runaways

Cast your mind back.  Back 38 years almost to the very day, to 5 December 1980.

Can you remember what you did?

I can.  I went to Birmingham with my girlfriend of (on and off) 2 years to see Queen.  We were just 16, so did our parents take us?  An organised and supervised trip maybe?  Older relatives or friends to look after us?

Er, no.

I can’t remember how I got the tickets, but I remember us arranging the train journey there.  We'd leave Swansea at around 10 in the morning to get to Birmingham for lunch and after plucking up the courage to buy some cider, heading out to the National Exhibition Centre for the concert that evening.  And coming home?  Well, we hadn’t really thought about that.

But we convinced our parents we would be home later that evening (I think we said by 10pm at the latest!).

No chance.  Obviously.

After the show, we got a train back to Birmingham city centre only to find, quite obviously when you think about it, that there was no train to Swansea until the next day.  We daren’t phone home, there’d have been hell to pay.  But we formulated a plan.  There was a mail train to Bristol leaving at 5am.  We’d get on that and see what we’d do after that.  I don’t know how we convinced the guard to let us on, but he must have felt so sorry for the freezing cold and starving hungry children before him.

a night at the opera followed by a day at the train station(s)

So, arriving in Bristol at around 7am, we were sure we’d get a train to Swansea. But, again, no chance.  The nearest we could get was to Cardiff by around 9am and then at last on to Swansea by about 11.

We were both grounded for a week.  And for me there was a very real threat that Christmas would be cancelled. But my parents, and my girlfriend’s, soon got over it.

Susan and I stayed together for another six years before the inevitable split. But when I was seriously ill, she came to see me in hospital and we joked about our exploits that December day thirty odd years before.  We got into loads of scrapes after that, usually going to see bands all over the country, but nothing approaching our daring day out to see Queen.

We were true adventurers.