How I used to befriend strangers in the days before the internet

In the days before the internet, things required a bit more effort and creativity than they do now.

For example, if you had to do a comparison between New York and Calcutta for your homework, you had to get your ass down to the local library and thumb your way through the Encyclopedia Britannica to find stuff out.  This included using a few skills which are falling out of fashion these days, eg walking, reading and thinking.  I got 19 out of 20 for that homework by the way, so I must have been able to do all 3.

Meeting and getting to know strangers also needed a bit of creativity too, and a little known thing called 'Being able to have a conversation' used to come in useful.  A good forum for having conversations in my youth was the ferry from Dover to Zeebrugge.  I used to go to Germany quite a bit in the 80s and we mostly travelled on the Transline buses.  These took about 24 hours to get from Leeds to Northern Germany and they required a 4 hour ferry crossing aswell.  They were brilliant for talking to people, because they couldn't get away.

Although it seems unlikely now I actually made some friends this way.  And one of them I'm still in touch with, although it took Facebook for me to find her again after losing touch for a while.

She used to be called Ute Fehn and she was from Stuttgart.  We got talking on the back of a cross channel ferry.  It was in the early hours of the morning and it was dark so we couldn't see each other for the first 3 hours or so.  In fact it wasn't till 5 am that I found out she was dressed in yellow.  

Because I couldn't see her my first impressions of her were that she was funny and kind and had a nice voice.  Oh and also that she was German, although I'm not sure she is any more (I think she might be American now).

I've met other people in similar circumstances, but I can't go on about that now, because Ruth has invited Graeme round for coffee, and I didn't know, because I wasn't looking on Facebook, and even though she's in the same house, she failed to tell me...Ah, it wasn't like this in the olden days.  Actually I take that back, it was, friends turned up at your house unexpectedly all the time then, because it was easier to go to their houses than use the bloody massive phone with the dial on...

My grandma couldn't bend her legs and my grandad used to jump out of windows

I've got arthritis.  I got it when I was 34.  That's around the same age my grandma got it.

She stopped bending her knees when she got it, so eventually she walked a bit like R2D2.  I decided to keep bending mine, in case they set in place, and also I think they have better drugs these days.  I'm sure riding a bike helps, because that's tough to do without bending your legs.

My grandma used to infuriate me by sellotaping 50p to my birthday card, but then telling me I had to share it with my brother.  But it's my birthday I used to say, to no avail.  Still, the same thing used to happen to him on his birthday.

My grandparents lived in a back to back house in Sheffield the first few times I went to see them.  They only had an outside toilet so if you needed a wee in the night you had to pee in a pot called a Gazunder (because it goes under the bed).  It wasn't much good for number twos, and tripping up when taking it to be emptied was not to be recommended. 

My grandma would give me games that she'd cut off the back of the Cornflakes packet, and she once gave a big build up to the fact that she'd bought me a Taxi.  I used to collect Corgi cars (before I smashed them all up to make a junk yard) and I thought she meant one of those, but it was actually a chocolate biscuit. 

My grandad had an affair once.  He used to pretend he was off round to his mate's house to do the pools but he was actually seeing another woman.  Not sure if she helped him fill in his pools coupon or not.  Details are sketchy on that.

One day he thought he'd been found out.  Something his son said to him made him think he'd been rumbled.  So he jumped out of a window.  It was six floors up.  I think he meant to die, but he didn't quite make it.  As well as damaging his legs, he also bashed his head in, and not long that after he became schizophrenic.

When I saw him after that he used to giggle a lot and buy furniture.  Sometimes he'd tell my grandma he was off out to the shop and the next thing he'd turn up at our house in Leeds (about 40 miles away) giggling.

My grandparents only lived in a small flat but they had so many settees and chairs it was like a game of 'We are the Champions' getting from one side of the room to the other.

Eventually my mum had to circulate his picture to all the furniture shops in Sheffield.  Sort of like a Wanted poster but with the message 'Do not sell furniture to this man!' underneath instead of a reward.  But that didn't stop him.  When they were on holiday in Skegness he ordered a 3 piece suite to be delivered from there.  He gave them a key and told them he'd left a bag of money in the wardrobe to pay for it.  He hadn't though.  

As well as settees and chairs they had about 7 things that my grandma used to call 'Poofies'.  They were just big lumps of stuff you could rest your legs on, or stand on if necessary to get stuff off the top of cupboards.  I'm not sure if they have a real name.

Those two were the only grandparents I knew, and they both died in the 1980s when I was still at school.  My dad's parents died before I was even born.  And my dad didn't last long either.

If I can take Silverdale, I can take anything

My mum couldn't afford to take us on holiday when we were kids, but she did manage to get us on a two week holiday for underprivileged children in a place called Silverdale.  It was 1980.

It was quite a tough regime.  There was no showing off about what fancy stuff you'd got.  They made sure of this by taking all your clothes off you when you got there and giving you a random selection of clothes out of a cupboard.  

My brother couldn’t find any underpants to fit, so he had ones that were too big that hung out of the sides of his shorts.

There was pretty much non-stop running.  60 boys in 30 a side football games which were a just a mob of swinging legs kicking anything that moved.  Cricket with a bat that was so worn away it was more like half a bat.  Running for the sake of running, sometimes just round the building.

We had a disco one night, but they only had 3 records.  One was Rockin' Around the World by Status Quo and one of the others was Toccata by Sky.  I can't remember the third.

The weather was red-hot, nearly everyone got tonsilitis and under no circumstances were you allowed to leave any food on your plate.  Most meals featured giant boiled potatoes which were undercooked but they had to go down the neck, tonsilitis or no tonsilitis.

We took regular baths, which were supervised by someone called the matron.  I was 12 at the time.  It would be a long time before I'd be naked in a room with a woman again after that. 

When we got back to Leeds and had our clothes returned to us, my brother and I were let off the bus first as we were told we were the best behaved children they'd ever had.

It was hard, but as they used to say in the old days, it never did me any harm.  I've had other holidays since, but I don't think I've ever come back from a holiday fitter, even from my cycling holidays.

I think it's all run by charity, and I believe it's still going today.  I should really write and thank them.  

Post Script. I did write and thank them shortly after writing this, and in fact I sent them a link to this blog entry.  I ended up having a lovely e-mail exchange with them.  They seemed keen to distance themselves from some of the tougher measures employed at the time I went, but to be honest, even then it was always clear to me that they were operating with completely the best of intentions, and even with quite limited resources they managed to keep 60 young children clean, fed and occupied for a whole two weeks at a time.  And it was all done charitably, so I have nothing but praise for them.  Then and now.  

Why do I call myself a lazy cyclist?

Why do I call myself a lazy cyclist?

Firstly, it’s because of my physical limitations.  I’ve got a less than helpful combination of arthritis and anatomically deranged  feet (I laughed when the doctor said that, because I thought she‘d made it up, but it‘s a real term).  Sometimes it hurts when I pedal, particularly if I’m clipped in and I can’t move my feet around.

I’m on some strong drugs now but in 2008 I was in a bad way.  I noticed I was in a bad way at pretty much the same time I turned 40 and got made redundant.  That wasn’t the best month I ever had.

By 2009 I was doing better  but I wasn’t sure how much better so when Ruth and I went on a cycle tour to Scotland to do the Glasgow to Inverness Lochs and Glens route, I decided to conserve as much energy as possible by not pedalling  whenever possible.

This worked especially well after leaving Balsporran Cottages one morning.  It’s a B&B pretty much at the top of the Drumochter pass and I rolled the 4 miles downhill into Dalwhinnie before I met Ruth who had double backed to see what I was up to.

I find the harder I pedal the more my feet hurt, so I try to pedal only as much as I need to.

Going up hills I need to pedal a bit to overcome gravity but I’ve discovered that by pedalling magnificently and brilliantly slowly I can get up most hills without getting off.  I am sometimes overtaken by tortoises but that doesn’t really worry me too much, because I get to notice things as I go very slowly past them.  I sometimes feel as if I am getting to know sheep one at a time as I am going past them.  I am in their world for long enough to take in their individual features and personalities.  Fast people don’t do this.

Another reason for my slowness is that I don’t like to suffer when I’m out riding, so the less effort I put in the less it hurts.  This had the added bonus that I don’t sweat much so when I’m commuting I can ride to work in my work clothes which can prove useful as I usually set off 10 minutes late anyway and by not having to get changed I just about make it to work on time.

So that’s why I call myself a lazy cyclist.

I swapped my dad for Tonka Toys

My dad died on Halloween and he was cremated on Bonfire Night.  I didn’t fully appreciate the irony at the time as I was only six and I could barely read and write.  In fact, at the very moment he was having his third and fatal heart attack I was at school learning how to add up.

It was 1974.  We lived in a corner shop in Garforth near Leeds.  I didn’t notice when I got home from school that the shop was closed.  I often find it difficult to trust people and when I got in that day there were lots of people there and they were all smiling and happy looking as if me walking in was the greatest day of their lives.  My mum asked me to go upstairs with her.  This gets better I thought, a present of some kind.  But no.  My dad was dead and I would be watching the Six Million Dollar Man on my own tonight.  We’d only just got a colour telly.  What a waste!  I’d always enjoyed Bonfire Night but the day of the funeral I wasn’t really in the mood.  I could see the cricket club bonfire out of my bedroom window, but I didn’t go.

For a long time I cried into my baked beans at mealtimes and didn’t play out.  Belinda Smith (my favourite girl when I was six) had seen my dad’s death in the paper.  He was 40 she reminded me during story time.  It seemed old then, but that’s younger than I am now. 

After we sold the shop we had to live in a caravan for 5 months as our new council house was being modernised.  My brother Phil was in terry nappies so laundry was a pain and he didn’t help matters much by drinking disinfectant out of pop bottle one day.  But it was okay because they sobered him up with milk and gave him a cardboard hat to be sick in.

We lived next door to some dodgy families and I made loads of dinosaurs out of egg boxes and bits of fake fur and other crap which they store in boxes at primary school and someone broke into our caravan and tore them all up.

It was easy enough to do because you could get a child’s hand inside our letter box and open the caravan door from the inside.

We managed to run a black and white telly off a car battery but as the battery ran down the picture got smaller until it disappeared.  There was nothing on in those days anyway.

For our first Christmas as a one parent family two of my dad’s sisters Aunties Dot and Joan stepped in at first to look after us.  We went to Dot’s for Christmas.  It was a strange transaction.  Being taken to Sheffield and given about 20 Tonka Toys each for Christmas.  I think the whole extended family had had a whip round. To a child’s mind it seemed to be a case of ‘Ere you go, sorry about your dad, here’s a shitload of indestructible metal toys’.  We got 2 of everything. 

After 5 months in the caravan we got a council house.  We still lived near the dodgy families but now they had houses and so did we, and our doors now had locks that you needed a key for.

And even if they had been able to break in, we didn’t have toys made out of egg boxes and bits of fake fur anymore.  We had masses of Tonka Toys that we could smash the skirting boards to bits with as my mum soon discovered to her cost.  And they did not.

I almost had a step dad once

I almost had a step dad once.

He was almost my step-dad because my mum never married him.  At first he impressed me because he could do card tricks. 

The first time I met him was in February 1979.  I had passed the entrance exam to go to Leeds Grammar School on a free scholarship and he gave me a lift to the interview. 

At the interview, the school governors asked me a few questions to make sure I wasn’t an idiot.  Then they asked me if I had any questions.  Just one I said.  Is it true that if you’re thick but your parents are rich, you can buy your way into this school?  They seemed to find this amusing, but they assured me it wasn’t the case, and they gave me the scholarship.

For the statistically minded out there, I was allegedly the first person ever to get free school meals there, and the school had been going since 1552.

My almost step dad was chunky and hairy with an orange soft top BMW which was full of fag ends and Rod Stewart cassettes, oh and drawings, him being an architect.

Later he drove a Cortina but it didn’t have any brakes so sometimes he’d have to swerve onto a grass verge to avoid collisions.  Towards the end he bought an Opel Manta but the engine blew up and he had to get a new one.  My mum lent him the money and he bought her some flowers.

He’d never come to the table when dinner was called but he’d come late and then microwave it all to hell and cover it with pepper. 

He thought he was still a miler because he used to run at school and he thought he knew kung fu, although trying to kung fu kick my brother on the ice proved to be a mistake as he ended up groaning in a hedge.  My mum thought I’d killed him when I played him at squash because he dived on top of the racket and it smashed some of his ribs.  More often than not, luck was not on his side.

He wore dark glasses indoors and put things in piles when he was nervous.  We called him Roy Orbison.  He said it was so we wouldn’t know what he was thinking.  Before he got in from work we used to call it Happy Hour

He wore beige socks, he drank fizzy orange in the morning when he was drying out, and he descended into alcoholism.  He wanted to die, he just didn’t know it. He had bad luck but he thought the answer to every problem was in the bottom of a bottle.  There were only more problems there.

12 years ago I became a step dad myself, ie a real one since I got married to someone with children.  At the time I thought ‘All I have to do to be a better step dad than I had is to stay conscious beyond 5.30 pm, not cook fish, chips and frozen peas all together in the deep fat fryer when paralytic, not fall down drunk in the street and have to be carried home by the neighbours and not mess the bed’.  I was pretty confident I could do it.  With hindsight, I’m not sure I was a great success.  I didn’t make the same mistakes, just lots of different ones. 

We never really got on, my nearly step dad and me.  When I was young I treated him more often than not with contempt and ridicule, but when I think of him now I feel sad, because it’s not an easy job and he gave it a go.  And so did I.  And that’s how I know.

The Apathy Square - My natural habitat

When I was 19 I took a year off and although I did do some useful stuff like learning to type and working in Germany for a few months, I spent most of the time between September and April lazing around eating pizza, watching videos, drinking tea and playing the occasional game of squash.

One of the things I did during the time I was bumming around was to make a board game with a friend called ‘Year Off’.  It was supposed to be an antidote to the whole ethos of having a year off which seemed to involve going off to dig drainage ditches in Botswana, going trekking in the Himalayas, or generally being productive etc.

One of the features of the game was the Apathy Square.  It was basically a hole in the board and if you landed on it you just gave up playing because you couldn’t be bothered to go on any more.  The game also featured a Big Bed and if you landed on that, you just went to sleep.

At the time I didn’t realise it, but both the Apathy Square and the Big Bed are my natural habitat.  I could quite easily go through the whole of life asleep or in an apathetic stupor.

Thankfully I know some people, and they know some other people, and a lot of these people have enthusiasm for doing things.  And sometimes I get pushed into doing things with them, or sometimes I just get carried along with their enthusiasm and before I know it I’m joining in and thinking up stuff to do too. 

Left to my own devices I would probably just hang around near the fridge and not go out, so it's a good thing I have friends, or I would soon be a likely candidate for a Channel 5 documentary called Giant Fridge Man or something similar.