Where It All Began 28

Sally and I had been running Night Owls, the largest Mobile Disco company in Yorkshire for five years. In the December of 2000 we had thirty mobile rigs in the store and had hired thirty five DJ’s. Christmas parties were at an all time high and we did 308 functions that December. We’d managed to get away a few times, visiting Kenya and Sri Lanka, but they were brief visits and I always felt disappointed when we left.

I was still running, completing several half marathons in a time of one and a half hours. I’d joined the local gym and taken up Kickboxing, but after two years, and in my forties, it was getting tough. One night I broke three ribs, which kinda hampered installing disco rigs, so I called it a day. The next challenge was to climb the National Three peaks in 36 hours with the boxing club.

We had a great time, but it got me to thinking. There was more to life.

Sally and I were at loggerheads, she fancied selling up and settling down with ordinary jobs. So inevitably we sold the business, paid my old bosses off and went our seperate ways, all very amicable and everyone happy. But I needed a plan, so as breather, I rented a small flat in Boston Spa and worked the night shifts for my old kickboxing instructor who owned a security business. That was fun, especially one night when I came across a guy in a lorry park, slitting open the side of a lorry with a knife. Sadly he managed to get away. I’d been single for a while and had two ideas for the future. One – Buy a smallholding in France from where I could get anywhere in Europe. Two – Rejoin the Foreign Legion if I could get away with lying about my age 😂 It was around this time I reconnected with Gillian. We’d met in 1990. I’d made a few moves on her at the time, but she was engaged and I was rebuffed 😂. After she married and Sally and I became an item, we all became close friends, but she’d divorced in 2000, and moved to Bracknell as Operation Manager of Oakley Court Hotel, which had been used for the Hammer House of Horrors back in the day. We got on famously, even though we were in different parts of the country. Eventually I moved to Bracknell and as a stopgap took a job as a Carpenters hand (labourer)

Surprisingly I enjoyed having a proper job and working on a constuction site. After six months I qualified as a Level 2 Site carpenter, a year later I took my Level 3 and the boss made me a foreman with my own site. Gillian and I married, and everything was hunky dory.

But there was something niggling at me and one day I saw an advert for Prison Officers to train and work at Feltham Young Offenders prison. TBC 😂

Happy Trails, Folks x.