Rachel hasn't figured in all of this nearly as much as was originally planned. I figured out pretty early on that this is my autobiography and not someone else's biography, and I've been so mad and crap that there really wasn't the space for another person's mad crapness as well. Suffice to say that she was a horrible drunk, more so towards the end of her drinking, but sober, she's like something out of Disney a lot of the time, and small children and woodland creatures rush to gather at the hem of her garments etc.
She's outgoing and exuberant in a way that I never could be unless I'd researched and achieved some perfect balance of booze and class A's, and people love her, on the whole. She can be over the top and gets hold of the wrong end of the stick quite a lot, but she's aware of both of those things and doesn't really give a fuck about either of them, preferring to view them as character quirks rather than character faults, and who am I to argue?
She refuses to learn how to work a computer, only recently started using a mobile phone and has a general mistrust of any technology that features a digital or LCD display, and, while I often find this Luddite approach to the world frustrating, it's also very funny at times, usually when she's on the phone to someone work-related, and says something like
"Now, if you could just download me your e-mail number..."We fight a bit still, but happily, no longer the kind of fights that require intervention from the drivers of vehicles that flash blue lights and make the nee-nar nee-nar sound, more the kind of fights that viciously scrutinise one another's shortcomings and feature liberal use of the F and C words.
I'm pretty damn sure that working together doesn't help - in 2002, Rachel started renting the kitchen in a music/arts venue in Newcastle, the place we'd had our wedding reception at, and that's where we're at to this day, knocking out proper, home-cooked food that the Daily Telegraph recently described as
"Absurdly delicious" while the New Musical Express went mental and said that it was
"A life-changing burger experience"...which is all well and groovy, except that I'm not a caterer, I'm a bloke who's married to a caterer, a bloke who has made himself otherwise unemployable after years of abuse and doing fuck-all tore a gaping hole in his CV that's impossible to put a spin on.
I don't really like being a boss, but, having taken the piss in kitchens before, I'm aware when someone is taking the piss in ours, and I can often be acerbic and short-tempered when expressing my displeasure. I may well come across as being more of a cunt than I actually am (or believe myself to be) at times, and the fact that people might sometimes not like me does fuck with my ego and my id every once in a while, so I'm trying not be that arsey bloke so much these days, but it ain't easy, because my heart isn't in that kitchen; it's sat here, and it's writing...
Happily, 2003 saw my superior writing skillz collide with a fat slice of luck and five years of the best blag EVER fell into my lap out of nowhere. I was perusing our local Sunday paper, the (Soaraway) Sunday Sun one day when I noticed their Champion Columns page, where readers could score £50 for writing articles of around 600 words or so. As it happened, I had an article already written that I'd done for a magazine that never happened, all about Goth kids and Charver kids fighting in town, so I brushed that up, took out all the swearing and drug references and sent it off to them. They liked it and ran it, so I submitted another one about the hassles of living in the posh wanker student ghetto that is Jesmond, and they ran that as well.
One of our waitresses at work was seeing a bloke from the Sunday Sun, a lovely fella called Rory, and he'd said he'd liked my articles, thus establishing his lovely fella credentials forever in my eyes. I wasn't 100% sure what he did at the paper until the day he phoned me out of the blue and asked if I fancied going to London for a few days to review a swank new hotel and the odd tourist attraction for the travel section? They couldn't pay me, but they'd sort out my travel and lodgings and food/watering needs for nixie if I was up for it. Fucking rights, man, show me as attending, for sure..
And so began five wonderful years of legging it from the kitchen every six weeks or so and entering the magical world of travel PR, where absolutely everybody called me Ettrick without question because that's what it says right there on my passport, so Skotty didn't get a look-in, and it was like Andy had never happened. I'd go to an airport, meet up with a load of strangers and go away somewhere with them for a few days. It was all a bit Big Brother Goes On Holiday at times, but I never met anybody that I wanted to kill with a hammer in the whole five years, not really, anyway, so that was good.
The
'You Jammy Bastard!' list of places I went to includes Ibiza, Majorca, Croatia, Rome, Milan, a week learning how to sail in Turkey, four days in Miami reviewing a ridiculously OTT cruise liner going round in a big circle in the Atlantic, several trips to a theme park near Barcelona to review their new roller-coasters and death-drop rides and, as a grand finale before the wheels on my travel-wagon went tits-up, a week in the Cayman Islands to review Michael Fucking Bolton at a Carribean Jazz Festival and swim with stingrays. Plus loads of little trips to London and Glasgow to review hotels, restaurants, music festivals and art events and just generally be Mr. Culture Vulture from the paper.
Sadly for me, amalgamations and down-sizing and crunched credit at the end of 2008 led to major reshuffling and policy changes at the paper and the services of freelancers like me were no longer required, which is a bit of a bluey, for sure, but honestly, I had the best of times while it lasted, and I'd like to say a big fat heart-felt thankyou to Mr Rory Foster for having the smarts to recognise my fledging genius and making it all possible...