Just About Me 28

I am sorry if this is starting to sound like a name dropping session but this was really my life in the early nineties, one of the strangest jobs I had was working with Joe, Simon Hierons and another fella, doing the security for the funeral of the author Roald Dahl, apparently, as I was told Roald was a bit anti Semitic in his younger days, and his family were worried that some fanatics would A- Attack the hearse/coffin and B- Attack the house, Joe and the other fella went off with the coffin, whilst me and Simon guarded the house by playing snooker on Roald's full sized snooker table in anticipation of a hail of missiles that never happened.
I could talk here about my different jobs with famous names but I reckon you will all think of me as a bit flash and a name dropper and that is not meant to be. Maybe at the end I will include an "Afters Page" who knows.

Anyway back to real life, In January 1991 we found out that Mandy was pregnant, we were both so happy about this and started to make provisions for the new baby, off we went for the first scan, Mandy drinking Lucazade by the litre, we went into the scanning room only to be told that there was a problem, she had suffered a miscarriage, it was the Thursday before Easter, April 91, It must be bloody awful for a woman and she must have have felt many times worse than me and I was feeling like the world had caved in, Unbelievably in November 1991, Mandy found out she was pregnant again and on the same day had another miscarriage, women are so much stronger than us men, how can you possibly have to tolerate that twice. People tell me there is a god, but I really do not see it, you hear of so many people harming children and generally abusing everyone around them, so my opinion is that your god ain't there folks.

It was also in this year that Joe had the offer of taking over the the running of the door at Raffles Nightclub in the Kings Road, Chelsea, London SW3. He asked me if I fancied sharing it with him, I still worked for him and I would do 3 nights and he would do 3 nights and the club closed on a Sunday, I gladly accepted this offer and was paid £25 a night between 10pm and 3am, it was either 90 or 91 and I remember starting my first night on a Thursday and a chap telling me that I was "only a club servant" I thought he's in for a shock when I find my feet, on that first night I was letting one of the punters out when I heard the driver of a beaten up old Cortina offer him a taxi ride, he quoted this guy £8 to go to Fulham, approx 1.5miles away, I started laughing and was amazed the guy jumped in, bare in mind that it was probably about a £3 journey in a black cab then. Well that got the little cogs in my head turning over and being one who likes to think he can spot an earner. So I rang a couple of guys up, one being Simon Hierons, and ran the idea past them that they park outside the club and I put the punters into there cars, we would charge £5 to go within a 2 mile radius and a £1 a mile for any extra, I would take commission of £1 a journey and 10% of any long distance jobs, this proved a right little earner, the first job was a guy going to Flood St which is approx 300 yards away from Raffles, and the guy paid his fiver, Simon was stunned but I knew it was a winner, and the first Friday was indeed a winner I earned all together £125 on that night alone on top of my wages through cabs and a couple of tips, a man who worked as the cloakroom guy told me to put a little plate out with a couple of £1 coins in and that I would do OK, after that Friday I asked him if it would be OK to put a bucket out!