Bad Medicine: The young ones.

Abstract

It was my 50th birthday recently. I have a large family, and like most large families we grew up pretty poor: shared rooms, wearing hand-me-downs, a shared sock and pants drawer, and two toothbrushes between the eight of us. When I went to university our student flat made the TV show The Young Ones look like a public information film on healthy living. We indulged in wildly irresponsible behaviours: skipping classes, having hangovers in tutorials, smoking on buses, drawing noise complaints from neighbours, making home brew, moving street signs and traffic cones into the flat, eating at chippies, eating pies, gratuitously swearing, running on train tracks, walking on high walls, listening to the Smiths, the Clash, and the Pogues, visiting cold …