in St Helens my
roadblock was making people safe, I was keeping them from killing themselves in
their cars.
Pretty
soon the one interference I would make in my smoothly flowing business was to
suggest to my people using mobile cranes where there really was no need for
them. Since this was virtually my sole input they were happy to humour me.
After a while this wasn’t enough; next I began getting my sites expanded into
the roads they bordered, on various unlikely pretexts so that they blocked off
or narrowed major arteries all over the north-west of England . And the thing I learned was they let you do it, the councils, the
police and the highway agencies; if you told them you wanted to block off the
roads, they said okay, take all the time you want, do what you have to do.
After the first few times wondering if I’d get caught out, the realisation
dawned that I was able to barricade the streets at will. We would put in an
application to place a crane at some vital road junction, my men would put up
the barriers, then they’d go, the driver would park the crane then he too would
go. For a few days I’d leave it there screwing everything up, then the crane
driver would come and take his sixteen-wheeled behemoth away again and nobody
would know that it had lifted nothing at all.
After
that, becoming bolder, I started digging the roads themselves up. See, they all
assumed, the authorities that is, that if you wanted to spend money digging up
the highway then you must have a good reason to do it. It was inconceivable to
them that somebody would part with cash for any other reason. So I would send
my men out (usually I got official permission though sometimes I didn’t even
bother with that), they’d take their jackhammers and their picks, my men, and
they’d smash up the fucking killing tarmac, put a fence round it then leave it
for a day or a week or a month or a year, before coming back and filling it in
so badly that it was absolutely impossible to drive over at any speed.
Thousands more lives saved.
That
hole in the Dock Road , the one
that was holding up the copper — that was one of mine, now coming up for its
six-month birthday. And, do you know, it really didn’t cost that much at all.
The
year I spent in London (Loyd
once told me Colin had said I talked about it as if I’d had twenty years before
the mast on the Valparaiso run)
had been my first year at a famous central London art school.
I’d
always been crap at exams. Admittedly the private school in Cheshire that my dad sent me to wasn’t
what you’d call academic, none of the kids were particularly posh, just had
parents who wanted their kids to grow up being hard-working and honest, who
thought suing the council over imaginary back injuries was not a viable career
path. Come to think of it, I guess not all the parents wanted their kids to
grow up exactly honest since a sizeable minority of the pupils were the sons of
the big Liverpool crime
families, the Gorcis, the Mukes, the Pooles. Still, they weren’t going to need
any A levels with what they’d be doing.
I guess
my work must have been okay because they took me. In 1988 at the age of
eighteen going down to the capital I’d been full of happy confidence, assuming
I would start making good friendships that would last a lifetime within the
week, make that two tops. Back home in Liverpool I’d always been one of the popular kids. I was the funny one, sure,
but not a kid you fucked with, okay at sport and able to look after myself.
Looking back I suppose a lot of what went wrong was plain bad luck but at the
time the world seemed to have turned suddenly and unexpectedly malevolent:
firstly the hall of residence where the college put me was one that was shared
with a load of different schools and universities in central London. I never
met anybody from my own college there, it seemed to be entirely full of
homesick Africans weeping in the laundry room. Liverpool humour didn’t work at all — my
roadblock was making people safe, I was keeping them from killing themselves in
their cars.
Pretty
soon the one interference I would make in my smoothly flowing business was to
suggest to my people using mobile cranes where there really was no need for
them. Since this was virtually my sole input they were happy to humour me.
After a while this wasn’t enough; next I began getting my sites expanded into
the roads they bordered, on various unlikely pretexts so that they blocked off
or narrowed major arteries all over the north-west of England . And the thing I learned was they let you do it, the councils, the
police and the highway agencies; if you told them you wanted to block off the
roads, they said okay, take all the time you want, do what you have to do.
After the first few times wondering if I’d get caught out, the realisation
dawned that I was able to barricade the streets at will. We would put in an
application to place a crane at some vital road junction, my men would put up
the barriers, then they’d go, the driver would park the crane then he too would
go. For a few days I’d leave it there screwing everything up, then the crane
driver would come and take his sixteen-wheeled behemoth away again and nobody
would know that it had lifted nothing at all.
After
that, becoming bolder, I started digging the roads themselves up. See, they all
assumed, the authorities that is, that if you wanted to spend money digging up
the highway then you must have a good reason to do it. It was inconceivable to
them that somebody would part with cash for any other reason. So I would send
my men out (usually I got official permission though sometimes I didn’t even
bother with that), they’d take their jackhammers and their picks, my men, and
they’d smash up the fucking killing tarmac, put a fence round it then leave it
for a day or a week or a month or a year, before coming back and filling it in
so badly that it was absolutely impossible to drive over at any speed.
Thousands more lives saved.
That
hole in the Dock Road , the one
that was holding up the copper — that was one of mine, now coming up for its
six-month birthday. And, do you know, it really didn’t cost that much at all.
The
year I spent in London (Loyd
once told me Colin had said I talked about it as if I’d had twenty years before
the mast on the Valparaiso run)
had been my first year at a famous central London art school.
I’d
always been crap at exams. Admittedly the private school in Cheshire that my dad sent me to wasn’t
what you’d call academic, none of the kids were particularly posh, just had
parents who wanted their kids to grow up being hard-working and honest, who
thought suing the council over imaginary back injuries was not a viable career
path. Come to think of it, I guess not all the parents wanted their kids to
grow up exactly honest since a sizeable minority of the pupils were the sons of
the big Liverpool crime
families, the Gorcis, the Mukes, the Pooles. Still, they weren’t going to need
any A levels with what they’d be doing.
I guess
my work must have been okay because they took me. In 1988 at the age of
eighteen going down to the capital I’d been full of happy confidence, assuming
I would start making good friendships that would last a lifetime within the
week, make that two tops. Back home in Liverpool I’d always been one of the popular kids. I was the funny one, sure,
but not a kid you fucked with, okay at sport and able to look after myself.
Looking back I suppose a lot of what went wrong was plain bad luck but at the
time the world seemed to have turned suddenly and unexpectedly malevolent:
firstly the hall of residence where the college put me was one that was shared
with a load of different schools and universities in central London. I never
met anybody from my own college there, it seemed to be entirely full of
homesick Africans weeping in the laundry room. Liverpool humour didn’t work at all — my
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