Tweet
I would like to hive you a snippet from my early days as kid. Nothing dangerous, just mischievious. You will also notice the book is written in NorthEast dialect, so bare with me if there are some words you don't quite understand. It just gives the book the realism of my life story......
I’ve got two sisters Kim; the eldest, then Sue and a younger brother called Colin; ‘our kid’. I think I would have preferred to be the youngest one though cos you get spoilt rotten but more importantly, you get away with everything. But when I tell you about the ‘accidents’ that our Colin endured, it does make me glad I wasn’t the youngest. I was always out to test people. You know, to see exactly how much I could get away with before I landed myself in trouble.
You made your own entertainment back then and there was always plenty to do. I was a right little tearaway. Our Colin and me were always up to something. There was once, he got an orange tractor and he absolutely loved it. Remember when you used to get toys one week and they would be the best things in the whole world until the week after when you’d get something else? Well this tractor was the cow’s tits for Colin. It was his toy of the moment. Our dad used to take us camping quite a lot and while we were there he’d take us shooting, so as a kid I had my own air rifle. One day I clocked the tractor in the garden and Colin was nowhere in sight. I thought it must have taken the doctors ages to separate the pair of them so I didn’t want to waste such an opportunity. I tied it to the washing line with a piece of string, bounded upstairs and hanging out the window took aim with the rifle. Ping … Crack! I was like a ****ing sniper. It was the dog’s.
(Dog’s: See ‘dog’s bollocks’ or ‘the bollocks’: a British term for something that is amazing / good / the business. Originates from a dog being able to lick it’s own parts, hence the brilliance.)
Here’s me sitting there like Scorpio in Dirty Harry - Ping, Ping, Ping, and there’s all these bits of orange plastic flying all over the garden. After a few minutes I heard someone else bound up the stairs. You’ll never guess who it was … His first reaction was, ‘You’ll get wrong for that,’ but he hadn’t even seen what the target was yet. So I’m going, ‘Here. Have a go.’ He knew it was a bit naughty, but at that age when you’re handed an air rifle and told it’s alright to shoot it, guess what you’re gonna do. By the time he set eyes on the thing it looked nothing like any tractor I’ve ever seen, so he aimed and pulled the trigger. Ping, Ping … he loved it. He was getting well into it and falling around laughing then he asked me what it was he was shooting at. I couldn’t lie: ‘It’s your brand new orange tractor!’ he stopped laughing for some reason. There was that two second pause that kids do just before they start to bawl their eyes out. And that’s when I knew the little git was gonna shop me when our mam and dad got home.
I’ve got two sisters Kim; the eldest, then Sue and a younger brother called Colin; ‘our kid’. I think I would have preferred to be the youngest one though cos you get spoilt rotten but more importantly, you get away with everything. But when I tell you about the ‘accidents’ that our Colin endured, it does make me glad I wasn’t the youngest. I was always out to test people. You know, to see exactly how much I could get away with before I landed myself in trouble.
You made your own entertainment back then and there was always plenty to do. I was a right little tearaway. Our Colin and me were always up to something. There was once, he got an orange tractor and he absolutely loved it. Remember when you used to get toys one week and they would be the best things in the whole world until the week after when you’d get something else? Well this tractor was the cow’s tits for Colin. It was his toy of the moment. Our dad used to take us camping quite a lot and while we were there he’d take us shooting, so as a kid I had my own air rifle. One day I clocked the tractor in the garden and Colin was nowhere in sight. I thought it must have taken the doctors ages to separate the pair of them so I didn’t want to waste such an opportunity. I tied it to the washing line with a piece of string, bounded upstairs and hanging out the window took aim with the rifle. Ping … Crack! I was like a ****ing sniper. It was the dog’s.
(Dog’s: See ‘dog’s bollocks’ or ‘the bollocks’: a British term for something that is amazing / good / the business. Originates from a dog being able to lick it’s own parts, hence the brilliance.)
Here’s me sitting there like Scorpio in Dirty Harry - Ping, Ping, Ping, and there’s all these bits of orange plastic flying all over the garden. After a few minutes I heard someone else bound up the stairs. You’ll never guess who it was … His first reaction was, ‘You’ll get wrong for that,’ but he hadn’t even seen what the target was yet. So I’m going, ‘Here. Have a go.’ He knew it was a bit naughty, but at that age when you’re handed an air rifle and told it’s alright to shoot it, guess what you’re gonna do. By the time he set eyes on the thing it looked nothing like any tractor I’ve ever seen, so he aimed and pulled the trigger. Ping, Ping … he loved it. He was getting well into it and falling around laughing then he asked me what it was he was shooting at. I couldn’t lie: ‘It’s your brand new orange tractor!’ he stopped laughing for some reason. There was that two second pause that kids do just before they start to bawl their eyes out. And that’s when I knew the little git was gonna shop me when our mam and dad got home.
Comment