Vamooshed

Its a sad reflection of the ravages of time that a lot of the items that I struggled to make with my own hands in my apprentice years are gone.

The EITB technical apprenticeship block release gave us all workshop and classroom experience, initially I thought that the whole thing was a joke, mainly due to the boot camp type feel, what seemed like ridiculous tasks and supervisors who were, to say it mildly, bastards.

The first weeks in workshop involved basic cutting and filing techniques, the infamous "square block" test that drove almost every apprentice insane but allowed the early stars to rise.

Not me.

If something could be done wrong the first time, that would be my job and usually when I'd finish, my own sense of achievement was elevated.

Which is puzzling, as all those articles have been lost in the quicksand of time, I have no recollection where my toolbox went, my clamp blocks and many other sweat equity items have vamooshed into the atmosphere.

Mind you, I've also no idea what my mother did with my Action Men.

Cling on to what you hold dear.

Preface

Dave Weldon, Age 17

This diary was bought on Saturday the 16th November, 1974 at Smiths bookshop in Huyton. My career started on the 2nd September 1974 at Fords. At the moment I'm doing basic workshop etc, I start block release on the 2nd December.

The course is quite easy at the moment but I keep "bodging" my jobs, ie, cockups.

Went home at Christmas, the usual round of things. Good party at Mariangelas, found a half bottle of gin. Another party at Dave Burts, not much but Dave got tapped up with Karen Gray?!! Love?

Dave Weldon, Age 50

It was incredible that I kept a diary that year, so much going on in my young life. I state that the course was quite easy, but due to all the drinking down in London I actually failed maths in first Ordinary National Certificate year and our training boss pulled some strings so I could sit it again four weeks later. I was not the best in the group on the practical side, hence messing up some of the tasks give to me, again something that improved with experience.

That Christmas party, drinking a half bottle of gin. The diary makes no mention of me passing out in a toilet and only being found after almost everyone had gone home, it was a defining moment and I was not going to drink gin for over 10 years after that night.

Tapped up, have not heard that phrase for years.....

Here's to your Health

The last thing on my mind when I was young was the effect all that alcohol would have on my health, it seemed that we were indestructible, almost. Although the phrase "never going to drink again" was probably used a few times.....

So called Health Insurance was always provided for in the UK, National Health service is what they called it, hey, even my apprenticeship sponsor, the Ford Motor Company had on site medical facilities for the occasional removal of splinters in eyes etc.

Nowadays, personal health is becoming more important because, there is less time left on the planet than already has gone by, a sad state of affairs really as the body is the best toy we were ever given and on average, we abuse and misuse it.

The Insurance companies cash in on our refocus of course, there are commercials with gently spoken, smiling angels who will look after our every health concern, and most promise that "there's no medical involved" and that "no salesman will visit"

The hard reality of it all is that, with an aging population, medical costs are going through the roof and whenever there's a niche to be capitalised on, Insurance will pounce. The boomers can pay their premiums, with "limited benefits in the first two years" and hope beyond reason that they never have to claim.

Then when the slippery slope starts to happen, and it usually will, that soft spoken happy angel from the advert will turn into a hard line, gruff, New Delhi call centre operative with one major career goal in life:

To pay out as little as possible.

Bottoms up!

Never doing that again

I'm sure even with my reduced intake of alcohol in this second half of my first century on the planet I'd get bad marks from the doctor.

So, of course I'd lie.

It pales in comparison with that first year of apprenticeship though, the rapid growth curve of alcohol consumption and the embracing of the lifestyle of a binge drinker.


Newcastle Brown Ale was eighteen pence a pint at the Polytechnic Bar, Best Bitter a penny less, the Lacy Lady had Thursday night happy hour where, shots and mixers were ten pence, not to mention Tuesday and Wednesday nights at the Green Man, cheap beer and cream cracker eating contests.

The dangers, of occasionally being hit on the temple with a pickled onion, driving a Humber Sceptre around the rugby field or hijacking a double decker bus to get home had little effect, even an hour in the trade school toilet the following morning listening to a loud high pitched whistle in your head would do little to dampen the enthusiasm for the next pub night.

Total Loss

I stepped off the tube train, wrinkled my nose somewhat and thought that something was not quite right with the world, it was February 1975 and the London Underground circle line was, by now, a familiar location on a Sunday evening.

I turned, as the doors closed and the train took off to my right, I knew what was wrong, and the moment was gone, along with my bundle of six or so vinyl records that had been sat on the seat next to me.

I still had both parents and all my brothers so at that point, this probably equated to the worst loss of my young life, my mind raced at how it was possible to recoup my prized possessions, but I rapidly concluded it was a lost cause.

A total loss.

This was only exceeded many years later by the break up of a relationship, where for some ridiculous reason, I'd allowed my girlfriend to borrow my entire collection of Supertramp albums. She finished with me and just would not return them.

However, life has happily proven that I can always get the music and the sex back.

Custard Creams

I do believe however, that there is good in most people and that your average human is happy to be sitting with a cup of tea and a couple of custard creams as opposed to blowing other humans up.

The Message

I'm guilty nowadays of being oblivious to everything that is going on here on planet earth, a side effect of my belief in fate and that nothing I do will change the course of what is about to happen.

I have to believe in something, have to believe in one thing, that was what Supertramp told me, have to believe in one thing. Unfortunately, I'm afraid I don't believe in THE one thing at all, this may come as a big let down to my maker, but hey, whoever that joker was, she gave me a choice.

I've been let down so many times, been winded, been sidetracked and been downright raped and kicked over by whoever is pulling the strings, and I tell you, its really an amusing thing that I am supposed to believe that this "moving in mysterious ways" is a sign of love.

What is the message after all, am I supposed to bundle all my joy and heartache up and package it into a healthy edict for the world, tell you all, no matter what happened to me, beit miniscule in relation to other worldly losses, was for the greater good?

I think we package all our bad things and put them on something elses shoulders for a reason, we have to believe that there's an overall positive in all of this and it can't just be a wash.

Langoliers

This may be happening in all lives out there, and Stephen King wrote a book about a similar concept, the phenom is that our personal history is being chomped by the system, as time goes by there's less and less physical evidence that anything ever happened to any of us.

I'm so old that my first school resembled something out of a Dickens novel anyway, Clint Road School in Liverpool, which of course is no longer there. Then my parents moved the family twenty five miles away and the dart thrown stuck in Whiston County Secondary School, which, for continuity in this blog, has been bulldozed as well.

That takes care of any record of my primary and secondary education.

The street where I was formed is clinging on, barely, the pub at the end of the road was recently demolished and Botanic Road is the last row of houses from that era, I'm sure it won't be long before the wrecking ball has its go.

Of course, Mill Road Hospital, the place where I was born, is gone, not to forget that mum, dad and probably everyone else who was involved in the event besides me, have long gone.

If we're lucky to live long enough then most of what we know, or who we knew, will fall off our individual tapestries, places will change, schoolyards will become housing estates and few will know or care who the hell we are.

Eventually as our own batteries fade, the very essence of our individualism will be lost and we will return to the cosmos, perhaps to start again.

Or, that will be it.

Fontage

Yes, back to that little comment about fonts and the slippery slope.

I've never had that so called 20/20 vision, could not be a pilot and was never tall enough to be a policeman, but at least I could read.

In the last ten years my eyes must be hardening or something, I used to be able to hold a menu at a reasonable distance when searching for my nachos, now my arms are just not long enough and finally I capitulated and went to the eyeglass man and he made me some eyeglasses, which, by golly, make me see again.

Well, for now anyway.

The aging boomer generation, are mostly going through this process, some have balls and elect to have their eyes lazicked and fixed, some like me, cowardly custards, elect to throw a hundred bucks at some goggles.

So, I have here in front of me, the manual that came with the MP3 player, and I kid you not, the font used is probably a 5 or 6 point and I'm hard pressed even with my hundred bucks worth of nose ornament to discern text, regardless of the fact that the little electronic gidget is complex, the detailed, badly written manual is only visible to a small percentage of the population anyway.

Another small rant, but in a readable font....

Saturday night fever

One of the problems with aging, is age itself, take that eighteen year old lad who thought he could dance to Bohannon and plonk him on a dance floor right now. In spirit his mind is back there in the seventies, Baileys nightclub in Liverpool town centre, upstairs in the groovy area, rum and coke and happy feet.

In reality though, fifty years old, up on the occasional empty dance floor at the Canadian Legion, a litre of red wine doing its best to try to make things right and all the wrong music.

However, it's the thought that counts and the fact that we can all still swing a leg is a credit and lets not forget that once the music really stops, the music really stops.

Bohannon

In any of the blogs here, don't think I think that I'm introducing any of these people to the world, they're just sitting in the memory banks and were part of that magical time in the mid to late seventies.

Hamilton Bohannon had a series of club hits back in the time that it mattered to me, prior to real life distracting me away from the dance floor, he had a reasonable hit in 1975 with "South African Man" brought to my attention from the Soul Show, and then soon after, quite a hit with "Disco Stomp" and then a few years later with "Let's Start the Dance"

I don't know where I'm going with this though, starting making a list of artists that ran on the periphery of my life, giving some sort of collage of sound for the reader as to what I was back then, well, confusing I think.

Suffice to say, Bohannon was part of the soundtrack, and very good he was too. I don't know if he would have approved of my striped jacket and red loons though, not the richest kid on the block and not a smart or coordinated dresser.

But when I was out on the floor and dancing to anything like Bohannon, regardless of alcohol content, I was white hot.

The Soul Show

The transition into earning my own money as an apprentice not only launched the bus onto the waves of alcohol, but also, with the advent of night clubs, I realised that "The Bus Stop" was not just a place to wait for that bus.

At weekends, home in Whiston, I'd slap in one of those new fangled "compact cassettes" and record two full hours of the weekly Liverpool Soul Show on Radio City. As I said, it was 1974 and that was a very great time to be waking up to all the music.

I didn't know there was anything better after I discovered my own version of soul music, washed down with a goodly portion of rum and coke, that's coke by the way, the fizzy pop and not the crap that you stuff up your nose.

A seventeen year old whiter than white boy, brought up on his brothers records, suddenly out in the world on his own and finding the essential music that made his compass point in one direction.

It was a shame a consequence of all this night clubbing was eventually women, and that my invisible friends was the beginning of the end.

Tranny

I'm downloading a bunch of my well listened to albums into my cheap and cheerful MP3 player at the moment, another of those items that is nice to have but really, I don't have a need for.

In the tunnel of time there have been quite the few music players through these chubby little fingers and I still have the (not so tiny) transistor radio I bought in September 1974 with my first or second apprentices paypacket from the Ford Motor Company.

The Philips transistor radio was a Long and Medium Wave radio, and alone in my tiny Essex digs I could tune in to Radio Luxembourg or even the pirate station Radio Caroline and listen to what the outside world was listening to.

It is a precious memory, and although some parts of my early life transition into working life had their sad moments, the ability to buy such a wonderous device, with my own money, in fact almost all of my weeks wages, was my choice, and it felt good.

I'm not trying to come off as it was better then than now and that the "tranny" was better than this MP3 player, just for the likes of me, some of the magic over time has been lost, and its a shame that a lot of my fave tracks on the MP3 player cannot be reset back to a time when I had not heard them yet.

I'll talk further about this later, however, one final point, who in China decides what minute fonts to put into instruction booklets nowadays?, I could put up with bad spelling, bad grammar and nonsensical statements, but please lets all decide to use a 12 point or higher font "just for the old uns" out here who may want to begrudgingly use one of your products without needing a magnifying glass.

Looped

It seems a bit like cheating with this new blog, going back to past blogs and trawling for stories, but the odd thing is that blogs, written the way they are with the ebbs and flows of thoughts, tend to be a mismash of thoughts and it appears that there's something nagging inside me to organise them into some sort of coherent and revisionist pattern.

The intent of that would be to show to my reader that the author is a balanced individual, with a sharp, focused mind.

However, I would lose interest in that pretty quickly and, with a usual reference to Monty Python here, storage jars are just not my cup of tea.

So, if you see me plaguerising myself, I would appreciate an intervention, not only from the approach of rewriting a blogger history, but I may be regurgitating the same old stuff without knowing my own actions, as mother would say, I may have gone off with the fairies....

Reverse Topping

It is the normal "old" thing to do, go on like one of the four Yorkshiremen about what it was like back then, how you could buy eight black jacks for a penny, a real penny at that, none of this nonsense that they call a penny nowadays.

The West Virginia Surf report blogger, Jeff Kay, struck a common thread with me the other day, he said that the USB drives were accumulating on his desk and he could not stop buying the things because they were so damn cheap.

They are, are they not?

The old thing to do would be to liken one of these twenty five dollar eight giggly bite USB vaults of useless silicon to a megla bite of valuable "random access memory" back in 1989 which was being grabbed by computer nuts everywhere for about a hundred bucks.

Only to be trumped by someone who paid three times that for one eighth of a megabyte back when they bought their XT and that was more expansion than the young Bill Gates rationalised at the time.

There's always an ace in the hole with the reverse top, a sort of backward victory where the gold medalist will eventually have paid everything for nothing.

Oh, no, thats life isn't it.......