Free Twisting My Melon by Shaun Ryder

just so they could rob stuff. But most of the mugs were so thick they just nicked stuff on their own patch and got caught within a couple of weeks and carted off. Robbing from the Royal Mail was an automatic prison sentence back then. You had to sign the Official Secrets Act when you joined and if you got caught there was no fannying about like there is now, when you can get a twelve-month conditional sentence and go and do some community service. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you got sent down. Since I first started as a messenger boy, I’d picked up on every trick that the IB had to catch people out, and how they worked.
    If you got to eighteen and you weren’t driving, you became a real postman. You didn’t necessarily have a round; you could be on indoor sorting. I did a bit of time in Newton Street, bit of time on Kings Road in Old Trafford, and then I ended up in Walkden, which was where I got the sack. I had a round then, and one day I clocked the IB following me. They knew I was pulling scams and were determined to catch me. So when I got to the end of a cul de sac I knocked on the door of a house where I knew the owners, explained I was being followed, and they let me jib through the house and out the back, while the IB were still waiting for me outside.
    I used to take acid before I went out on my round sometimes, and another postie had already grassed me up for that. I had a lot of enemies at the post office by this stage, people who were pissed off that I was getting away with murder. The final straw was one day when I was tripping my box off on my round again. There was a little horrible mongrel dog at a pub on my walk, and every time you tried to deliver the mail to the pub it would attack you and try and bite you, ‘Yap! Yap! Yap!’ This particular morning I was on acid, this little pissing dog tried to bite me again and I just flipped and thought, ‘You know what? I’ve had enough of you, you little fucker !’ and picked it up and bit the thing. I bit the fucking dog and it yelped, then I threw it over the fence. Someone saw it and reported me, so I was up for that and for taking drugs. They suspended me on full pay for a few weeks – it might even have been a couple of months – while I was waiting for some hearing, but I knew what was coming, and sure enough they sacked me.
    After I got the sack from the post office, I decided to hustle about on the dole and spend more time on the band. Denise wasn’t too happy with that, obviously. She was working behind the counter in the post office in Swinton and she’d come home to find me and the band and a few other pals listening to music, smoking weed and dropping acid. I was the first one of our lot to get a house, so everyone would pop round to get stoned. Denise would come home and see us all off our heads, drinking cans of beer, and go mental. She really was like a fucking raging bull, so I started calling her Bull.
    Bull hated me smoking weed, and hated it even more when I used to do little deals to make a bit of extra cash. I started to go to Moss Side now and again to buy a few ounces of weed, which I’d split and then knock out in fiver bags. Once I had a mound of it on my glass coffee table when all of a sudden there’s a knock at the door and I look out the window and there’s two coppers standing there. Not bobbies on the beat, or from a Panda car – these were high-ranking bobbies. Fuck . My arse absolutely went because I thought it was coming on top. If you don’t know what ‘coming on top’ means, it’s kind of a generic saying for when you’re in the middle of a situation that is in danger of getting out of hand; either you’re about to get rumbled for something or it’s about to kick off. Either way, if things are coming on top you have to deal with it.
    I closed the living room door to try and stop the smell getting out, and answered the front door to see what they wanted. It turned out all they were doing was going from