Generous to columnists, though the editors of Able Magazine are… I am never likely to make large sums of money from my writing!
From Able Magazine #110 (March/April 2014)
However, I went to a university (Exeter, since you ask…) where there were a disproportionate number of students with a disproportionate amount of money behind them. For example, there was a survey published revealing that we had the highest number of students with two cars. Although I suppose parking in the city centre of Cambridge and Oxford can be a little tricky?
As well as my new friends from Wigan and Warrington, I also met Caroline from the Home Counties on my course. She had lots of money. She drove a new silver Volkswagen Golf (I don’t recall what her other car was) and drank Martinis at the Cowley Bridge Hotel with the best of them. And she was rich, funny and clever and we became good friends – although I’m less sure what she saw in me. They say ‘money talks’, but I didn’t really speak the lingo.
It was the summer of ’79. Some of Caroline’s friends were no doubt driving their sporty second cars along the Corniche, getting tipsy on Bolly. Meanwhile, I was getting ‘legless’ at Queen Mary’s Hospital Roehampton, having a cosmetic trim on my stump.
My long summer vacation on crutches dragged by. I was missing my new friends from Exeter and not having a leg to stand on meant that I couldn’t go and visit them. Caroline came to visit me, looking a million dollars in her designer punk outfit.
Later in the summer she had a big birthday party at her parents’ posh house in Buckinghamshire. Still unable to drive on one leg, I had to persuade an Exeter acquaintance called Viv to drive me out there. The printed invitations for Caroline’s party said: “Dress up” on them. I quizzed her carefully about what this meant, but she said airily: “It means whatever you think it means”. Well, to my money, “dress up” meant “garish trouser suit from the Alphington Ladies’ Conservative Association jumble sale”. This was a stunning, unrivalled piece of psychedelic glory – a bargain at 25p, you’ll agree – and I persuaded Viv to wear a pink and blue curtain thing. I assured her we’d look hilarious. When we got to the party I banged on the door and swung in on my crutches in a blur of fluorescent pink. Everyone else was wearing evening dress. I don’t think Viv spoke to me again after that night, although it probably didn’t help that I got drunk and tried to persuade her, alone by Caroline’s swimming pool, to leave her long-term boyfriend and come away with me.
The place was posh, the clothes were cheap, but I was still cheaper.
