Denyer's bits n' bobs

Time's Winged (how do you get an accent on this?) chariot..

2011-10-13T10:51:00.006+01:00

Well, more weeks and months have flown by since I dragged myself Blog-wards.... Not a natural blogger, moi....

Very little news of import... The last year brought some excitement, some unexpected heartache, some new friends, new work, new projects, costume making and hols. Plus battles, bruises and making ends meet in our currrent financial unpleasantness.......

I shall, shortly, be setting up a blog related to my Living History and workshop work (link to come).
Watch this space.... : D

Time rolls on....

2010-08-03T09:00:00.004+01:00

Well, my last blog was in january, so things must have been busier than I'd thought...

Workwise the "investigation/suspension" petered out in January, and everything was done & dusted by March, once the legal bods had sorted themselves out. I'm not legally allowed to tell anyone what the result was, but I'm smiling...

Had an excellent tiger safari holiday in India: lots of tigers and general wildlife in an India that, if anything, appears to be getting more extreme, in terms of social contrasts, with every visit...

Have gone back to my old self-employed status: odd-jobbing, a little carpentry, consultancy etc. etc. and am getting a series of "living history" packages together for paid work in schools. Website (thepastmasters.biz) now published.

Am actually enjoying life with minimum sturm und drang..

Started off the fighting season well; the usual medieval events, plus two shows (including one at Bateman's, down here in Sussex) with our new, non-combatant venture: Napoleonic Sappers and Miners (circa 1810). All's well with weather & injuries so far.

Denyer's Suspension Blog.

2010-01-09T11:55:00.020Z

The city having (again) come to a complete standstill (apparently due to winter weather having once more arrived at an a unpredictable season of the the year) and being trapped in the house (insofar as I can't be bothered to put my boots on and go out) I bethought myself of my neglected blog.... So here I am.

Another year has flown. Life has slipped past, swiftly with silent steps, leaving barely a whisper of her perfume (trans. I can't remember what I bl**dy did last week, let along last January – Nov.) so I don't intend a full “old year” round-up. However.........

Domestic:

Very little really. Poor old cat Julius developed a cancer, and had to be put down (very, very sad indeed).

Joan has had really bad knee problems (and an operation). I've been more than a tad frustrated and stressed at work (complete with headaches, rages and palpitations no less. Actually had to seek medical advice -which isn't me at all) but otherwise have been generally fine.

Two new (rescue) cats (Egyptian Maus, we believe) have arrived. Lively, very lively; always hungry - and unhouse-trained (think mini, pretty velociraptors). I shall say no more.....

Holidays:

Suffice to say that Mali was magnificent: the sights, sounds and scenery of course – but especially the warm, friendly people. The visit deserves a full entry on its own (along with the many, many, photographs) if I get time some time. What most impressed was the feeling that this is a land where different faiths, Christianity, Islam and traditional beliefs, seem to be able to live alongside each other with mutual respect and minimal conflict. Long may this endure.

Washington (DC): a brief (long intended) visit to catch up with Paul, a drinking buddy who presently heads up (President no less!) the Corcoran Museum of Art (a stone's throw from the White House) and Darci, his most excellent E.A.. A fantastic time was had and fascinating people met.

Washington Surprises (for me):

The really interesting architectural mix – not what I expected at all; from the imperially overblown, through excellent, individual, eclectic domestic and public buildings, to quaint, folksy ship-lap cottages, so reminiscent of Wealden villages.
The fact that things were easily accessible on foot (we walked practically everywhere).
The sheer quality of the museums and galleries (esp. the Aerospace one. Went twice).
The quietly impressive monuments to the Vietnam and Korean war dead (the latter piece previously unknown to me).
Seeing an eagle flying overhead while walking through the monument gardens.
The pleasant, understated domesticity of Mount Vernon (an immediate comparison with the overblown horror of Blenheim Palace was inevitable).
The road signs – again, strangely quaint and folksy in places.
The (unnecessarily?) HUGE truck & vans and amazin' fire engines.

Convinced me that I must (and will) visit US again...

Work...

….has been bloody (and more of that anon). In November I decided that enough was enough (you can only beat your head against a brick wall/kick against the pricks for so long) and handed in my notice. I will be gone before the end of the financial year (i.e. .before the end of March). End of an era in a way. Started pretty much at the bottom and have got as far as I will get/want to get (not politically minded/careerist enough to rise further).

Feel that I have made a positive contribution over the last dozen or so years, but the frustration with corporate systems and attitudes that prevent progress (two steps forward, two steps back) and the kind of passive mendacity now demanded of officers have started to affect my patience (and indeed health – in the headache, palpitations, “lack of patience”, shouty kind of way). So, back to self-employment for me....

It may seem odd that anyone at my time of life should jump out of a well paid, secure, pensioned and comfortable public service post into the uncertainty of no job at all (and in a recession too) but enough, as they say, is enough.....

Fighting & stuff:

Our group engaged in lots of combat displays and living history this year. I managed

to get to most of the usual events: Bretten (Germany) of course & Antwerp. Herstmonceaux, Berkeley and Warwick castles. The battle commemorations at Blore Heath (550^th anniversary), Tewkesbury and Bosworth - where I got a sword in my eye (ouch!).

Fortunately I was kept out of the clutches of the local paramedics, and so was able to be ferried home (rather than spend several hours in an up-country A&E). Checked out at eye hospital following day. No permanent damage, luckily – and at least it was not a spear or bill (people tend to keep their sword blades clean – and not stuck in the ground overnight). Had to wave the flag, rather than fight, at the next event; but was battle-ready for Blore in late September (huzzah!!).

We also had our own event with the good people of the Hangleton & Knoll Festival.

Last year being the anniversary year for Good King Hal's succession we added an alternative performance to our regular “The Wars of the Roses – in 20 mins.”; “The six wives of Henry VIIIth – in 20 mins” with your truly as our 'Enery. The fat, ageing, crotchety Henry was easy; the young, slim, athletic, handsome version... Well, just a question of acting. Obviously. : )

We also managed a couple of jolly horse-fighting training sessions up at Windsor (organised by Captain Sandy).

Good for us (esp. for those folk who haven't fought riders before) and good for the horses (confidence building).

Massive fun (?) practising being chased and cut down from behind by galloping cavalry (& trying not to fall under the hooves)....

Oh, and I had to make a life-size, guttable, prop dead deer (& innards) for a show; a perfomance of Orpheus in the Underworld for the Wandering Minstrels. This project took a while (!!), but was interesting..

Suspension!!!! (or why I have time for this..).

What would you say to an indefinite holiday, on full pay, as a result of having done the right thing (complete with the traditional “warm feeling” inside)...?

Well, I expect that one's immediate reaction ought to be “Yes please” - especially when the work front has proved to be a stress-laden, semi-Sisyphean ordeal for the past three years rather, than the pleasure it should be (yes, that's right; you heard it here.. I do actually expect to enjoy my work - and generally have done throughout my somewhat chequered career). Well, in a way that's what's happened to one's humble self...

This unexpected extension of the seasonal holidays is to run for the duration of an “investigation”. Meanwhile, I have the opportunity to disport myself in whatever way I see fit*, on full pay (* almost. In the letter formalising my suspension there was an instruction demanding that I do not communicate with any officer or Elected Member of the Council. Given that this is perhaps the most socially active part of the year, and given that some one fifth of my social circle are officers or are elected members of said authority, many friendships actually pre-date my joining said organisation and all of such being unconnected to the investigation in any way, I take this perhaps legally dubious, given certain basic human rights, generalised prohibition is deemed to be more honoured in the breach than the observance).

Now, to be frank, this suspension has not come out of the blue. I am not permitted to say more (I may be able to elucidate later in the month). All I can say is that I definitely haven't been caught with my hand in the till (or anywhere else inappropriate for that matter).

Those that know me will be aware that I care about my work and am naturally pleasant, diplomatic and polite. However, on the fault side: I am not one to take fools gladly, cannot abide hypocrisy or injustice and am not someone who allows himself (or likes to hear of others being) bullied. Couple this with a lot of what the medicos have called work-related stress.. Well, lets just say that my patience with my masters has been in shorter supply than one would normally wish. Well, enough said.

Anyhoo, since my suspension on Monday Dec. 21^st. ("a push-off and a merry Xmas to you". This event following the Friday that the last snowfall ground our fair city to a halt – a day on which I'd had to hold the fort, alone in the office for several hours while others had their Xmas parties - and good luck to them - you can imagine the phone calls. Plus fell down myself three times on the icy two mile walk back from work, hit my head and cracked my elbow. Oh, did I mention that I walked the two miles to get into work too) "pending investigation", I have been able to:

Sort out my Xmas presents & stuff.
Visit the aged P's & nieces/nephews pre-Xmas (something that otherwise wouldn't have happened).
Re-read my collection of Chandler novels and some technical books lent by our Captain.
Do some online uniform research.
Go for a really good daytime drink with mates on Christmas eve afternoon (and recruit possible fighter for the group).
Go to see Avatar on the big, 3d screen (Well I liked it..).
Have long lunches with dear friends.
Tidy my room (a marathon, two day operation; including the handing to charity shop of some five jumpers, seven pairs of trousers and twelve shirts – all of which have strangely shrunk since they were last worn – and boldly dusting where no duster has gone before).
Start tidying the room in the roof (ditto. Three day operation).
Start sorting my living history kit (repairing fighting shirt, boots etc.)
Work on CV variants.
Consider how I can put up the curtains that the new cats pulled down.
Order stuff (rare books etc.) online for mates & buy things for m'self.
Do research, plan website and other details for new, self-employed initiatives.
Cleared today's snow from the steps & the pavement fronting the house (granular cat litter makes good grit).
Fully appreciate the support I've received from other officers, union reps. and Elected Members aware of my situation (and what led up to it) - including those people who have mailed & texted me, stopped me in the street, corridors etc. to offer support (and even sent flowers & cards).
Add to this blog.

So.... Re. this suspension lark. Not seen any disadvantage to me, thus far – and as I'm leaving the job anyway (to go self-employed). As a soon-to-be ex-officer and as a tax payer, I object to this (the service delivery shortfall and the waste of public funds) but as lil' ol' me, sitting in here in the warm, looking out at the snow, without a care in the world, things seem pretty good.....

So, a Happy New Year to you all.. Oh, and don't let the b*****ds grind you down....

And then I blinked.......

2009-03-24T22:01:00.003Z

& all of a sudden three months have swept past, with nary a ripple to show for them...

Well, Mali was an experience..... A nice, small group (three Brits, an Australian, two Canadians, a South African and two Americans) an excellent local guide, good drivers and jolly boatmen (plus cook).

I'm not going to do the tour guide bit (look up Wiki for the details) but it's a big country (understatement), generally flatish, with dry scrub & trees, rising at the Donga Escarpment (200k of rock face, shooting up from the plains) and fading off into the desert above Timbuctoo. Lots of travelling (roads pretty good). Three days on the Niger. Music Festival at Segou. Varied villages. Massive mud mosques. Good food. Hard work, but worth it.

Not a huge amount of wildlife. We saw hippo, birds (lots of fire finches, herons, egrets, hornbills, parroty things) and lizards. Top spot - Djenne & the days on the Niger. Biggest let-down - Timbuctoo itself.

For me the most memorable part of the trip was the people. The ethnic/religious mix within the country (apparently with minimal rivalries/tensions) was fascinating (and an example to the rest of us). The people everywhere friendly. I've put some pics on. Hopefully they'll speak for themselves.

A worthwhile trip, some amazing memories - not least for another one of those coincidences you just wouldn't bet on. The American gentleman, a retired pilot named Jim, was with the US military in Bushire, Iran at the same time I was working there, pre (and for him, during) the Revolution. We'd possibly even drank in the Taft club at the same time....

Otherwise life goes on. Work (the necessary evil). Making, polishing & repairing kit for the fighting season.

2008-12-31T18:59:00.005Z

Well, another year begins, and so, as am I’m about to launch off on another trip with Joan, this time to Mali * (while in the midst of getting my gear together for another season of fighting &ct) I thought I’d run through a quick, personal review of the last twelve months….

(*Inc. Timbuktu – which, I was assured by three different people, isn’t a real place at all, but is where the Mister Men live…. Honestly!!)

Work has been its usual mix of tedium, frustration and crossness-making idiocy on the part of others (always others, obviously : ) ) leavened with moments of jolly banter and occasional flashes of job satisfaction. Nuff’ said about that…..

Hols: A trip to Brittany with the archaeology group (a part of the world new to me, and which was really good), but that was about it (apart from the fighting trips). Saving my leave for Mali .

Bookses; I have read (& re-read) more this year than I have for a while: Lots of old fave historical fiction - Wallace Breem ("Eagle in the snow", "The Legate's Daughter", Shipway’s, “Imperial Governor”, “Strangers in the Land” & “Free Lance”, Duggan’s “Winter Quarters”, "The King David Report" by Stefan Heym, Claud Cockburn's "Jericho Road", Holt’s “A Song For Nero”…

New ones (to me) included C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake adventures (Dissolution, Dark Fire & Revelation), Tales from Firozsha Baag (Rohinton Mistry), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Moshim Hamid), My Name Was Judas (C.K. Stead), Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (For the first time!! Yes. I know…!)

Non fiction included some new ones: Urban’s “Fusileers”, Red Sabbath (a new reading of the 1876 Rosebud campaign by R.J. Kershaw), Elizabeth ’s Spymaster (R. Hutchinson). Plus some re-reads: - In the Lion’s Court (D.Wilson) particularly standing out again..

Finished off with re-reads of a scattering of Kipling faves (following a new biography of himself’s early years; “Kipling Sahib”, by Charles Allen) a couple o’ Pratchetts and a peppering of potboilers..

Friend-wise I’ve hardly seen anyone, apart from my Sunday night drinking partner Pete, on any regular basis… A couple of nights in Clapham with old school friend Nige. A few soup or tucker n’ dvd sessions with Marina . The odd lunch with Mo or Seven of Nine Fran. Occasional pub drop-ins with the re-enactment crew, random bump-into drinks with Smith etc…but that’s about it.

Films of note: “In Bruges ”, “Pan’s Labyrinth” & “Waltz with Bashir” probably topped the in-cinema ones.

TV: Nothing really to touch the sides at all (except the “discovery” of Family Guy – wondrous – and the horrid fascination of watching the younger me in elements of Sheldon out of “The Big Bang Theory”).

Games: Dungeon Siege 2 and the guilty pleasures of GTA san Andreas…

General stuff: Inspired by Joan’s efforts in tracing her roots, and TVs “”Who Do You Think You Are” (the Ainslie Herriot and Boris Johnson ones were priceless) I did a little digging on the Denyer ancestry side.. Got back to the 1780s - which I thought was pretty good (still have to chase up some Parish Records). It was easier than I had expected, mainly due to the fact that we Denyer folk did nothing (Nothing! Nada! Zilch!) in two hundred years - apart from losing a small farm and moving about eight miles up the road (to become road labourers)...

Notable events n’ issues: Obama (obviously). The reminder that bankers really, really, really don’t know what they’re doing (yet are still the cleverest con-merchants ever). The continuing mess that is Zimbabwe & The Congo & Gaza . The ghastly anachronism that is Saudi Arabia . Terrorism generally. The fall of the Met. police’s credibility re. competence and honesty. The sheer awfulness, irresponsibility and downright cheapness of the British press. The continuing decline in broadcasting standards. The Fall of the Today programme etc. etc. (moan, moans moan….)

Hobby-wise….. Well I cobbled together three, near consistent costumes for the re-enactment side; a) a more appropriate fighting kit, b) a slightly posher “posh” kit (for when I get lumbered with playing “nobs”) and c) a fluffier Landsknecht outfit…

Add a GoP sailor’s outfit & Hollywoodish pirate, just for silliness sake and that was probably enough for the year... Next I have to sort out a tent, get some maille voiders (to protect me underarms) and a maille skirt, plus make a better fighting jack. Oh, and maybe some upper leg armour.

Medieval shows: We did Antwerp & Bretten over the water. Wars of the Roses events at Tewkesbury , Bosworth & Blore Heath. Less serious fairs at Herstmonceax, Michelham and our own little event at Hangleton, down here in Sussex , Next year? Who knows..

Apart from the usual fighting & living history, the highlights were; sharing a camp at Antwerp with our friends from Bretten (helping set up their amazingly clever and organised laager and fighting alongside their pike block – plus a little pike practice ourselves using their seriously long, poking sticks), the Peter & Paul Fest at Bretten itself (as always) and Sapper and me trying out some late medieval/early Tudor surveying techniques at Michelham (detailed account will follow)..

Resolutions for the New Year..? MUST LOSE WEIGHT!!! Plus exercise more, eat less, wear my maille around the house, practice sword & bill moves etc. etc. (the usual)… I’ll try to update here, but if I do keep remembering to top this up from time to time, then I’m not doing enough in "real life"… : )

Well, that’s it. The New Year begins, and what will be will be. Have a prosperous and peaceful New 'un….

Gosh, how time flies......

2008-11-17T23:13:00.009Z

More than a year has passed since the Today Generation thing, and to be frank, I'd forgotten all about this Blog. But an idle hour, the credit crunch and some prompting from outside has led me to tap away once more....

The news has, of course been all about money & the US elections and the latest outpouring of "moral outrage" from the yellow press over something else they'll forget about in a couple of weeks.. So all dull as ditchwater, something we've all of us (over a certain age) seen before & nothing to do with/to interest me really (c'ept a vague routing for Obama)..

Work (yuk) has been it's usual wrestling with politicos, legal dept., nimbys, staff and the hard of understanding..

Leisure has been a jolly holiday in Brittany with the archaeology group and Ischia(plus am saving up for trip to Mali in Jan), sewing,too much reading and lots of fighting weekends (medieval reenactment, not casual violence or footballian fisticuffs)at home, The Netherlands & Germany.

I will be thinking of a theme for this over the next couple of weeks, and next year will put more in about the reenactment side, since some folk seem interested in that (was asked to do a talk about it for the arch. soc. - but not enough folk subscribed :) ). Also, may submit a little more about me travels etc. - so long as I don't get too "when I was in Poonah" -ish...

Well, that was something of nothing wasn't it.. Idle ramblings really. Must try harder next time. Toodle pip for now...

Today, Yesterday..

2007-11-14T21:50:00.003Z

Well children, the birthday & the Today Generation thang passed by without incident....

The loop seemed to have unlooped somehow & there was a rescheduling or something, so I missed the whole event + there was no de-brief (as if); but that's the wonderful world of the Medja fo' ya.

Anyhoo, as I was really only doing this for the wireless thing I'll drop it for now; sorry to all those who were hanging on my next "exciting" installment (Hah!!).

If I get really bored, or housebound through some ghastly debilitating illness I'll maybe take up the task again & do some happy tapping. Who can say.
Hey, Ho,and on we go.. If you have been, many thanks...

Signing off now.
Have fun. Be happy.
Denyer.

Coren...

2007-10-19T22:19:00.000+01:00

I heard today the very, very sad news that Alan Coren has died....

I can't remember being so affected by a "celeb" death for many, many moons (Lennon, Mercury, Churchill, JFK, Alastair Cooke etc.etc. fade into insignificance...).

I stumbled (and I still don't remember how) over Alan Coren in Punch, some time in the early seventies (when Punch was funny and the comic essay a staple of civilised life).

His mastery of the language, his talent for parody (I knew Hemingway through Coren long before I read Papa himself), his scathing stabs at the comical horror that was Idi Amin; all of these kick-started my love of words and parody and paradox and fun with prose... Some excerpts, certain phrases from his comical essays are so ingrained in my memory that they are part of my life - decades after last reading them...

And all that was long before I heard him on the wireless.

Back in the eighties, girlfriend Teresa sent off to him, asking for a fan pic for me (just as she did with heartthrob Geraldine McEwan - who sent back a still-treasured, signed photo). He replied with a charming, self-deprecating letter (still squirrelled away somewhere) regretfully bemoaning the fact that sending out his actual image was likely to put off female fans....

A lovely, lovely man; whose humour genuinely enriched my life, and who will be greatly missed.

Today Generation: The "O" level....

2007-10-18T22:48:00.000+01:00

I've been looking over the blog entries for the last few weeks..... I have rambled on rather haven't I (diagnosis: I really ought to get out more..).

Any road up; The other week us Today Generation folk were sent another e-mail from the new production team; this time asking us to give thought to a number of comments/statements/queries from an historian.

Well, yours truly had a think - but was at a loss as to how to approach this....
So, being pretty unimaginative, decided to rephrase the bits sent to us as if they were exam questions. So here they are; the Today Prog. "O" Level questions (the "o" is, of course, supposed to stand for old.... Yes. I know we probably only class as middle-aged, but I'm clutching at straws here dear reader. Tolerance please).

PAPER ONE:FAMILY -
Question 1)The image of the family in the 50s was strong - a family Britain. Discuss the change from the traditional extended family in the 50s and 60s to the small nuclear family now, considering whether slum clearances were partly responsible for causing a dispersal of people.

Given that there were no slums in our neck of the woods; small, smaller than average, basic houses & terraced cottages certainly, but most are still standing today (and fetching nice prices thank you very much) this is pretty unlikely.....

The diaspora of our particular tribe would seem to be largely due to social and economic changes for the better - i.e. changes in attitudes (the widening of same), increased social opportunities and material security/success, rather than mere physical displacement.

The extended family of my youth - with its innumerable aged aunts (particularly aunts), uncles, associated cousins, grand Ps. and hangers-on (honorary aunts with no blood connection) was pretty vast - but we certainly weren't living in each others' pockets (or back yards). We saw these folk at family rites of passage, occasional teas or formal "visits", but we were already pretty scattered geographically, even by the early sixties (from the Witterings at the coast, through West Surrey and East Hants. up to the southernmost reaches of London).

Scattered as we were already, there was no local ("village" or "estate") social pressure to show family solidarity and so family contacts just tailed off in the seventies. With the death of the older generation and as wider social circles beckoned and the increased opportunities for jobs away from home led folk away, the extended family just withered untended.

I would say that the biggest factors in the dissolving of our own extended family have been voluntary - and not forced by pressures from "outside" - for example:

i ) The breakdown of social barriers and easing of conventions: At school I was able to build a far wider social circle than seems to have been the case with earlier generations. Practically all social classes attended the local schools and mixed-in together. The same was true at grammar school - where there was a wider social mix than in our village.

[Irrelevant note: even though I was from a far lower draw than most of the boys at the grammar school I never encountered any social/class barriers or bias until my mid twenties - when "mockney" became fashionable and my normal Surrey accent suddenly became labelled "middle class" (leading to attempted bullying and even threats of assault because suddenly I was perceived as "posh").

Funnily enough this prejudice against perceived "posh" accents seems to be one of the few that people seem to consider reasonable nowadays - even to the extent that it is apparently thought acceptable to joke about having such a prejudice at otherwise strictly PC local-government equalities seminars]

I would say that this mixing of all sorts - and the fact that we all pretty much sounded the same and all wore pretty much the same (school uniform) meant that the number of potential friends and partners my peers had access to increased, compared to the world my parents grew up in. Later, we could also contact each other without the need for parental consent should we so wish.

Partly as a result of this wider social circle, gone was the idea of the family providing friends and a "marriage pool" - we made our own friends and chose our own girlfriends (or not), thank you very much. There was therefore no need to keep in contact with (or to be made to keep in contact with) cousins etc. for social reasons.

ii) The ending of the custom/obligation of maintaining family links; The expectation that one had an obligation to maintain contact, other than at funerals, christenings and the occasional wedding, simply evaporated with the grandparents.

Apart from our immediate cousins on my fathers' side I have not seen any of my other non-sibling relations for many, many moons - and probably would be hard-pressed to contact them if I needed to. If we have seen any of them at all over the last twenty-five years it would have been at funerals.

iii) Most influential of all to my mind is the removal of the need for an extended family in times of want, thanks to the Welfare State and general prosperity. As there was now a "safety net" (and as none of our extended family had influence or contacts or were in a position to help others with jobs or materially in any case) any factor of self-interest in maintaining contacts didn't exist.

With social restrictions, family obligations and self-interest/need being removed the natural disinterest of the young meant that the extended family has softly and silently vanished away.....

Nowadays, I see my parents, brother, sister, nieces & nephs. a handful of times a year (we also keep in touch by e-mail with one uncle & a cousin's family, both overseas), but that's about it....

I guess to sum it up; In my experience the extended family died not because of the break up of communities (slum clearances) or the growth of the nuclear family. It was going anyway, and was replaced by the nuclear family because we didn't need it and, in all honesty, didn't want it anymore...

Question 2) Do you feel that you differ from your mother and father? If so, how?

I believe that superficially I differ from my parents in many ways; I have always been interested in books, Art and drawing (although they may have been, given the opportunity). I am not as naturally gregarious and was never a teenager in spirit as them neither was I ever interested in fashion, music or peer culture in the way they were when they were young (my mother was really insistent that I ought to go out dancing etc and would have liked it if I had been more sociable). Maybe these are personality differences, not generational ones - but to be frank, I think a lot of this is down to the fact that, although basic in material terms, my life as a child was pretty good, free and easy. I had nothing to rebel against. I had no experience of the war or rationing. By my time there were no serious social conventions to breach (until the invention of Feminism) and no unpleasantness to escape, perhaps unlike their childhoods.

In many ways I am less conventional than my parents, but then I am also less conventional than my brother and sister (both married with kids). However, as I never felt there was an expectation on my parents part that I should marry or have a family this may not be relevant.

(Note: My experience was very unlike that of a contemporary of mine from a Yorkshire family, who felt he had to marry early or be branded "a poof" by the family. You can imagine what his dad made of me "Still unwed - at 25!!!" Actually he was really a very lovely, tolerant man - with a great sense of humour. We got on like a house on fire).

Unlike my parents in their earlier days(but like my siblings) I feel no significant need to maintain family ties or obligations to folk I don't like or wish to see.

The biggest real differences are due, I think, to the fact that I was lucky enough to go to a good, basic county primary school, and later a grammar school, rather than the local secondary. The latter fact, I believe, meant that any assumption that I would automatically go into some kind of manual/clerical/shop work following school was removed (the opposite assumption in fact being made - that grammar school boys didn't go on to do bricklaying, shelf stacking etc. and that they automatically had more options re. further education).

This simple fact meant that staying on at school after sixteen was an option for me, which it wasn't for them (my younger brother, grammar school again, even went on to University - first in our family).

It also led to my pastimes and interests being different from what they would have been, as different data and outlooks became available to me.

Basically, because of this simple chance - the chance of going to a different school - my brother and I had greater opportunities than my parents ever had - leading us to slip up into the middle class (our little sister however never had the opportunity to go to a grammar school - they were abolished in Surrey before she had the chance - and so that "progress" in that way never happened).

Also as a result, my brother's children will almost certainly go on to further education and already have "middle class" aspirations and hobbies. My sister's, thus far, do not seem to - although they are equally bright, lively, interesting and interested.

To again summarise: If I had to point to anything as being the major difference, I would say that it is this (though I hate such labels): my parent are are "working class", I am perceived (though just as much a wage-slave) as "middle class" - and have had "middle class" opportunities (thanks to the grammar school). In itself this is a pretty meaningless difference, but what this difference has done is to actually made me a "citizen of the world" in a way my parents never were nor will be.

Question 3) Examine the relationship between the more recent pressures on the nuclear family & the rise in divorce rates.

Not really my palaver this..... I can only talk of my own direct experience, but none of the nuclear families I know seem to be under any more external pressure than those I was aware of as a kid - e.g. genuine poverty, sickness, uncertainty over their future etc.. In fact, people on average seem generally wealthier and materially better off than they were when I was young. Housing is certainly better. Things are more stable economically. People have more opportunities. The only families that I personally know of that have had serious problems are the ones where kids (with more "stuff", more opportunities, more freedom than most of my generation) have gone off the rails...

There do seem to be plenty of self-created pressures though: the tendency to marry/start breeding before establishing yourselves financially, "need" to "buy" a home (as if any of us ever actually own it anyway), the drive for possessions (that end up possessing you), the kow-towing to fashion and trends - and the failure to guide their children away from those particular tyrants.....

However ,never having had experience of a family divorce I'm not really qualified to say much (the only divorce really close to me involved a friend who married early because of family pressure - and divorced swiftly afterwards - causing even more family upset than remaining single would have). All I will say is that, from my observations it seems to me that it is the trivialising of marriage, the ease of divorce, the lack of commitment (or the not realising what a promise actually is) and the lack of social pressure (and removal of stigma) that once would have meant people "sticking it out" when the dream turns out not to be perfect that is to "blame" rather than social pressure....

But as I say - I'm not best qualified on this as I have never intended to make a promise I don't believe I could keep (which, to me, is what marriage is).

Question 4) Families in the 50s 60s didn't engage in "frank talk." Could family meals all sat down together be torture? Now there's more emotional openness. Discuss.

We only really ate as a family at weekends. These meals were perhaps more formal than in some households today (if families still eat together, I wouldn't know).

However, to me the kind of self-indulgent emotional openness I have witnessed at some other families' dinner tables has been more horrific that any "torturous", staid 60s gathering I ever experienced. I am perhaps a tad old fashioned in some respects - and really would not like to live in a domestic version of the Big Brother household...

Paper Two: WORK -
Question 1)Consider and discuss the statement; "In 1957 the workplace was more stable, a full employment economy with benefits from the Commonwealth. You were "in a job (public or private sphere) for life." Global influences enter in the 70s 80s".

I was too young in 57 to really comment.. In the 60s and 70s my father's work was dependant on incoming orders to the family firm for which he worked. My mother too only had work when it was available.
Maybe there was an assumption of a job for life in the 50s & sixties, but that had certainly gone by the time I started work - my first redundancy was at 22 and all later ones were the result of the housing/building collapse of the late 80s/90s - which as far as I'm aware were caused by local factors (but then, what do I know...).

Question 2) Examine the effect on your life of changes in manufacturing (especially the Midlands, Scotland, Miners, Steel /Sheffield etc.) and of technology/ smoking in the work place …

Well, for a start, we're "all middle class now" aren't we (hah!).

Actually, if I am going to be selfish and blunt (and realistic) about this - and only look at how things have affected my life (i.e. my personal quality of life) - and ignoring my finer political/social feelings (despite the risk of coming over all Littlejohn-ish) the loss of the major manufacturing industries in this country has made very little difference..

My periods of scratching around for work have been unrelated to manufacturing ups n' downs and I have never lived or worked in an "industrial town", so that as far as my own employment and environment has been concerned, ebbs and flows in the manufacturing industries have been pretty much irrelevant - except when/if they affected the building trade.

However, in my experience as a consumer, manufactured goods now are a darn sight cheaper, more stylish and, in many cases, more reliable than when we did it ourselves here in the UK - so really, it looks like the loss of our manufacturing base has really been for the better....

Oh, and lots of jobs have been created in other, more needy countries, and this is brilliant; there is no shortfall in actual production due to inefficiency, few significant strikes, costs are lower (see above) - plus there are fewer people dependant upon agriculture alone "out there" - keeping them from starving and appearing forlornly my telly like they used to (as I say, I am deliberately looking at this with cold blinkers on - and not as the kind of reasonably caring, liberal minded, vaguely left-of-centre bod I actually am ).

The medieval business of grubbing-up coal has pretty much gone, along with the associated mess, unnecessary illnesses,deaths and disruptive political agendas of it's leader/s.

The TUC is a toothless background noise and there are fewer strikes of what were somehow (but not now strangely)"key" workers to derail the democratic process, prevent me from getting on with my own life or just to irritate me generally by clogging up the news bulletins.

Nope: I really miss industrial Britain not one whit....

Yes, I appreciate that communities have lost their reason for being there or have vanished, but there's nothing new there - history, and the vanished villages on the Downs close to where sit now, tell us that. But that hasn't affected me or mine,so what me worry?

Yes, the chickens will undoubtedly come home to roost in a generation or so, when the Developing World decides it has had enough of doing the dirty jobs thank you very much and wants to move into "service industries " too - undercutting us into becoming an economic eunuch as a by-product (we have seen the start of the trend with call-centres and some financial services already). But, again, nothing new there. You can't buck "progress". You learn and you adapt - if not, you go under (but hopefully I'll be dead n' gone by then).

The question spoke about "my life"; so that's me answer..

Question 3) Technology:

I've dealt with this elsewhere (IT mainly).

Question 4) Smoking:

Never have. Never will.

Never made a difference to me wowork wiseapart from me having to weave through people cluttering up the doorways into offices & kicking through the litter of fag ends).

Used to hate it in pubs mark you, before the introduction of air circulation (eyes used to react + the smell after - ugh.. And I still recall the "yuck" factor the first time I snogged a girl smoker).

Actually, to the point for once, smoking was only ever been allowed in one place I've actually worked, and that was in the office of a small, private company - and only the owner and his dad smoked anyway.

Drinking, however, is a different matter. When I first stated work drinking was an almost an extension of work - and de rigeur in some places. Three pint lunchtimes were quite normal. Now, if I drink any alcohol at all - even have a half of shandy -in my own time, and then go into work, I can be sacked.

PAPER THREE: LEISURE -
Question 1)Around 1957 the Radio Times changed the order of its listings, TV now came before Radio. Discuss this, and examine the proposition that at the same time there was a decline in visiting the cinema.

Well, my brother & I used to go to Saturday morning pictures, but other trips were pretty few & far between. To be frank, taking out the Sat. stuff, I probably go to the cinema as much or more now than in the 60s (but then, I hardly watch TV these days).

In my opinion TV stopped us kids playing outside, more than it affected cinema trips (which cost money). Can't answer for the 50s though.

Question 2) "Leisure used to be simple. Stats show the working class dominated and was focused around football/ rugby/cricket. Following the decline of the working class came motor cars. With more travelling further afield possible & football crowds went down in number". How does this statement differ, if at all, from your own experience?

My brother & father used to go to see Woking play occasionally, and my brother played - but the assumptions posited sound very Northern/Midlands/urban focused to me....

None of my friends were serious football fans - at least not to the point of going to matches. There were knock-abouts in the local Rec., we had token "loyalties" (I was supposed to support West ham and my brother Chelsea; but I don't recall ever sitting through a whole match - even on telly) and we collected the World-cup medals from the petrol stations and cards with players on from bubble gum or tea packets; but that was really the extent of our interest. There were much more fun things to do..

Question 3) "Holiday camps for the masses transformed over the 5 decades to favour more individual holidays". Discuss in relation to the holidays of yourself, family and friends.

Not the case with us (again). We were not great holiday people...

Our earliest holidays were just day trips - mainly Sunday School outings to Littlehampton or to see relatives. Later, with the car, we went as a family down to Hayling Island (and at least once with some friends of my parents and their family), but this was to stay in funny little private chalets rather than to holiday camps (not least because the camps were a bit too pricey for us at first).

Later on we occasionally went to Butlins (Bognor and Clacton), I would say about three or four times in all, but our holiday practice never really underwent any significant change at all over the years. Even today, my parents and sister's family still go down to Hayling for their annual break.

However, holidays, though a welcome change, were not what could be called great escapes; we usually simply relocated - although I was taken off by our grandparents on my mother's side a few times: Torquay - and once to Jersey!!! Practically abroad!!

When I got older, I didn't always go down to the coast with the family, but spent the time at home - and once I left home I pretty much gave up on holidays altogether for a while (I was doing enough travelling at work, thank you very much). In fact, most years, I didn't even use up my annual leave entitlement. My dad would probably have been the same, were it not for the family.

As my jobs allowed me a reasonable amount of free time or flexibility, holidays were pretty much irrelevant. There would be rare trips away with old school mates or newer friends (packages to Spain & a holiday in Ireland in the mid eighties) but otherwise holidaying for me meant being at home, reading or hobbyising.

It was not until my late twenties when hardened-traveller Joan got me back into the globe-trotting habit. Since then I have been to places my parents (and the younger I) would never have dreamed of going to.

As far as the question goes, we're talking about Midlands/Northern/urban masses again - not my background or experience...

Well - I've failed that one (wandering off subject, not answering the question etc. etc. - and worst of all, sounding like a columnist from the Daily Wail!!!).

Seventies Iran I: Ships and stories..

2007-10-09T19:38:00.000+01:00

Bandar Abbas:

One of the luckiest breaks of my life was being given the chance to work in Iran - and twice!! We are talking late seventies, pre-revolution, and a country and people to whom, with perhaps the exceptions of Italia & India (the three Is), I took to like no other….

The first trip was to Bandar Abbas (Autumn 1977); Iran’s main naval base down on the Persian Gulf - and one of the several sites (like Bandar Bushire) for the nuclear reactors the Shah was then being encouraged to build by the US (funny to think that if the revolution had been delayed the Iranians would have had nuclear power for some decades by now).

Even after Nigeria, the Gulf seemed very hot and very humid (relative humidity 66%).
It was also very dry on the ground.

Compared to Nigeria's almost overwhelming lushness, Southern Iran's countryside seemed Spartanly sere.

I seem to recall being told that that I was sent out to replace a chap who, practically on his first day in the country, had gone out to his work station, at the end of a long mole, clad in only shorts. Fooled by the sea breeze, he was flown home the following day, burned to a crisp..

Work was warm, but not hard (compared with Nigeria).

We had little genuine free time here; we were based in a work-camp - a weird little world all of itself – with private rooms, food galore (but all Western) free cinema etc. etc. This was all a little odd to me, comfortable, but a bit institutionalised. The chaps in the camp were a pretty mixed bag, but generally friendly. We were only there a matter of weeks, but some guys had contracts that lasted yonks. Not for me I feel.

Myths n' Money:
There were the usual work stories, the kind of urban myths that you find everywhere I guess: like the tale of the chap who collapsed at noon while alone in the oven that was one of the dry docks; and of the guy sent down to get him out, who likewise collapsed, and the next guy ditto, and the next (etc. etc. till twilight)……

Oh, and the one about two of the Iranian Navy’s new F14s who were sent out to sea, to see how far they got before they ran out of fuel.

The best one, for my money, concerned the “Israeli” 200 rial note:

The story went that apparently, in 1974, there was uproar when the Iranian government issued a new 200 rial banknote - identical to previous issues, bar one small detail; it had the Star of David on the back.

Previously the star in question had been the traditional ten pointed star.

Rumour had it that the Shah had had these new notes printed in Israel - or, even worse, that they were Israeli forgeries intended to destabilise the Iranian economy..

In point of fact, the six pointed star is a traditional Islamic symbol too (not least because it is also known as Solomon's Seal). Despite this there were outraged protests. Official assurances that the notes were home made, and nothing to do with Israel, fell on deaf ears, and the offending dosh had to be withdrawn.

I like urban myths (esp. when they are largely true; see below, two notes from my money box).

Work & memories:
Chatting to dock workers & staff at the camp was interesting – I found the Iranian workers very friendly, although they usually seemed to assume that I was Italian – but apart from the old bazaar and unexpected Hindu temple in the town, the mud skippers and dhow-like boats on the beach, and the huge bridges over dry river beds out in the scrubby hinterland, we saw little of the real Iran.

The most abiding memory outside of work was the appearance of many of the women; with strange, half-masks; some red, some plain, some decorated. others were black, beak-like and slightly scary...

There was also the new strip of dual carriageway (with streetlights, central reservation and all)that led out to nothing but a patch of sandy scrub…; allegedly where the Shah’s helicopter landed on state occasions…

The project we were working on was odd, not to say a little surreal at times (or perhaps like something out of an Ealing comedy).

We were there to carry out a hydrographic survey of one of the outer basins of the naval yards.

Meanwhile, the SS Michelangelo (see pic. - described, so I’m told, as greatest Italian liner ever) was hove-to, bobbing outside the port, waiting to start the rather sad last phase of her useful life - as a floating barracks for some 1800 Iranian seamen.

Our job, as I recall, was to survey the dock, not least to make sure the dock was deep enough for her. My role, as junior, was to stand marooned at the end of a mole (that seemed to stretch out for ever) with a theodolite, EDM and umbrella (for the theodolite) to take sightings on the guy doing the depth reading, who would be in a boat juggling a prism and a depth finder…

Sat. pic. of my old work station, nicked from the Web.

One small flaw in the plan: We had hydrographic surveyors. We had lots of survey equipment & radios…… But boat had we none…. Luckily the Imperial Iranian Navy was willing to help out.

First day, a navy-issue, battleship grey cabin-cruiser; very nice, and with a jolly little crew, but far too high out of the water for the survey equipment to reach the waves.

Second day a couple of sailors and a D-day style, drop-fronted landing craft. Better, but too high sided for use or comfort.

Third day – and success; a black inflatable, with outboard motor and single sailor with a walkie-talkie.. We’d seen these little boats, flitting between the warships like water-beetles; fast, low and nimble.. Ideal… Except that the I. I. N. obviously didn’t have enough of them; as we found after a couple of hours when our boat, equipment – and a shouting, fist-waving surveyor and all - peeled off & away to answer an errand among the sleek, grey shapes in the main harbour…

Oh, and then, a couple of days later, the outboard blew up (peering though my theodolite. One second I could see boat and dipping hydrographer. Next, just a puff of grey smoke), result, a sad limp back to the battleships….

We got there in the end though and the Michelangelo came to rest (her last useful job, wallowing in the detritus of ninety score matelots, before the breakers).

Some years later I met a chap on a ferry to Crete, (Andy & Sue - now two friends of long-standing) who, at the same time I was surveying in Bandar Abbas for the Iranian navy, was surveying the Gulf for our own R.N. off that very same coast. Small world innit…

Bandar Abbas was a slightly odd taster of a new (to me ) country. My second job in Iran was longer, and much, much more interesting. I'll tell of that another time...

Fashion, smashion.......

2007-10-08T21:56:00.002+01:00

Family, fashion and me...

As I reclined in my office this morning, sveltely clad in my bespoke, dark
purple cashmere suiting, salmon silk shirt, silken tie, and gleaming brogues*, I bethought myself of the trends, tricks and twirls of the world of dress - and how elegantly, yet discretely, I have so often led the way for the fickle fairy of fashion ….

(*note: This may not be considered by some as an accurate picture of my work attire...)

From my earliest days the tartan bow ties (a budding bandleader?), artlessly crinkled panties (note the blond locks... What happened there?) and, if in playful mood, cheekily camp cowboy accessories marked me out as a budding Beau Brummel.

The matching navy and white play suits worn my brother Gary and myself for photo-shoots (see opp.) speak volumes, as do the hat, big collar and "cardy" look..

Family pics show my more formal side, with button-down collars, buttonhole and shiny shoes.........

and those classical cricket whites for family sporting occasions.

By the late seventies my own leisurewear was tending towards the wearing of many layers..
I still recall the comment of the young lady Dresser when, stripping prior to being costumed for a school revue, I removed first my bush hat, parka (with the mock squirrel-fur trim on the hood) and Tom Baker Tribute scarf (two school issue House scarves sewn together), my denim frock coat (actually more a long, denim Oxford jacket, but who’s quibbling) my stylish Marks & Sparks brown & buff lozenge on ivory “Val Doonican style” jumper and a dark blue shirt with little red cars on it - to finally reach my Tooth-rotting Pepsi parody* tee shirt. “Stop there” she said “or they’ll be nothing left of you”… My how we laughed….

(* a parody of the 1974 Lipsmackin thirst quenchin (ace tastin motivatin good buzzin cool talkin high walkin fast livin ever givin cool fizzin) Pepsi slogan – wish I could remember the parody version. Even the Wibbly Wobbly Web hasn’t helped….).

Alas, there is no extant image of me in this ensemble. Neither are there any with me sporting my wide collared, pink-Meso-American pattern on white shirt with identical pattern matching tie and blue denim peaked cap. No pictorial record has been found of my toxic green bandanna, baseball boots, wide, frayed and flare bottomed jeans - the latter occasionally supplanted by white Oxford Bags. The loss of my two-sizes-too-big WWII vintage US Army raincoat – with detachable lining - is particularly deplored (not least for the pocket space – two bottles of wine in each pocket!!).

The nearest image we have to this colourful period is this tiny snap: my buff and brown shirt, bearing the images of those icons of high comedy, Laurel and Hardy, under a carelessly crushed, shiny cotton Safari jacket. Breathtaking neh?

A group snap again shows that high fashion was very much the order of the day au famille.. Note the brown suit. Classic lines….

Alas, again, a discontinuity in the record mean that my early twenties are, for the most part, unrecorded pictorially. The lack of any image of me in plimsolls, ill-matched fluorescent yellow and green socks, oversized cavalry twill trousers, bottle- green buttoned-collared shirt, red with blue polka-dot bow tie (or occasionally, blue, paisley patterned fringed scarf-cum-cravat), white silk opera scarf, baggy Italian camouflage jacket and tweed hat – with my trademark yellow Bic biro behind my ear - is surely a loss to posterity…

There is one snap (Circia 82?) - of mate Smith, and me in said jacket.

Note silk opera scarf just in view.. and natty accessory of mag crammed into top pocket..

What artless elegance..

With maturity came discretion.. No more the eclectic, even eccentric, pairings of items. Now it was co-ordinated; either Marlowesque-formal (buff trench coat and either bow or garish forties-style ties), military (thanks to army surplus: German Bundeswher shirts were particularly the thing.

Also, there were RAF seventies-style overalls and the “Russian naval look” – blue shell jacket, stripy tee shirt and beret) or for more casual events,“Redneck Leisure” (checked shirts & denim).

My family has, as always, been an inspiration...

And so to more recent times. Black, black and more black (of course). Overseas, natty light blue, with occasional cricket hat. Morning coat and topper for shopping.

At home nowadays,when in lighter mood, my tailors, Messrs Primarké or Cotton Traders, do me proud (beige is so much the thing, don’t you feel)...
Note the rather nice charity shop waistcoat and slip-on deck shoes..
Style never leaves one, does it...

For those special occasions, away-days and expeditions over the water, a chap can’t really do better than Burgundian colours and tin, can he…

And for home games with friends,or ecpecting foreign visitors, doesn't it just have to be maille & a winning smile...

Remember, you are, apparently, what you wear.
Dress nice..

Persian Reflections...

2007-10-08T20:31:00.000+01:00

Always time
for tea,
rice and
kebab..

I've been musing on the changes I noted between my visits to
pre-revolutionary Iran and my all-too brief return, back in the nineties...

First impressions of my revisit: well, nothing much had changed at Mehrabad airport: There were no longer huge US military transport planes at the sides of the airfield, security and immigration procedures seemed slightly tighter and took a little longer - but the former was understandable and the latter no more than in many other places. However, while we waited to have our passports stamped, there was one glaring alteration - instead of the memorable colour portraits of the Palavis on the wall behind the booths there was the somewhat grimmer visage of the late Ayatollah Khomeini gazing down.

I don't recall whether it was at the airport, en-route to our hotel or at the hotel itself that I saw my first "Death To The USA" declaration. There was a particularly unsubtle "Down With" sign at the hotel (see pic), but these were about here and there; on billboards & posters or painted on walls (along with occasional images of an evil looking lion or Mrs. Thatcher) without anyone taking any notice -though when juxtaposed with (to us) the unmistakably American images of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck (American? Whatever he's speaking it's not GB English) on a kindergarten wall or children's playground this just seemed a tad surreal....

Tehran:Tehran seemed brighter and bigger and slightly more modern in parts, with huge, towering hotels that I didn't remember, but the traffic was still horrendous (I recall hearing when we were in Shiraz back in 77/78 that one particular day had been declared "Obey The Rules Of The Road Day". I don't remember this making any difference at the time). A lot of new young trees seemed to have been planted next to the main roads, but most of these appeared to have withered anyway.

There were, I would say, more black (as opposed to lighter-coloured) chadors about, but with more denim-clad legs and trainer-wearing feet below them than I remembered, and maybe there were more beards & fewer tweedy-looking jackets (on the men).

There were certainly no smartly-uniformed, late teenage schoolgirls about any longer, but there were many more "Italian" looking women - by which I mean ladies who would not have looked out of place on a winter street in, say, Florence; very smart overcoat (a kind of mustard yellow seemed popular) with a snazzy, multicoloured, expensive looking headscarf just concealing a hennaed quiff.

I was glad to see that, although females in Western dress had vanished, women were still driving cars, working in banks and official buildings and going too and fro with briefcases.

People were still as friendly, hospitable and willing to help as ever (I have always found the people in "the Middle East" seem to be much better than us here in the UK when it comes to accepting a visitor from a country that might officially be a "political enemy" as an individual, no matter what the government rhetoric, and apparently being willing to see him or her as a "guest" in their land, rather than as a potentially hostile foreigner. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've found that to be true in Iran, Libya and Syria, as well as in other countries where Western governments aren't as universally liked as most of us would wish us to be).

Oh, I almost forgot, when we were coming out of the old Shah's palace (now a museum to appalling taste; the tacky murals and the huge boots - all that remained of a colossal statue - stick in the memory) we met an American lady, married to an Iranian (and amazed that any Brits would want to come to Iran on vacation) who had lived there since before the Revolution; all through the US Embassy hostage crisis (& abortive rescue attempt), the Iran/Iraq war etc. etc. She said that she had not felt threatened or tainted or treated any differently despite the international situation. ..

Army games:
As I'd discovered before in Iran, despite an official "front", most police and military personnel were far more tolerant (or perhaps more laid back) regarding foreign (UK?) civilians than would be the case on bases here.

For example: our tour was archaeologically based, and on the itinerary were a number of ancient caravanserai's. Some of these, being fort-like in construction (four high walls, limited entrance ways, accommodation within) had been taken over since the Revolution as "drug rehabilitation centres" (prisons) or military establishments. The first of these we arrived at (walls plastered with a mural of a skull, stabbed with a syringe, on a background of the stars & stripes) had armed guards in evidence and looked pretty firmly out of bounds.

Nevertheless, our tour guide nipped over, returning a minute later saying the guard didn't think we could come in, but had sent someone to fetch the commander, who was asleep (it was very early in the morning). As it was (and not unexpectedly, given the nature of the establishment) the commander (in pyjama bottoms) apologised, but wasn't able to let us in. We were, however, allowed to take snaps. I don't see that happening at a similar secure establishment here (more likely you'd just get a sharp word from the Duty Sergeant).

At another caravanserai, now a fort, site we drew up to see helmeted and armed soldiers peering down at us from the ramparts. Again there was a discussion (not a "sling your hook") and an apology, and again an invitation to wander around the external perimeter and take pictures. Some of us did this, while others from the tour remained clustered around the gate.
By the time we'd done the circuit the guards at the gates and the remainder of our crew were getting on like a house on fire - with snaps being merrily taken of the troops, with the troops - and with some of our group posing with the soldiers' guns...

School day out at Persepolis.

Dress:As I said earlier, black chadors were in evidence, but not universal. Towards the south I again saw women in the fields working uncovered, just like before the revolution (realistically, how can you do manual labour in full hejab) and nomad women in towns, wearing the black chador, yes - but tied around the waist, over their traditional dress...

For men there was an alleged requirement for long-armed shirts to be worn throughout - though this didn't seem to be enforced. Noticeable from time to time was a peculiar, hybrid shirt/tie. With ties being frowned upon as "western", for formal wear (e.g the several, noticeably "western" style weddings we saw) men were sporting buying shirts with a narrow dark band from collar to shirt bottom (i.e. where a tie would hang) giving the appearance of having a straight tie on without actually wearing one (These seem to have dropped out of fashion - I have searched for a picture of one of these shirts everywhere, but can't find a single one. Really frustrating).

In Shiraz particularly we noticed that there were now some amazing womens' clothes shops - especially shoe & lingerie shops - with frilly, fancy or saucy over-the-top confections the like of which I have seen nowhere else in the world...

The Hejab Question:The arguments about the effect the Revolution has had on the status and behavior and freedom of women in Iran will run and run and I'm certainly not going to plunge too deeply into that one; but I will touch on three factors that were discussed with Iranian women - dress, education and employment.... These are broad brushstrokes - and represent what I was and have been told by Iranian women..

Although hejab is to many in the West a symbol of oppression, this is a limited view very much based upon our values and, in some cases, gross ignorance (our Pakistani labourers in 77 on the other hand, all good Muslim hillmen, thought the way Iranian women wrapped themselves up was hilarious - their own women in their village, we ascertained by sign language, seemed to dress in North Indian style).

We forget sometimes that the late Shah's father actually forced women to westernise by Law, with women who continue to follow traditional or religious dress codes risking being beaten. It was the strong opposition by women to the banning of the veil which led to this element of enforced westernisation being lifted in 1941.

We also forget that for many women wearing hejab in the period leading up to and during the revolution was a clear pro-democracy, anti-Shah statement, taken up by many, otherwise non-religious, westernised women. As the dictatorship of the Shah was western/US backed, the chador also came to symbolise a rejection of this foreign interference in Iran's politics. Even now, many Iranian women still see hejab as a statement of national identity rather than as purely a religious prohibition - particularly in the face of foreign, secular (once Iraqi, now Western) aggression . They may be pro-democracy and pro-choice, but when they see their country and culture under threat from outside, the chador is a statement of national solidarity.

Not for all of course - but stepping out of line may be, or be seen to be, a political statement in itself; the bright, coat & headscarf wearing middle-class ladies we saw in the bar (coffee) at the Abassi Hotel in Isfahan, with their scarves pushed back as far as they could get away with to show their make-up and dyed hair were described to us as "counter-revolutionaries".

But it would seem that for some Iranian women hejab being compulsory is not only symbolic, but also preventative; it represents their independence from western expectations and values - and prevents them being forced by society, family, peer or professional pressure to live in a Western, "immodest" manner with which they feel uncomfortable - as happened to many women before the Revolution. For many women the sex-and-appearance obsessed society we appear to have (and all the social problems they associate with it) are very unwelcome indeed. Hejab is seen as a way of standing against this. We ourselves agonise about women being viewed as sex-objects or being pressured into conforming to media or social stereotypes (and indeed about the sexualisation of childhood) but, trapped in our "liberal" straightjacket, can apparently see no way of putting the sex-genie back into the bottle. Perhaps is not surprising that some folk are reluctant to let that genie out.

As I say, I prefer freedom of choice; but then peer, social and family pressure is something I have always happily ignored when I've wanted to.. It may seem bizarre to some of us, but not everybody wants to be exposed to the kind of "freedom" to live in a society where others have the freedom to force them and their children into a situation which they perceive as being far more harmful simply than being told what to wear.

The situation probably isn't helped by the fact that some in our society (politicians and some of the western media) seems to be happy with people to have the freedom to democratise in "our" way, but not necessarily to be free to chose an alternative. Western attacks on Iranian democracy and the chador are not going to make people give it up. This hypocrisy does not go unnoticed by Iranian women..

One of the other things we forget is that we ourselves don't like being told what to do by those who "know better". Why should they like it or lump it, just because we believe we are "right" (how many other societies and regimes have thought the same in the past)? One day, Iranian women (who are, don't forget, very active politically) may one day decide to pressure seriously for a voluntary dress code, but until then Iran should be left to make it's own decisions.

Final thought (mine): We also forget that here in the UK have had our own periods of dress legislation; but we, as a society, were allowed to grow out of that ourselves, without foreign interference. I may be wrong, I would guess that if we English men had had some big-bully outsiders telling us what we should or shouldn't be wearing wear on our heads, we'd probably be bloody-mindedly sticking to wearing our Tudor Statute caps.

Education and employment: Education for women was an priority under the Shah, and many women benefited. However, because it was seen in some quarters as westernised and secular in many traditional or religious households - particularly in rural areas - there was much resentment and avoidance, so that the main beneficiaries of the education system were the urbanised, westernised middle classes.

With the Revolution the importance of education for women was still there (indeed, the options for education and careers have opened up immensely; apparently by 2003 sixty percent of university students were women) and with the Islamisation of the education system the more traditional, poorer classes now felt that they could safely send their girls to school - with the blessing of the Ayatollahs. This has made a significant impact on women's education and can only be good for Iran's democracy.

Job wise, I think my conversation with three young women in Esfahan and young lad in summed things up: The trio were all at university. One was studying to be a doctor (the young lad's sister was studying dentistry) and explained that for her, and women going into the medical/dental professions the Revolution had opened things up to an unexpected degree - as the Mullahs wanted more female health professionals: women to treat women, men to treat men. Unlike under the Shah new opportunities for women had opened and a glass ceiling pushed up a few floors within a few years. Can we say as much here...?

Oh, and I was surprised that, despite it being the tongue of the Great Satan, teaching English had been kept up in the schools - with some of the little kids I spoke to being practically fluent (even if some of them did ask if we were Japanese).

Politics:In the Shah's time you didn't discuss politics. At least nobody spoke to us about it. Only once, way out in the sticks and well away from prying ears, one of our new, casual labourers; a student from the town we were living in (most of our labourers were either illegal rural Pakistanis or settled Qashqai from the hills) asked me what I though of the Shah. I made some diplomatic answer. He then dropped the subject (at this time we were occasionally being shadowed by a saloon car. Given that we were miles from the nearest settlement, and in pretty rough terrain, we were all a little suspicious about this).

I only mention this because of the contrast on my post-revolution visit, when people were willing to talk about politics much more openly. I had several conversations, at busy tourist spots, on internal flights and in local airport concourses (where lots of folk understood English - and you didn't know who was sitting behind you) where folk were happy to tell, without prompting, what they liked and disliked about the new regime. Maybe this sounds pretty meaningless. But that never happened to me under the Shah.

The new Iran certainly more democratic than many countries we (or our leaders) approve of. It isn't perfect. It's religious leaders have (to our UK eyes anyway) too much influence. It has some old-fashioned ideas about women's place in society that we got rid of oh, decades ago (and only after centuries of democracy). The electorate is, in some ways, unsophisticated and uneducated; the same can be said of many lands. But they, like those who vote for our leaders and those of out allies, do so for a reason. We all know that, if threatened by outsiders or frightened by change every democracy - even ones hundreds of years old - can all too easily fall into the trap of voting for the hard man with the easy answers, the one who will fight their corner... I guess I would say, don't back them into a corner then, but I am not a political animal (and am a bear of little brain).

Iran Impressions....

2007-10-02T19:05:00.000+01:00

One of the luckiest breaks of my life was being given the chance to work in Iran – and not once, but twice..

We are talking late seventies, pre-revolution - and a country and people to whom I took at once. Later, back in the early nineties I got the chance to revisit on holiday - a whistle-stop tour that I'll tell about another time.

I was by now nearly twenty, and the posting to Iran represented my second & third overseas jobs (and only my third & fourth trips abroad).

Iran was obviously very different from Nigeria…..

For a start, with my colouring and fairly nondescript looks, I didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. As long as I dressed anonymously and watched my body language I was able to wander about and watch without attracting attention to myself. Indeed, on several occasions I was taken to be Iranian by Iranians (by the way, when I say Iranian I don't mean I could pass as one of the fine-featured, pale, handsome, full-blooded Persians - just as one of the darker, hill people...).

I loved Iran. The towns were bustling without feeling threatening, the people friendly and hospitable. The scenery was varied and dramatic (I still recall the thrill on my first morning in Tehran of looking out at the Tehran roofscape, with its backdrop of the Alborz Mountains and the long drives through the spectacular Zagros, from Shiraz down to the coastal plain or out towards the oil and gas fields on the Arwaz road). In bad weather the mountains were positively exhilarating - with forked lighting crashing into the rocks around you as you bounced around through the very clouds themselves…

One of the things I’d missed in Nigeria was the lack of visible historical sights when travelling.

At home in the UK hill-forts, tumuli, castles, old houses, ruins and the “lumps n’ bumps of archaeological remains were just “there” - to be seen on any longish trip. In the part of Nigeria in which we’d been journeying there had been nothing like these to be seen. There was scenery and colour; forest, scrub, light woodland and the occasional town or village – but nothing distinctively old. In the north of the country, or near Benin, things would probably have been different, but in Yorubaland I’d missed seeing the pattern of history seen in the landscape at home…

[Thought: It’s strange, the things you miss in different places... In Nigeria, for me, it was a visual “historical background“ and, of all things, ordinary, British corner shops. In the Libyan desert it was feeling clean, seeing people about and greenery. In Indian holidays, later on in life, it was solitude - esp. solitude in a crowd. When in Iran, strangely enough, there was nothing in particular that I missed.]

Travelling in Iran was very different..

From the air there were cities, roads, mountains – and the distinctive pockmarks of the ancient quanats.

When driving we would pass ancient villages, dove-towers and mosques. Even the police and army checkpoints were interesting, often being in old forts (and with wrecked cars up on scaffolding “gibbets” as a reminder to drive carefully). Hills would be topped with strange little watchtowers, shrines to local “saints” or ruined fire-temples. You could turn a corner on a mountain road to come face to face with some huge relief on a cliff face, while on other stretches of road unidentified ruins, castles and caravansaries stood off in the distant plains or nestled in valleys.

And here there was a history I knew… This was the “known world” to me in the way that Nigeria hadn’t been; the world of the Royal Road and the Persian Gates, Persepolis and Shiraz, Parsagadae and the Persian Gulf – and the world of Alexander, Darius, Xerxes and Cyrus.

Then there were the people and the animals… Sure, we saw people by the roads when journeying in Southern Nigeria, and that was new and interesting, but in Iran it was somehow special. Perhaps because things weren’t quite as totally “foreign” as Nigeria I could relate to it more, I don’t know...

You would pass old men, in the strange, domed, felt hats (later banned by the Islamic Republic) that looked as if they’d come straight off of the ancient Persian reliefs. There were herdsmen, with their goats and long-eared sheep, bells tinkling, along the hillsides, and women, chadors of all colours tied around their waists while they worked in the fields or carried huge loads of kindling on their backs.

Antelope-like creatures leaped on the heights. At the roadside stood camels, asses and mules - or far off, huge, gliding eagles hanging in the air over an Arabian Nights village.

And, occasionally, there were the nomads - bands of Qashqai; the women striding along with their spindles, in pill-box caps, bright waistcoats and colourful flounced dresses, the soberly clad men, with slung rifles, crouched on loaded, tassel-saddled camels - while big, rangy dogs and ragged children kept herd on the flocks.. Unlike Nigeria, which was totally new to me, Iran was like dipping into something familiar, but magical – like the childhood tales of Haroun-Al-Rashid, Sindbad and Cyrus come alive..

Well, that will probably do as a preamble. The work we were doing in Iran was (to me anyway) interesting, and I have lots of reminiscences, for both before and after the revolution, but I’ll describe things in bite-sized lumps, rather than pour things out in a torrent – as I think rather happened with the Nigerian offerings…

Note that I still haven’t worked out how to allow comments without getting spammed - but as soon as I do, any feedback would be welcome. Thanks.

Tek-stuff...

2007-09-30T10:09:00.000+01:00

Having had a week sparring with the PC and & chatting at work (again) and with Polly from the Today Generation project I have had a think about the way the technical/mechanical aspects of life have affected me,from childhood to early adulthood to now.

When I was a kid things were probably not technically much different from just after the War (as far as a child's perception was concerned). There were electric rather than steam trains of course. Cars were presumably more efficient (though as we didn't have one for some time that was pretty irrelevant. However, they were certainly changing looks-wise). Telephones (again, a later development for us) started looking different - and there were more of them about; but by and large I guess that for the first decade or so there was very little real technical change - certainly none that was apparent to me....

There were, of course, the brilliant articles in comics and magazines (World Of Wonder, old copies of The Eagle handed down from cousins etc.) which gave one a grasp of how things worked - and how things were going to change over the next few decades.

From such magazines (and later Tomorrow's World on TV)it seemed like space travel, the "leisure society" with machines doing all of the tedious, manual work (no thought about mass unemployment being unwelcome there) and speedier, easier rail and air travel (esp. personal aircraft to replace cars) were just around the corner. I remember being a very exited little bunny over an article promising 3d-surround, life-size "television" (I guess we'd call it hologram-based technology now).

By 1969 - with the moon landings - things looked as if they were finally starting to move. The film 2001 promised a future of space stations and exploration of the solar system. Later we saw robots being used in car factories. We had expectations...
But the reality for us was that while a lot of the outward appearance and design of things changed (and no doubt certain technical aspects/efficiencies hidden to a child had been made), from a day to day child's perspective very little actually seemed to improve in any technical sense.

Some things certainly became more attainable, presumably because they were now cheaper to make (cars, telephones, cameras, hi-fi, white goods,televisions etc.) and must have made life much, much easier for our parents; for example, as I mentioned in an earlier post, in our first house there was no bath and no central heating, washing was done by hand (and dried on the washing line and on the mangle) - but by the time I was nine we had central heating, a washing machine, a hoover,a bathroom and a TV . Later came a telephone, hi-fi and car.

In a domestic, material sense our life as a family had changed and improved immensely. But really ,all we were doing was catching up with what others in our society had had for decades. Progress for us as a family was therefore largely due to economic change and "hidden" improvements in production, rather than the kind of leap in technical progress of interest to a kid.

At school it was still blackboards, chalk and exercise books. Travel was mainly still on foot, bike, train or bus. Holidays meant going a couple of hours driving away from home. Entertainment meant playing with friends or toys, TV or cinema.

By my teens I was aware that more people seemed to be able to fly abroad for holidays (the growth in cheaper flights and of the "package holiday" I guess). But apart from a general greater prosperity and availability of material goods it was only the introduction of video and tape cassettes that made any real impact on me personally, and that mainly at school.

By the end of the Seventies the promises of Tomorrow's World and magazines had just failed to materialise.

The moon landing had not heralded a race for the stars, just more of the same back here on earth (and a succession of less interesting moon-walks).

We weren't traveling to school or work in our own mini-rockets (or even hovercraft - whatever happened to them?). There were no ray-guns (the army were still using rifles and tanks not much different from those of the 2nd World War for goodness sakes) and no room sized TVs (!) My mum had no robotic housemaid. Work at the supermarket meant lugging boxes, stamping prices tickets on products and sweeping floors - positively Dickensian!!

At school, by the lower sixth, some folk in the science grades were going for an hour of "computer studies" once a week - but that just sounded like electric maths (boring!) with very little application to real life (retrospective "Hah!").

All in all, in the grand scheme of things (and outside my own home) by the end of the seventies, despite the superficialities and the packaging, not a great deal seemed to have moved-on as far as my little mind could see - certainly not as far as we'd been promised in films, TV and comics.

Even at my first "proper" job, at the land survey company, most drawings were being produced by hand, using Letraset, and being reproduced by a kind of huge camera. The land surveying itself had modernised, in that EDM (electromagnetic distance measuring) was being used on large projects, but most measurement was still being done with theodolite, level and tape; so that, apart from the improvement in the accuracy of instruments, little had changed since the Sixteenth century.

The big leap forward work-wise however was the computer - the first I'd seen out of films & telly. This was huge; taking up one side of a sealed, glass-faced room. It had rolling tape discs (just like in James Bond), a Brains-like Controller/manager - and several girls on card-punch machines; turning handwritten, raw data into computer cards. The computer drew plans; black and white, two dimensional plans or elevations (That was pretty much it. You can probably do that on a laptop now).

The company also had a computerised theodolite/distance measurer - a Zeiss Reg Elta. This was huge, about two feet across, had it's own van and, at the forefront of technology, was wired to an accompanying box of tricks which produced data on a punched ticker tape.

To keep in touch with each other on projects we shouted, waved, or occasionally used walkie-talkies. On one job we used heliographs to locate each other.

I mention all of this because, as far as I can see (again, choosing to ignore mere efficiencies in design, fashion, performance and cost of existing technologies) the only technical (as opposed to social) changes that seem to have dramatically altered, in real terms, my day-to-day way of going about things over the first thirty years was cheaper goods and cheaper transport..

Domestic life was more comfortable certainly and there was less manual work around the house for Mum. More women were able to work outside the home. More people travelled abroad than ever did in my childhood (my Dad had gone to Egypt on national Service, but otherwise my parents didn't go overseas until their fifties - to visit ex-neighbours in Denmark), the food in the shops was more varied and eating-out became easier and more "normal". But most of these changes seem to be to be down to "hidden" technical improvements that made travel, transportation and goods cheaper.

Again, if I put my fifteen year old head back on, not much seems to have changed technologically between my late twenties up to my forties (so it appears superficially - ignoring medical advances, general efficiencies, tinkering with existing systems - e.g. digital communications etc.); airplanes still looked like airplanes, my clothes still weren't at all figure hugging, metallic and shiny, I still had to work full time - no robots to do my job, buses, trains, bikes and cars were still the only way to get about etc. etc..

Social attitudes had altered result and horizon's seem to have broadened, which is good (or did attitudes have to change before travel and transportation became easier - I'm not sure... My Grandad wouldn't travel abroad or eat "foreign food" until well into his seventies - and only changed because of an Austrian girlfriend) but the technological "feel" of the late twentieth (and even the twenty-first century) doesn't seem that different from the eighties (though no doubt it does for the people in other countries now producing the cheaper goods for us).

However, there have been some technological leaps in the last ten years that my childhood self would have appreciated...

Thirty, even twenty, years ago if someone had said I would by now be carrying a phone around in my pocket that would allow me to call home from pretty much anywhere in the world, that I'd be able to tell where I was on the planet at a flick of a switch, that I'd be typing my own letters (as opposed to having a secretary to decipher my scribble for me) and have instant access to a reference library the size of the Internet, I'd not have believed them..... So who knows what the future may bring....?

What I wonder is, what do present fifteen year olds think the future will be like? As drastically different as we thought it would be - or do they anticipate just more of the same...?

I don't know the answer to that (just as I have no idea what's coming next myself). I won't hold my breath for the rocket car. I might for the room-sized telly though..

Toys, games & guns...

2007-09-29T14:59:00.000+01:00

Over the last few weeks I've been thinking (& we've been talking in the office) about childhood toys and games.

For us, back in the Sixties, outside the house it would be "War", Cowboys n' Indians or hide and seek in the woods, up by the old canal or down at the "Rec".
You don't see this happening round our way anymore - just the occasional organised game (football etc.) in the local park, or youngsters just standing in forlorn-looking huddles.. The local woods and spinneys are left to the dog walkers.

I rarely see kids playing as we used to; making up our own games, building camps or dens, getting thoroughly mucky. In fact the only kids I have seen doing this lately are the camp children at re-enactment events; when the kids seem to run free, policing and looking after each other as we used to do (refreshingly, only just this last weekend I watched a bunch of kids of all ages at a reenactment event happily clambering around the broken wood and debris of a demolished building; constructing a castle from concrete blocks and posts and doing their own thing unsupervised - happy and confident and using their imaginations and having the same kind of fun we used to have. If only more kids had this kind of opportunity).

However... while we spent a lot of time healthily charging around outside, looking back our actual outside games (as opposed to building or climbing) were, as I recall, pretty much about warfare or hunting in one way or another. There were certainly lots of "war toys" about - and when we hadn't any toy guns we used sticks. It seems amazing now, but I had at one time, in die-cast metal, both a realistic Luger and a Webley revolver.

It gets worse; one Xmas my brother and I were given a "White Hunter Set" (see pic). I don't know if it was branded as that, but that's what it was; plastic cartridge belts & holster, binoculars,a plastic 45 automatic, a rifle fitted with telescopic sights - and which ejected brass cartridges - and a plastic solar topee..!!

Indoors there was drawing - and lots of cut-out or push-out paper toys; figures, soldiers, machinery or animals in the early days. Airfix and Britain's toy soldiers were universal - and almost obligatory (in passing - a friend's definitions heard last weekend: "In the old days, you knew you were a serious modeller if you had you own weight in Airfix models and a serious wargamer if you had you own weight in unpainted "lead" soldiers. Now, you know your a serious nerd if you have you own height in PC game CD boxes").

Family board games were Coppit, Ludo, draughts or the weird variety of activities found in the "Compendium Of Games" that we were given one year. Later, board games like Monopoly, Escape From Colditz and Campaign - and model making (plastic Airfix kits) came in.

I only mention all of this because the chats at work, recent reports about the new "gun culture" among kids and tales about children's use of the Internet to entertain themselves and to keep in touch after school (plus reports of bullying by means of messaging services etc.) set me thinking...

When we kept in touch, if we wanted to, we did so by going round people's houses or by making arrangements while at school (we didn't even have a telephone for much of the time) - interacting with adults more (if only with friend's parents).

I'm not saying that our way was better (indeed, once went to the Grammar school, some several miles away, I rarely saw any schoolfriends out of hours, so perhaps texting or the Internet might have encouraged me to keep in touch more - though I doubt it, because by age twelve I was pretty self-sufficient) just pondering on the difference is all.....

The use of toy guns with us was "normal". When there were real disagreements we had rough and tumble fights, but using weapons wasn't on the cards - ever! That would have been seen as a sign of weakness(knives were for weedy "foreigners". Oh - and kicking was as "girlie" as pulling hair; no kick-boxing thank you..).

Despite the nature of the games and equipment, none of the folk I knew and played with as kids grew up with a desire to own or use the real thing - or indeed to be as aggressive or prone to to the kind of violence, verbal and physical, I see among the children attending the local schools near where I live today. Maybe we got our aggressions out of the way in play, rather than bringing it into the playground? Who knows? Certainly not me.

Well, that's enough musing for now. Next time I will try to put in some more relevant odds and ends, and start telling of my stints in Iran.
If you have been reading... thanks.

Nigeria 77 - III; The end of the trip..

2007-09-27T20:43:00.000+01:00

Ikeja Nights n' Days:

After finishing our stint in Ibadan we were shifted south to Ikeja. We arrived safely - after a journey which involved being harassed by soldiers with sub-machine guns, looking for bribes.

One of the weird things that struck me about driving around in Nigeria was the petrol shortages.. We saw plenty of petrol lorries, but the petrol stations were always packed, and regularly ran out (On one occasion we actually ran out of petrol ourselves, while actually in a queue at a petrol station. We had been queuing for the best part of an hour - and when a black BMW hopped the whole queue and pulled in front of us I lost my rag and banged on the hood. A huge, local bigwig started getting out - shouting - and kept coming... My cutters threw me into the back of our truck and locked me in...). from what I hear, even with the new pipelines and technology, fuel supplies within the country are just a chaotic today.

The work in the south was the last stretch of the line, and the end of the job was very different from what Roy and I had become used to.

The land in which we were working was largely swamp, rather than forest. This meant less cutting, but was hard going. There were, of course the usual insects, more snakes, more mossies, plus leeches... I wore long trousers, tucked into my socks, to avoid these. The locals rubbed themselves in engine oil. White guys who opted for shorts suffered. (I should mention that by now I was wearing long trousers all the time and mainly wearing light, corduroy sided and very thin soled shoes when in the bush. I had started out, at the beginning of the job in Ibaden, in high, tough, very thick-soled Dr. Martins boots. In my first week a thorn went right through the sole & entered my foot. I decided that if I was going to have my feet impaled, I'd rather it was through footwear that could be cut off easily. For the next decade or two I padded about in plimsolls or their equivalent for almost all walking & scrambling - this included most of my time in the Zagros, various Spanish Sierras, down the Samaria Gorge etc. etc. - hence hardy feet, even if the rest of me is pretty soft).

Being the youngest and lightest (and sprightliest I guess) I was charged with hopping from tussock to tussock with the paperwork (nowadays I suppose it would all be computer-chips or memory cards) and instruments, while the older, larger, heavier chaps waded through the often waist-deep sludge (despite my staying relatively clean, on my return home, my mum threw away my "swamp-trousers" as "too smelly". I was outraged !!).

We were working in larger teams now, and being swapped around. I was handed-on from Roy to Magson (Mister Chris) - a broad, blunt, albino-fair Halifaxian (who had taken me out to work on my first day with the company back in UK, and introduced me to the three-pint lunch break).

Digs were back at the Enuda Guests Inn. Some of the guys stationed here were now very much "at home" and the atmosphere was very different from Ibaden.. The staff were much more casual (I remember Magson yelling in outrage, as one of the brief-clad houseboys padded by; "Hey - They're my keks" before retrieving the filched underwear there and then) and there were regular "lady visitors" (I recall our arrival, being shown to a room - only to find one of our chaps already ensconced in bed with a local night-moth).

There was also some seriously heavy drinking, and the first of many "lost nights" for me; all I remember, after several beers, a bottle of Mateuse Rose - of all things - followed by bacardi and cokes, is a scatter of images, including me on my back, face-up in a storm-drain, while above me Julian, a workmate, slugged it out with a taxi driver. Waking up at seven the next day, scarcely alive, to go to work in the bush, was not good...
It had been a heavy night all round, and walking back along the trace at midday it was like the Retreat from Moscow, as I came across slumped bodies at regular intervals. At the end of the day's work Julian - still full of beans - had organised a football game with some local lads. No contest. We were crushed like bugs.

Something very new to me...: It was very much the thing for chaps to avail themselves of the local ladies of the night (at the Airport Disco the higher class girls hung around the bar. The down-market girls used the car park for pick-ups). I am glad to say that my natural purity of heart (hah!) and the gloomy groups in the morning, setting off for the local "clinic" prevented me from following their lead... Actually, in retrospect was probably just circumstances (too drunk), lack of interest (I was still carrying a torch for a lass from schooldays) and lack of funds (too tight) that kept me from the primrose path... Probably just as well..

The work progressed this was the "last push") and soon it was all over, and Hey, Ho for chilly UK.

Looking back, the Nigeria trip, though it was sometimes uncomfortable & occasionally troubling, was an amazing opportunity - and one which went a long way to opening up the horizons and broadening the opinions of a fairly simple, Surrey lad. I count my blessings - & wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Nigeria "77" II - Work, words & witchcraft.

2007-09-21T16:25:00.000+01:00

Names & words; As well as eating, drinking and scudding about, we also had to do what we were there for..work...

As I wrote earlier, once at Ibaden Roy & I started work. The project we were working on was the line-setting for the Ikeja-Ilorin oil pipeline. We, and local Nigerian government surveyors, were doing the line-finding, i.e. following a compass bearing through the bush, as best we could, cutting a "trace" - a cutting about 1 to 2 metres wide as we went - and digging in concrete blocks as levelled and recorded way-marks at intervals. The Russians were to follow on and build the pipeline.

Labour came from a bush village near Eruwon in Yoroba country. My main cutters, and the ones who stayed with us throughout, were Robert, James, "Youth" (he wouldn't give his name) and our "chargehand" Saibu Hassan, who was not Yoruba, but was the one who spoke some English.

Exchanging names seemed strangely complex: As well as the factor that my Yoruba was non-existent (surprise, surprise) and had no grasp of Pidgin, there seemed to some kind of taboo over the use of names that I never got to grips with. We certainly had problems with mine! On the first day I was asked a long and rambling question by Saibu Hessian, put to me in a manner that suggested a considerable degree of embarrassment was involved at his end. The query itself was something akin to; "The name at the village where you live" What it is, the name at your village? When you are in your village, what is that the name that is called there.?"

In my defence, this was being put to a hot, slightly out of his depth Surrey teenager; with no familiarity with local accent, no grasp of local idiom or custom - and possessed of a desperate need not to be so rude as to have to ask the speaker to repeat something he, the listener, should have understood first time round. Anyway, suffice to say that for the next three months I was "Mister West" (attentive readers may recall that "my village" was called West Byfleet).

Roy was easy, Saibu Hassan just asked me what I called him. I said Roy, and they called him Mister Roy - job done.

[Names; Totally irrelevant note.. Called Mister West in Nigeria, in Iran I was "Mister Einee". I have assumed that this was either because either a) the locals had problems with the IA sound or b) "Einee" - or a word very like it - meant something we didn't understand (one of our other surveyors in Iran was called Mister Cuchek - "small" - 'cos he was). However,like so many, I am a man of many names and all are alike to me (at home I was Ian or Enoch or Ian the Demon. At school; Denyer).
For three years in the Seventies, at my Saturday job, I answered to the name of John - that was largely because the manager called almost every teenage male John - and I have never worked at a place where surnames were used by bosses in any serious way (my current team at work call me Mister Denyer, but we run a kind of Hornbloweresque, mock formality among ourselves, so that doesn't count). In Molesey, Surrey, working as a contracts manager in the Eighties, I was apparently known among the chaps as "Iron" (as in Iron hoof = poof; a response to my perceived "posh" voice, general politeness and slightly fey manner I assume (believe me, this nickname was affectionate. Other managers were known as by such lovely names as "Lips" and "Knucklehead"). Folk at other jobs have called me I.D. or I.Dee Dee, a friend of scarily long-standing's family call me "Madman" (for my lovable eccentricity I assume :) ) and another friend's family apparently know me as Father Dougal (don't ask). Bosses and acquaintances call me Ian. Proper mates call me Denyer.

I only mention all this because it struck me that names seem to mean different things - and seem differently important - to different people. Are we back to "labels" again?]

Language: With Saibu the language barrier was not surmountable (there was a problem the first day out, me instructing the guys to "chop" - and them sitting down to eat) By and large, we got on with communicating pretty well, but some idiosyncrasies wore a little over the weeks...

There was "The Exclamation" - a kind of "Ah!!" (with the "A" as in cat) which seemed necessary when anything new or even mildly surprising happened or came up in conversation - and the mildly irritating "Sorry" - used whenever anything unfortunate happened and fronted by a brief "t" sound (e.g. Denyer trips and falls face-down into a freshly-demolished weaver-ant colony. Saibu uses "The Exclamation" and says "(T) Sorry... Did you fall down....?").

(Favorite Pidgin phrase, heard by one of our guys visiting a colleagues villa: villa owner asked houseboy to go and find out what a stranger is doing crouching in the villa's shrubbery. Houseboy comes back "That man. He say, he doff his knickers".)

Cutting: As I mentioned earlier, my third day in the country left me on a bush track, with a cutting team and a prismatic compass (with little tripod in what looked like as small gun case).

Sighting along the bearing I had been given, and using sticks cut from the bush as markers, we cut a survey trace along the line of route. Most of what we were cutting through was forest. Small and medium-sized trees in the trace were cut down, huge trees (massive, grey, buttress rooted monsters) left in place & worked around. Elsewhere we found light woodland, where cutting wasn't always necessary - we simply marked the trees - or Secondary Growth; over head-height, awful, dusty, woody-stemmed, springy scrub that was the devil to cut and closed you in as if you were in a trench.

Later, Roy, our team of three locals and me and followed up with the theodolite and tape to measure, map, straighten out the line if necessary and dig in the concrete marker blocks. If later meant "too late" (e.g. nearly two weeks along in one stretch) the Secondary Growth (or in some cases the maize) would be two metres or so high, meaning that we had to cut or push though again.

Work was hot and wet (the rains began part way through the job). I can still hear the rain coming through the forest towards us, like a railway train, then - whoosh - being soaked to the skin (we later learned to cut & balance banana leaves on our heads as umbrellas).

The forests were full of creepy-crawlies; ants of various types, flies (biting & non biting), tiny bees, millipedes (or centipedes - I never counted the legs), termites (soldier termite -the only insect that has drawn blood on me) and weird, flea-like bugs that roved around in swarms, making a crackling sound on the dead leaves. We heard monkeys, bush-rats and birds - but saw nothing through the undergrowth, except the occasional snake, usually on a track (on one occasion a Green Mamba - causing us to cannon into the leading file - Roy, who had stopped dead - like a cartoon train pile-up).

Occasionally our guys would head off into the bush, and bring back huge land-snails (to eat). Once they brought back pineapples. I had only ever had the tinned variety, so when I was given a huge chunk I ate it like I would eat a melon - result, smile-shaped pineapple-acid burns on my face, like some cut-price version of the Joker out of Batman.During the normal working day we drank water and ate cassava bread (a whole loaf each - we all got the same).

Twice, when cutting, our trace hit a village, which you could smell some way away (mainly the chickens - scrawny things, stepping delicately over the midden heaps). The huts were mud brick and timber, for the most part with corrugated iron roofs.

In one place we had to tell the headman that the village Spirit House was in the way, and that when the Russians got there it would be demolished. This seemed to be regarded as just one of those things - they just moved the "objects" inside to another building and set about bashing open the walls. However, we didn't think it safe to mention that the nearby Ju-Ju tree was also likely to be a casualty.....

Witchy Women: Talking Ju-Ju:
We had seen various fetishes and so on for sale in the markets or by the roadside, and come across the odd tree hung with rags and with a bowl at its roots.
This was just background.

It came closer to home on one occasion when, walking back along the trace at the end of the day, we saw two old ladies sitting in it, one on each side. I trolled onwards, just preparing to give my cheery smile and greeting when I was yanked back. Saibu whispered (following The Exclamation); "They are witches. They are making a curse".

The guys were looking pretty spooked, but I was in no mood for mad old women and superstitious mumbo-jumbo and given the choice of a few kilometres in a straight line along the trace to our rendezvous point with the vehicle, and an unknown distance trudging along windy jungle paths at the end of a long, hot day.... .. Well, that's what I though. It might have seemed like nonsense to me; but to the team it was very real - real enough for them to act totally out of character and manhandle me back up and off the trace - and a good way down the track they thought led back to where we wanted to be..... I was not a happy bunny, but when it came to witchy matters, it was obvious that the guys were going to be in charge...

[Sideline note - Native tracks: It took a while to get the guys to trust us that the best way back to our rendezvous point was via the trace we'd cut that day. As we cut along we would cross the various meandering paths and tracks that ran between villages. The men knew the area pretty well for the most part (we weren't that far from their homes really) and if they didn't know, they would ask. But the concept of a straight line linking A to B being better than the known path that took you (eventually) between those two points didn't seem to compute. Showing them a map, or drawing it in the dust on the bonnet of the Landcruiser made no difference... In their eyes everyone knew that the best way from A to B was path C - not some crazy, straight, temporary cutting.... Of course, they were right ; our trace would be gone in few weeks, swallowed by secondary growth. But meanwhile - can we use it? Please....?]

Once in a while we would come across fields; cassava for the most part, some patches with small, market garden plants or maize (the leaves of which cut like knives, I found) and coco plantations. Low growing crops we just "shot" over. The maize we tried to carefully press to one side, rather than cut.

On one occasion we came across a patch with a small, grass-like crop. The guys were particularly careful when walking around this so, being agriculturally ignorant, I asked what it was. I wasn't confident that I'd get an answer, as only Robert, James and Youth were with me at the time (Robert seemed to understand English quite well, he just wouldn't - or didn't have the confidence - to speak it, but I noticed that sometimes he would understand what was going on while Saibu Hassan was still floundering). They crouched down to confer with each other. After a while Youth looked up at me, grinning and enlightened me "Uncle Ben" he said.

We tried to be as careful with crops as we could be. I had a little book where I had to record any damage done - particularly to the cocoa trees. This would be passed up the line and, theoretically, compensation would paid by the Government for any damage, though to be frank, in retrospect, I think only one chap we came across probably actually got any (an army major who made us sign a kind of receipt on the spot).

Incidents & Attitudes: There was surprisingly little trouble over what we were up to (I dread to think what would happen in the UK if we were doing what we were doing over British farmland).
Occasionally a farmer would have a little moan, then after a chat and a laugh, either sits down to watch or join in and help us.
There was only one iffy moment that I recall: we were moving through a cocoa grove, mainly marking the trees rather than chopping, when an armed mob of about thirty came up from a village, sticks, cutlasses and long flintlocks in their hands. The villagers were seriously unhappy: they were shouting, Saibu Hassan was shouting, my other guys were looking very scared indeed... People started pushing S.H. and, somehow, without thinking, I went into some kind of sahib mode. Jumping up on a log I shouted, as loud as I could "Be Quiet!!". Standing there (nineteen, pretty much fresh from a Surrey Grammar School) in my Millets bush hat, it seems ridiculous now. But it worked...
Everyone went quiet. Everyone looked at me. I told Saibu Hassan to repeat what I said, then, clearly, calmly and slowly I told the angry villagers the we were "Government Men", that we were there for Government Work and that they must not interfere.
I held up my little book, and told and showed them the marks I had made for each damaged tree. I told them about the Government compensation plan. Finally I made it clear that there were other "Government Men" behind us in the forest - and that if there were to be any trouble the village would be punished.
Complete bluff of course; Roy was probably some twenty or so miles away, and would have no idea where we were even without walking the trace. Anyhow, it worked. There was some grumbling (I don't think they believed a word about the compensation). But the muskets and the cutlasses dispersed.

Looking back it was all a trifle Kiplingesque I suppose (and now, faintly embarrassing) but that was the way things were..

I was definitely a novelty (young, white, straight-haired, dressed in a semi-military style) so that probably helped (and we shaved every day!!! Even for a day in the Bush!!) The Nigerian surveyors apparently had a much harder time of it (even in getting labour - our chaps said they would rather work for us, for less money, than for - their words - some "black boy". Certainly picking up or dropping off our cutters at their village was always an event, with the children screeching "Oyibo" (whitey), folk crowding round to look at, or in some cases, touch our bare arms (usually me; presumably I looked less scary than older, glowering Roy.).

What was embarrassing to semi-PC little me was the attitude of some of the local people: I could take the presumably ribald and certainly cheeky chit chat about me by the topless washerwomen or long-breasted ladies pounding cassava as we passed villages. I got used to refusing politely offers to carry me over streams (to stop my delicate feet getting wet I assume). It was being saluted, at attention, by some village ancient who had served in the West African Frontier Force, or having a headman, as wizened as a walnut, try to touch my ankle in salute - when, as an elder it was he who should have been receiving that mark of respect from me (in my mind - but my mind alone mark you) - that I found unsettling.
Having a whole village turn out to greet me, while being presented with a bunch of blooms by the headman's half naked, teenage daughter (probably actually thirteen or fourteen), was not something Surbiton Grammar had prepared me for!

There seemed to be, even in the late seventies, a sense or assumption that us Oyibos were to be respected as somehow superior (that I am here only talking about in the country. In the cities things were VERY different.).
I remember Saibu Hassan and the lads, sitting at my feet as if i were some sort of sage; listening intently while I chuntered on about snow, British dogs, my town or the cost of living back home - when what I knew about real life, like raising a family or scraping a living or survival in the bush, could be written on a fingernail - or asking respectfully for "pills - for power" from us (we only had aspirin).

What really brought this attitude on their part home to me (and quite upset me at the time) was when we were cutting two traces, each extending some scores of miles, one from the North, one from the South. The intention was that the traces should both reach a particular track at roughly the same time. We would then work to straighten out the line between the last respective Intersection Points (change of bearing).
Neither group had had any direct contact with the other until the last day (when we were issued with radios)and given that we had both been cutting from our start points by eye, and using hand held or tripod compasses - and given that the maps we were using were pretty basic (being based largely on aerial surveys (over forest !! -with villages being in the wrong place, misnamed etc.) there was quite a lot of scope for error.
As it was, we hit the track on the same day (our team got there first) - only about fifty metres apart and within sight of each other.
Much hand shaking and congratulations between myself and the Nigerian Government surveyor in charge of the last cut from the North...Until Saibu Hassan and the guys sidled up to me, looking pleased with themselves but whispering, "Mister West.... Look at this black boy! He is in the wrong place". Aaaaaghh...!!!!

This attitude, the simple life of the country people, the little that they had in our terms, got me thinking and had a profound effect on the lad from Surrey.

One small incident in particular, at the end of the Ibaden job, is still with me...

We had taken the guys back to our digs, to buy them a drink, pass out some small present and say farewell before we moved down to Lagos.
I'll always remember the reaction as, hesitatingly, they crept into our little chalet. Looking round at the almost bare whitewashed walls and very basic furniture Saibu Hassan spoke for them all; making "The Exclamation" he whispered gently "It is beautiful".
This, genuine reaction of almost awe to what was, to us, a fairly anonymous motel room, was genuinely humbling.
It was events like this and the working experience abroad that I think have helped make me pretty impatient with people living up here in our comfortable, North European cocoon; who complain about their lot, so tied up in their own wants - and not having the faintest idea of how much of what we take for granted is an impossible dream for so many others (back to the old "What do they know of England, That only England know" I guess).

Well, that's enough for now. Again, I've rambled rather, and it all sounds pretty naive; but I've tried to set things out simply, as they seemed to me at the time. I'll complete the Nigeria memories (the end of the project, in the Lagos area - which was very different) later.

More thoughts (corruption - other lands)

2007-09-21T10:46:00.000+01:00

I have just returned from a short break in the Crimea (stopping off in Istanbul for a couple of days on the way back).

It was fascinating, and humbling in a way to hear how people had to cope with arbitrary favoritism/corruption/victimisation under the old Soviet System and still have to live with corruption as "standard" even now (e.g. to get anything significant done you need to square someone, the road police stop drivers randomly for bribes - it happened to us - and has even happened to the President of Ukraine when driving his private, rather than official, car. Also, allegedly, the Director of the UNESCO site at Chersonesos - the "Ukranian Pompeii" has three private houses, courtesy of funds supplied for maintenance of the site, but covers this up when UNESCO visit by hiring computers and other equipment from local businesses to show inspectors. We were also shown an "illegal" housing estate, recently built on what we were told is a UNESCO/World Heritage site - ancient Greek field systems near Sebastopol. These houses were apparently built by KGB officers, so no action is to be taken. As our guide repeatedly told us "It is like this").

We really do take so much for granted here in the UK.....

Some things have changed; before the break-up of the Soviet Union we wouldn't even have been allowed near some of the places we visited (e.g. Sebastopol & Balaclava - these were "closed" towns, due to the naval and submarine bases there. Even the locals needed a pass to get out. Once things opened up the the bus and taxi drivers didn't know their way around outside their home towns. They're still a bit hazy even now).

Anyway, I will type out some more "ancient" memories later (I see there is now a link to this blog on the Today website, so I'd better get cracking).

Note: I have had to change the way comments are received on the blog, as I had some kind of "spam" attack (in Spanish!?) while I was away. I will be working on this later too.

Nigeria; Summer 1977

2007-09-08T15:13:00.001+01:00

Post One: Welcome to Nigeria - Arrival, Roads & Living.

Nigeria was a little like a car crash - horrid but fascinating. Well, o.k. - just bits of it were horrid.. The towns were pretty dire, but this was balanced by the basic niceness of the people in the countryside. But to an untraveled Surrey teen it was a totally new world.

I even remember the flight; the time it took (my longest previous flight - to Jersey - a hop, skip & jump) and the remote, slightly severe but breathtakingly beautiful British Caledonian stewardesses. Like schoolmarms in uniform...

The long stretch at night over the Sahara - black, with just the rare campfire below as we came nearer Kano - was strangely beautiful. Then Kano from the air, looking like something from the Arabian Nights. Land, then up again - further South, down to Lagos.

On arrival, standing at the top of the steps to the plane, with a hot, wet wind blowing against me, I assumed I was standing in the slipstream of another jet - but that was the cooling, early morning breeze....

Off the plane - and welcome to Nigeria: Getting us through immigration etc. worked fine - but of course we'd come with equipment: tea chests full of theodolites, tripods, tapes etc - the works. We had seen them get on the plane. We had a detailed manifest.... But, according to the huge sergeant in army uniform leaning back in his chair "No, sir. Nothing here..." Behind him, through the half-open door, a stack of suspiciously familiar tea-chests..

As the "boy" of the group I could just stand there as my seniors asked, begged, swore, and ground their teeth in frustration. "No... Nothing here"....

It took the arrival of our "welcoming party" - and a large brown envelope - for our sergeant to suddenly "discover" - to his evident delight, given the width of his smile - a stack of chests exactly matching our own... Welcome to Nigeria...
I swiftly discovered that you got nowhere in Nigeria without "dash". You receive a service, you "dash". You want something - you "dash". You even buy something - and the guy behind the counter says "dash me".

Taxi to the Airport Hotel (we were advised that taxi drivers would at least know where that was) then out with the Photostatted map (as drawn by me back in Blighty) to direct the driver to where we were actually staying; a little place called The Enuda Guests Inn. I never learned if the road on which it stood had an actual name.
Lagos itself , or rather the bit we saw, which was mainly Ikeja, was chaotic, dusty, noisy and slightly threatening. Deep storm drains flanked the pothole ridden main roads, while the side roads seemed to be mainly mud - with the odd small pond thrown in for variety. The traffic was horrendous (and I was just a passenger!). Amazingly aggressive - with horns sounding, fists waving, and shouts of "Give chance!" in the melees at junctions..

The Enuda Guests Inn itself was simple, but clean and pretty pleasant on the whole. It had a little bar. The food was simple but fine - I remember my first ever experience of peanut butter - with tomato -and in a toasted sandwich (well, I was a simple, Surrey boy).

Briefed about the job the following day, and with the vehicles loaded (from memory, an old, Volkswagen minibus and a Toyota Landcruiser ) we set off north for Ibadan.

Roads: If driving in the cities was bad, driving to and from them was worse.. The roads were just as bumpy, the edges simply petering out into earth. Wrecks littered the rout (especially on the "Hill of Death" - a particular black spot). There were even wrecks and burn-outs on the unopened Expressway... The scattered remains of blown truck tyres (I had to ask what they were - I had no idea) were strewn along the roadsides. Large colourful trucks and "Mammy Wagons", with wooden slatted backs, tore along with little apparent concern with safety - or even with staying on the road. These were inevitably, seriously overloaded - but colourfully emblazoned with slogans such as "Hope", "Jesus Is Lord", "God First" and (ironically, first seen on a truck full of Guinness crates, upside down in a river bed.) "God Is With Us".

Whole families and women carrying huge loads of market good or wood on their heads walked perilously along the sides of the road, sometimes having to leap out of the way of some madly meandering lorry..

On one occasion, making our early morning way out to site, we had passed a woman, a load of cloth on the head, weaving out into the road and back. On our return, at the end of the day, we hit, unusually, for that stretch of road, a long, long line of traffic. As we drew nearer the end of the line we could see cars and lorries swerving around something in the road. It was the same woman, now lying in the carriageway. Our first instinct was to stop - but our labourers, local villagers, told us, in no uncertain terms, not to. To stop meant accepting responsibility - and interacting with the police; best not get involved. I was shocked - but we simply drove round her like the scores of cars before us. The next morning, someone, or something, had dragged her to the side of the road. By the time we drove back that evening she was down the embankment. After three days I stopped looking.

If it was a dog or other large animal, rather than a person, people simply drove over it: until the body flattened out like some macabre carpet..

We passed waystops, with large, colourfully dressed ladies with big headscarves sitting on steps amongst pyramids of plastic, soft -drink crate and small roadside settlements; people holding out their goods for sale: bottled drinks, sandals made of old tyres, bread, fruits, land snails and other bushmeat - and once , a pangolin. At checkpoints, police and army waved sub-machine guns around, asking point blank for "dash". Either side of the tarmaced road was the red earth and scrub; later tall trees, turning into forest. Red tracks and paths snaked off into the green.

Living: Once near Ibaden we settled into our digs near an Agricultural college (a quite nice motel actually; in a chalet with big rooms, air conditioning, a shower and water filter. It even had a t.v.!! The power supply was a bit erratic (and t.v. largely consisted of news, impenetrable local soaps in Pidgin - and, occasionally, executions. It was the "slow-motion action replays" that were most unsettling) but really this was quite something - and much better than I had expected (I'd expected tents).

I was sharing the chalet with my senior: Roy, an ex-Royal Engineer, a nice guy, with a fund of tales. There were a handful of other chaps from our company also in the motel, working on other parts of the line.

Food was generic European for the most part (during the daytime we lived on a loaf of local cassava bread and water), with a local-style Pepper Soup or Pepper Steak thrown in from time to time. Sundays was CURRY!!! With gages!!! Very colonial style, but delicious. There was Star beer to drink and even Nigerian-brewed Guinness ! A little like drinking mud, but one had to try it once. And there was also Nigerian gin - rumour had it that if you put it in a spray pump, you could kill flies with it.

Occasionally we would venture into Ibadan itself; either to buy equipment (I was sent out once with a local driver to pick up some concrete blocks. We couldn't find the address, so I suggested - I had only been in the country about a week - "why don't we ask a policeman?". I cannot begin to describe the look of disbelief and horror on the face of my guide... I was obviously quite insane....) or to eat, if we had important visitors.

We ate at places like the Ish Mudah - which looked uninspiring and was in a hideous muddy alley - but was actually very good. The restaurant itself was run by a very friendly Lebanese guy. If you could control yourself at the sight of local Yoruba dressed as Alladin (this got more difficult as the beer flowed) - and, in my case, cope with being taken for Japanese - it was very welcoming.

Once we ate at the big, Premier Hotel (I think it was) in the city centre, while the seniors attended a meeting. Two of us junior-chainmen had chicken sandwiches, which nearly killed us (both comatose and delirious for three days - stuffed with all the antibiotics the team could throw down us - and my first experience of "evacuating" at both ends simultaneously. But not my last.).

As far as I could tell, Ibaden consisted of a tiny modern core, a larger dirty, untidy permanent town around it - and a huge shanty of tin and wooden huts that seemed to stretch for miles. I remember the quaint, hand-painted signs of the roadside businesses, the long-horned cattle in trucks or being driven along the roadsides, the dust, the noise, the inevitable queues for scarce petrol (despite the large number of petrol tankers driving about).

Life at the motel was quiet. The only other regular guests, as far as I recall were a Russian couple -the only European lady I saw the whole trip. Fairly ordinary, blond and verging on middle age - but a source of strange fascination after a few weeks...

Other guests were transient, but I recall one night with particular vividness: We were at dinner, with sausage-flies bouncing off the ceiling fans, (and probably on the first course of Solferino Soup) when into the room walked two princes... There is no other word for them. They were Hausa, fom the Muslim North. Tall, slim, deeply black and strikingly handsome, with fine profiles. Both were in traditional robes of dark blue, with white tarbooshes. And they carried themselves like kings. The sight of them, as if they'd stepped straight out of a legend, was breathtaking. I can still see them, even now, framed in the doorway as their eyes disdainfully swept the room.

One of the nice things (and new to me) was the travellers' custom of exchanging books, once you had read them. As a result I was introduced to a range of writers I'd never touched before. There were all sorts, a real eclectic mix: Poe, Len Deighton, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Michener, Alexander Kent, Desmond Morris and a range of others - but most of all, Wodehouse, and George Macdonald Fraser.

Other reading matter consisted of Newsweek - and "The Daily Sketch", with its odd, slightly quaint use of the language, indecipherable Pidgin cartoons, curious adverts regarding the titles and legitimacy of local Obas and other chiefs, death notices - with pictures of the late departed, copies of announcements and legal documents (with the thumbprints of signatories mixed in with actual signatures) and very, local articles; such as "Is Lynching Always A Bad Thing?" (this followed a string of lynchings of pickpockets at bus stops).

Well, that's probably enough for now. Sorry if I've rambled a bit.
My next post will be about the work itself.

History an' me

2007-09-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

This week, prompted partly by other blogs and thoughts from the Today Generation team, I have been pondering as to how (or indeed if) the great events of our times impinged upon or affected little moi.

To be frank, I fear, not a lot...

As I think I said in a earlier post, ours was not a political family.. If you had to pigeon hole my Dad & Grandfathers in attitude (and, for all I know, voting practices, though this was never discussed) I suppose you'd say "typical, working class conservative" - but that definition has probably been slewed by the eighties & nineties and the horrors of the "Essex Man" & "loads'a money" stereotypes, so don't read too much into it... Theirs was more of general respect for old fashioned values, and a distrust of too much politicising..

As far as the women went, well, from what I could see they just got on with the important stuff - running a house and family.

Although certain things caught my attention, and even interest, Current Affairs were really for the papers and the television (we had a radio, but that was mainly on Radio 2) - and not subjects for discussion or comment.

As for me, well, I remember registering the fact that JFK had been shot (we had a telly by then)- but in truth probably had little idea about who he really was.

The images of Vietnam - and the anti-war protests - loom large, as does the Six Day War (Peter Snow playing with Airfix tanks); but these events didn't seem to concern or affect anyone I knew - at least, not in real terms. People seemed, in so much as they appeared to have an opinion, to be against the Vietnam war (without being pro the Vietcong) and pro-Israeli (because they seemed to be the underdog).

It may sound pretty parochial, but folk in our village just seemed to get on with their lives, with world issues just being part of the backdrop rather than matters to be discussed or worried over. Maybe that was a hangover from the "Real War" of their prime and childhood.. As for us, well, we were just kids - with far too much to get on with...

There was the horror of Biafra of course (a disturbing cartoon of a skeletal Sir Alec Douglas-Home selling guns to a well-fed Nigerian, while below them sits an equally skeletal Biafran child, lurks darkly in the memory somewhere)and the Indian famine of 65/66. But no matter how disturbing, these were far, far away.

There was certainly no Swinging Sixties down our way... Not even in the Seventies. No flower power, no free love... We saw Hippies on the goggle-box, but that was it. Oh, and my parents liked the Beatles (I think we had two of their LPs). But in our part of Surrey life just seemed to plod along, with the wacky outside world hardly affecting conversation, let alone actual life..

"The Troubles" in Ireland were always hovering in wings of course, but not really of genuine interest - until the Aldershot & Guildford bombings. They were more one of those irritants that won't go away..

To us schoolboys, weaned on "The War" the IRA campaign seemed half-hearted and amateurish anyway. We couldn't see the point of shooting the odd policeman or bombing pubs, hotels and tourist spots when to us the obvious targets were the motorway bridges, main railway lines and power stations (but by then, we were commuting by train to school, so perhaps had a vested interest in rail & power chaos). In reality (and once more)all of this was somehow not part of our little world.

Closer to home I was aware of strikes and threats of strikes (there ALWAYS seemed to be strikes; dock strikes, train strikes, miners strikes, power worker strikes, car factory and steel worker strikes), power cuts, shortages, Union leaders always angry - oh, and the Three Day Week.

Most important: Inflation (and decimalisation) eroding my pocket money and Saturday earnings.

All of these were of far more concern than happenings over the water or across the continents. Perhaps that was a class thing or folk concentrating on the basics of earning a living.. I just don't know..

Re-reading this, it does seem odd that over the years - perhaps largely due to defecting to (or rather discovering) Radio 4 in the eighties, perhaps due to moving in more of a "teachery-middle-class" milieu than when a child - the kind of current affair issues that were there when I was growing up seem somehow more "real" to my peers now than they ever seemed to be for my parents, their friends and other adults when I was a kid. Maybe I had a false impression of what my elders worried and spoke about (kids can be very self-focused after all)- or maybe, unlike them, we now feel that we can influence matters (no matter how deluded that feeling might be) and therefore have a responsibility to take more of an interest. Who can say... (not me anyway).

Well, that was something of nothing - a faint whisper from head-in-the-sand-land - and.. Oooh dear, there seem to be some cracker-barrel philosophising back there (I promised myself I'd avoid that), but Hey, Ho....

Random thought - Hair...

2007-08-19T09:45:00.000+01:00

This week the subject of hair has come up at this end - mainly because of looking at old pictures & chatting to mates...

After pretty much keeping to a short back & sides for the last ten years I'm growing mine again - what's left of it - partly for a Living History "character", partly just to wind people up at work (I've told folk that I've vowed not to cut it until I.T. get their act together - standing Council joke; we've been waiting seven years for some basic software) but mainly out of curiosity to see how long it'll get.

Reading that back, that sounds slightly mad & somehow sad - but I'll keep it in....

From family pics, if you exclude Dad's fifties D.A. and me, guys' hair in our family has been pretty conservative (S.B. & S. & cleanshaven for chaps. My little sister went skinhead for a few weeks in her teens, but otherwise hers has just been straight, medium length. Mum's seems to have hardly changed at all over the decades, except for colour).

The only exception has been me - there having been a succession of different hair lengths and types of facial hair (see pic.) and I am wondering why that was the case? I wasn't consciously following fashion - and hair has certainly not been an issue with either myself or others at home or work (although at about age nine my hair was long enough for a friend's Granny to think I was his "little girlfriend") and I was definitely not making any "statement" or stand about it....

Occasionally I have had to "do" things to my hair for a part (worst was having to go blond - I looked like a particularly petulant Roman emperor - or the Earl Haige moustace I grew for "Oh What A Lovely War - I didn't actualy want to look like an aging member of the Village People) but generally the pics show me just being me in "real" life...

More thoughts......

2007-08-16T21:34:00.000+01:00

Home life: I have been racking my brains for things that stand out as being different from “nowadays”, or which had an impact of being unusual at the time, but which wouldn’t raise a eyebrow at all today...

Once we were settled in at West Byfleet (i.e. in an actual village, rather than on a private estate) there always seemed to be people about the street in a way we don't get down in our part of Brighton these days: the horse & cart of the rag & bone man, the daily milkman, a bike-riding French onion-seller (honest! No stripey jumper though), guys selling manure or brushes, the monthly visits of the Insurance Man - and at my Nan’s house, in Addlestone, the pig-man - who came every week, with his horse and very smelly cart, to empty the pig-bin; i.e. the bin where all the off-cuts of veg. went.

Over the road was Mr. Gooch’s shop (where he cured his own ham in a shed at the back & where you could still pop round to the back door buy things even after the shop was shut).

The village itself - a commuter spot really - had a reasonable number of shops, but was otherwise pretty quiet. There were no social issues that I was aware of (I remember seeing my first beggar – it was in in Italy in about “76”. I had seen buskers, up in London a couple of times, and the village had “Yogi”the tramp, who didn’t beg, but just turned up from time to time - and who, near Christmas, would commit some minor misdemeanour and be remanded “inside” for the season) but it wasn't until the eighties that I saw begging or rough-sleeping in the UK.

We seemed to have real snowy winters back then – cold in short trousers.. I remember walking back alone from choir practice, I suppose I was about eleven at the time, at about nine thirty at night, rolling a snowball half as big as I was.

Food: Well, one can do no better than read Nigel Slater’s “Toast”. That was my life (only the culinary bit, mark you - not any of the sex). Birds Eye Chicken pie (a special treat) & fish fingers, Dream Topping, Vesta curry, Nesquick (spelling?). Baked beans were “discovered” for the first time at a“posh” friend’s house…

Eating was alway “at the table”, with the ritual “Can I get down please?” once one had “finished”.

Saturdays there would be a fish & chip van up by the spinney (near the pub & station) - threepen’orth of chips & free “crackling” (the bits of discarded batter).

On very special occasions, birthdays or special treats, it was up to the coffee bar for a milk-shake. Once or twice (partly because of my dad having done some work for the owners) there was a meal “out” at the Bella Napoli –one of the village’s two eateries (the other being Chinese).

Back then, Italians were the Woking area’s “ethnic minority”, though I can’t recall that being a concept at the time . Local tradition had it you could tell “Italian“ houses – they were the one’s painted on the outside. It was a family joke that my father, dark and browning easily, was often mistaken for an “Italian gardener”...... We have always presumed that this“touch of the tar brush” (as it was called back then - horrors!!), was from the gypsy side of the family.
My brother & I inherited the same colouring (dark hair, brown eyes & a tendency to tan swiftly) & I have myself been taken to be “local” by locals in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, Libya, Syria & Iran; usually being asked the way to somewhere while leaning against something, watching the world go by (but not in Egypt. There it was assumed I was Saudi… I think it was the beard…).

Mind you, in Nigeria, back in the seventies, I was asked if I was Japanese - and at a party in Hove a few years back it was assumed that I was my mate Pat’s brother – and he’s Malay-Chinese – so maybe that says more about people’s preconceptions than anything else…..

Some time in the seventies, the Italians in Woking, moving up or out, were replaced by the Asian community. Given that Woking had had a mosque since 1889 (apparently the first purpose-built one in Northern Europe) this seemed only natural to me. I was never aware of any conflict or problems locally.

From our point of view that was great – we ended up with a curry house in the village (last time I visited there was one fish restaurant, two Italian restaurants, two curry houses, a burger bar, two wine bars and even the pub had a restaurant !!).

Visits to the Bella Napoli were the only occasions that we ate out as a family until well into the eighties - though I was sometimes taken out during weekends when staying with my grandparents on my mother’s side. Grandad Read, my mother’s father, had some kind of supervisory job for a medical equipment company. He had worked at Fort Bellevedere during the Prince of Wales/Edward VIIth’s time and was a stickler for form – though he’d been a bookies runner as a youth.. He taught me how to tie a Windsor Knot, how to act in a restaurant and how one never stood with one’s hands in one’s jacket pockets.

Apart from street traders and shopkeepers, the outside world (i.e. non-family) hardly intervened in our lives… My parent loved dancing – generally down the Working Man’s Club – but rarely entertained. Glamour, in the sixties, consisted of occasional visits from“Auntie” Jean – young and pretty, in white boots, bright, short dresses and driving an orange (!!!) mini (Husband was Tommy Gunn, memorable only because of his name..) and Uncle Ray (Phillips) of The Nashville Teens -our one connection with the world of show business.

We went to the pictures with Nan from time to time, once to a pantomime (with Jimmy Tarbuck as Buttons – he was just brilliant!!) and a few times to Ice-shows (with Charlie Caroli the clown as light relief). Once a year there was the village Parish Day(with a Mouse Town and “Freak Show” – but even at seven we could tell the mermaid was a woman in a papier-mache tail behind a fish tank – and that the Bat-Woman - half woman, half bat – was someone with her head through a screen). Sometimes there was a circus. At Parish day there were Wild Flower competitions, cooking, vegetable or Flower Arranging competitions and so on that kids of all sexes went in for. Once Douglas Bader opened the show, which caused a minor sensation to us boys, brought up, as we were, on All Our Yesterdays and Victor Comics.

TV (black & white) was a mix of the kids standards that seem to be still going (Sooty, Bill & Ben etc.) plus Doctor Who (of course), Fireball XL5, Torchy the battery Boy, The Saint, Danger Man and The Prisoner, All Our Yesterdays (a particular favourite), Robin Hood (Richard Greene), William Tell and The Adventures Of Long John Silver, with the incomparable Robert Newton...

I still recall seeing my first colour TV - it was on the way to an Ice Show and was round a relative's house. Cricket was on - and I can still picture the green and the white of the players.

Well, I've rambled a bit - & I may have to do some editing later - but it's something else to be going on with... : )

Today Generation

2007-08-04T09:31:00.002+01:00

Having paid little attention to birthdays for a while, it was a bit of a shock to hear that I share one with the venerable Today prog. Anyhoo, fright or not, it has inspired me to tap away & create this blog, so here we go.......

Childhood..
Born Victoria Hospital, Woking, Surrey (two years after this pic. of Mum & Dad was taken) for three years I was an only child – till my brother (Gary - I also received a model AA truck) & later my sister (Julie) came on the scene (brother would have preferred a rabbit). Earliest memories seem to be of running around with cowboy hat & six-gun outside the caravan in which we lived, or playing with things on the tray of my high chair (Plastic animals? Toy soldiers?).

Childhood was happy; no trauma - apart from splitting my nose open in a bumper car & some kind of bug that produced hallucinations (I only saw tigers on the window. Little sister, years later, saw Colonel Blink, of Beezer fame, on the radiator - now that is weird!!).

Moving out of the caravan, we lived for a while on the "Four Winds" estate of the Webber family (of Tonybell ice-cream fame) near Weybridge, where my grandfather was gardener. Memories of Dad calling (& shooting) wood pigeons, me playing by the Bell family’s swimming pool (but not in – I’m a lifelong non-swimmer), collecting chestnuts in the woods.

Days out or holidays meant picking winkles & eating them with a pin at the Witterings or playing in the muddy potholes of the dirt road outside wooden, spider-filled chalets at Hayling Island.

We seemed to have a lot of family back then: all four grandparents, Great-granny & Grandad Bonner; he looking like something out of an Edwardian photo, with big cap & waistcoat on at all times. According to family lore we were "settled" gypsies, & Gran was the first of that side of the family to live in a house. There were our lovely maiden aunts, Nelly & Winnie (grandad’s sisters) who, after a lifetime in service, lived together in Whitely Village, with their china pigs, home-made teas to die for and a yen for playing cards for money…

There seemed to be droves of miscellaneous aunts & uncles back then, many long gone now, living in tiny, brick cottages with unused, chill front rooms (like the one in which dead Uncle Will was laid out) or funny wooden huts or railway carriages at the coast. I recall a lot of sitting still, taking tea in quiet rooms, while a clock ticked…. We had lovely Auntie Jenny (whose daughter-in-law is now Miss Mondo Italia) and interested, interesting and fun Uncle Barry (who introduced me to Bernal Diaz and Tacitus - I'd discovered Graves "I Claudius" at eleven & had become fascinated with lives from the past). There was saturnine, but very funny, Uncle Tony and toothless Aunt Dot (whose dentist committed suicide – a revelation at the tea table that sent me into hysterics). There were aunts everywhere; Olives and Betties and Edies, Auntie Weasel, Uncle Tin - and kindly, jolly, rosy-faced Uncle George – his cabinet decked with pictures of him and tanks in the Western Desert - and the Iron Cross he'd taken from a dead German.

Even once we got into a house of our own (thanks to the influence of the Bell family, who helped swing a mortgage for Dad. They also owned the house in which my grandad lived after retirement, on a peppercorn rent, until his death and came to his funeral. Genuine, caring employers.) we were not well-off ( no car, phone or pets till quite late; with an outside loo, a tin bath on the wall and no heating - which meant ice on the inside of the windows and getting dressed in bed to keep warm) but as kids we seemed to lack for nothing. Certainly I have no memories of wants or unfulfilled yearnings. Perhaps we were just happy with what we had. I know that none of us grew up to be materialist or demanding.

I suppose we were working class (Dad was a building worker, Mum a housewife - later a baby-sitter, cleaner & receptionist) but as there were no politics in our part of the world, neither in our house nor at school, "badges" like that were meaningless. Even today I can't understand people's willingness to label themselves or to let themselves be labelled.

I grew up a cheerful, polite, well spoken, well mannered child; perhaps typically "Surrey" in some ways (there we are.... a label), a little shy in company perhaps, but with no hang-ups, fears, issues, prejudices or strong beliefs of any kind (well I would think that anyway, wouldn’t I?).

By the time I was five we lived in West Byfleet (claim to fame – a mention in the "Monty Python Election Special sketch"). Schooldays meant walking to school alone or with my bro (only a round trip of a kilometer & a half, so not far) to the local primary. I could read before I went to school (thanks to Mum - by seven I was on Kipling’s Jungle Book) but my maths were pretty poor and have remained so all of my life (see Work).

Spare time meant rushing around on bikes, reading, drawing, playing out all day in the woods by the railway across the road or up along the old Basingstoke Canal - where for a few weeks one year, there were rows of gigantic, cement, sewer pipes, about six feet across and ten feet long, which we clambered on & jumped across & tried to get rolling - Health & Safety - hah!!.
Sometimes we went exploring along the edges of the mysterious, humming, electrical sub-station, or the "yellow river" – a sort of open sewer that ran down the backs of the houses in our road – or built dens in the spinney, playing "War".

Saturdays meant Saturday Morning Pictures: my little brother & me catching the train to Woking for black & white films (adventure, lions, white hunters) with Jamboree Bags full of odd sweets.

Sunday was Sunday School & Tuesday "Happy Hour", at the little chapel down our road, where I learned my Bible stories but somehow missed the God part – actual religion passing me by (there was certainly none in the house). Joined the Lifeboys, the church choir (two & six for weddings) & the Red Cross (wrong side of the railway tracks AND wrong side of the canal for the Cubs & Scouts).

Getting through the eleven-plus I went off to Surbiton Grammar School at Thames Ditton. I fitted in well enough, but being quiet, well behaved, an indifferent scholar and not at all sporty - partly due to general lack of confidence & a series of childhood accidents (lop-sided smile -cricket ball to the face - & a trick knee - knelt on pin & had to have it cut out) - I don’t think most of the teachers even knew I was there…

We had the usual mix of odd cases among the staff a scattering of harmless eccentrics ("Nutty" Bolt in hunting kit, with his stories of the War & strike-breaking in the Thirties) and the occasional sadist or molester (sciences or Latin for some reason) who these days would be locked up, but generally schooldays were pretty uneventful. I think I was only beaten twice (chemistry) and had my hands crushed by a desk lid (physics) but otherwise school was just something one did – neither good nor bad. Enjoyed geography, history & Eng. lit, but otherwise just muddled through & out with a handful of O levels & three A levels, not knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up (still don’t).

Work…
Since fifteen I had been working Saturdays, holidays & evenings, partly in a little local supermarket (the years of the loo roll, salt and sugar shortages – which taught me a lot about human nature). I had done well, & enjoyed it, so I had gone for an interview with Woolworths to be taken on as a trainee manager; but the interviewer – a pompous chap with fingers like fat, white worms – had (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) been rude about my chocolate brown safari suit, so I turned the proffered posting down. I had also done odd-jobs for a local land surveying company (my Mum temped there from time to time) cleaning curtains & gardening, so when I left school I started there as a Trainee Surveyor.

By my early twenties I had worked all over the country. Work was occasionally odd (my first day of site work: lunch was three pints of bitter – no food, just beer – then clambering round on tin roofs at an urban farm, where they smashed old car batteries. At RAF Leuchers I was introduced to the use of dowsing rods), sometimes extremely cold (I particulalry remember the ice-covered, fist-sized clusters of ladybirds - the year of the ladybird plague of 76 – nestling under the eaves of buildings at RAF Binbrook, Lincs. and losing my boots in the freezing mud in icy-blue chalk pits near Rochester) .

Overseas work was a bit "Boys’ Own";

Nigeria, where, at nineteen, on my third day in the country, I was dropped off in the jungle, alone with a team of "cutlass" wielding locals and a compass - & told to cut a line along a bearing (character forming I think they call it).

Pre-revolutionary Iran (which I loved) down at Bandar Abbas (Iran's Portsmouth) and Bushire (where, with US support, they were building a nuclear power station back in the seventies), on the salt-pans or up in the hills (trailblazing a route for our land rovers through the Zagros).

Libya (Surveying the desert. It was sandy.).

All of this opened up a world to a lad whose previous foreign travel totalled to a school trip to Italy.

Other jobs followed: more surveying (quantity rather than land this time. Numbers; remember the bad maths?), contracts management in the insulation trade (in the 80s, when energy saving was a government priority. Energy calculations & pricing - maths again) then general building contract managing. Following the 90s building slump (& three redundancies later) I went self-employed, back to odd–jobbing, carpentry & decorating (pricing, doing my own accounts - maths). The offer of two weeks temporary work in a wet November led me to a ten year/ongoing stretch at our local council (running an enforcement/licensing team - maths & money) where I am now (but not for much longer I feel…)

Well, that's my first post.... It needs more work (and more colour - hobbies, friends etc.) & I'll create some more pics & links & stuff later - but it'll do as a start... If you have been, thanks for reading.