Marie Tidball

I find it astonishing how some overcome illnesses, difficulties, and barriers that to me would seem overwhelming. 

I think of a student on the university course I took. He had brittle bone disease, and at one time or another had broken just about every bone in his body. Despite the small stature and deformities that often go with the condition, he lived independently in the university halls of residence. He travelled in each day in his three-wheeled Invacar, and moved from class to class in a wheelchair, with books and notes hanging in a plastic carrier bag from the rear handles. We took turns to push. He always had a cheery smile. 

Later, there was Mahir who had muscular dystrophy. He had arrived in England in his early teens as a Bosnian refugee, speaking no English. By then, he had lost the ability to walk, which in Bosnia had excluded him from school. Once here, he did well enough to go to university, and enrolled on the course I ran. He struggled to control his limbs, used an electric wheelchair, and was accompanied everywhere, even to the toilet, by Brian, a full-time paid assistant. What incredible dedication that must have required. 

When you had a bit of a cold or headache, and looked out at the weather in the morning and it seemed tempting to crawl back to bed, the thought that Julian or Mahir would be there shamed you into getting up and going in. 

I came across Brian a few years later, looking after another special needs student. He said he’d heard that Mahir had died, still in his twenties. Julian did not have a long life, either, but lived into his forties. 

Recently, we came across another inspirational figure, Marie Tidball. She was born with multiple physical difficulties, including no hands. It was unclear whether she would live. She did, but missed years of school through medical treatments, such as surgery to enable her to walk. She has just one finger. From school in Penistone, Yorkshire, she won a place at the University of Oxford where she got a degree in Law and a Doctorate in Criminology, and has since worked as a legal researcher, disability rights campaigner, and local councillor. She has now been selected as a Parliamentary candidate for her home constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge at the next General Election. Our ceilidh band played at the launch of her fundraising campaign.  

Going by last week’s local election results, she is almost certain to be elected, and will quickly make an impression as a Member of Parliament, not because of her difficulties but because she is every bit the fiery, determined woman her story suggests. You heard of her here first. 

“I learned there was no such word as ‘can’t’ and that you have to go out in the world and develop your own skills to use them for others.”   

So, let’s have no more whingeing and procrastinating. Just get on with it.  

https://www.marietidball.com/

Snowing Like Buggery

Heavy snow was forecast today, with a weather warning for our part of the Pennines, but it was nothing compared to how things used to be.

The guinea pigs snowbound in their hutch at the end of the garden, 2013

Wednesday, 25th January, 1995. It started to snow at half past four in the afternoon, much earlier than forecast, and much more heavily. I was at work at the university, feet on desk, on the phone to someone in Newcastle. Big heavy flakes, like dinner plates some would say, reflected the office light back in through the window. I should have got out straight away. When I did, it was chaos in the car park. Any later and I would have had to spend the night in the sports hall. 

All over Yorkshire, people were trapped overnight at work, on trains, in churches and town halls, and in cars on the M62. Six people died trying to walk home. The audience at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds were forced to stay the night. They had been to see ‘The Winter Guest’, a play about a community cut-off during a blizzard. Realism at its utmost.

My wife, J, was six months pregnant, her last week at work before maternity leave. She worked seventeen miles away. How was she coping? No mobile phones in those days.

It took me two hours to do three miles. The traffic inched forward with longer and longer standstills. The road then steepened and the next few hundred yards took another hour. I turned round and went back to a pub car park, had a whisky and some crisps, and started to walk home.  

I crunched my way through the countryside under crystal-clear stars, along the middle of a now silent road. There were a few other walkers, all cheery and excitable, and a lot of abandoned cars. Where was J? Was she back already? There had been no answer when I phoned from the pub.

The house was in darkness. No messages. I waited up for a time. It seemed best to get some sleep, so I went to bed.

I was awoken by her scathing voice. Her car was outside in the middle of the street, deep tracks through pristine snow. It’s an interesting experience, shovelling two feet of snow off your drive at three in the morning.

It had taken her nine hours to get home. Apart from stopping for petrol and a bar of chocolate, she had simply kept going. She knew she couldn’t get out and walk. On getting stuck, she just went backwards and forwards wiggling the wheels until free. She was rather pleased with herself, the only car still on the road.

The snow melted quickly and we were able to rescue my car the following afternoon. 

Early the following week, it happened again. In no way was the university management going to be caught napping again.

This time I was helping to invigilate an exam for a hundred and fifty students. We were in a windowless, sports hall half a mile from the main campus. I had accompanied a student to the toilet (fortunately, they were still capable of removing and replacing their own pants in those days) when someone came to tell us we had an urgent phone call. Gary, one of the other invigilators, went to take it.

“Evidently it’s snowing like buggery* outside,” he whispered to us. “The examinations office say the university is about to be closed and we should all piss off home quick” (don’t ever think that university professors are urbane and well-spoken all the time).

I wasn’t too happy. It meant we would need to set another exam, and the students would have to prepare for it and retake at a later date. We whispered between ourselves and decided to tell the students how things stood. Gary made an eloquent announcement offering them the opportunity to leave early. None did.

Afterwards, we were supposed to be collected along with the examination scripts by university transport, but none came. We had to struggle back on foot. The university was locked up and abandoned. Even the security staff had gone home. We could not get into our offices. We walked to the car park and put the scripts in my car. I began the drive home.  

If anything, it was worse than the first time. The traffic was even slower and more halting, and I could see I was going to get stuck again. I had the bright idea of diverting by one of the back roads. Wrong decision!

Half way home there is a steep, down and up dip. I slid to the bottom and that was it. Car stuck in the middle of nowhere, boot full of students’ examination scripts. It was going to be hard enough to walk the rest of the way without having to carry the scripts as well. So, I abandoned them. I wasn’t going to spend all night in the car.

There it stayed for two days. What would have become of me had the car been broken into and scripts full of data flow diagrams and entity life histories scattered across the countryside? I suppose it would not have been the first time that examination papers have been lost. It must have happened at some time, somewhere. Or has it? 

Road near our house, 2013

 * a colourful expression I had not heard since childhood, meaning "a lot".

Information Systems

Let’s have another boring computing post.  

Writing in November about how careful we once had to be in saving and backing up our computer files, I remembered something else that was difficult: just getting information in or out of a computer. It happens now as if by magic: writing and reading stuff on smart phones, social media, Blogger, ... it is  all so easy. We don’t have to think about what goes on behind the scenes. Most of us have no interest. 

But, until the nineteen-nineties, computers were for nerds. As one of those nerds, I feel fortunate to have seen how things developed. I could still write programs to accept typed-in text, or to send a screen to a printer, but thankfully I no longer have to.

My desk at work in 1990

Back in 1970, computers were near-fantasies. Few had seen one except on television or in futuristic films: ‘Tomorrow’s World’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ come to mind. At work in accountancy, we had one client who used ledger cards with magnetic stripes, and there were golf-ball typewriters with primitive memory, but they were thought of as business machines rather than computers.

My friend, Neville, was the first I knew to latch on to the potential. He undertook a project as part of his business studies course, and that led to a job in the computer division of a Hull supermarket. This is the kind of thing he worked on: a system to help supermarket managers replenish stocks. They drew lines on forms that could be read by machine. It used forests of paper. The used forms (blank on the back) kept Neville and friends in rough notepaper for years; me throughout my university studies. They were great for lecture notes.

1970s Supermarket Stock System

Around this time, I took a job with a Leeds clothing manufacturer where account entries were made through yet more football-coupon forms. The forms went to a data centre to be coded on to punched cards and fed into “the computer”, which we were never allowed near. The data was printed on huge concertinaed sheets bound into weighty folders. Later, we all had to go on a course to be taught how to write numbers properly, in readiness for Optical Character Recognition which cut out the card punching part of the process. The weighty folders remained long after I’d left.  

1970s Nominal Ledger System

Later, on a computing course, I learnt programming on teletypewriter terminals connected to a mainframe computer. They printed all your input and output on wide rolls of paper, and reprinted it all repeatedly. 

These step-by-step exchanges continued after screens came in. Everything was typed in as text and printed on to a scrolling screen. It even happened with games. I remember playing a version of ‘Star Trek’ in which you moved the ship by typing a location you wanted to fly to, such as G27, and it dislayed and re-displayed your new position and those of all the objects around after every move. The ease of Windows, icons, mice, pointers, and colour graphics were still a long time away, and touch-sensitive screens even further. Voice and gesture input were not even dreamed of.

Not until around 1985 did we see the kind of systems we might recognise today, with on-screen forms and menus. The first I worked with was written in DIBOL and looked like this:

 

You could get quite excited about it. But, although it looked a bit like a modern windows system, it wasn’t. Every part of that screen is made up of text-like characters. It had to be planned out very carefully. Fortunately, not by me.

This system can be seen on the right-hand screen in the photograph of my desk at the top of this post. It was on a ‘dumb’ terminal connected to the DEC computer system. The screen on the left is an IBM business PC of that time, similarly unsophisticated. It was really something to be allowed two screens! 

Just a few more of the things I kept. Like the old disks and tapes on the earlier post, they were used as teaching examples. They won’t be needed again.

Full Circle?

The way we save our computer files seems to have come full-circle, as if we are back to forty or fifty years ago.

Clearing out more of my life’s debris reminded me of this. I had accumulated a collection of disks and tapes that are now little more than museum pieces. You once had to be so methodical in looking after your documents and images. But, before that, it was all done for you. An so it is now.

At first, with mainframe computers, systems managers made sure everything was safely backed-up. I learnt to program in a room full of teletypewriter terminals - the noise was deafening - that were connected to a computer centre somewhere else on the university campus. Once you had typed in your program and asked for it to be save, you could be reasonably sure it would be there ready the next time you logged in.

However, if you wanted to move programs or documents elsewhere, or if you had one of those new-fangled micro-computers (i.e. a PC), you had to transfer it on to magnetic takes or disks. The first PCs had no internal disks, nothing was saved automatically by an ‘app’, and there was no OneDrive or Google. The internet did not get going until around 1995.

I learnt the hard way using Tandy TRS80 computers. Everything had to be saved on C60 audio-cassettes, which were notoriously slow and unreliable. I lost hours of work more than once. It was a godsend when floppy disks came along.

Here are some of the storage media I used, now destined for the tip.  

8-inch floppy disks containing my Masters project, which was written in Pascal on an LSI-11 machine. UMIST insisted they had to be protected by special folders. 

The 8-inch disks look enormous next to the later 5¼ -inch and 3½-inch ‘hard’ floppy disks you may remember. 

This is a 6-inch cartridge take from a nineteen-eighties PDP11 Unix system, containing some of the work I did as a university research assistant.

Later, I used zip-disks which were a bit like thick floppy disks, but had greater capacity. Only a few home computers had them. 

 

Then, we all moved on to CD ROMS and DVD, and USB memory sticks and SD cards. I used a pair of memory sticks to transfer files from work-to-home and home-to-work. My first memory stick had a magnificent 256MB of space (that’s Megabytes not Gigabytes). 

How things have changed! Nowadays, some home computers have internet access only, and no disk drive or USB ports. Some have minimal internal storage. That is also the case if we work only on phones. It feels as if we are being pushed towards keeping everything on the ‘cloud’, like returning to the mainframe days.

Microsoft is removing the Windows video editor from our PCs (through Windows Updates) because they want us to use the online ‘ClipChamp’ editor. Google circulated an email saying they are deleting accounts inactive for more than two years. That could well include blogs. Andrew in Australia lost years of blog posts because of something unspecified he supposedly said. Next, they’ll be trying to charge us to store our stuff.

I don’t trust the b------s at all. I now have enormous amounts of material: family history research, my parents digitised photograph albums, our own photographs and colour slides, our own digital photographs, digitised videos from cine films, our own digital videos, ... and archived blog posts.

In all, it fills over 100 Gigabytes. I’ve backed it all up in duplicate on a pair of hard drives. I’m glad I learnt the discipline.

Don't Tell 'Em

All the talk of babies on blogs made me think back to when our daughter was born.

We arranged for our son to stay overnight with friend Barbara if needed. She was needed. When the hospital said to make our way in, I took him to her house and she tucked him up in bed top-to-tail with her two-year-old.

We drove to the hospital, but things seemed to come to a stop and there was some discussion as to whether we should return home. A lavender bath got things moving again, and our daughter was born at half-past-one in the morning.

I returned home to get some sleep. I phoned Barbara in the morning and asked to speak to our son as it seemed only right he should be the first to know. She gave him the phone, and I told him he had a baby sister.

"Oh! Right! I'm going to finish my breakfast now." That was all he said. He hung up.

I returned to the hospital and brought wife and daughter home. In the meantime, Barbara had taken our son to nursery school from where our child minder picked him up later in the day.

I went to collect him. The child minder was still very much in the dark. She was desperate to know what had happened. What did we have?

"He won't tell us," she said. "He hasn't said a word all day. He wouldn't tell Barbara, either. He has refused to say anything at all."

I gave her our good news.

Son would now claim he was practising the levels of discretion and confidentiality required in the professional capacity in which he now works. He was four at the time.

A chip off the old block. When we got married, I didn't tell anyone at the computer company where I worked. They thought I was just going on holiday. They only found out when the company received notification that my tax code had changed to reflect my new marital status. The payroll administrator did not  practice the levels of discretion and confidentiality required.

Academics

Working in a university is a privilege. You get to meet and mix with some of the cleverest people, especially if you do research and give talks at conferences. You can find yourself sitting along the dinner table from an academic celebrity. The most impressive person I encountered under such circumstances was Jerome Bruner. To adapt a saying of my mother's, he had more wisdom in his little finger than I have in my whole body.

But those you actually work with can be just as impressive. Professor Alan (A.D.B.) Clarke of Hull University was one of those people who seemed to look deep inside you and know everything about you in just a few seconds. He had helped uncover the academic fraud of Sir Cyril Burt, upon which the British system of selective secondary educacion was based, with children selected for grammar school by intelligence testing at the age of eleven. I sat in Alan Clarke's 'Life-Span Human Development' tutorials for a year, absorbing every word. "Koluchova," he would say (she conducted one of the first scientific studies of children brought up in extreme isolation), "she stayed with us when she visited the U.K.". He seemed personally to know everyone who was anyone in psychology. We were awestruck. It showed me the power of personal anecdote.

Others I worked with more closely. Frank, with whom I shared an office for two years, was one of the cleverest people I have known. He had a degree and Ph.D. from Oxford University, and had seemed destined for a high-flying academic career until he had some kind of breakdown. He switched to university computer centre management, but another breakdown put him in a mental hospital. There, he met his wife, another patient. He was Jewish and she Catholic, and they had eight or nine children by the time I knew him. Long-term medication had left him with a permanent tremor and a staccato node of delivery that gave an air of affable authority. One day, instead of turning up for work in his usual casual attire, he appeared in a suit with his hair slicked down. I heard the students laughing in his lecture next door. "I must apologise for my appearance today," he had told them, "but I had to take my children to the nit doctors." (laughter). "And the reason why my hair is so neatly flattened is that I had to have the treatment as well." (Louder laughter, prolonged).  

Noel, another I worked with, knew everything. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? "The egg he would say," without hesitation, and explain it scientifically. How long is a piece of string? "Forty-two and a half inches" was his answer, "because that is the amount needed to hold up a navvy's trousers". I once saw one of his lectures: "Today's topic is Ethics," he began. "No, that's not a county in the South-East of England, it's a system of behaviour." The students sat blank-faced. I swear some of them wrote the whole thing down word for word, and will reproduce it in an exam answer.

Trevor was another who amused me. We were discussing the art of marking. "I can mark anything at all," he said, and looked around the room. "I could mark that filing cabinet if I had to," he pointed, "it's a B-minus." I knew exactly what he meant and had to agree. B-minus it was.

Just a few of the characters that come to mind. They are all dead now.

Mick Copier

Most university lecturers work very hard (at least in my experience). They spend hours planning teaching and helping students, and give up too many of their evenings and weekends dealing with email. I also used to put in further time carrying out research, writing academic papers and applying for external funding. With some success, I might add.

Yet I always had a sneaking regard for those who did basically what was asked of them and little more. One such colleague was called Mick Copier.

I first came across him when I still worked in the software industry. My employer sent me on a course in SSADM (Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method) and Mick was on the same course. Around a year later I got a job at the same university where he worked and found myself sharing an office with him. If truth be told, the course helped me get the job and Mick put in a good word for me.

Part of my role involved visiting students out on their work placement years. Late one morning, arriving back on the train, I was surprised to see Mick at the railway station. “Are you on a placement visit too?” I asked him. “No,” he said, “I’ve done all I need to do today so I thought I would have an afternoon out in York.”

Mick based much of his teaching around the SSADM course we have both been on. I sometimes used it too, but Mick took it to extremes. Every June, our office would fill up with boxes from the reprographics room. Soon they were stacked four or five high and three or four deep. They were his teaching materials for the next academic year. From October to April, all he then had to do was to hand out these pre-prepared notes and worksheets week-by-week and guide the students through them. They nicknamed him Mick Photocopier.

To be fair, he was extremely knowledgeable, and the students liked and respected him.

With his preparation all finished, Mick  then took all his holiday in one block over the summer. While workaholics like me spent our time writing and researching obsessively, he kept a boat on the River Ouse and could comfortably make it to the Mediterranean and back on the French canals. One day I would be like that, I told myself.

Mick came unstuck in the end. Well, sort of. The university decided it needed to reduce the number of lecturers and began a redundancy consultation. I survived, largely because of my research output. Mick didn’t. Instead, he accepted a large voluntary severance payment and walked straight into a new and highly paid position with a nearby passenger transport authority, restructuring their database of bus and train timetables. He even took some of our students on placement. He knew what he was doing, in more ways than one.

I never did get to be like Mick. I think now that I drove myself far too hard.

Cameras

Last month’s post about photographic lenses and extension tubes set me thinking about the cameras I’ve used over the years. Some were also in the loft.

1950s

The first would have been our nineteen-fifties family camera, an Ensign Ful-Vue II. No, that wasn’t in the loft, but my dad had kept the instruction booklet:

It is surprising how vividly it brings things back: the large silver winding knob; loading the size 120 roll film (frames of 2¼ inches or 57mm square) with its thick black backing paper; the “ruby window” for viewing the frame numbers printed on the back – twelve per roll. Lovely colour, Ruby! 

 

1962

The Ensign took most of our family photographs until 1962 when I received a Kodak Brownie Starmite camera for Christmas and became the family photographer. This used smaller 127-sized frames (40mm square), also 12 per roll. Pictures from both the Ensign and the Starmite have appeared many times on this blog, especially indoor flash. 

1974

After starting work I wanted a 35mm single-lens reflex colour slide camera. One of the most economical to buy was the Russian Zenith E. It cost £33 from York Camera Centre in January, 1973. 

Comparing the quality of the Zenith images with the Ensign and Starmite negatives, you can see why it was cheap. I would have been better with something slightly more expensive, perhaps Pentax or Praktica, but the Zenith was fairly robust and I used it into the nineteen-nineties. It survived hours in rucksacks including two weeks backpacking in Iceland, and once rolled several hundred feet down a mountainside in Switzerland. Unfortunately, the fabric shutter is now torn beyond repair. As the lenses have gone to the charity shop, the camera body might as well go for metal recycling. 

One nice touch was that the Zenith came with a free book, “Discover Rewarding Photography: the Manual of Russian Equipment”, which, despite its name, contained helpful hints and useful information.

1994

The Zenith and its lenses were heavy and bulky to carry around, especially out walking, so around 1994 someone took pity and bought me a 35mm Pentax Espio 738G compact camera. It was a nice, easy-to-use, lightweight camera, but I never really liked it. It had the irritating feature (at least with the films I used) that, on loading, it automatically wound the film  all the way to the far end, and then back again frame-by-frame as each shot was taken. This meant that numbers printed on colour slides were in reverse sequence: e.g. slide 36 was really slide 1.

It still works: Daughter used it for an art project a few years ago. It might be fun to get a black and white film to develop myself just one more time: extracting the film from its cartridge under blankets in the dark, sliding it into the developing tank, salivating at smell of sodium thiosulphate fixer. I’ll keep the camera and tank for now. No need to print the negatives these days; better just to scan them in.

2001

And so to digital: a 2.1 megapixels Olympus D-490. It cost £399.99 in January 2001. The lens glided satisfyingly forward when you slid front the cover open. It had pop-up electronic flash on top. It had 3x zoom (35-105mm) and a macro function, but you could buy longer lenses and extension tubes. Its 72 dots-per-inch, 1600 x 1200 pixels jpg images used around 400MB of storage, so you could get around twenty on an 8MB memory card. It also took 20-second silent videos. 

The software for transferring images from the memory cards was awkward. You couldn’t just stick it into a computer slot like now because the ‘Camedia’ cards were enormous – seen here beside a standard SD card for comparison. I bought additional 16MB cards to take more photographs. A hundred was luxury after 35mm film. The camera was also a little heavy because it used four AA batteries. It still works but is worth at most £20 on ebay. Should it go to the electrical equipment recycling skip?

With two young children the Olympus was used a lot, but after a few years I noticed that the images had a small number of blank pixels. It seemed time to upgrade.

2006

Technology was advancing rapidly and getting cheaper too. My 7.1 megapixels Canon Digital Ixus 70 cost £169.99 in April 2006, and I still use it today. It has a similar spec. to the Olympus: a 3x optical zoom (35-105mm), a macro function and built in flash, but also an extensive range of image settings and unlimited movie time with sound. Mine is set to 3072 x 2304 pixels at 180 dots per inch which creates jpg images of 3.5MB. Even a ‘small’ 4GB SD card stores loads. 

You can get much higher spec. cameras now, even on phones, but this is fine for most purposes. However, one might say that it isn’t as much fun, and doesn’t have the same mystique as the Zenith.

Not wanting to disappoint the technical amongst us, here are links to the Ensign Ful-Vue, Zenith E and Pentax Espio instruction booklets and manual.

My Very First Mother Goose

In the small collection of items I put aside to blog about at some future time, is an obituary of Iona Opie, children’s folklorist, who died in 2017 aged 94. If this post interests you, you will enjoy her life story.

Her delightful book ‘My Very First Mother Goose’, an illustrated collection of nursery rhymes, gave us hours of fun when the children were little. Bedtime after bedtime, we would turn through the pages, pointing at the pictures, singing the rhymes we knew the tunes to, and reciting those we didn’t. Now in a box of books in the loft, it is definitely not one to be disposed of. 

Amongst my favourites to sing were:

         Polly put the kettle on
         Half a pound of tuppenny rice
         I had a little nut tree
         Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been
         Elsie Marley’s grown so fine, she won’t get up to feed the swine
         Dickory, dickery, dock
         Sing a song of sixpence
         Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle
         Ride a cock ‘oss to Banbury Cross
                 (we are certainly not going to sing ‘cross’ to rhyme with ‘horse’ in Yorkshire)
         Horsie, horsie, don’t you stop
         Boys and girls come out to play
         Jack and Jill
         Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake
         Down at the station early in the morning
         Wee Willie Winkie

We probably enjoyed it more than the children.

“I don’t like that Wink Willie Wee-Wee,” son J said one day.

Iona Opie, with her husband Peter, began collecting nursery rhymes during the war when, one day out walking in the countryside, the rhyme “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire, your children all gone,” came into her head. She wondered what it meant and where it had come from. Nursery rhymes had never been codified before. From scratch, they unearthed a rich vein of children’s rhymes, traditions and folklore that had been passed down through generations, which they sought to record before it was erased by the commodification of childhood.

As in “Ladybird, ladybird”, many hint at untold horrors. The Opies suggested this was uniquely British, “All part of being frightfully tough and not minding the weather; we’re nourished with this nonsense and it does us a lot of good.” 

With us, the rhymes took on a life of their own, with changed words and new verses. “Down at the station” acquired a second verse in a minor key:

         Grandson and -daughter¹ wave goodbye to Grandma,
         She’s on the train, she’s on her way home,
         Ten minutes later a face at the window,
         “Hello, it’s me, I’m baaack² again.

                 ¹ their actual names were used here
                 ² exaggerated southern accent

The odd thing about this is that it is not entirely true. Our extra verse refers to an incident that occurred before either of the children was born.

Grandma used to travel up from the South on the main line to Sheffield and then take a local train through Barnsley. She was appalled by the thought that any future grandchildren might grow up with Barnsley accents.

On this particular day, we saw her off home on the local train, but she returned an hour or so later and knocked on the window. What had happened is that, just outside our station where the line becomes single-track, the driver of the train coming in the opposite direction stopped to inform Grandma’s driver about a broken joint in the track which had allowed him to pass but would have derailed Grandma’s train. Grandma’s driver then had to wait for permission to reverse back to our station. 

How many of our traditional rhymes are similarly muddled?

 

Iona and Peter Opie (rhymes with ‘soapy’) published several other books, including ‘The Oxford Dictionary Of Nursery Rhymes’. We also bought ‘Here Comes Mother Goose’ which is in the same Walker Books series as ‘My Very First Mother Goose’, but most of the rhymes are unfamiliar to us.

Old Wires

You do odd jobs, you accumulate all sorts of bits and pieces, and you them keep because they might come in useful one day. You buy things and they wear out but you keep the bits and pieces that go with them because they might also come in useful one day. And, fifty years later, you have boxes full of all those bits and pieces, some of which may have come in useful but most of which didn’t. 

Here is part of my lifetime’s collection of wires and plugs. Funny what memories they bring back! 

I found the plug, socket and cable used to make an extension lead for the fluorescent light I fitted under the eaves of my loft room in the shared house in 1972, a short length of ring-main cabling from when I installed several spur wall-sockets after moving into our current house thirty years ago, and some left-over heat resistant cabling used to wire up an electric immersion heater around the same time. Then there were the transformers from old computers, printers and scanners, and their plugs, sockets and adapters. I can still identify them: RS-232, Centronics, VGA, S-Video, Ethernet, HDMI, DIN. There was even an old cordless telephone system. 

And where on earth were the following electronic components from? It might have been one of the kid’s Design Technology projects at school, involving transistors, capacitors, thermistors, a photo-resistor and light-emitting diodes. They remind me of my brother’s nineteen-sixties electronic engineer’s kit, or my nineteen-seventies home-built Heathkit stereo. 

How many of the following does one really need?

• spare 3, 5 and 13 amp fuses
• spare mains plugs and multi-socket adapters
• travel adapters for various kinds of power supply
• transformers for long-gone printers, scanners and computers
• cables for printers, monitors and keyboards
• USB cables
• ADSL micro-filters for connecting broadband to telephone lines
• SCART leads for video recorders
• mono/stereo audio/video jack plugs, DIN plugs, HDMI leads, S-video leads
• television aerial cables
• lawn mower cables
• electric kettle cables
• time-switches
• wall sockets, light fittings and light switches
• wiring of various lengths and thicknesses

If I don’t sort them now, someone else will have to do it. This is some of what will be going to the electrical skip at the recycling centre.  

And the rest? Sorted into smaller boxes, labelled and back in the loft in case they come in useful one day.

Interview Woes

A colleague told me in confidence he was desperate to leave the software company we were with. He was tired of having to spend so much time abroad. The week after he’d been to Venezuela they had sent him to Athens – talk about jetlag! Fortunately for me, he was away so much he couldn’t get to interviews. Had he escaped, I would have picked up all his travel. It was bad enough being sent away just occasionally, like being asked (i.e. told) on a Friday morning to go to Stockholm to sort out an urgent problem, and having to pop home to pack a bag and leave a note that I might not be back until Tuesday. Newly married with a family in mind, it was not what I wanted. I understood my colleague’s predicament entirely. I decided to get out before he did.

I started applying for lecturing jobs in Polytechnics. It would be a cut in salary, but not all that much taking pensions into account. I had to make my own provision at the software company, whereas lecturers were members of a government-backed, inflation-proof, final-salary scheme worth at least 20% on top of what they paid you. A salary of £20k was the equivalent of £24k, and £25k was worth £30k.

Things did not go well. I applied for no end of posts, but despite being well qualified – higher degree, authorship of academic papers from previous work as a research assistant, relevant commercial experience – it counted for little. I was interviewed often enough, but, no matter how well I felt I’d done, they appointed someone else. It was usually either an internal candidate or the cheap option. At Leicester Del Monte they appointed a twenty-three year-old straight off their M.Sc. conversion course. At James Heriot they appointed a mystery candidate who wasn’t there when the rest of us were interviewed.

Nearly a year went by and I was spending more and more time away. With one last throw of the dice, I applied above my league to the University of Nottingham. There turned out to be two posts and four candidates. We sat around after the interviews awaiting the outcome. It took ages. Finally, they called in the first successful candidate and then the second, but told me not to go away. I will forever be grateful to Professor Peter Ford who explained that they had appointed the two candidates with the broadest balance of skills, and had they been appointing to only one post it might well have been me. “Do not be discouraged in any way”, were his exact words.

I vaguely knew one of the successful candidates as one of those people who spend their lives messing others around and being unreliable, and it annoyed me a few months later to learn that he had chucked the job and moved on.

Polytechnics then changed. The government decided they were all to become universities, and they started to hunt for staff able to carry out research and bring in external funding. It was like a football transfer market. I applied to a Yorkshire institution and got an interview. In phoning to accept I discovered there were six candidates. Not good odds.

On the day only four turned up. Then, like at Nottingham, they said they were hoping to fill two posts. Two out of four looked promising until I learned that one of the candidates was an internal candidate called Anthea who was just about to submit her PhD thesis, another was a high-flying researcher from British Telecom, and the third an affable Rory Bremner lookalike who was a temporary lecturer at a Russell Group university.

We spent the morning giving presentations. I managed to work in stuff about something called SSADM (Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method), the expert systems research I’d previously done, and how it related to the commercial system I now worked with. The Head of Department though it an excellent presentation.  

We were taken for lunch at which Rory Bremner did most of the talking and Anthea said nothing at all. Then the chap from BT was taken aside and didn’t come back. I heard later that his talk had been terrible, and they doubted his ability to connect with the Higher National students. The remaining three of us waited for our formal interviews in the afternoon.   

It went badly. There were questions that caught me out and set me talking too loud and too fast, and they said not to wait around because decisions had to be approved by the Vice-Chancellor.

I waited ten days. The Head of Department was out so I phoned the personnel office. There was a muted conversation at the other end of the line during which I overheard the words “Bremner and Dunham” and “shussssh”. They said the decision was still awaiting approval. Soon afterwards, the Head of Department then rang me. Yes, I had a job.

The other post did indeed go to Rory Bremner. I felt sorry for Anthea who had to vacate her desk to accommodate him.

We were both still there twenty years later. One thing I learned during that time is that with these kinds of jobs, probably with any job, you can never truly be aware of all the considerations, and why you might or might not be successful.  

Signalling

I recently mentioned four boxes of discoloured colour slides I came across when scanning in. Several people suggested, and indeed showed, it was not difficult to recover at least something like their original appearance. I said I’d try, but needed to get out an old computer with Photoshop Elements which came bundled free with a scanner. These days they expect you to buy it over and over again with a subscription. I refuse to be treated as an income stream.

I got out the old computer but have not made much progress yet. This is not down to any difficulty with Photoshop, but because of distraction. The old computer also contains a set of PC-Rail signalling simulations.    

They might not sound it, but they’re great, they really are – not because of what you do or see but because of what you imagine. You pretend you are controlling all the trains through York, the noise and the power and the enormity of the things, and imagine being on board, remembering journeys once made.  

It could be the summer of 1983, when they invited me to interview for a research job in the world-famous Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. I travelled up from Hull and back in a day, changing at Selby during its last months as a station on the East Coast Main Line before being bypassed by the coalfield diversion They wanted to offer me the job too – they phoned the same evening – but were then overruled by the funding council who insisted on someone either with or close to finishing a Ph.D.

Or it could be any one of the many other times I’ve been through York by train, up to Newcastle, Edinburgh or Glasgow, visiting clients when I was with the software company, or later, to see students on work placement. I once went to Aberdeen on the overnight sleeper, did what I had to do there, returned the next night and was back at work by 9 a.m.

It’s tricky signalling a path through York for the Scarborough Transpennines. They come in from Leeds on the top left of the above screen and need to get to Platform 4 and the Scarborough line on the bottom right. The screen shot shows train 1B23 (Blackpool to Scarborough) nearly there after crossing the East Coast Main Line just outside the station. I have to be careful not to hold up trains from Doncaster and London. I am being distracted by train 2C26 coming in from Harrogate at the other end of the station (below) where it has to get to Platform 8 without  holding up trains from Newcastle and Edinburgh. Fortunately, it’s not very busy – not yet. 

Sheffield is great, too – quite demanding. You control everything from Dore Junction and the Bradway tunnel south of the station (on the left in the screenshot below), to Meadowhall to the north. You have to put goods trains into loop lines to give priority to the London and Cross Country expresses on the Midland Main Line. Oh to be on the Aberdeen to Penzance!

I’ve been through Sheffield a lot too: south to the East Midlands where the software company was based, north to Leeds, York and beyond, and East towards Doncaster and Hull when I lived and worked there. These days you might find me taking the Barnsley branch home. Mother-in-law used to do it when she travelled up from Hertfordshire and changed trains at Sheffield, complaining it was so much easier when we lived near Nottingham, horrified by the Barnsley accents on the local train and dreading her grandchildren might grow up to speak like that. They got called posh at school.  

The full simulations are not free, but there are evaluation versions which run for thirty minutes or so without charge, which is all I have ever done. With well over a hundred different stations or eras, there is plenty to do. Some are “heritage” simulations which recreate mechanical lever-framed signal boxes communicating with adjacent boxes through working block instruments and bells. I’ve played with quite a lot of them, both modern and heritage, always there personally in the mind’s eye.

Now, what about those photographs.

Dominosteine

Mrs. D.’s homemade Dominosteine: an unusual thing to bake in an English kitchen.

When my mother-in-law was a teenager after the Second World War, her school organized food parcels to send to families in Dusseldorf. I imagine most of it would have been tins of meat, vegetables and condensed milk, and maybe a few perishables such as sugar, butter and cheese. Dusseldorf, like many European cities, had been bombed to ruins and the people were starving.

This, and similar schemes, were not universally supported. When the Mayor of Reading spoke about families in Dusseldorf living in dreadful conditions in bunkers and cellars, there were angry letters to the press condemning the Boche for not working to feed his children.

My mother-in-law’s family did support and contribute to the scheme. The school also encouraged children to write letters to send with the food parcels, and, as a result, there began a life-long friendship with a German girl called Ingeborg. There were visits between the families, and, during the nineteen-nineties, mother-in-law brought Ingeborg to stay with us for a few days.  

As Europe recovered from the war, the German children began to send Christmas presents to England. Ingeborg usually sent dominosteine, lebkuchen, stollen and spekulatius. You would have been hard pressed to find these delicious continental treats anywhere at all in Britain during the sixties, seventies and eighties. Later, my wife always managed to find them at Christmas, even if they had to be ordered by post from Germany. I had never tasted or heard of them before.  

Dominosteine and stollen are my favourites, but, this year, there were no dominosteine to be found anywhere except at exhorbitant prices. So, Mrs. D. made her own, baking the gingerbread, building up the layers of jelly and marzipan, cutting it into squares and covering them in soft, dark chocolate. They’re enormous. Four times the size of those you buy. And more than two tins full. Yummy!

POSTSCRIPT - coincidentally, Graham Edwards also mentioned German treats in his recent post, with a photograph of a box reminscent of what Ingeborg used to send: https://galenote.blogspot.com/2021/12/christmas-day-2021.html

Doubters, Doomsters, Gloomsters

In 2019, in his first speech as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson said:

“The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters, they are going to get it wrong again. The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts.”

What a masterful statement! The first six words are rather good, but I am especially impressed by the subtle insertion of the word “again”. 

In the late nineteen-eighties, I moved from the public to the private sector. The salary seemed generous but the pension provision not so good. As I could no longer add to my so-called “gold plated” public sector scheme, I needed to make my own provision. I joined a private pension scheme and started to take an interest in stock markets.

In those days the global share indices were not dissimilar. In Britain the FTSE100 was at 2144, in America the Dow Jones Industrial was at 2679, and in Germany the DAX30 was 1366.

As I write this, the FTSE is 7138, the Dow 35,369 and the DAX 15,781.

In other words, since 1990, the value of the FTSE is now 3.3 times what it was in 1990, while the Dow has multiplied 13.2 times and the DAX 11.5 times.

So £5,000 invested in 1990 would now be worth about £16,500 in the FTSE, £65,000 in the Dow and £55,000 in the DAX.

In fact, the Dow Jones and DAX have done as well over the last ten years as the FTSE100 over the last thirty.

Here it is as a graph showing how they multiplied over the years: 

This doesn’t tell the whole story. In 1990 the pound was worth 1.7 dollars. Today it is around 1.4, so the £65,000 would be worth more like £79,000 taking into account the exchange rate. Similar factors apply to the German stock market. When the Euro was introduced in 1999 it was worth £1.40 compared with £1.17 today.

You can argue about this until the cows come home – for example that it doesn’t take into account rip-off fund management fees, that the constituent companies in the indices have changed, that FTSE companies pay higher dividends and that the Dow Jones contains more technology stocks and fewer traditional industries – but the numbers must surely be indicative of the economic wealth, health and confidence of the three countries.

So much for “get it wrong again.” Does it look as if those who waged bets against Britain lost their shirts?

Should we now be switching funds to Britain in readiness for the great catch up? I don’t think so.  

Fortunately, I put a good chunk of pension into international funds. And as I later re-joined the public sector, I’ve had the best, and worst, of both worlds.

Pounds, Shillings and Pence

The new ‘Turing’ £50 note brings yet another change to our U.K. currency. There seem to have been so many in recent years.

They used to be rare. When my grandpa gave me this set of Queen Elizabeth II coins in 1953, their denominations and basic appearance had remained more or less unchanged for decades. In theory, some coins in circulation were over two-hundred years old. Their nicknames – tanner, bob, florin – were part of popular culture.

My dad put the Queen Elizabeth coins safe in his black metal box and took them out now and again to let me look. I liked the lady in armour with her fork and shield (“Britannia,” he told me), the elaborate sailing ship (“The Golden Hind”), the different lions of the English and Scottish shillings, and the young Queen on the ‘heads’ sides. The penny and half-crown were biggest, but my favourite was one of the smallest, the tiny farthing with a “robin” on the back [as pointed out in the comments, it is a wren, and a sixty-eight year old misconception].

They were shiny bronze and silver then, but, like me, they have tarnished. Those whose packaging has also failed to preserve them will tell you there were twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings, 240 pennies, to the pound. We can still, in our heads (Weaver?), do things like add 14s 10d to 11s 8d to get £1  6s 6d (i.e. fourteen shillings and ten pence to eleven shillings and eight pence, often written 14/10 and 11/8). It was a great way to bamboozle foreigners.

The only recent change to the coinage had been the introduction of the twelve-sided yellow threepenny bit in 1937 in place of a smaller, round, silver coin that was discontinued in 1945. The last significant change before that had been almost a century earlier with the introduction of the two-shilling piece in 1849. As one-tenth of a pound, it had been created with decimalisation in mind – a rare example of a government planning well ahead.

Since 1953, the only thing not to have changed is the Queen. Changes were slow at first but since then most coins have changed twice. First to go was the farthing which became so insignificant that none were minted after 1956. They were removed from circulation in 1961. The halfpenny (‘aipny as we called it) followed in 1969, and the half-crown in 1970, although that was to prepare for decimalisation in 1971, fifty years ago.

Decimalisation put paid to most of the rest. Pennies (‘d’) were superseded by New Pence (‘p’). One New Pence was worth roughly two and a half old pennies. Five new coins came in (½p, 1p, 5p, 10p and 50p) and the old ones were gradually withdrawn.  For six and a half months we used the old and the new side-by-side and became adept at switching between. That’s why we’re mentally nimble. One pound six shillings and sixpence? Easy! £1.32½. Some of the old coins had exact decimal equivalents, the lowest common factor being 6d which was worth 2½p, so provided you used the old coins in sixpenny clusters you were fine.

What came next? It’s nigh impossible to remember but I’m one of those sad people who look things up and make lists. 

• The old sixpence, shilling and two shilling coins remained in use after decimalisation as 2½p, 5p and 10p coins. In fact, the new 5p and 10p coins were identical in size and weight to their older counterparts and had been introduced in 1968 to get us used to the idea. The sixpence lasted until 1980, and the shilling and two shillings until the early 1990s.
• Also in 1968, a seven-sided 50p coin had replaced the paper ‘ten-bob note’.
• In 1982, the inscription ‘NEW PENCE’ was changed on all coins to show the denomination, e.g. ‘TEN PENCE’. 
• A seven-sided 20p coin was introduced 1982 and a round £1 coin in 1983.  
• The ½p coin was withdrawn in 1984 and the paper £1 note in 1988. 
• Three of the original decimal coins were replaced by smaller versions: the 5p in 1990, the 10p in 1992, and the 50p in 1997. 
• A £2 coin was introduced in 1998, the first bi-metallic coin in Britain since the 1692 tin farthing. 
  
• The original round £1 coin was replaced by a twelve-sided bi-metallic coin in 2017. It looks like the old threepenny bit and doesn’t seem to buy very much more.
• There have also been several changes in the physical size and design of banknotes over these years, most recently between 2016 and 2021 when paper banknotes were replaced by polymer ones which slither and slide restlessly in your pocket and refuse to stay folded.
  

My grandfather probably thought the 1953 set of Elizabeth II coins would be a good investment. Not so. Even if the packaging had preserved them in mint uncirculated condition, which it hasn’t, despite not being opened in sixty-eight years, you would do well to get back the inflation adjusted equivalent of their face value: £9.50 for 7s 4¾d (seven shillings, four and three farthings).

Anyone would think it just a cynical ploy by the Royal Mint to make money from making money. I hang on to them only because they are things of beauty. They still live in my dad’s black metal box. These too:

1965 set issued on the death of Sir Winston Churchill, including a rarely-used five-shilling coin, the ‘Churchill Crown’. This was the first time an image of anyone other than a monarch had appeared on a British coin, showing the extreme high regard in which Churchill was held.

Another pre-decimalisation Queen Elizabeth II set dated 1966.

Crowns (five-shilling coins) commemorating the 1951 Festival of Britain, the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and the 1981 Royal Wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer.
(Obverse ‘heads’ sides above, reverse ‘tails’ sides below). 

Sungold

Question: if packets of tomato seeds contain an average of ten seeds, what is the chance that one will contain just four? I will come back to this later. 

Thirty years ago, the most popular television gardener in the U.K. was Geoff Hamilton. Here he is on the cover of the Radio Times wearing the same Marks and Spencer air force blue shirt as I had (Radio Times also lists TV programmes but has kept the same title since 1923).

In 1996, he wrote a column praising the virtues of Thompson and Morgan’s orange ‘Sungold’ cherry tomatoes:

        Ever since I first grew Thompson and Morgan’s cherry tomato “Sungold” I’ve rejected all others. For me, it has just the right balance between sweet and acid that makes it melt in the mouth. Mind you, I can’t afford to be a stick-in-the-mud, so I shall try others…

The column has been folded at the bottom of our seed box ever since. Sadly, Geoff Hamilton died shortly after it was published. He may not even have got to try the Sungolds he grew that year. His gardens at Barnsdale, Rutland, remain a much visited attraction.

They are pretty expensive as seeds go. They only put a small number in each packet, and, being F1 hybrids, they don’t re-seed themselves true to type so you have to buy new ones each year. Nowadays, they work out at between 30 and 50 pence per seed, and would probably be more if the patent had not expired and they were still only available from Thompson and Morgan.

We followed the advice and bought some, and, being able to afford not only the seeds but also to be sticks-in-the-mud, we have since rejected all others too. They are as good as Geoff Hamilton said. 

To return to the question I started with, about the probability of getting only four seeds in packets that have an average of ten. After pondering for some time, I’m afraid I still don’t know the answer, and neither do you unless you work for Johnsons Seeds of Newmarket, Suffolk, and can say how accurately the seeds are counted and whether packets are just as likely to contain more than ten seeds as less than ten seeds (in other words the spread and skew of the seed-count-per-packet distribution). I don’t think the question can be answered without this information. So let’s just guess the answer is: “very unlikely”.

What I do know is that I was pretty annoyed when it happened to me. About a month ago I opened a packet of Johnsons F1 Sungold tomato seeds, average contents ten, and found only four seeds. I am not sure when and where I bought them. I got them early last year, forgetting I had some left over from the year before.

I complained to Johnsons and after a few weeks received a replacement packet, but in the meantime I had bought another new packet to get things started. Tip: have a good feel of the packet before buying. Even if the seeds are too small to count, you can certainly detect the difference between four and ten.

Here are this year’s seedlings on their way from the house to the greenhouse to be moved into bigger pots. I always grow six seeds on the assumption they won’t all come up, but, as you can see, this year they did. Now, what are the odds of that?