The world is fucked; we’re heading to war, Trump is becoming ‘the great peacemaker’ he’s always wanted to be by attacking, invading, kidnapping and being aggressive and military towards anyone he can provoke.

The football is worse.

So I can’t be doing any of that now. Instead, my mind drifts. To ‘happier times’…

Funny; I hadn’t thought of Mr Byrite until I wrote the other day about Saturday jobs. Because they were all the rage last Sunday, now it’s all about Greenland. I never had a job in Greenland. Nor Iceland.

My Saturdays were fab. PLUS: we got, like, 30%, maybe 40% off clothes we bought. And that brought the stuff down to what is was just about worth. It looked great. Once.

One week, the word went round that David Bowie was playing gigs. In 1971 we all loved Hunky Dory and played it all the time. Bowie was not a big star. He was an ‘oddity’. And then Ziggy Stardust came out. And that was a massive ‘wow’. Probably because it was Bowie’s rock phase, so it was all much louder, less ballady that his previous. Personally, I hadn’t made up my mind about Le (or, as it sometimes was, La) Bowie. All that make-up? Dressin’ up silly? But what the hell, gig’s a gig, right? So we got tickets. About 20 us. And went to Romford Odeon to see the Ziggy set. Which is probably the best gig I ever saw. Then at the end of that tour, he ‘killed’ Ziggy, became the ‘Thin White Duke’ and it all went downhill.

I had a… friend. Called Jackie. She wasn’t a girlfriend, but a girl friend. And for about a year, we just kind’a hooked up every few weeks, with my dear, departed best mate, Stan and her mate Suzanne, and went wild. Jackie was a wild child. She was also 6 foot tall, stick thin and incredibly, stunningly beautiful. Olive skin, long dark wavy hair, she’d been a ‘Colgate girl’, on adverts as a kid, for toothpaste. She walked like a supermodel, even though they hadn’t been invented yet. Everywhere we went people stared at her. And therefore, they would see me too. The little guy next to her. And as ‘it’s all about me’, that was great.

Jackie had a Saturday job in Chelsea Girl, just down the high road from me. And in her lunch break, virtually every week, we had a ritual. She would saunter into Mr Byrite, which would be rammed with shoppers, as it was all day, and heads would turn. Because she had an air of both incredible confidence and fun about her. The crowds would part and she would find me, grab hold of my head and kiss me. But we’re not talking, ‘mwah’, how ya doin’?, kind’a kiss. We’re talking Bardot-movie, slow, passionate, grinding, 4-minute snogging. Then she’d just turn around and walk out with that killer smile on her face.

Ahhhh, the things you remember from the past when the present is so consistently horrible.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx