I think it was Christmas Eve. I was visiting home and just really drinking. There was bunting up throughout the town and at closing time I climbed up a lamppost and swung on it. Obviously, it broke and I fell, then watched the chain reaction, as the bunting on each post along the street came crashing down.
I couldn’t stand so began stuffing the bunting into my trousers. When the police arrived I denied all involvement, despite the enormous bulge of festive decorations protruding from my crotch. The cop was a nice bloke and, in the police car, gave me a choice: ‘I can take you home and tell your parents what you’ve done, or you can spend Christmas Eve in the cells’.
Easy: ‘the cells’
I thought at worst I’d be out in the morning and could tell my parents I’d drank too much, stayed with a friend. Believable, except for the friend part…
But he’d reverse psychologied me. Said: ‘in that case, we’re going to see your parents’
We knocked on, and it’s late, and my mum answers the door to her only boy and a police man. Worried. He says we need to go inside and makes me tell her the whole story. When he leaves she just shakes her head at me and goes to bed. The next day, my dad burst into my bedroom, shook me awake and said: ‘you’re letting us down.’ When he slammed the door, I felt a real tug of something. It was the bunting, still stuffed down my trousers and trailing out the door.