But you couldn't complain. One time, I'm eating this cabbage and it tastes like soap. Jean sees the look on my face, so she jabs me in the ribs and goes, 'Don't say a word.' But I'm sick to my guts and I don't want to die from fucking cabbage poisoning. I'm just about to say something when my dad gets back from the pub, hangs up his coat, and sits down in front of his dinner. He picks up his fork, stabs it down into the cabbage, and when he lifts it up to his mouth there's this lump of tangled wire on the end of it! God bless my old mum, she'd boiled a Brillo pad!

What did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said,

John Osbourne attended Birchfield Road Secondary Modern.

Signed,

Mr Oldham (Headmaster)

It turned out that although I was no good at plumbing or tuning car horns or working on building sites or doing any of the other half a dozen shit jobs I'd been fired from, I was a natural at killing animals

Being trashed by Rolling Stone was kind of cool, because they were the Establishment. Those music magazines were all staffed by college kids who thought they were clever - which, to be fair, they probably were. Meanwhile, we'd been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we'd made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?

'That wasn't a striptease you were doing, Ozzy. It was a fucking Nazi goose-step. Up and down the table. That poor German bloke looked mortified. Then you put your balls in his fucking wine.' 'I thought I pissed in his wine?' 'That was before you pissed in his wine.'