Bottle
My first flat on leaving home at the age of 17 was a bedsit about 2 miles from my mother’s house. Three months prior to my move, she had given me three months notice to quit the family nest, due to the complete impossibility of my being able to fit in with any semblance of family life. When announced the fact of my new flat and my impending departure by the due date, her obvious surprise revealed that she had only been angry or frustrated with my lifestyle, and had not really intended for me to leave. But it was too late for me. I was committed and had high hopes.
The bedsit was a large, ground floor room, and I already knew the occupants of the other two ground floor bedsitters, with whom I was going to be sharing bathroom and kitchen. We were part of a fairly large crowd of misfits and hippies, used to heavy drinking and smoking dope for our kicks, along with a soundtrack of somewhat obscure hippie music of the time: bands like Egg, Tangerine Dream, Taste, King Crimson and so on. Having rejected everything that was considered mainstream in music, such as pop, we had also rejected TV, newspapers, radio, tidy clothes and career ambitions. But we spent a lot of time grumbling about the piss-poor town of ours, and how there must be some way to get out.
I had worked in a pub not long before moving to this flat and one of the things I had collected was a huge empty whiskey bottle, with a cork. During my time working there, I watched this huge bottle get emptied and thought it would be a great thing to possess. As soon as was time to replace it with a new one, I asked the landlord if I could take the empty bottle home and he didn’t mind. At first, this was something of a trophy for me and was prominently on display in my flat, but I soon lost interest in this huge bottle.
As the occupants of each level shared a bathroom and kitchen, it always seemed quite a long walk to the toilet in the middle of the night. The bottle became a night toilet for when I needed to pee and didn’t fancy the cold hallway walk to the bathroom.
My friends and I were in the habit of spending whole weekends, from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, in a stupor brought about by various combinations of cannabis, booze and hypnotic music. One weekend, much the same as any other, several of us were lying around having consumed too much of everything. Steve Cox suddenly shouted to me that he thought my whiskey was really shit. I asked him what he meant, and he indicated the large bottle under my bed! Usually, I was assiduous about emptying it, but this time I had forgotten. My initial consternation quickly turned to relief as soon as I realized that the greedy bugger had swigged the lot, about a pint of day-old piss. As there was none left, no one else would be called upon to try a taste to confirm his judgment.
As the years passed, new music emerged, and youth culture developed and changed. I left my home town and went to university. Hair was cut and beards were shaved. Punk and new wave emerged. All sorts of interesting things were happening in the late seventies. The strangest thing was a return visit to my home town, spending an evening with these people. After all the grumbling about life in this town, not one of them had left. I would not have been surprised to find they were all still there, but for the fact that their complaints about the place were stronger than ever. Why didn’t they just pack up and go if it was that bad? The last conversation I recall with them was about all the wonderful new music emanating from London and Manchester. Steve Cox, with great pride and confidence, or perhaps just plain boorishness, announced that he was never going to grow old, that he was a Peter Pan, and that he was always going to stay with the same music and fashion (not that we used the word in those days: fashion was the last thing we wanted to be identified with). That was the precise minute when I decided that I would never be paying a visit to these people again. And I never saw a single one of them from that day to this.