Again, with the Singing

A few years back, I lost my job. My wife and I had not long been married and had recently bought a flat. It was awful. Along with the fact that I felt all kinds of worthless (getting the sack tends to do that to a man), I needed to find another source of income as soon as humanly possible. While I was single and living pretty much hand to mouth, I occasionally would enter karaoke competitions to win beer money and did ok. The odd fifty or twenty five quid here and there kept me from cadging cigarettes too much and allowed my social life to clip along quite nicely.