Dinners

This is about School Dinners.

When I were a lad, we were skint. Proper skint. My old man, who is the most awesome bloke on the planet, left the RAF to bail out his old man's butchery business. Didn't work. Both of them went bankrupt.

My grandad did well originally, self-made man, had a factory. The government compulsorily purchased it in the war. Well, I say purchased, gave him fuck all for it, knocked it down, used it as a tank park to protect the South-West entrances to the UK, which nobody ever invaded, and without as much as a "fuck you" reduced him to a potless wreck.

Anyway. my old man did OK in the end. Through lashings of bullshit and winging it.

In the meantime, we had the dinner tickets, so we had a different colour ticket from the folk that could afford it. Ours were beige.

One day in the dinner queue, a chap who turned out to be head boy later on had forgotten his ticket. I lent him one of my dinner tickets.

"Oh, no," said Mick (for that was his name), "you don't want to get into that kind of thing." So he went without dinner. I sneaked some chips out for him in a serviette after.

Anyway. MANY years later I went to a school reunion. Mick (now Michael) made a beeline for me. I asked how he was doing, because he was DEAD CLEVER at school. I said "I bet you went to Oxford or Cambridge." He told me that he'd been to both, did some bollocksy politics thing, and had a life-changing thingy one day. Apparently he realised it was all shite and remembered the poor boy (nobody ;loves him) from a poor family (sharing his wife for some pork sausages, Bizmillah) who'd offered his dinner ticket one day, and he jacked it all in, and joined a Jesus Commune in Northampton where they make sandwiches to sell to local shops to make ends meet.

So there you go. Weird story but all true.

Pink custard.