It’s a Saturday afternoon in August 1982 and my mother is dragging my sister and I around Stockport town centre. We are all weary from the trudge around the shops so before heading home we call into the Debenhams department store for a customary cuppa.

We’ve been sat for a few minutes when a desperate looking woman rushes across the café towards us. She’s middle-aged, all 70’s beads and bangles, and plainly has something she wants to get off her chest but is so overwrought it takes her a moment to formulate a sentence.

“Please, you have to help me,” she finally says, “I really need 45p.”

There’s a moment’s quiet, and we all stare at her while she shifts uncomfortably on the spot.

The increasingly distraught woman tries again. “You have to help me, I need 45p, it’s really important. Listen, I’ll make a deal with you.”

Tugging at her ring finger, she pops off her wedding ring and hands it to my mother.

“Here’s the deal”, she says, “you loan me 45p and keep hold of my wedding ring as insurance, we can meet up right here tomorrow and I’ll repay you. It would mean the world to me if you’d do this.” Actually, she may have said, “you borrow me 45p,” but you get the idea.

My mother chips in with the question that has already crossed our minds and asks what could be so important that she’d trade her wedding ring with a stranger for 45 pence?

The woman having found her nerve, answers without hesitation.

“I’ve just got to buy ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners.”

Come on Eileen was at number one, and eventually sat there for four weeks, but it wasn’t like there was a dearth of copies kicking around, that song was everywhere, Julien Temple’s video was all over TV and the 7 inch was racked in every record store. This peculiar woman loved that single so much she couldn’t wait another minute – she wanted a copy instantly.  

Now, I was no teenage jeweller but the ring looks pretty good to me, so I try to surreptitiously encourage my mum to run with the strange offer on the table. My mother however, has other ideas, and being a principled and somewhat wary character politely declines. The peculiar woman makes no further pleas and in a moment has hurried off across the room, in search of another unsuspecting but hopefully more amenable mobile pawnbroker.