The other night as I walked to meet Rachel at Clare College I tripped (or perhaps fell off my flat orthopedic shoes – hard to say) and hit the worn stone floor hard. Of course, I was wearing my last unripped pair of black tights and they were shredded. This was more painful than the bloody bruised knees and hands.
I’ve been working furiously to offset a month of imminent travel but found time to do a bit of shopping in London, where I caught up with Iain. He took me to the New Piccadilly, where I watched the owner and his mates drink several bottles of champagne in the time it took me to drink a cup of tea.
At the weekend Iain and Xtina went to Margate to watch the Exodus and generously loaned me their flat. Since coming back to England I’ve mostly reverted to my uniform of old tattered black clothing, but I elected to wear a dress for city adventures:
I went to drinks and dinner with David. One of his friends asked how we met and I had the thrill of replying Standing on line at dawn to buy tickets for the first ever Madonna Like a Virgin show in 1984 – with the Beastie Boys opening.
David added And they were booed off the stage!
I attended countless concerts as a teenager, many of which were no doubt of great historical importance. I did come of age in the NW in the eighties, after all. But for some strange reason the people I met that cold morning at age thirteen are the rare few I am willing to know as adults.
The concert itself is also more memorable than any of the seminal punk shows, though for a reason I never talk about: it coincided with the worst bit of my cancer treatment, and I spent the evening with my head pressed against the guard rail, wretchedly ill.
Later David showed me one of the shops he owns:
Then we walked over to his other store, housed in a building constructed in the 1650’s. We wandered about admiring the wares until David said Would you like to see the cat?
He grabbed a screwdriver and started to prise up the floorboards:
Apparently when the place was built there was a tradition of burying a live animal on the premises for luck.