55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of
my life...so far.
One of the guys at the office rented a large house just off Christchurch Park, a pretty nice part of Ipswich. He took the biggest room and sub-let the rest to friends and co-workers. I'm not sure how legal the sub-letting actually was, now I come to think about it. When one of his 'tenants' gave notice, he made it known at work that he was looking to fill the room. Without thinking too much about it, I said I'd take it and that evening, told Mum and Dad I was leaving home. I'm utterly appalled at my younger self for the way I dropped this bombshell on my parents. They knew the day would come, but were clearly hurt at the blunt way I broke the news, something my immaturity couldn't comprehend, yet to their immense credit they still helped me considerably when the day of the move came.
Don't say I didn't warn you about the 'tache! 1979
It was at the end of 1979 that I started working in a record shop. I wrote about those early days on the other side of the counter a couple of years ago (here). Earlier in the year, around the time I was leaving home, I bought 'Telegram' by The Monitors, a glorious, jangly little thing that I love dearly. I loved it so much that I also bought it again a couple of months later, when the single was reissued on a major label. Over the years, when times have been hard and money short, I've reluctantly exchanged bits of my record collection for cold hard cash - and usually regretted it. But I've never regretted anything quite as much as selling my original Monitunes copy of 'Telegram'. What a fool I was.
