Post by rayge on Feb 13, 2024 19:14:17 GMT
No, it's no-one you heard of.
Around the late 7-s, early 80s, my pal and trips and Frisbee partner, Billy, was romanticaly involved with a woman called Sally, from Highbridge in Somerset, not far from where I live now. She was a college friend of Bill's younger sister, Tita (a childhood nickname that stuck because she had been christened Nancy Boyes).
Sally had been friends with Paul Thomas at high school, but Paul had gone to Manchester, rather than Sally's choice of Brighton, to do his degree, and then to train as a teacher. His first job as a teacher was in London, and when he moved there, Sally arranged for us to meet as Paul was looking for a dope connection. So Paul came round with his friend and fellow teacher Chas, and the connection was made. Very soon, Paul was buying more than just his personal requirements and started retailing himself (he may have been doing that in Manchester, memory is a bit hazy).
Throughout the Eighties, when I was dealing, I relied mostly on a very well connected guy called Rog, who lived in Hampton Wick in the South-west (just around the corner from the Operation Julie house, although neither of us knew it at the time) and dealt in antique clocks; he shared a stall in the Portobello Market, and we often transacted there. Sometimes he didn't come through, and in that case I relied on three other retailers I new personally, usually as a friend of a friend: there was Paul in Camden, Chris in Kentish Town and Heather literally just around the corner from me in Cricklewood (Chip and I first met at Heather's, and she was a client before she was my GF). Each of them had their own personal Rog as a wholesaler, and whatever we got we would trade among ourselves.
When I moved out of London to set up home with Chip in Brizzle, in 1990, I moved on most of my regular clients to Paul (they already knew him anyway, as all four of us were in and out of each other's houses). Through the Nineties, and into the Noughties, I would go up to London every week to work for a day or two, and stay overnight with pals. One of these was Paul, who lived in a housing association house in Islington. By this time he had quit teaching and was working at a cuttings agency some of his pals had set up, and writing the odd article/report about the oil industry - he once spent a month or so in Almaty writing about Kazakhstan.
One thing Paul and I shared was that his father, a schoolteacher, died just before Paul went to University, and his indomitable mother lived on and on in Somerset. I met her a few times, lovely woman; she doted on Paul, her only child, in much the same way as my mother did on me.
Paul had always been a heavy drinker. I remember once him giving me a ride back from Bristol, where I had been visiting Chip for the weekend, while he had been visiting his Ma: earlier that day he had been visiting a cider farm at Wedmore, on the Somerset Levels, and we rode back down the M4 with him steering with one hand and - rather skilfully I must admit - using the other to take great swigs from a plastic jerrycan of perry. His drinking got heavier and heavier through the Nineties, two or three bottles of wine a night unless he was in the pub and his life, and his liver, inevitably started to fall apart.
When, around 2005 or so, his mother died, leaving him the family home in Burnham, he moved back there, ostensibly to sell the place, but he never got it together. He passed on his clientele, and his sources, to Chas, who eventually became my supplier. The last time I saw Paul was around 2008, when he visited me at Kenn with Chas, who drove him there. Paul couldn't hack driving any more, and when I saw him that time, he was shambling and a little bewildered.
Just this morning I heard from Sally on Facebook that he had died, and I've been disproportionately affect by it, considering I hadn't seen him in 15 years.
Paul and Sally around 1990
At Sally's wedding 1984
Mid ’90s, with tea and a joint rather than beer