Jean-Paul M. - Just Call Me Jack

Just Call Me Jack

Jean-Paul M.

Copyright 2012 by Jean-Paul M.

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Contents

Wikipedia.org for research information on events in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s

Goolge.com for general research, including Googlemaps for distances etc.

Jimi Hendrix, Bold as Love, The Stranglers Bring on the Nubiles, The Ramones Hey, Ho, Lets Go, GC Llyod Steel Fabrications, Oberland Holidays, Merthyr Tydfil, St James Club, London, Mallinson-Denny Ltd., Timber Merchants, Cardiff, McGowan & Son Roofing, Cardiff, Hursteel Ltd., Atlantic Wharf, Barry Island, Poyners Dairy Ltd., Cardiff, Parc Hotel, Cardiff, CB Cabs Cardiff, Concrete Impressions, Ciudad Quesada, Alicante, Robbins Timber, Kingswood, Bristol, S & J Roofing Ltd., Kingswood, Bristol, Ultra Clean, Oostende, Belgium, Maenhout Logistics, Oostende, Belgium, Creyfs Interim, Oostende, Belgium, Masa International, Torrevieja, Alicante, Euroland Properties, Santa Pola, Alicante, CID Bau, Denia, SNC Media Denia, Orenes & Orenes Internacional, Santa Pola.

To all those I havent mentioned by name, be they private individuals or companies,, please accept my apologies. My memory is not infallible.

I would like to dedicate this book to my friends Siggy (Sigrid) and Ged (Gerard) and my other friends, my dear old mum (Monika) and my dad (Sylvester-John).

I am a mature student at the University of Life. I have been studying here since the age of sixteen. I am now forty-six. Over the past thirty years, I chose to study the life of a working man and alcoholic. To gain an in-depth understanding of the subject, I adopted the practice of a method actor, became one with the character, and subsequently lived the life with its inevitable highs and lows. This is part 1 of my thesis.

During my youth, I regarded life as a starving man would a free buffet, innumerable delights laid out, just for the taking, with no limit as to how often one can refill ones plate. Today, as an adult, with many years behind me, Ive eaten enough; my sated hunger has changed my outlook. I see the feast through the eyes of a connoisseur. Bilious experience has taught me not everything on offer, no matter how tempting or plentiful, is worth the tasting!

The first memories I have of my drinking are during the holidays I spent with the family in Stellingen, a suburb of Hamburg, Germany. A half a glass of shandy and even a few sips of wine or sparkling wine often came my way. My mother, at the time an advocate of reverse psychology, gave me alcohol and cigarettes at an early age in the hope these vices wouldnt interest me when I reached puberty and subsequently adulthood. Unfortunately, this approach proved fruitless, and by the age of sixteen, I had become a regular smoker and I didnt often say no to a drink either.

My father introduced me to the hazy world of overindulgence at the tender age of fourteen, and on one Sunday afternoon, Dad took me to the Boars Head pub in Caerphilly, where he liked to meet his mates and drink a few beers on the weekend. Looking back, I suppose that event marked my introduction into the big wide world of manhood. Even though many years were to pass before I actually considered myself wise enough to call myself a man, it felt good to be a temporary member of adult society, sitting in the smoky atmosphere at the table with the old man and his buddies, listening to their conversations, and sipping on my own seemingly enormous pint of Brains Light.

I dont recall exactly how many I managed to drink, however the figure four remains in my mind for some reason. Whilst still in the bar, everything was fine, however once we went outside and the fresh air hit me, things started to spin. It wasnt a long walk home. It was a little over half a mile from The Twyn, where the pub stood facing the somber monolithic cenotaph, but on that particular Sunday, it turned out to be half a mile too far. My world had somehow slipped off its even plane. Everything seemed hazy and on a slant. Hot and cold sweats coursed over my body, I couldnt see straight, and I felt the beer trying to force its way up and out of my insides. Finally unable to suppress the tide any longer, I fell to my knees, hung my head over a low garden wall on Brynau Rd., and threw up!

That was the first occasion I remember being pissed, however obviously not the last. During my teenage years, especially once I started attending St. Martins Comprehensive, my experimentations with alcohol began in earnest. I was sixteen, and as with many sixteen-year-olds, I stumbled around in the mist between childhood and adulthood. Our lives were governed by hormones, fashion, music, gangs, fights, heartbreaks, alcohol, and as time moved on, drugs. On the weekends, we threw house parties. Everyone brought along a bottle, we turned the music up loud, and started drinking. Those were wild times, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. On my eighteenth birthday whilst out on the piss with my mates, I drank pints of beer out of a Wellington boot, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the parties would soon be over. My teenage life was ending, life-changing, and I had the first bittersweet taste of what it meant to be an adult, the responsibilities and the hard realities of life.

Friends were moving away and going off to college, and soon, I would also be starting my journey into the unknown, however I had one constant companion throughout that time, who has remained with me to this day: the Drink. Since stepping out of the secure environs of childhood, alcohol has been at my side along every step of my existence, like a friend, sometimes a good one, other times a total bitch, however my companion, like my shadow. She is always there and draws me to her, inevitably, repeatedly, like a fluttering moth to the flickering flame of doom.

Whilst we wander down memory lane, I shall sprinkle the misty trail of events with recollections of some of my alcoholic excesses and their ramifications. Please dont think badly of me as you read what I say, because every step I made, I made with the best of intentions.

In the winter of 1964 after a smack on the arse, I took my first breath in the St. Brendas Maternity Hospital in the Clifton area of Bristol. Since that day, I have always considered the fact that the place of birth technically made me English to be no more than a geographical accident. I am the fruit of a mixed relationship. That is to say, my parents came from different countries and contrasting social standing.

My father, a Sligo man from the west coast of Ireland, one of nine children, five boys and four girls. At the time of writing this, sadly, most of the people I knew then, including my dear old dad, are dead and gone. The best way to describe the circumstances in which he grew up would be poor and uneducated. He and his brothers left Catholic school at a ridiculously early age, and by the time the family moved to England, my father had become a working man, obviously more out of necessity than out of choice. My early memories of him are dominated more by his absence because of work than pleasant times playing games or walking in the park.

My mother, on the other hand, came from Hamburg in northern Germany, one of two girls born to a well-educated and financially stable man, though things hadnt always been so idyllic. My German grandfather returned from Denmark in 1954 after nine years in prison awaiting trial on suspicion of war crimes. Upon his release, he went home to his almost destitute wife and two daughters. That destitution was a result of losing the war and, during subsequent occupation, most of the family possessions. Some ten years later when I took my first breath, he had already managed to get back on his feet; the old boy network played a significant role in his rise out of the gutter. By the time my memories were reliable, around the age of five or six, he had a large house in a good area of Hamburg and had become quite wealthy once again.