It was New Years Eve. An offer I couldn't refuse. A voyage in a luxury yacht, at the invitation of, amongst others, Barry Grant from Brookside. We were sailing to a small island to collect some shipments. What could be more fun!
Boarding the luxury yacht was strange - walk along a gangway, but then pull yourself up on a rope that enabled you to clamber aboard.
I don't remember much of the voyage until we returned to home port. To get off the yacht required abseiling down a rope but I was too scared to make that small jump onto the rope. I walked along and found a ladder. I clambered down the ladder, but it only went so far, then I had to make a leap of faith, as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I floated on my back to strains of Queen's I Want to Break Free, and landed in a house, where I had a bedroom. The bed had a mustard coloured candlewick bedspread
We were raided by Plainclothes Customs officers. One, who was quite wimpy stripped off to his string vest to reveal impressive muscles and many tattoos. He was frustrated in his search. Barry Grant led me off to a waiting car, an old fashioned open top car, maybe a Morgan. The chauffeuse, who I think was also the housekeeper and maybe the lover needed to know what to get from the shops. She didn't speak English, he didn't speak Spanish. Fortunately, I could interpret. Langostinos were top of the list.
She got jealous of me, so Barry took me off to the priest hole. but we were followed by HM C&E, who arrested me, and 'cuffed me - not with metal cuffs, but with those plastic strips you use to tie Confidential Waste sacks.
We walked through crowds at a railways station and I managed to slip the cuffs, but I thought it was a good laugh being arrested, so I didn't run away. And we were joined by the uniformed police. We walked to the road next to my mother's road, where a bull was rampaging up and down. Dozens of gypsies had assembled in their pony traps to welcome in the New Year. With dread, I realised I wouldn't get any sleep that night.
The police realised that it was foolish to let me go to my mothers. They realised that I needed to be handcuffed properly, so took me into a neighbour's house. I tried to protest that this poor woman suffers dreadfully with her nerves, always has done, at least since the Sixties, but the police weren't listening. We went into the house, where she was being ill with her nerves, because of the gypsies partying outside and the maurauding bull.
Then Jimmy's alarm clock went off, and he was already downstairs so I had to turn it off.
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