Gin and Tonic

My first memories are living in Charlton Mead Drive in Bristol, I must have been about 3 and a half. I remember sitting on my dads motorbike, scribbling a picture or two and going swimming on a Sunday morning. Not bad for a three year old.

As well as the motorbike my family also had a red and black bubble car that you had to climb in through the front. Strange that the steering wheel was on the door but I'm slightly rambling here.

My brother came along when I was 4, there had been a previous pregnancy 2 years earlier however that unfortunately concluded with miscarriage at 24 weeks. My mother is still scared today by it. She was told by the midwife following delivery that 'it was for the best' which indicates that it was probably due to a genetic defect in all probability. There's some epidemiology for me to Google at some point.

So dad got his place at Nottingham Uni and he packed us all off to Nottingham. We lived near a canal i believe and y only other memories was that the house was open plan and my dad would lock himself away in what can only be described as a cupboard with louvre doors pouring over the not exactly difficult 1st year exams. I say not that difficult as his reason for packing us off back to my grandads in Bristol was that the exams were very taxing (bollocks dad, piece of piss even TheKnifeMan and Collosus flew them!) and having two kids and a wife around was incredibly distracting and this was his last chance of success.

At first, so I'm told, my mum, my brother who I will call Sid and myself toddled back to Bristol to live in Westbury on Trym with my grandad (he was a widower having lost his wife to an MI (heart attack when I was 6 months old) for 6 weeks.

Now my grandad was a man of the old school, he was a docker, was well over 6ft tall, heavy set and had hands like shovels. I will take some time later to describe him in depth as it would be an injustice to try and do it in one sitting.

Anyway 6 weeks turned into 10 which turned into 16 and so on. This is when I remember a very dark cloud descending over my mother.