A Waster..? 15 2 10 (13) 25 1 23

On the face of it Pete seemed to me to be an okay kind of a guy, but...beneath the surface it would come out that he was no such thing.

I'm talking about my middle years when I had one of the biggest jobs I see now it would ever be my good fortune to get and my wife felt confident enough in her middle years, some way behind me, to give up her job as a State Registered Nurse and go back to college to read English Literature, History and Philosophy, a part of which was returning to the student way of life which of course like any other walk of life has its hangers on. Perhaps Pete fell into this category..?

My student life some 10 years earlier had been that of a mature student with a young family which involved living away from college in high-rise rented accommodation of the type available in our northern English town to out-of-towners because no-one who belonged to the town wished to live there any more...driving into college each day in our beat-up old car which had seen better days in the time we had both worked in regular jobs before our young family arrived.

Pete then, we met together with other students in a pub in the town on Friday nights through girl friends of my wife, when we weren't having a college type party in one of their collective places, and we'd play those mindless "monkey-climbing-buildings" types of electronic games where the monkey has to dodge falling house-hold objects to attain the sky-scraper top, when a second building would appear to the sound of pleasant congratulatory link music, with even more falling objects to dodge, and Pete was the master player whom everyone admired...

After the pub we would sometimes go back to Pete and Isla's his girl- friend's Mansion to check on their three dogs and drink a night-cap before returning home...even share a joint which was never really my scene, a life-style one spring term unlike any other until the summer holiday when their mansion was demolished and I told Pete he could stay at our house while our 2 boys took their 2 week summer holiday visiting their Scandinavian grand-parents by that time flying there unassisted.

Well the problem arose when our boys – “those turds” Pete’s 

“affectionate” term for them! -- returned and it became almost impossible to dislodge our lodger. The bigger problem being that I never really got to the know the guy until it was too late: a public school drop-out who for work was some kind of salesperson but who perhaps made most of his money selling dope to college kids, and who by passing his joint to us would I concluded after a while think he was making his contribution to the upkeep and running of our very middle-class home...phew!!!

Fortunately for me my wife was the one who found him rented accommodation elsewhere and moved him out with all his belongings never to return. I recall a business dinner one time when I had to entertain this young Finn who at the time was installing some fault detection system onto one of my company’s Paper Machines and I was unable not to talk about our unwelcome guest…He recalled a similar incident from his own experiences when he told how to this “friend” of his he “lent” the enormous sum equivalent to say £100, in today’s terms perhaps 6 or 7 times that amount, in the knowledge he would never be re-paid, but more important, never need to see the guy again which is what happened.

Well my wife re-counted just the other day how when she last heard from Pete he had phoned our house to ask about some CD or gramophone record when she just put the phone down without answering… such was the level to which this our “friendship” had sunk..!

Have a good day everybody I hope you don’t have a Pete like this one in your circle..? hahaha.