Today being Tuesday we carried on some additional wedding anniversary celebrations by going down to Waitrose and entertaining the rest of ‘the granny gang’ with the promised cake which we know is always available in the store. The store very kindly gifted us the cake which was very good of them but we are about their oldest and most loyal of their customers. Approaching mid September, the weather now has a decided autumnal feel to it and although we do not mind a little light drizzle such as we experienced on Sunday, the wheelchair wheels always require a certain degree of cleaning as we enter our hallway to ensure that we do not make a mess of the carpets by transferring the roadside grit to the inside of the house.

Upon arriving in London to take up my post at the Central Office of Information, I was directed to make initial contact with reception where someone from personnel was detailed to look out for me. Her words sent a chill through my heart as she announced that as I had had library experience, I was going to be detailed to work in the Reference Library of the Reference Division of COI. I tried to indicate to them that I knew nothing about libraries as the National lending Library was staffed by scientists who filled professional librarians with despair by ignoring nearly all of the rules of what was considered good library practice. For example, none of the periodicals was given a classification number but a series of rules were applied to standardise the title for the library records and then everything was filed from A-Z. I had visions of the Reference Library being stuffed full of little old ladies with fingerless gloves on poring over card indexes and the like but the die was already cast and so I was marched upstairs. My worst fears were not to be realised, though. The Library was indeed a library but not in the conventional sense and was nowadays what would be called an ‘information centre’ Its function was not to lend out books as such but to research and supply relevant information to the rest of the Reference Division who produced each year ‘Britain – An Official Handbook’ mainly for the use of embassies abroad. It worked with Whitehall departments and public bodies to produce information campaigns on issues that affected the lives of British citizens, from health and education to benefits, rights and welfare. The rest of the Central Office of Information, henceforth COI, was full of departments which again was very unlike the Civil Service. For example, there was a Films and TV division which made official government films such as road safety films and an Exhibition Division that would design and mount the UK’s pavilions at overseas trade fairs and the like. As it turned out, my year at the COI was one of the most interesting and productive that it was possible to be. Although we all had our official list of duties, in practice we answered telephone queries from the rest of Whitehall to assist in the marketing and press offices of the various ministries. COI was full therefore of journalists (in the Reference division), TV and media people (in the Films and TV department) and so on. One of my official duties as the office junior was to arrange for the distribution of newspapers across the various parts of the Reference Division and we took every newspaper then produced including ‘The daily Worker’ (which was to rebranded as ‘The Morning Star’ as the official mouthpiece of the Communist party – it was said that the newspaper was excellent on constitutional issues) The library was headed by an emigre Hungarian who treated me kindly and benevolently and it was here that I met Jo, the brilliant young widow who took me under her wing as it were and became a life long friend. She died in her 90’s and I devoted the whole of my day’s blog to her when I heard the sad news of her demise as our frienship lasted from 1964 to 2024 so we had been life long friends for sixty years. The other staff were very varied, one being a young and I suspect gay man who was passionate about and incredibly well informed about every aspects of the arts and cultural life in Britain. There was one other young person who had performed the office junior role but moved on to make way for me and a friendly older female worker. Most of our work consisted of answering queries from all over the rest of the Whitehall machine and we always kept an ear open to other’s conversations in case you happened to have a lead that would help them in their present enquiries. A few days after I joined the Library, it was the date of General Election which the Labour Party won by three seats. Our Hungarian boss had a transistor radio on his desk tuned to the election news which resulted in knife edge win for the Labour Party. The Tory Party had won three general elections in 1951, 1955 and 1959 and by 1964 there was felt to be a need, then as now, for a change. The Labour party had made massive gains in the urban results declared in the early part of the evening but then the results from the Tory shires kept trickling in making a Labour victory seem more and more problematic. For accommodation, I had been offered a place in the London Hostels Association which, as it name suggests, provided hostel accommodation for young impecunious civil servants. My hostel was in Broadhurst gardens and I made the journey every day down the Bakerloo line from Finchley Road to Lambeth North which was a journey of about eight Tube stops. As I made my journey home each evening, the placards of Evening Standard newspapers was full of warnings such as ‘Battle for the Pound’ as immediately after the election of the Labour Government many international investors (then dubbed by Harold Wilson as the ‘Gnomes of Zurich’) took fright and withdrew funds from the London capital markets. So the incoming Labour government with a majority of only three had an immediate fight on its hands not to be destabilised as it fought to preserve the parity of the pound vis-a-vis the rest of the world’s currencies. My journey across London by Tube took about 20 minutes and I only had a short walk at each end of the journey to reach the appropriate Tube station so travel was not one of my difficulties. We managed to get a cut price season Ticket for the Tube which helped considerably as well as it could be used for out of work activities as well.

Today is our 57th wedding anniversary but it is a very low key affair given the other milestones that we have celebrated. Our 25th wedding anniversary was held in Mexico but for our 40th wedding anniversary we really pushed the boat out and had four celebrations in total, one in Harrogate in Yorkshire (primarily for members of my family) one in the Midlands for friends, neighbours, one in Southampton for our friends, neighbours and work colleagues and the final one in Santiago de Compestela in Northern Spain for our Spanish friends. For our 50th, we had a fairly large celebration here in Bromsgrove and then we had organised on in Santiago de Compostela which I attended but Meg could not because at that time she was plagued by a succession of disabling migraines, which have nor fortunately ceased. Today we made track for ‘The Lemon Tree‘ where we have promised ourselves some goodies for the day and tomorrow, when we see our Waitrose friends we shall some celebrations delayed by a day and share some cake with our friends. On our way down into town, we bumped into a couple of our Church friends who came round with some Prosecco to help us celebrate in the late afternoon which made a wonderful day for us. We also acquired some goodies from the AgeUK shop across the road which is often the case.

The question might well be asked what happened to terminate my period of association and employment with the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate and the short answer to all of this is that this association ceased when I started work at the Central Office of Information in London. Although I was more than happy working at the National Lending Library, from the ages of 17-19, I really wanted to see the world and I found out that I could do this by joining the Foreign Office as a Grade B6 clerical officer where I would almost certainly be posted abroad. You would have thought that it would have been quite an easy job to transfer from the scientific to the home (domestic) civil service but there seemed to be some ‘silos’ in place to make this difficult. The simplest way to achieve my objective was to enter the Civil Service Open competition which were set at a more or less GCE ‘O’ level standard. I was obliged to take English and Arithmetic as two core subjects and then chose to study French, Physics and Chemistry and I still have the examination papers that I took in my files at home. I do not remember doing any real preparation or revision for these exams and I am a fairly confident examinee in any case and then the results were published. The total marks of in the five subjects I took was 900 and I scored exactly 600 which makes my average percentage mark very easy to calculate at 66.67%. The Civil Service Commission published a list of the entire 6085 candidates and everybody slightly above a certain mark would be offered employment as a Clerical Officer and candidates in a lower tranche of marks would qualify as a clerical assistant. My position in the list was 77th which out of 6085 candidates works out as the 98.735 percentile point (i.e. 1.265% candidates scored a high composite mark than I achieved) So having achieved a degree of success I was then offered a list of ministries in London of which the Central Office of Information seemed to be the most interesting. This was the post war successor of the Ministry of Information and proved to be a very interesting and exciting period of my life. When I was chatting with some of our younger care staff, one of them asked my if I knew my IQ. As it was, I did not and I have always had rather a disrespect for this metric as I undertook more studies in the social sciences. There was a massive expose of the work of Sir Cyril Burt, the so called ‘father’ of the IQ test who believed in the ‘heritability’ of intelligence, now a discredited concept. In order to prove this statistically, one needed to compare the measured IQ of the young person with that of their parents but Burt had not taken any measurements of their parents. So Burt estimated what the intelligence level of the parents might be by studying the IQ of the school children he tested which was evidently no sort of objective test at all. This was all exposed in a great investigation by the Sunday Times in the 1970’s but by this time, the formation of the post WW2 school system which was based upon grammar schools for which to pass the infamous 11+ examination had done its best (or its worst). It has been argued that the whole of the school system was based upon the Platonian concepts of ‘Men of gold, men of silver and men of brass’ and the IQ test was a way if identifying which was which and selecting for the ‘appropriate’ level of school. Nonetheless, being asked about my IQ and certainly not wanting to take a rather spurious ‘know your own IQ’ tests, I reasoned to myself that the Civil Servant Open competition examinations and identifying where one stood in the pecking order so to speak, one could probably quite easily concert my position of 77/6085 into an IQ score. There are masses of online calculators from which I derived a figure of 133 for what that it worth. But when I thought further about it, the sample of individuals putting themselves forward for five GCSE type examinations must be a skewed sample of the entire population as one would not expect many individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy to put themselves forward for five examinations. So I did some quick investigations and discovered that in 1964 some 17% of the population gained 5 passes at GCSE ‘O’ level. Then taking this into account and attempting to correct for what initially was a skewed distribution, I then consulted some online calculators that now came up with an IQ score of 143. So I am prepared for settle for 140 as a reasonable mid-way figure although I am still not convinced that it has real utility. In my later years of teaching, I discovered an index of ’emotional’ intelligence which I suspect is a far better guide to how well individuals function in practical work situations than an IQ score the currency of which I feel is now spent.

Yesterday, we were delighted to make our progress down the hill and to meet up with our Saturday crowd in Waitrose. We have noticed that the lamp standard into which a car crashed and the driver lost his life and we were only about one hundred feet away has now been replaced. In addition, the grass has been mowed and all of the last remnants of the crash cleared away so not a trace remains of a memorial to the driver who sadly lost his life.

One of the jobs that I did at the Old Swan hotel was to act as a porter and specifically a night porter. But we had an ‘all hands on deck’ hour to deal with the coaches that arrived to disgorge their usually American visitors on two or thee occasions a week. The hotel was on a route which ran from London to Stratford on Day 2, a journey up to Yorkshire and the Old Swan on Day 2 and then a trip up some of the Yorkshire dales and onwards towards Edinburgh. Four coaches with 40 occupants each is evidently 160 bedrooms that are required and not many hotels would have the capacity to accommodate the coaches. But on arrival, the customer’s bags had to be marked up with their room number and then it was our job to deliver these to the right rooms as quickly as possible. You might have thought that this was a fairly simple task but the job had its complications as with many ancient hotels there were sections of corridors that went up or down three or four steps and we had to utilise a trolly with those wheels arranged in a triangle to negotiate these. Each room was equipped with a gas fire (in those days) and often the Americans had no knowledge or experience of a gas fire so we often needed to light it for them. Sometimes, they were nervous that the gas fire would consume all of the oxygen in the room. One of the reasons why we liked this job was that we were always tipped and sometimes quite generously. The hotel used to sell books of matches that retailed for about 2d but I use to buy a quantity of them out of my own money and then donate the book to the guest after the gas fire had been ignited. Needless to say, this gesture paid for itself several times over. The other portering job that I remember was as a ‘night’ porter. I suppose there was a need for some portering staff for guests who arrived late in the evening but I do not remember that much about our duties except that we were probably trundling trestle tables and chairs from one part of the hotel to another. But a nightly job was to use one of those big old Hoover vacuum cleaners to hoover the large function room that was typically in use throughout the day and therefore had to be cleaned at night. This job took about an hour to complete as the room was so large but when the job was completed and there was nothing else to do after about 2am, we were allowed to curl up on one of the sofas and go to sleep for the rest of the night for which we got paid as well. We did put on a rather snazzy green porter’s apron to distinguish us from other staff and these duties were quite pleasant compared with the dish washing. There were evidently times in the ebb and flow of the year when the hotel was relatively quiet but there was always quite a brisk Saturday and Sunday lunch time trade. It was one of those hotels where families who wanted to celebrate a birthday, anniversary or other special occasion would forget about the expense and treat themselves to a meal. Indeed, when our son was at boarding school in York, my wife, son and mother would treat ourselves to a meal at the Old Swan and these we generally enjoyed, But we did have a celebratory meal for family members on the occasion of our 40th wedding anniversary and our stay, and that of our son, was generally disappointing and we suspected that we would never stay at the hotel ever again. Harrogate being a conference centre, there were two occasions that I remember when the hotel was full and absolutely buzzing. These were the Toy fair held in the spring and when manufacturers, wholesalers and other toy retailers would come to some kind of decision as to what toys were going to be the best sellers at Christmas time some months later. The other large conference event was the Antiques fair and I think this held in the Autumn. After the Harrogate conference centre was built in the 1970’s evidently this pattern of conferences would evolve over the years. In a hotel of this size – I think about 375 bedrooms – it was evident that on a statistical basis there would be about one death a year in a hotel bedroom. Nowadays, of course, we would have crash teams, ambulances with wailing sirens and flashing lights and a general hullabaloo. But we had a much more sensible and pragmatic solution as to how dispose of the dead body without attracting undue attention. As porters we often had to transport rolls of carpet from one part of the hotel to another and when a death occurred, we simply rolled the corpse in a length of carpet and brought them downstairs in the utility lift. I never had to do this myself but I was reliably informed it was a not infrequent event and the staff had to learn to ensure that the feet of the dead person did not stick out from the carper roll. In later years, the Old Swan became well known as the hotel with Agatha Christie associations. It was to the Old Swan that Agatha Christie famously disappeared in 1926, resulting in a public furore over the 11 days that she could not be traced. Nowadays this is made into a feature of the hotel and events such as ‘Mystery Weekends’ have tried to capitalise upon this famous association. But when I worked there, nobody really mentioned it. This hotel became an important part of my life because it was not only a source of income but also one good meal a day. Also, there is something a little ‘special’ about working in a large hotel like this which becomes a society in miniature and some of the lessons that it taught me I have retained for the rest of my life.

Yesterday morning I went to get our weekly shopping done as with the delivery of Meg’s bed yesterday and a morning punctuated by the visit of the Eucharistic minister from church, our normal shopping routine was disrupted. Meg and I made our way down the hill, somewhat later than usual to Waitrose for our elevenses this Friday morning with our University of Birmingham friend.

In my career at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, I had now been promoted, as it were, from washing dishes at 12.5p an hour to washing glasses for the bar at 20p an hour. Why the differential in pay rate was in operation escapes me now, as it did then, for one was exchanging heavier and more arduous work for lighter and less onerous work but at a higher rate of pay. It was not too long before I was prompted again to become a cocktail barman in the main hotel bar (even though, paradoxically, I was under the legal age for drinking when this happened) I exchanged the white linen overall I wore when washing dishes for a little jacket which was like a small waistcoat and pointed to a small ‘V’ at the back. We were expected to buy and wear our own black trousers and a pair of black shoes as we now served the public. Although behind the bar most of the shift, one had to collect empty glasses and do a general tidying up to make the bar area presentable (emptying the ash trays, wiping down the tables, keeping them supplied with crisps and nuts and so on) The rate of pay was 25p an hour i.e. I had doubled my wages but the hours of work were generally shorter. There was, of course, the opportunity to get tips and we always found the Americans generous in the extreme and the English generally stingy. One was expected if the night was a quiet one and a customer wanted to make conversation to be able to do so on a wide range of topics. We were instructed if a customer bought us a drink not to abuse this by having a real drink but taking the price of a small soft drink such as a coke or a tonic water. Although I started off in the main bar, the hotel management decided to open up another more specialised area. So we had what was termed a cocktail bar which specialised in serving some quite exotic sea food type dishes and this was staffed by an experienced waiter and myself. Everything seemed to be going extremely well and we made a great team until one night I discovered that the waiter was outrageously drunk which I suppose was an occupational hazard. As a young barman, I was actually given a great deal of autonomy on occasions. If there was a large function such as a dinner and dance then a temporary bar would be set up on trestle tables. One quickly learnt what kind of stock was required and the glasses were arranged in neat looking diamonds together with cigarettes, nuts and crisps. We had to make a good guesstimate as to what stock was required (gin and tonic and Double Diamond beers being the favourites), organise a float of money from the hotel reception, then at the end of the evening do everything in reverse including making sure that the stock sold and the money collected were in a sort of balance with each other. The thing that was particularly enjoyable, though, was when we were detailed as washers up in a part of the hotel when a large wedding reception was organised. I well remember that one occasion, one hundred of champagne were ordered for some three hundred guests. We used to say to ourselves on occasions like this that there will 90 bottles of champagne for them and 10 for us, which we consumed in beer glasses behind the scenes. Serving is so frantic of course that nobody could possibly literally count the bottles of champagne as they made their way into the function room so I drank more good champagne when I was about 17 or 18 than I have ever done since. Of course, we ensured that the guests never ran out of the champagne that they wanted so we always had some in a strategic reserve. It is said that everybody remembers what they were doing on the night that President Kennedy was shot, which was 22 November, 1963. Although I was working during the day at the National Lending Library, I would still do occasional evenings and functions when called upon to do so and indeed, I was working with the chief barman-cum-cellarman on a temporary bar such as I have described when a member of staff shot into the room to exclaim that Kennedy had been shot. Christmas was always a special occasion in the hotel because it was one of those types of hotel where families would spend their Christmas and so the hotel would be full. The management imported a bevy of young female catering college students from a catering college in South Yorkshire to act as a temporary waitresses and, of course, to the local lads employed in the hotel this was like manna from heaven. The young waitresses were supplied with some temporary accommodation in an obscure part of the hotel and so seemed to be around for every meal and I did strike up a friendship with a couple of them who actually came from Middlesbrough as I remember. When the Test matches were on, I did serve Fred Trueman, the famous English bowler on one occasion. My abiding memory of him was with two quite gorgeous looking young women, one on each arm, of whom one was a blonde and the other a brunette. Whether it enhanced his performance on the field of play the following day, I was never able to ascertain. Being what was technically described as a cocktail barman, I was expected to know a range of cocktails. Typically at Christmas people would come and order a ‘sidecar’ and the like. But half the time, the customers themselves were unaware of the actual ingredients particularly if a ‘John Collins’ was ordered as there are so many different concoctions by which it can be made. We had a little book to consult on occasions when we were stumped and on the occasions when there was some ambiguity we used a certain amount of guile to extract from the customers what their preferred recipe was and so went on our merry shaking way.

This Friday, our routine is going to be altered somewhat. Yesterday morning which is generally devoted to shopping had to give way to the delivery of the new ‘floor’ hospital bed which is going to be delivered and installed for Meg. This bed was commissioned by the OT team on the basis that it will be a safer bed for Meg to use because if she does get too restless during the night, the worst that she could do would be to roll onto the floor. The OTs seem to think that a hospital bed with sides could present some dangers and hence this new piece of kit in the fullness of time will tell us whether this piece of hospital furniture will prove to be beneficial. This morning, my son has offered to sit with Meg whilst I go off and do the shopping that is normally done the day before but I will endeavour to race around and get it done quickly.

After documenting my experiences at the National Lending Library which was my first ‘proper’ job, I thought it might be interesting to recall the weekend/vacation job that I pursued for several years which started off with the washing of dishes at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate. This was a 4-star hotel, ceding the position of ‘top dog’ to the Majestic Hotel which was quite nearby. I suspect this position in the hierarchy of hotels came about because when the Headingly Test was being played, the England team were generally put up at the Majestic whilst the touring side were lodged in The Old Swan whilst their well-heeled supporters seemed to drink equally well in both establishments. My mother secured me the job by the simple expedient of phoning around the large hotels when I was 15 in 1960 and evidently, there were vacancies for casual labour at The Old Swan. This became a significant part of my life as well as a much needed source of income and I performed in a variety of jobs in the hotel, about which more later. But to wash dishes, we donned a white linen apron which quickly became stained but we claimed a newly laundered one every day. The dish washing machine consisted of a large tank with vertical revolving brushes – when the plate was inserted, it was spun around and quickly cleaned and one learnt that you could even detect egg yolk through the sensitivity of human fingers. Evidently, nothing as nandy-pandy as gloves were ever used and they would have got in the way. The detergents was incredibly simple consisting of two large empty fruit tins punctured with a mass of holes and then filled with blocks of green soap. The dishes once thrown one by one into the machine were then placed upon a wooden rack and when this was filled up, it was then inserted into an adjacent tank of water kept at a boiling temperature by virtue of a steam pipe that bubbled steam into the bottom of the tank. After immersion for about half a minute, the racks of plates were removed and they were so hot that they were generally quite dry after 2-3 minutes, In practice, one became quite expert at judging all of this. Evidently, the plates had to be cleared of left overs and this waste went into some large dustbins that were essentially pig swill and were collected each day. Of course, we were fed a main meal in the middle of the day and for this one approached the chefs who were working nearby and they plated up a plate of food (the same as the guests naturally) and you ate it by sitting at a steel counter staring at piles of empty plates. For this the rate of pay was 2s 6d (12.5p) an hour but to bring this up to current day price levels you would generally have to be multiply by about 100 in round figures. We generally worked eight hour shifts but these could be a little shorter if all the day’s work was done but also longer if the hotel was very full and there were large numbers of dinners served. My fellow workers were generally middle aged women with families complemented by some of us school students (and in this respect, the care industry today is not too dissimilar) On occasions, we were detached to an adjacent area which was charged with washing cutlery and for some reason, this attracted a higher rate of pay of 3s 0d (15p) an hour. Adjacent to the room in which the dishes were washed was the ‘still room’ In the still room, beverages such as tea and coffee as well as fruit juices and breakfast cereals were produced and evidently this really came into its own at breakfast times. There was a bread slicing machine and occasionally we had to slice bread incredibly finely to make melba toast under a hot grill. In the still room, there was sone old lady who must have worked there for at least 20 years and probably dating back to the wartime years. I can remember being shocked to the core by the manager, a huge ‘bear’ of a man who had organised an Army Catering Corps earlier in his career, marching into the still room and announcing to the old dear ‘Woman – you are inefficient – get out!’ and she was sacked on the spot just for getting on a bit in years. To our eyes she was no less efficient or inefficient as the rest of us but that was management for you. Some of my fellow workers told me that about a year or so before I started working (in 1960), in response to a temporary financial crisis, the management reduced everybody’s pay from 2s 6d an hour to 2s 3d an hour (12.5p down to 12p) whereby all of the staff walked out and stayed out for the morning before the management relented and restored the old pay rate. Our immediate line manager was an incredibly handsome 21 year old who really had Adonis looks – in fact, upon hearing that he had become engaged most of the waitresses burst into tears as they all harboured secret desires that they might marry him. This young man was evidently destined for elite hotel management because he was sent on a gastronomic tour of Europe and I heard him chatting in fluent French to a guest on one occasion. But he was a very good manager for us, being clear and direct with no ‘favourites’ and he earned our respect and loyalty. But I shall continue with more of this tale at a later date.

This Thursday we have lots going on but with things threatening to collide with each other. It is normally my shopping day but we are expecting Meg’s ‘floor’ style hospital bed to be delivered and assembled some time this morning. The existing bed which does go pretty low but not to the floor is being replaced by a floor bed, the concept being that if Meg were to roll about during the night, she would only roll onto the floor and this is probably safer than a conventional hospital bed with sides. Our Eucharistic minister is due to call around mid morning so getting the weekly shopping done might prove to be a little problematic but we shall see.

Yesterday, I wrote about the kind of work that I was undertaking in the scientific civil service at the National Lending Library (NLL) in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. When I was recruited, the library was only a few months old and I was part of the huge recruitment and staffing drive to develop the Library as a whole. The nucleus of the collection was formed from a collection housed in the Science Museum London and a small team of civil servants was formed who worked in London to prepare the bulk of the collection for eventual transfer to Yorkshire. Occasionally, one heard the term ‘goers’ and ‘stayers’ the former being that stock that was to be moved up to Yorkshire and the latter to remain in London. The whole establishment was part of the scientific civil service (actually, at that time, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) and the whole atmosphere was as ‘un civil service like’ as it was possible to be. The middle management staff all had science degrees and they wore the kind of almost casual clothing that would have been common in the normal postgraduate common room. I was actually graded as a ‘Scientific Assistant’ which was the parallel grade to the ‘Clerical Officer’ in the more conventional civil service. The Clerical Officers would deal routine correspondence and the routine application of rules to particular cases e.g. as in the tax office. To be recruited to this grade one needed five GCE ‘O’ levels passed at one sitting but there was a lower grade of Clerical Assistant who did things like routine filing, some record keeping, stationery supplies and the like. But Scientific Assistants took critical readings at establishments such as the National Physical Laboratory, the National Chemical Laboratory, the Meteorological Service and so on. Now the pay of scientific assistants was actually a bit lower than it should have been perhaps because of the linguistic comparison with a clerical assistant but the actual qualifications required (which must include a science) was actually higher. Although it happened a few months before my employment, every scientific assistant in the country effectively went ‘on strike’ but all taking a day’s leave with the connivance of their superiors. The entire work of the DSIR ministry effectively ground to a halt and the government, and the powers that be in the civil service, were forced to take notice and the anomaly was corrected. Despite our ‘playtime’ in the Machine Recording section, we all did work fairly hard and conscientiously and I think there was a general feeling that we were part of a new and to some extent ground breaking new venture for the civil service. It is not often that a brand new establishment is created essentially from scratch but everybody was pretty happy in their work, even the routine work. Whilst in the Acquisitions section, I was responsible for ‘file splitting’ which sounds boring but was reasonably interesting. Given that the NLL collected scientific literature from practically every country in the developed world, then for example anything emanating from Bulgaria would go into the ‘Bulgaria’ file. But as the correspondence grew and grew, I needed to take each file and to split it into the principal sources which were often the universities and research institutes, I was given a fair degree of autonomy how I went about my task and never actually completed it because I was moved from one department to another after a year. But I did have a Public Administration student about 15-20 years later who actually was working on the same job as I was and recognised some of my handiwork (perhaps my handwriting?) from years beforehand. In one of the more obscure parts of the library, we did give some employment to the prisoners from the nearby ‘open prison’ and they were engaged in tasks such as bookbinding and repairing some of the stock which might have got a bit tatty or degraded. In theory, we were not supposed to speak with the prisoners but occasionally we did as they were inside for crimes such as bigamy which was not going to breach the foundations of society. Someone had the good idea of organising a football match between the prisoners and the young male civil servants. This was a complete mismatch as the prisoners tend to be fit young men who worked out every day and we were a bunch of very unfit civil servants. I think we were beaten by a score of about 11-0 but what was fascinating was that one team was foul mouthed and bad tempered whilst the other was the model of politeness. It was the young civil servants who swore like troopers whilst the prisoners were very conscious of the fact that the match was refereed by their own prison staff and were the model of politeness and good behaviour so if you happened to be tripped up, you were always helped up with a polite ‘Can I help you up?’ Some of the rest of the staff contained some fascinating characters and one older civil servant who worked in my office was a very keen philatelist (stamp collector) and got stamps from all over the world. His name was ‘Robert Lake’ and he told us the story of a letter that he had received a letter from a correspondent in Africa that only two works on it were was ‘Lake Keynsham’ Somehow the letter got to England and then someone in London recognised that Keynsham was actually a suburb of Bristol. When it got to the local sorting office, Robert was well known and so the two word envelope actually reached him from the other side of the world. Some of the staff had originally worked in London and were dubious about being moved up to Yorkshire. However, some kind of deal was done in which they were allocated a new council house and their quality of life went up so much being located in the delightful market that is Wetherby (population about 25,000) that none of them would dream of moving back to the London area.

Wednesdays are always the days when our domestic help calls around and we are always very pleased to see her. After a couple of wet days, we are hopeful to have a somewhat better spell of weather midweek.

Yesterday, just about sixty years ago, I started work as a Scientific Assistant in the National lending Library for Science and Technology at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Fortunately, I had a scooter to get to work but if you had to rely on buses to get to work it was always a bit of a nightmare because I needed to catch one bus into Leeds, another to Wetherby and then a third to the outskirts of Boston Spa. If you were two minutes late for the first bus and missed it, you could end up being two hours late at the other end. For the first year at the National Lending Library (known to us all as ‘Nellie’ after the initials NLL) I worked in the ‘Acquisitions’ section where we obtained scientific literature from all over the world either being provided free (typically by the Americans), purchased from many of the European countries or exchanged for similar literature from USSR and the Iron Curtain countries. These exchange relationships were a way of avoiding currency restrictions and worked quite well although the Russians had a different view of what constituted ‘science’ (e.g. the collected works of Marx and Lenin) than we regarded as ‘science’ in the west. In my second year, I worked in the rather quaintly called ‘Machine Recording’ section although nowadays we would call this a data processing section or even just IT. But then the technology that we worked with to generate a multiplicity of library records was a very ancient punch-card operated IBM printer, designed in the late 1940’s and remarkably error prone by 1963. We used to generate cards for each periodical using an IBM punched card system sometimes known as Hollerith cards. Punched card tabulating equipment, invented and developed by Herman Hollerith to process data from the United States Census of 1890, was the first mechanized means for compiling and analyzing statistical information. Through continual improvements, first by Hollerith and then by many others, punched card equipment created and expanded the worldwide information processing industry and continued to play a significant role in that industry for more than two decades after the first commercial electronic computers were installed in the early 1950s. Each card was eighty columns wide and each column was numbered 0-9. But by using two zones at the top of the card, you could generate an alphanumeric set of data by punching two or three more holes in each column. This technology had the advantage that it was both machine and also human readable as when the card was produced, the corresponding character was written along the very top edge. The cards were manufactured with a distinctive notch in the top corner so that you could tell at a glance if the cards were all the right way round. So we spent a lot of time on the card punch which might quite a pleasant clattering sound and in which the card was advanced along under the keyboard/hole cutting edge until it got flipped into a stack at the end of the machine. To go along with this, we had a card sorting machine which evidently read the ‘holes’ in each card and deposited the card into the relevant bin. But you could only sort on one column at a time which meant that a sort within a sort could be quite a tedious affair. Finally, we came to the heart of the system which was an ancient IBM machine, possibly the IBM 407 which could be ‘programmed’ by means of a plug board. The ‘program’ if you could actually call it that was a board some 12″ x 15″ with a mass of wires all over it and depending upon the instructions that you fed into it, would ascertain what part of the punched card fed into the machine was to be printed out and in what order. This we used to generate a multiplicity of library records (e.g. all of the new acquisitions within the last month) on sheets of computer paper. There were three of us in the department, myself and a fellow Scientific Assistant and our boss who was a 28 year old with a fairly laissez-faire attitude and we all had a play around with the system according to our likes. Our boss, Peter, I think secretly loved playing about with the plug boards (as you had one for each of the particular types of record produced and they often needed tweaking) My co-worker was a great fan of the singer Jim Reeves and produced all kinds of catalogues of every one of his recorded songs. As I remember it, I produced invitations to an 18th birthday party and Peter, our Boss, was always seemed to be having a play with the thing. The equipment was often prone to failure and the IBM engineers often had to pore over the various machine with a manual and a circuit diagram to sort out the malfunctioning. However, I think this probably gave me my first taste of what one might call ‘real’ computing which love I have never really lost. We had frequent groups of visitors around her work area, some of them technical and some of them from the local community. Our boss was away one day a week doing a part-time qualification called a Diploma in Technology (precursor to a degree) and myself any my colleagues use to work like demons all day on a Friday leaving some time at the end of the day to be visited by a couple of the girls who worked elsewhere in the library in a section known as ‘Kalamazoo’ after the binders in which the periodicals were recorded as they arrived. The library was organised in a series of old munitions stores and the ‘Machine Recording’ section was in the third of these buildings called ‘C’ store and the girls who visited us always had a piece of paper in their hand which justified their visit to our work area so that something could be ‘checked’ This occasionally gave rise to a succession of teenage frolics the details of which I will not go into at this point except to mention that we were in deep frolic mode at one point of time with the girls sitting in receptacles known as ‘coffins’ put upon the table and showing all of their stocking tops (with the word ‘CANCELLED’ stamped on each thigh) when in walked the Standing Committee on National University Libraries leaving me to explain the situation (my mate saw what was about to happen and kept on walking leaving me to cope with the situation as best I could)

Tuesdays are always one of the days in the week to which Meg and I particularly look forward as it is one of the days of the week when we meet up with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria. Once we return, we also have a ‘sit’ service from the care agency which was originally designed for me to attend my Pilates class. In practice, I have not managed to attend these sessions for some weeks now which does not trouble me as greatly as might be imagined as pushing Meg in her wheelchair up and down the hill practically every day of the week is giving me some exercise as well as the fresh air. In practice, I use the sit session to make a visit into town to buy some of the things such as toiletries that are not necessarily readily available when I do my grocery shipping each Thursday.

Whilst watching the Paralympic athletes, I am quite interested in how they manage to cope with failure. Whilst the gold medals are celebrated, sometimes an athlete makes a bad mistake such as the cyclist who crashed out in her individual sprint in the Velodrome where she was tipped for a silver or even a gold medal. Kadeena Cox had missed out on the first gold of the Games when she crashed on the first corner of the C4-5 500m time trial on Thursday, having made a bad start, then slipping while trying to correct herself. The 33-year-old struggled with a calf injury, an eating disorder and a relapse in her multiple sclerosis in the build-up to this event, but overcame all that – plus her Thursday mishap – to claim a fifth Paralympic gold. Cox admitted she had struggled badly with her mental health after the incident and was nearly crying before going to the start line, but was helped through it by her sprint team-mates.

On a personal level, I have had occasion to wonder how to cope with failure – or at least the lack of success on the first attempt. I have always had a fairly successful academic career and have never really had to cope with outright failure or even a relative failure. But after I submitted my PhD way back in 1997 there was a waiting period of some three months which was the time given to the external examiners to read and assess the PhD. At the time, we lived just over a mile away from the Scraptoft Campus of Leicester Polytechnic and I used to walk to work each day in order to give myself some daily exercise, although I did use the car if I had masses of student work to carry. Whilst I was walking each day, I had plenty of time to contemplate how I would cope with failure because I had not had much experience of failure in my life to date. There was a much younger but brilliant postgraduate student with whom I was a conference buddy as we went on conference trips where we could to build up our contacts and publishing record. He was very much an old head on young shoulders and he gave me the advice, which was timely, to prepare myself psychologically to be asked to revise or rewrite a chapter. This is actually what did occur as the Chief External Examiner asked why I had not include ‘4th generation evaluative methodologies’ in my thesis which was a concept of which I was completely ignorant (as, incidentally, were the other two examiners of the thesis) So I undertook another increment of fieldwork, added the results into a chapter including, of course the aforementioned 4th generation evaluative methodologies, submitted the revised version of the thesis and was eventually rewarded with success. A month or so later, I was in contact with a fellow academic who worked at the University of Birmingham and who, like myself, had written and submitted her own PhD when we were both about the same age (in our 50’s) She told me that did I not realise that my Chief External Examiner who we both knew well from the conference circuits always, always asked his students to go the ‘extra mile’ and to undertake some further work to refine the thesis they had submitted. Knowing this, I did not at the time feel that my initial setback was a ‘failure’ as such but was a lack of immediate success which is not quite the same thing. However, I have known at least a couple of close colleagues who had similarly not met with immediate success but who had become thoroughly disheartened and had not proceeded further with their PhD thus ending up with nothing. But athletes themselves know that they cannot win every race every time and there may be good reasons for a lack of success on the day. For example, they may know that they are carrying a niggling injury or they might have got their tactics for the race all wrong and end up being ‘boxed in’ which is a constant danger in middle distance races. No doubt, they learn from these experiences and know that if they are beaten by a bitter rival in one particular encounter, the positions might be reversed at some point in the future. Moving to the sphere of politics, the controversial right wing Tory MP, Enoch Powell, once remarked that ‘all political careers end in failure’ Actually this is a précis of what he actually said which was somewhat more verbose than this as follows: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’ But when the failures do come, they are often in quite dramatic circumstances as we saw when Margaret Thatcher failed to secure enough votes from the Tory parliamentary party to carry on as Prime Minister and eventually had to be told by her fellow cabinet members that she had come to the end of the road. Actually, it is said that her husband Denis Thatcher, who was quite a sage politician in his own right but who rather like to be portrayed as some kind of buffoon, told her in their Downing Street flat ‘C’mon on, Maggie – you know that the game’s up’ and we all can remember Margaret Thatcher leaving Downing Street with a tear in her eye. To conclude this point, I still think it is an interesting point how as individuals we cope with failure (or with evident lack of success). It is undoubtedly true that this can act as a spur to redouble one’s effort to succeed in the future and equally the case that some find they are completely disheartened. I suppose most of us oscillate between these two extremes.

Today we enter our Monday morning routines which consists of a longer walk than normal down to ‘The Lemon Tree‘ cafe, swinging past Waitrose to collect our daily newspaper. Typically, the schoolchildren are being given a last little treat by their grandparents in the form of coffee and cakes before the school regime starts tomorrow. I am reminded of the little child who after their first day at school and explaining that they had done some painting and singing before being read a story asked of their parent ‘Do I have to go again tomorrow?’ not fully appreciating that the education bureaucracy will have them captured for the next 14-15 years or so.

Yesterday was the 1st of the month and I have to resist the temptation to say to my nearest and dearest ‘White rabbits! White rabbits! White rabbits’ and then keep my fingers crossed behind my back until I saw a policeman on a white horse. These were the ridiculous rituals in which we used to engage at about the age seven and evidently it must have a Yorkshire thing. Here in the Midlands some of my friends tell me that elder brothers gave their siblings a pinch followed by a punch whilst exclaiming ‘Pinch! Punch! First of the Month!’ But the 1st September always seems to symbolise for me the end of summer as every time I have started a new job or venture (all of my periods of employment, attending university) I always seemed to start the new venture in September or October. Consequently, I tend to think of this time of year as the starting point for ventures new. Schools start back in early September once the August Bank Holiday is well and truly over and we start the long haul towards Christmas. Of course Halloween and the activities associated with it constitute a way of breaking up the long period between now and Christmas. When I worked in higher education, the start of our year was effectively the middle of August because this was the point in the year when ‘A’-level results were announced and we were always pressed into service to start the recruitment process for the forthcoming academic year. From that point on, there was a gradual intensification of activities when one was marshalling the resources for the forthcoming academic year and there was generally a frantic period in which we needed to recruit not only students but the staff to teach them. In an ideal world, we would have wanted to recruit full time staff in about May but the resources never seemed to be forthcoming when we needed them so there was always a lot of last minute of ad-hoc planning. Then having recruited the students there was a variety of induction activities and a series of rolling starts for the various years of the course. I noticed that by about early November, the spirits of both staff and students started to drop considerably. August seemed a very long time ago and Christmas seemed a very distant shore so the Autumn term, coupled with nights getting longer and the first blasts of bad weather made this a difficult period of the negotiate. Things were much better in the Springtime after Christmas because with a modularised system there were typically examinations in mid January, a couple of inter-semester weeks for the holding of examination boards and then only about six weeks of the second semester before the Easter vacation kicked in. When possible, Meg and I tried to go away for about a week in mid January before the second semester of teaching started and this, too, helped to draw the sting of winter.

Just when you think that Donald Trump is one of the most unsuitable men ever to run for President of the United States, another extraordinary story has emerged. Donald Trump has threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg for life if the Facebook founder does ‘anything illegal’ to influence the upcoming presidential election. Next to a photograph of him meeting Mr Zuckerberg in the White House, Mr Trump wrote: ‘He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.’ This was a reference to the more than $400m (£303m) Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, donated to election offices in 2020. The gifts mostly went to Democratic-leaning counties in some states – partly because Republican politicians rejected the donations as Mr Trump warned against funding election offices so they could instead encourage postal votes during the coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump and his supporters have repeatedly blamed the donations for contributing to his loss in 2020. The extraordinary thing about this outburst is the limited grasp that Trump seems to display of how legal processes work in the context of the United States and in particular whether a (newly elected) Trump would have the authority to imprison anybody ‘for life’. It also displays the sort of threatening and bullying behaviour for which Trump is now becoming notorious and one has to wonder whether in his commercial activities Trump found he could use bullying tactics against anybody who happened to cross him with complete impunity. Even more stories are starting to emerge of Trump’s incoherence and ability to think through straightforward questions, the latest example being his incredibly confused stance on abortion. The latest national opinion polls put Harris some 3.4 percentage points ahead of Trump with only just over 60 days to go before the election in November.

I read a remarkable technical story recently that almost reads like an April 1st spoof. Scientists have found a simple trick that could dramatically change how our batteries perform. A lithium-ion battery, of the kind used in everything from our phones to our cars, is usually charged up soon after it is first made. That first charge is key: it decides how long the battery will work for, and when it will eventually deteriorate. Now researchers have found that if that first charge is done with unusually high currents, it dramatically changes how those batteries perform. When that happened, the batteries’ lifespan was improved by 50 per cent and the initial charge took just 20 minutes, compared with 10 hours usually. If this story ‘has legs’ as it were, then this might have a dramatic impact upon many aspects of our lives, not least mobile phones. One is forced to wonder, as well, whether the battery power in the present generation of electric cars could be similarly improved.

We have our usual ‘Sunday morning’ routines into which we slip but the broadcasting of the Paralympic Games in Paris provides an alternative to the diet of Politics programmes at the weekend. Our Eucharistic minister will still be on a well deserved holiday for a few days yet so we shall not see her for the best part of another week now. But the trip to the park is still on our weekly ‘to do’ list, particularly as the weather is set fair for a few days.

A day or so ago, we received a phone call from one of the nurses who specialises in Meg’s condition and who keeps in regular touch with us to offer us practical as well as emotional support. I knew that she was a little worried about the elastic supports that I have adapted to keep Meg’s feet from slipping off the wheelchair footrests when I wheel her up and down into town and wanted to contact the OTs (Occupational Therapists) to check out the safety aspects of the supports. I think the OT’s respond more to calls from fellow professionals than they do to patients and their carers because they had responded very promptly and positively on this occasion. After a telephone call, two OTs turned up at least one of whom knew Meg pretty well from previous contact with her. The two of them checked out the ankle supports and gave them the OK so I shall send a message to the specialist nurse which I am sure will reassure her. The two OTs had taken the trouble to call in at their stores and brought with them two quite specialist little flat cushions.These are designed in two layers such that one layer can slip over the other but it will not work in a reverse direction. This they thought might be incredibly useful to prevent Meg from slipping out of her wheelchair and they took the trouble to hoist Meg in her sling to seat her on a chair and check out that this little aid seems to work as intended. I showed the system that I have particularly in the late afternoons after the carers have left but before the final evening call to keep Meg secure in her chair. This involves a variety of little ‘tricks’ one of which is to tilt the chair cushion somewhat backwards and another of which is to utilise a cushion to give her back straight rather than slipping down the chair. Finally, I have a system to support Meg’s legs and feet on a low stool with a blanket on it. When the OT’s saw how I had to make these improvisations to keep Meg safe and secure they said they were going to recommend a special chair for us which might help to keep Meg’s posture in the correct position given that she has to sit for up to four hours between the penultimate and the final visit of the carers for the day. So this was an incredibly positive intervention and I fervently hope that if a more specialist chair can be provided that it will assist in keeping Meg in the correct orientation. I proudly showed the OTs the new sofa brought into commission and as the two carers called at the same time as the two OTs we had quite a houseful and the four of them started to wonder about hoisting her onto the new sofa. We soon realised that this was not going to be feasible as the leather panels of the sofa extend to ground level and hence the ‘legs’ of the hoist cannot be fitted underneath. The two OT’s were completely unfazed by this apparent setback and reckoned that we could remedy the situation with some risers to fit under each sofa foot (which they referred to as ‘elephant’s feet’ which they must resemble) The two OT’s were a jolly couple and one of them announced to me that she was getting married next Saturday. So I gleefully told them about the earliest feminist slogan which was apparently scrawled on the back of a toilet door in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1967. This slogan was that ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ The soon-to-be married OT was so taken with this that she was going to try to introduce it into any of the wedding speeches which she might be called upon to deliver. In conclusion, I must say that I have the highest regard for OT’s who almost uniformly have an incredibly ‘can do’ orientation to the dilemmas faced by patients and their carers.

There is really disturbing evidence emanating from the troubled war zone of Gaza this weekend. There is evidence Israel could be establishing infrastructure in Gaza signalling plans for a long-term military presence in the Strip. Satellite imagery, gathered over months, has mapped the creation of a new corridor in northern Gaza that is almost a kilometre in width in some places. It reaches from Gaza’s border with Israel to the edge of the town of Beit Hanoun. The IDF has bulldozed farmland, orchards and buildings to create the corridor, which allows the IDF some freedom of movement while denying Gazans access to their homes, many of which no longer exist. One analyst has argued that corridors are well-honed colonial techniques of fragmentation and separation. In the history of Israel’s occupation, corridors have been used to fragment Palestinian territories, particularly in the West Bank. What these corridors are doing, is that they will be preventing access, preventing return of residents. The implications of all of this is that it makes any peace treaty incredibly more difficult if not impossible. We have reports this weekend also that there may be a cessation of hostilities not for any evident military reason but because polio is rearing its ugly head as a consequence of the destruction of much of the social infrastructure in Gaza.

Meg have been fascinated by the series that we watch on BBC iPlayer by David Olusoga called ‘Black and British – a Forgotten History’ from which Meg and I have learned so much. For example, I learnt that known in its day for being the second best selling of a book after the Bible, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ has had a global presence ever since. While it may not have the wide readership it did in the 19th century, it continues to be one of those books that many people still know about without ever having read it. Stowe’s book is known for its position against slavery, often depicting the harsh, cruel conditions that slaves had undergone in the Plantation south. Olusoga even revealed that Queen Victoria had a secret meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe at King’s Cross in 1856.