Memories
I’ve been doing a lot of clearing out lately and came across a box of photographs from my teens.
OMG!
LOL!
Not phrases used back in my day, but very apt for the contents of the box I unearthed.
I found shots of me in the tightest jeans imaginable, so tight I had to lie flat on the bed, thread a coat hanger through the zip and ask my Dad to pull it up while I tried to fasten the top button. God, how the memories that flooded back when I saw me in the red leather biker’s jacket I loved like a best friend, but had to keep hidden from my parents because it had a hash leaf embroidered over the left breast pocket.
And my hair! I must have had a love affair with the crimping irons, and I never left the house without my navy-blue eyeliner and lip gloss. Me and my friends had rips in our jeans because they were so old, long before it became a fashion statement. Oh and the obligatory rock-band t-shirts: Hendrix, Zeppelin, Motorhead.
I sat for hours remembering all the gigs we attended in church halls, back rooms of pubs and community centres. Everyone knew somebody in a band and we all wrote songs. We spent our Saturday afternoons in the summer, drinking cider and smoking on Eldon Green in Newcastle city centre. Huge crowds of us would sit around chatting. Someone might bring a guitar or a cassette player – not a ghetto blaster – and we’d soak up the sun ‘til the pubs opened again in the evening.
Tales of a misspent youth - you could say that. I wasn’t a star pupil by any means and when I did go to school I didn’t last the full day. I was more interested in being with people I could relate to. On the days I left early, I would head straight for a café in town attached to the one of the cinemas. It was always full of students, but in a corner beside the counter, I would always find, Kip.
Kip was an inspiration to me. He carried a penny whistle in his pocket and played it whenever the mood took him. He painted his nails black, always wore something bright red and wrote poetry about sex, drugs and life in the town and would sketch people on napkins and sell them for next to nothing.
I’ve no idea how old he was, I was 15. When I look back it was a bit of a strange relationship, but it never felt that way at the time. I think he was thirty-something, but I could be wrong. His skin wasn’t good because he drank and smoked so much, so he could have been in his early twenties. He did loads of sketches of me. He loved to draw my hands and eyes. He was fascinated by cigarette smoke and capturing it on paper. He was a strange guy.
Kip gave me the red biker’s jacket. He said he won it in a bet and it was too small for him, but I’d seen it hanging in a second-hand shop the week before and fell in love with it. It didn’t have the cannabis leaf embroidered on it then, but it was definitely the same jacket. I still wonder if he embroidered it or got some else to do it.
I got to the café one afternoon and he wasn’t there. Nothing unusual, he wasn’t part of the fixtures, I thought he’d gone to sign on, but when I got to the counter the waitress, Muriel, gave me a napkin. She said Kip had left it for me. I went with my cup of tea to his spot and opened the napkin. It was a sketch of me, smoking a cigarette with smoke curling around my face. That was him saying goodbye and it was thirty years ago, but looking through those photo’s last night brought it all back and I shed a couple of tears over Kip again, strange man that he was.
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17 Comments
Wonder what happened to Kip, perhaps he was moving through and was just one of those people that come into your life for a reason, then leave again.
This is such a lovely and happy - yet sad blog. What would we do without our memories...
I'm almost positive I spotted Kip busking in Manchester Victoria Railway Station about 20 years ago. I was on the train and I just caught a glimpse as the train pulled away. I don't think I'd have got off if I'd noticed him sooner though, he looked a bit haggered if it was him and I had my daughter with me who was only 2 at the time.
SecretSpi, I can smell pernod across a crowded bar aften an incident involving a bottle of it when I was 16 - yeauch! As for the people from the past, yes, very much like Shrodinger's (sp?) Cat...
It does you good to be whistful now and then - it got me through some pretty complicated reports today.
My problem here is that I was born too bloody late. I was a baby when all the best stuff had either been and gone, or was just about still happening. I won't complain about growing up through the 90s, that had it's own merits, but god sometimes I really wish I'd been born even ten years earlier. I guess that's what happens when you end up with two extraordinarily laid back but eccentric parents.
It gets me in the gut, though, when my boyfriend talks about seeing different bands play when at the time I was still at home colouring my barbie dolls' hair with black permanent marker. He's 31 - 6 years my senior, and although it doesn't sound like much, those 6 years could have been crucial for me gig-wise. All I can do is hope for reunions and hunt for second hand band tshirts online (I collect them, avidly!) while pawing through my cds...and boyfriend dearest sits at his place with his fancy new turntable (courtesy of moi) pawing through his extensive vinyl collection.
Skinny jeans never applied to me (thank god!), it was uber baggy jeans in my teen days and nothing much has changed for me. I still wear the same studded belt I bought when I was 16 with my first real wage, and I have a pair of raggedy old black cords that are never off me.
However! I do have one embarrassing memory. There was a time during the 90s, when Levi 501s were seriously in, and my brother (he'd pass out with shock if he knew I was publicising this) got himself a pair of white ones...around the same time he decided to get his ear pierced. I nicked the white jeans on him as soon as he'd done that cut snip thing that folk used to do on the seam, and I wore them day in day out with a tiedyed halterneck for an entire summer.
A final confession - and this is scalding for someone who spends all their spare time and money listening to/buying rock and metal records - I had a red knitted jumper with a silk heart stitched into the middle that sported a picture of, wait for it.....
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Kylie and Jason.
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