Doug's Personal Blog

I have no idea how many parts, so let's just pick a random number. One thing that surprised me when I had the occasional burst of contact with Jof recently was just how well he remembered the past but I'll stick to what I can remember so it might be a bit more limited.

- The first time I met him ... me deep in emotional and financial trouble (as usual), turning up at Ocean with my barely-written first demo of Grog's Revenge. Him liking it. Me being very pleased. (Even more pleased later when I learned how high his standards were)

- When I got engaged, Jof came up to Edinburgh soon after. Must have been 19 years ago? For an engagement present he bought me a portable CD player and two CDs. One Bomb The Bass (who we both liked), one William Orbit (way ahead of his time, as always).

- Dancing with each other every weekend in Macmillans (?) night club in Liverpool. We weren't gay and didn't hate women, just utterly petrified of them and didn't really understand the *point* of going to a club. Well, we did, but just the getting drunk and dancing bit Had a fantastic time, anyway.

- His glasses steaming up when we'd be eating the Chinese after getting home from the club. He *hated* that. He was *so* pleased when he switched to contacts. Virtually life-changing for him, although I always thought he looked weird without glasses

- The night we watched Liverpool 'tame the Beastie Boys' and a copper gave me a good hard slap!

- When I first worked at Ocean I had a bedsit. Coin-operated electricity meter and I had one of those mini-ovens that you can put on a kitchen work-top. Joffa stayed the night and, despite me putting the oven on as a heater and feeding the meter with coins, it may have been a little cold. He told me that they'd built a special freezer room for 'The Exorcist" so that the actors breath would steam up and that's what my bedsit was like.

That was the thing. I was the crazy mixed-up kid and he'd chuckle at my misadventures whilst trying to help me out whenever he could.

This might go on forever. Not right now though ....

P.S. Yeah, well done spammers. I'm going to have to shut off comments to this post again. Hope you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning. Scum. Anyone who is not spamming scum and wants to talk about Jof, just drop me a mail and I'll post the comment for you.