Read Byron Easy for Free Online Page B

But, all in all, I’m feeling relatively spruce after throwing up. There’s nothing better for lifting the spirits than a good yodel.
    I should tell you that there was another catalyst for puking, aside from my encounter with Tracksuit Man and the considerable quantity of red wine I’ve put away since breakfast. There was a poster in a sealed frame, advertising life insurance, on the way to the loo. It featured a psychotically healthy Nordic-looking woman and her gurning companion; a man with one of the most punchable faces in late twentieth-century advertising. They were both sporting the kind of grins usually achievable only after dropping three tablets of ecstasy. The simple tag-line read: ‘Getting Hitched?’
    As you might expect, this brought me quite low. And made me not a little nauseous. Yes, it was the poster that really did it. That finally uncorked the bottle.
    Well, my thirteenth birthday came and went. It was around this time that I realised I was a writer. I hadn’t actually written anything at this point, but, to my mind, this was merely a technicality. I’ll fill you in on what happened after that epiphany a little later; suffice to say that I had the usual single-child, commuter-town adolescence—shitty comprehensive; innumerable and astonishingly barbaric beatings outside Burger King on the midnight High Street; Saturday jobs; a parental divorce followed by ten years starving in London. Just the usual. The usual transition from provincial to urban. The predictable fate of the connectionless, gormless hick who comes to the big city to seek his fame and fortune with seventy-five pence in his pocket, and no firm understanding that talent is only two per cent of the equation, if that. I’d like to lie to you and declare I’m a teacher of foreign languages, or an oil-rig worker or a postman and this is my story covering three dynasties of stoic Royal Mail Operatives (as the dole-office computer sinisterly likes to term them now). But I hate those phoney heroes. No, I’m a writer. Why else would I be noticing the long-married grandparents or going on about what’s inside my head? Other people, normal people, postmen , are safe from the impingements of these things; of the subtleties, of the increments; the nuance and tone of daily life. Unmanageable thoughts, in other words. They don’t need to write it down. That’s how they can be postmen without donning a baldric of bullet belts and spraying down the occupants of 28a every morning. You just wouldn’t believe me if I said I was anything else. Other people, normal people, would get over this trauma—this vicious separation—with a combination of mates, spirits and that great counterfeit healer, Time. Above all, they would display an innate negative capability—capable, as Keats had it, of ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. But, with writers, things hang around. The chronology is lost. Writers don’t want to forget, to be healed by time. Writers want to write it down. Writers want to remember before it goes.
    I also work in a shop, but that can wait for the moment.
    So, something went wrong with my family at a crucial age, and I didn’t manage to get an education. Though not for want of trying. My one attempt at scaling the towers of ivory, which I may share with you later, was soiling in the extreme. Instead, I suffered the trials of the autodidact. For years I bluffed it on wit alone, mispronouncing a sizeable lexicon of words, including heterogeneous and Goethe. I was twenty-eight before I understood a fifth of the evening news. What saved me was the English public-library system. After ten years of sharing hushed tables with reeking job-shirkers and Italian language students I was able to get by. And anyway, my birthright demanded that I take up the pen. When my mother was heaving me about in antenatal classes she was instructed to find a mantra suitable for getting through