annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Waiting

I can’t work out the years, the dates or the times. But I moved back into the family home when I was in my early twenties, I think. Gradually, after all the ectopic pregnancy shit. During that first hot summer of 1976, Dad had retired, my brother, sister and myself were all unemployed and Mum was working. We spent the day lazing around - we lived five minutes walk from the sea so we were in and out of the water all day. Not Dad, he was at his allotment virtually all the time riding his bike there and back. Mum always left a list of tasks for us, never very much – peel some potatoes for dinner, that kind of thing, but none of us ever did any of it.
At this point in my life I considered myself pretty cool. We didn’t call ourselves hippies, that was a name bestowed in retrospect, but ‘heads’ as opposed to the ‘straights’ which mainly meant those who didn’t smoke dope. I was completely oblivious of homosexuality, and that definition of straight. Whatever, I thought I was pretty cool until I met my sister’s friends. They were a bit younger than me, had had a brilliant drama teacher at school who’d organized a group of them to create a show and take it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and were bursting with creative ideas None of them smoked dope which they thought inhibited your creativity. For once I felt stupid – I had nothing interesting to contribute, all my ‘great’ stories were about drugs, usually to do with narrow escapes or massive ‘heroic’ overconsumption. I attached myself to this group though, whether they liked it or not, though probably they were indifferent.
I kept myself busy – for a couple of years I worked in a café five days a week, plus a few nights in the pub and in a really ropy old club. In those days to be a club and have a license to stay open later than 10.30/11 there had to be food so my job was to make a vat of macaroni cheese, with hardly any cheese, which no one ever wanted but it made it all legal. I must say I was astonished years later to discover this was considered desirable food – even made with great cheese it’s still a big pile of stodge. There was a bit of a truce with the stepmum as I recall, by which I mean I don’t remember any particularly awful scenes. I was saving money to go and visit my friend in Venezuela – she’d married a Venezuelan and was now living there with him. She was a writer too – we both wrote massive ten, twenty page letters to each other which took so long to get there we were always replying to one that had been posted forever ago – like that chat there used to be on Facebook – I chatted with Barb/awittykitty on that and it was tricky with all the delays.
I can’t remember how it all unfolded but it might have been that brother went off to university while sister and I were still at home and the parents thought we could fuck off. We rented a house near the pub with a lad we’d been at school with and was now in the area doing an engineering course. From here, from longer ago actually, I can see that we bullied him. He was amiable, and easy-going to the point of being indecisive – he didn’t mind was his basic stance and we were mean and horrible to him in a way that makes my insides curl up with shame. Banter, that’s what we called it, having a laugh. Nasty.

11:38 p.m. - 15.01.24

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