The sudden cold snap at the beginning of March caught everyone on the hop, even though the Met Office had been forecasting snow for a week and were very specific in the detail of their forecast just the night before the snow came.
So I woke that morning to about two inches of very icy snow sitting on top of half an inch of solid ice from earlier rain falling onto frozen ground. It was very windy in sharp gusts and the tiny ice crystals of snow were blowing into drifts up to a foot deep. The Council had been sending gritting lorries up and down the Esplanade all night. I knew that for a fact, I saw them trundling by and spraying me with sharp rock crystals on my way home just after midnight from the Pizza Dreem shop in the High Street after an evening's casual temp work doing pizza deliveries for bang on the minimum wage.
I had to make my way back into the High Street again first thing in the morning to see if the Acme Placement Bureau could find me another couple of days' casual work this week, Harinder from the pizza shop had already said he didn't need me any more as his "sick dude was now okaydoky", as he put it.
The monthly mortgage and ground rent on my place were both due on Friday and I was more or less an Isaac short. Also, I had to walk down to the Bureau that morning even though the pavements down the streets were like sheets of glass.
My piece-of-shit 20-odd-year-old classic Jaguar XJ12 rust-bucket gas-gurgling excuse for a fucking motorcar packed up last week and I had no way of repairing it or of even getting it home from where I left it conked out miles away on the by-pass. I had asked my old mate Macleod to pick it up and take it to his shop a couple of days ago but he just laughed at me. One favour too many on my part I guess.
When I was a kid, fifty years ago now, my parents brought me, Barry Chamberlain, and my two older brothers and a sister down to this resort every single summer. There used to be a rather rundown holiday camp on the outskirts of the town and, although tacky as tuppence, it was perfect for young families who didn't have the resources for much else. Us kids were organised into various activities all day so we were knackered and slept like corpses by nightfall. There was entertainment and cheap booze laid on for the parents in the evening, with chalet patrols on hand to ensure the kids were safe asleep. We kids loved those visits to the seaside, our mums and dads loved it too, and the owners loved it most of all, so they could have their holidays in the Caribbean.
When I had kids of my own, two boys from my first marriage, we brought them down here regularly. Even brought my second wife and kid down too for a while when Katherine was a small girl, Shirley and I both sharing similar memories of our parents bringing us here when we were kids, although we never actually met each other back then.
So there I was, six years ago at the age of 52, with no family around (Shirley, the second missus had fucked off after an affair with her boss, my daughter thereafter wanted fuck-all to do with me and, of my first family, one boy had gone gas drilling to Canada, the other to Australia for aquatic research, the first missus? Fuck-knows or cares where she went).
Thus I decided to move to the resort that held such wonderful memories for me to live permanently. I didn't just go blind, I took out a 70% loan at stupid-fucking-percent interest for the 30-year lease of a small cafe with a two-bed apartment and a tiny studio flat above, pulled on a masculine pinnie and a chef's hat and thought I was set comfortably making all-day breakfasts and basic short order lunches for the rest of my natural fucking life.
Then shit happened. The recession meant that crowds of tourists stopped coming to the resort. My cafe was a bit off the beaten track so I stopped getting the overflow I used to get from the High Street and Esplanade trade. So subsequently I was forced to close up my lovely cafe and the larger of the two flats. I was still paying the swindling arsehole shyster bastards at the fucking bank for the exorbitant lease on the whole crap caboodle but at least I was able to sublease the shop and the main flat to a trader. He was a fucking great big guy called Donovan, selling customised printed tee-shirts on the Internet, so I was only left with the shithole studio flat which was almost impossibly squashed into the roof space. Still, I'll have the whole run of the place again at the end of the month when Donovan moves out to bigger premises. At least one company was thriving in the recession.
After about three months of absolutely fuck-all coming in after I closed the cafe, I was still having to pay the fucking bills, but I managed to get nearly two years of fractionally above minimum wage work in the packing department of a timber yard on the estuary next to the resort. Then, thanks to the downturn in the building industry, I got laid off by the six months ago, a full month before I automatically qualified for redundancy payment. The fucking cunts! Like I said, shit happens time after fucking time.
Since then I had a total of four and a half days of work at minimum wage to my credit in six months. The debit side, which kept on happening, didn't bare fucking thinking about. At least I was able to bring home a spare pizza last night so I was able to have both supper and breakfast, which was a rarity of late.
Even my bloody cat eats better than me, and he's not even my fucking cat. He came with the flat and when I moved out into the vacate studio in the attic above, which I had previously used for storage, he moved up there with me. I think he was intimidated by the big guy covered in tattoos and metal studs who moved into the shop and flat. I don't blame the cat, Donovan frightened the bejesus out of me too. It may have been the balance of the original 144 tins of tuna that was left in storage in the studio flat after the cafe went tits up that determined the cat's residential status. The fussy fucker wouldn't touch normal cat food, the first time I tried him on a tin of Whiskas, actually the very first day I moved in and became aware of my fauna inheritance, the fat bastard piddled in the corner of the sitting room, hence his rechristened name, Piddles. At least he didn't shit indoors, just every fucking inch of my fucking alleyway.
Anyway, Karen, the supercilious cunt down at the placement bureau, had fuck-all for me as was per fucking usual and then she dropped the bombshell that the pizza guy was unlikely to pay the bureau until the end of this week, so I wouldn't subsequently get paid until the end of fucking next week, which meant rent wise I was basically fucked.
I tripped grumpily down their narrow stairs. The bureau was situated in offices above an estate agents. As I came out of the doorway with my mind really concentrated elsewhere, I stepped onto the icy fucking pavement and went arse over tit and down like a sack of spuds dropped off a delivery truck.
Oohff! I landed painfully on my thin bony arse and one of my not-so-funny-bone elbows, while my feet continued to describe a perfect arc and consequently the back of my head also struck the pavement with a resounding thud. I was carrying a haversack on one shoulder. It only carried my empty wallet, a much-used litre bottle refilled with tap water for refreshment and half a dozen fucking library books which I needed to return that very day to avoid the overdue fines that I couldn't afford to pay if I left them one more bloody day.
That damn heavy bag swung around and, like a cunt, it landed right on the tip of my fucking nose. Bastard thing! I was lying there, me, an old guy pushing 60 and every able-bodied younger bugger walking by ignoring me, or worse, taking the fucking piss. I could hear them, although not see anything, all I could see were stars. Even if there had been real stars in the sky I wouldn't've been able to see 'em, though, because my stupid woolly hat with ear flaps had somehow got pushed over my eyes, which were watering like fuck anyway.
"Are you alright?" asked a kindly, gentle sweet woman's voice.
I felt a warm hand grip one of mine comfortingly.
"Yeah, thanks," I mumbled as I tried to get back up, feet and knees ineffectively scrambling for traction on the ice until I could at least get on my knees and drag myself up by the crumbling brickwork between the doorway and display window of the estate agents. My threadbare sweatpants were very wet from the snow and ice.
When I finally got up, I pushed the hat off my milky grey eyes and was confronted by a pair of crystal clear brilliant blue eyes reminiscent of a Norwegian fjord bathed in mid-summer sunlight.