Teenage rebellion – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

My teens were a time of conflict. It was a time when I started becoming an individual. I was fast developing my own philosophy on life, thinking about the big issues and my place in the world, what I stood for and what I stood against. It was coupled with a strong urge to break free from the confines of my family.

I knew that my Mum and Dad loved me. There was never any doubt about that. They gave me unconditional love and care. They did not insist on great contributions to the housework or try to influence my views. I was very lazy. I had almost complete autonomy with my room. I lived in my own universe.

In 1965, inspired by the film ‘The Knack’ I painted my room white, including the mirror and all furniture. I put brackets on my walls so that I could display my albums. My parents weren’t particularly enamoured, particularly the mirror and furniture, but didn’t seem to mind too much. My mum even bought me a white bedspread to match. My life revolved around girls, friends, hair, clothes and music.

I had lots of freedom. At fifteen I was allowed to spend the summer hitchhiking around France with my sixteen year-old friend Foss. At sixteen they allowed me a motorbike, despite all their fears about me killing myself. At sixteen, I was allowed to go out to parties to the early morning and pubs to drink. My liberty was almost without limits.

While I was dabbling with morality and the wonders of the infinite, developing strong attitudes towards pacifism and animal welfare, they listened and didn’t argue too much. I was passionate and I think they were intrigued. They tolerated my girlfriends and turned a blind eye to the happenings in the privacy of my room. I was able to bring girls and friends in at will. The only frustration was my music, which I liked to play loud, was sometimes met with bellows of ‘Turn it down!!’ but even that was generally tolerated. My friends were made welcome and fed. My house became the focus for gatherings.

My conflict was with school and my appearance created a series of confrontations. I was constantly being sent home for infringements of the dress-code, hair and beard. It was a game I enjoyed playing.

My father saw education as the panacea to a perfect life. Education brought access to jobs. Jobs meant money. Money bought your life-style. Education was the answer. Education had been denied my father. He was bright but had been prevented from going to Grammar School because his family claimed that they could not afford the uniform and needed him to leave school and get a job.

Dad valued education and he wanted those opportunities for me. They sent me to a private primary school and scrimped and scraped to keep me there. The fact that they couldn’t afford a proper one and sent me to a Mickey Mouse establishment was by the way. They did what they thought was best.

So there I was, at the age of sixteen, with opportunities and freedom. Did I appreciate them? No. I enjoyed the social life, hanging round with friends and chatting up the girls. I was no trouble in class but only did the bare minimum to escape retribution. I was in conflict with the hierarchy at the school who viewed me as a rebellious nuisance. A view that was totally justified. I was standing up for my rights. For me Kerouac made more sense than any career.

My father took a more long-term view than me. My behaviour confounded him. As he saw it, I was actively damaging my future.

Having a good time was OK. He’d done his share of rebellion, smoking drinking and hanging out with the ladies. He could understand that. What he couldn’t understand was why I was growing my hair and wearing clothes that put me in conflict with school and ruined my education in the process. In his eyes I was busy burning the bridges that he’d have given anything to build. It did not make sense to him. He thought that my idealism was something I’d grow out of. The hair and clothes were fashion statements that would rapidly become redundant as next year’s business-manipulated whims created a new set of fashion. He did not see a cultural aspect to any of it. This wasn’t culture. This wasn’t philosophical. This was fashion. Fashion changed. We weren’t a new generation founding new values rejecting the ancient rat-race values he lived by. We were just doing what teenagers always did and pandering to current styles and attitudes.

In my mind I was not a young sixteen year-old kid, I was part of a unique new counter-culture. We rejected religion, politics and all the old world stood for. Nothing like this had ever happened before. We were forging new aesthetics, breaking away from the old traditions and attitudes. This was the modern world. We wanted rid of all that claustrophobic cultural baggage. A knife had come down and severed us from all the old ways. It wasn’t fashion. It was something much bigger than that. I was sixteen and I thought I knew it all.

I saw my Dad sitting there every evening, exhausted by his work, consumed by it, with no questioning of the system he was part of, and I knew I did not want to be part of that. I wanted to goof, and have fun, to discover every new way of looking at things. To him I was a crazy kid, sprouting hair from every orifice, looking like a rag-bag, doing crazy stuff and losing sight of the distant horizon – which was a good career. He knew that I was going to be working for forty years of my life and what I did now would determine what that career might be. I had the chance of an education. I was bright. I could go to university. I was blowing my future for things that ultimately did not matter.

For me, career was a dirty word.

“Get your hair cut!”

The fact that I was rejecting the life that he aspired to was an anathema to him. What did I think I was going to do with my life? I was accepted. They were proud of me. It was my behaviour that was being questioned.

But I was sixteen. I was an adult. I knew what I was doing. I knew where I was going. We were building a new world with new values. I was sure of it.

I wanted something simpler and more meaningful than the pursuit of wealth and comfort. This was probably because I had not experienced poverty, war and the drudgery of daily life with family responsibilities.

My Dad and I were from different sides of the spectrum. Life was simple for me and complicated for him. It was so obvious to him that I was deliberately messing up. He was certain that I would grow up to regret what I was doing.

Yet throughout it all, despite the arguments, I received their full backing. The house was beset with rows but my life-style remained untouched. I did what I wanted. There was a string of concerts and parties, the pub, girlfriends and friends. I don’t know if there was any way he could have insisted on anything else, short of throwing me out.

Despite myself, and my priorities, I scraped the necessary examination passes, and, although they weren’t good enough for the universities I’d assumed I would be going to, they were good enough to get to a polytechnic. I muddled through.

Once I’d left to go to college I was completely free. They had no jurisdiction over me. At eighteen years old, there was nothing to moderate or restrict me. The rows ceased. They accepted that I was going to do it my way – right or wrong. I had a home to come back to, they funded me and I got food parcels.

My relationship with my Dad became less fraught.

12.10.01

 

Happiness is freedom to do what you want!

3.11.01

Working at the bakery – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

After a year or two of working Friday nights at the bakery, I got moved onto forklift truck driving. This was great. The forklifts were electric and fairly zoomed about. My job was to pick up the bread pallets and load them on to the trucks. If you got it right you could swing a pallet on and brake so that it came off the prongs and came to rest in exactly the right place in the lorry. This was an art. I enjoyed that. You could spin those trucks on a sixpence.

One of my fellow forklift truck drivers was called Tiny. Tiny weighed about twenty stone and was not at all tiny. He was Scottish and he’d been a paratrooper and had fought in Korea. At tea break he would tell me about his exploits. On one occasion he had been part of a small patrol who had gone behind enemy lines on special operations. He showed me these huge scars on his legs. He explained that this was where he had got strafed with machine-gun fire on one of this particular ‘jaunt’. He’d been badly wounded in both legs and could not walk. One of his colleagues had incredibly carried him on his back for over twenty miles, over rough terrain, to get him back to his own lines. The alternative would have been to shoot him. Tiny was a huge man. That was almost a superhuman feat.

“We didn’t leave anyone behind alive to be captured,” he explained. “The North Koreans used to torture you, tie you up with barbed wire and leave you screaming for days. They wanted your mates to try to rescue you so that they could shoot them.”

So many people are traumatised by the horrors of war. Tiny was one of them.

Another guy I worked with was Henry. Henry was a huge Jamaican guy. He even made Tiny look small, but he was the gentlest man I have ever met. He spoke in a deep whisper and had this great rumble of a laugh. Because I was so little I think he felt very protective towards me.

One day I was doing a run up to one of the lorries and made a miscalculation. I accidentally put a prong through the side of the lorry. I went to find the driver to explain.

Now drivers are notorious for taking great care of their lorries. It was like a personal pride. The fact that I’d been careless, nay, malicious and stupid enough, to put a hole through the side of this guy’s lorry was inexcusable. The driver was a big guy. As soon as he saw what I had done to his lorry he became incandescent. He grabbed hold of me by the throat and was going to smack me right in the mouth. Just as I was grimacing in anticipation of seeing stars, a big black hand encompassed the driver’s fist as it hurtled towards my face and stopped it dead. Effortlessly the guy was spun him round to face Henry. It must have been quite a shock. Nonchalantly Henry picked him up with his other hand, by the scrunching up shirt and jacket and lifting this large man into the air. He then held him off the ground at arm’s length.

The guy was so shocked that at first, he didn’t even struggle. He could feel Henry’s enormous strength.

“Now what do you think you’re doing hitting my little friend?” Henry asked in a deep murmur.

I can to this day still see this guy being held off the floor with his feet dangling and hands clutching at this enormous arm. His mouth dropped open and his eyes widened and he tried to get loose – to no avail. Henry, as placid as a rock, held him tight. I don’t know if it is my memory playing tricks but I can see his legs kicking wildly in the air.

“Now calm yourself down,” Henry drawled.

Henry stood as firm as a rock and held that driver up there until he’d stopped struggling, then he gently put him down. The driver was in shock and quickly shuffled away muttering and casting wary eyes at Henry and me.

Another of my work colleagues was John a sixties freak like me. He had hair halfway down his back and the ambition to grow it down to his feet. To this end, he refused to brush or comb it. He reckoned that brushing or combing broke the ends off and so it took longer to grow.

John and I would spend the breaks discussing which albums we’d purchased, whether the Doors were better than Country Joe and the Fish, or Hendrix was as good as Cream. We’d talk about Middle Earth, UFO Club and Klooks Kleek, which club was best and who was on next.

John was really into acid and would take it regularly for his trips into the psychedelic cellars of London.

He was always telling me tales of coming out into the morning sun, still tripping, how one night the mounted police in Parliament Square all turned into centaurs, the trees breathed and pavement sweated. He even came into the bakery tripping and spent the evening saying ‘Wow’ and moving his hands slowly in front of his eyes to create slow motion trails. He said that the ovens glowed all colours of the rainbow, the bread was alive and throbbing, and the dough was luminous and pulsed as it was being plopped in the pans.

It freaked him out a bit to think that the bread was alive as it was going through the ovens.

All told, the bakery was an interesting place to work.

5.11.01

 

Some are obsessed with their physical shape and spend their lives counting calories, planning magic diets and refining exercise regimes in-between binge eating.

11.10.01

Tarting up the past – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

They are presently digging up parts of Britain, indeed the whole world. They are uncovering the past and restoring it. They are tarting it up so that it looks attractive. They put in roads to the sites and trim the grass. They construct paths and riddle the place with signposts. They produce brochures and put in historical information on plaques. The result is a tourist attraction.

People have got so much money and time that they can indulge themselves. They can go and see things that look interesting. This may be natural phenomena, such as hot springs, waterfalls and gorges or they may be old ruins. The idea is to make it accessible and attractive. It is no good leaving them as they were. They have to be manicured and resurrected into the artists’ impression of past glory. We worship the past.

We are becoming heritage Britain. We sell a sanitised version of the past to tourists. Battle scenes without the blood – we are fascinated. Stone circles without the sacrifices – we are intrigued. Castles without the rape and pillage – we are in awe. We are then invited to visualise these events.

Soon the whole planet will be a big plastic historical amusement park for the benefit of affluent tourism. It brings in the dollars. It is big business. You sell your merchandise on the back of the curiosity seekers.

I enjoy doing it myself – but, at the back of my mind, I know that what I am viewing is not necessarily real. It’s been tarted up to make it look more attractive and not more authentic.

8.11.01

 

Some seek out sexual partners and spend hours making themselves look attractive so that they can have lots of sex with different people.

11.10.01

 

We pretend we are ruled by our minds when in reality our noses and emotions tug us around. We do not even register that we are responding to each other’s chemistry. We do not know what makes us do the things we do.

We watch our dogs sniffing lampposts and other dogs and think we are superior. At least they most probably know what messages they receive. We respond without it even becoming conscious.

8.11.01

Death in the bakery – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Our vision is only clear in two small pools, like headlights, in front of our sight. Our brain makes up the rest and pretends that it is sharp and clear. Most of us go through all our lives without even knowing this.

Most of the world we live in is made up by our brains.

We males vie with each other in some primordial ritual to establish a pecking order of status. Our position is set by the chemicals we exude from our armpits and groin. Unknowingly we respond to the chemicals exuded from others. Most of what we respond to, we are not even aware of.

Our subliminal responses reveal our disposition. Our status is based upon the respect we command via these chemicals and other subtle messages from our body language. The game never ceases as our position is always precarious. We are only as good as the messages we are sending out. In order to reinforce our status some people in power bully and arrogantly show off.

Females respond to the signals we transmit in different ways to us. They respond to status. Females also respond to the subliminal messages they are putting out. They have their own pecking order.

8.11.01

 

 

According to the rumour in the bakery, two people were horribly killed while I worked in there.

One was a mechanic who was fixing the ovens.

The ovens were long tunnels through which a conveyor belt took the baking trays. There were many of these ovens all lined up next to each other. The bread moved through the ovens in a constant flow. It was all automatic. A machine plopped a lump of dough into a bread-pan and a conveyor belt took the dough through the long tunnel of the oven. The journey took twenty minutes, which was the length of time necessary to cook the bread. It emerged at the other end as a standardised, fully-cooked loaf.

On this occasion, something had gone wrong inside one of the ovens and the only way of dealing with it was to get an engineer to crawl up inside the oven and fix it. Of course, they turned it off and let it cool down first. The trouble was that someone inadvertently turned it on. It wasn’t on long enough to cook the guy it seemed he got mangled up by mechanical arms inside the guts of the oven that were there to keep the bread-pans in line! At least that was the tale that was circulating.

The other tragedy was when a man was killed in the flour storage bins. These were huge storage bins, circular and tapering. They were about thirty foot high and twenty-foot across. When they were emptied someone had to go down into them with a broom on a long handle and dislodge any flour that was sticking to the sides of the hopper. It was a very dusty, unpleasant job.

While this guy was down in the hopper sweeping out, someone, not knowing he was in there, pressed a button and a load of flour was deposited into the hopper, tons and tons of the stuff. The guy was buried and completely suffocated in the fine powder.

5.11.01

 

One push of one button could be enough to finish everything. Easily done.

7.11.01

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

The vicious cruelty gene – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

One day I will die and all my things will be divided up. Some will go to friends as mementoes. Some will be distributed to the family. Liz will keep some of them. My kids will have some. I will take pleasure in knowing that things will go to people that might get them out from time to time and think of me. I don’t know why that is? It will not matter to me. I shall be dead.

26.10.01

 

Perhaps it is necessary to wield the bomb and bullet and just eradicate all the evil bastards! Get rid of all the genes that breed fascists and torturers in one fell swoop!

It seems so easy!

But that’s frustration talking. Nothing is easy. It is likely that we all have the nasty genes. We all enjoy destruction, we all love cruelty. It is merely that most of us are better at suppressing it, or have never found ourselves in situations that are conducive to our nasty side becoming developed or expressed. But it is latent in us.

We have descended from the people that built Shakespeare’s Globe – but we also descended from the people who designed the pits for cockfighting, bear-baiting and bull-baiting that took place next door to the Globe. We are still the same as the people who organised the rules for blinding the bears, badgers and dogs and ripping their claws out to make the baiting more of a spectacle.

We designed the bullrings and flocked to them in our thousands, to bring the kids and have a family outing full of laughter and excitement, cheering as the animals were jabbed and speared and stabbed and teased or ripped apart before our eyes. The more bellows of pain and gore the better. What a day out for the family!

We are the descendants of those people. I do not think we have changed much in a few hundred years. The Taliban and Isis demonstrated that very clearly.

You can imagine the conversations around the family table a few hundred years ago. ‘Perhaps tomorrow we could go to the execution? I’ve heard they’ve got some new techniques. There are these wicked curved things they use to rip the entrails out and then they burn the guts while they are still attached and to the dirty criminals. I bet that makes the eyes water. More than merely crushing bollocks or pouring molten lead in ears. Then they have these great shire horses that they use to rip their legs and arms off. Bet that makes them scream?’

‘What fun!’

Perhaps we should just do the world a favour and do away with ourselves, slit our own throat, rip our own nails out, poke red hot pins in our own eyes?

Wouldn’t that be fun?

Sometimes, I think that there is something intrinsically wrong with the whole human race and that the world would be better off without us. Then a crisis comes along and there is always a multitude of kind people risking their own lives to help others or rescue an injured animal – every day a million acts of selfless kindness.

13.10.01

 

You can’t put your own aspirations on your kids. I think my Dad gave me a platform on which to build, but my life is nothing like his.

12.10.01

 

How many times have I let people down?

26.10.01

 

I’m guilty of playing the material game. I’ve surrounded myself with possessions, all of which seem important to me. After I am gone they will not be important at all.

Some of my things will be sold, some given to charity and some thrown in the bin where they belong.

26.10.01

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

Change – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

Some people travel to far off countries and take photographs of people and buildings from different times and cultures.

11.10.01

 

Because I was mouthy the staff voted me on to the governing body. I was the staff representative. They put me there to stir things up.

I did stir things up. I wanted the school to change. I wanted the students treated better. I wanted education to be expansive, caring and interesting. The governors at that time were a conservative bunch who resisted change.

It was apparent to me that the governors were ‘old boys’ who wanted to see the school run the way it was in the 1930s, the ‘good old days’. They wanted the kids to wear smart uniforms, get caned and know their place. They wanted the school to be selective, after all, what was the point of teaching ‘thick’ kids? They never wanted anything to change, least of all their power and authority.

I didn’t agree.

At my first meeting, I encountered one millionaire businessman governor who slagged off the present teaching staff as ‘lazy people who couldn’t hold down a job in the real world’. As the bastard had never stepped a foot inside the school when the kids were there, and didn’t have a clue about the planning and marking that took place out of lessons, and how hard the staff worked, I had to put him in his place.

After the meeting, the Chair of Governors, stopped me in the corridor, grabbed me by the throat and pinned me up against a wall, furious and shouting in my face. He called me a ‘trouble maker’.

I concluded that I had to be doing something right.

You have to laugh don’t you?

If you want to build a better world you’ve got to be prepared to change the old one. If you believe in equality you have to fight for it.

Remember; once you stop fighting to improve the situation, the bastards will use every means they can to wrest power away from you. They want their privileged position maintained. They want things to stay as they are.

These people are the same elitist group who’ve always run things. They do it in the background and are slippery like greased shit. They appoint the bosses and pull the strings. The bosses are the ones who take the flak. They are the front. The real power lies behind them.

One thing I rapidly discovered was that this was a game of attrition. A person cannot easily change the big things; you keep chipping away at the small stuff until you have created a successful momentum. The big stuff follows.

3.11.01

 

My old man was in charge of an office of telephone reporters. It was a very responsible job. He was good at it and he worked hard. Many of the people working under him earned more than he did. You see they had unions that fought for their pay. My old man was management. He had to rely on the goodwill of the bosses. He didn’t automatically get a pay rise.

When he died I found copies of some of the letters he’d written to request a pay increase: ‘could you see your way to’ and ‘following the efficiency’. It was pathetic. They saw the wording as weakness and never seemed to see their way to provide him with the pay increase he deserved. He should have adopted a stronger tone and demanded a pay rise. They would have respected that.

The person who took over from him started with a salary that was over twice the level of his pay.

It makes me mad. These people will always give as little as they can get away with. They are greedy. He deserved better than that.

3.11.01

 

Some people read books that are made up stories of the lives and adventures of fictional people.

11.10.01

Dentistry – an extract from ‘Farther from the Sun’.

Posted on by Opher

When I was at school our main concern was that we might die before we got laid. That would have been true tragedy.

11.11.01

 

Brush your teeth, use fluoride toothpaste and don’t eat too many sweets. That’s good advice. Unfortunately, not advice I was given as a child.

My teeth are not too good, all capped and filled, but I rarely get any decay these days. That’s because I brush regularly twice a day. Most of my dental problems occurred when I was a kid.

My mum was not too hot on teeth. She tried to pretend they didn’t exist. She made half-hearted attempts to get me to brush my teeth regularly but eventually gave up, so I didn’t bother brushing. I was always in too much of a rush.

My Mum was also pretty keen on sweets. I think that was a hangover from sweet rationing in the war. When she was a girl sweets were a rare treat. Mum and her friends would have died for a bag of liquorice allsorts. Consequently, after the war she went a bit mad and completely over the top and indulged us. She reckoned that sweets were a necessity of childhood. We always had sweets in the house and I never went short.

That combination of sweets and no brushing meant that my teeth soon became badly decayed. It was not nice. They hurt.

The only dentist available was the school dentist. He was an old guy who was not very up to date with the latest developments. I suspect that he was hopelessly underfunded and overworked. His equipment was probably rescued from the stone-age – all old, rattly and excruciatingly slow and painful.

I hated the dentist. He always found something wrong to get to work on with his old ramshackle drill (none of this fancy high-speed drill that we have these days). He’d probe around with that sharp metal prod and jam it into a cavity and you’d nearly jump out the chair as electricity shot through your body like a bolt of lightning. It always seemed to jolt out of your tooth and right down to the tips of your toes like your tooth had been plugged in to the mains.

He’d chuckle and prepare his drill. Our school dentist used none of those painkilling injections. He’d crank up the old grinder and slowly bore his way into your tooth while you clung on to the arms of the seat in sheer terror, agony and desperation, willing it to be over quickly. It never was. When it all became too much you tried shrieking but to no avail. He had the nurse grip your head tight while he applied the drill. You dug your nails into the armrests and tensed up while he slowly ground your tooth away and seemed to be hitting every nerve on the way. He could have got a job in a concentration camp!

What made it worse was my mum had this phobia of dentists and couldn’t go near them, and my dad was always at work, which meant that I always had to go on my own. It felt like visiting the executioner. Looking back I can’t actually believe that I used to go.

Before I had my second set of teeth I actually had four teeth out because they were too rotten to fix.

In my teens I had a tooth with a big abscess on it. It made the whole side of my head swell up and was agony. I actually wanted to go to the dentists and get it sorted. The dentist, in his white coat, looked at it, prodded around, tutted, and said it had to come out. I didn’t care. It hurt too much I just wanted it dealt with. I wanted someone to make it better. I didn’t care what they did.

It was a big back molar and not the easiest to extract. He gave me an injection for that. At that point in time, I don’t think I really cared he could have pulled it out without any pain relief. I can remember him yanking it this way and that with this pair of pliers. The nurse was holding my head and he was putting all his weight behind it as he gripped the tooth and forced it one way and another with all these crunching noises sounding like he was doing serious damage. The force was tremendous. I imagined him crunching up my jawbone. The nurse and dentist held my head so hard I thought he’d crush my skull. Then he finally triumphantly pulled it out. It came with a squelching, crackling noise. He held it up for me to see and there was a big yellow bag of pus dangling from it. What a relief.

That wasn’t the end of it though. It seemed that he’d left a root in. The wound healed and about a year later it all swelled up again. All pus oozed out of the socket, my face swelled up again and my breath stank. The root that he had broken off had developed an abscess on it. I had to go back for a second bout. He gave me another injection and this time had to cut into the gum and crunch the jaw-bone up to get at the root. He deployed a device like a long silver pair of pliers. Having lanced the gum and mangled half my jawbone he eventually managed to prise the festering root out.

I don’t think that the school dentist was the most expert or caring of individuals. But then it was probably not a highly sought-after occupation. The private dentists with their fancy high-speed drills were probably making ten times what he earnt. We weren’t able to afford such luxury. I can understand why my mother developed such a phobia. Back then dentistry was one step removed from torture.

The next time I had to have a tooth out it was under gas. They put this rubber mask over my face and the dentist and nurse held it firmly in place. The gas didn’t smell but the rubber did! It was a horrible sensation. They forcefully held me down so that it felt like I was being smothered! It was really claustrophobic and I panicked a thrashed around but they kept hold of me until the nitrous oxide did its job. After that they pulled the tooth out and I never felt a thing!

Both experiences were equally horrendous. If I had to choose I’m not sure which I would opt for.

Thankfully dentistry has moved on. It’s nowhere near as much of an ordeal.

Rationing and the war was to blame. Shortages seem to induce more desire. Sweets have a lot to answer for – but in some ways I was one of the lucky ones.

Gary was in my year. He’d never once brushed his teeth and he constantly had a gob-stopper in his mouth. Through judicious use of truancy he had managed to avoid the school dentist for all of his life, but when he was twelve he was caught. By this time he had a mouth that Shane McGowan and Johnny Rotten would have been proud of. His teeth had gone through their green years and emerged into a terminal condition. They were now black and many of them were mouldy stumps, the crowns having completely crumbled away. If he’d have had a nervous system he would have been in excruciating pain. Fortunately he did not seem to suffer. Heaven knows how he hadn’t poisoned his entire bloodstream though. Most probably no self-respecting bacterium would dare set up home in such a disgusting pit as existed in Gary’s mouth.

Gary was a lesson to us all. At twelve years old he had to have all his teeth removed except for three – and they all had to be filled. He had dentures fitted!

We all took up brushing!

11.11.01

 

When you’re young looking ahead means the weekend. The distant future, adulthood, careers, marriage, is too far away to contemplate. Time travels slowly. You’re obviously never going to get there.

11.11.01