Seventeen Come Sunday (part one).

It’s mid-September ’88, and I’m sat there in quite indescribable agony. A few minutes earlier my friends had been all laughter and mirth, until they saw the blood. Despite the horrendous dull throb, I’d done the manly thing and attempted to climb the steps from the pool, only to collapse back when weight was concentrated on my right foot in the effort. Hoisted out by two burly life-guards, I was lowered gently to the tiled floor and informed that an ambulance was being summoned. It was at this point that I realised just exactly what had happened when my tomfool attempt at Olympian diving went horribly wrong, with the injury which I initially reckoned to be at worst a bad sprain to actually be my tibia and fibula protruding from my heel.
Oddly enough, in the emerging shock which seemingly saw every drop of my blood rush to my ankle, and which lent itself to that state which can only be described as gradually losing all senses, my words were of a more domestic duty persuasion, as I apologized for the pool and asked for a mop to cleanse the poolside.
So three weeks in hospital, which saw pins that remain to this day installed in my ankle, gave me the opportunity to reflect on the way my life-plan had had to be repeatedly adjusted over the past twelve months. It also gave me the resolve to make a decision which had a subtle importance which would actually make a huge change to my life.

It’s September ‘87, and this then 17 yr-old is convinced he’s going to be a journalist. Many darkness hours spent with World Service had told him that a radio-based foreign correspondent was his ticket, a sentiment shared by his languages and English teacher at comprehensive school. Not a particularly good school, but a few teaching gems who left an impression. However, it couldn’t offer me the next stepping-stone to where I was going, so it was college then university.
Normal morning. Up at 06:00; two consecutive paper-rounds followed by an hour behind the counter in the shop, then satchel and sandwiches and off to Oldham’s very own athenaeum. Normal, as in the same, but different as in not the same. My short trot from the newsagent’s to my house afforded me the sight of my father, whom I knew to have been on a 23:00hrs shift finish (rolling in at @ 02:00 following a drinks session somewhere), racing off down the road in his ‘Sweeney’ car (old Ford Granada), with mission in his eyes. Assuming another nuclear-powered argument with my mother had occurred, I just shrugged and walked through the front door at a little after 08:00. Mother was indeed there, and the tears and upset confirmed my suspicions. I could never have suspected the next line she came out with.
“Pack a few things! We’re being evicted.”