A History of the Tortoise Head, part 2

I bought a steel-string acoustic from a classified ad in the Evening Echo and my dad took me there in the car to get it. £5. It was made by Boosey and Hawkes, who mainly maufactured orchestral instruments. It had a high, high bridge and an action so high that after 5 minutes of playing you developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in your left wrist. (CTS, not TNS.) It hadn't been played since the time of Wat Tyler, or at least The New Seekers. I took some of the strings off and took them down to a music shop to see what kind of strings I needed. Wound in a circle, they looked like bailing wire. The assistant in the shop looked somewhat startled by what I showed him, then sold me a packet of Rotosound 10s. Something for the weekend.
I got a book out of the local library that showed me chord shapes, and was soon strumming Es and As and Ds. I tuned the guitar using an old Casio keyboard I'd been given for Christmas some years before. I think now I must have tuned it an octave too high, because one day, while playing, I knocked the neck against the edge of a table and the head snapped clean off. In the 1980s, Roland had a line of headless bass guitars (Curt Smith from Tears for Fears played one) but this was ridiculous. Ever the stalwart, my dad fixed the head back on with some kind of wood glue, and by God, it worked! It was always just slightly crooked, though, so not really to be trusted.
Something had to happen. A broken steel-string acoustic wasn't very rock and roll. Fortunately, I knew Ed Hill.
Ed and I were in the same group for English for A level, at SEEVIC (the South East Essex VIth Form College). I'd known him a little at King John, our secondary school, but I was really a part of the football-playing crowd, and Ed wasn't. We became good friends at SEEVIC. Ed drove in from Leigh-on-Sea on a 50cc motorbike, for some reason, and always had the helmet under his arm when entering the class. He also wore donkey jackets, and one of these jackets, for a reason I was to find out later, lived up to its name in an olfactory sense. It gave Ed a rather eccentric, almost Beat kind of persona - a development of his King John character, 'Ed Banger', as Ed was a metaller.
(I had been, for a few years, a Mod. I loved The Who, and still do. I had had a couple of coversations with Ed at school about music, where I complained about metal's 'raucousness'. He pointed out to me, quite rightly, that was was John Entwhistle's bass playing, if not 'raucous'? This was the very early stage of my entry into the world of metal, as guided by Ed. He wasn't a true believer, though - he called the Metal style mag 'Kerrap' rather than Kerrang!, so I knew irony was in there somewhere.)
I scraped together some cash and bought the Honky Tonk guitar Ed had received for his time on the Hadleigh pavement - Ed had picked up a Strat copy and that was easier to play. So I went from CTS-inducing acoustic to a semi-acoustic electric guitar whose action was only marginally more forgiving. At least it made enough of a sound, as a hollow-bodied electric guitar, that I didn't need an amp straight away. Just as well. I couldn't afford one.