But apart from those innocent lip-wetters.

The first proper one was a bottle of Budweiser lifted out of a skip.

Some daft bugger had thrown a crate's worth of the stuff into said rubbish receptacle, and myself and another enterprising young eleven-year-old decided to salvage two of the items, lest they perish amidst the unforgiving crunch of the garbage disposal vans.
I didn't know much what to make of it, other than I liked it, and it was certainly something I could see myself devoting a substantial amount of leisure time to the pursuit of. Y'know, when I was a grown-up and such. Older and so on. Mature. Those kinds of things.

But here's the first of the big twists. And it's quite a good one, too. Maybe not like finding out Bruce Willis was a ghost, or that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Sosye, but reasonable, certainly better than when Neve Campbell's brother turned out to be the fucking killer.

What the fuck was that all about?

The twist is that by the time I was legally permitted to partake in the consumption of alcohol and any derivatives of such, I was no long mentally able to do so. Pain in the balls, you would think, but no. You would be wrong. Because I no longer want to partake of such. And that right there is the first of many miracles you will encounter herein.
Maybe it's not as impressive as Lazarus sitting up and rubbing the maggots out of his skull, or wine springing from a tap, but I'm still quite shagged by the whole affair.

I was raised a few miles from the nearest town, in a housing estate little bigger than a car-park. Big enough to have its own primary school, mind, and how many car-parks can claim that? Not many, I'm guessing. For the young lad or laddess, the centre of all social activity, however, was the bus shelter, unless you were allowed to go into town on your own at such a young age, in which case you were probably some kind of delinquent tearaway and it's the fault of your parents.

The bus-shelter was where grand ambitions and philosophies would take root, only to be torn asunder with the first nagging outbursts of puberty. And sometimes there were girls, which was a bonus for some, but I personally found it rather distracting. When one is trying to be funny, one is less likely to engage with profound thought. Unless one is Woody Allen.

In fact, girls proved to be an inconvenience for much of my youth. One minute they all want you, and it's kiss-catching and chasing and "will you go out with her" and "no, girls are crap" and so forth. Then, with bitter, gloating irony, the very second, the very nanosecond that my interest in their feminine mannerisms was plucked, they decide there's actually much better looking gentlemen a little further along. Ones that play football, by God, and some of them even drink.