my first comment...

My first blog, and now my first comment. Appropriate that it should come from Shafton (not his real name of course)  because it was down to him that I ended up doing night shifts in the first place. I was the archetypal starving artist in a garret, my garret being a council flat in a tower block and not literally starving but generally skint all the time, and that was starting to get a little bit old for me.

I happened to be up in Scotland, in my old home town (village really) and chewing the fat with Shafton, old school friend and one time very loud bass guitar player in our idea of a band (what we lacked in musicality and talent was compensated for with volume and enthusiasm... rock 'n' roll as it should be)... Anyway, so he tells me of this new job he's got and it wasn't the kind of work he'd done before but more importantly it wasn't the kind of wages either of us had earned before and so, tongue in cheek, Yosser Hughes style I said,

“Geeza job” and so he did. Within a couple o weeks I was being kitted out in chainsaw pants and helmet and sent out onto dark railway lines at night to drag branches into a chipper. And there began a whole new era of my life.