Les Birkett and Stuart Petrie

The guy in the middle wearing the Afgan and black rimmed specs is me. Under the Afgan I'm wearing a 'grandad shirt', a real one with pockets for studs around the collar and long enough to keep your bum warm, as worn by the workers in the Lowery photos. Either side of me are two wonderful girls who joined us in many adventures. They joined us but were completely proper and i don't think they even drank. The one to my left, right on the picture is vivacious Viv, is the other one Alsion? I have a memory syndrome described by Oliver Sachs. Is it them who got me into the Twisted Wheel? To the left of the group and wearing glasses is Les Birkett. He was an honourary student because he actually worked as a company secretary and was studying company law part time. Just to my left shoulder is my cousin Stuart Petrie. Stuart and I lived with Les in a two up two down in Guide Street. I shared a room with one of Les' friends. Later I think Stuart moved upstairs but originally he slept in the front room underneath a pile of furnitire. Visitors did not believe that there was someone sleeping there because the room was tightly packed with furniture.

By the time we me moved out of Todd Street we had accumulated quite a bit of furniture including my Grandma's mahogany dresser. The landlord didn't want any of the furniture, I think he was going to sell the property. So we arrived in Salford with a backpack and after a year had at least one van full of stuff. I approached the University about storage and they must have had some ownership of the old Salford racecourse because they let me store our stuff in the racecourse pavillion for a while. This was a couple of years before the student village development started so there was nothing there except for the pavillion and a guard with dog.

Stuart and I met the guard and dog one morning at about six am. We had been at one of our Todd Street parties where somkeone gave me a tab of something.  Stuart and I had scaled the wall into the racecourse and were admiring the amazing colours and feel of the textures around us when we met the guard.

When we delivered our furniture later that summer I didn't let on that we had already met under different circumstances.