Man alive! I have been thinking about this post for years and years and years.
(I nearly wrote tears there by mistake).
Anyway! I have been coming through Tottenham Court Road Station for years.
It holds joy, sorrow and mess for me.
I have puked in the corner, fallen asleep on the platform, broken up with girls (actually they were probably breaking up with me but you guessed that……)
Of course most of this was all in the last century and was over way before Facebook arrived on the planet.Back then I worked in bars, clubs and hotels in the West End. it was the 90’s and it was the nearest I have been to rock and roll.
Never quite as rock ‘n’ roll or sophisticated as I would have liked it to be but I did serve a lot of famous people.At the time of writing none of them have shown up in BBC investigations yet.
I am here, standing on the it has occurred to me that I have been listening to “You can’t always get what you want” by the Rolling Stones in this station for years.
First in a Sony Walkman, then on a discman, then on a minidisc player, then on a Sony MP3 and then Apple got me.
Everything seems to stay the same. Of course it does not but sometimes I feel I have been 19 for years.
Part of me has never grown up and another part – the best part is full of zest, adventure and possibility.
Every time I am here I look up and down the platform wondering if I will spot “old me” in a pair of shit kicked DM’s wearing an ill fitting Jack Daniels T-Shirt thinking I look like something of the front of Sky Magazine. (I even had a pair of white jeans – but please don’t tell anyone).
I am quite sure the first time I came here you could still smoke on the tube which seems NUTS!
The extremes of “old me”
I loved Bernie the bartender, I had no clue what responsibility was.
I was either being super super healthy – cycling everywhere, running marathons for charity and drinking juice
OR
Face down in a pile of drugs not wanting the sun to rise because I’d have to taste the horror of the morning aftet the night before.
I was lost. I knew it and so did everyone else, if fact I am sure we all lost together sometimes. If restaurants did not hire and fire people so fast we’d have died way sooner.
These days I come through this station with #BabyBernie and #Supercoolwife and can’t believe my luck.
In fact I don’t even recognise the person I am describing in the paragraphs above.
Part of me likes the fact it happened like it did. I have struggled, expericed pain and self imposed tragity, been a million miles from something I’d let my late Grandmother admit she was related to and I know the most worst and desperate versions of me.
It is certainly not good, lots of people have been hurt by the consequences of my hell raising. Not violently or physically – emotionally and bored of listening to my drunken drivel.
Here is my train!
This time last week I might have thought about jumping in front of it.
After the chat I had with friends tonight I would not dare leave this world yet 🙂
See you tomorrow and thanks for the messages back, even the cruel ones made me laugh 😉
