In the end, I jumped before I was pushed. I told the factory to shove it. Well, to be honest, I handed in my notice, which, thankfully, was only a week. I was beginning to think I had made a disastrous decision leaving university, but a week later I found the best job in the world.

Marlborough House is the most prestigious department store in Cheltenham. Established in the 1850's, it has framed enlargements of Victorian photographs on the walls of its main stairway, illustrating its illustrious past. Only the very rich can afford to shop there, but Cheltenham is a town full of very rich people who like nothing better than browsing around its many floors lavishing useless gifts upon themselves. After they tire of their frivolous spending, they like to refresh themselves in the Garden Restaurant and chat to the charming working-class people who work there, entertained by their colloquial expressions and quaint tales of unrefined living. And it was in this restaurant that I secured employment precisely one week after leaving Bastard & Co. in Tewkesbury.

My new boss, Mrs Mead, was a kind sort. She'd been doing the job for years and was only a couple away from retirement. She introduced me to Spike, whose job on the wash-up I would be taking over, and Pete, the storeman, and then left me in their hands. Spike was a couple of years older than me and, as I soon discovered, a very unlikely sort of chap to be working washing-up in a restaurant. He had completed his degree in Philosophy and was considering taking a Masters in Analytical Psychology. He was currently reading 100 days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. He said he enjoyed doing 'real jobs' with 'real people' and told me that the majority of dustmen were actually very well read. Over the course of that day he expounded his philosophy in more detail. He was interested in gaining insight through excessive sensory experience, a route espoused by, among others, the French poet Rimbaud, who believed that "the true poet becomes a visionary by a systematic derangement of the senses". Spike would also often quote Blake's aphorism that "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Spike really did walk as he talked, and that lunchtime I went to the pub with him and Pete and he knocked back six neat scotches.

Spike was also the first vegetarian I ever met. When I asked him why he didn't eat meat, he retold me the story of his conversion, which he spoke of like a Damascuscene epiphany. He was walking through a field of cows one summer and the inquisitive beasts came over to check him out. They licked the salt from his hands and he noticed their beautiful long eyelashes. He'd never really appreciated the connection before between these gentle creatures and the food that was on his plate. After that walk he could never eat a piece of meat without remembering the cows' eyelashes, so he gave it up.

Pete made the perfect foil to Spike. Short instead of tall, round instead of skinny, he seemed a good deal older at twenty-six, particularly as he was already balding. Pete's philosophy also pivoted around a requirement for sensory pleasure, but for him this was the goal of existence, not merely the method to obtain it, and he soon educated me in all the best places in the restaurant to get a good 'leach'. His favourite spot was near the entrance to the kitchen from the staff restaurant; he taught me the technique of kneeling down in front of the fridge and pretending to count the milk in order to get an unobstructed view underneath the tables of the restaurant. Pete would go absolutely berserk whenever he was able to get a glimpse of a lady's stocking top or panties, and he would run into the wash-up to tell myself and Spike to come quickly for a look.

Pete's other favourite leaching haunt was at the delivery entrance. This backed on to a busy street and Pete would spend up to 80% of his day leaning against the doorframe watching people walking by. He classified himself as an "arse man" and his gaze would follow the posterior of any attractive woman until she was out of sight. I soon got the hang of it and it wasn't long before I too had adopted the habit of saying "yeah" or "nah" in relation to all the women that walked by, as if we could have had anyone of them, were we so inclined. In reality, not even the most desperate of them would have given us so much as a second glance dressed as we were in our dark green kitchen uniforms – mine with half-mast trousers and covered in tea and custard; Pete's with his flies broken and his top threadbare with the effort of constraining the globular tummy beneath.

Pete's other job was to care for the stores. Despite his busy leaching schedule, he knew exactly how many packets of flour, loaves of bread, jars of mayonnaise, trays of eggs, boxes of pasta etc. were in the stores at any one time. The refrigerated foodstuffs were kept in a larder in the yard; the dry foods on the top floor of the building accessed through soft furnishings. At certain times of the day Pete knew he had to be on hand to answer the requests from the cooks for more of this and more of that, but after these hectic periods, when he wasn't leaching, he would 'stock-take'. This really meant sleeping, for Pete had acquired the ability to stock-take the entire upper stores in less than half an hour in order to leave himself at least two hours a day to sit down in his chair and have a rest. I lost count of the number of times I had to go and wake him up before Mrs Mead went looking for him herself. Luckily, she wasn't inclined to climb all the stairs to the top floor too often at her age, and only generally made the effort when she and Pete did the weekly order. The assistant manager, Joanne, however, was only twenty-two, and therefore more of a danger.

Joanne was not popular with the women who worked in the kitchen and on the food-counter because she was young, pretty and, worst of all, qualified; but Pete and I worshipped her. She always wore a blue suit with, generally, a white blouse, of a revealingly see-through variety, and, whether she did it just to turn us on still remains a mystery, but always stockings and suspenders. Not a week would go by without her adjusting her hosiery in the office at a time when we were passing, keeping us in an excruciating state of sexual tension. Pete made it worse for himself by accompanying her to the cold stores as regularly as possible and then following her back up the cast-iron steps always three or four rungs behind.

After my first week, Spike left and we all went to his leaving party at the Beau Bells pub. He had made an enormous impression on me in that short space of time and I was very sorry to see him go. I felt like he'd helped me to adjust the trajectory of my life – and a small matter of degrees has a profound effect over vast distances, I thought. I would later compose a poem about him called 'Comet' because he was living his life at an incredible pace and I think he knew he would burn himself out before too long. His girlfriend was there too that night and she seemed even less grounded than he was. They got through forty-eight shots between them.

"What you gonna do then, Spike?" said Doris, one of the old girls from the Garden. She, like most of the cooks, was tough as nails on the surface, but soft underneath, not unlike her cooking. That was another thing I picked up from Spike. He knew how to handle these cantankerous women. It was no use acting the sensitive flower; they called a spade a spade and a turd something clinically improbable. He didn't patronise them or act like a sycophant, but was genuinely interested in what they thought and was forever running new ideas and theories past them to get their reaction.

"I'm going back to school, Doris. Haven't finished learning yet. Lots more to discover. I need to integrate my anima for a start," he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

"What'd ee say, Vic? Have an enema? Ow d'you do that then, Spike? Does it 'urt?"

"Dunno, actually. Should be interesting. Have you explored your animus?"

"Hey! You leave my anus out of this. That's between me and my old man, you dirty shit!"

"But don't you think Doris that your constant sexual innuendoes may be related to the projection of your feminine unconscious persona onto us lads as symbols of the animus?"

"What's he on about, now? Give us a fag, Spike."

Pete and I very quickly became close after Spike left. He was one of the sharpest witted people I'd ever met. We'd spend ages in the upper stores munching our way through bags of M & M's while Pete taught me karate moves, kicking holes in the sides of crisp boxes. One time we were playing tennis over a suspended strip light when I hit a return too hard and sent the walnut whip straight into it causing it to shatter in an explosion of flying shards.

"You're mad, you two!" cried Harry, one of the porters. "Clean this mess up before I have you reported to Mr Jossket."

"Bollocks, Harry" replied Pete.

Although we occasionally wound Harry up the wrong way, at lunchtimes he always had a seat on our table in the staff canteen. All the restaurant staff and the porters sat on the same table. There was kind of a class thing going on even among the staff. The kitchen staff were looked down on by the other employees in the store as the lower orders. Next in the hierarchy came electrical, stationery, toys and sports; after them, lingerie, shoes and haberdashery, and at the top men's and ladies fashions, china and crystal and fragrances. These latter were the snobbiest. They fancied themselves as super-models although they were really just bimbos with too much make-up. They were always flirting with management at lunchtimes, playing with their hair and laughing too loudly. Doris, in retaliation, would grab one of the manager's arses and ask him when he was going to keep his promise and work a day in the kitchen with her.

"I give you my word, I will take you up on that. I don't mind getting my hands dirty, me" he'd lie.

"Bollocks" Doris would reply.

Chris, the son of the boss, was one of those people born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The kind of jumped-up, power crazy dweeb that would have made a good captain in the Hitler Youth. He loved to humiliate people. One chap was sacked for dropping a palette of bottles from a fork-lift. I saw another guy being made to clean his shoes. Two weeks after leaving college, it was my job to be at the end of a production line packing bleach bottles sixteen to a box. I clocked in at the factory at 8am and out at 5pm. Half an hour for lunch. A morning break of fifteen minutes. I tried hard to implement what I had learnt in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I failed.

I had got the job because my mother worked for the local Jobcentre and was determined that I wasn’t going to spend my days in bed, particularly after bringing further disgrace upon the family by becoming a ‘drop-out’. This was the only job going she said, but it always felt like it was a punishment – chastisement for my failure to be who I was expected to be. It really couldn’t have been much worse.

Fortunately, a good friend of mine from the village, Grant, was working at the same place. Grant had played drums with Ipso Facto, my first band, and was the only one of us with any real musical talent. Unfortunately, he didn’t share the same taste in music and was now playing for an awful shlock-metal band called Hell Bat. Grant was such a mild-mannered, easy-going chap, that he didn’t seem to notice the gruesome working conditions. He had already been there for six months and was well on his way to seniority. He was allowed to be in charge of a couple of the machines – making sure they didn’t overheat or run out of dye or whatnot. He was still on the minimum wage, however. I used to catch a lift in to work with him and his brother in the morning. His brother worked at the army camp just a mile away from the factory; taken on as an apprentice at sixteen.

There was also a young girl there called Steph who we were friendly with. Steph’s boyfriend was a traveller and, being an inclusive-minded kind of person, I invited them to come to the party I had organised in honour of the fact that my parents were taking their annual two week holiday in Greece. To my horror, they took the presumptive step of inviting half the Tewkesbury underworld, too. It turned out that while my sister and all her sixteen year old friends were dancing to Chesney Hawkes, a circle of at least twenty assorted travellers, tattooed, bearded, dreaded, skin-headed, sat rolling joints on what appeared to be straw beach-mats in the middle of our lawn. By the end of the night they were actually giving lessons to my sister’s mates:

“No, never use the skins packet for a roach. Always keep a bit of card handy in your pocket, see.”

“Okay,” said my sister’s friend, Daisy. “What do you do for a living, then?”

“This and that. Just been inside, actually.”

“Oh right. Prison. What was that for?”

“Nothing much, GBH.”

My mother is really going to kill me if she finds out, I thought. Not only am I corrupting all the kids in the neighbourhood, but also I’ve brought all the people who sign on back to the house of the person who sometimes refuses their giros! I tried to hide everything that was valuable in one room downstairs and spent the rest of the night loitering by the door in order to guard my parents’ antiques. The next day everything was accounted for except for an Asian pewter smoking pipe, which had obviously caught one of the hippies’ eyes. I immediately raced to Cheltenham and scoured the antique shops until I had found a similar replacement.

Later that evening, while vacuuming and dusting the lounge, to my shock I noticed that some knob had actually engraved his or her initials into one of my parents’ most beloved antique mahogany tables. There was no time to call out a French polisher as they were due back the next day. The only thing I could do was put a picture frame over the spot and hope they wouldn’t notice until I had time to get it fixed.

The next morning, about 11am, they came back. I had tidied everything I could think of. The place was immaculate.

“Who’s been smoking in the house, Danny?”

“What?”

“Have you had some friends round while we were away?”

“Yes, but not many, we had a small party.”

“I’ve told you before about people smoking in my house. I won’t have it!”

“Sorry, Mum. Did you have a nice time?”

At this point, she was circling the room like a bird of prey. She knew something was wrong, God knows how. Within two minutes she had spotted it.

“Look, what that boy has done, Henry! Just look! You’re for the high jump and I kid you not! I don’t want you as my son anymore! You can’t be trusted! You’re a disgrace!!”

Well, it could have been worse. In fact, this was nothing compared to the time two years ago when she had actually physically thrown my entire drum kit out of my bedroom window. And I didn’t have one of those downstairs bedrooms, either! Actually, she couldn’t get the bass drum through the gap, but the rest of it went: cymbals, snare drum, stands, sticks, the lot.

“You can’t do this, Mum!” I protested.

“I can, Danny”, she replied, “and, so help me, I will!”

This time I counted myself lucky.

Unfortunately, the ceremony ended quite abruptly. Marijuana blew my mind, but it also blew my chances of graduating from college – instead of attending seminars on the dissolution of the monasteries, I would be flat on my back in my room listening to Strawberry Fields Forever. After less than six months, the college authorities hauled me up to a castle in Ripon to discuss why I had failed to produce a single essay. It was as if I really had been transported back to the early sixteenth century as, bizarrely, the Lord Mayor of York himself was in attendance in full regalia looking like Henry VIII in his bloated years, seated amid a host of other dignitaries. Promising me a fair trial, after a mere fifteen minutes a verdict was reached and I was sentenced to dismissal from the institution, narrowly avoiding being hung drawn and quartered.

With what I would replace my academic career was still uncertain. The week before the mock trial inflicted disgrace on my family for years to come, I had gone for a job as a drugs dealer. (As you will see, I rarely do things by halves). I was convinced that marijuana was the answer to all the world’s problems: Get everyone in Parliament high and they were bound to pass only the most liberal and peace-loving bills: The bomb would be banned, the working week reduced, our economy would be strengthened by sales of walnut whips, mini cheddars and other convenience snacks, and there would be less domestic violence and closing time fracas due to its pacifying effect. How I actually ended up at this ‘interview’ for the vacant position of ‘Assistant Pusher in North-East Region 2 (York)’ I no longer remember. The previous incumbent had ‘moved away’, which I later found out was a euphemism for ‘was in prison’ or ‘was dead’, and a new person was required to move approximately four kilos a month in the York district. My would-be boss, mysteriously known only as ‘Tiger’, lived in a plush apartment in a posh area of the city. He had shoulder length black hair which was tied into a tight pony-tail and, when I met him he was wearing a black and white patterned kimono. He showed me into his lounge, the walls of which were adorned with huge Japanese swords, while a mammoth tiger-pelt rug guarded the fire-place. After offering me some green-tea, Tiger explained that his philosophy was based on the ancient code of the samurai and that his illegal operations afforded him little stress because he was prepared to die with honour. Of course, he expected all his employees to comply with the principles of his code, and he would not tolerate deviation from his strict ethical discipline.

“You see Danny, the grass is just a crop, like wheat or tobacco. If people wish to harness it for their own spiritual well-being, then I am simply empowering them to do that. If, however, they use it in a way that destroys their chi then I can’t be held responsible. Basho said, ‘Look not for the morning raindrop on the grass when the sky above is crying.’”

“Right.”

Tiger then handed me a heavy sandstone pot. Inside was a roll of extremely thin cigarette paper and some really pungent weed.

“Skin one up,” he said.

I realised that this was the practical part of the interview and that I would need to pass this test to prove myself as a proficient pot-manager. Unfortunately, I’d never learnt to roll joints terribly well. Hank would generally do them; I tended to use this little machine I’d bought from a tobacconist that made thin cigarillo type joints of perfect line but which lacked the panache and smoking satisfaction of the classic ‘carrot’ shape, and I didn’t think Tiger would be terribly impressed if I took it out of my pocket at that moment. I needed to convince him that I was street smart, that I was no small-town small-fry, that to me four kilos a month was child’s play, that I’d practically been born with a spliff in my mouth.

With Tiger’s beady eyes on me, however, I went to pieces. My fingers all of a sudden assumed the dexterity of a front row forward and the sweat that they produced merely managed to de-activate the adhesive properties of the papers, in vain the deluges of saliva that rained down on them from my tongue. To make matters worse, the roach I attempted to insert refused to enter, and, instead of the five paper super-spliff that I’d intended to produce, I shamefacedly handed Tiger a soggy two-paper bodge job.

He looked at it disbelievingly. I gave him a knowing look as if to say, “Betcha haven’t come across one of those before,” as if it was some kind of underground New York joint of esoteric recipe kept hidden since the sixties.

“I can’t really taste anything in that,” Tiger said.

Was he kidding? I’d absolutely loaded it. There was hardly a grain of tobacco in there. Most of it had fallen out.

“Anyway, Danny, why exactly do you want this job and what qualities do you think you would bring to the enterprise?”

For heaven’s sakeI should have prepared a CV. I wasn’t expecting such professionalism. I thought back to my last interview for a shelf-filler job with Hyper Value.

“Well, Tiger, I’m a very motivated and hard-working individual, who places a high regard on personal integrity, works well within a team and is committed to seeing projects through to completion.”

Tiger failed to call me back the next day as promised and I realised, extremely thankfully, that I’d blown it. I promised myself that from here on in I would take a more active role in the decisions governing where my life led me.

Thus, I found myself standing in the rain again, in the same car park that my parents had left me in less than seven months ago. However, I was now a very different person. I had indeed spread my wings and flown. I counted my achievements: learning to play squash and winning the college squash tournament (I knew Dave, the squash captain, from smoking sessions and I knew he had let me win); living independently for the first time (OK, so three square meals a day were available in the refectory, but I still had to make it to the other side of the campus), and, er, going for an interview as a ‘drugs dealer’. However, despite these diverse and dazzling accomplishments, nothing could have prepared me for what fate had in store next. I would soon be flying into the eye of the storm!

For the first time in my life I was truly alone.  The moment the young bird has to spread his wings and fly or plummet to the ground and die unpleasantly.  My parents and my sister had just driven off leaving me behind in October drizzle in the car park just down the road from the College of St James and St John.  With me were a suitcase and a rucksack.  Manfully, I resisted the temptation to cry and made my way to Block B in the halls of residence.  After unpacking I put on Peter Green's The End of the Game album which best expressed how I was feeling, i.e. mentally unstable.  After the first track, the guy in the room next door came round and introduced himself as Hank from Wisconsin.  He was on an exchange semester.

            "Fancy a doobie?" he said.

            "I'm sorry?"

            "Want to meet Mary Jane?"

            "Sure," I replied, assuming she was one of his friends.

Hank was alone in the room when I entered, however.  He invited me to sit on the bed while he started fiddling around with some stuff at his desk.

            "So, you smoke much, Danny?"

            "I dont smoke at all, actually."

            "Oh right, you dont like tobacco, huh?  I prefer it without, myself."

Hank then removed the Grateful Dead badge he was wearing and placed it upside down on the desk.  He took a dark green substance from a matchbox and held his lighter to it.  He looked like some kind of alchemist.  He then took out a pocket-knife and cut a thin slice of the substance, which he flattened with the badge.  He removed the wafer-like disc and placed it onto the badge's spike, which he had upturned.  He took a pint glass from the shelf, lit the wafer with a match and then placed the glass over the burning green.  The smoke began to mysteriously fill up the pint glass until it was white with cloud.

             "You go first," he said.

"After you, mate," I courteously replied, not having the faintest idea what I was supposed to do.

Hank got down onto one knee in front of the desk and with one hand slid the glass over to its edge.  He then placed his mouth at the intersection of glass and table edge, and, after exhaling deeply, sucked in all the smoke into his lungs.  He stood up and motioned to me to do the same.  He was apparently holding his breath.  The green disc was still burning and the glass was once again filling up with clouds of smoke.  I knelt down in front of the table and mimicked what Hank had done.  After a couple of deep breaths I put my mouth to the edge of the glass and sucked in the smoke.

I stood up holding my breath.  Hank apparently caught me before I hit the floor.  I came round coughing wildly.

            "You didnt let it out, man!"  Hank was laughing.

            "Sorry, I've never done it before," I said.  My head was spinning and I felt very strange.

            "Hey!  I feel great!"

            "Mary Jane my friend!  Want me to cook up another?"

            "I think I must be high, Hank."

            "Toast.  Me, too!"

I joined him on the floor.  After some length of time, he said:

            "You ever heard An American Prayer by The Doors?"

            "No.  Is it any good?"

"This, my friend, is going to blow you away!  The ceremony is about to begin!"

Determined to make the most of my enforced year out, I found a job with electrical retailer, Grady's.  My parents had very nearly disowned me when they found out my A level grades.  My argument that considering the amount of revision I did I must have done really well didn't cut much ice.  I vowed that I would earn some money before next year to help them out with my tuition fees, when I would take up my place at the College of St James and St John, the thinking man's University of York.  Apparently signing on wasn't good enough and they said I'd have to find a proper job.

My main duties at the store were hoovering the carpet before the shop opened, making the tea for Graham, Dave and Sue, and hiding in the stock room.  I didn't know the first thing about TVs, videos or washing machines, and I certainly wasn't going to take one of Graham's trade manuals home to read up on like he suggested.  But it was embarrassing; every time a customer asked me something I'd have to say, "I'll just get someone who can help you." If Graham, Dave and Sue were busy I'd have to run upstairs and pretend I was getting another member of staff.  One time this tactic failed and after fifteen minutes hiding behind a large tumble-dryer, the bloke was still there.  He wanted some new speakers for his record player.  I sold him a pair of top of the range Bang and Olufsen for thirty quid - 80% off the recommended retail price.  I had no idea how to use the till.

Fortunately, Grady's retail was subject to the same harsh economic realities as Dan's Caf and went into liquidation three months after I started work.  Mr Grady was evidently caught watching The Young Ones on his black and white portable, too.

The summer of 1990 was a memorable one.  England in the semi-finals of the World Cup, long hot evenings spent roaming the fields behind my village, games of basketball on Matt's front drive that only ended when one of us collapsed, and parties around campfires with huge moons and REM and golden sparks flying up into the seemingly endless night.  They were the last days of innocence.

I had been working at the petrol station on the main road since November.  There were two shifts worked on a rota: six till two or two till ten.  Amazingly, in those days I used to make the morning shift.  It was the first time I actually shouldered any real responsibility in a job.  I was a 'key holder' - the gravity of which position I further embellished in my imagination having just finished The Lord of the Rings.  The red v-neck jumper and name badge simply heightened my aura of importance.

It wasn't a bad job.  There were perks.  For instance I got to put the new magazines out on some evening shifts.  Surprisingly, fewer top shelf editions found their way back to the newsagent after I began working there.  It was also quite funny selling them to people.

            "And, er... twenty Lambert please, mate."

"Sure.  Twenty Lambert and Big Knockers Monthly.  That'll be £5.90 please, sir."

After a while, either because the mornings finally got to me or because I was scared of going blind, I gave it up and got a job in the pub in the next village.  I didn't have a car, so I used to cycle the two and a half miles.  I also didn't have an adult's bicycle.  The only one that survived in the shed was one my sister had had when she was eight.  I did my best to customize it.  I replaced the white girl's saddle with a racing one, the white pedals with black reflective types; I raised the handle bars and seat extension as far as they would go, and on the back I attached one of those nifty flashing rear lights.  Despite my modifications I still looked like a chimp on a tricycle when I rode it.  I cannot believe this now, looking back, but the final half-mile of this journey was actually on a main road - the A436.  No front light, and a top speed of five miles per hour with my legs going like the clappers.  I remember straining to hear if any cars were coming in the distance when I reached the junction with the main road.  If the coast was clear I would then try and make it to the pub before a car passed me, for fear of embarrassment as much as anything else.

Once parked up, I began a six-hour shift on the wash-up.  Fortunately, my space was round the corner from the main kitchen where the poor lads and lasses who were unfortunate enough to work with Veronica, the red-faced Chef and Landlady, had to simper and cower and avoid flying frying pans until closing time.  The major benefit of this job was the cheeseburger that I received after each shift.  Veronica made the best mincemeat in the country, it was well known.  Now that I have taken ethical exception to the consumption of lamb and other animals, I can only savour the memory of that delicious food; of the warm, golden polystyrene box glowing in my hand as I made the hazardous trip home - made even more hazardous by the fact that I now had only one hand on the handlebars and it was pitch black - of opening it lovingly on the kitchen table and breathing in the rich aroma of melting cheese, finely minced meat and fresh and slightly soggy granary bread before raising it to my lips and taking the first exquisite mouthful.  Momentarily, £3.10 per hour seemed a decent wage.