annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jubilee I'm getting fed up with the jubilee bollocks already and it's not even here yet. There's fucking union jack bunting all over the place and shit on the telly and I just don't care. So instead I'll tell you about the silver jubilee, the 25th anniversary, which was in 1977, another world back then. I was twenty-three, had no kids, was temporarily living with my parents and working mostly in a cafe during the day but also a club and a pub in the evenings. This was the seventies. Think flares, long hair, no bra, no make-up, no sense. I had the day off from the cafe so worked in the pub which for the first time in living memory was allowed to open all day. We started at ten; everyone had the day off so poured into the pub and started chucking beer down their necks at an alarming rate. Loads of them bought me drinks which I accepted and drank, who cared, it was the jubilee, woo hoo, cheers your maj, mine's a Guinness, don't mind if I do. Things started to get a bit vague by about 11 - we had The Sex Pistols 'God Save the Queen' on the jukebox quite a lot, interspersed with Lucille - "you picked a fine time to leave me Lucille! with x hungry children and dum de dum deel" or however it went, we all sang along, raucously to both, "No future, no future!" it was bloody brilliant. At some point I was told I could take my lunch break, an hour. I knew my parents were at some grown-up, dull something that I wanted nothing to do with, so I thought I'd go into town and get a fry up in the cafe. The pub was on the beach side of the river estuary, the cafe on the town side. There was a footbridge in between. I had my bike so thought I'd ride over. People always used to moan and yell, "No cycling on the footbridge," but I didn't give a fuck about them and always rode my bike over. On this day I managed to get almost to the middle, swaying and wobbling about, nudging against the walls every now and then but keeping going till suddenly the flares on my jeans got tangled up in the chain, totally, and down I went, quite hard, me, bike, flares, chain, all muddled up together, rash onto the quite warm paving. I tried to untangle it, but it was hard to reach, too hard and I was very drunk and very tired so gave up. I could reach my cigarettes and lighter, so I lit a fag and leaned against the wall and thought I'd just rest for a bit and see what happened. What happened for a while was loads of clean, neatly dressed people walking past, having to step over the bike a bit - the footbridge was quite narrow - and holding their children by the hand away from me, and I really didn't give a fuck, I do remember that. They were looking at me with scorn but I was looking back with scorn too, fuck you, uptight bastards, yeah yeah, whatever. Finally, and really before I even started to get agitated and worried about how I'd get free, my mate Clive came along. "Hi Anna," he said, also a bit wobbly on his feet, and squatted down, chatting shite and untangling the jeans from the chain, without referring to it at all. When I was free I got up and pushed the bike as I walked with him to the cafe where we both ate big plates of sausage, bacon, egg, beans and chips before walking back to the pub where I got behind the bar and carried on serving and drinking till about midnight. So the moral of this story is don't celebrate the anniversary of hereditary monarchs and don't wear flared trousers, children. 12:50 a.m. - 30.05.22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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