Times I almost died....


well, I got beat up once or twice...one time I'm thinking of with the Burley Punks of Leeds - i got made unconscious - yet it was a great ice breaker, got to be good mates with them afterwards lol.


coulda died then.


Before then, when i was about 8 or 12 or maybe a bit older...dunno. We were in France - our favourite camping bit. Me & Gary in a dingy in the bay rowing out to sea, having fun. at some point we realised that we couldn't get back to shore as the tide was taking us out from the bay into the big big wide ocean....of death! I got real scared real quick & started freaking out. Gary was way cool all the way thru this. Might’ve wrote about it before?


My aunty Brenda tried swimming out to us but got caught in cross tides & got her legs all ripped open cut by the ragged rocks. My uncle Hughey (Gary's dad) appropriated a boat type dingy & rowed out to us & saved us!


Had dreams for a while - up to my LSD times in my 20's about water & nearly drowning, thought i may've had an issue with water but i haven't. Weird tho.


2nd was, that I can actively recall, well - this numeric system is kinda flawed due to when i was a bit deaf, i do recall walking to primary school with my parka hood up - the kinda blinkered one that made your vision just part of a tube emanating from my face. And I crossed the road trusting to mine own self of just existing within this world of mine and everything else was just a distraction - if it ever touched me in anyway. As i was saying I started to cross this road looking where i was going yet a fucking car nearly ran me over! i was a bit scaredly shocked i guess. I regale this due to not having the sense of hearing & not hearing the car looming down on me and the unsense of realising i was not a wholesome 5 senses type kid and therefore using sight more so. Because i did not look left look right then left again before i crossed the road. i was within my own happy-go-lucky world. Phew close call.


So that will have been my about 2nd close call with death - though age wise could have been the 1st. boat/water 2nd. 3rd will have been the car meets tree incident. again possibly covered somewhere else in this blog.


Me & Rich walking up or down tinshill lane saw Andi, my brother pulls up in a car - ford Cortina? I think he'd borrowed it from someone who'd stole it...fucking joyrider! - anyroad up he calls to us and says get it, let’s go someplace or some shit ha ha ha. fuck, we were up for an adventure so we both got in. I got in the front and Rich got in the back, in the middle seat. Did we wear seat belts? Was it law back then in the 80's don't think it was - don't think we did. so we went for a long fucking drive in a stolen car and we loved it - it was soooooo liberating. Sad for the poor sap who's car had been nicked but hell, wasn't his insurance payments gonna cover the loss of this vehicle? It kinda sadly made some weird sense. Still there we were zooming around the roads near the bombholes near Yeadon airport. at one point we was on this big long road speeding along at 70 mph at least, chillin' out yet death reached out a finger & touched our carriage of joy & WHAM....we left the road, traveling at speed, we left the asphalt, dipped and crashed thru a wooden fence, hurtling through into a field where there was a tree standing in our way. Slam!


All our energy, inertia, speed, velocity, hopes, dreams, vitality, humanity and machine ploughed into that tree at speed. And it was an immovable object that killed all our motion. Yet we weren't dead.


Rich had been propelled out the back window yet his shoe was impaled in the front dashboard. i had blacked out & had fallen thru the door on the passenger side. Andi? Can’t recall what happened to him in this scenario - will have to ask him his thoughts....


So, when we all 'woke up' we realised we could not be found with this scene so we had to hoof it as fast as possible. Andi his injuries were....dunno can't recall. Rich, well, he’d lost a shoe - other stuff, can't recall. Me, well i had a cut over my right eye that had been bleeding and by time of becoming conscious again had coagulated therefore causing a crusty dried blood patch over my right eye. I could only see out of my left eye. (bearing in mind i wore glasses from age of about 8 - i was about 15 or 16 when this happened, so i was pretty crap visioned in my 'good' left eye) also i kinda had a limp cuz my left leg had sustained some kind of laceration. Only about 5cm in length but in a V shape. Made walking a bit difficult. Funny to mention walking cuz Yeadon is/was about 5 or so miles from our homes...so yep us lot had to walk/limp home. Jeez I can still vaguely recall all the jokes we made on the way back to keep our spirits up, whilst doing this we concocted a story for our parents which actually held true for about 15 years until we broke down & told the truth. the story sadly was quite plausible. what it was was that we three intrepid explorers after truth had ventured into the deep dark avenues of the dreaded Hawksworth estate of Leeds and the fearsome foes of the skinheads of Hawksworth had been so offended by our righteousness and beauty and fairness that they had mote us all mightily with a fearsome smiting. We were loath to go to the authorities as they would evade capture due to their unnatural diligence to badness and all things evil. etc etc etc


My parents were so shocked by our state I do think they believed our stupendous story. Rich's parents probably thought it’s those bloody Shaw's.....and it was!


Well the next morning I do think one or three of us did limp very dejectedly into the A&E department to get a bit stitched up. Oh woe, the moral of this tale is - belt up kids! Oh, and don't crash if you can help it. (Oh & don’t steal what isn’t yours!!! Don’t forget to tell that to the capitalist gits who steal our time & energy to make profit from our labours…ooh ooh a bit of politix)


Next is a story about depression & suicide attempts. Not jolly japes & escapades - but then again maybe they are - depends on how you look at it. oh also being so fucking drunk I get attacked & mugged & beaten up (again) so badly i end up in A&E twice on different occasions - but doing the same thing....this is part of what I call my depressive era...well, to be honest I never called it nowt - but writing it down it kinda flowed & seemed sadly ironically appropriate. Though getting tired now so will hafta continue a bit later.