“I can remember what it felt like at 17: I was a cat, a dog, a lizard, a mouse….”

No, I wasn’t….however, it was the last & final time when I went on a family holiday with my parents & younger sister. Piled into the family car and off to Scarborough for two weeks, summer of ’79. “Ye Punk” and “Ye Post-Punk” hadn’t quite made it to our house, although one chap at school called Tim* appeared to be cutting his own hair & wearing his blazer inside out. Mind you, he had a weekend job on a record stall at the Barras & took his pay in vinyl – a couple of years prior, he had been the first on the block to have a copy of the “Virgin God Save the Queen single in picture bag”, when I was raving & drooling over Animals…..but I digress.

Scarborough became a cat ‘n’ mouse game with the parents, trying to sneak off for a lager & spend as little time with them as possible. With nearly forty years of hindsight and a family of my own, I can see that I was an ungrateful little sod and as moody as » Continue Reading.