Anoraks Anonymous - A Play in Three Parts.

Welcome to Anoraks Anonymous - We are here to help all of you. Our three part 'play' is designed to assist you on your first steps to your journey of recovery. You can be normal again, you can have real friends again, you can go outside again, all of this can happen. So follow the first steps to recovery as our play unfolds, this might be part of you, all of you, or at the very least the first guiding light to recovery. YOU CAN BE NORMAL, IT IS NOT JUST A DREAM.

John: My name is John Smith and I.. well yes.. well erm...  I am an Anorak.

Shorty Wave (Group Therapist): Well done John, all of us here know just hard making that statement can be, and we all welcome you to your first meeting. So John if you can, tell us some of your story.

John: Well for me it started back in the early nineteen eighties, I had been tuning around on the radio and came across Radio Sovereign... it's really hard isn't it....

Shorty Wave: It's OK John, take your time, I promise you, we have all been there in our own way.

John: Well the buzz was incredible, they were playing oldies 24 hours a day, you know back then nobody was doing that. They didn't have a license and seemed so enthusiastic and day after day I kept going back for more, at first an hour here and there, but after a month or two I was tuning in for at least ten hours a day, I even found it hard to hold my job down, I just needed to get back in my Ford Escort after work and have some more on my car radio.

Shorty Wave: So what happened next?

John: I knew a guy called Dave who on one occasion had been going on about his new girl friend Jackie when we were in a pub one night. Well I bumped into him a few days later and he looked really rough, I asked him what was up and it turned out that Jackie was another pirate radio station and he had just binged on a forty eight hour non stop listening session.

Shorty Wave: I guess that did not help?

John: No. I now found myself doing both Jackie and Sovereign and within a year I needed more. I got to know more listeners, that's what we called ourselves back then, one guy had a list of other pirates and where you had to go to tune in, he'd been a Thameside Radio listener and after they were busted big time, he had made it his cause to spread the word about land based pirates wherever they might be, he was totally addicted.

Shorty Wave: Do you want a break John?

John: Yes please, but I have so much more to tell when I am ready.

Shorty Wave: That's OK, you have done really well for your first meeting, I promise we are really proud of you!

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