There's no smoke without fire.

I’m sitting in Warrington visiting some old friends in exactly the same way I did last year before the Wasted Festival. Being here is a chance to catch up and know that the greater part of the journey to Blackpool has already been accomplished. Rosa is with us again and luckily, being a year older, didn’t spend the entire journey saying “are we there yet” like she did last year.
There is so much that is similar to 2006, being in Warrington, the festival continuing in Blackpool, playing the same night in the same venue with the same acts on before us and after us (although all these bands are appearing a little earlier this time). One could lazily conclude that every thing will have the same outcome but I think it is dangerous to believe this.
Regarding the audience numbers in front of each act, where there are multiple stages running all day, there is a big proportion of people who hang on after watching a band to check out the following act who they have heard are good. I’m wondering how the new smoking ban is going to effect the behaviour of this floating audience, and in a way the advantages of having all these venues under one roof makes going out to have a cigarette completely arduous.
When ever we went outside last year there was a sea of punks everywhere around the streets surrounding the Winter Gardens, with the new ban I can’t image what it will be like this year. When ever a band finishes, the smokers will probably wish they could catch a tram out to the front of the Winter Gardens and then, after having a smoke catch one back in to the stage of their choice.

I am a little worried that this going to affect audience numbers on the night. I don’t just want to play to committed fans, I want to convert people who have never heard us before, lets just hope that those potential Neurotics newbies are not heavy smokers eh?.

1963

Once we had moved to Harlow New Town both made attempts to recreate that close relationship in other church groups, but it was very hard to do and Sandra found it impossible. She had to keep returning to her old school to finish her course and take her exams as the curriculum was completely different in Brays Grove in Harlow.
She returned again and again to meet up with her old friends but the link was hard to keep up.
It was hard for my parents too; they were used to a very polarised close nit community in the East End where friends were all just around the corner and could be called upon to help with babysitting at the drop of a hat. Support in times of trouble was a quick run down the road.

As they closed the door on the first night in the new house in Pear Tree Mead all of that was shut out and was never seen again. The friends they agreed to keep contact with didn’t get to hear a lot of us from then on, we were two far away.
Although the distance doesn’t seem much now, meeting up with them was a long cold wait at a bus stop for a 718 bus that quite often suffered cancellations and then a long journey on the twisting roads that were all we had before the arrival of motorways.
We couldn’t drive to see them, we couldn’t afford a car and my parents had never learnt to drive. The train was expensive and the station was situated on the edge of town on the opposite side of it to us, a separate journey was needed just to traverse it. The tube started in Epping which also needed a separate journey to start the bigger one.

Nothing was easy.

We couldn’t even ring them, we didn’t have a telephone. Communication was by letter only and neither of my parents were very literate. My mother only wrote when forced to and always needed supervision.

The support network collapsed, and because of that so did the relationships with each other, slowly, but surely.

Whilst we lay in our new beds on our first night, the wind blew round our little house, over the big green fields and down the almost endless cycle tracks of our newly adopted town. In this environment, this buffeted silence, so different to what we had previously been used to, everyone must have felt an open claustrophobia even if some of them didn’t dare to admit it

For the very first time we were truly on our own.