Yesterday, Thursday, is my shopping day so I needed to remember to buy cat food without which, Miggles our adopted cat would be left bereft. I find that as a male cat he has rapidly transferred his affections towards the young female carers one of whom, at least, is a ‘cat’ person and showers him with affection. Whilst on the subject of being showered with affection, I remember well when we used to visit Almuñécar, a small town on the coast of Spain east of Malaga. Here Meg and I got off the beaten track and discovered a little coffee bar where they happened to serve some hot chocolate which I think was some of the finest to be had in Spain. The little coffee bar was stuffed full of locals, practically all female, and a six month male baby was being passed around from one neighbour to another. The child had a beatific look on his face as well he might as he was passed from loving bosom to loving bosom. An elderly gentleman was leaning against the bar and I asked him, in Spanish, if he was the father of the child. The answer, as I expected, was that he was not so I asked him to whom the child belonged and got the most wonderful response that this ‘child belonged to all the world’ This puts me in mind of the wonderful expression originating I believe in India that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ We had hints of this when we lived in Hampshire. We had to buy a house in a hurry and bought one in a Close in the district of Hedge End. Living in the Close were several children from the age of 4 to about 10 and they all played together much of it on their bikes and in and out of each other’s houses. The various mothers took care of whatever child happened to be around and put an elastoplast on them if they fell off their bike, for example. When it came to the Millenium celebrations, we closed off the Close with some strategically relocated traffic cones and then utilised a little green area the developers had provided nearby. Here we set up our Millenium party with lots of garden chairs and trestle tables. The mothers provided the face painting for the children whilst the men used their car batteries and extension cables to provide us with some music. We all bought supplies of beer, wine and ‘street food’ to eat in our hands and the communal atmosphere was wonderful to experience. Having said that, the children grew up, went to university and moved away and the whole communal atmosphere faded. Meg and I acted as surrogate grandparents for a couple of children whose father was a doctor and mother was a midwife and who lived about two or three doors away. Again, these children were in our house quite a lot and we enjoyed their company tremendously. When we came to leave, there was much crying and heaving of shoulders as the young children, on their way to school, had to say goodbye to us and in fact the whole departure process was incredibly emotion filled.

After lunch, we had our normal monthly session with the chiropodist who calls around once a month and then settled down to complete our viewing of the Trump ‘Heist’ programme which was quite an eye opener. I do not suppose it takes very long for disillusionment with the current government to set in. Today it has been revealed by the Sky News Westminster Accounts project, which tracks the flows of money through the political system, that since December, 2019 Keir Starmer has received more than £107,000 in freebies ranging from invitations to top flight sporting events and, of course, the donations for his wife’s clothing which hit the headlines recently. What is so disappointing about all of this is that on Day One of his premiership, Keir Starmer could have set the tone and declared that the slightest whiff of scandal or indeed impropriety would result in instant removal of the miscreants from their post. Instead, by accepting all of these gifts which is two and a half times the amount claimed by the next highest recipient, a terrible impression is created and some Labour MPs are already expressing their unhappiness. Sir Keir ignored warnings from some in his senior team that the issue of freebies could cause him political damage while in opposition. Senior Labour figures are incandescent that the story about freebies for the Starmer family has dragged on for days, and ministers going out with different and often contradictory explanations. Firstly, I think it was Harold Wilson who said that the Labour party had to be a moral crusade or it was nothing and accepting these huge amounts of money looks as though the leader of the Labour Party is in office for his personal gain. There was a golden opportunity to draw a line under the undoubted sleaze of past Conservative governments (particularly the Johnson government) and this has been missed. It also feeds into the dual narrative that all politicians are just in the game for their own personal profit and also that they ‘are all the same’ Accepting money from the football industry is particularly dangerous as the government is seeking to exert a degree of control over it. There is also a strong case that the PM and his spouse should receive a personal clothing allowance given their public appearances instead of having to rely upon a wealthy donor. Other societies seem to manage these affairs reasonably well but accepting a clothing allowance from a wealthy donor does not go down well in this era of people being forced by necessity to shop in charity shops for their own clothing. It looks as though the government could do with much sharper political antennae to ensure that issues like this do not arise. Keir Starmer could have put the issue to bed much more easily by clarifying what is necessary for the performance of one’s role (and clothing comes into this category) and that which he should personally pay out of his own pocket. Senior figures in the Labour Party such as Harriet Harman are already expressing their disquiet and going on the airways to imply that Starmer should have realised the political damage and sought a solution much earlier.

Yesterday was the day when our domestic help calls around and her arrival is always greeted warmly, needless to say, with a steaming great mug of tea. She and I are both devotees of charity shops and we have to restrain ourselves from over-impulsive purchases although there are occasions when we succumb to temptation. I had asked our help to look out for some napkins which she did happen to see in one of her visits so these were gracefully received. In return, I had organised the delivery of a plate glass kitchen surface protector because we had just replaced one of ours which had cracked but I managed to secure an identical one. The day was a very gloomy one but no rain was forecast so Meg and I made a trip down to collect our newspaper and some bread but did not tarry in the park, preferring to get home and have our elevenses at home this morning. Some months ago, I had got into the habit of cooking a risotto once a week but have got out of the habit. But yesterday, I decided to cook a risotto for us, and we find that some smoked mackerel fillets makes for a wonderful meal. We always tend to cook a little too much but our domestic help absolutely loves our risotto so I am more than happy for her to have an overflow portion of this which she can heat up for a quick lunch whilst she is dashing between jobs. We actually did make rather too much for our own needs so I was delighted to send off our domestic with some home cooked goodies. On our journey down into town, we were delighted to bump into our Irish friend who we have not seen for over a couple of weeks now. She explained that they had both been away in Ireland on a family holiday which does explain why they were not at home when I hand delivered an anniversary card to them as I knew that their wedding anniversary was within a week or so of our own. We exchanged some rapid news about the health of our respective partners and promised that we would meet up when we could in the next few days when we could exchange a lot more news with each other. After we returned home, it was time for the late morning call from Meg’s carers and actually we were a few minutes late in our walk back. In mitigation, although we do have a spreadsheet detailing the times of the visits and the names of the carers, this tends to change on a daily or even an hourly basis as little crisis events occur that have to be managed. A case in point was one of the carers for Meg who should have turned up yesterday but did not. We got a message that she had been involved in a near-miss motoring accident and was quite badly shocked by the incident and unable to work. Naturally, when she turned up today I was sympathetic and made her a cup of sweet tea which she was initially loathe to accept, indicating that she did not really have the time. Anyway I insisted that she have some tea and I explained to her not to be alarmed if she experienced a ‘delayed shock’ syndrome as this can occur some 24-48 hours after the initial incident had occurred. She had not heard of delayed shock so I tried to reassure her that if she did experience some symptoms in the next day or so, they would be transient and would pass. Lots of rest and hot, sweet tea is probably beneficial as well. So the question is raised ‘Who cares for the carers?’ One could extend this ad infinitum saying ‘Who cares for the carers of the carers’ and so on in an ever-widening circle. Still on the subject of carers, when our carer called this afternoon, he recounted to us rather a sorry tale of woe as he had apparently been subject to an assault by a near neighbour, recently discharged from prison, of a relative. The lad was not seriously hurt but his nose might require a bit of further attention from the medics to straighten the cartilage a little. I asked him if he had been to the police but reckoned that things might be worse for his relatives if the aggressive neighbour decided to take reprisals against the rest of the family. I was very sympathetic but could not offer any real advice in this difficult scenario.

Late on this afternoon, we started watching with a fascinating horror the first half of a documentary on Channel 4 entitled ‘Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose‘ Evidently, the whole documentary is an expose of the machinations of Trump to attempt to prove the last election was ‘stolen’ from him. What was the extraordinary was the number of close aides and former Trump supporters who became increasingly worried and disillusioned by the behaviour of the former President. I shall leave the second half of the two part series to an afternoon viewing with Meg but it is rather compulsive viewing. What is perhaps so surprising to us on this side of the Atlantic is the way in which the Republican party had completely ‘hitched its wagon’ to the Trump star and are quite willing to give him their support.

I was intrigued by a story I read in the Huffington Post but which has not found its way into the UK media as yet. The impact on UK businesses from Brexit’s red tape is only getting worse as time goes on, a new report has found. According to Aston University Business School, the value of UK goods exported to the UK was 27% lower – and imported goods 32% lower – compared to what the economy may have looked like if Brexit had not happened. Leaving the single market officially in January 2021 has had a ‘profound and ongoing’ impact on Britain’s trade with the EU, according to the economists’ modelling. The variety of exported goods has also declined, with 1,645 fewer types of British products sent to every EU country and many manufacturers no longer sending their produce to the bloc. Trade with smaller states further from the UK have been most impacted, the authors found. Workers in farming, clothing, wood and paper manufacture have particularly struggled with the post-Brexit red tape, as they grapple with the new time-consuming safety checks and extra labelling requirements. In fact, annual exports to the EU are now 17% lower while imports are 23% lower than they would have been if the UK had not left the EU. The report also suggested the impact is only getting more severe as time goes on, rather than levelling out, as the authors spotted a ‘noticeable worsening of EU-UK trade’ in the last year. So although none of this is a real surprise to many of us, I do not think that the deleterious effects of Brexit worsening over time is really fully appreciated by any of the political class.

Yesterday, Meg and I slept in a little later than intended. This might have been due to the darker mornings and to the fact that the previous late afternoon, we had a breath of fresh air whilst I got the back lawn cut whilst Meg (and Miggles, our adopted cat) supervised operations. I was very relieved that the mower seemed to be behaving itself as on a previous occasion I felt that it misfired occasionally but the mowing proved unproblematic so perhaps a jet had cleared itself or there had been some moisture in the petrol.

After we had returned from our Tuesday meet-up with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria, it was practically time for the carer to call for Meg’s late morning call. But an unforeseen emergency prevented one of the carers to be able to call so, as is quite common these days, I assisted the one carer who did manage to attend. Afterwards, this young carer was due to stay on as it was Meg’s ‘sit’ call which releases me to go out on the road and do some much needed shopping. It transpired that this young carer had got a GCSE A star for in music so she was quite happy to listen to the Fauré which is one of our perpetual favourites on YouTube when Meg would appreciate some soothing music. I needed to go and fill the car with petrol and this was absolutely straight forward and then I planned to visit an adjacent Halfords to purchase some motor oil for the mower. The last occasion I did this in the spring, I popped into the store, saw what I wanted, purchased it and was in and out of the store in two minutes. But today was a bit of a nightmare. I could not find the lawn mower and garden machinery oil despite scouring the shelves with every kind of motor oil imaginable. Not being able to find it, I enlisted the assistance of one young store assistant who was putting together a bike. He could not find the oil and neither could two other assistants who had to be approached in the search for this very standard product. Eventually, the computer was consulted and not only could the assistants not find the motor mower oil but also they claimed that it was not available in their regional warehouse either. This was a very standard product and is like going into a supermarket and not being able to buy any butter. Eventually, on returning home, I went onto the internet and am going to have delivered in a day or so what I had hoped to pick up easily locally today. As there was a beautifully sunny afternoon on Tuesday and the mower seemed to be performing satisfactorily, I managed to get the big communal grassed area in front of the house mown whilst Meg watched from her wheelchair. Then after going inside for a spot of afternoon tea, Meg and managed to watch the first. of a two part biography of Mozart which was first broadcast on Monday evening but was easily available on BBC iPlayer on Tuesday. The second part will be broadcast next week so this is another thing to which we can look forward.

In the US, Donald Trump has escaped from a second assassination attempt as someone was about to take a pot shot at him whilst he was playing golf on his own gold course in Florida. This has made me wonder about the fates of several presidents and prominent politicians and to the best of my knowledge, there seems to be quite a remarkable difference in outcome according to whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. The three most prominent and noteworthy assassinations of Democrats were of course President John Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, all of whom were shot dead almost immediately. The Republicans with whom I am familiar start with George Wallace who was a declared racist governor of Alabama and after he was shot, he was confined to a wheelchair. Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt and might have died were it not for prompt treatment in the local hospital to which he was rushed. Now we have Donald Trump who had a close shave (almost literally when a bullet grazed his ear)and has now been in the sights of a gunman even if not actually shot at. So the rather facetious question that I ask myself is why prominent Democrats get killed outright but prominent Republicans seem to evade death? It could be that those of a Republican persuasion ‘en masse’ own more guns, have more practice and are better shots than Democrats but it is an interesting question nonetheless. It is perhaps interesting that a cursory Google search reveals nothing on this topic which might tell us something about how the algorithms that are utilised by the principal search engines are constructed. I can remember my frustrations when I was trying to research the internet for arguments against TQM (Total Quality Management) but every time I tried a search term such as ‘arguments against Total Quality Management’ the vast majority of what was thrown up in searched were arguments in favour of TQM or sometimes an article that would read that arguments against TQM are misplaced).Returning to the assassination attempt (which seems to have been carried out by an individual without fixed views who has voted both Democrat and Republican) I have a horrible foreboding that this may actually help to bolster up the Trump campaign. Harris may have a slight lead in the polls overall but there is no point in piling up votes in places of California that are always going to vote Democrat anyway. In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, it could be that the candidates are neck and neck. But the portion of the electorate that has to be persuaded to abandon Trump are the white male non educated rural voters and it could well be that in this particular demographic, a sympathy vote for Donald Trump may appear now that he seems to have survived two assassination attempts. The nightmare mare scenario for the United states remains quite a likely option that Harris wins the elections by the narrowest of margins which the Republicans refuse to accept and then we have the groundwork for a civil war in America (at the worst) or months of political stalemate whilst courts argue out individual results (at best). If the latter were to happen, appeals would eventually be made to the Supreme Court which as it now has several Trump appointed nominees appointed to it (for life) would probably gift the disputed elections to the Republicans.

Being a Tuesday, we join with a group of regulars for a coffee and a natter in our local Waitrose cafeteria. We explain to them all what a brilliant little concert we had enjoyed last Saturday morning and we had actually run across a fellow parishioner from our local church despite the concert being held in the large Anglican church which serves as a ‘de facto’ performance space for the town of Bromsgrove during its annual festival fortnight (which has now ended)

Before I entered my third year at Manchester University, there was the business of the summer vacation to negotiate. The previous year’s employment at the cardboard box factory seemed closed to me as they were not in a recruiting mode. So to get a job, one waited until the very first edition of the ‘Manchester Evening News‘ was published a few minutes after 12.00pm. You then scoured the job vacancies column, ran to the nearest telephone box with a pile of 6d’s and then made one’s way to the factory offering employment. So it was, I ended up with a line of about 10 men in the yard of the Greengate and Irwell Rubber company in Salford which manufactured the casings for those large cables that carry power supplies and the like. The hiring process was a little like the Biblical parable of the overseer and the vineyard as the foremen went down the line indicating who they were going to hire and who not. The man next to me desperately needed the job as he had about 9 children to support but I needed a job and got hired at the rate of £10.50 a week which was about half of the wage at the cardboard box factory for much harder work. There was a strange arrangement whereby one had to work a compulsory hour’s overtime each time in order to bring the wages up to about £12 which after stoppages came to about £10.50 for the week. As an unskilled labourer, we manipulated those huge drums of cables you often see by the roadside when new cables are being laid and to get it around the many corners you had to rock the whole drum, stick a metal pipe under one of the retaining bolts which would make the whole drum judder and twist a little and repeat until it was round the corner. The factory was practically underground and the machinery in it absolutely Dickensian – I doubt there was a single piece of machinery in it constructed in this century. I also got a job as a cocktail barman at Tiffany’s ( a Mecca establishment) which was a very expensive venue (over £50 admission price at today’s prices) but decked out with a fabulous Hawaian stye bar that ran down the whole of one wall of the premises. There was a resident band who played the popular tracks of the day – for example, this is where I first heard Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ which helps to date my period of employment. There was a resident band of one male singer and two female singers who we thought were actually very good. In subsequent years, these two girl singers who by now were in their late 20’s had joined a band calling itself ‘The New Seekers‘ and as such they actually made it to No. 2 in the Eurovision Song Context which was held in Harrogate in 1972 i.e some five years later. They actually recorded for Coca Cola the song ‘I want to teach the world to sing’ which was used extensively as an advertising track but the singers themselves made hardly any money out of it. The night club was run by a couple of ex-dancers who had moved into management having won the equivalent of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ some years earlier with a rendition of ‘Slaughter on 10th Avenue’ They were snobbish in the extreme but hired me because they rather liked the idea of employing an ‘Old Swan Harrogate’ trained cocktail barman on their staff. The turnover of staff was tremendous and in the end I worked there for so long that I became quasi-management, helping with stock takes and the like every two weeks. I used my earnings to finance the purchase of photocopies of crucial articles for my third year studies, arguing to myself that I would never do any academic work on a Friday night so I might as well earn some money and use the money on photocopies. Meg and I got married in the September of our final year which might be a source of some surprise. But I had been working for 3-4 years before going to university and did not go until I was aged 20 rather than 18. Similarly Meg had spent some of her childhood in France and so both of us felt so much ‘older’ than our actual contemporaries. We rented a modern maisonette over a row of modern shops and two of our flatmates from the previous two years moved in with us and helped us defer the rent. We furnished the whole of the maisonette by frequenting a local auctioneer who was very kindly and looked after us ensuring that his gavel came down at just the right point so that we could secure the purchase for our desires. In fact, one of the captain’s chairs we now have was bought from the auctioneers and we furnished the whole house for some £70 which is £1800 in today’s money but, of course, we had no debts of any sort. Rather than worrying about our finals, we were more concerned with getting a mortgage from the City Council to purchase a terrace house overlooking Platt Fields Park. This cost us £1995 but we could have secured a cheaper and lesser property not overlooking the park for £1400. What we paid for this house represented twice the average earnings but mortgages were hard to get in those days. However, the ratio of house prices to average earnings was then about 2:1 but must nowadays be nearer to 12:1. Our son was born right at the end of our final year so we both ended up with 2(i)s, a child and a house before we embarked on postgraduate careers both having been awarded SSRC studentships, Meg at Manchester University and myself at Salford University where I read an innovative new course in the ‘Sociology of Science’. Unfortunately, Meg had to abandon her MA course to look after our son in his early years but this experience was not uncommon amongst academics who married each other, as we discovered in staff room discussions when working at Leicester Polytechnic.

By the way, this autobiographical exegesis is going to end at this point and my normal style of blog will resume from the next entry onwards.

Yesterday and being creatures of habit, we watched the Sunday morning Politics programmes, had breakfast and then made our usual journey to the park, having picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper at Waitrose first of all. Now that we have had ‘Last Night at the Proms’, I always have the feeling that summer is well and truly over. The jingoism prevalent at the Last Night of the Proms irritates me in these post Brexit days but a witty conductor’s speech can occasionally make up for this.

Having successfully negotiated my first year at University, we now tended to specialise and my regime was to concentrate upon Sociology and Social Anthropology. But we still studied some cognate subjects of which one was Comparative Politics where we studied the French, German and Russian political systems. At the end of year examinations, we were expected to retain some knowledge of the British and American political systems and the end of year examination was designed so that one could have questions that ran across all five political systems. This was so wide and vast in its scope that I think I made a conscious decision to not revise part of the syllabus as otherwise I felt my knowledge base ran the risk of being wide but incredibly shallow. But the second year of my undergraduate career had a pronounced political tinge to it as events unfolded. The Vietnam war was in full swing and the Student Union offered a ‘teach in’ whereby distinguished academics came along to debate the subject all day long and we often missed other lectures in order to attend it. The concept of the teach-in was an American import, I think, but the whole university was highly politicised at this time. For example, the president of the student’s union was Anna Ford who became well known in later years as a news reader and TV presenter whilst another president of the Students Union became editor of the Communist mouthpiece ‘The Morning Star’ and one of my fellow sociology students was to finish up as editor of ‘The Scotsman’ having made his career by editing the Student newspaper which was then called ‘The Independent’ and came out weekly with a circulation, I believe of about 20,000. But the biggest political event of the year was the Labour government’s debacle over raising the fees of the overseas students who attended our universities. At the time, overseas students paid the same fees as the rest of us and this was an almost derisory sum but the government decided to raise the fees for overseas students five fold. The university practically came to a halt as protests of various kinds were undertaken. As I was an avid reader of ‘The Guardian’ at that time, I had collected s series of press cuttings which were taken over by the Students Union and ‘blown up’ to create poster and campaigning materials. The university instituted several ‘ad hoc’ committees where the university came together as one body and we had the interesting experience that would never be countenanced these days when I chaired a particular sub committee one of whose members was the Professor of Geography and another of whom was one of my Social Anthropology tutors. Student protest and ‘sit ins’ were very much the order of the day in the mid 1960’s but in the campaign against the raising of the overseas student fees we acted completely constitutionally and organised a huge lobby of the UK Parliament. As one of the protagonists in this whole debate, I was allowed to be part of a small delegation that were ushered into a committee room of the House of Commons to make our case. This was quite an experience in itself as the technology at the time meant that a microphone was placed above one’s seat and one spoke in a normal voice but the whole of the committee could hear one’s contribution without a voice having to be raised. We did not bother with lobbying Conservative MPs who backed the action of the government but only those on the Labour back benchers. Having said that, the whole of our protests and completely constitutional practice did not result in a single change of policy in any of our details. We were led to reflect why Labour governments engaged in these kind of measures for which there is no popular appeal and which only seem to harm the rest of their agenda – the debate that we have over withdrawing the winter fuel allowance for pensioners is very much cut from the same cloth. In the university life, the Rag Week was a highly important event and generally took place just after the university had some mid-sessional examinations and where the tutors were busy marking and were quite happy to let their students have their head for a week. In our time, we raised £20,000 in Rag week and if we were to translate that into current values we would be talking of an amount of about £½ million pounds across all of the Manchester colleges. The Rag week took in students not only at Owens College (the main body of the university) and ‘The Tech’ (that was later to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) Some of the students performed impresssive money raising stunts – for example some of our number went down to Regent’s Park Zoo and captured a famous golden eagle known as ‘Goldie’ and kept it in a student flat at the top of a large residential student block known as the Fallowfield Tower after the Manchester suburb where it was located. All hands were on deck to help in this venture so the Biology students were enlisted to go and capture some mice to feed the beast whilst the electrical engineers rigged up a pirate radio station from the top of the tower. One of the really amusing stunts at the time was to paint footsteps from the statue of Queen Victoria in Piccadilly Square to the nearby public conveniences in a curving arc and then back up the statue again. Rag Day itself was given to the procession of floats which thousands of the townspeople came out to witness and to contribute money. As students, we also given to an all day drinking spree. In fact, it was at a Rag Day ball that I first really got together with Meg and we became an ‘item’ although we only tended to really go out once a week and to enjoy the occasional coffee with each other during term time.

On Sundays we fall into our normal routine which is the Politics programs at the start of the day followed by a visit to Waitrose for the purpose of picking up our Sunday newspaper and where we met with our University of Birmingham friend. Then after we return home and I cook the Sunday dinner, we view another episode of ‘Pilgrimage’ which somehow seems especially appropriate for a Sunday. After lunch, we completed our viewing of ‘Goodbye, Mr, Chips’ (which had an especially poignant ending) followed by the full length feature film of ‘Dad’s Army’

My first year at Manchester University was quite hard work and I typed up my lecture notes every single night. This had the advantage that at the end of the year I had a comprehensive (and much sought after) series of lecture notes that could be further day-glo’d or annotated and, in any case, fixed their content in my mind. We allowed ourselves to slip out to a local pub sometimes for an occasional half pint at the end of the day and for a bit of relaxation but the main focus of our leisure activities, apart from the Student Union, was the institution of the student party. At this time, in 1965 in Manchester there were no night clubs to speak of largely because of the very repressive policies of the then Chief Constable. I did in subsequent years work as a barman at Tiffany’s, run by Mecca but the admission charges were very steep (at about £55 per person at todays prices, £2.00 then) So the student party was ‘the scene’ of the moment. The pirate radio stations were to come along later – Radio Caroline was founded in 1964 but could be received in the Medway towns for example. So the music that we had consisted of portable record players and collections of Beatles and Rolling Stones records. Via one of my flatmates, I did listen to and acquire a taste for the folk songs of Joan Baez, a Mexican-American folk singer, well known for her protest songs but not particularly well known in 1965 in the UK. But party goers brought along their LP’s and someone acted as a DJ whilst the rest of us drank cans of beer, bottles of cheap wine and occasionally stuff sold cheaply from a barrel in some off-licences such as peach wine. The satisfying party always consisted of three stages. The first stage consisted of much drinking and the occasional bit of dancing if space would allow. This stage went on until about midnight after which there was always a certain degree of pairing off and this stage could last from a few minutes until about 3.00am in the morning. The final stage consisted generally of us sitting around on the floor, nearly always in semi darkness and engaging in arguments and discussions in which we believed in the Latin tag ‘In vino veritas’ This is a Latin phrase that means ‘in wine, there is truth’, suggesting a person under the influence of alcohol is more likely to speak their hidden thoughts and desires. For example, I remember having a very long and completely inconclusive discussion with the girlfriend of one of my school friends whether a true understanding of society and social conditions was best appreciated by a study of the social sciences (my position) or by a study of Literature such as Balzac and Dickens. Neither of us convinced the other but the argument went on for a long term. We had quite an interesting pecking order when we came along to discuss and argue with students on other courses. In general terms we quite liked the lawyers and the town planners with whom we could always have a good discussion but a low opinion of medics who we felt, with some justification, were unable to talk about anything much outside of their field of study. This was interesting, really, as the medics were generally much better qualified than we were in terms of A-level grades. So the party petered out by about 6.30 or 7.00 or certainly dawn when one would make one’s bleary way home. But one usually had a great sense of satisfaction when all of one’s thirsts and desires physical and intellectual had been satisfied. Now one of my flatmates also rode an Lambretta scooter as I did but mine was in Leeds and his was in Croydon. We decided that I should collect my Lanmbretta from Leeds and we would then share it on a 50:50 basis. This proved to be invaluable at the weekends because we very quickly discovered that whoever had the scooter that night got the girl (who being streetwise, realised that a male with transport could give one access to a generally empty flat for the evening) The one of us who did not have the scooter stayed behind quietly drinking the night away as it were. All of this was, of course, in the autumn term and although I had been introduced to Meg we were not actually going out with each other until about February of the following year when we paired off at a Rag Ball during the rag week celebrations in Manchester. Meg and I gradually made our parties a little more sophisticated by having cheese and wine but we were to discover that scraping off ground-in cheese after a night’s activities gradually took the shine of all of this. At one famous, or perhaps infamous, party (as our fame and address seemed to spread) we had more than 70 people crammed into nook and granny of a three bedroomed terrace house. After this, we rather felt that we had done the ‘partying’ bit and got it out of our system but as the popularity of our parties grew, we had to introduce a ticketing system and a series of whistles by the means of which we as the host could mobilise support from each to throw out gatecrashers, the more so if they were completely unknown to us. One occasion, we took a very drunk stranger that no one knew and hung him over the fence overlooking Platt Fields park outside our house. In the morning he had disappeared but we did not know how. We even had a party at out house in Leeds when my mother happened to be away for the weekend but this, too, turned out to be a disorderly event and was yet another reason to have done with partying. But in many ways the part of the party scene I enjoyed the most was the lengthy discussions in the wee small hours of the morning when we were anxious to put the world to rights.

Yesterday we looked forward to seeing our domestic help who had delayed her session with us from Wednesday to Friday. After catching up news, we visited our favourite cafe but had to dash up the hill to be in time for the carers’ late morning call. Then we discovered some fish pie which I had prepared some time ago but made for a very satisfying Friday meal. This morning we were delighted to visit out local (large) Anglican church which is being used for a ‘free’ concert venue as part of the Bromsgrove festival. We are treated to a pot pourri of organ and piano pieces followed by some welcome tea and biscuits.

Now we come to my early days at Manchester University. I was lodged with three other lads, with two of whom we subsequently shared a flat and I am still in contact with them. The third has moved out of our orbit, so to speak and I believe had a successful career in a Canadian IT firm. Once we had got over the trauma of registration (it took me a week with one thing or another), work started in earnest. There were about 200 of us I think who all studied the same four subjects of Economics, Economic History, Social Anthropology and Politics/Government. I remember quite vividly the various first seminar which I attended which I think was in Social Anthropology and the tutor asked a question of the 8-10 people in the seminar group. There was a pause of several seconds before anyone spoke but several thoughts raced through my mind. This was that I felt I had undergone a struggle to get to university having left school at the age of 16, having had two civil service jobs which I had evidently given up to go to University and then, of course, I had studied for my ‘A’-levels completely on my own. So as it is said that your life flashes before your eyes if you are drowning, so I felt that I had done so much to get to university and I was not going to let the opportunity of a University education pass me by. So I started to give my answer to the question and another of the students replied to me after which point the two of us were labelled as ‘talkers’ and argued with each other throughout the year whilst everything else stayed more or less silent. I must clarify at this point what when I say ‘argued’ I do not mean in the disputatious sense of the word. But in logic and critical thinking, an argument is a list of statements, one of which is the conclusion and the others are the premises or assumptions of the argument. I was also conscious of the fact from my little ‘Teach Yourself Logic’ which I studied intensively is that it is possible in Logic and Philosophy that in an argument between two participants it is possible to arrive at knowledge which in a sense is new knowledge for one or both of the parties. And so I carried on in my university career being conscious of the fact that it was quite possible that your own thought processes when articulating a position can be clarified in the course of argument/discussion with others. I have one or two abiding memories of my first year at Manchester. One of these is that the University Economic History department used to think of itself as a world leader in the subject which may have been true thirty years earlier with some distinguished scholars but now I got the impression that they were living out their former glories. So during the course of the year, I think I wrote at least five longish essays in Economic History and we were directed to go straight to the journals in Economic History to get to the heart of particular debates avoiding anything so mundane as a textbook. So when it came to the Economic History examination at the end of the first year which happened to be the first examination in the timetable, I felt reasonably well prepared and confident. To my absolute horror, every single essay that I had written failed to be represented on the Examination paper so I got the horrible feeling which does not happen very often when you read the first question on the paper and say ‘No’ to oneself before proceeding to read the rest of the paper. I do not think I have ever felt so much like absolutely bursting into tears – I had spent probably half of my first year researching and writing Economic History essays and I felt I could not answer a single question on the paper. When I shared this experience with others on the course, one explained that he was in the tutorial group of the Professor who had actually written the paper so that the contents of it came as no surprise. After this experience, I vowed to myself that I would never let this happen to any students that I might happen to teach in the future and therefore I always gave students an indication of the areas upon which a question was going to be asked so that ‘examination question spotting’ should not have to be a concern of students. In the event, at the end of the first course of the course, I achieved a Third in Economic History and a Third in Economics (the curse of having achieved an ‘A’ at A level and assuming I knew it all already) But I achieved a First in Sociology/Social Anthropology and a First in Politics/Government so it was fairly evident where my strengths did and did not lie. Sociology seemed to be the more interesting of these choices then but nowadays I would probably have chosen the Politics/Government option (but it was more like constitutional history rather than Politics as we know it today) The huge intake divided into the specialisms of Economics, Economic History, Politics, Sociology, Social Administration and several more besides. In practice, in the first year when we had mass lectures, one tended to know other students who were part of ones party going set rather than students who were to later follow one pathway or another. But the University Union had a very lively debating society, the debates being an opportunity to offer entertaining and witty contributions. I remember one very talented student of German (who failed his examinations) providing the lead-off debate on the subject of ‘Do children enjoy their childhood more than adults enjoy their adultery?’) But these debates that started at about 12.30 had to be terminated by 2.00pm when the afternoon lectures resumed.

Yesterday was my shopping day and we have a sitter who looks after Meg whilst I pop out to local grocery store. I try to get all of this done in just over an hour if I can but the local traffic can make a difference to the timings. Today, we go to ‘The Lemon Tree’ for our weekly treat of a bacon butty followed by a quick tour of the local charity shops to see what takes our fancy.

Whilst working at the Central Office of Information (COI) I quickly came to appreciate that I had to acquire some ‘A’ levels in order to get into University and I also made application to a range of Northern Universities to study almost anything. I secured an interview at the University of York which was then only about a year old – the University consisted of an Elizabethan manor house (I think) called Heslington Hall and the rest of the university was under construction but it was a largely green field site. I was interviewed by the Professor of Sociology (Raymond Fletcher) who I subsequently discovered had written the definitive student textbook on ‘The Family and Marriage in Britain’ He was assisted by a very young Economics tutor called Douglas Dosser who asked me various technical questions in Economics which I struggled to answer. But the older Professor asked me some other types of questions, one of which was whether there were any concepts in Economics or the other social sciences for that matter that had applicability outside the immediate field. I rather took the bait at this point and waxed lyrical about Marginal Utility theory which is the theory that increasing increments of a good (pints of beer) become of less import to the individual as one consumes more. At the end of the interview, Raymond Fletcher said to his colleague ‘Are we decided?’ by which he meant that he had made up his mind and his younger colleague was not in a position to argue. I had applied for a degree in Sociology about which I knew nothing although I had read a periodical called ‘New Society’ in earlier years but I was offered a place on their joint Sociology and English degree course about which I was over the moon. I remember earnestly requesting that they inform me of the grades that I needed to achieve and was told that all I had to do was to satisfy the matriculation requirements which meant, in practical terms, two ‘A’ levels at a grade of ‘E’ which was the lowest grade of pass. This was almost unheard of at the time but I think I know what happened in my case. Faced with the very unusual situation of a candidate with a good range of ‘O’ levels supplemented by the Civil Service Open Competition result and four years of work experience, they decided to take a gamble on me. At this time, in 1965, it was really quite unusual for mature students to apply to university but as the years rolled by the universities realised that students in this category were quite a good bet and of course the Open University was to underline that point when it was established in 1969, some five years later. Also, I have a shrewd suspicion that in the absence of a report from a headmaster, my immediate library boss had written me a reference which I suspect was sufficiently glowing for the reference not to be ignored. All of this happened, as I recall on a Friday and it was a very wet and rainy day in York. I remember walking through the streets of York going to the bus station with tears of joy rolling down my face but, of course, as it was raining so hard nobody noticed that I was weeping copiously. I mention the fact about a glowing reference because the following Monday, I received a scrappy bit of a duplicated letter from Manchester University without so much as an interview with the same offer. Hence I think that the admissions tutor at Manchester must have come to the same judgement and for the same reasons as the professor in York. As Manchester was an old and established university and I already had at least one school friend there, I chose Manchester over York because it was a case of the established versus the unknown. York University subsequently established a high reputation in the social sciences and had I graduated from there then I think the degree would have had the same street credibility as one from Manchester but the Manchester University offer seemed, at the time, to be the more sensible offer to accept. One complicating factor about the Norther Universities at this point was they demanded a ‘University Test in English’ in addition to one’s ‘A’-levels, even if you already had an ‘A’-level in English. I think this was instituted primarily for the Science students but the science faculties argued that standards of English were declining and so everyone ought to take the test. It made the actual process of registered so much more fraught as you had to prove you had passed the test, even though a certificate was not issued to you (but rather a form ‘Q’ followed by a form ‘R’) when I worked at the National Lending Library, I did actually acquire an English Literature ‘A’ level at the grade of ‘D’ I actually feel quite proud of having achieved this certificate because I only studied for three weeks to obtain it. There were two Shakespeare plays of which one I studied one for three weeks and completely ignored the other. I read some Chaucer in translation the night before the examination and then faced with Chaucer in the original Middle English, I could just about remember enough of the story line to make it look as though I was actually translating rather than remembering. I remembered the poetry form what I had studied for ‘O’ level so the three weeks of preparation, plus a good memory allied with good examination technique ‘(aka known as ‘Bullshitting’ such as ‘There are evident parallels to be drawn at this juncture etc. etc.’) I must say I have always been slightly cynical about the value of ‘A’-levels in the Arts subjects because it would be impossible to gain a similar qualification in the Sciences, Languages, Music etc. after only three weeks of study. To underline this point, my attempt to gain an ‘A’-level in French failed and I got another pass at ‘O’ level which I did not need as I already gained this ‘O’ level some years earlier. In my later professional career, we used to recruit students without ‘A’-levels if we could find some good alternative evidence that they could profit from a degree course but of course, 1965 was a very different era.

Yesterday is the day when our domestic usually calls around but this week she was going to come along on Friday instead. I have got quite a lot to moan about to her this week as the care agency has been falling short of requirements this week. We had a fairly horrendous day last Tuesday when one thing went wrong after another. For a start, I needed to be the ‘second hand’ to assist the care worker first thing in the morning, Then the promised ‘sit’ call did not materialise as they had forgotten that the scheduled care worker had actually returned to college. Half way through the afternoon, I discovered that the downstairs toilet was blocked as the morning worker had put a non-disposable wipe down it. I stripped to the waist, donned the only Marigold glove that I had which happened to be the left hand, cleared the loo which was not a pleasant job but at least succeeded. Then the scheduled care workers were an hour late in the afternoon as they had encountered horrendous traffic jams (probably because it was raining all afternoon and this plays havoc when parents use the car to pick up children from school and the whole system jams up) When the care workers turned up for the evening session, Meg had a bad mood change which made getting her to bed somewhat traumatic and, as I suspected would be the case, it took her a couple of hours to get to sleep. So it was one of those days that we all experience from time to time which it is best to forget.

Life in the civil service hostel proved ‘interesting’ at least for the first few weeks. Initially, I shared a downstairs dormitory with three other quite adolescent lads who were all into rumbustious horse play which I did not actually like but had under group pressure to join in. After a couple of weeks, the Personnel Officer at the COI sent for me and I assumed (wrongly!) that I was going to have a pleasant chat about how I was settling in and so on. Instead, I was greeted with the fact that the ‘lady’ who had the basement flat below the hostel had made an official complaint to the hostel warden about the thumps and noise coming from the room above and this then resulted in each one of us being summoned within our various ministries to explain our bad conduct. I explained about the horseplay and then mentioned that the occupant in the flat below us seemed to have a succession of men throughout the early evening and wee small hours of the morning followed by a series of all night parties. We concluded, righty or wrongly, that the occupant of the downstairs flat was ‘on the game’ and when I mentioned to the personnel officer that the complainant was probably a prostitute, I have never seen anybody work so fast to get me out of the office. After all, she might have assumed that I was in a type of moral danger but she was powerless to do anything about, so I promised to be more quiet in the future and was quietly amused by the whole episode. Later I was given the opportunity to share a top floor double bedroom rather than a dormitory at a considerably enhanced rent which I could scarcely afford but there was a consolation that my fellow flatmate came from Leeds and was working for a year before he went off to Cambridge University. We were given a breakfast and an evening meal as part of our hostel rent but the remainder of the time I was desperately short of money. For lunch I often had half a pound of broken biscuits which cost me about 4d (1.5p) but when I could afford it, I treated myself to a warmed Cornish pasty which cost about 6p. The London Hostels Association had a sort of inter-hostel sports and social organisation the main function of which was to arrange football matches between the various hostels. We used to play on some football pitches in an obscure part of Regent’s Park and the games were generally shambolic, not least because we did not any uniform strip and it was not uncommon to pass the ball to a member of the opposing team who, similarly, did not have any appropriate strip. However, I became a close friend of the Sports and Social organiser of the hostels association, so much so that I almost became his Man Friday. My friend was training to be an opera singer and tried to inform me about some of the roles in the operatic pieces that he had been practising which was lost on me then but not now. Through his good offices, we actually received a grant of £20.00 from the Lords Taverners (cricketing group) which was meant to be spent on cricket equipment. But we had some old cricket equipment lying about and did not really need it so I went down to a sports shop in central London and bought some football strip. I could buy whatever I wanted so I went for a black top and then (very fashionable) cut away black shorts so that the whole team looked like an assembly of referees. This did such magnificent things for the morale of the team so on the first occasion instead of losing about 11-1 which was the norm we won by several goals, such is the tremendously motivating effect of some good kit. Apart from the football, I did actually run some inter hostel general knowledge quizzes which provided us with something to do in the evenings. I need to explain that there was no TV and none of us could afford to go to pubs or anything that cost any money at all. I then helped to compile and published the inter hostel magazine of which the social organiser was technically the editor but actually we split the task between us, In this, I wrote some stories and some jokes, as I remember and this is when I first got the taste for writing, publishing and putting together a communal magazine. I also save up as hard as I could and purchased an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter (which later I discovered was regarded as a modern design classic and was featured as such when I saw an exemplar of it decades later in the Design section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) The typewriter was to be my constant companion in the next few years because I used it to type up all of my lecture notes when I eventually attended Manchester University.

Yesterday we were pleased to continue our wedding anniversary celebrations carried over from the day itself which was on Monday. The Waitrose staff were exceptionally good to us, donating a special chocolate cake to the five of us which we consumed with much relish – and many thanks to the staff. I wore the special ‘psychodelic’ tie that I generally reserve for birthdays and anniversaries after which it will certainly be relegated to the tie rack once again. I have recently learned that a special concert is to be held in our local Anglican church on Saturday morning and the timings are excellent for us from 10.30-12.00. So I have found a way in which I can get Meg’s wheelchair up the hillock and into the church so that is something to which we can look forward.

After I had joined the Central Office of Information in 1964, little was I to realise that this was going to be a most significant year in news terms. One event was the death and subsequent funeral of Winston Churchill and the world’s press were going mad to verify each bit of Churchilliana it was possible to find. So the whole of our team was immensely busy and then there was the lying in state. I actually did queue in, I think, Westminster Hall and we filed slowly past the coffin as I had the sense of ‘history in the making’ Together with several other hostel residents we went down to be part of the crowd that watched as Churchill’s body was drawn past us on a gun carriage. Our hostel warden who was both Australian, racist and a monarchist allowed us boys to go down the watch the procession and arranged that a dinner be available to us half way though the afternoon when we returned. A second major event was the fact it exactly 700 years since the founding of the first Simon de Montfort Parliament in 1265. This was an important step in extending the role of ordinary people in government and Simon de Montfort’s 1265 parliament deserves to be remembered as a crucial step on the road to modern democracy. The British government devoted much energy and resource to this celebration of Parliament and again meant quite long but interesting days as we tried to feed the world’s press with whatever we could muster. There were some remarkable individuals employed at COI and quite a sense of history as well. For example, Sir John Betjeman the one time poet laureate was employed at the predecessor Ministry which the wartime Ministry of Information. Many of the older generation may remember the lines penned by John Betjeman in ‘A SubAltern’s Love Song’ of which the most famous couplet is ‘Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn/ Furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun’ Now the person to whom the poem was actually addressed (not the Joan Hunter Dunn as in the poem indicates) was well known to personnel in the Ministry as a clerk with whom Betjeman was besotted so her identity was an open secret. In theory, we were meant to supply information only to the rest of the Whitehall machine but occasionally illegitimate queries got through. Members of the public were directed to their local reference library but on one famous occasion I answered the telephone at about 1 minute before 9 and on the phone was the managing director of a company that made water pumps. The Queen was due to arrive later on that day and he wanted to let her Majesty know how long it would take one of his pumps to empty all of the water in the Serpentine (which is a 40-acre recreational lake in Hyde Park, London, created in 1730 at the behest of Queen Caroline). Obviously I could not answer this question but I referred him to the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works who might have been able to give a guesstimate of the answer. On another occasion I was asked the colours of the Union Jack and upon replying ‘Red, White and Blue’ was then asked to specify which shade of white, which red and which blue were to be used. The Pantone system was only developed in 1963 and this was only one year earlier than my period of employment. But the Exhibitions Division of COI must have known the exactly right paint hue and so the query was transferred onto them. Occasionally, a query would be addressed to us and we would transfer the enquirer to a body better able to answer the query which occasionally got back to us as it was assumed that the COI should have the answer to everything. I did notice that to get any kind of promotion within the COI I would get nowhere without a degree so I needed to some GCE ‘A’ levels as soon as I could. I chose ‘Economics’ because I was desperately short of money but it seemed an interesting social science and then ‘Logic’ because it was the shortest possible syllabus I could find in the information available to me. To help me study the course in Logic, I did purchase a set of duplicated copies of a course from a correspondence college called Wolsey Hall College, Oxford. I had known about this so-called College because my mother had used these notes to help her prepare for some ‘O’-level courses that she need to pass in order to get in the then teacher training Colleges in 1955. In the event these notes served me well and I studied them whilst I could which was generally on my journeys along the Bakerloo line between the hostel and my place of work. Upon learning this, I was rescued by my life-long friend, Jo, who let me go along to her house for the three weekends before my examinations so that I could revise intensively whilst she fed me. This undoubtedly help me to do well in the examinations which of course I studied completely on my own and without the benefit of any submitted any work to get marked. I applied to a variety of universities mainly in the North of England to study practically anything. I did gain two good ‘A’-level scores (an A in Economics and a B in Logic) on the basis of which I finished up at Manchester University, where I read for a BA(Econ) which was the generic title of a degree course in the social sciences. There it was that I met Meg within the first few weeks of arriving at University and the rest, as they say, is history.