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Oops

Jorgen Angel / Redferns via Getty

New Year’s Eve, 1966.

I’m young, free and single – or unmarried, anyway – and things could not be going better.

I’ve moved on from Section 5, for a start, and I’m the singer in a new, much-better band, with a far more sensible name. Okay, that last part isn’t true. We’re called The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub, which we saw written on a novelty T-shirt advertised in the back of the New Musical Express, next to an offer for stick-on sideburns . . . which we ordered, without thinking to check the colour.* As for our musical style, let’s just say that I go on stage equipped with maracas and tambourine. Oh, and we don’t play ‘gigs’. We play ‘happenings’ – and even better, ‘love-ins’.

Did I mention I’ve got a new girlfriend? Aye, and she’s a stunner. Flaming red hair. Big blue eyes. Carol is her name, and we can’t keep our hands off each other.

And now here we are, just before midnight, at a party to celebrate 1966 turning to 1967, at the home of The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub’s rhythm guitarist, Dave Yarwood, a man bravely sporting a bowl cut paired with a floral shirt and tight white trousers.

Like everyone else in the room that night, Dave is that most wonderful and unlikely of creatures – a hippie in Newcastle. There are hundreds of us in the North East of 1966, if not thousands. Our God is the sweet-voiced Scott McKenzie, and our anthem is ‘San Francisco’ – even though San Francisco is a very, very long way away from Dave’s house here on the Scotswood Road.

Now, New Year’s Eve – or Old Year’s Night as some call it – is a big deal in Newcastle, and not just because Geordies will embrace any excuse for a piss-up. When the clock strikes midnight, every ship on the Tyne blasts its horn, and the whole city vibrates to this eerie, stirring sound, which carries for miles through the fog and the rain. Then it’s time for ‘first-footing’, when the first person to enter a house on 1 January carries with them a lump of coal for good luck and is greeted on the other side with a glass of whisky and a rousing chorus of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ . . . unless the first-footer is a woman, or a redhead, in which case a curse will be upon you for the next twelve months. A strange superstition, given the number of lasses and gingers in these parts – but don’t blame me, I’m half-Italian, I had nothing to do with it.

To this day, neither Carol nor I can remember a single detail between the clock striking midnight and us waking up in each other’s arms the following morning on Dave’s living room floor.

All I can tell you for sure is that we both got very drunk . . .

And one of us ended up very pregnant.

In the race to find fame and fortune as a rock’n’roll singer, knocking up your girlfriend at the age of nineteen while working full-time in a factory was not performance enhancing.

It’s not that I regret it. You can’t regret it. The little girl who was born nine months later – my beautiful Joanne – has brought me more joy and love than I could ever put into words.

But my timing . . . well, it could have been better.

It certainly couldn’t have been much worse.

I mean, for a wannabe rock’n’roll musician, Britain in early 1967 was about as good as it was ever going to get. It was like being an explorer in Portugal in the age of Christopher Columbus. Or a painter in Italy at the height of the Renaissance. When you think of what was going on at the time, it’s just staggering. The Rolling Stones had just released the double A-side of ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles was about to come out . . . as was Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the single of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by The Kinks. Then a few months after that, the BBC would launch Radio One.

Radio One alone would be a truly life-changing development. Before it went on the air, all BBC Radio offered was the awful crap of the Light Programme or, even worse, the Home Service, with its shipping forecasts that seemed to go on for days at a time, describing every last gust of wind and drop of rain in places that only a handful of fishermen knew existed. ‘Holmsgarth, northwest, two to four . . . mainly fair, occasionally poor . . . Lochmaddy, intermittent slight rain, falling slowly . . .’

Yet somehow, they went from that to playing ‘Flowers in the Rain’ by The Move – the first song Radio One ever broadcast. I missed a quarter of an hour’s wages that morning because I couldn’t tear myself away from the Rediffusion radio in the kitchen.

And when I got to work, all I could think about was getting home again, so I could listen to it some more.

To be fair, I’d felt as though the 1960s were passing me by even before I became an accidental dad. After all, it wasn’t like my job at Parsons was just nine-to-five. I was devastated when I realized there would be entire weeks when I’d have to work the 9 p.m. to 7.30 a.m. shift – even after it was explained to me that it meant double pay and a four-day week. But I didn’t give a shit about the extra money, even though I needed every penny that I could get. I just wanted to be out at night, playing with the band.

I remember my first night shift like it was yesterday. I was walking to the factory gate with two lads who were fellow apprentices, and when I looked up, I noticed the most breathtaking sunset. Now, for all the shit I give the North East about its weather, I can tell you, hand on heart, it does sunsets like nowhere else. The wind becomes God’s paintbrush, and the rain clouds His palette, and the sky just explodes into these incredible swirls of pinks, oranges and reds, especially in summer, because you’re so far north it never gets fully dark.

‘Jesus Christ . . . just take a look at that,’ I said, straining my neck as I tried to take it all in.

‘Look at what?’ came the reply.

‘The sky, man, the fucking sky.’

The lads glanced up . . . then looked at each other and shrugged. They’d seen sunsets before.

‘Just think of all that’s happening in the rest of the world under that same sun,’ I marvelled. ‘All those brilliant places. All those brilliant people. All those adventures just waiting to be had.’ Then I looked over at the light machine shop – a gaping black hole with train tracks running into it. ‘And here’s us,’ I said, ‘going in there.’

The lads looked at me as though I’d just landed from another planet.

‘You’re weird, you. You know that, don’t you? You’re fucking weird.’

My frustration wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d started going to see a lot of big-name acts, giving me a glimpse of the kind of life that I could have if I ever made it as a professional singer.

The earliest show I remember going to was at the Odeon Cinema on Pilgrim Street in Newcastle. Admission was free because it was sponsored by a cigarette company, which was okay in those days, because cigarettes were good for you – according to the doctors who endorsed them, at least. The headliner was Julie London. I remember them giving us each a pack of twenty at the door, which was like Christmas come early for me and George Beveridge, who’d gone with me. Usually, we were so skint we had to buy them in packs of ten. Apart from the main attraction, there was also a line-up of bands who played two songs each. The Bachelors, The Fourmost, then The Pretty Things came on and just about blew the doors off the place with ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’.

I would have given my right arm to trade places with any of those guys on the stage, especially The Pretty Things.

One of the reasons the top acts all came to Newcastle was because of the Club a’Gogo, run by the notorious Cockney music manager Mike Jeffery. It quickly became the North East’s answer to the Marquee in London – mainly because Jeffery had hired a brilliant young singer named Eric Burdon to front the house band.

The band, of course, was The Animals.

Everyone played the Club a’Gogo. The Rolling Stones. The Who. Ike and Tina Turner. Howlin’ Wolf. The Animals even dedicated a song to the place, which they released on the B-side of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’. That’s how red hot the place was. But there were plenty of other booming venues in town. There was La Dolce Vita, then there were The Downbeat, Change Is, The Oxford, The Majestic, The Cavendish and, of course, The Mayfair, which had a fabulous revolving stage.

Aye, Newcastle really was a hopping place in those days.

The Mayfair was where I went most often because it had the best sound system and a ‘rock night’ when DJs played the latest heavy rock and blues at the kind of volume that felt like a punch in the gut. The track we most wanted to hear was ‘My Generation’ by The Who. We’d all wait for the line that Roger Daltrey sang so brilliantly and with such menace – ‘Why don’t you all . . . f-f-f-fade away?’ – and we’d mime along, throwing ourselves around the dance floor, heads back, doing Pete Townshend windmills on our air guitars as Keith Moon beat the shit out of his drums.

I loved that song so much, we later tried to cover it in The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub . . .

But we ran out of talent in the first verse.

The show that really brought home just how fast the future was coming at us was The Jimi Hendrix Experience. I can even tell you the date: Friday, 10 March 1967. At the Club a’Gogo, of course. It must have been one of Hendrix’s first shows in Britain – no surprise, given that he was managed by Mike Jeffery and The Animals’ Chas Chandler.

The moment I heard that he was coming to town, I knew it would be something else. The guy had blown up even before anyone had really heard his stuff, with the Record Mirror writing a profile of him entitled ‘Mr. Phenomenon’. Then Are You Experienced came out – the opening track, ‘Foxy Lady’, was said to be about Roger Daltrey’s girlfriend – and I remember listening to it and going, what the fuck is this? It was as though the guy had somehow beamed himself in from another dimension . . . and brought with him a whole new set of musical frequencies.

Louder ones.

I didn’t have the money for a ticket, of course. Not that it mattered, because they sold out in a second. So, I did what any other enterprising young lad would do under the same circumstances. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled in under the admissions box when the bouncers weren’t looking.

By the time someone spotted me, I was already bolting up the stairs and into the crowd.

The place was beyond packed. We’re talking double, triple capacity. You could barely breathe. I’ve since found out that at the same gig was one Gordon Sumner, a.k.a. Sting, who was just a wee lad of fifteen at the time. Also present was an even younger James Bradford, a.k.a. Jimmy Nail, not yet turned thirteen. The Club a’Gogo had two rooms, I should probably mention. One of them was marked ‘The Young Set’ because it was for under-18s, and the other was ‘The Jazz Lounge’ – for an older, more sophisticated crowd. On this night we were in The Young Set, because the show in the Jazz Lounge didn’t start until the ungodly hour of 2 a.m.

Even Sting remembers there being a bit of trouble as the management tried to find the kid who’d snuck in. (‘That was you?!’ he said, when I told him, years later.) But I managed to find a spot near the back where I could stand camouflagilently, if that’s a word, and listen. And that’s all I could do, listen, because I couldn’t see a thing . . . other than a bit of headband, the top of a guitar and some ribbon. But then Hendrix swung his guitar and got it stuck in the false ceiling – not hard to do in such a ridiculously claustrophobic space. Most guitarists would have stopped the show, but he just kept on playing it as it hung there.

At one point, if memory serves, with his teeth.

The place went absolutely fucking nuts.

The world will never see the likes of Hendrix again. Just the aura of the guy. The charisma. Words can’t begin to do him justice. Although, if I’m being honest – the sound was awful. I mean, really bad. I couldn’t even see a road crew. There was just Mitch Mitchell doing his thing on the drums, Noel Redding banging away on bass. There was no mixing desk, no sound guy, just the three lads on stage and this incredible, totally overwhelming noise, everything cranked up beyond its limit, fuses glowing, sparks flying, the air fizzing and crackling with high-voltage current. The truth is it was Jimi Hendrix’s brilliant fingers that shaped and sculpted the whole thing. He opened his soul through his guitar.

The band might have called themselves an experience, but really, they were an assault. When you came out, you knew the world had changed, that you’d changed. I see the same effect when Angus Young lets loose, completely lost to himself and using the guitar to translate what he’s feeling.

Needless to say, I was instantly hooked.

My ears were still ringing from the Hendrix show when The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub got together.

Line up – yours truly on vocals, Dave Yarwood of New Year’s Eve party fame on guitar, and another pretty handy guitarist called Ken Brown. (I’d met Ken at Parsons – he had long hair, a moustache, and later took a shine to Carol’s sister, Jen, eventually becoming my brother-in-law.) On bass, meanwhile, was my old pal Steve Chance, and on drums there was a lad with the fabulous Monte Carlo name of Fred Smith.

There’s a photograph somewhere of us all sitting on the back steps of Dave’s house, trying to look groovy.

If I remember correctly, Ken had wanted us to be called Half Past Thirteen. But we all thought that was a stupid idea.

We had big plans, of course. But our iffy covers of tracks by John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – my little 10-Watt Watkins P.A. system completely drowned out by Dave and Ken’s guitars – were never going to get us far.

But the band did provide me with one of the major rites-of-passage of any musician’s career.

I was at my parents’ house when it happened, looking out of the front window.

First, came the horrible squealing sound. Then the deafening clatter. Then in a haze of exhaust smoke, it appeared – an Austin J2 van with ‘Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub’ on the side.

For the first time in my life, I was in a band with transport.

Somewhere up above, God’s Fender was playing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.

I mean, okay . . . the van was a piece of shit. But it was our piece of shit. We didn’t care that the cable connecting the gear lever on the steering column to the transmission kept snapping, meaning we had to change gear on occasion with a pair of pliers. Or that the thing drove almost sideways because the tyres were worn down to the sidewalls and there was something profoundly wrong with the alignment. To us, that funny-looking little van was freedom. Never again would we have to lug our gear onto a public bus – or worse, have to beg any of our friends for a ride. I have no recollection of who sold us such a death-trap. All I know is that we pooled our money, someone’s dad chipped in the rest, and that we paid about £20 for it, which was about £20 too much.

The world went into slow-motion when that van pulled up outside No. 1 Beech Drive.

Curtains twitched.

Heads popped up.

There were gasps and whispers.

And as I left the house and walked up the front path, I imagined flashbulbs popping, girls calling my name, fans screaming. Then the side door of the van slid open, I climbed in and it slammed shut behind me. The street suddenly realized that I was a musician. Boy, it felt good.

It was just the most wonderful sense of belonging . . .

Until reality set in.

For all the talk of us playing ‘love-ins’ and ‘happenings’ – there was only ever one love-in, an outdoor event put together by Newcastle University students to raise money for ‘rag week’ – the only places that would book us were the grimmest of North East pubs. As for the working men’s clubs – which hadn’t yet achieved their total dominance of the 1970s – we just weren’t mainstream enough. They preferred to book comedians, jugglers and magicians.

‘Can yers not dee nowt from the charts?’ the audience would shout, the few times we were booked in those places. Then we’d do another Paul Butterfield number and the people who weren’t flicking their tab ends at us in disgust would just leave.

Even less successful was our attempt to branch out into ‘events’ – which boiled down to one booking from Steve Chance’s uncle, who’d just opened the first motel in Northumberland, up the Roman road on the way to Carlisle, in the absolute middle of nowhere. But what a beautiful nowhere.

And this was where Steve Chance’s uncle, aspiring tycoon that he was, had decided to build his motel. This was ground-breaking stuff, to go where no Northumbrian had gone before, because they didn’t know what a motel was.

It wasn’t until we got there – which was a miracle in its own right given the state of the van – that we realized we’d be playing for a local fire brigade’s Christmas party. This meant the crowd would be composed mostly of big lads in their 40s and 50s, and their wives, and they’d be tucking into a cigarette ash-sprinkled buffet of ham and peas pudding sandwiches and pies as we played.

‘Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ I asked Steve nervously, as I peered in through the window.

‘It’s a paying gig!’ said Steve. ‘What more do you want?’

It was when we were unpacking our gear that the fire captain came over and dropped the bombshell. ‘Alreet lads,’ he said, ‘when you’re ready, I’ll get on the mic and introduce you, and then – as discussed – you’ll open up with “Fire Brigade” by The Move.’

We looked back at him blankly.

‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I said, as politely as I could. ‘We never discussed that with anyone.’

‘Well, I made it very clear to the motel manager. “Fire Brigade” is our theme song.’

All eyes turned to Steve – whose uncle was presumably the manager in question. Steve just shrugged.

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘but we don’t know “Fire Brigade”. We thought we’d start with some Chuck Berry.’

‘Of course you know it!’ laughed the fire captain, before launching into a rendition of it himself. ‘Run-and-get-the-fie-uh-bruh-gaade, get-the-fie-uh-bruh-gaade, get-the-fie-uh –’

‘I mean, aye, we know it,’ I interrupted, ‘what I mean is, we don’t know how to play it.’

‘It’s at No. 1 in the charts! How hard can it be?’

I was starting to feel a bit desperate now. ‘Can we please just do Chuck Berry?’ I asked.

‘Look, son, the only reason we booked yers was to play “Fire Brigade”. So can you just give it a shot, eh?’

Oh, fucking hell . . .

Once our gear was set up, we huddled for an emergency rehearsal. Dave, Ken and Steve tried to work out the chords, I tried to remember the lyrics and Smithy tapped out the rhythm. (This was 1968 – you couldn’t just open your music app and have a listen.) Still feeling totally unprepared, we then got up on stage and tried our best to get through the song. I was just making shit up during the verse, but the chorus was easy enough, the gist of it being that Roy Wood wanted someone to ‘run-and-get-the-fie-uh-bruh-gaade’ because the lass he sat next to at school was so gorgeous. And the audience didn’t care, they just wanted to sing along.

When we finally made it to the end, I’d never felt so relieved in all my life.

‘And now,’ I panted, sweat pouring down my forehead, ‘for some Chuck Berry . . .’

Which went down like a lead balloon. Followed by, ‘Dee “Fire Brigade” again! Dee “Fire Brigade” again!’

‘We don’t fucking know it!’ I said into the mic, causing a squeal of feedback.

‘JUST FUCKING DEE IT AGAIN, MAN!’

We must have played it five times. Then some smart arse called out and asked for ‘Penny Lane’. It took a moment for that one to click. Then I remembered the lyrics about the fireman keeping his fire engine clean. But we had to try and play it. You don’t argue with a room full of pissed-up firemen.

Whether it was the fire brigade gig that killed us, or the fact I was about to become a new dad – or our inability to get into the bigger venues where our kind of music was played – I’m not sure.

Whatever the case, the van crapped out at about the same time that we did. I was driving it back to North Shields one night – after dropping everyone off at their houses – when I saw blue lights behind me. Oh, shit. I was being pulled over by the cops. Which was a problem . . . not least because the van’s brakes didn’t work, so the only way to stop it was to force it into first gear with the pliers, while yanking up the handbrake and hoping that it wouldn’t cause some kind of catastrophic mechanical failure.

‘Out of the van, son!’ snapped the copper once I’d bounced and rolled to a halt. ‘I can’t let you drive this, it’s a danger.’

Then he noticed the tax disc . . . which was, of course, a Brown Ale label. Any van owned by anyone under the age of twenty-five in the North East had a Brown Ale label instead of a tax disc (well I did, anyway). It was as though Scottish & Newcastle Breweries had deliberately made it almost the exact same shape and size. ‘I’m gonna pretend I didn’t see that,’ said the copper. ‘And to make both of our lives a bit easier, I’m not even going to ask if you’ve got insurance, because I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to that question. But I am going to insist that you follow me – slowly – to the police station, where I’m going to take possession of this van and put it out of its misery. At the scrap heap.’

My heart sank.

No transport meant no gigs – which meant no band.

But the truth was, I had bigger things to worry about.

I got married to Carol on 1 June, 1968 – by which time she had a very obvious bump. Everyone had tried to talk us out of tying the knot. Carol’s ma had offered to look after the baby. My dad had kept telling me I still had my whole life ahead of me, that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But like every other teenager before me, I didn’t listen. Marrying the girl I’d got pregnant just seemed like the right thing to do.

The venue was a church in North Shields, the town on the coast where my bride-to-be had grown up – which was a bit awkward, because North Shields is a fishing town and Dunston is a coal village and, historically speaking, fishermen looked down their noses at coal miners, and would never let their daughters marry into coal-mining families. I mean, it was proper Romeo and Juliet shit. But thankfully none of Carol’s family were in fishing any more, and the tension had eased over the years.

The service went by in a blur. We were just kids. We had absolutely no idea how to handle ourselves on such an occasion. All I can tell you is that Dave Yarwood was the best man, and that my ma made the wedding dress.

Once the vows had been exchanged, my dad looked at me and went, ‘You happy?’

‘I’ll be alright, Dad,’ I said, but the fear was written all over my face. How was this going to work? How was I going to hold down a full-time job and do extra half-shifts and look after a wife and baby and still play in a rock’n’roll band? I already knew the answer, of course. I couldn’t. Something would have to give. And it wasn’t going to be the job or the extra half-shifts or looking after a wife and baby.

The reception was in a hall just by the church. The whole family was there, including my granddad and grandma. All the women got a sherry, all the men got a whisky. Then we sat down to this very inexpensive but tasty hot buffet. By which time everyone was getting on like a house on fire because we were all half-cut.

The honeymoon – such as it was – consisted of one night at Carol’s uncle’s house in Belmont, near Chester-le-Street. I had a second-hand Cortina Mark I at the time with a dodgy powder-blue paint job – it had bubbled within ten days of coming out of the shop. It would later develop a nasty habit of losing its bonnet in high winds – the thing would literally just fly off down the street, like a big metal kite – so I suppose we were lucky that the fourteen-mile journey went without incident.

Then suddenly we were at this house, which was small and semi-detached, with a fridge filled with food for us to eat. I remember us looking at each other and thinking, now what?

‘I could kill a sausage sandwich,’ said Carol, who by then was having all kinds of pregnancy cravings.

I ended up trying to cook – and failing miserably. On my wedding night.

When we got back to North Shields the next day, I moved into Carol’s bedroom at her parents’ house – ‘living in’ it was called, something most newly-weds did back then. It was so awkward, especially when I came down for breakfast the next morning. Not to mention crowded, given that they had two other kids in the house.

I don’t know how we did it, looking back, I really don’t.

My musical career, meanwhile, was going nowhere. If anything, in fact, it was going backwards because I’d stopped gigging entirely. The Gobi Desert Kanoe Klub was now history, and none of the bigger bands around town would employ a singer with a measly 10-Watt P.A. system. For good reason too. For your voice to be heard over a rock band at a theatre or nightclub – or even at one of the bigger working men’s clubs – you needed a far bigger amp with a proper Shure microphone to go with it. But that was well beyond my means, even with a hire-purchase agreement.

Then Carol’s dad, Bill, did something brilliant that took a huge weight off all our shoulders. He’d got some insurance money from an accident at work, so he bought a nearby downstairs flat for £600 – 61 Chirton West View was the address – and he let us move in there as tenants, paying next-to-nothing in rent. It was the first house that he’d ever owned. (He rented his own from the council.)

It was such a relief when he told us, I could have cried.

I mean, yes, the place had been built in 1910 and there was damp on the walls and the toilet was outside, right at the back of the yard, in an outhouse so cold there was a hammer hanging on the wall to break the ice on frozen mornings. But at least we had a place to call our own. And it had a coal fire in the bedroom and another in the front room, so we could have heated the place if we’d had any money, of course. But a small bag of coal from the corner shop cost two shillings and seven pence, and it lasted just a couple of hours. So, we chose to shiver and save our money for food instead.

A few weeks after we moved in, the woman upstairs phoned Bill and told him that her roof was leaking. ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ he replied, ‘but what’s it got to do with me?’ That’s when he found out that he hadn’t just bought the downstairs flat – he’d bought the whole house! And now he was on the hook for all the repairs, which were going to cost far more than the pittance he was getting in rent.

Mind you, he soon got his mates over there with some tiles and fixed the place up.

Carol wasn’t loving life any more than I was. The poor lass was just sixteen and should have been out having a good time. But she had to stay home and look after a baby. Looking back now, I feel terribly sorry for her. But our little Joanne was a constant joy – as was her sister Kala when she arrived a few years later. The love that both of our daughters brought us, you can’t put into words. It’s why I wouldn’t change a thing.

Rock bottom arrived when I went back to my parents’ house one night and found my dad on the street outside, red in the face, shouting in his loudest sergeant’s voice at my sister Julie and some guy she was seeing. Julie must have been about fifteen or sixteen at the time.

Poor Julie was in floods of tears and her boyfriend was so scared, he turned tail and ran. But my dad kept on shouting – and I just snapped. I felt like he was always shouting at someone, usually my ma, and it was so embarrassing and so unnecessary. But the truth was, of course, I was wound up to breaking point myself.

‘Dad, that’s enough!’ I screamed at him, in a voice almost as loud as his. ‘What’s this all about?’

But my dad was in a blind rage. ‘Don’t you talk to me like that, or I’ll take your head off!’ he roared.

‘I don’t think so, Dad,’ I said. ‘You lay a finger on me and I’ll –’

My dad went for me like I was still a ten-year-old boy. But I was a grown man and strong from all my factory work – and I was on a hair trigger. So, I whacked him. Harder than I meant to. And when he went down, I jumped on him, and I told him that if he ever bullied anyone in my family again, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions. He was all flustered and frustrated, and I couldn’t tell if he was proud of me for standing up for myself, or shocked and disgusted.

It didn’t matter in the end. I felt so terrible, I went back the next day to apologize.

I just got the usual grunts in return. But I think that he felt bad too, because everything was fine again after that. But the shock of it woke me up and made me realize that I couldn’t go on like this, just hoping for a miracle.

It was time that I actually did something.