A Ton Of Malice: Half-Life Of An Irish Punk In London

1979. The Winter of Discontent. Barry is a 20-year-old Irishman in London. His girlfriend dumps him after he wrecks the apartment. "I don't hurt people", he says, "but I'm tough on fixtures and fittings." Somehow Barry lands a job at Sellafield HQ in London, managing the storage of plutonium. Most days he shows up to work with more drugs in his system than the entire Chinese swimming team. Tossed out of a hippie squat in Kennington and mugged in a coal bunker flat off Oxford street, he finds sanctuary with his lonely uncle Joe, a man who gets visibly aroused by disaster victims on the evening news. A Ton of Malice recounts a vivid, hellish, hilarious coming-of age on a trail trodden by many an Irish boy, but rarely with quite so many dangerous substances. And it's (almost) all true.