With hindsight, packing the Purple Ohm was a mistake
It’s the dawn of the 1990s. A bright new dawn has already curdled. Winter. And, oh, my Wolverhampton is in the grip of recession. Bitter, bitter winds blow empty special brew cans and cheap fag packets along icy streets. Wolves' charge up the divisions have stalled, and "Turner Out" graff has - ominously for Turner - started to appear on the vandalised bus stops, broken down garages and boarded up civic buildings. Hale and Paces' "The Stonk" is still played all too often in the pubs and the clubs and a young Charles Calthrop has yet to kiss a girl.

Of course, none of this bothered me in the slightest because I was 19, I had my own Switch card, I had every record which the Ozrics had released, and, probably more pertinently, I had an nascent addiction to dextroamphetamine sulphate and a more established relationship with alcohohohohol.

My mum decided that a good way to “cheer me up” was to take me on holiday with her and her Sister and her sister’s dysfunctional 17 year old son to the only place we could afford to go, even in midwinter. A place called Hafton which is in Scotland. The two tourist attractions were watching the nuclear submarines go up and down the grossly misnamed Holy Loch. And shivering.

One afternoon, my mother and her sister having gone into Glasgow, I found myself shivering in my DMs. My drunk cousin was shivering, huddled in my drug stuffed Dutch Amy Overcoat to keep him warm. I remember thinking “he looks so young”. Two empty Thunderbird Wine bottles were lolling on the grass, giddy as confessions. I held the third firm. We were outside, so that I could smoke some more draw.

I still maintain it was not my fault. After all, he stole the acid. He was the one who took it. It was him – not me who got the fear. He ran away. None of this was my fault. I would have warned him. I would have. As it was, after he came up and freaked off, I spent the next two hours wandering around some sort of wood thing searching for him in the charmingly ineffective manner that only a true drunk can muster.

My mother and her sister found him as they drove back. He was on the road, doing that crying you do when there is nothing left to cry. When my mother approached him, he threatened her with a stick which he said had been given to him by Herne the Hunter (who I believe to be English, therefore unlikely to frequent Scottish Holiday Resorts in the off season). Predictably, argument ensued. My Aunt blamed me, squarely. My mother – with the magnificent logic that only 30 years on the sherry can create – blamed the cousin. We departed at dawn the next day, and to the best of my knowledge, my mother never spoke to her sister again.
(sirolimus, Fri 3 Aug 2007, 15:57, Reply)