My twenty-fourth birthday (Nov 1986) I would describe as ideal. The previous year, Mandy had arranged for me to have one of those surprise affairs where you open the door of your flat and thirty people you don't know that well scream at you and scare you to death. After the initial rush of adrenaline shock, it's immediately down-hill from there as you rapidly progress from being the absolute centre of the social universe to standing in the kitchen nursing a glass of cheap red wine talking to someone's mum. My destiny this particular year though was well and truly in my own hands, and I was determined to spend it doing the three things that would please me the most: an Italian restaurant booked for ten or so friends, free passes into the Limelight Club, and, the highlight, the main event, la piece de resistance...snooker, into the small hours.
The free passes were mine, not because I had made it onto the "A" list of the London club scene, but because, a month or so before, I had been employed by the Limelight to dress up as Dracula for their Halloween party. There were six or seven of us. My friend, Angus, was Igor, I think - either that or a demonic dentist - and there were other people in various stages of damnation and ghoulishness. We were told to wander around the club and be generally part of the scary atmosphere - some of sort of living decoration. I had a slightly more active role, in that I had to run in to the middle of the dance floor at various stages of the evening, arms up, big black cape flapping, and grab my colleague, a screaming virgin, bite her on the neck and drag her off to general applause! Things were going pretty well for the first hour or so. Ran on a couple of times; grabbed virgin; much merriment. Scott, however, the club's designer, made the unfortunate error of telling us the drinks were on the house. Two hours and eight vodkas later, I found myself leaning very un-vampire like over a Norweigan girl who foolishly thought I held some sway over the getting of jobs at the club. One minute we were chatting away animatedly; the next, I drunkenly recall trying to tickle the back of her throat with my tongue; and, the next, I have a vague memory of her wandering away looking shell-shocked and still unemployed. The evening ended on a night bus in Hammersmith with me being nudged awake by the driver, having missed my stop entirely. I had to walk the two miles home in full Count costume, my face a sweaty smear of white foundation and black lipstick. No wonder that police car slowed and had a good look before deciding to leave the Prince of Darkness to weave his way back to his castle on his own...
I must have done something useful back at the club, however, as Scott seemed to have taken a shine to me and called me a couple of days later. He offered me another night at the club, November the fifth. Only this time, there would be no rampant virgins or Igors, the theme was Guy Fawkes. I arrived an hour or so before the night began and very quickly realised that this was not all going to be the drink-fest that halloween had been. He put me in a schoolboy's uniform (Guy Fawkes?) and told me to stand at the door with a load of sparklers in my hand and give them out to people as they came in. A twenty-three year old man in a school uniform and a bunch of sparklers! How I got out of there with my dignity, let alone my arse, intact, I'll never know! By the way, you know that ad (Comet?) where the delivery men come in the house with a new TV and offer to take the "old thing" away and the wife says no leave him in the chair? That's Angus. Scott, I think, is now physical education master at an all-boys school in New Zealand... Before he left though, he gave me these passes to get into the club for my birthday a couple of weeks later and in we piled after our Italian meal and a great time was had by all.
The highlight, though, as I said, was the snooker.
(Looking back through old family albums, it's hard not to notice how, even as a young boy, I seemed irresistably drawn to the game and how this attraction manifested itself in my choice of shirt)
It has to be remembered that this was 1986, the peak of snooker's popularity on TV. Dennis Taylor had clinched the Embassy World Championship that year on the black against a very drained Steve Davies. Pensioners all over the UK were having their latest night in years as they sat glued to their sets into the early hours. You could start watching the snooker after lunch, kip off on the sofa for the afternoon, and it would still be on when you woke up. It was endless, green, hypnotic, TV wallpaper. Gran's favourite. These dinner-jacketed 'sportsmen' were house-hold names. Snooker was great.
I'd started with pool. It was cool to be good at pool. Sod all that 'mis-spent youth' bollocks, if you were good at pool, you had style. You may not be able to string a sentence together but pot a few balls and you had girls at your side, respect and the attention of the whole bar. I fell somewhere between mercurial and grinder. Solid. Not particularly astonishing, but not too crap either. I drank Guinness and held my own down the Wheatsheaf, the Swiss or wherever else me and my drama school mates all met up to play. It was only a matter of time before a few of us graduated to the hallowed baize of the snooker hall.
With snooker being so popular, there were halls popping up all over the place. The one I joined was in Hammersmith and it was open twenty-four hours a day. You would go in there at tea-time and come out for breakfast. Time was meaningless - which was great for the owners as they charged by the hour. Your concentration never waivered from the green oasis of light within the dark desert. Hours would pass and still no-one reached a break of double figures. I once managed not only to pot a colour after a red, but also to go on to pot another red! Absolutely true. You ask anyone.
Such was my devotion to "stroking the reds", on New Year's Eve, 1984, I found myself in a brightly lit garden shed in West London potting away with Aslan the Lion ( I was, at the time, if you remember, in a Christmas production of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" - those weekly visits to London Zoo while at college were not in vain ). I remember on the stroke of midnight, looking up from the table and sharing a smile with Barry (The "Lion" of the title ) that said it all, "Fuck it! It's New Year's Eve, but we're doing just fine..."
Two years down the line, however, things were looking bad. I was becoming incredibly unfit, had eyes like a bush-baby and Mandy had actually left me months before...