Home Sweet Home

I was at home recently in Northern Ireland to visit friends and family and I must admit I missed the old place. I still have my parents, one of my wonderful sisters and her lovely family and my extended family still living there. My other sister is happily married and living in England with yet again her wonderful family. I love to go home and catch up on the local gossip as Im sure most of you enjoy doing also. What does dominate the conversation is chat of how many of the people I knew and grew up with have passed away. Your probably thinking, 'The cold winter nights must just fly by at his place', but I am surprised at the amount of people that have fallen over. I do laugh at my old man, who in his local pub has nicknamed a bench seat, 'Death Row', because he says, 'as each of the old guys who sit on it and gets to the end, he croaks it and they all move down one'. Not a very good thought when your second from the end I've told him. As I was saying I do miss the place and where I used to go over at least once every 3 months, its now once a year if I'm lucky. What I do know is though I wouldn't swap my birth place for anything because absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

Fond Memories

When I joined the Navy which was along time ago I was treading the same ground as those who I watched in the old seadog war movies such as 'The Waves Above Us' and 'The Cruel Sea'. What I wasn't expecting was that 40 or so years down the line the night clubs and pubs in those movies hadn't changed one bit. Im only talking about this now because Im back In Plymouth and while driving past some of the old haunts it has brought back some of those memories of my ship mates and I pissed beyond the next Galaxy staggering up and down Union street(The Strip). The strip was where I saw my first stripper in a place called Diamond LiL's. There she was in a pair of dental floss knickers wearing a sailor's work shirt and carrying a family size tin of U.H.T cream. My first thought was 'she's never gona eat all that herself is she', and I was right. It has put me off Bannana splits for life. The second club the young matelots of my day would frequent was a place called 'BOOBS', a very dark and sticky place it was to. I remember winning best dancer award there in the late 80's and all I was doing was trying to get the chewing gum off the bottom of my shoes. The old Diamond LiL's and BOOB's are both gone now but at least I have the memories of what it was really like.