– 1993 –

I quit my apartment and my job in London before we flew to Jamaica to get married. When we came home, we went to live in Malta and moved in with Mrs Clown’s family until we could find a place of our own.

One day, Elena took us out to see a friend and on the drive back, she said…

“We just need to stop at the thing to get the thing.”

…but as we drove, Mrs Clown got agitated.

“There’s a party isn’t there! Grrr.
I told you we didn’t want a party…”

We went into the party hall and about half of Malta was there for our secret wedding party. My Maltese wasn’t that great at that time so when Mrs Clown introduced me to every single guest, about all I could say was:

Grazzi ħafna talli ġejtu!
(thank you for coming)

Eventually, my lovely new wife abandoned me with her brother and three bottles of red wine and Mario said he’d help me with my speech in Maltese. I managed most of it on my own but I asked Mario how to say “I am as pissed as a fart!” and I opened with that.

“Imbewwel daqs bassa…” — in case you were wondering.

They didn’t find it nearly as funny as Mario and I did but I continued bravely and when I got to the end, I told them they were “all very naughty” for giving us a surprise party.

Intom kulħadd pastaz!

But, it turned out, pastaz doesn’t quite mean naughty. It’s much closer to vulgar or wicked. For weeks after, people would stop me in the street and say “So you think I am wicked, Kevin?”

Life went on in Malta and we began to settle down but… did you ever see My Big Fat Greek Wedding?

My new relatives smothered me with love. If I fancied a beer, half a dozen cans of Hopleaf would appear in the cupboard. If I went for an interview, a friend of a friend of the man across the street had already called to tell them I was coming.

We were looking for a flat in Sliema but Uncle Leli’s sister had a place up the road where we could stay and everything was sorted before I even got to see it. But Mrs Clown and I were out shopping in Hamrun one day when we decided it was all getting a bit too much and we decided to move on.

We didn’t know where we wanted to go though so we made a list. Australia, Singapore, France, Italy, England, Madagascar — all places we had talked about living and we made a little matrix with countries across the top and features down the left to help us decide. There were maybe ten features — weather, jobs, salary, language, distance to relatives, etc — and we gave them all marks out of ten and added up the scores.

We were as shocked as you are now when England came out on top and we made our plans to leave. We didn’t really have many possessions — just a couple of suitcases and a saucepan that Mrs Clown’s mum gave us.

When we arrived at Gatwick though, they took us off into the little interview room for illegal immigrants.

Why do you have a saucepan?

Er… to cook with…?…

How long are you planning to stay?

Er… forever…?…

It had not occurred to me that I couldn’t take my wife home with me.

They left us in that interview room for ages and we checked our list of target countries while we waited to see which country might be next but, eventually, they came back and just said…

Go on. You can go.

So we went. We rented a car and off we drove.

We didn’t really have a destination in mind but I thought it would be nice out West somewhere and we drove. As we passed Bath, I told Mrs Clown that it was supposed to be lovely there (I had never been) but it was such a glorious day, we kept driving.

We drove past Bristol and Taunton and Exeter and I said,

Plymouth is nice. My friend Kev lives there and he has a lovely Portuguese wife, Tusha. You’ll like her. Let’s go to Plymouth.

We stayed in the Kynance Hotel on Plymouth Hoe and after a bit of a misunderstanding where we thought we were sleeping in the closet under the stairs, we went down to the Barbican for dinner. Over a pizza, we asked the waitress if she knew of anywhere to live.

Oh! Mr Daniels just up the road has a little flat for rent! It’s over the grocery store.

We moved in the next day.

Living in the Barbican was brilliant!

We were in a first-floor flat (2nd floor, for Americans) overlooking Southside Street which — if you like a rowdy, raucous, party atmosphere — is the best street in the world. It’s lined with pubs and restaurants and it’s right by the harbour. Behind our flat was New Street which is about 700 years old and The Mayflower sailed for America from the quay at the end of our street.

There was something happening every night and all the residents would sit on the outside of their window sills with a can of beer and legs dangling down to watch the excitement below.

The two lovely young ladies in the flat across the street from us always put their makeup on in the mirror after a shower. The mirror was in the window opposite ours and they were always stark naked. It was a great place to live.

There were parties, pub crawls, fights — we once saw two blokes being beaten up by seven and every time they were left for dead in the street, they would get up and fight some more. A favourite was The Bruce Forsyth Appreciation Society where 25 blokes staggered down the street dressed as Bruce saying “Nice to see you. To see you nice!” every few yards. Something new every night.

Mrs Clown’s favourite was the artist, Mr Lenkiewicz, who lived around the corner from us. He painted beautiful young women and painted himself leering in the background. Mrs Clown wanted to model for him.

His best picture was an enormous mural in our street. It was a bit like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and showed all the members of Plymouth Council doing obscene things to each other and pooping on each other’s heads. I think they had upset him about something.

After a few months of living above Mr Daniels’, we were able to buy a flat of our very own on Plymouth Hoe but I’ll save that story for next time.