My Life as a Tapestry
My past in the style of the Bayeux tapestry
Tuesday, 1 March 2022
My Life as a Tapestry -16 The End of the Beginning
Tuesday, 18 January 2022
My Life as a Tapestry 15 - The Road of Good Intentions Leads to Birmingham
Immediately after finishing my MSc in Artificial Intelligence course in summer 1989 I got a job at Kingston Poly (soon to be university) as Research Assistant on an European Union project run by PG who had been the director of the MSc course. It was the first step in an odyssey around technology and education (as the O Level Latin title nearly says) that would go on for the rest of my working life.
The global omens were good - Nelson Mandela was released in February 90 after 27 years in prison, heralding the final end of the Apartheid era in South Africa. It doesn’t often happen that true justice is achieved by a true hero in this complex world but this was a clear case. It made my heart sing.
I didn’t have much idea what I was supposed to be doing in my new job and PG was very busy and really just wanted me to be his representative at concertation meetings with EU partners held in boring places like Brussels. He was magically a lot less busy when later meetings were held by Lake Como in Italy and the Rio Tejo in Lisbon. Luckily I got to go with him on those trips too.
The project was supposed to be designing an intelligent ‘workbench’ to support industrial training needs. Very few of the people involved in it had any experience in industrial training, particularly not me. Nevertheless I spent the first few weeks of the project writing a report which I managed to circulate to all 5 partner organisations with the misspelled title ‘Functional Specifictions for the System’ (the malapropism turned out to be more appropriate than I realised at the time).
In Brussels I got to see a) the statue of the Mannekin Pis and b) groups of hungry south European tourists roaming the streets at 10pm (dinner time in Italy, Spain, Portugal etc.) looking for a restaurant that hadn’t closed by 9pm (dinner time in Brussels).
At Lake Como I experienced magical scenery and delicious food. In Lisbon I wandered down whole streets of houses clad in extravagantly decorative tiles (azulejos). And ate sardines.
I had some highly enjoyable and convivial lunches with PG and our colleagues from Germany, Italy and Portugal, and sat through a number of presentations on intelligent systems architectures which were illustrated by diagrams that looked like stacks of film cans that had been used for archery practice. PG argued socratically with everyone (he was Greek after all) and spent hours passionately defending preposterous theoretical assertions that even I could see were probably bullshit. I did learn that ‘workbench’ in IT-speak was not a place where you sat to do your work - it was a human-computer interaction concept that could be manifested across multiple architectures. Needless to say, we never actually built anything.
At the end of 1990 my cup ranneth over as Margaret Thatcher was hounded out of office by her own party, having become an electoral liability following the riotous and failed attempt to introduce a flat rate Poll Tax in place of local rates. It was a less edifying moment than Mandela’s release but I and millions of others still exulted as she was driven away blubbing in the back of her limousine with Dennis grinning inanely beside her.
Early in 91 I made the decision to try for a PhD and registered at the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology. I would be a full time student with a maintenance grant from SERC, although I was allowed to carry on working part-time for Kingston, now doing the occasional lecture in Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems as well as writing reports for PG’s ailing project. As I was technically a full time student I was also entitled to a Young Persons Railcard to enable me to travel to Milton Keynes and back cheaply. (My mother fell about laughing when I told her I was an official Young Person, at the age of 43). For the next two years I divided my time between Milton Keynes where I sat upstairs on ancient green double decker buses trundling interminably through building sites and round deserted roundabouts, Kingston where I struggled to stay one page ahead of the students in the Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Intelligent Knowledge-Based Systems handbook, and home where I wrote programs in Visual Basic designed to teach English to Spanish speakers and vice versa, and watched TV footage of American laser-guided bombs ‘surgically’ targeting Saddam Hussein’s war machine, including 480 unlucky civilians sheltering in a bunker in Amiriyah.
In September 1992 home became a two-up two-down 19th century terraced cottage just across the Harrow road in W10. It was our first freehold property - originally a council house sold for a pittance to its tenants by Westminster council in obedience to Thatcherite housing policy/political strategy and then sold on to us at current market rates (about £75k if I recall). We had to up our mortgage quite a bit but figured we could just about afford it. We completed the purchase on the day Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the loan rate shot up to 15% for a few hours, causing us not a few palpitations.
The new house came with a small backyard with a border garden which, when we moved in, had nothing living growing in it, not even weeds. But Steph is green-fingered and this was a chance to create her own garden from scratch. Berta, who lived nearby and was also a keen gardener helped by giving us a jar of healthy and industrious worms as a housewarming present. Over the next few years a riot of planting sprang into life - gardening had entered my world where it has remained and helped to shape my understanding of what home is really about.
We shopped at multi-ethnic food stores along the Harrow Rd and at Sainsbury’s at the top of Ladbroke Grove. Beef burgers were off the menu as BSE had infected Britain’s cattle farms (only 2 years after we had been warned of salmonella in all our eggs). The Government insisted beef was safe of course and to prove it Minister of Agriculture John Gummer tried to get his 4-year-old daughter Cordelia to eat a burger on TV. She wouldn’t eat it, so he did, but Cows continued to go mad and over the next few years four million were slaughtered and burned on huge pyres throughout the land. 177 people died of a human variant of the disease. British beef was banned in several countries.
In 1993 I attended my first international academic conference. It was in Williamsburg, Virginia. When I showed the university tech support people my overhead projector slides they were perplexed. They weren’t sure they still had an OHP - everyone else was using digital data projectors by then. Outside the university Williamsburg was busy pretending to be still in the 17th century - half the town’s population were employed to dress up like characters in a Vermeer painting and show tourists around the wig-makers workshop and the candle factory. My stay there was prolonged by several days due to a freak snowstorm all along the eastern seaboard which caused the cancellation of my flight.
Towards the end of 93, just as my studentship was coming to an end, I got a job as a Research Associate at Aston University working on another European project this time to do with using new technology for language learning. This was something I considered I did know something about by now, the only problem was - Aston is in Birmingham. It was agreed that I could work at the university for 3 days a week, at home in London for 1 day a week, and on writing up my PhD for 1 day a week. That meant I could be at home from Friday to Monday, get a coach from Victoria to Birmingham on Monday night, stay in a university hall of residence for 3 nights, and get the coach back to London on Thursday night.
The first time I sat on the coach and saw the Birmingham skyline appear across the fields of Warwickshire it seemed to me like a fabled city. But my stay there was not to be a happy one.
Tuesday, 23 February 2021
My Life as a Tapestry 14 - Turning (in)to My Dad
In 1987 I turned 40.
When I was growing up, 40 was considered the prime of life for men and over the hill for women. I remember Mum in a parish review singing ‘Nobody loves a fairy when she’s 40’ in a tutu.
When I hit the big 4 I still thought I was quite a way off my prime. But I was feeling prematurely middle-aged and a bit unsettled, mainly because of Dad’s operation (for colon cancer) a couple of years earlier. He, and all the family, had been worried that he might either not survive the op or else be condemned to wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. In the event he came out of it with nothing worse than a loss of confidence. A loss I shared. I was suddenly aware that I had been taking his existence down there in Purley for granted, for years – available for Christmas and the occasional family party but otherwise irrelevant to me – but he was not going to be there forever. As soon as he was able to get out and about again we started meeting up from time to time for lunchtime beers and chat, usually at some pub in London that one of us knew. I briefly considered doing the right thing by his values and settling down to a respectable career at London School.
But TEFL was getting tedious and Margaret Thatcher won her 3rd election and I was feeling bolshie. The Right thought they were riding high but us lefties could see the writing was on the wall for their yuppie nonsense. What was the name of the Townsend Thoressen car ferry that rolled over in the sea just outside Zeebrugge killing 193 passengers and crew after leaving port in a hurry with its bow doors still open? The Herald of Free Enterprise. That election also produced the British parliament’s first ever black MPs: Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Dianne Abbot, so change was in the air.
I urged the change along by becoming MATSA (white collar trade union) Staff Rep and Branch secretary – they gave me a badge and shelf-full of ledgers to record subscriptions in, not exactly the barricades as far as I was concerned.
I formed a band with some friends at the London School of English and we wrote and sang political songs. We were called Mad Hazel (Spencer’s nickname for Harriet). Spencer could play anything provided he had the music in front of him, Harriet played flute and a gutsy tenor sax. We sang ‘Took the country for a grand/Took me for a business man/Blew it on a one night stand/That’s free enterprise!’ which was about the Government’s futile efforts to get the unemployment figures down by giving people £1000 to start their own businesses.
In late ’87 a great wind blew up, flattening 15 million trees across the country and killing 18 people. Steph and I weren’t directly affected, except that she had to make her way to her OU exams through streets full of fallen trees. During the several days of heavy rain that followed, however, our bedroom ceiling developed a large blister which sagged downwards around the light fitting. Curious, I took a screwdriver and poked it. Next moment we had a torrent of dirty water pouring down the flex onto the carpet. We turned the light off and in the dark improvised a water chute out of bin liners. For twenty minutes I stood on a chair and held one end under the waterfall and Steph held the other out of the window. Eventually the flow stopped and I went up onto the roof to find it missing a large number of slates – presumably distributed across North Kensington by the storm. The roof was mended by the Freeholder, who owned a cafe next door, but redecorating the bedroom set us back a few hundred pounds.
Hot on the heels of the ‘hurricane’ came Black Monday – a financial crisis that wiped £150 billion off the FTSE. It was the end of Thatcher’s popular capitalist boom, the end of yuppies, the end of champagne sharedealing, and eventually the end of her. How we laughed.
The following year it was the end of London School for me too, as I took up a place on a Government-funded (the irony was not lost on me) 1-year course in Artifical Intelligence at Kingston Polytechnic (later University). We borrowed £3000 against the mortgage to support me and I bought a bicycle to get me down to Kingston every day. The route took me across Richmond Park - during the winter of ’88 I was rewarded with some magical encounters with deer in the frosty early morning landscape. I got fit too and felt years younger. Also on the route was the little hamlet of Strand-on-the Green in Chiswick, where there were a couple of real ale pubs on the riverside. In the summer of ’89 Dad and I met there a couple of times to drink pints of Youngs and talk about his childhood, his army life, his work life, and his retirement.
Then the Berlin wall fell, and there was a new sense of hope.
Steph won a scholarship to spend her last degree year studying fulltime at Cambridge and I started taking the train up from Liverpool St. to stay with her at weekends. We walked round the ancient city and through the Backs discussing our academic work and feeling like proper scholars on the verge of recognition.
Wednesday, 25 November 2020
My Life as a Tapestry 13 - (The Art of Husbandry)
At the beginning of 1984 Steph moved in with me in Colin’s Housing Trust flat off Ladbroke Grove (he was living with Moira in Camden by this time). She brought with her a Sunbeam Electric Frypan - the first time I’d ever seen one. It was big enough to roast a whole chicken in and we used it for just about everything. This was the first of many innovations she introduced into my domestic life, and indeed into my life generally.
Despite all that, Steph and I got engaged while we were there. On the day we made the decision we went for a walk along the shore and saw a huge flock of flamingos in a coastal lagoon. I sat on the beach and watched S. paddling out to try and get closer to them. I thought how lucky I was and how happy I was going to be with her, but then I was ambushed by irrational fears: what if something happened to her? Do they have salt-water crocodiles in Mozambique? Can sharks swim in a foot of water? What if she steps on one of those spiny things that are fatal? When the flamingoes noticed she was getting nearer they started to move away so she came back, to safety. I felt a huge sense of relief but had the sense not to say anything.
When we got back to England the miners’ strike was under way. The famous photograph (by the Guardian’s Don McPhee) of a confrontation at Orgreave Coking works, between a hairy miner in a toy police helmet and a fresh-face constable just up from London, symbolised the conflict for me. Unfortunately for the trade union movement it was ruling, rather than working, class coercion that got the upper hand under Margaret Thatcher.
1984 turned out to be a pretty catastrophic year for many working people all over the the world, without even needing Orwell’s Big Brother to organise it. Unemployment in Britain hit 3.25m; Union Carbide killed 40,000 Indians in a gas explosion at their pesticide plant in Bhopal; Pemex killed 500 Mexicans in a petrol explosion at San Juanico; civil war in Sri Lanka killed hundreds; 1.2m people died in a famine in Ethiopia. And the ruling classes had some nasty moments too: Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikhs, and the IRA blew up the Grand Brighton Hotel during the Tory party conference and almost but not quite got rid of the entire British cabinet.
On December 8th we got married - cliche it may be, but it was the happiest day of my life so far. We did the formalities with just Peter (my best man) and Carron (Steph’s best woman) at Chelsea Registry Office, then had a celebration ceremony with as many friends as we could pack into the Orangery in Holland Park. Steph and I read poems to each other (mine was Robert Graves’ ‘Counting the Beats’ - I think) and several people sang and played. We gave out red and white carnations and everyone had their photos taken, enabling me to recreate the scene 36 years later. I’ve shown Peter singing ‘The First Time Ever I saw your Face’ (Ewan McColl), Gilli singing ‘In my Life’ (The Beatles), Colin singing ‘Let it Be Me’ (Everly Brothers), and Susan’s family, Steph’s band of Kiwi girlfriends, and some of my friends posing for photos. And I’ve drawn Moira looking like a visiting film star in her fake fur coat (at least I hope it was fake), with her daughter Emma. Later we all had dinner and then a ceilidh at the London School - I’ve pictured my Mum and Dad and me and Steph, waltzing in a haze of marital bliss.
For our honeymoon we went to New Zealand and I finally got to see where Steph was brought up and meet her family and their then-current mad Dalmatian, Dominic. We got to ride across Auckland harbour in a 4-seater plane, and we got to climb down to the bottom of one of the extinct (at least that’s what they told me) volcanoes. Eagle-eyed Aucklanders will spot the anomaly in the picture: the hyperdermic-like Sky Tower wasn’t built till 10 years later - but, like mad Dalmations, its so much part of my mental image of Auckland now that I had to put it in.
Back in England, momentous 1984 was followed by an unmemorable 1985 (apart from the Rainbow Warrior outrage, the Heysel and Bradford Stadium disasters, the Brixton and Handsworth riots and the Battle of the Beanfield, the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, and the death of Ricky Nelson).
The following year we joined the property-owning classes. As the radiation blew over Europe from the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, the UK government was in the process of selling off the more profitable nationalised industries, supposedly to the public but ultimately to their cronies in the financial ‘services’ industry. My favourite cartoonist Steve Bell caught the zeitgeist perfectly with his depiction of Sid (from the government’s ‘tell Sid’ publicity campaign that aimed to get people to buy shares in newly privatised British Gas) sharing his lorry cab with Alexis from the TV show Dynasty (played by Joan Collins as a stereotypical rich witch) and worrying that he was HGV positive.
As the media clamoured for everyone to get rich and live like yuppies Steph and I allowed Abbey National to sell us one of their new foolproof endowment mortgages and we bought our first flat, in Golborne Rd, on the 4th floor above a Moroccan cafe. ‘Hypotheca’ in the fake Latin title means mortgage. I now had a wife and a mortgage. I had officially arrived at maturity (just in time for my 40th birthday).
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
My Life as a Tapestry – 12 (Grownup Life Begins)
Tuesday, 23 July 2019
My Life as a Tapestry - 11 (Comings out and their outcomes)
Tuesday, 24 July 2018
My Life as a Tapestry - 10 (Living the Revolution)
Berta, about to be buried under an avalanche of books that she had just brought from her flat in Ilford, to come and live with me (we had separate rooms). She put the shelves up herself, refusing my offers of help on grounds of gender autonomy (no comment).
David P. endlessly re-building or repairing something around the house (thank god someone was).
And on the steps outside I’ve drawn Myrtle, holding hands with one of her small charges from the local nursery where she actually had a proper job. Myrtle was one of the few points of connection we had with the West Indian population of North Ken. Our local was the Apollo at the corner of All Saints Road and we spent a lot of time in there, although we rarely had much interaction with the black people who also frequented it. Everyone rubbed along fairly amicably in those days without exactly socialising together (it didn’t stay like that – see the account at the link above).