This is very easy to write here after all these months or is it years. I know there are some people who visit this blog. So very soon I am going to put a comments spot on this.
I am home less. Yes no home no gas bills no electric bills no place to clean no rubbish bins to put out on every other Monday. Gosh it is getting complicated and all. We had a black box to put the recycling stuff and a big black bin to put rest of the rubbish in. Very neat and very easy. Now a household has a black box to put the cans and bottles and paper in. Then there are two brown boxes to put the cooked and uncooked food left-overs in. No plastic bags in them please. Nice neat very easy. But the complication comes when they say put the black bins out every other Monday. And the others every Monday. It does not look complicated to the ordinary, but when you live in a house every Sunday is not the same and every other Sunday is not the same. So sometimes if you forget to put the big black bin out you are fucked. Why? Because you have two weeks before it gets unloaded. And if you have too much like a bit of a black bag protruding they refuse to empty it. There you now got six weeks of rubbish. Yeah well get rid of them in the neighbor's init? Well thank you very much I do not have that problem now ha ha!
Living homeless is an art. I have done it many times. In 80' I was a partner in a grocery shop. No kidding. This Indian kiddie I knew in London bought a shop in Bristol in 1979 and he did not have a clue about groceries. He is good at money which I am not. But I understand the punters and how they behave. So he invited me to become a partner in the business. I hate documents, agreement signed etc. So on his word I started to give him a hand.
The place was the Spar shop in Abbotsford Road. It was a shed with a slanting flat roof and a smaller shed at the back for the store room and staff room. The toilet was an outhouse for toilet and storage. The shop opened on weekdays at eight in the morning and close at six in the evening with a lunch break at one to two. Half days on Wednesday and Saturdays nine to five with one to two lunch break. It was the good old days over in Cotham Hill. All the shops had the same hours. Spar shop was taking about £600 a week. I could not think how they made money out of the place. There were two part time staff. One woman around forty to fifty and a young teenager. The old lady could not handle my mate,Jef. His real name is Indrasingh Jethwa. But we anglacized his name to Jef. Any how she quit. And the teenager lasted another month and left. Now me and Jef to do the hours in the shop and get the cash and carry sorted. Then again there is a matter of vegetables, fresh every day. That means our day started at about 5 AM and go to the whole sale vege place in Brislington. Get the days fresh vege and down we go back to the shop. Down a cup of tea. Set up the shop. Then Jef goes away to the cash and carry place in Avonmouth. I won't see him for the next 5 hours or so.
We set up a new time table. We open the shop at 9 AM and close at 10 PM. No bloody lunch breaks and no more Wednesday half days and Saturday different times. We are open every day except Christmas day, 9 to 10. Killing hours but it is easy for the punters to remember init?
That is how I came to be living in Bristol. It is a cool city. Compared to other places I been it is friendly. I remember one night about 8; I decided to go out and asked one of the customers to direct me to a good pub. This guy took me to Highbury Vaults. It used to be run by a guy called Pony tail Paul and his girl frien Dot. Nice juke box and the people were friendly. At 10.30 - remember the closing time - I started guzzlying my pint of Guinness and my mate told me not to worry about it. Then Paul came behind the bar and asked me how many bottles. I said 4 without even knowing what the hell is about. After about half hour when most of the people has gone we were taken upstatirs to the living space. The party on.
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