annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Not so good old days

10/1/24
For my therapy I’ve been asked to try and describe, to get a feel for the ‘me’ I was at different ages. We’ve done quite a lot on the miserable child, the promiscuous, manipulative (aka neglected) teen but what happened next? How did I get from there to here? I’ll write it in the third person, see how that goes. In chunks. Starting when I was about 21.
There came a time, in the town where she lived and worked, when the drug squad got their act together and did multiple raids on different flats and houses very early one morning. Although she’d been in the thick of it all through – had come back from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival aged 16 with a lump of hash in her pocket which she immediately shared with her friends: “This is dope, this is how you smoke it,” – she’d never been a dealer, though the truth was none of them were dealers in the way they’re presented. All the stoners in town knew each other and when everyone started to run out, someone would go to people in the next, bigger town to buy a few ounces, half a weight or a quarter of a weight, and we’d all buy our little bits from them.
But she didn’t get busted that night, though almost all her friends did, some in possession of quite a bit of hash, and slowly but inexorably, the word went round that she’d grassed everyone up. Nothing to do with them shouting across the pub, in front of all kinds of straight laced people, “Who’s going to score this week? Get me a half ounce and ask if there’s any more of that red leb.” Her true friends knew it wasn’t her – Bloke, him upstairs, was part of the crowd and he’d known she wouldn’t do that, but it was horrible. She didn’t know who she could trust and who she couldn’t so she decided they could all fuck off, and she fucked off herself, down to the coast.
At first she lived with her ex-husband, on the edge of the city, thinking they could share a flat as friends, which was wildly optimistic. Legally they were still married and legally she had no right to refuse to have sex with him – he was entitled to use her body and she was not entitled to stop him. He was stronger than she was. The good old days, as some, other, people tend to say.
She worked in the biggest, best pub in the city one Saturday night, helping out a friend when the other staff all went down with flu, loved it, hectic, challenging but satisfying to stay on top of it, to be able to add up the cost of the rounds of drinks in her head, but she needed more, she needed a regular income and to live somewhere else, not with him.
She still smoked a lot of dope and a lot of fags, was drunk by the end of most evenings and wandered alone round the night-time city as if it was as safe as the villages she’d left behind, which it was. The only danger was back at the flat. Often she’d go to the beach when the pubs shut (this was the time of licensing laws, pubs had to shut at 10.30 apart from Fridays and Saturdays when they could stay open till 11), throw off her clothes and swim naked in the cool sea. Once some drunk men watched her from the prom then came down and sat right by her clothes. She swam round and round waiting for them to give up. But they didn’t and in the end she had to front them out, just walk defiantly up to them in all her nakedness, pick up her clothes and walk away, head held high, heart pounding.

12:01 a.m. - 11.01.24

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