They called me Polo because my ex boyfriend shot me in the chest with an air rifle and it left quite a decent size hole.
Well, I say ‘shot’ but it was an accident I suppose. He was sat opposite me with the rifle laying across his lap, pointing away, when – for no other reason than to make some noise and break the boredom and because he knew he shouldn’t really just point the thing without taking aim – he squeezed the trigger. Only the pellet hit a metal rivet in a stone post and ricocheted straight back into my chest.
It’s lucky I wasn’t a bony child or it would have hurt like a MF. As it was it stung enough to make crying in front of the boys a reality. When the wound started dribbling blood all over my clothes, making the whole incident even harder to hide from my mother, fear dried my tears.
Mam worried about me and my sister so much it’s a wonder she got any sleep. As it was, she would lie in bed at night imagining horrific ‘what if’ scenarios where my sister and I met with a gruesome end at the hands of a deranged maniac, or under the wheels of a lorry, or trapped in a torrid house fire. She loathed to let us out of her sight (and out of the protective circle of her arms) and would have fainted or choked or threw the most almighty temper tantrum if she knew just what we DID get up to. If I came home sporting a gunshot wound, my mother would have enough reason to ban me from going outside for the rest of my adolescence.
Eventually the wound healed and the scab fell off and, through some clever dressing, my mother was none the wiser.
My mates had great fun for a few months calling me polo and, on any flat surface they could find, drawing pictures of a short, fat, round girl with a hole in her chest . I especially liked it when they used permanent marker and wrote my name next to the drawing with a big arrow pointing at the fatty.
Happy days.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
Fashion Fuck Ups
I made so many fashion fuck-ups growing up that I think it’s permanently altered the part of my brain that sees reality; the part that’s called judgement and makes you team up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that do go together and discard the long wrap-around skirt, chunky trainers, ratty old T-Shirt and winter cardigan (in the middle of summer no less) that don’t. Truly, the instances of getting it seriously wrong were so numerous that any ‘fashion sense’ potential was muddied until buried somewhere deep and dark, never to surface again. They say that if you do a thing 35 times or more, it becomes a habit. Well, I’m a habitual fashion f-up and I blame my teenage years.
But then, I did grow up in the Eighties, so the blame can’t be entirely mine. Anyone escaping the 80s with fashion sense unscathed is a rare and special thing and should be on display in a museum.
So, yes, back to the fashion disasters. There was the whole wearing Dad’s diamond-pattern-Sunday-afternoon-in-the-pub cardigan with jeans and black patent shoes, then the animal print two pieces (not leopard print or zebra print or anything like that but little dogs or cats in a zany pattern with bows on their heads and on their tails). But the biggest, boldest and sustained for the longest fashion f-up was cycling shorts with everything. Didn’t matter what the occasion was, or the weather, me and my sister would be wearing cycling shorts and trainers with thick white ankle socks. Teamed with either a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt or a unisex jumper.
My cycling shorts were black and had a black and white checked panel down the outside of each leg. My sister had orange detailing on her cycling shorts. We used to colour co-ordinate as much as possible, so she was always looking for something black or orange to wear with them. I liked to match mine with something red. Black, white and red; me and the Nazis very fond of that colour combo. I had one particular T-shirt that I used to wear all the time with my cycling shorts, even in the freezing cold. What can I say? I was daft back then.
Anyhow, wearing cycling shorts and a T-shirt in February meant that my nipples were permanently hard, earning me the nickname of bullet nipples.
But then, I did grow up in the Eighties, so the blame can’t be entirely mine. Anyone escaping the 80s with fashion sense unscathed is a rare and special thing and should be on display in a museum.
So, yes, back to the fashion disasters. There was the whole wearing Dad’s diamond-pattern-Sunday-afternoon-in-the-pub cardigan with jeans and black patent shoes, then the animal print two pieces (not leopard print or zebra print or anything like that but little dogs or cats in a zany pattern with bows on their heads and on their tails). But the biggest, boldest and sustained for the longest fashion f-up was cycling shorts with everything. Didn’t matter what the occasion was, or the weather, me and my sister would be wearing cycling shorts and trainers with thick white ankle socks. Teamed with either a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt or a unisex jumper.
My cycling shorts were black and had a black and white checked panel down the outside of each leg. My sister had orange detailing on her cycling shorts. We used to colour co-ordinate as much as possible, so she was always looking for something black or orange to wear with them. I liked to match mine with something red. Black, white and red; me and the Nazis very fond of that colour combo. I had one particular T-shirt that I used to wear all the time with my cycling shorts, even in the freezing cold. What can I say? I was daft back then.
Anyhow, wearing cycling shorts and a T-shirt in February meant that my nipples were permanently hard, earning me the nickname of bullet nipples.
Wednesday, 2 April 2008
UB40
I hate UB40. I hate them with a passion that has nothing to do with the band, their songs or their sound and everything to do with Sunday afternoons.
You couldn’t get away from UB40 on a Sunday in my village. ‘There’s a rat in my kitchen’ was pumped out of crap stereos in row upon row of back gardens. You could hear ‘Red, Red Wine’ wafting through kitchen windows in entire streets and if this wasn’t bad enough, it came wrapped in the smells of cooked cabbage, for UB40 was the official soundtrack to the Sunday Roast. And ‘Kingston Town’ blasted out of car stereos the village over, making UB40 truly unavoidable.
Back when I was young, shops didn’t open on a Sunday. Nothing did, apart from the pubs and the off-licenses. The pubs, restricted by the licence laws at the time, opened between 11am and 2pm and again between 7pm and 10pm, and the off-licences sold alcohol in hours to match.
When I was a child, Sundays meant four things: Sunday dinner, dad coming home from the pub drunk and late for dinner, a bath before school and UB40.
I loved Sunday dinner (still do), but I hated that dad would be drunk and that he and mam would argue. I liked school, but I still got a sinking feeling when bathtime rolled around because it heralded the end of the weekend, and I hate UB40 because it reminds me of all of the above. There was nothing to do on a Sunday except play outside and wait for these four things to happen.
A quiet desperation clung to the village on even the sunniest, shiniest of Sundays.
By the time I hit mid teens, Sundays hadn’t changed much: I still looked forward to mam’s dinner but got the same sinking feeling in my stomach as the clock hand landed on two-thirty and dad stumbled up the drive, but the bath before school had been replaced by a mad dash to the offie.
We would hit the offie at noon, drink down our purchases, go for Sunday dinner, have a bit of a nap then make a mad dash back down the offie at seven for more booze. Depending on how much we’d bought and who was drinking that evening (we always underestimated how much we’d need when Trish was with us), we’d make one final dash in the run-up to ten. We’d usually get there at one-minute-to, purple in colour and about to heave our guts up.
And still, UB40 blared out of anything with speakers.
You couldn’t get away from UB40 on a Sunday in my village. ‘There’s a rat in my kitchen’ was pumped out of crap stereos in row upon row of back gardens. You could hear ‘Red, Red Wine’ wafting through kitchen windows in entire streets and if this wasn’t bad enough, it came wrapped in the smells of cooked cabbage, for UB40 was the official soundtrack to the Sunday Roast. And ‘Kingston Town’ blasted out of car stereos the village over, making UB40 truly unavoidable.
Back when I was young, shops didn’t open on a Sunday. Nothing did, apart from the pubs and the off-licenses. The pubs, restricted by the licence laws at the time, opened between 11am and 2pm and again between 7pm and 10pm, and the off-licences sold alcohol in hours to match.
When I was a child, Sundays meant four things: Sunday dinner, dad coming home from the pub drunk and late for dinner, a bath before school and UB40.
I loved Sunday dinner (still do), but I hated that dad would be drunk and that he and mam would argue. I liked school, but I still got a sinking feeling when bathtime rolled around because it heralded the end of the weekend, and I hate UB40 because it reminds me of all of the above. There was nothing to do on a Sunday except play outside and wait for these four things to happen.
A quiet desperation clung to the village on even the sunniest, shiniest of Sundays.
By the time I hit mid teens, Sundays hadn’t changed much: I still looked forward to mam’s dinner but got the same sinking feeling in my stomach as the clock hand landed on two-thirty and dad stumbled up the drive, but the bath before school had been replaced by a mad dash to the offie.
We would hit the offie at noon, drink down our purchases, go for Sunday dinner, have a bit of a nap then make a mad dash back down the offie at seven for more booze. Depending on how much we’d bought and who was drinking that evening (we always underestimated how much we’d need when Trish was with us), we’d make one final dash in the run-up to ten. We’d usually get there at one-minute-to, purple in colour and about to heave our guts up.
And still, UB40 blared out of anything with speakers.
Weapons in general
What is it with teenage boys who grow up in the valleys and weapons? All my friends had stacks of stuff that got them into all kinds of trouble. There were long bows, cross bows (which you can’t buy now until you’re 18, drat it), ninja stars, knuckledusters, replica handguns, knives of all shapes and sizes and air rifles in abundance. One of my friends had so many different weapons that he painted his bedroom black and decorated it with his mini arsenal. Another of my friends was asked if she wanted to buy a hand grenade one day when she was sat in class in college (see it aint just the guys you know). The Army & Navy stores in the valleys were doing better trade than Marks and Spencer’s back in the late eighties.
12 bore shotgun
When I was about 13, I fired a 12 bore shotgun. My dad took me and my sister up the mountain with his mate to pick mushrooms (the kind you eat without thinking you’re the rounder half of French and Saunders). It was dead exciting; we got up really early and trekked up through farmer’s fields in our best wellies and waterproof coats and spent a good few hours picking loads of lovely mushrooms. I can remember thinking how chuffed Mam would be when we brought back bulging bags of stuff we could eat, like real foragers. I planned to eat nothing but hand-picked mushrooms until they ran out. Then I took a closer look and saw that the mushrooms had little worms in them and I wasn’t quite so keen.
Anyhow, back to the shotgun.
Being the bolshy little sod that I was back then, I kept nagging my dad’s mate for a go of his gun. I’d shot air rifles before – no problem - and I wanted to trade up to something proper. Eventually, he said I could have a go and gave me a quick tutorial on how to fire the gun, which I thought was a bit daft and unnecessary as the thing only had a barrel and a trigger and I had enough aptitude to tell which was which, so I didn’t really pay attention. Maybe his mistake was in letting me hold it while he talked.
We collectively decided that I would aim for a puddle on the edge of the field. No problemo, I thought. I raised the gun, blimey it was heavy, and took shaky aim. So engrossed was I in hitting the target and showing off in front of my sister that I forgot the one cardinal rule of firing something with a kick meaner than a mule when the vet calls round with his rubber gloves already on: tuck the non-firing end deep into your shoulder. I very quickly understood this rule when I, having left a good centimetre gap between shoulder and said non-barrel-end, pulled the trigger and the kick almost sent me to the mushroom-strewn ground. I had a bruise for weeks, but worse than that, I missed the puddle by a couple of inches.
Bastard.
Next time the opportunity to shoot the shit out of a puddle presents itself, boy-oh-boy I’ll be ready though.
Anyhow, back to the shotgun.
Being the bolshy little sod that I was back then, I kept nagging my dad’s mate for a go of his gun. I’d shot air rifles before – no problem - and I wanted to trade up to something proper. Eventually, he said I could have a go and gave me a quick tutorial on how to fire the gun, which I thought was a bit daft and unnecessary as the thing only had a barrel and a trigger and I had enough aptitude to tell which was which, so I didn’t really pay attention. Maybe his mistake was in letting me hold it while he talked.
We collectively decided that I would aim for a puddle on the edge of the field. No problemo, I thought. I raised the gun, blimey it was heavy, and took shaky aim. So engrossed was I in hitting the target and showing off in front of my sister that I forgot the one cardinal rule of firing something with a kick meaner than a mule when the vet calls round with his rubber gloves already on: tuck the non-firing end deep into your shoulder. I very quickly understood this rule when I, having left a good centimetre gap between shoulder and said non-barrel-end, pulled the trigger and the kick almost sent me to the mushroom-strewn ground. I had a bruise for weeks, but worse than that, I missed the puddle by a couple of inches.
Bastard.
Next time the opportunity to shoot the shit out of a puddle presents itself, boy-oh-boy I’ll be ready though.
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
Bye Bye Birdy
I have a sneaky suspicion that my friends shot and killed birds. They would never do it in front of me or admit to it (I’d go mental and they knew it), but I’m sure they did take out the occasional feathered friend.
I came surprisingly close myself, once. I had tracked the bird and had it centred perfectly in the sights (I had no idea what species of bird it was or whether it was male or female – my generation don’t seem to know these things – though my mam or dad could have probably told me at the drop of a hat). I felt a thrill that I had kept the gun trained on the bird as it hopped its way along the tree branches and part of me wanted to see if my aim was as good as I thought it was.
“Go on”, whispered a voice in my head. “Just go ahead and do it. Everyone else does”.
That voice has tipped me over the edge of indecision into making so many mistakes in my lifetime, but I’m glad to say this wasn’t one of those times.
In the end it came down to respect for life (not how cute the ickle birdy wirdy was). What right did I have to kill the bird? None whatsoever, so I lowered the rifle and watched him (or her) sit in the sun and ruffle his feathers.
Then my mate came along and shot him.
I came surprisingly close myself, once. I had tracked the bird and had it centred perfectly in the sights (I had no idea what species of bird it was or whether it was male or female – my generation don’t seem to know these things – though my mam or dad could have probably told me at the drop of a hat). I felt a thrill that I had kept the gun trained on the bird as it hopped its way along the tree branches and part of me wanted to see if my aim was as good as I thought it was.
“Go on”, whispered a voice in my head. “Just go ahead and do it. Everyone else does”.
That voice has tipped me over the edge of indecision into making so many mistakes in my lifetime, but I’m glad to say this wasn’t one of those times.
In the end it came down to respect for life (not how cute the ickle birdy wirdy was). What right did I have to kill the bird? None whatsoever, so I lowered the rifle and watched him (or her) sit in the sun and ruffle his feathers.
Then my mate came along and shot him.
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