Working for the Council – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Tribal. We are tribal. We are xenophobic and territorial. We are designed to function in small groups. We have to recognise and fight that if we ever hope to be civilised.

7.11.01

 

When I was eighteen I obtained a job working for the council as a road sweeper. I enjoyed it. The group of road-sweepers I worked with were a bunch of communists and revolutionaries. We met up for two-hour tea-breaks, discussing what was wrong with the country and how the whole social order should be overthrown. Then we went back to work.

Taking a two-hour break was OK as long as you knew the system.

I soon learnt that the foreman came round to check on me at exactly the same time every day. All I had to do was to be working hard for when he turned up.

I also sussed out that the public only saw you when you were working. If they did not see you they forgot you existed. I developed a strategy. I worked extremely hard when I was on the job. I did all manner of things over and above the call of duty. I weeded and cleared litter and leaves from hedges. Then I hid my barrow and headed off home or to the café. I only worked for half the time but whenever anyone saw me I was going at a feverish pace.

People were impressed. They’d never seen such an energetic road sweeper. Some actually phoned in to praise my industry and accomplishments, which was unprecedented. I was the sweeper who was clearing out under hedges and pulling up weeds. Nobody ever rang in to say I was only doing a three hour day and was sitting around drinking tea and gabbing most of the day. That’s because they never knew.

One weekend I wanted to take the Friday off to make a long weekend. There was a Rock festival on that I wanted to get to. I was in a dilemma because I could not afford to lose pay. I had a story sorted for the foreman for when he came on his rounds and I was not to be found. I had been caught short and I’d gone to the loo. I thought I could get away with it.

On the Thursday I worked for five hours and went overboard. I dragged stuff out from under hedges that had been there since Alfred had been worrying about the Danes. By the time I had finished I had left heaps of rubbish all the way along my route to demonstrate how hard I had been working.

On Monday the foreman came round early. He seemed cross. I was preparing myself to confess and take the consequences. I suspected he would dock my pay and give me a ticking off but there was a chance that I would be summarily sacked. Too late now to do anything about it. I was resigned to my fate.

“You realise the problems you’ve caused?” He started, glaring at me.

I hung my head, mulling over what I could possibly say in my defence.

“You collected so much rubbish on Friday that the men refused to pick it all up. We had to give two men three hours overtime to collect it!”

I couldn’t quite believe my ears. I looked up at him in astonishment.

“You’re only here for the summer,” he admonished. “You don’t have to kill yourself. Slow down a bit and take it easy!”

It was quite amusing – I was being bollocked for working too hard on the day I’d skived off.

5.11.01

 

Some people seek out friends in order to gossip about trivia concerning their everyday lives.

11.10.01

 

We humans are strange creatures.

We are obsessed with status and power.

We construct huge edifices to our glory. We swank around dripping with jewellery. We festoon our homes with priceless artwork. We fill our lives with labour-saving devices.

We are also incredibly inquisitive.

We use our skills to travel the web in search of knowledge and entertainment. We analyse atoms and explore the reaches of space. We build machines to explore the bottoms of the oceans, the edges of the stratosphere and the far limits of the solar system. We extend the limits of our senses with instruments and supersede the limits of our powers with machines.

We are ingenious.

We construct vast, complex civilisations with cities, commerce and philosophy. Our ideas exceed our capacity to understand them. Our tools are now so complex few of us now understand the principles upon which they are constructed.

Yet for all our intelligence and cunning we still behave like the most primitive of animals. We are violent, cruel, tribal and belligerent.

Are we ever going to grow up?

8.11.01

Fred the doper – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Our doper was Fred. He was none too bright. He worked in the lacquer room which was contained behind double doors to cut down on evaporation of the volatile organic solvents in the lacquer.

We made a point of regularly visiting Fred for a few minutes at the beginning and end of sessions. You walked in took a few deep breaths of the heavy solvent laden atmosphere and walked back out as high as a kite for the next half-hour.

Fred worked in there all day.

“I love my job,” he told me. “I don’t take holidays even. I’m never sick. I miss it when I go home. I love my job.”

You felt like telling him to take a tub of the lacquer home with him so he could go away for a week. He could sniff it whenever he got the urge!

Fred must have been a complete addict without even knowing it. Heaven knows what it was doing to his liver or his brain! Perhaps he wasn’t quite so loopy when he started the job! Doesn’t bear thinking about.

You’d never get away with allowing anybody to work in those conditions under Health & Safety these days. Management must have known. They did not care!

5.11.01

 

Some people play sport and run around a field trying to knock a round object between two posts.

11.10.01

 

My friend Bali worked in a different part of the factory. He had a face pitted with smallpox scars. He’d got the disease as a baby in Pakistan and miraculously survived. He was a Muslim.

One day we were in the canteen having lunch. I had sausage and chips and Bali decided he’d have sausage and chips as well.

On the way out of the canteen, a thought came into my head.

“I thought you Muslims didn’t eat pork?”

He looked at me in horror as he digested the content of my words. He’d obviously thought they were beef sausages. Then he violently emptied the contents of his stomach over me and the corridor in one great liquid jet.

I wished I hadn’t asked.

5.11.01

 

Some people gyrate and flail around to rhythmical sounds. Some spend years learning how to use instruments to make rhythmical sounds for others to gyrate to.

11.10.01

 

 

Tribal. We are tribal. We are xenophobic and territorial. We are designed to function in small groups. We have to recognise and fight that if we ever hope to be civilised.

7.11.01

Loudspeaker cones – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

When I was seventeen I took this holiday job at Marconi making loudspeaker cones. It was a horrible, grubby factory. The machines and systems were labour intensive and the whole practice did not seem to have changed for fifty years. What made it worse was that it was a particularly hot summer so you were always sweaty and uncomfortable. It was frustrating as you could get a glimpse through the fanlight windows of a patch of beautiful blue sky. You imagined your friends out there chatting up the girls, swimming, lazing about, while you were stuck inside melting away in tedium. I’d signed up for ten weeks; ten weeks of utter boredom. I was very apprehensive but I needed the money.

The foreman showed me to my machine. It was a horrible squat thing. You sat in a chair in front of it and pressed the red button so it came to life. It was electric and seemed to run on compressed air. You placed a loudspeaker cone on to a template that matched the shape of the cone, pulled a lever and a heavy metal plate thumped down which had the function of trimming the edges off the loudspeaker cones. He demonstrated the procedure, showed me the safety precautions, watched while I did a few, then he nodded to me and disappeared.

I smiled around at the rest of my crew who were all staring at me. They glowered back at me. A good start.

The procedure was simple. Someone brought a heap of untrimmed cones and placed them in a pile at my side. With my left hand, I picked up a cone and placed it on a mould matching the shape of the cone. You withdrew your hand and pulled a lever with your right hand. This was like a fruit machine except it set a process into operation. This process caused a hiss of air and a cutter stamped down and trimmed the edges off the cone and then went up again. This cutter came down with enormous force. You knew that if your hand were in the way it would be taken off, crushed and severed. Fortunately, there was a safety shield that came down when you pulled the lever that was supposed to ensure this couldn’t happen. I didn’t experiment. You then took the trimmed cone off with your right hand and put it in a pile on your right.

There were a number of things that could go wrong. If you put the cone on crookedly it got ruined. If you knocked the pile they went all over the floor. If you were clumsy you could drop your cones. If you weren’t paying attention you lost the rhythm the whole procedure went to pieces. The process required a degree of coordination. You had to learn it in order to get your speed up. Ho hum.

Once you had the hang of it you reached a point where you were picking up, placing, pulling, taking off so that you were doing the two processes simultaneous with both hands doing different things at the same time. But this took a bit of time to get right. It was a bit like tapping your head while rubbing your belly.

You were there from 8.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. and most people then did an hour’s overtime until 6.00 p.m. You worked 5 days and then on Saturday morning up until midday (on time and a quarter). You had a break for fifteen minutes at 10.00 a.m. and lunch was between 12.00 noon and 1.00 p.m. You had to clock in and out. If you were three minutes late they docked you 15 minutes pay, ten minutes late and it was 30 minutes pay etc. We were paid by the hour with a large percentage being based on piecework. This was worked out for the whole line based on the number of completed cones you produced in a day. There was a formula. It meant that the pay of everyone in your line was determined by the speed of the slowest member.

There were a lot of lines. Each line was based on a different size or shape of cone.

My team consisted of a pulper (he prepared and maintained he consistency of the pulp used to make the cone – it had to be kept at a precise density), a sucker (he sucked the wood pulp onto a moulded suction end – this was considered semi-skilled as he had to suck exactly the right thickness onto his moulded end), a drier (he dried the cones), a centre puncher (he had a machine like mine that punched a hole in the middle), a trimmer (me), a doper (he dipped the cones in lacquer) and a gatherer (his job was to move the cones down the line so that you never ran out and pack them at the end). My team, like all the others, were entirely male. The only females in the place worked as secretaries in the office.

My colleagues, involved in making six-inch oval cones, introduced themselves to me in the toilets during the first break. They gathered around me and threatened me, punched me a few times, and generally promised me further attention, with various menaces, if I didn’t speed up. It seemed I was slowing the line down. I was committing the cardinal sin of losing all of them pay. I had better shape up quick and get my speed up or they would assist me by providing me with an incentive (though how you could work faster with broken fingers, fractured ribs and squashed testicles was beyond me). Fortunately, I’d managed to get the rhythm going and by the end of the day and managed to up my rate to that of my fellows. They seemed satisfied.

Once you’d mastered the technique the enemy was boredom. The minutes dragged. To say it was tedious was to understate the mind-numbing monotony. After a week I’d run out of songs to hum.

I designed a chart and stuck it on the wall by my trimmer. I’d plotted all the hours I was going to have to work in my ten weeks. At the end of a session, I crossed the hours off. I could see it slowly melt away – but at least my moment of salvation was visible.

Harry, our sucker and team leader, came past my work station one break. He was retiring at the end of the summer following his sixty-fifth birthday. He’d told me that he had started working there at the age of eleven, sweeping floors, and claimed to have got in fifty-four years without a day’s illness. He looked at my chart and asked what it was. I explained that I was checking off my hours. He glared at it and then ripped it off the wall and threw it in the bin.

5.11.01

 

 

Some people spend their life watching soap operas about the ordinary, everyday life of fictitious characters.

11.10.01

 

 

Ninety per cent of all we do is subliminal. We don’t even understand the reasons for our most basic behaviour. We make it up as we go along. What lies behind the things we do? We go status-seeking, power craving, accruing wealth and impressing the opposite sex (or same-sex).

A lot of our behaviour revolves around getting our genes into the next gene pool. Life is sex. We are ruled by our pheromones!

7.11.01

Bernard the Builder – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

My Dad was no handyman – neither am I.

Bernard came to build our kitchen.

Bernard was a really nice guy who, though untrained, had set up as a builder. I don’t know why he had settled for a career in that field, as far as I could see he did not have any background for that kind of work.

I know exactly how we came to get Bernard. It was because he gave us the lowest quote, which meant that he was the only one we could afford.

Our kitchen was too small. We wanted the walls knocked out and the old outhouses and scullery knocked into one big kitchen. It was quite a big job really, although we did not really appreciate that at the time. One of the walls was the main support wall for the back of the house. We did not have to worry, Bernard had it sussed.

He began pounding and smashing away until he had created enough rubble to fill the place three times over. This is an aspect of building that always seems to defy the laws of physics. It defies the laws of entropy. You start with an amount of matter (walls) and create ten times as much matter (rubble). It proves the Big Bang theory for me.

We couldn’t afford a skip so we carted the rubble to the tip in plastic bags.

Bernard set about the support wall which ran the width of the house. He brought in Acros to hold it up. Soon he had knocked it all down and removed the rubble. He had purchased these big beams from the reclamation centre and proceeded to knock holes in the outside walls to put them through. It was quite a feat. In order to insert the beam through the hole he had created Bernard had to balance on our garden wall and thread it through. He was incredibly strong for a small, slight guy, and at one point looked like a mad tight-rope walker with a massive balancing pole, teetering on the wall six feet above the ground. That beam was incredibly heavy but he scorned all assistance. Eventually, he got it inserted through the hole. The problem was that he could only push t in so far because then it came up against the first of the Acros. Bernard’s answer to this was  to get off the wall and come inside to take down the two Acros that were holding up the rear wall.

I was inside at the time and came out into the kitchen to observe the progress and offer further assistance. No, he did not want my help. I surveyed the work with the beam poking through the wall and the two dismantled Acros.

“There’s about 50 ton of bricks up there above our head,” Bernard remarked looking up at the back end of the house suspended above our heads.

I looked across at the twenty-foot expanse and the dismantled Acros.

“So what’s holding it up right now Bernard?” I enquired a little apprehensibly.

He considered this for a few minutes. “It’s just got used to being there,” was his reassuring answer. With that, he set back out to clamber back up on to the wall and thread the beam through so that it could be lodged in place to support the wall. He then used the acros to raise the beam up as high as it would go and cemented it in place.

I was talking to another builder about this some years later. He went ashen. He’d heard of whole buildings collapsing because of similar actions. We could have easily been killed and the whole back end of the house demolished.

“When they go, them buggers come tumblin’ down,” he remarked. “An’ I bet he weren’t insured, neither!”

Good old Bernard!

3.11.01

Jimi Hendrix at Woburn Abbey – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Some watch sport, films and drama in order to avoid thinking.

11.10.01

 

Hendrix played the Woburn Abbey Festival. We had to be there.

We camped in a field which the farmer had, rather maliciously, sprayed with liquid manure. The smell infested our tent forever. It had to be thrown away.

Geno Washington was the act who had the unenviable slot before Hendrix came on, but the tension of anticipation was too great. Everyone wanted Hendrix, poor Geno had no chance. No matter how good he was he wasn’t Jimi. The crowd booed and threw chairs at the stage. They wanted him off. There was electricity in the air. Everyone was baying for Jimi. Eventually Geno gave up and left. The roadies began setting the stage up.

Everything was ready. The stage was empty but it held such promise that all our attention was focussed on it. There was a pregnant pause that seemed to go on and on as we impatiently waited. Everybody was up on their feet, calling out, clapping, chanting, trying to contain the nuclear energy of expectation. This is what we had all been waiting for.

Then Jimi, Noel and Mitch came out on to the stage. The whole arena erupted and surged forward taking me off my feet.

The band plugged in and began to play. The speakers were crap. The sound was distorted. The speakers were just too small to deal with a big outdoor space; they couldn’t handle the volume. It didn’t matter. We could hear it and we could see them. The bass formed a wall of noise. Hendrix’s guitar soared and whined through it all. The drums pounded and the vocals punched over the top. The sound quality might not have been first rate but it was good enough!

The crowd surged forward to get even nearer, I was in the crush near the front. We all wanted to watch Jimi as he performed his magic. He was so much larger than life in a big black broad brimmed hat with a coloured sash around it, a floppy bright flowery psychedelic shirt, green loons with a scarf tied around the leg. He held that guitar like a weapon and unleashed it on us. The excitement was palpable – hysterical. The band were multicoloured giants storming around the stage. Noel stood still, studiously playing, while Mitch pounded away and Jimi stole the attention. You could not take your eyes off him. Hendrix was magnificent. The band blazed. Who cared about the sound quality? This was a wall of excitement the like of which an outside concert had never witnessed. We were bouncing up and down, caught up in the overwhelming group mania, living every note, every growl and wave of the hand.

He stroked, caressed and wrenched at his white Stratocaster, pulling out every trick. He played it between his legs, upside down and behind his head. The sound roared and the fanged beast he had produced and set free, devoured us.

Afterwards, in the press, they said that this was one of the jaded performances. If that was below par then bloody hell. It was the most exciting gig I’ve ever been too. Any more excitement and it would have been heart attack time. He was stupendous.

I only managed to see Jimi perform three times in a small club – I think Klooks Kleek, where he was mind-blowingly brilliant, at Woburn, where he was fabulous, and at his farewell concert at the Albert Hall which was nowhere near as exciting.

I’m glad I was alive to see such jaded dreams. I so wish Jimi was alive to have given us more of that magic. I’ll never experience anything like it.

8.11.01

 

Human beings do a lot of weird stuff to fill up the seconds that make up their lives. But is any of it more valid than anything else?

11.10.01

A Jaundiced view – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Life rarely goes the way you plan it.

31.10.01

 

I stayed with friends while Liz moved up to Hull with Dylan so we gave up our bedsit. Kathy and Toby were good friends looked after me. They’d quickly escaped from downstairs to move into our little flat. It meant that I did not even have to move. It was only for two weeks. I had to serve out my months’ notice as a technician.

It was towards my last week at work that things started going wrong. I felt so ill. It was like flu but worse. I was so muzzy and weak and was struggling to cope. My pee was coming out brown. No amount of aspirin or paracetamol did any good. But it was my last week and I carried on.

On the final Wednesday it was all too much. I was so ill I could not function. I decided to go to the college doctor to see if he had anything that might get me through the week.

I knocked on the surgery door and walked in. I had not got more than two paces in when he shouted at me.

“Stay there! Do not come any closer!”

That was rather disconcerting but I was too ill to care. I just wanted to curl up and die.

“You have Hepatitis! Yellow jaundice. You are highly contagious.”

He actually got out of his seat behind the desk and edged away from me towards the corner of the surgery.

“I will write you a note.” He scribbled on a bit of paper. “Take this to the nearest hospital and give it to a doctor. Do not – I repeat – do not go near anyone! You are highly contagious.”

He placed the note on the edge of the desk and backed away into the corner of the room.

It was like I had leprosy or plague but I was too ill to give a damn. I wanted to go to bed and be ill. I couldn’t handle all this.

I didn’t ask how I was meant to get to hospital without going near anyone. I didn’t ask anything. I trudged over to the desk, took the note and left. The doctor was almost cowering in the corner of the room. It would have been quite comical if it wasn’t for the fact that I felt so ill. I was beginning to surmise that my condition might be quite serious.

I went to my car and passed one of my colleagues on the way.

“Where are you going?” She asked.

“I’ve got Hepatitis. I’m off to hospital,” I explained.

“Oh,” she said, edging away.

I somehow arrived at the hospital and handed in my note at the reception.

“Go and sit over there in the waiting room and a doctor will see you,” the receptionist explained curtly. I looked round at all the people sitting in the waiting room. Mothers with babies, children. There were hundreds of them.

“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “It explains in the note. I have Hepatitis. I am highly contagious. I am not allowed to go near anyone.”

“Well if you don’t sit in the waiting room we can’t see to you.”

I was too ill to argue. I went and sat in the waiting room with all the other people.

After two hours the doctor saw me. He read the note. He looked at the deep yellow whites of my eyes.

“Good heavens,” he exclaimed. “You have Hepatitis. You are highly contagious. Why on Earth did you sit in the waiting room? You should have brought this note straight to me.” He was annoyed.

I was too ill to explain.

“We will have to admit you to an isolation ward straight away. Where have you been working?”

I explained that I was a laboratory technician.

“Do you work with rats?” He asked.

“Yes. I’ve been working in the animal house with about three thousand rats.”

“Good God! That’s even worse. You could have Weil’s disease!”

I’d never heard of it but it sounded bad.

Perhaps I was dying.

I explained that my wife was in Hull and I was meant to be going up to Hull in two days when I finished work. Was it possible for me to go up to Hull first before going in to hospital.

“There is no way you can undertake such a journey. You are much too ill. You need to be isolated straight away. You could have a very nasty form of Hepatitis.”

From the way everyone had been acting around me I was beginning to suspect that. But all I wanted to do now was to get to Liz. That was the only thing in my head. I told him I needed to go to Hull.

We had a bit of an argument. He lost his temper with me and handed me discharge papers. He warned me that if I signed them they took no responsibility if I subsequently died.

I discharged myself and left the doctor dousing himself with ethanol.

I caught the next train to Hull and tried to keep away from people. It wasn’t hard. They didn’t seem at all keen to go too near to me. That might had been because I was glowing luminous yellow. It was not a nice yellow. And my eyes were now orangey brown where they should have been white.

I arrived in Hull and got on a bus. The conductor told me where to get off. I’d only been there a few times by car and did not have a clue how to find the place. I asked a local kid where my road was. He was very helpful. He jabbered away in some deep Hull accent something about tennies and bairns and what not. As far as I was concerned it could have been Russian. So I set off in the direction he had pointed.

I found it.

As we had no phone Liz did not know I was coming. She thought I was coming up in two days time.

What she found was a bright yellow husband standing on the doorstep.

“Don’t come any closer!” I said as she stood there.

“What’s the matter?” She stepped back, alarmed.

“I have Hepatitis. I have to go straight to hospital. It’s very contagious. Don’t come near me.”

She could see I was ill. It didn’t need spelling out. My unnatural yellow colour bounced off the walls. We negotiated a way into the house. I had a cup of tea and we set off.

She got the pram and put Dylan in it. We walked to the hospital. It wasn’t too far away. But when we got there they wouldn’t see me because they didn’t have a casualty department. They directed us to the Infirmary on the other side of the city.

We had to get on a bus.

Eventually, we got to the infirmary. They took down my details but because I didn’t have a local GP they couldn’t admit me. I was instructed to go home and get a local GP to take me on.

By the time we got home it was too late. I had another cup of tea and took myself off to bed in the spare room.

The next day Liz went straight down and registered me at the surgery she had already registered with. She explained what the problem was and they arranged to send a doctor round.

The doctor was a Locum. He came and examined me, prodded my stomach, checked my eyes and confirmed it was Hepatitis. He told me to go to bed, take some aspirin and plenty of fluids.

I asked about the baby and Liz.

Yes it was contagious. I was to sleep in a different room and use separate utensils, sheets, flannels etc. That should do it. He would arrange some blood tests to see how I was going.

In London it was life and death, isolation wards and panic. In Hull it was take an aspirin and go to bed.

They’re pretty tough up North, obviously.

I was too weak to argue.

31.10.01

 

So what do you regret most? If you could go back and put it right? If you could relive it with the knowledge of hindsight how would you do it different?

The trouble is that it’s all or nothing. If you change a bit the chances are that you’d end up changing it all.

31.10.01

 

Now Jack Kerouac probably started it all. It wasn’t so much the structure as the journey; not the arriving as much as the doing. He sure did it. He wrote it. He lived it.

He wasn’t the first to search for the meaning of life, and he wasn’t the first to want to goof. He was just the first to put it together that way.

He was the first Messiah of the new age.

The fact that he lost it, messed up with booze and religion and couldn’t handle it. That was incidental.

All heroes are fatally flawed.

31.10.01

Breaking in to the Rugby Team – extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’

Posted on by Opher

I was five foot three and weighed eight and a half stone. I was tiny and as light as a dandelion clock. The whole year group played rugby. They were big, burly kids. On Wednesday afternoon they were divided up into six teams and allocated to the three different pitches where they all played a game.

The five of us leftover were given a rugby ball and told to kick it around at the far end of the field, out of the way, where we couldn’t get into mischief.

I was right pissed off. I was tiny and thin but I was strong and wiry and extremely aggressive and nippy. I’d already been thrown out of cubs for being too wild. I was the champion of British Bulldogs. I was thrown out of scouts for being too wild. I was the sporting champion of my block. My whole life was spent running wild in the fields, up trees, in ditches, riding horses and up to all sorts. I was co-ordinated, determined and fearless. Yet I couldn’t even make the sixth team. It was insulting. I knew I was born to be a rugby player.

I put up with it for a few weeks but it was so boring kicking a ball around with six other non-combatants. They were useless. It was obvious that we were considered the dregs. Nobody even checked to see if any of us had any potential. As far as they were concerned, from a cursory judgement, we were too fat, too uncoordinated, too unfit, or too little to be of value on a rugby field.

After three weeks of boredom, I went to see the sports master Kallinack and complained. He brushed me off.

In frustration, I went home and demanded that my mum write a note. I was steaming. Kallinack read it grudgingly, weighed up whether he could put up with the hassle of sticking to his guns and grudgingly made a decision. It was of little importance to him. He put me in the sixth team and ousted some other unfortunate into the wilderness that existed behind the touchline.

I played like a man possessed, or at least a boy possessed. I tackled, wrestled, charged and fiercely contested for every ball. The teacher in charge had put me in as a hooker. I asked him where I had to be as I was a bit hazy about the rules. He said my job was to be where the ball was. That’s where I was.

I was under every maul. I was charging every kick. I was wrestling the ball off anyone who had it. I didn’t care what team they were on. That ball was mine. I was a demon. I had no regard for personal injury. The rules were a little bit of an unknown but I had five weeks pent-up frustration and unlimited energy to burn.

The next week I found myself promoted to the fourth team. Once again I was like a firework exploding in their midst. I wanted that ball. I chased it down and once I had it I was a fury. Nobody was getting it off of me. I ended the game bruised, battered and exalted. Many of the bigger kids were afraid of me. My determination more than made up for my lack of finesse or brawn. I was a midget H-bomb. They saw that I had no limits.

I walked off the pitch clutching that ball. I was loving this!

The next week I found myself in the second team. The second team were important, they actually played other schools. Somebody had said something. Kallinack gave me the once over and I thought I detected a little hint of admiration in his eye. I would show the bastard. I would teach him to leave me out on the touch-line. This time it was not so easy. We played against the first team and they had craft, speed and stamina, but I was a ferocious dynamo and I had something to prove.

It took me a few more weeks for me to break through into the first team. Trevor, the school hooker, had to drop out with bad burns on his back, caused either by someone putting a firework down his shirt or deliberately burning him with a lighted cigarette, depending on who you believed (he was a bit of a bad lad). I took his place as the school hooker.

Once I was there no one was going to get me out.

I played like a dervish. The centre of that scrum was mine. I didn’t care which side had the put in, I fought for that ball. I’d fling myself in there. If the other guy was foolish enough to get his legs in between me and the ball that was his look-out. I swung on my props and fought for that ball into their second row. My job was to get it back for my side. Every ball lost was a mortal blow. I wasn’t happy unless I hooked every ball and even if it was deep within their scrum I still fighting for it. This was where being small was an advantage. I could stand up and swing on my huge props. I could reach into their scrum and battle. It took other teams by surprise. It was normal to acknowledge second best when it was the oppositions put in. Not with me it wasn’t. I won a fair proportion.

The following season I was playing for my county. Nobody would ever write me off again.

21.9.01

Making a blood smear – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

I was teaching about blood to one of my High School classes in the Spring of 1980. I had gathered them all around me. We were going to make slides of blood smears – a popular lesson. This was the bit they loved. This was when the teacher fearlessly jabbed himself in the finger with a sterile lancet to demonstrate how it was done, and how easy and painless it was.

“Hey man, I missed that! Do it again.”

You had to do it nonchalantly as if it was nothing. You had to produce loads of blood. It hurt.

The kids were always attentive. They were nervous about making their own slides and pricking themselves, but they just loved to see the teacher jabbing himself and bleeding. You usually had one who could not cope with the sight of blood and passed out. It was a chance for the macho ones to show how it was done, but ironically, most of them were the ones most nervous.

I had all the class sit down, so that if anyone passed out they didn’t crash to the floor and smack their head, and applied the alcohol to sterilise the area on my index finger. I played to the house. You swung your arm round to get centrifugal force working. The blood built up in your fingers. You theatrically took the lancet and demonstrated where you were going to jab on the pad of your index finger. The back of the finger at the base of the nail was for cissies, besides it didn’t bleed so much. The forefinger produced a lot of blood.

This was the moment where all the eager eyes were feverishly focussed on you. You dragged it out before jabbing the lancet hard into your finger and squeezing a big dollop of blood out. It really hurt, inflicting pain on yourself is not pleasurable, but you smiled and told them it was nothing.

I could sense that the class were excited as I went through the act, but then I became aware that they were not really watching me. Their eyes were focussed on something behind me.

I looked around. There was Ruben ‘El Gangster’ Alvarado standing behind my ear holding a slide in one hand and a long stiletto flick knife in the other. He had not merely jabbed his finger he had sliced it to the bone. Blood was dripping freely on to the slide and pooling over to trickle on to the floor.

Ruben grinned at me.

I turned back to the class. ‘If anybody has any trouble getting sufficient blood for their smear, they should ask Ruben. I think he has some to spare.’

19.9.01

 

I am changing the world!

18.9.01

 

“Hey man, lend me your eraser.”

“No. Get your own.”

“If you don’t lend me your eraser I won’t let you use the machine gun tonight!”

19.9.01

Falklands War fever – extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

I have a dream of a world where enjoying yourself is not frowned upon and laws are just and equally applied to all – where a person has freedoms.

21.9.01

 

We hadn’t been back from America long when the Falklands crisis blew up. Those evil Argentineans had dared to land on a set of islands they arrogantly called the Malvinas when everybody knew they were really called the Falklands. For some obscure reason the Argentinians made some historical claim to these islands and, it seems, they have been a bone of contention in Argentina for years, just because they happened to be situated a short distance off the coast of Argentina and a whopping six thousand miles away from Britain.

Trust the Argentineans to get it wrong.

Didn’t they know the British had landed on those islands, run their flag up, and laid claim to them hundreds of years ago? They must have known that because that’s what the British did everywhere they landed, regardless of who was living there – particularly if the indigenous people were black or brown. In the days of the British Empire black or brown people obviously weren’t civilised so they did not count at all.

Now, I don’t mean to be too harsh on the British here. Not because I am British, you understand. Conquering was an evil practice that the British did better than anybody. It was not even a colour or race thing. Slavery and the conquering of other nations was what all humans did to each other regardless of race or colour. The blacks did it to other blacks, and browns to blacks and other browns, whites to other whites, reds to reds, and so on. Even the slave trade was inaugurated and sponsored by black tribes preying on other black tribes and selling black slaves to the Arabs who sold them on to the white traders. It was more that the British, and later the Americans, did it more thoroughly and efficiently. It was not something to be proud of, but we British conquered, enslaved and exploited better than anybody else at that point in history.

I don’t mean to digress, merely to explain. We had landed there and run up the flag, hence it was British forever. Those were the rules. We should know. We made up those rules.

Then again there were a lot of people living on the island and it has to be said that some of them were Argentinean but the majority were, or considered themselves to be, British. They lived a quiet rural life farming or fishing. There wasn’t an awful lot to do out there.

It all went along very smoothly with commerce with the mainland, ferrying goods back and forth between Argentina and the Falklands. Britain was much too far away to have meaningful commerce with, but the people still thought of themselves as British and the majority did not want to be ruled from Argentina. For some reason they wanted their masters to be British.

When the Argentinians landed and laid claim to the place people were up in arms.

In a democracy you ask the people.

Matter solved. Ask the Argentineans to go home.

After all, what was so important about a desolate island somewhere out in the ocean six thousand miles away from Britain? Why cause bother?

It surely wasn’t anything to do with the Antarctic, natural resources, oil, gas and mineral wealth? Surely not? No. This was democracy. The people had a right to choose. If they wanted to be British then British they had the right to be. Mrs Thatcher said so. The pesky Argentinians had invaded British sovereign territory. A lesson had to be taught.

A task force was rapidly put together and prepared for war as the British war effort swung into action.

Now back in England I decided to hold a debate in my classroom and explore the situation from all sides. To maybe weigh up the various options and apply a bit of logic to what was becoming a volatile situation. I gathered the class in and began a good old British debate where cool, calm reason was brought to bear, to tease out the possibilities and current intricacies of the situation and arrive at the best solution.

Before a few minutes had passed I found myself presiding over a bunch of hysterical demons baying for blood and chanting ‘Argies out!’ as if these people had always been our enemies and were the devil incarnate. Reason did not seem to be the main thrust of their argument. It was yet another scene from Orwell’s vision of the future. Of course, I repeated it throughout the day even though it was a bit depressing.

This thoughtless war fever could never happen here! But it did.

30.10.01

 

Sometimes it is necessary to keep restating the obvious otherwise what were once obvious ceases to exist.

29.10.01

 

I have a vision of a world where cultures are not homogenised into some twenty-first century plastic universe, where nature is not covered in concrete or fenced into reserves for human consumption.

21.9.01

The car – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Because there is no purpose to life does that preclude all purpose? Can we not stand back from it and invent our own purpose? Take control and script it ourselves?

We could elect a director! We don’t need to rely on god, ‘the director that isn’t there’ to determine our fate. We can build better tomorrows out of sad todays.

29.10.01

 

Sometimes, in a road movie, your car can take the starring role.

We didn’t have a car – couldn’t afford one, not with three kids. So we borrowed one.

It was Liz’s mum’s black automatic Morris Oxford – a bland and plodding, run-of-the-mill car.

We set off for the Lake District. We were going to camp, do a bit of walking and visit friends. A week away. Yipeee!

We arrived at the lakes and found a field to camp in. We set up the tent in the drizzle. It was beautiful. We had found a field overlooking Lake Ennerdale – the green rolling hills with rocky outcrops around the tranquil waters of the lake – nobody in sight. Apart from the rain, it seemed idyllic. We could have been in the middle of nowhere if it wasn’t for the dry stone walls and the odd curl of smoke from a farmhouse in the distance we could be all on our own.

The drizzle was a nuisance but we had a perfect spot up on one of the hills. The whole lake was spread out below us with the hills as a backdrop. Gorgeous!

The kids were alright, but the tent was a little cramped. It wasn’t really designed for five. But this was an adventure. It was a bit weird in the tent, particularly when you were trying to get to sleep because the ground sloped, but what the hell. We’d sleep with our heads facing up the hill.

We woke up for our first day and it was still raining. It looked as if the rain was set in for the day but we were not going to allow that to deflate our spirits and decided on a walk. No rain was going to spoil our holiday. We set off around the lake, grumbling kids in tow. It was quite a long walk and we were pretty wet and exhausted by the time we got back.

We crammed in the tent and tried to dry ourselves off. By now the drizzle had turned to hard rain and the little tent was leaking. Every time someone brushed against the canvas, water came through, and it wasn’t possible to keep the kids from brushing against the walls. The tent was much too small.

We had something to eat as the rain teemed down. We tried heating coffee on the primus stove. We tried keeping the kids entertained. It rained harder. Everything was getting damp. The kids were bored.

After a couple more hours we decided to modify our itinerary. Perhaps it was best to go and visit friends first? The weather might clear up later in the week.

Once thought of, the idea rapidly became more and more appealing. Stuck here in this tent we were becoming wetter and more miserable by the minute. Adventure was fast giving way to misery.

It was decided.

We started packing up. Everything in the tent was put in boxes. I went to load them into the car.

There was no car.

I stood and stared at the place the car had been. It wasn’t there.

It had to be there. Nobody could have driven it off without us hearing. I was sure it was there when we got back from our walk.

I stood in the rain clutching a box of cooking utensils and stared at the space where the car had been.

I convinced myself I had left it in the lane. It wasn’t there either.

Bewildered and with a deep gnawing panic, I went back to the tent and asked Liz to help. She came out and looked around but agreed that there was no car.

I looked down the hill to the lake and there in the distance, I could just make out a tiny model car up against a dry stone wall that separated the field from the lakeshore.

‘SHIIT!!’

‘SHHHHIIIIIIIITTTT!!!’ I shrieked as I began to gallop down the hill and career madly in the direction of the tiny model car. This could not be happening. That minute thing in the distance could not be the car – not Liz’s Mum’s car.

The hill was steep and my galloping run soon became an out of control series of leaps.

‘SHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTT!!!!’ I was screaming, my mind shrieking.

I should have broken my neck but somehow I stayed on my feet and didn’t crash over on the wet grass or on to the rocks.

The nearer I got to the vehicle the more certain it was that it was the car – our car, Liz’s mum’s car. No matter how much I willed it not to be, it insisted on being.

I arrived and stared at it. Surely it was not.

It was.

At the bottom of the hill, the ground levelled off and became a series of rocky outcrops. The car was up on top of these rocky outcrops. All four wheels were off the ground. It had come to a stop on top of a pile of big boulders, right up against the dry stone wall.

I came to a dead halt, hands up in the air, mouth open – my mind frozen.

I was stricken.  I stared at it in disbelief. This could not be happening. I slowly walked around it, inspecting it from all sides. I noticed that the headlights were actually touching the stone wall but hey were not broken. I opened the door and looked in. You could see the floor all dented up where the rocks had smashed it up but apart from that, it looked OK. The bodywork was unmarked. The car looked fine – but it was up on the rocks with all four wheels in the air. How was this possible?

I checked the hand brake. It was on. It just could not have been on quite enough. It was an automatic. I hadn’t put it in gear. Somehow it had rolled.

I did not know what to do.

We had wrecked Liz’s mum’s car.

Liz and the kids caught up with me. Together, equally aghast, we surveyed the car. It was up on the rocks, wrecked, but, yet, strangely, it looked perfectly alright. What could we do?

‘I’ll get the farmer to bring a tractor,’ I ventured.

Liz nodded.

I ran up the hill and along the lane to the farm.

The farmer must have seen the panic I was in. He came straight away and thoughtfully surveyed the car. He went and got his powerful tractor and chains. He prepared to drag the car straight off the rocks. I had to prevail on him to first use some planks and jack it up so that we could get it off the rocks without ripping it to bits.

He looked at me as if I was an idiot. The idea of the car being salvageable was beyond belief. It had crashed down the hill and on to the mass of rocks. How was it going to be alright? But he shook his head and went along with us.

Gradually, amazingly, we coaxed it off the rocks without further damage and towed it up the hill.

As soon as we got to the top I crawled underneath to have a look. The floor was all staved in and one of the steering arms was bent, the sump had taken a big bang that had knocked the engine up six inches to put a dent in the bonnet but it did not appear to be broken. I lifted the bonnet and had a look but I couldn’t see any other damage. I walked all around the car and could not find a single dent or scratch. It was miraculous.

I did not dare to hope that it might be alright.

With a great deal of trepidation, I put the key in the lock and started it up. It fired first time, gave a shrill whine and then settled into its normal idling. I waited for it to blow up. It sounded sweet. I put it in gear and inched it forward. It seemed fine. Even the bent steering arm didn’t appear to affect it. I drove down the lane and back. The lights worked. The steering worked. Nothing dropped off. There were no other strange noises. The only thing I could detect, apart from the floor being dented up, was that the horn did not work.

We thanked the farmer profusely, forgot to tip him for his trouble, we were in such a state, piled into the car and drove to a garage. They beat the floor down with wooden mallets, rewired the horn and replaced the bent steering arm.

The car looked, apart from a small dent on the bonnet, as good as when we had started out. It worked fine.

We could not believe it but were so shaken up by the experience that we curtailed the holiday.

We drove home, rather gingerly, and delivered it back to Liz’s mum.

I still cannot believe how that could possibly have happened.

29.10.01

 

A decision can kill. Some decisions kill a million or two. I wonder how much thought goes into that – killing a million or two? And who the beneficiaries of such decisions really are?