggling.
“Is Eric a hippie?” Nick asked Zoë.
“Sort of, how did you know that?”
“Just a feeling.”
As if on cue, Eric chose that precise moment to come through the front door. He walked into the room, took a look around and muttered to no one in particular,
“Hmm, communal grooming. Nice.”

Once we had all been trimmed, Bob, Nick and I walked the mile or so back to the city centre swapping anecdotes along the way. They had been amused by my account of Barry and his comeuppance at the hands of a nonce bashing ex-con but had told me a story to totally top that.

Bob and Nick shared a flat in the Walkley area of Sheffield and had a thirty something hippie known as Whiff living in a bedsit across the corridor. Whiff had been involved in a nasty motorbike accident in the early 1980s, which had shattered one of his legs leaving him with a permanent limp and heavily reliant on a walking stick. He had received a large payout from the other party’s insurance and had also been able to milk the sickness benefit ever since and did little more that sit around getting stoned all day.

Whiff had a habit of calling on Bob and Nick at mealtimes, inviting himself in and then loitering about the place, skinning up spliff after spliff and generally being an annoying hippie until they offered him something to eat - which was the only way to get rid of him.

They had got so fed up with this that following an afternoons drinking in the Wap, they had decided drastic measures were called for and had formulated a plan which they put into action as soon as they got home. Bob had dug an old saucepan out and emptied a jar of vindaloo sauce into the thing before taking it to the toilet to add a generous helping of – and there’s no delicate way of putting this - unappetising bodily solids. He then placed the pan on the hob and proceeded to bring it to the boil.

The smell was so revolting, Nick reckoned, that even with all the windows open he still had to go outside to breathe and could barely stand to go near the saucepan to stir it.

That struck me as being very gracious of Nick, he may have been planning to feed curried human shit to a mentally confused and physically disabled neighbour but at least he was being meticulous in its preparation and making sure it didn’t burn.

Bob found an excuse to knock on Whiff’s door and casually mentioned that there was half a pan of curry left over from dinner which was going to waste. Whiff didn’t need to be told twice and came hobbling across just as fast as his walking stick and one good leg could carry him.

It became apparent that something wasn’t quite right when he failed to gag on the sickening stench hanging in the air.

What Bob and Nick didn’t know at this point was that Whiff had actually come by the nickname as a result of losing his sense of smell in the same bike accident that had mangled his leg. Losing his sense of smell also meant he’d lost most of his sense of taste - the pure sensations of taste being those of salt, sugar, acid and bitter, all the other sensations we think of as taste are actually sensations of smell (you see, this stuff is an education too).

It never occurred to either of them that Whiff might actually eat any of the reeking mess that was bubbling away angrily on the stove. All they had intended to do was to drop the most unambiguous hint possible that he wasn’t welcome but found themselves standing there, totally mesmerised, as Whiff ravenously polished off the lot. The spell was only broken when he folded a slice of bread in two and wiped it around the bottom of the pan which was when they both ran into the back yard to throw up.

Anyway, and getting back to the titular theme of this chapter, most of the time you’d get through the full fortnight without too much bother or privation. This wasn’t always the case though, there would be times when you either miscalculated the amount of shopping you needed or failed to discipline your spending and ran out of food with a couple of days to go. This was when you would be, quite literally, too poor to get out of bed. You were too poor to get out of bed because moving around used up energy and made you even hungrier than you already were. There was absolutely nothing you could do about this other than to burrow under the quilt, curl into the foetal position and will yourself into a state of suspended animation until the giro dropped through the letterbox.

But when the cheque arrived, the shopping had been done and Friday evening loomed, we came alive. It was time to take a shower, fire up the crimpers and hit the off-license for a bottle of Thunderbird and a pack of twenty Marlboro because the weekend had come around again – and this was what we lived for, this was practically all we lived for.