Birthdays

October will soon be over, and we have put the clocks back. That should have brought two more birthdays because my brother (pictured) and I were both born in this month, but, tragically, he only made it to 36. Even his children have now lived longer, and I have been here over twice that, despite what the oncologists keep telling me. 

He would have been 70 this month. There was quite a gap between us. The explanation, according to my mum, was that she had a miscarriage two or three years after I was born. I don’t know whether it makes medical sense or not, or how she knew, but she said it was due to rhesus incompatibility. Mum had an uncommon blood group that sensitized her to mine, which caused future pregnancies of the wrong type to miscarry. 

My dad expanded the story many years later. It happened when we were on holiday in a caravan at Primrose Valley, Filey, on the Yorkshire coast. I don’t know how she dealt with the foetus, but she said she could tell it was a baby girl. I believe she spent a day resting in the caravan and then continued the holiday. No tests, no doctors, no hospitals. 

Self-Doubt, Imposter Syndrome and Hegemonic Masculinity

New Month Old Post: first posted 26th January 2018

A couple of weeks ago, the normally impeccable Hadley Freeman, writing about self-doubt in her Guardian column [in 2018], said:

 “I have yet to meet a man who has worried he’s not good enough for a job he’s been offered, whereas I have yet to meet a woman who hasn’t.”

Well, I don’t know what circles she moves in, but that is simply wrong, as many of the responses to the online article make clear. Imposter syndrome is not just a female thing.

She finds it impossible to imagine a woman who, like certain men she amusingly identifies, is “perennially mediocre, untouchably arrogant, and eternally gifted by opportunity and protection by the establishment”. You only have to look at some of the women in high political office to see the error in this.

As regards men who worry they are not up to jobs they have been offered, there are lots, myself included. When I got good grades at ‘A’ Levels the second time round in my mid-twenties, and then a good degree, I felt that almost anyone could do it, and still do. When that led to jobs in universities, it felt like unmerited good fortune. When I got research papers into academic journals, I wondered why no one had seen the gaping holes they contained.

This is, of course, both blowing and sucking my own trumpet at the same time, but I just want to say that even for those who invented the concept*, hegemonic masculinity was never assumed to be universal.

* Connell and Messerschmidt.
The cartoon is from startupbros.com - click to link to its source.
Here is another relevant article from The Guardian.

Fixing A Hole

New Month Old Post: first posted 7th February, 2015. A rather contrived piece about how the Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ accompanied my DIY jobs through the years. This piece was published in The Guardian newspaper (second item on the page linked here).

Fixing a Hole by the Beatles 

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in /
And stops my mind from wandering / 
Where it will go”

1968: A-level examinations year. We moved house and I was allowed to decorate my new bedroom as I wanted, and listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my reel-to-reel tape recorder I covered the flowery wallpaper a responsible dark blue and irresponsibly failed my A-levels. I’m not sure which my mum thought worse, the room colour or the exam results, but after I left for an office job in Leeds, the flowery wallpaper returned.

1970: “Painting the room in a colourful way.”
 
To the tape of Sgt. Pepper, I painted the walls of my rented room an adventurous orange and unadventurously stayed for seven years, ignoring my mum’s frequent hints about the dreadful colour.

1978: A mature student in Hull. With Sgt. Pepper loud in stereo through my Akai tape deck, Leak amplifier and massive Wharfedale speakers, I emulsioned the room an impulsive dark red and unimpulsively got a first, despite living with such a dismal colour my mum said.

1990: “Filling the cracks that ran through the door”

In a good career in Nottingham, I at last meet someone who appreciates my interior design skills. I moved in with my old stereo and tape of Sgt. Pepper and mended the doors and window frames. I like to think my mum would have been impressed too but sadly by then it was too late. We sold the house and moved back to Yorkshire.

1993: Sgt. Pepper is now on a cheap cassette player as we paper our bedroom ceiling using the two chairs relay method. Standing one behind the other, the person nearest the wall sticks one end of the pasted wallpaper to the ceiling and the person behind sticks the next bit. The first person then moves with chair behind the second, and sticks up some more, and so on, right across the room. We both end up slippery and sticky, with more paste on us than on the paper, which slowly detaches itself and drops down.

2015: “Taking my time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”

I only hear music in the car these days. Sgt. Pepper comes on and reminds me that now the kids are grown up we need to re-paper the bedroom ceiling which has cracked under the weight of all their junk – and mine – up in the loft. I wonder if the tape deck, amplifier and speakers still work?

Akai 4000 DS Tape Deck, Leak 3200 Tuner Amplifier and Wharfedale Glendale Speakers

Wise Words

Words echo through the years. I hear and remember them as if it were today. The written word can be as memorable. Here are some that stayed with me, the ones that come first to mind, which probably say as much about me as their speakers or writers. Do any resonate with you, or do you remember others?   

You know very well John that men are afraid of living alone. 

(JB, English Literature Teacher on the evening class I took when retaking Advanced Level exams in my mid-twenties. After the course ended, John (another student) and I went with him for a drink, and he was complaining that creative output declines or ends after marriage, as had happened to him. John asked him why he had got married then.) 

It takes you ten years before you realise how crap you are. 

(Tim Keech, Hull guitar teacher. It applies to other skills as well, from computer programming to blogging. My own variation is: No matter how good you think you are, there is always someone better. I used to say this to the computing students. Another variation is: The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know. Or as the friend I call Gilbert in this blog put it: You know fuck all Tasker. He was very astute.)

The motorcycle you are maintaining is yourself. 

(Slightly misquoted from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Again, it applies to almost anything in which you are so deeply immersed it becomes therapeutic and cuts out all other concerns. This was something else I used to tell computing students.)

If those countless millions began to see the possibilities he saw and were then frustrated, there might be hell to pay. And they have been frustrated. 

(Ted Simon in Jupiter’s Travels, an account of his journey round the world 1973-1977 on a motorbike, observing the different living standards between rich and poor countries. He was right.) 

You always fall on your feet, don’t you. 

(My mother after I scraped six Ordinary Level exam passes at school, allowing me to progress post-16 into the Sixth Form. She knew how little work I had done.)  

I’ve got more common sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body. 

(My mother during her final illness, as my impractical dad struggled to erect bean poles, a job she had always done but no longer could. He usually responded with Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife! But I could have strangled him when he visited one day to find me with the floorboards up, channels cut in the walls, wiring neatly laid out, as I was installing some new spur sockets in the bedroom. Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife! he said.)

Always make sure your driving wheels are on firm ground.

(My dad on driving on muddy ground, but it seems to have wider meaning. Another useful tip was: In ice and snow, drive in the highest gear possible so as not to spin the wheels.)

This is the life. 

(The friend I call Neville in this blog, sometimes laying on the ground in hot sum out in the countryside with his shirt off, but more often up a mountain sipping a cup of coffee from a thermos flask, hiding from driving rain and sleet behind an inadequate rock, exhausted. He is blessed with the gift of always remaining cheerful.)  

It’s a bugger, i’n’t it. 

(The family friend I call Uncle Jimmy in this blog, on serious illness. At the end, my Aunt said we had better get him into hospital. “All right,” he said, “but we’ll have a cig first. We’ll have one o’ yours.”

Age is like cricket. Some make a century while others are out for a duck. A score in the seventies is a useful innings. 

(Me in a draft too bleak to post.) 

There were many others, but I will stop with those. 

The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

For those not from the U.K., Blue Peter is a BBC Television children’s magazine programme that has been running at least once a week since the nineteen-fifties. Amongst a wide variety of content, it is known for encouraging children to make things out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, household waste items, and “sticky-backed plastic”. One of its best-remembered creations was a version of the Thunderbirds Tracy Island in the nineteen-nineties. 

That was amusing in itself. Television re-runs of Thunderbirds generated a stream of toys and merchandise, and Matchbox Toys brought out a Tracy Island play set just before Christmas. It sold out within days. Blue Peter responded with a home-made version made from paper mache. Thunderbird 1 was launched from a Yoghurt pot, the hangar for Thunderbird 2 was a tissue box, and Thunderbird 3 launched out of a toilet roll. The BBC was inundated with so many requests for the free instructions, they had to stop sending them out, and instead released a VHS video of presenter Anthea Turner making it (see the BBC archive). 

Our Blue Peter afternoon was spent making a horse racing game for the memory group Mrs. D. runs. The theme that week was Royal Ascot. 

We came up with a track made from long pieces of card marked with lines, with cardboard fences. For the horses, I printed out two-sided chess knights in different colours. They were stapled around movable cardboard stands.  

The rules were kept simple. Each player has a horse to move according to the throw of a dice (I can hear my maths teacher telling me if there is only one it is a die). If you land on a space before a fence, that counts as a refusal and you have to move back three spaces. The first to the finish line is the winner. With around ten participants taking turns, the game lasts more than half an hour.

Horses are go. F.A.B. Anything can happen in the next half hour. 

It was fantastic fun, with laughter and excitement. One lady must have had a “donkey”, because it kept refusing the first fence when most of the others had nearly finished. Some wanted to bet on the outcome, but that was not allowed, although they could try to predict the winner. One could not remember which was her horse, and one kept taking the die out of the cup and turning it in his hand, not knowing what to do. They laugh at each other because they think that they are the only one that is with it, and that all the others (including the volunteers) are completely gaga. 

“Parka”
“Yuss Billaidi”
“Put down one hundred pounds each way on the green-yellow one, at 7:2”
“They won’t allow it, Billaidi” 
“Oh! And Ascot used to be such fun” 
“Yuss Billaidi”

Of course, I wanted to strive for perfection by colouring the track green and drawing white railings along the sides, having water jump, colouring the horses in jockey colours, and making one a zebra, but Mrs. D. said we had spent long enough. Perhaps we should send off for our Blue Peter badges anyway. 

We spent days making things like this as children. One of the best Christmas or Birthday presents you could get was a roll of Sellotape, a bottle of glue, a ball of string, and a few cardboard boxes. My brother made himself an aeronaut’s flying suit out of cardboard, complete with streamlined leggings, gauntlets, helmet and wings. He bounded around the house in it, jumping on and off the furniture making flying noises. 

Would many of today’s youngsters, who seem to spend most of their time playing games and messaging each other on their phones, have the interest, persistence, or even the practical ability to make such things?

Credits: The voices of Lady Penelope and P. were provided by JayCee and Parker, with American and Australian versions by Steve Reed and Andrew High Riser, and German sub-titles by Meike Riley. The horses were fed on silage grown by Dave Northsider, their stables built by Debby Hornburg, and the zebra ridden side saddle by Debra who seeks. The horses are writing a guest post for Tigger’s Mum. Tracy Island and the race game were made by Mrs. D. who let Tasker think he was helping. Thelma played Anthea Turner, and Yorkshire Pudding was Brains. 

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.