Thursday 17th August 2000 (Moving Day)

Thursday 17th August 2000 (Moving Day)

2357 Hrs

What a day! I can’t believe I’ve made it to Torquay alive.

It was still dark when Dad came and woke us all up and he was in a right anxious temper. He said it was because he wanted us to get to our new exciting home as soon as possible, but it seemed more likely that the pointy nose twonk wanted us to get away as quickly as we could without being noticed by the neighbours (especially by the murderous Mr. O’Dowd at number 69 who is/was our landlord, and who, I’m quite sure, Dad hasn’t paid any rent to for almost four months. If Dad thinks Mr. O’Dowd will just let him slip away into the night, he’s a bigger idiot than I give him credit for).

Dad whizzed the hire removal van outside our house (which he had parked around the corner last night) and like some sort of rabble military operation we all had to rush the heap of manky boxes and torn black bags of all our shitty worldly goods into the van on the double. As soon as the last delicate cardboard box of kitchenware was tossed in, Dad shut the door and was swiftly half way down the road shouting back that he’ll see us down there. By ‘us’ he meant me, Clint, Curly (Dad is quite happy to be getting some slave labour he said) and a very hung over Miller who was driving us to Devon in his supped up, rust bucket, death mobile.

I felt more scared getting into a car with Miller behind the wheel than I did the time I had to see our camp doctor for a bowel inspection (How can you tell if it’s a finger he’s poking you with if you have to bend over the bed facing away from him. In fact is that normal? I really should ask someone. Maybe there’s a phone line about that sort of stuff). Even though he was having trouble driving in a straight line he still thought it was ‘cool’ to see how fast the snot box would go on the empty M5 motorway. I begged him to slow down but unfortunately I was not backed up at all by Curly or Clint who just egged him on to go faster. He actually managed to get it to go 115mph and it really felt like the shit box was going to shake out of existent. Miller was manically laughing at his own joke because he kept quoting Scotty from Star Trek ‘She canny take much more Captain!’ Where are the bloody police when they’ve got the best chance yet to arrest my muppet brother? Their never around when you need them.

If anything was going to kill us you’d have thought it was the fact that Miller was driving at brainless speeds when he couldn’t even see properly but no, that was not it. Miller soon slowed down when a police car was spotted in the distance and from then onwards he seemed content with only going 90 mph once they were gone.

I expected Millers toxic levels and excess speed to be the reason for us all to end up in the arsehole of a tree near Bristol but no, it was almost caused by his inane fear of birds. Miller can’t even walk down a street without making a tit of himself. It only takes a cooing pigeon to flutter nearby and he looks like some kind of bad 80’s break dancer with shitty pants. He’ll literally dive for cover with arms flagging about to protect himself from what he must think will be a violent attack by a feathered rat. So we’re cruising down the motorway, listening to some crap one hit wonder on radio 1 (the song is called Yellow, I dunno who it is by) and suddenly we swerve across to the slow lane and then back to the fast and all because a bloody low flying seagull was supposedly going to hit the car, or so Miller said. As he veered off the road he made one of the tyres pop and we were lucky to come to a stop on the hard shoulder without getting mangled. None of us are members of the AA and we couldn’t change the tyre because Miller didn’t have a spare one. We ended up walking for about two hours to the nearest service station to give Dad a ring to ask him to come and help us! I keep saying to Dad that I need a mobile phone but he thinks they are a waste of money, just another way to take more money off of the poor, the government’s way to keep the proles (his stupid made up word for the working class) down.

During our trek I gave Miller a real good telling off and told him exactly what I and everyone else thought of him. It really annoyed me though because Curly and Clint denied everything I said about what they thought of him, yet they laughed when Miller answered back that I had only changed my mind about moving to Torquay because I was hoping to pick up some nice sailors ass down there! When I pointed out that the only one with homosexual tenancies was in fact him, my oafish brother, because he cried when the bunch of men he obsessively love got knocked out of something called Euro 2000, Curly and Clint started calling me a knob and a bunch of other foul common names. As soon as I get to Torquay I’m going to make them regret the way they spoke to me! I sat at Michael Wood services reading The Daily Mail while the other three spanners played in the arcade until 7pm when Dad finally turned up to help us. We didn’t even set off for the car for over half an hour because we, me included (!), had to listen while Dad pointed out why each and every one of us was a fucking retard. I felt like pointing out that I was only here to save his business, thus too the family. He should have been rushing to see if I was okay, and apologizing for making me travel with by monkey wang brother. I certainly felt within my right to drop drawers and have him kiss my ass. I should have sternly pointed all this out to him, but as I feared he might have dropped dead of a heart attack any second as he face changed from red to purple, I decided to keep quiet (for now).

At 9pm we finally rolled into Torquay and I soon forgot about my stupid fellow passengers on the journey from Hell as I arrived in Heaven. Our new home is in a part of Torquay called Babbacombe and it is beautiful. Our new pub overlooks the serene sea and the awe inspiring scenery fills your entire view. I just stood and stared for ages. I felt like I was on a beautiful alien world. In Birmingham you are surrounded by depressing concrete everywhere, concrete towers, and concrete block council houses, its all so grey, but here it is gorgeous. Blue sky, turquoise sea, red cliff faces, an assortment of different greeneries and PALM tree’s too! This is where I belong. This is class.

None of us really went into the pub part tonight. Partly because it was the leaving do of the previous tenant but mainly because we spent ten minutes piling all of the boxes out of the removal van into a storage room and then spent hours trying to find things like the kettle, and my computer, which was buried at the bottom of that mountainous pile. The pub sounded really busy though, very lively.

I can’t wait to introduce myself to my people. The old King is dead, long live the KING! I've got a good feeling about this place. This is going to be a good chapter in the book of Cox!