millionreasons | Blue remembered hills

There was a summer I couldn’t sleep - 1992, after my first year of University. I stayed on for a while after exams finished. I was seeing this boy called Eddie. He was a Mackem (native Sunderland) on the dole with his income augmented by crime. At the time, he seemed exciting. I remember we stayed up all night drinking, smoking, occasionally shenanigans-ing and walking up Tunstall Hill to see the sunrise out of the sea. When I returned to Doncaster, I still couldn’t sleep. I painted "I can stay awake all night, if need be. Cold as an eel, without eyelids. Like a dead lake, the dark envelops me" in purple gloss paint on my bedroom wall, much to my mother’s distaste. I started seeing a lad who lived in Norfolk. I went to stay with him and we spent all night in fields not drinking or smoking, nor shenanigans-ing.

At one point during the summer, Eddie rang me up and told me he’d overdosed on cocaine and I went straight up to see him, not realising until years later that it had been a lie, such was my naïvety and gullibility.

Thank god I no longer live in Sunderland. Thank god I can sleep now, and thank god that we’re not young forever.