My top 10 momentous moments -which aren't as I only have 4 or 5 and forget them

I often laugh at the most momentous moments in my life which I have ignored and other people find fascinating.... So I am now documenting them that should kill all fascination.

In no particular order but largely they relate to my youth.

When I was six I had to do a jobby on a potty for three days because I swallowed a thruppenny bit. This taught me how long the bowel took to process metal. It's also taught me about the strength of the acid in your intestines and stomach as the coin was very shiny when it finally emerged. I don't recommend children turn themselves into human slot machines as they could read this instead. I didn't become a doctor or a biologist in fact the closest I get is having an allotment.

When I am on the Camino walking across to Santiago or wherever I choose to end I bump into people regularly that I feel so at home with. I've never been a fan of "like-minded" people but it is true that on the Camino that are very many people like me. Mad as hatters and relaxed in their madness. I've just forgotten the memorable moment that I always forget, so will fill it in later. As I say this memorable  moments section is full of momentous moments that I disregard all the time as I forget them.

I had a wonderful chat with the treasury minister Angela Knight after her speech at the Mansion House in London in 1997. I basically said that her speech writers were rubbish and that this new system called Crest was a fantastic electronic system which was going to make the market far more secure resilient and would put London ahead of its peers in the world financial industry. It would enable London to move to immediate settlement thereby removing risk completely. If a firm does not have open positions then they could go bust and nobody would notice in the marketplace. Some years later when MF global went bust and it took a few years to unwind all the positions, it demonstrated that the market still had an appetite for risk despite there being mechanisms that removed them. You can install a lift to the top of a mountain but people would still walk. What I always forget is my Rangers supporting mate Tom grabbing me or as he used to say hauling me off the cabinet minister.

I was kicked down the slope when leaving Easter road after Hibs very Rangers game. Your opinion bastards was shouted as the foot went into my back that propelled me down the slope as I exited the old East terracing. In those days fans were segregated using the top tier and the lower tier. This segregation plan came unstuck when they both had to use the same staircase. This particular range is fun to say that the I should use the grass. It reinforced the belief that Catholics had tried to perpetuate in my youth of victimhood. We were all Jock Tamson's victims. I however did not become a priest later in life nor did I bother going to church again. I decided that all that stuff was fairy tales and what was real was the foot that connected with my back and nearly killed me.

When I was 26 I felt fated to commit suicide. Having been married for 18 months I decided on the eve of my 26th birthday to get divorced. I have had suicidal thoughts for many years leading up to this point but was lucky enough to go out with a girl whose brother had the same name as me and had committed suicide when he was 26. She read me the riot act about suicide and I never mentioned it again to her. In fact one of the reasons why we split up was I felt I would let her down one day and that hurt me more than anything. 26 years therefore goes down as being a momentous occasion as I survived it. There was one night in particular when I was living on the 21st floor of a barbican Terra in London. The railings around the balcony were waist high and one night in a fit of pique I left all the doors open and went to sleep saying if I sleep walk and die it was fated. I never had the confidence to kill myself, as troubled as I was there clearly was something in my core that kept me living. I have tried drinking myself to death for the guts of my 58 years and have given it a really good go. I do occasionally still home suicidal thoughts or thoughts about not living. After my mom's funeral I joked with my pal about how "You don't need to commit suicide when death is on its way, naturally" which was a massive stress release for me. Life has been one long continuous struggle trying to do the right thing and watching so many wrong things. I think it is the eye for detail which sees the imperfections and at my worst I am haunted by them. 

I went to the White House Christmas parties when I was 9 & 10. I ran around like a wee daftie searching for the green room. It was pat nixon who gave me a Christmas present and I always tell people it was a tape recorder. I have also puked up on the front steps of said White House but that was on another occasion. I am very blase about all this because it never really left a great impression on me. That is why it makes it onto this list. It is something that others might find curious and I find tedious but as I get older and have fewer stories to tell it is retrieved from the archives.

Well that's five to start us off.

My Deadbeat moments are well documented here so for a ock'n'oll story, (my keyboad has a sticky r) I have two to choose from. They are both Clash moments. I saw the Clash in Paris in 1981 at the Mogado. Mogador if the R is not sticky. The Beat and the Selector were supporting and it was a great night. It was the first time I got in to see a real band for FREE and going backstage to enjoy the buffet was icing on the cake. The free bevvy was the candles. We got backstage passes because we were lucky enough to meet the road manager aloft the Eiffel Tour!I threw him some funsize Mars Bars and we got talking. It got better when he started winding us up about being the tour manager. "Oh yes he was" I said to my mate. We turned up at the door and gave our names, more in hope than expectation, and suddenly we're in a sell out gig with backstage passes. My mate left after "Washington Bullets" and so I went home alone via a few beers and 27 canapes backstage where the band needed help with the food. Fat Al never needed a second invitation. He arrived in Scotland with an appetite, being almost 10lbs at birth. That appetite served him well at 19! I'd get to me Joe and Paul later at the end of Deadbeat when they were in Edinburgh and looking to play at La Sorbonne. As Neil the bassist of the band booked that night said, "we'd hired a van, so we needed paid, and they'd only pay, if we dumped the Clash to play." I turned it into a Life Support song a few weeks later, it worked a treat.