Last week I wrote a blog post about my life with spectacles. I’ve worn glasses almost all my life and I thought writing about the world seen through corrective lenses was a pretty good idea. I’ve said many times in this blog that my writing is always aimed at one person in particular and that happens to be me so it’s no surprise that I actually really liked that post.
I tinkered with it for quite a while adding new bits here and there. I made a pretty interesting graphic for it made from shots of myself wearing different pairs of specs. I liked that so much I went a step further and made an animated version, one where the text and the pictures seem to just slip into place.
Feeling pretty pleased with myself I thought I’d make a quick promo video with which to plug the post on Twitter and Facebook. Yes, there I was feeling good about my work and my media profile. I put the video on my Facebook page with a little announcement ‘New Post Coming Tomorrow’. I felt like a real media genius and then while I was scheduling the post for my usual time on Saturday, my big fat fingers slipped and pressed the publish button by mistake. If only it had gone out at the usual time of 10am on Saturday morning, I reckon it would have pulled in so many more readers and potential book buyers. Oh well, if only . . .
I wrote about my old Dad a few weeks back. I wrote specifically about his diary as like me, he was keen on keeping a diary and a notebook. Journaling is important for us writers. Don’t take my word for it; Marcus Aurelius Thought so too and he was a great Roman philosopher and of course, an emperor.
My Dad died when he was 72. He lived, I suppose, a good life. He worked hard and was happy walking his dog and keeping his garden in shape. He enjoyed his favourite sport of boxing and was fond of anyone who might possibly beat Mohammed Ali. Ali, or so Dad thought, was a fraud and the ultimate ‘fix’ was Ali’s fake ‘defeat’ of Dad’s idol, Rocky Marciano, in a so called computer fight.
In his youth Dad had a few years of excitement when he joined the army and his memories of army life he kept with him to the end of his days, sharing little stories every now and then to me and my brother. He left school at 14 and worked on farms because back then before World War II, Wythenshawe, a suburb to the south of Manchester where I was brought up, was very much a rural area before the urban development of the 1950’s and 60’s.
He told me once that a farmer he worked for was moving to a new farm in neighbouring Cheshire, in a village called Lymm. Lymm is a very posh area indeed and because a lot of it is green belt land, few housing developments have emerged there, so today it looks pretty similar to what it did in my Dad’s time. At least it did when I last visited, many years ago. The farmer asked my Dad to come with him to Lymm to work on the new farm. It was a better area he said and he would have sorted Dad out with accommodation but Dad declined, choosing to stay in Wythenshawe with his family. If he had moved he would perhaps have met someone else other than my mother. He would have courted and eventually married this new lady and I might never have been born. If I had still emerged as his son, I would have been substantially different, with a different gene set up and a different background.
Strangely enough, many years later I met an old friend on that long defunct web site Friends Reunited. Alan lived just round the corner from me and as children we used to meet up regularly at either his or my back door and we’d both produce a selection of comics, usually American ones like Batman, Superman, Spiderman and so on and decide which ones to swap. I always liked Batman and Superman but there was also the Green Lantern, The Fantastic Four and a whole host of superheroes that today’s youth are probably more familiar with from the cinema. I enjoyed the first Superman and Batman films and also the first Spiderman movie but some of the rest haven’t really done it for me. Maybe that’s because the comics themselves have changed. In the film world they often talk about rebooting a particular film franchise with new actors playing the parts of the franchise hero. James Bond is probably the film series that started off the notion of franchising.
Sean Connery gave way to George Lazenby; Lazenby gave way to Connery again and then Roger Moore and so on down to the present day Bond, Daniel Craig. The Superman films have been rebooted and also the Batman series. Ages ago I picked up a DVD copy of Batman Begins. I wasn’t crazy about the film, mainly because it was so different from the comic book Batman I used to read. The thing is, while I had been absent from reading comic books and generally getting on with my life, the comic books themselves rebooted with new artists and a new origin story for Batman. In this version Bruce Wayne’s parents are still murdered by a mugger but then Bruce goes off to Tibet or somewhere and in a sequence a little like Batman meets Kung Fu, Bruce, who is Batman’s alter ego in case you didn’t know, is trained in the ancient arts of martial combat. He then returns to Gotham City and becomes Batman.
Yes, other comics have rebooted things too with new artists and new layouts and new back stories for their characters. I didn’t care much for the X-Men films but I did used to read the comic versions. In my day The Beast was one of the X-Men but he is nowhere to be seen in the films and Wolverine must have been just a gleam in some comic book writer’s eye when I read about the X-Men because I had never heard of him until I saw the film
Anyway, getting back to Alan my comic swapping friend. Alan was shorter than me and a pretty tubby guy. In the late 60’s he and his family emigrated to Australia. I never heard from him again until we met, as I mentioned, on Friends Reunited. One day on our internet chat Alan asked me to pass on the regards and best wishes of his Dad on to my Mum. I told her and asked did she remember Alan and his Dad. It turned out that Alan’s Dad was once engaged to my Mother. They had gone out together for a while but Mum liked dancing, Alan’s Dad didn’t and when she went dancing he was forever questioning her, asking her who she was with, who she danced with and so on. Eventually she gave him the bullet.
Of course, if she had married Alan’s Dad, once again I wouldn’t have been born. At least not as I am now. I would have been Alan. I would have been the short chubby lad who liked comics and moved to Australia. The thing is, if my Dad had also married someone else, where would that leave me, buying comics in Australia or flicking through comics in a Cheshire village shop?
Just going back to superheroes for a minute, I reckon it would be kind of good to have some superpowers for a day or so. Not necessarily superpowers even, I’d settle for some martial arts skills. During the period I had the powers or the skills, I’d take no messing from anyone. If anyone was rude to me, they’d get a slap and if someone tried to mug me, well I’d send them flying along with a flea in their ear. Once when I was in my twenties, I arrived at my friend Chris’ house to pick him up for a night out. Sometimes we’d go to the Valley Lodge Hotel near the airport where they had a really good night club. I’d leave my car there and Chris and I would both make our own way home. Sometimes he’d pick me up and we’d go into town and he’d be the one to leave his car somewhere.
Once when I was waiting for him to finish getting ready there was a knock on the door. It was a guy called Dennis. Dennis was a bit of a local villain, a very tough hombre and although I knew him, I didn’t know him very well. He had somehow had his car towed away by the police. I’m not sure why but naturally he wasn’t happy. Actually, he was hopping mad and looked like he wanted to take his anger out on someone. He was visiting his mother’s house a few doors away from Chris when this outrage occurred and he wanted an urgent lift to his friend’s place, a ten minute drive away. Chris suggested I take Dennis while he finished getting dressed. I wasn’t too keen on the idea but went along with it. Five minutes down the road we came across a big fella wandering idly across the road. I beeped my horn but all the guy did was give me the V sign and swear at me so I swerved across the road to miss him. ‘Wait a minute’, said Dennis. ‘That’s well out of order, we’re not having that’.
‘It doesn’t matter’, I said. ‘No! Pull up here’ snapped Dennis. We stopped and Dennis stepped out of the car to advise the big fella that his manners were substantially lacking. The guy didn’t take this well, in fact he wasn’t happy at all and a fight began. Dennis basically taught the guy a major lesson in manners that I doubt he ever forgot. I dropped Dennis off at his friend’s house and he left me with thanks as I had apparently got him out of a major spot. ‘If there’s anything I can ever do for you’ he called, ‘give me a shout’.
Now I had no intention of giving Dennis a shout I can assure you and in fact I never did. The good thing about knowing Dennis though was that his reputation as a tough thug was pretty welcome sometimes. I once met him whilst queuing up to get into Fridays, a local nightclub, and he greeted me like a long-lost friend. He convinced the bouncers to let me in without paying the usual outrageous entrance fee and once inside after chatting with him at the bar for a while, I had the feeling that the local punters were eyeing me with a new found respect.
Another place I liked to frequent was a huge pub called the Snooty Fox. They had live music on at weekends and the place was on two levels with a games area upstairs. It had a late bar so back in those far off days, my friends and I could stay out late without having to pay night club prices. Also it was full of pretty girls waiting to hear whatever corny chat up lines we were using back then. The bouncers on the door were of the big neanderthal gorilla type and to be fair, they needed to be because that bar was a pretty rough place. I remember going in one time and a new bouncer stopped me at the door.
‘I know you from somewhere’ he said, breathing stale donner kebab breath all over me. ‘You look like a trouble maker.’
‘Me? No, I’m a quiet lad. You’ll get no trouble from me’
A bit later on I realised who he was. Yes, he was the guy crossing the road the time that Dennis had given him a lesson in bad manners. That was my last night in the Snooty and I was out of there like the proverbial wonga bird before he realised who I was. Pity! If only I hadn’t given Dennis that lift . .
Here’s one final, ‘what if’ story.
I think I’ve mentioned before in these pages that I went from working in an insurance company to being a bus conductor. Working on the buses wasn’t a great career move by any means but I didn’t like being out of work and for a while that new job was actually quite a lot of fun. Friends told me that working shifts would be the end of my social life but actually it was really the beginning of my social life. At the end of an early shift, I could usually be found down at the busman’s club, playing snooker and pool. After a late shift I’d be heading to the pub for last orders or sometimes heading off to a night club. It was all great fun and as someone who suffered greatly from an intense shyness, I found that being a bus conductor brought me out of myself and that gradually I was becoming more and more confident.
Some years later though the company made us all into one-man drivers and driving through the streets of Manchester on my own wasn’t my cup of tea at all. I was desperate to get another job but I didn’t know how to do it or what to do. One day I decided to start my own business selling motor sport merchandise. I called it Armchair Motorsport and I rented a unit inside the Corn Exchange in Manchester city centre. I worked on my small business for about a year. I didn’t make a great deal of money but I did spend a great deal of time chatting about Formula One racing. In fact, now I think about it, a great many of my customers used to come in and buy me a tea from the nearby café, come in, sit down and we’d talk Formula One.
One of my customers was a big Ferrari fan and was always on the look out for Ferrari memorabilia. There was a particular book he wanted and it took me a long time to get it for him but he was really pleased when I did. He mentioned that he drove a Ferrari and said he’d come down one day and show it to me. On the appointed day he came into the shop and asked me to hurry as he was outside on a double yellow line. We hurried outside and I have to say, I was eager to see his car. I expected a blood red Ferrari Dino or something similar. As a matter of fact, I fully expected to see my favourite car the Ferrari Dino 246GT, the one driven by Tony Curtis in the TV series The Persuaders.
The car wasn’t a Dino, it was actually a very dull saloon car. It wasn’t even red. It was a rather drab green and I have to say I don’t think I disguised my disappointment very well although my customer assured me that the car drove and handled every bit as well as one might imagine a Ferrari to handle.
The aftermath of the IRA bomb, Manchester, 1996. Photo courtesy of BBC
After a year of relatively poor trading, it was time to sell up and say goodbye to the Corn Exchange. I’ve always wondered if I could have lasted longer. Perhaps if I had advertised more, done more promotions, increased my advertising I could have built up a good business. I could have made a decent amount of money, expanded and perhaps employed some staff so I could have spent more time at home or dining at my favourite restaurants but it was not to be. If only I could have made it work.
Then again, not long afterwards the area was destroyed by an IRA bomb planted nearby. If I’d stayed, if my business had worked out, I could have been blown to pieces.
A major disaster happened to me this week. Not an actual disaster like a car crash or anything but for a writer and blogger it was the blogging equivalent.
Round about then I realised the delivery guy had not left any wine. A quick call and happily the driver was nearby with an order for someone else so the wine came shortly after. Luckily, another bottle of red was already warming by the fire but with so much food, that second bottle came in pretty handy.
Anyway you look at it, this whole Coronavirus thing is quite frankly, a bit of a bummer. I might even go the whole hog and say a lot of a bummer. Of course, there is the tragic side of the virus, people dying in their hundreds and indeed thousands across the globe. Some fools even protest and say it’s a conspiracy and that the government is trying to control us! If they are it’s no mean feat for governments across the world to agree and work together, even if it’s just to keep us lot, the public, under their thumb. That control does come at a price though. Already businesses are closing and going under. Many pubs and restaurants may not survive and those who are self-employed may suffer the most as in many ways they fall outside the various schemes the government has concocted to help workers.
Travelling to work on Christmas day afternoon was interesting. I expected the roads to be quiet, after all, Christmas day is not usually a day for travelling, especially when we are in the middle of a pandemic. The lockdown then was a bit of an odd situation, especially where I work because my workplace is right where three different counties meet, Cheshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside and all three were in different states, or tiers of the lockdown. Now that we are all locked down the situation has at least been clarified.
The record keepers of the regiment may not have cared about my Dad but he certainly cared about his regiment. He was very proud of his army service. He served in Northern Ireland, Germany and Hong Kong, and told me many stories about his army life. In fact some time ago when I posted a picture of him on Facebook showing him at work for the council highways department, one of his old work mates replied mentioning the stories he used to tell his workmates about his army sergeant major.
As the diary comes to April the daily entries become briefer, sometimes just one sentence about the weather. Dad’s handwriting seems to become a little less firm. It is still the same hand, sloping gently to the right but it somehow seems perceptibly weaker. On July 17th there is an entry in my Mum’s hand. She always wrote in capitals for some reason. FOUND RALPH IN BATHROOM ON FLOOR she says. He went to the doctor and they found nothing. Another entry on July 20th, again in Mum’s hand, FOUND RALPH ON FLOOR IN KITCHEN. He was taken to hospital and on the 26th July a brain scan found that he had a tumour on his brain.
In the diary Dad’s last ever entry was on June 2nd. It says he took Bouncer for a walk and went to visit my brother who lived not far away. Underneath my Mum has arrowed across to May 31st, so it looks like Dad wrote his entry on the wrong date. His eyesight was failing, He was due to have an eye operation for cataracts but the operation was cancelled because of his tumour.
OK, here we go. Remember the post from a few weeks back? Life story in less than 2500 words? You do? Great stuff. Here’s the continuing story then, this time restricted to 2390 words.
My life in 2500 words? Really? My whole life, everything? Is that possible? Well, hang on a minute, give me a chance. I’ve been reading a book by Nora Ephron called I Feel Bad about my Neck and its really just a series of essays. In fact, Nora would be a great blogger because all her essays are nice blog sized pieces which could all easily be humorous blog posts. Her book is a little bit of a cheat really, it reminds me of a book by Spike Milligan I read years ago, A Bit of a Book I think it was called. It was full of little drawings and sketches which could easily be flipped through and other things like blank pages entitled the blank of England.
Now that lockdown is easing I’ve spent quite a bit of time at my mother’s house in Wythenshawe which is a suburb of south Manchester. Wythenshawe is the site of a huge council estate once known as the garden estate because each house had a front and back garden unlike the terraced houses in Hulme and Salford where most of Wythenshawe’s tenants came from back in the 1920’s and 30’s when the estate was first started.
Moss Side is an inner city area of Manchester and quite frankly, it is a very rough area indeed with more than its fair share of villains, drug dealers and other unsavoury characters.
I thought for a minute of changing the title of my whole website to that which you can see above: The Ramblings of a Locked Down Blogger. Maybe even the crazy ramblings! Still, in a few weeks or perhaps months, the lockdown and Coronavirus will just be a bad memory. In fact, my first post lockdown restaurant visit has already been booked and my table and meal are actually only a matter of hours away.
Another original film I saw lately was Big Eyes. It’s based on a true story of an artist, Margaret Keane, who turns out some popular and charming pictures, all of people with big eyes. Margaret is a woman who can paint but is not so good at selling and marketing her work. She meets future husband Walter who seems to be a bit of a whiz at the promotion lark. He decides to rent space on a local nightclub wall to get attention for both Margaret’s and his paintings. Surprise, surprise, it is Margaret’s paintings of the doe eyed girls that get all the attention but Walter decides to play the part of the artist as some people have mistakenly thought that anyway. Margaret plays along but gradually becomes very unhappy having to constantly deny her own work.
Back in the 1980’s I received my first debit card just like many other people. Debit cards were a new concept back then. We already had credit cards but a debit card, what was that about? Back in pre-debit card days when everything was in black and white like an old film, we used to have to go into the bank to withdraw cash. I remember queuing at the bank on a Friday lunchtime in Manchester City centre waiting to draw some cash out for that weekend’s activities. The way we did it back then was to write a cheque to yourself or as I was taught to do ‘pay bearer cash’. In 1987 debit cards were first introduced in the UK although they had been around for a while in the USA. As you can imagine I didn’t actually know that, I had to look it up so while I’ve got that Google page open here are a few interesting facts from the BBC:
Here’s another number: 14. Yes 14 was the number of the house I lived at as a child. My parents house was a council house and it was my grandad and grandmother’s house until they bought their own house and moved away to Wales. My mother managed to take the house over on the understanding that her brother and sister could continue to live there although by the time I came along they had both found their own homes.
My very first car had the registration plate PDB71M. It actually caused a lot of confusion when I bought it because I traded in my motorbike, a Honda CB250 with the very similar registration PDB1M. Incredibly, checking on the Gov.UK website my motorcycle is still registered. It was a green Honda first registered in 1974. It has no tax or MOT so presumably it is languishing in the back of someone’s garage, rusting and probably neglected. My car was a Reliant Bond Bug which does not come up on a website search so presumably it went to the scrap yard many years ago. I bought it because I failed my first two attempts at the driving test and was really getting fed up. Of course we didn’t have a family car so the only driving I could do was the one hour a week on a Saturday morning that was my actual driving lesson. The Bond Bug was a three wheeler car and could be driven on a motorcycle license. After a few months regular driving I booked the test again and sailed through it.
While I’m on the subject of firsts, my first camera was either a birthday or Christmas present and it was a 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 