Shiny Side Up

It could have been worse but, at the time, neither of them could see how.  After years of pulling in decent dough, Kate and Steve had both lost their jobs in June 2001 - the very year they''d said was to be "their year".

It was, but not the way they''d planned.

They spent a year as husband and wife and part of a management team desperately trying to keep the publishing company they worked for afloat.  And keep 120 people in work.  Several rounds of redundancies later, and months of their entire lives dominated by survival, it turned out that the guys who said they had the money were charlatans.  Even tiny, demure, Michele said they were bastards.  Actually, she called them worse than that, but Kate hates the word so much even Steve''s scared to write it down.

Steve and Kate got together about four years before the whole ill-fated enterprise went tits up.  Both had been married before - Steve twice - but there was no mistaking it this time.  Even regulars at The Cannon, their Newport Pagnell local, realised something special was up.  Nearly 40 of them travelled to Coatbridge, 400 miles away, for their wedding, many of them sacrificing a week''s paid work for the privilege.

Steve and Kate bought a beautiful Victorian terraced house in Newport and everything was looking good until the jobs took over.  And then disappeared.

Steve tried all sorts of agencies and job applications, some of them plain rubbish, but publishing was going into recession and anyone in an Editor''s chair was staying put.  No-one was launching, advertising revenue was diving and the only job he saw advertised was for the chair at Gay News.  He didn''t feel qualified.

Kate, as a sales manager, fared better.  She landed a job paying decent wedge, company car, private health and all that good stuff.  Pity she hated it.  Seems like the staff, the bureaucrats and the lawyers ran the show.  All she had to do was the paperwork and carry the can when it went wrong.

She also had to do over two hours’ commuting every day, a bit of a culture shock, having lived 500 yards from the office for two years.

Steve decided writing was the only viable option open to him.  Except, with morale on the floor and two years of desperate - and failed - struggle as a manager behind him, motivation was non-existent.  He managed a few pieces but not much and, with book agents and publishers refusing even to read a summary, enthusiasm waned.

Night after night Kate came home and found Steve semi- or fully pissed.  Research in The Cannon, he called it.  Bollocks.

Night after night Kate came home and told him about her day.  She was sure she could crack it, but Christ was she down.

Steve bit the bullet and went into a warehouse, moving boxes around at the whim of spotty 19-year-olds whose career goal was a fork-truck licence and £6.50 an hour.

The stress told.  Their sex life evaporated.  Eventually Kate persuaded Steve to go to the quack, which he did.

The quack diagnosed depression and gave him Prozac.  That pissed Steve off big time.  But it worked.  He was so pissed off at the prescription he flushed the pills and decided to get his head together.

Then, one Friday night Kate come home in tears and said she had nearly lost her job because another spotty 19-year-old with a good grasp of employment law had got out of her pram.

Steve said: "Look, love, if it''s that bad, chuck it."

Having failed to get any money from the charlatans, Steve and Kate relied on the statutory government package - five eighths of fuck all.  But he needed transport, having lost the company car.  So he bought a motorbike, much against Kate''s wishes.  It was a big, black BMW tourer with a 1,000cc engine.

Originally Kate had refused to go anywhere near the bike but one sunny Saturday afternoon Steve had persuaded her to take a run out to The Swan at Sheringham, about five miles away, for lunch.  When she got off the back it took a full two hours to get the grin off her face.  She was converted.

"If the worst comes to the worst," said Steve, “we can always jump on t