The story of the record collection...

So, the record collection story then...

Its 1982, in the south atlantic the Falklands have just been liberated by British forces from their Argentinian agressors and tins of corned beef lay unpurchased on supermaket shelves after the tabloid newspapers convince housewives all over the land that Argentina is the only country in the world to produce mushed up beef laden with coagulated fat in cans.

The Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship warship which sank minutes into its maiden voyage off the coast at Plymouth in 1510 is raised from the seabed after Prince Charles famously scuba dived to the sea bed to rescue it live on Blue Peter.

And Michael Jackson releases his "Thriller" album which quickly becomes the biggest selling album in the history of the world prompting the comment from the famous Jerrychicken that "this album is utter shite".

Meanwhile back home the fresh faced aforementioned Jerrychicken is informed that his company, after five years of doing so due to a clerical error, will no longer be paying his hotel and beer bills in the far north east and that if he wants this job on a permenant basis then he will have to give up his lethario lifestyle and purchase a permenant residence in the area.

I admitted that five years worth of blagging your living expenses off the dateless accounts department was pushing your luck a bit too far and so borrowed £500 off my dad as a deposit on a one bedroomed flat (trendy bijou singles apartment is how it would be described now) and paid the £9500 asking price for the dwelling in sunny Seaton Delaval, home of my soon-to-be wife and her huge mining village family and friends.

With Suzanne's father being an important figure inthe local community (social club committeeman no less, you get no higher than that in those parts) then everyone in the village knew me instantly, despite me knowing no-one and having a hopeless memory for names.

A 500 yard walk to the shop for a newspaper would take me 20 minutes or more as everyone I passed on the way would stop me for a chat about pieces of my private life that even I didn't know about, christ knows how the rumour mill worked in those parts but it was the most efficient one known to mankind.

And eventually towards the end of 1982 the soon-to-be wife decided that my new bachelor pad needed a womans touch and she announced that she was moving in, I never asked her, in the same way that I do not recall ever asking for her ring finger in matrimony, it just seemed to have happened, I just turned up on the day.

She and her sister turned up on the doorstep one sunday morning in October with a huge box of her stuff with the news that this was just one of several huge boxes of stuff that needed to be squeezed into the already cramped two roomed apartment, it was no problem they both advised me, they would clear out the space, all I had to do was take loads of my own stuff to the local council rubbish tip.

I should have thrown them both out onto the balcony walkway but for reasons still inexplicable to this day I meekly opened the door wider for them to allow passage of the huge box of her stuff, and like a fool sat down and continued watching something far more important on TV while she and her sister headed for the bedroom and the emptying of my wardrobes therein.

It wasn't long before the first of the cardboard boxes of my stuff was ready to take to the rubbish tip, I did try and look inside to ascertain what exactly they were throwing out but they had taped the top down and caught me peeking, telling me not to be so nosey and just take the box to the tip, it was all rubbish they assured me.

I shake my head in dismay as I type this, how could I have been so foolish ?

By the end of the afternoon I had made four or five trips to the tip and four or five similar trips to her house to bring acres of her stuff around to my not-so-bachelor flat, she had shoehorned herself in and my stuff was gone, I was left with half a hanging rail of clothes and two pairs of shoes, everywhere else that I looked in the apartment was full of her clothes, shoes, handbags, make-up and other wimmin stuff.

Several weeks later, while she was out at some sort of shop (it mattered not which shop her, her sister and her mother went to on their expeditions) I sat in the living room bored of TV and bored of the local radio which was spoken in a language that I still struggled to understand at times, geordie. I ventured into what was now her bedroom and opened up one of the wardrobes in which I had formally stored my extensive singles record collection, a precious record collection that I had purchased with pocket money and blood since I was a youngster, hundreds of 45rpm records that told the timeline of my youth including three original (one unplayed) copies of the House of the Rising Sun by The Animals - I like to think in the telling of this story that The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals, original in unplayed format, would be a huge financial assett to any record collection, it certainly is whenever I remind her of this story and for the sake of this telling we shall pretend that it is so.

The singles record collection was not there.

I searched the bedrooms only other wardrobe in the unlikely event that I had mistakenly searched the wrong one, I had not mistakenly searched the wrong one, I had searched the correct one, there was only one conclusion, the extremely valuable singles record collection of my youth was missing.

I fretted for most of the rest of the day until she returned home from her shopping laden with more bags of stuff to be crammed into the apartment, "have you seen my singles" I blurted out in panic before she had set both feet over the threshold.

"The ones that were in the wardrobe ?" she asked
"Yes" I replied, voice raising in hope after she had at least recognised which singles record collection I was speaking of.
"You threw them out" she answered in an uninterested manner

I stood for many minutes as bags full of stuff were carried across the doorway, ignoring her requests for help, after all she'd carried them all the way from the shops why would she need my help in carrying them the last two yards into the apartment.

Eventually my brain instructed my mouth to say something.

"I threw them out ?"
"Yes, you threw them out"
"When ?"
"When you cleared out the flat to move my stuff in"
"I cleared out the flat ?"
"Yes, the day I moved in you cleared out your wardrobes for me"

I could recall nothing of this event.

Hours later we were sat in front of the TV watching something even less memorable when my brain instructed my mouth to say something else.

"I didn't clear out my wardrobes"
"What ?"
"I didn't clear out my wardrobes, you did"
"What are you talking about ?"
"My singles record collection, the wardrobe, you did it"
"It was you that threw them out"
"No it wasn't, you and your sister cleared out the wardrobe, I just took the stuff to the tip"
"Well there you are then, you threw them out"

No possibility of a response, I had been bamboozled by females, not for the first time and certainly not for the last for now in the modern day Jerrychicken household there are three such females, two of them offspring of the original, who pull such tricks every single day.

Today I will host a memorial day for my extensive singles record collection, the one that I inadvertently and without question, took to the council rubbish tip one day and which even now will lay several dozen feet under landfill somewhere waiting to be uncovered at some undefined date way, way into the future by archeologists who will stand up from the hole that they have dug and scream joyously to their colleagues "look, look, an unplayed copy of The House of the Rising Sun by The Animals", the bas'tads.