Tuesday 20 October 1981

Our Wedding Day - Not At All a Traditional Wedding NOT COMPLETE

Deb Job interview am
lads around in the morning
Registry office polkingtons walk
Mispronounced my name
The DeMontford Hotel Reception
Meal

Nick, Nick, Andy, Racheal, Mum, Dad, Tess, Ray, Doreen, Alf, Deb, Me - The Whole Party

Tuesday 13 October 1981

Ian Hamiltons Funeral

This was going to be our wedding day; Deb and I thought it would be amusing to get married on Friday the Thirteenth but my Mother, the superstitious atheist/agnostic, was absolutely against it because of the possibility of it being bad luck...people I'll never understand them. It turned out to be a much different day to the one we had planned. Ian Hamilton, the permanent full time Secretary of the Leicester University Students Union and an absolutely lovely bloke, came into work the previous week complaining of a headache. It got so bad that eventually he went to the Royal Infirmary who checked him over, gave him a paracetamol and sent him home. He collapsed of a brain hemorrhage on the hospital steps and never regained consciousness and died three days later...he was Forty One Years Old!
At approximately One O'clock, on the day we had planned to get married, we instead found ourselves in the University's official church St Nicholas attending Ian's funeral.
 After the service we drove to Saffron Hill Cemetery where Ian was cremated. This was the same crematorium where twenty five years later Duncan Hastie, a friend and colleague at British Gas, was cremated after he committed suicide on 3 Oct 2006.

Tuesday 15 September 1981

Approx September 1981 - Price Waterhouse, Skipworth Street, Proposal

Started work at Price Waterhouse as a trainee chartered accountant but didn't appreciate that finally I was doing something that would actually require me to sit down and study so didn't qualify and left after two years.
 Deb working as a traffic warden after being let down by the solicitor who had promised to article her.
After much to-ing and fro-ing between the builders and the vendor the purchase of 14 Skipworth Street finally completed and we moved out of the flat on Evington Road and into our new terrace house. At this time the interest rate was at 12+% and our repayments on an £8,000 mortgage were huge. Within a year they had halved. Nice place to live, great corner shop unfortunately a young black guy moved in next door and over a period of 20 months, due to the drugs, changed from a nice block into a total c*ut who I often fantasised about killing. Eventually he forced our move from the property thus bollixing our plan to keep and rent out the house as a start to acquiring a rent property portfolio. Mind at the time getting a buy to let mortgage was impossible, if you couldn't get the money from family you couldn't get started. this is why most of the people doing this in Leicester are Asian because this is what they did; pooled family money.
At some point during this period I suggested to deb that it might be a good idea to get married for the tax relief so we did the following month on the twentieth.