Life’s a long song

One of the joys of being unemployed (and I’m sure there are many – I just haven’t found them yet!) is that one’s spouse eventually comes to realise that hunting for jobs online doesn’t actually take all day and a list of “little jobs” that have needed doing for some time is brought, with great subtlety, to one’s attention.

Two years ago we had new windows fitted which replaced the dark brown wood frames with UPVC ones that are brown on the outside but white on the inside. Very nice they are too but we overlooked the fact that the old wooden window sills remained on the inside and were still brown. Not just brown varnish but a number of coats of Sadolin – a thick, tough brown paint meant really for exterior use.

Over the last two years our rolling decorating schedule has resulted in all of the downstairs sills and the one on the landing upstairs being stripped down and repainted in the ever-popular Brilliant White non-drip gloss.

So, it wasn’t TOO surprising that doing the four bedroom window sills soon appeared on that jobs list and I decided that, since it could best be done with everyone out of the house, I would tackle it and knock it off the list as soon as possible!

Now the thing about this thick brown paint is that even the “one coat” type of white gloss won’t cover it satisfactorily so I have to strip it down to the bare wood every time and to do that I use a thick gel paint stripper. This blisters the stuff off the wood in fairly short order enabling it to be removed with an ordinary scraper.

It’s very effective but it DOES have one side effect – it gives off fumes! And even with the windows open and quite a strong breeze blowing those fumes had quite an effect on me. While I could still do the work – stripping paint isn’t the most intellectually challenging job in the world – I found that I wanted to listen to loud music!

In this regard the effect was similar to that of over-indulgence in alcohol (not that I’ve experienced THAT lately) – right down to the hangover afterwards! I very quickly hooked up my mp3 player to a set of external speakers and was soon singing tunelessly along to a random selection of pop tunes from the last 45 years.

I’m sure I read somewhere long ago that indulgence in “chemical substances” is such that the type of music chosen while “under the influence” can, broadly speaking, be used to identify the substance.

Now I don’t know what the active element of paint stripper is but I found myself dissatisfied with the standard 2-3 minute tracks I was listening to and soon felt obliged to change the settings of the player away from the random selection it was running. I switched it to a playlist that I had set up many months ago for use on long car journeys – presumably by myself as I can’t see the rest of the family particularly liking it – comprising very long songs.

I classify “long” for this purpose as being anything over eight minutes – not, therefore, the sort of stuff you’ll often hear played on mainstream radio!

The first track to come on was by Golden Earring.

“Who?” I hear you ask!

“The Dutch prog-rock group most famous for ‘Radar Love’ “ I reply.

The track I was listening to and getting transported by was NOT ‘Radar Love’ nor any track from the excellent ‘Moontan’ album on which it appeared but was a cover version which I only discovered after I became aware that not all cover versions were BAD! (See my posting “Cover Versions” from 16th June 2009)

It lasts a few seconds short of NINETEEN MINUTES and is a strange, partly improvised, reworking of ‘Eight miles high’ by The Byrds and it seems to be rather great to listen to when stoned on paint stripper!

To reduce my productivity still further it was followed by Hawkwind’s ‘Shouldn’t do that’ (16 minutes) and ‘Shine on you Crazy Diamond’ by Pink Floyd (17 minutes)!

By the time those little epics had finished so had the paint stripping and when I put the lid back on the can the effects began to dissipate and I began to sober up. It still took a brisk walk down to the local country park to clear my head completely and I was pleased to find that I hadn’t gone too far down the avant garde music route.

I did not, for example, degenerate to the point where I wanted to listen to stuff like Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band – they shouldn’t sell ANY chemical products that might make you want to do THAT!

Apologies to my old school friend Hank for that last comment – he was kind enough to send me a copy of one of the Captain’s albums a while ago.

As for the title of this post, it was a track from a 1971 EP by Jethro Tull and, oddly enough, I don’t have a copy of it on my mp3 player.

It just seemed like a good idea!

Alfie

TO whom it may concern.

First off, there is no typographical error in the title!

This is another of those items that arise from time to time out of things that I have written in the past and done absolutely nothing with. I now have the opportunity, not only to get a version of it onto computer and the internet to be saved for posterity, but also to rewrite it on the arrogant assumption that my writing skills have improved since 1993.

The idea came to me just after we moved to Peterborough early in December 1993 when I was hand writing change of address notes for enclosing with our Christmas cards and I suddenly realised that a particular letter combination was occurring in my life rather more often than could be coincidental. As you’ve probably guessed from the title this combination was “TO” and I’ll be typing it in bold capitals from now on to show it up.

My parents’ first house in Ipswich (in which I spent the first ten years of my life) was in BosTOck Road and while we moved across town to an address without the required letter combination I did start shortly afterwards at CoplesTOn school where I stayed for the next five years.

Following that I got a job with the Inland Revenue where I rose to the rank of “Tax Officer” (see if you can guess what THAT was normally abbreviated TO!) but apart from that nothing of alphabetical significance occurred until 1979 when I got transferred by Barclays Bank Trust Co. to their Norwich office.

I commuted daily by either train or motor bike that year until November when Faith and I bought our first house together some ten miles south of Norwich in the village of Long StratTOn. Now I look back on those days I see that many places in the news from 1979 to 1983 for all the wrong reasons also contained those letters. I’m thinking particularly of the riots that occurred in TOxteth and BrixTOn but nothing like that happened in my village (although it DID get hit a few years later by a freak TOrnado)!

My next move took me to Chelmsford and for five more years the magic letter combo was not directly obvious despite further rioting in BrisTOl, LuTOn and TOttenham!

In 1987 my office in Chelmsford was closed and I was sent to Cambridge. I was not consciously aware that I was buying a house in HisTOn for its spelling, although it DID occur to me that the place name contained a satisfactory anagram of what my employer had done to me!

Then in 1993 they did it to me again, relocating the entire company to the outskirts of Peterborough. After many months of house hunting, taking into account travelling expenses and schools for the children, we purchased our present place within walking distance of that office.

And it was while writing the change of address cards for that move that the original idea for this article occurred to me.

You see, the area on the edge of Peterborough where I live is called OrTOn WisTOw – and I don’t think I can ever top that!

I wonder what it all means!

Alfie

Hero or heroin?

I don’t often watch TV in the morning – the presenters are usually either too bland and “sugary” or just too damn cheery for that time of day! I want to see someone who looks like I feel – sour and grumpy!

Besides, I’m usually far too busy checking a massive collection of websites and automated emails to try to find a job.

Today, however, my dear wife was not at work and she likes to have the telly on while she eats her breakfast – so I watched it too.

I happened to sit down in front of it just as they had reports on two current news headlines.

The first of these was a report that Afghanistan’s insurgency is funded by “drug money” and that the country still produces 92% of the world’s opium – used, of course, as the base for the hard drug heroin. The report was illustrated by much stock footage of fields full of the particular plant from which the opium is extracted.

The second item was about the launch of this year’s appeal, intended particularly to provide help for British soldiers injured in Afghanistan fighting the insurgents funded by the proceeds of selling the opium from the previous item.

This is, of course, the Royal British Legion’s POPPY appeal!

Am I the only person who sees something highly ironic there?

Alfie

Caffeine!

As you will no doubt be aware (if you’ve been reading these articles AND paying attention) after 30 years of doing work involving Income Tax, in 1999 I somehow blagged my way into the I.T. Department of a food production company based in sunny Corby. I think I got away with this by A) not fouling anything up during my two week trial and B) being the only idiot around who was prepared to work four night shifts of twelve hours duration each week!

As a “9 to 5” office worker for those 30 years my only previous experiences of being up all night had been parties in my youth and doing the occasional stint at bottle-feeding babies in the mid 1980s, so working nights came as one hell of a shock!

The trial period, when I was paid hourly by an agency was bad enough and THAT only involved going in at 11 pm, doing the midnight backup of the production software data, sticking around to see if any problems arose and then going home at around 2 am.

When I passed that hurdle I went on to the full 12 hour shift as a “proper” employee and from that point on was driving 25 miles to Corby for 8 pm, working 12 hours including that midnight backup, then driving 25 miles home at 8 am.

I will return to other aspects of those night shifts in another post but for now will just say that the main thing that kept me going through them was the substance that forms the title of this piece.

That is to say, “Caffeine”.

The kitchen containing the kettle and the departmental supply of Gold Blend Instant coffee was about two steps across the corridor from my office and I think that kettle never had time to get completely cold all night!

If I got bored (which happened quite a lot – I can recall only one “emergency” in my 3 years of anti-social hours, and THAT was speedily resolved by restarting two servers in the right order!) I would put my reflective jacket on and go for a coffee with the security guards instead.

I did, of course, have to try to stop drinking coffee by about 6 am because I was going to need to sleep when I got home and this did mean I was feeling a BIT prickly around the eyes while driving.

It all worked out O.K. except for the occasion when one of the five guys who occupied the I.T. room during the day came back from a holiday in the USA with a jar of something called “Rocket Fuel Instant Coffee”. He left this on my desk one day with a note to give it a try. It was actually a blend of coffee and a substance called Guarana which is similar to the coffee bean but contains twice the amount of caffeine.

Knowing that this might be strong enough to replace the later cups of coffee on my shift, I had but a single mug of it – at around about 2 am, the halfway mark! NINE HOURS later (when I should have been asleep for two hours) I was walking around the block at home trying desperately to make myself sleepy!

I left THAT stuff alone after that!

After a whole year of doing those hours we got a new Manager who decided that the midnight backup could be done just as easily at 5 am and changed my hours from 4.30am to 1 pm Monday to Friday (I had only been doing four night shifts a week but you can see that this was an improvement in total hours worked).

This change meant that over half my day was now spent in the company of the “day shift” and it was then that I discovered what coffee consumption was REALLY all about!

With the Manager there were seven of us in the department and a system of “rounds” was in place to ensure that everyone took a turn at making drinks. That was OK over a whole day but they had a concept of fairness which decreed that all should have a turn BEFORE I went home at their lunchtime! Furthermore, these were proper I.T. Geeks – milk was for wimps, as was the idea of only ONE spoonful of “instant” per mug!

This meant that I was having the equivalent of FOURTEEN mugs of coffee every “afternoon” and that I drove home each day with my head buzzing!

Fortunately none of my subsequent work places have been as fanatical as that and some have even gone exclusively for tea instead to the extent that I now, sometimes, go whole weeks without having a coffee at all.

What this really means is that I now tend to only have a coffee when I really NEED one – which in my current circumstances means those occasions when Faith and I have to get a very early start setting out to visit our youngest daughter in Carlisle. We usually take a break at about the halfway mark, which coincides with a fairly new service station on the A1(M) at Wetherby.

This is a fairly relaxing place but the drinks facility has largely been taken over by Costa, a rather expensive, presumably Italian, version of the ubiquitous Starbucks chain.

So we approach the “vending point” and go to speak to our “Barista” (that is what they actually refer to the staff as on the menu). Faith asks me what I’d like.

In the midst of yawning and stretching, I reply, “I’ll just have a coffee, please”.

This, however, was not sufficient for the Barista! My attention was directed to the menu which informed me that I must chose between Espresso, Ristretto, Machiato, Americano, Cappucino, Latte or Mocha. Additionally I could request Fairtrade coffee, Decaffeinated, Skimmed milk or Soya milk and could, furthermore liven up my drink with Vanilla, Hazelnut or Caramel syrup!

To this young coffee expert’s great disgust I went “typical English” on her! “Sod it!” I said, “I’ll just have a tea!”

She had her revenge! The “tea” was served in a one of those waxed cardboard tubs with a plastic lid and tasted like about half a litre of brown hot water with a delicious flavour of waxed cardboard. Plus I had to pay about two quid for it! Faith experimented with the Caramel additive to a standard Latte and I understand that tasted disgusting too!

It seems to me that these people are TELLING us what we’re going to have instead of catering (literally) to what we actually WANT! And that never fails to get right up my nose!

So the opportunity is there for some enterprising person to set up a stall at any UK motorway service area offering Nescafe Instant Granules, with Tesco semi-skimmed milk and two sugars for £1. Knowing what the average Brit. (i.e. ME!) is like, they will clean up!

As for me, the next time I go to Carlisle I’m taking a thermos flask of coffee with me and I’m going to sit in the public seating area as close as I can get to the Costa station. Then I will sit and drink it with every sign of enjoyment and listen to all the other members of the downtrodden British public uttering that plaintive cry:

“I just want an ordinary bloody cup of coffee, OK?!!”

Alfie

Novel!

The other day I dreamed up an idea for a new series of novels!

These involved the adventures of a man who is a Medical Examiner for large animals – a sort of Quincy for the farm animal kingdom.

He lives and works in Oxford for which reason I decided to call the series……….

Inspect a Horse!

I really DO apologise!

Alfie

Saturday!

I have just spent my Saturday having yet another clear out of the garage (for details of my last garage clearout see my post “Where has all the Sci-fi gone!” posted 15th March 2009) and taking yet another car load of unwanted crap across Peterborough to the city dump! It’s very confusing because I happen to think Peterborough IS a dump!

And why, you may well be asking, is it necessary for me to keep finding stuff in the garage and throwing it away every six months or so?

Good question! The answer is that it’s so I can put the massive pile of books under and beside my bed back in the study – I thought THAT ought to be perfectly obvious!

Not obvious? Well let me explain.

The pile of books beside my bed has built up over the last six months and the gaps they have left on the shelves in the study have inevitably filled up by a sort of avalanche effect with some of the bits of I.T. equipment that I found myself sole heir to when the Accountants running the company ran down my Department to the point where it was just me. Nothing BIG you understand – the servers were all still there and running when I left – just the usual peripherals, mice, keyboards, cables, wireless routers, laser printers, software CDs – that sort of thing!

So, to get the books back on the shelves in the study I have to find somewhere to put the computer stuff and THAT means the garage – and the garage is full of rubbish. Got it now?

Actually, that wasn’t what I intended to write about because it wasn’t something I really wanted to be spending my weekend on.

As usual I noticed, far too late to do anything about it, that this was the first Saturday of the month and I do like to try to go to Ipswich to see my mum on that weekend so that I can “just nip into town” to spend three or four hours drinking with my Mensa buddies at The Woolpack!

It was thinking about that array of missed pints, while sorting out the garage, that carried my thoughts back to Saturdays of old – particularly to that wild interregnum between October 1975 (when the bad-tempered witch known here as “wife 1” pissed off with one of my mates) and November 1977 (when I met Faith and started, albeit very, very slowly, to become civilised again and settle down.

Cue wobbly graphics and Theremin music as I go into “flashback mode”!

When Saturday began at midnight my mates and I would usually be munching fish and chips, dodgy burgers or some weird assortment of items from the Chinese takeaway. We would have bought these on the way back to my house from the pub we would have been in all evening and when they were finished the cards and cigarettes would come out and someone would put the kettle on for the first of the four or five rounds of tea considered necessary to flush out the beer!

There were usually half a dozen or so present to watch late night TV or play Pontoon or Three Card Brag for small change until about 3 a.m. when four of them would leave to either walk home or get a shared taxi, leaving my lodger, Andy, and I to clear up and take ourselves off to our respective rooms.

I think that they all enjoyed those evenings – it was somewhere they could go where no-one minded if you smoked, swore, farted or put your feet on the coffee table! Or any combination thereof! And all we asked in return was a contribution from their winnings to be put into a big sweet jar by the fireplace to cover the cost of tea, milk, sugar and the TV licence. Incidentally my friends WERE sufficiently generous that we did manage to fund ALL of those items from that jar.

Saturday would begin again some seven hours later when we would emerge, somewhat blearily, to absorb a couple of large mugs of coffee apiece before repeating Friday evening’s hike into town in order to meet the same group in one of the town centre pubs! Yes. Drinking AGAIN!

The order of business from then on would depend entirely upon whether Ipswich Town FC were playing at home that week.

If there was an away match we would stay in the pub until the 2.30 p.m. closing time (this was before the invention of all day drinking!) then mooch around town before sobering up for an hour or so in the coffee house of one of the main Department Stores. This took us to about 5 p.m. when this paragraph merges with the two below!

If there WAS a match we would curtail the lunchtime session and take ourselves of to our favourite spot behind the goal in what was then called the North Stand at Portman Road. Only last week it was renamed, with due ceremony, The Sir Bobby Robson Stand after our great leader.

Failures of floodlights notwithstanding, the match would finish at roughly 4.45p.m. which gave us time to escape the packed stand, dodge any fighting with away supporters that might be going on (this was the 1970’s after all) and walk comfortably into town to arrive at the door of The Falcon at 5 p.m. – just as they opened.

The landlord knew us and if it WAS a match day our entry would be by the back door where he would stand holding the collar of the largest, snarliest German Shepherd dog I have ever seen. I can only assume that there had, in the past been trouble with visiting supporters!

Once ensconced in our usual corner we discussed the match, sipped our beers and exchanged witty banter with the guy who ran the “disco”. This gentleman had the concession to bring his own extensive record collection along and provide entertainment for the customers using the Pub’s own sound equipment. After a few weeks of having us as his only audience he jacked it in and became one of our group.

The person in question, whose name is Dave, will figure again in anything I write in the future concerning either my marriage to Faith (he was my Best Man!) or my Mensa membership!

Meanwhile back at the Falcon, by about 8.30 we would normally be getting restless and would head up to the bus station and take a number 5 bus to a pub rejoicing (for reasons unknown to me) in the name of “The Blooming Fuchsia”. There we would drink (surprise, surprise!) and play darts with the locals until closing time.

The darts matches were particularly memorable as they included an Ipswich Town footballer. He was one of those players who qualified as a “professional” only because he WAS paid by the club. The peak of his career, however, had been turning out ONCE as (unused) substitute at a first team game – the rest of his footballing life was spent in the “reserves”! Having said that, he probably got paid a damn sight more than I did (or do)!

To us he was famous for his total lack of mathematical ability – when playing a game of “501” at darts he would painstakingly ADD up his scores and when they got well into the 400s he would ask someone how many he had to get! The rest of us were doing it in our heads and working out our “out shots” as soon as we got below the 170 maximum finish.

At closing time (11p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, 10.30 p.m. the rest of the week) we would rush out to catch the last bus back into town from where we would split up for our separate walks home. Andy and I would stop at either a burger van or the late opening Chinese fish and chip shop (you may have noticed that FOOD wasn’t mentioned anywhere above!) and would arrive home just as Saturday ended.

Now you know why they call them “The good old days”! Clearing out the garage and spending the evening putting up with “Strictly Come Dancing” just isn’t the same somehow!

Alfie

Sometimes you just HAVE to snigger (part 2)

Way back in the dim and distant past (March 20 2009!) I wrote a little piece expressing the wholesome enjoyment I got out of the discomfiture of some politicians.

In case you haven’t been through the archives of this site yet, I will just remind you that this concerned a campaign by the BNP (British National Party) to repatriate Polish workers. Their campaign brochure was illustrated with a Spitfire fighter (the archetypal symbol of British defiance) which unfortunately for them turned out to have belonged to a distinguished Polish Battle of Britain Squadron!

It could be said that they not only shot themselves in the collective party foot but that they shot themselves in that foot with eight wing mounted .303 Browning machine guns harmonised to converge at two hundred yards!

I had a damned good laugh about THAT and now there’s another one!

Baroness Scotland, the UK Attorney General – the most senior law officer in the country – is being investigated by the Home Office after admitting that she employed an illegal immigrant as housekeeper.

She could well be charged under the Asylum, Immigration & Nationality Act 2006 and if found guilty, might face a £10,000 fine.

Her excuse, that she took the Tongan woman on “in good faith”, will cut no ice because:

A) She is a member of the Government and there surely cannot be ANYONE left in this country who believes ONE WORD that those slimy bastards say!

B) The above mentioned Act has a specific clause which states that even “unknowingly” employing someone who turns out to be an “Illegal” is no defence.

In the first few months since these penalties first came to be imposed in 2008 no less than 354 employers have been issued with liability notices – so if it achieves nothing else it’s another 3½ Million quid for the Government to waste!

Now the really good bit is that the prime mover in pushing through this piece of “guilty whatever the circumstances” legislation was the then Minister of State in charge of the criminal justice system at the Home Office.

See if you can guess who THAT was!!

YES! It was indeed Baroness Scotland, who seems to think that she is exempt from the legislation because she created it!

Not so. I hope the Home Office throws the book at her! And I hope it’s the hardback version!

Still, as a member of Gordon’s crooked army, if she does go down to the tune of 10 Big Ones I have no doubt she’ll find a way to claim it on expenses!

If you are getting the impression that I take some sort of unholy glee from politicians having the wheels come off, you are so RIGHT!

I LOVE IT!

As my old hero Simon Templar would probably have put it:

“That’s how we smite the ungodly!”

Alfie

Roots!

My father, who died three years ago this week and who I still miss terribly for his humour and wit, only noticed in the last ten years or so of his life that the date of birth on his birth certificate was somewhat less than seven months after the date on his parents’ marriage certificate!

This didn’t bother him in the slightest but following that discovery he would include the following in any discussion about family history:

“I come from a long line my mother should never have listened to!”

Mind you I’m mighty glad that my paternal grandfather WAS being “a bit of a lad” in the spring of 1926 because if he had been blessed with more self control my father would not have existed and, therefore, neither would I. And that would have been BAD – not only for my daughters but for you, my readers, who would have to find something else to do with your time!

Regrettably it was only in the last couple of years of Dad’s life that we both obtained sufficiently fast internet connections to make a start with on-line researches into our descendants. This did not proceed terribly quickly as the only source available to us then that did not involve spending a fairly substantial sum of money on annual subscriptions or “credits” with other sites was the official Public Record Office site for the 1901 census.

I knew where to start with Dad’s side of the family because one of the few family folklore stories that we had, concerned my great-grandfather who had left his Cambridgeshire village in his teens, joined the army and served in Burma. He ended this career back in Ipswich where he then got a job as a Warder at Ipswich Gaol.

My father described his grandfather as “a screw; one of three holding up a door hinge” – I sometimes think Dad spent a little TOO much time listening to Spike Milligan!

In later records such as the 1901 census and my grandfather’s marriage certificate great-grandfather was described as “labourer” and “net-mender” respectively so he plainly wasn’t exactly ascending the social scale as he got older – I suppose a career spent firing a rifle “up the jungle” didn’t really prepare him for ordinary toil in Edwardian England!

Incidentally, I’m getting confused over exactly who is whose grandfather now so I’m going to adapt my paternal ancestors’ true names as follows:

I (as you know) am called Little Alfie for reasons that have already been stated elsewhere in these articles.

My father (whose real name WAS Alfred) becomes “Big Alfie”.

His father, my grandfather (for variety) shall be called “Jack the Milkman”. Mainly because that’s what his name was and that was what he did for a living! There will be more about HIM in a later posting!

My grandfather’s older brother (after whom MY father was named) who doesn’t figure anywhere else in this tale, has to claim “Bigger Alfie”.

And finally, HIS father, the soldier turned “screw” can then become “Biggest Alfie” because I haven’t subsequently found any earlier Alfies to outdo him.

I’m really glad we sorted that out – it’s all much clearer now. Isn’t it? Good!

At the point when Dad left us to join the Cosmic Overmind in 2006 I had ascertained that Biggest Alfie had been born in Comberton in Cambridgeshire in 1847 and I would probably not have got much further without it costing me!

One of Dad’s cousins, however, (he is descended from Jack the Milkman’s sister “Florrie”) recently went the extra mile and shelled out some money on obtaining a duplicate certificate for Biggest Alfie and, because we have him in common as an ancestor, let me know the outcome.

It transpires that Biggest Alfie’s mother was not married! No father’s name is mentioned which means that under the patronymic system in traditional use my surname really shouldn’t be what it is but rather that of this anonymous sperm donor!

Unless, of course, there wasn’t an earthbound human father at all!

It isn’t of course the first time this is supposed to have happened now, is it?

And, because as you may have gleaned from my previous posting, I regard “blasphemy” as one of the more ludicrous “sins” created by mankind, I have no hesitation in referring to her whenever necessary as “The Virgin Edith”.

The awkward thing about it is, of course that it means that one whole line of my sixteen great, great grandparents cannot be followed up at all.

I just hope that the missing man was local to that area because my other tentative researches so far show my ancestors as coming from various parts of Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and North Essex, which makes me (until some interloper appears) pure East Anglian. Not British, not English but a member of a kingdom much older than both of those!

Because the main difference between Genealogy and family history is that the former is a collection of Birth, Marriage and Death facts and figures, while the latter looks at HOW those people lived, I have been getting out and looking at my old home villages.

Just recently, Faith and I took my Mum, wheelchair and all, around Kelvedon in Essex, and Lavenham and Long Melford in Suffolk – some of her ancestral places. I don’t think it would have meant much to her if we hadn’t been able to tell her that some of the grandparents she actually remembered from childhood were born in those places. Still, as I pointed out to her a couple of times, they were MY ancestors too and just as important to me as the Alfie line.

Oh, and I’ll remember Long Melford for other reasons too – I got stung by a bloody wasp in the “Cock & Bell” Public house (excellent pub, great food, just missing one of those blue light wasp zappers!) and had to hike about half a mile up the main street (it’s called LONG Melford for good reason) to find a Chemists’ shop!

When you are doing this Family History stuff it is obligatory to root around the graveyards of village churches looking for surnames you recognise and, in my case, photographing the gravestones. So far no-one has leapt out of the grave shouting “no pictures!” but I live in hope. In fact I haven’t found that many relevant graves at all yet – I have however, found a really great irrelevant one!

In the churchyard at Comberton (where Biggest Alfie’s ancestors are presumed to reside) there is a tomb bearing the following inscription:

“In memory of Joshua Mann who fell jumping over St. Ives toll gate at midnight July 25th 1809, the 33rd anniversary of his birthday.”

Bloody loony! If that’s the kind of person The Virgin Edith’s parents or grandparents were associating with it’s hardly surprising she turned out a single parent, now is it?

I shall keep on trying to find more pieces of the genetic jigsaw puzzle that is me and would really love to make some progress down the lost line of Biggest Alfie’s father. It would be rather nice to find a bit of noble blood in amongst all the railway workers, grooms and agricultural labourers I’ve found so far!

Just as long as he doesn’t turn out to be from Norfolk! Or, god forbid, Scotland! I think a spot of incest would be preferable to either of THOSE possibilities!

Alfie

I solemnly swear!

The other day I heard some Peterborough youths of the breed known as “Chav” say something really idiotic. Nothing unusual about that, you may think, but this was idiotic enough to make me think of an article!

I won’t tell you what the remark was until the end but I’m sure you’ll see how it set me off.

My upbringing was not “posh” and my parents’ house for the first ten years of my life was decidedly “modest”. It was a Victorian three bedroom terraced house with no central heating, an outside toilet and a bathroom that was, basically, a big cupboard with a bath in it. No hot water – you had to boil the kettle several times for THAT. It wasn’t the best neighbourhood in the town but it wasn’t the worst either.

The Primary school I attended served a large council estate but in those days there was no stigma attached to that, although even then there were starting to be “good council estates” and “bad council estates”! This one was one of the good ones – I THINK it had been built post-war to accommodate families that had been “bombed out” and the new families of returning servicemen.

What I’m saying is that it wasn’t a “rough” upbringing on some sort of “sink” estate – if it had been I would probably have turned out totally different and wouldn’t be writing this! It was rough enough, however, for me to have my share of scraps with a couple of rowdies from my street and a solitary school bully who lost a front tooth in our encounter. An ordinary, typical 1950s childhood in other words.

Looking back on it now, however, there was one thing that was missing from my life and the lives of my contemporaries at that school that is taken for granted now – bad language!

We seemed to get along quite well without swearing – if you hit your thumb with a hammer you just said “Oww!” with no need to modify it with an additional word of the sort that would get you a seriously hard smack around the ear should a parent overhear it. Indeed I don’t think I actually KNEW any of those words at that time!

My Dad had been in the army so I’m certain he would have known them all but he made a point never to use them at home so I just didn’t have the opportunity to learn of their existence. And neither, I suspect, did many of my classmates – any that did know them would have kept quiet about it because to be caught uttering one would have got you a thick ear from a teacher (and your parents would have backed the teacher up as well)!

It was not until the advent of Alf “you bloody silly moo!” Garnett and Kenneth Tynan – famed as the first man to say “F**k” on the BBC (although it has to be said NOT as a swear word but as a verb associated with sexual intercourse) that these words started to be heard by me in regular conversation as rather inappropriate adverbs.

And it was not until I got to Secondary school (all boys as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention!) that I got to know the one remaining taboo of TV and Radio – “the C-word”. And even then, that was only because our rather unpopular Deputy Head – who for reasons unknown to me rejoiced in the nickname of “Fairy” – had himself immortalised in large painted letters on the back of the Girls’ school cycle shed in the words “Fairy is a c**t”! It was there for YEARS!

Looking at what I’ve written so far I see that I am a victim of my own upbringing in that I still feel odd about writing the “F word” as anything but “f**k” and although “bloody” and “arse” get past my self-censor alright the words “c**t” and “s**t” somehow don’t. I’ll let the psychologists of the world work out why that is – I don’t want to know!

Let’s look (with asterisks as needed) at these words that have crept into our daily vocabulary to the point where many people don’t seem to be able to speak a sentence without including one.

Basically they break into two groups, blasphemous and biological.

The former include “bloody” (believed to be a contraction of “By our lady” – a reference to the Virgin Mary) and the variations on Jesus – “Christ almighty” etc.

The biological group tend to subdivide into body parts and bodily functions and I’ll leave it to you to work out which is which. However, can anyone tell me why the euphemism for defecation is regarded as a swear word while its urinary equivalent is used merely as a way of indicating either that it is raining hard or that one is drunk?

I have trouble working out why either group should, in this day and age, have “forbidden words” – for blasphemy to have any meaning you A) have to believe in a god small minded enough to think that the use of certain words would be offensive to him/her/it and B) believe that the deity in question DID indeed hand down the list of words so classified rather than it being dreamed up by a priest looking for another way to be sadistic to his “flock”- which I believe is more likely.

Similarly, there are alternative biological words for every single word in that category considered a “swear word” none of which have the same impact – so why do these ones? Try using the Latin term instead of the Anglo-Saxon and you just sound like a doctor!

Anyway, if you’ve stuck with me you will recall that I started this because of something I overheard a youth of the type who does make every other word a swear word saying to his friend.

They were sitting in the city centre and looking at a small group of monks who had passed them en-route for the Cathedral. I doubted that they knew what monks were (some new kind of rival “hoodie” gang perhaps) but obviously some facts had got through about the way of life involved for this semi-literate berk came out with an excessively loud remark.

It was this:

“You wouldn’t catch me being fucking celibate!”

I nearly wet myself!

Ooops! I just said f**king!

Oh, what the heck!

Alfie

The Great Fishing Match

……is how it was christened in 1987 by a lady named Janice with whom I worked in Barclays Bank Trust Company’s Chelmsford Office.

The same lady, incidentally, who passed on to me the appalling example of other people’s ignorance that closed my posting “Fog” which you can find in the March 2009 archive of this site.

She was the first person, that I am aware of, who called it that, particularly with the capitalisation.

Its proper title (which it retains with increasing inaccuracy to the present day) is:

“The Barclays Bank Inter-District Sea Angling competition”

Back in 1981, when I first became aware of the competition’s existence, Barclays’ branches were administered by a number of “Local Head Offices” run by a small number of “Local directors”.

The geographical area that each of these “LHOs”covered was known for convenience as a “District” – hence Inter-District rather than Inter –Local Head Office in the competition title. Additionally, subsidiary companies such as the one I worked for were accorded honorary “District” status and members of staff in these companies were allowed to enter any Barclays sporting event either as members of their own company or, if not required by them, as members of the Bank District in which they were physically located.

Anyway, back in 1981 I was working in the Trust Company’s Norwich office and taking part in advertised Sea Fishing events with the Norwich LHO sports club. These usually took place a couple of times a year, usually at North Beach, Great Yarmouth and it was while taking our lunch break in the Iron Duke public house just across the road from where we were fishing that the organiser mentioned what he referred to as “the National” bank match. At that time this took place in Weymouth in Dorset every year.

He explained that at the time he was required to enter a team for this event there were only four people, himself included, who were interested and he had already promised places to them. He did assure me that next year he would hold a match to select the team.

I did enter the selection match in 1982 but wasn’t TOO surprised to find that I came fifth – what I had been hearing about the social side of the event had led me to believe that these guys wouldn’t want to give THAT up when a handful of stones down the throats of a few dead Whiting could secure it for them! Of course they MAY just have been better fishermen than me!

By 1983 I had moved down to the Chelmsford Office and was far too busy being a new parent (the house move and becoming a Dad came within TWO DAYS of each other – THAT was a helluva week!) to take any action about that year’s event.

During the winter, however, I went on several boat fishing trips in the Thames with other Chelmsford District people and found a few who were interested in a trip to Weymouth the following November. A team was entered and my annual fishing mini-break had begun.

I obviously got a bit excited about the first one and by the 1985 event I had discovered that you could get TWO DAYS official leave to attend it so it didn’t even affect my holiday entitlement!

The 1986 match was notable for two things – firstly it wasn’t at Weymouth; we had started a “round the country” tour so that different regions could have a turn at hosting it. This one was on Holyhead Breakwater in Anglesey. Secondly we actually came second and won trophies!

This made us one of the major successes of the Barclays Chelmsford Sports Club for that year and we got to have drinks with the Local Directors and were mentioned in various newsletters because of it.

It was all this fame and fortune that prompted Janice to glorify the 1987 event with the expression which forms the title of this piece.

1987 did not bring any trophies but caused me some problems in the preceding months. Because of the success of 1986 I was told that quite a few people had expressed an interest in being in the team and, because I didn’t fancy being fifth in another selection match, I decided to form my own team of Trust Company people.

This entailed sending out circulars to the thirty plus Trust Company offices via our own Sports Club – something called the BarclayTrust Association – and I was fairly sure I would get sufficient replies to fill the three vacancies. I didn’t! I got two! One of them I actually knew from a Training Course a few years earlier but neither of us had mentioned our hobbies and interests during that fortnight.

Still, it WAS a team of my own and knowing in advance that three people would find it almost impossible to win we set out to Hastings, just two weeks after the October 1987 hurricane devastated the South Coast, determined to have as much fun as possible.

That team was extended to four successfully the next year and there has been a team or teams comprising one or more of those people competing ever since!

Yes, despite changes to the Bank, the rules and the staff (see my post “The ‘R’ word” from 16th July 2009) the competition still goes on AND SO DO I! I haven’t missed one since I started in 1984! The 2009 event to be held in Dover in November will be my TWENTYSIXTH consecutive match (and the eleventh since I left the Bank – which isn’t bad going for a Bank competition!) and I still look forward to it just as much.

Regular readers will already know that there is always, however vague, some point to me writing this stuff and this time it a simple advertisement.

You see, each year after The Great Fishing Match I have written a sort of journal about that year’s match, the results and amusing (I think!) anecdotes and events that happened.

And now I’m going to inflict them on you!

If you look on the “Blogroll” showing links to other pages belonging either to me or to friends of mine you will shortly find some reference to “Gone Fishing” or something similar. This will be another one of these excellent WordPress blog pages into which I propose to gradually transfer, on the basis of one post for each chapter, all of the stuff I’ve written about it so far. Or, at least, an edited version of it – I’m not quite sure if I need permission to mention the people in it by name so they may need changing to first name plus initial of surname.

Try it – you never know you may enjoy it.

Or, if you’ve ever been in the competition I’m talking about, you might get at least one name check!

Alfie

Apologies for absence

I see that it has been over three weeks since I posted anything here – doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

May be it does, I couldn’t comment on that at the moment because I’m NOT having fun!

After my 7th August post things suddenly got a bit busy at work – almost back to how they had been before the Administrators came in to “run” the Company on 10th July!

Incidentally, have you ever noticed how similar the words “run” and “ruin” are? The staff at MBM have!

And then out of the blue on Wednesday 12th August the accountants FINALLY found out where the IT Office was, paid me a visit and informed me that as of Friday 14th I was redundant! No “thank you” just “don’t come back next Monday”!

As they had put us all on weekly pay from their arrival, I was told the company didn’t owe me anything after that week’s pay had been credited to my account and that I would have to claim from the Government for anything else.

“Anything else” is 4 ½ weeks pay for Statutory Redundancy, 1 ½ weeks pay for unused holiday and 3 weeks pay in lieu of notice and God only knows how long it will take a Government Department to pay that lot over!

The remaining two and bit weeks have been spent struggling with the forms for the above mentioned compensation, jumping through the Job Centre’s ludicrous hoops and trying, by my own efforts, to find a job!
Now I’ve got all that down to a daily routine I’m at last getting back to writing stuff and hopefully some of it will be a bit less miserable than I’ve been of late.

Watch this space.

Alfie

Call Centre!

If you’ve been keeping up you will know that things are still a bit quiet here in the I.T. Department and are likely to get quieter still.

The eight or so remaining computer users at our last two sites seem to be managing to remember their passwords over the course of entire weekends for a change with the result that there have been no “internal” phone calls at all for the last week or so!

I keep busy mending broken PCs (provided it doesn’t involve spending any money) , running updates on the servers and doing other little tweaks necessary to keep the network running!

Incidentally, a few words of advice, if you DO suffer some sort of network problem and have to phone your I.T. Department, please DO NOT ask them the following question:

“Is there something wrong with THE server?”

I will tell you now that to I.T. people this question makes you look a complete dick!

This company is not that big as companies go (and getting smaller by the week!) and we’ve got FOURTEEN of the things in the room next door to where I’m sitting now! I don’t know of any networked business so small it only has ONE server!

I often ask the callers who put it that way which of these fourteen they think is THE server! I am perfectly aware that what they are really trying to do is show me that they are not complete IT idiots and have actually heard that there are things called “servers”!

It doesn’t work!

You are far more likely to be taken seriously if you TELL them what the problem IS rather than inviting a highly technical (and possibly completely fictitious) answer that you might not understand.

But that’s enough about my work – that isn’t what I wanted to write about.

While I don’t get many internal calls now the number of external calls has only gone down very slightly. I suppose the word does get around that Company X has no money and you won’t get paid if you DO sell them anything and that takes care of the worst of the “we want to sell you Servers/Computers/ Mobile Phone services and it doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t think you want to buy them!” type of call.

I have, on occasion, been heard to shout at particularly persistent callers of this type “WHICH PART OF THE WORD ‘NO’ DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?!!!”

That doesn’t happen now! What now happens is that I listen to the sales pitch; appear to give in and then tell them I’ll have whatever it is but will they be OK waiting until the Company is out of Administration to get their money? This statement is usually followed by a rather bad-mannered “click”, “brrrrr” as they hang up!

However, the very worst calls to try and deal with are those where attempts are made to sell you something from an Indian Call Centre!

I feel quite sorry for the guys having to do this for a living – they probably have considerably better educational qualifications than I do (wouldn’t be difficult!) and are probably paid considerably less.

However, in some ways they are their own worst enemies!

Picture the scene: I’m sitting here in the I.T. workroom. There are background noises comprising the fans of three or four computers and the air-conditioning unit all roaring away.

The phone rings and I answer it.

I then have to concentrate through the aforementioned background noise while someone with a stereotypical Indian accent (picture Peter Sellers singing “Goodness, Gracious Me!”) gets my name wrong and then tries to sell me something from a script.

That’s one problem. The other is that they will start said script in said strong Indian accent with something like “Hello Sir, my name is Jeremy!”

There you go, you’ve just lost me! I’m no longer listening to the script!

Instead I’m thinking, “Plainly your name isn’t Jeremy so why should I believe what you are still telling me so enthusiastically about your product in the background”.

I can, of course, see why they do it – it isn’t easy for Anglo-Saxon ears to get to grips with names such as Lakshmipathy, Subramanian, Harbhajan or Mahendra ( to borrow some Indian first names from the Wikipedia page on the Indian Cricket team)and to have each salesman assigned a standard British name probably seemed like the best idea available.

However, there must be a better “in between” solution because surely there are going to be very few people in the UK who are going to believe that someone with an accent like that is going to REALLY be called Jeremy, Brian, Keith or even Clive (Clive of India? Come ON!), yet I have been given all of those names in calls of this type.

I cannot imagine that you are ever going to make sales if most of your potential customers think (rightly or wrongly) that you are starting the call with a lie but maybe that’s just me being “old Mister Cynical” again!

Whatever the answer turns out to be it has provided me with a new term – when transferring calls from Indian Call Centres to my (now ex-) Manager I would put my hand over the mouthpiece and say, “He’s asking for you. It’s a Jeremy!”

It told him all he needed to know.

Alfie

Administration

On 16th July (less than a week after it happened) I posted a piece entitled “The ‘R’ word” in which I mentioned that the company I work for was “In Administration”.

As we are now nearly a month on from that day I thought I would share my experiences of this process with those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure.

I have already told how on “day 1” we were all called in to a meeting, told what was about to happen and divided into two groups, The Lost and The Saved! On that day I saw three of the Administration team – I have not seen those three since!

I have, however, seen a different one. He was managing the winding down of our Lincolnshire site and when I visited to sort out some routine computer problems I thought I would corner him and ask him a question that had been bothering me.

“When you send a team into a company like this, do you normally send in an I.T person to lock down the system so that no-one can delete data that you might need?”, I asked.

“Why would we need to do that?” he, in my opinion, rather naively replied.

I explained to him that my friend and I.T. Manager, Mike, had been sent home on the afternoon of “Black Friday” with no notice, and the promise that the Government would pay him his outstanding salary and his Redundancy Pay at some indeterminate date in the future. And no-one told me to disable his access to the computer network! It was not something I was going to do without instruction – that would have been disloyal!

Surely, I suggested, it was not beyond the realms of possibility that a person with a Wife, three children and a large mortgage to support might just feel the teensiest bit pissed off at having been put in that position. Then take into account that we are talking here of the person with the most extensive access to the company’s network and records and I felt that the Administrators could count themselves quite lucky that there was any data left on the following Monday!

After some thought he told me that his firm does not have such an I.T. person.

Quick as a flash (and with the short term nature of my own job firmly in mind) I replied with “Would you like one? – I’m available!”

He gave that little half-hearted laugh that people with no sense of humour use when they’re not sure whether you are joking or not, thereby killing the conversation.

On the Monday after the mass redundancies I had received instructions to completely disable the access for both Mike and HIS boss, the Finance Director and to change the Network Manager Account password. That felt a little strange!

Given the “efficiency” of our new masters, however, it took me well over two weeks to get from them the names of ALL the people across the company who they had made redundant – I suppose that being accountants by trade they only saw them as “cost savings” not people! I got around that by disabling the Remote Access privileges of anyone I thought had left. If they screamed about it I apologised and restored them!

This all means that as I sit here writing this I am I.T. Manager to three people in Lincolnshire and a further five (including me) in March. Not exactly the world’s biggest commercial empire!

Basically, that’s what it’s like being managed by a firm of accountants – no-one tells you anything even if you need to know and even if you ask, setting out your reasons they still don’t REALLY want to tell you!

Plus, the remaining personnel are treated like dirt by the Senior Management team as if it’s our fault they are having to be there!

So it’s all much the same as before the Administrators arrived really!

Alfie

Wayne & Harvey WHO?!!

This morning I visited my Doctor’s surgery.

No problem, I’m fine. Thanks for asking.

The Nurse at the practice wanted a sample of my blood for analysis. I try to convince myself that it’s because the National Blood Donor service has found that people given my contributions develop super-powers and they want to know why but I know that REALLY it’s for testing my Cholesterol level – something all men of my age are supposed to have done regularly.

To digress, I should mention that there is now a notice on the surgery door saying something like: “If you think you have Swine ‘flu do not come into this surgery – go home and phone up!”

This seems a bit harsh – a bit like saying “Go home sickies – we don’t want your sort around here!”

Having checked in at the counter I sat myself down and, there being nothing else to do, started watching some Breakfast TV show. I say “watching” very precisely as that was all I could do – the sound was turned off. They did however have these wonderful “typed live while the people are actually speaking” subtitles scrolling rapidly across the bottom of the screen.

Once upon a time all TV presenters spoke in standard, rather prim, formal sounding, accent free English and no-one had any difficulty working out what they were saying. Now, however, we have “diversity” which means that most of them have unmoderated regional accents that are almost unintelligible to anyone outside of a twenty mile radius of their place of origin!

And I think that it may very well have been such an accent that was confounding the poor soul who had simultaneously to translate and type those subtitles because I cannot believe that anyone could actually have been saying what was coming up on the screen!

There were many instances where, if I was quick, I could get what was meant and a couple which I made a mental note of and wrote down when I got back to the car.

The first of these came from what seemed to be a weather report from some holiday resort or other and apparently informed us that there would be “Harvey Rain later”. Who HE is I cannot now know!

Secondly, at the end of the holiday report part of the show we were informed that we could “Wayne a holiday” in some competition or other!

The best one though came when the interview with the Special Guest commenced.

The said guest was the ex-glamour model with the big jugs formerly known as “Jordan” who was introduced with her real name which came out in translation as “KATIE PIES”!

Somehow THAT didn’t seem inappropriate!

I was still chuckling over that when the nurse stuck a great big needle in my arm five minutes later!

Alfie

The Eagle has landed!

Never let it be said that I’m one to let a bandwagon pass by without jumping on it – and the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing is going to be no exception!

I have followed, with keen interest, the American Manned Space Programme (or “Program” if you believe in the existence of “American English” as a separate written language!) ever since the first Project Mercury shots were sent up.

The very first of these were “crewed” by monkeys and by a strange coincidence the same can be said of some departments within the company I currently work for!

My interest REALLY took off, however, when John Glenn did the first Earth orbit by an American on my 9th birthday! I can’t remember what other presents I received but THAT was a good one!

After that I watched all possible TV coverage of the following Gemini and early Apollo missions and, once upon a time I would have been able to quote you all of the crews and mission objectives for the whole lot of them. I’m afraid though that it has all faded away now, much like human ambitions to “boldly go”!

With the arrival of 1969 I was able, despite studying for exams, to keep up with the preparations for the moon landing which commenced that year with the launch of Apollo 10 which got to within 75,000 feet of the lunar surface but which was not equipped for a landing – presumably so as not to tempt the mission commander to “accidentally” steal a march on Neil Armstrong!

By the time Apollo 11 was launched on 16th July 1969 I had finished my exams and with the rest of my class was just passing the time anyway I could in our “common room” (a big room used as an extension to the Canteen and as the Heathrow Youth Club out of school hours).

Because of its use as a Youth Club this room had various facilities not available to us in a normal classroom – such as a table football machine and, much more importantly, a Television set!

It was on that large (for its time) black and white TV screen that we watched the actual launch of Apollo 11 – that must have been a Wednesday because on Friday 18th July I was released forever from the confines of Prospicimus Secondary Modern at the end of the school year.

I suppose many of my classmates went home and spent the next few days following these historic events on their home televisions – but not me!

Due to a really bad piece of forward planning I had signed up (and paid) to go on the annual camp (meant in a tent-y way not the gay sense!) of the 3rd Ipswich Boys Brigade Company which was to take place this year at Haytor in Devon. A place in the middle of Dartmoor which Television transmissions did not yet reach!

I have a number of recollections of that week which belong in a separate article but the main one is of LISTENING, in the small hours of the morning, to the moon landing on a transistor radio with fading batteries! I have, of course, WATCHED it all since but will always regret having been so far away from civilisation at such a critical time!

It was, however, a happy time in that listening with me in my tent were two brothers – Dwayne and David, US citizens who had joined the Boys Brigade a year or so earlier. They were the sons of an American Airforce Sergeant who lived off-base in Ipswich and I thought those two were going to burst with pride when Neil and Buzz got onto the surface!

It’s such a shame that the dream has subsequently died – it all comes down to money which the mindless masses want spending on stuff that gives an immediate short term return or benefit only.

We need to think, not just “outside the box” but “off the planet! The expression “all your eggs in one basket” occurs to me as very relevant here!

After all, in the words of the Russian rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “The Earth is the cradle of humanity – but who wants to stay in the cradle forever.”

Alfie