Barney looked like one of them Italian pit bulls, only with a moustache. First thing he says to Patricia is he pulls up his shirt so as it’s just his poor suffering chest with the bruises and the purple scars all over it – some of them scars are written on my brain till this day – and he says to her, go ahead and punch me, love. Go ahead and punch me, darling, he says to her. Of course she doesn’t want to do it. What breed of woman wants to punch a man in the fucking chest the minute she’s met him? But everybody’s half-blocked and shouting and Tommy says, fucking bang him one, so as she goes ahead and she swings for him and he just throws his arms wide and he says to her, I didn’t feel a fucking thing, he says, and he walks off, like a fucking maniac.

*

None of these boys could read or write; they was all basically illiterate. I was the youngest but at least I had been to school. People like your Tommys, your Barneys, your Pats. All these guys. Their das had them out working since they were seven year old. You should have seen the wedding cards they gave to Ellen and her husband Desi, who was a midget, basically. There were commas after every word, like, this, see, it, would, do, your, fucking, crown, in, or another classic was where they had every word underlined for some unknown reason. Either way, there was barely a word spelt correct between the three of them. It was like they were guessing how the English lingo worked. But it was no problem, because Ellen and Desi could barely read themselves. There was a big banner up in the hall that even spelt their names wrong. Above the door it said Live Musice. Between us we had rewritten the entire fucking world; not bad for a bunch of uneducated Irishmen.

*

Longhairs came late to Belfast. It was 1972 before I ever clapped eyes on a hippy, but there he was right enough, sitting on the ground at a bus stop on the Lisburn Road in the blazing sunshine, with his bare feet and an acoustic guitar round his neck with a piece of string; I could barely believe my lamps.