So when I was a student I lived in this tower, in what was at first known as Fallowfield Village, and then became Owens Park. This is the view from the back. At the time (1964) this was an all male building, the block just visible to the left - Green Court - was a women's block, and there was another to the front, the name of which I can not now recall.

There were various eccentrics  and ne'er-do-wells living in the place, as well as a fair selection of normal human beings, and we all got along pretty well. I was there the year it opened, and the place was let to students of all different years, from freshers like me, to post grads of all sorts. 

As I say, we all got along pretty well, but there were one or two cliques whose behaviour could annoy, on occasion, and the occasional person whom you you might do better not to cross. One such group included a tall rangey bloke called Mike, who had a Citroen Light 15, and a girl friend who lived in his room, against all the rules and regs. Nelly our Irish cleaner once said to me "Liz is the only girl that lives on this floor isn't she Jim?", so I suppose that helped. Mike had two friends, one who looked like and lived under the name of "Ringo" and Pete Norton, who although he looked entirely bland was pathologically strong. He seemed to be able to conjure up reserves of strength the way madmen are supposed to, and he had absolutely no regard for his own or anyone else's safety. He once arrived back drunk after a night out and having gone to sleep, someone decided it would be funny to sneak an ice cream advertising sign with its weighted concrete base into the room. Next day the sign was found embedded in the path six floors below. He'd woken in the night and thrown it out of the window. On one occasion while attempting to buy a Chinese meal from a takeaway in Moss Side (and this was a time when Moss Side was massively territorial and not at all enamoured of students) he accidentally knocked a bystander's meal from their hands. Not unreasonably the chap suggested Pete might like to buy him another. Entirely unreasonably Pete told him to fuck off and buy his own, without calculating the odds, which were so far not in his favour that he spent the ensuing five days in hospital.

Ringo in his turn was unstable though less dangerous. He was prone to indulge in practical jokes which were usually less rather than more amusing. The principle difficulty with him was that if he took against something you did, he would employ his mate Pete to enforce whatever retribution he invented, and since Pete was like a force of nature this was best avoided.

Anyway enough preamble. All of this meant that this little troika thought it was a law unto itself, and as is the way of things, Mike and Pete who had little doubt of their own superiority weren't a daily problem, but Ringo who was more insecure could be. Each floor of the tower had a pair of kitchens and each kitchen had in it a baby belling cooker. Sometimes when he found himself challenged in the laundry department, he would rinse through a pair of socks and put them in one of the cookers to dry on "low". This took quite some time, and meant that no one could use the cooker for up to an hour. No amount of remonstration had any effect on Ringo who just thought that complaints were amusing. This was doubly frustrating in that the time when Ringo most often wanted to dry his socks was before a Saturday night, just at the time when the rest of us wanted to use the cooker.

I was never one to resist a challenge but I was also not one who wanted to put his frail flesh or belongings on the line. There are two characteristics I have which have stood me in good stead throughout my life,  one is the capacity to act alone, the second is to keep my mouth zipped afterwards, forever if necessary.

Now it just so happened that the two kitchens on a floor were linked by a very narrow access passage, so it was possible to go into one kitchen (A above), and appear and disappear briefly in the other (B). What I did, I did entirely unplanned. Going into kitchen A I found that the oven was in use, though there was no one about. I then went through the corridor to kitchen B where I found the kitchen empty but the cooker occupied by Ringo's socks. Without a moment's hesitation I turned the cooker up to max, and made my escape unobserved to my room.  Ten minutes later all hell broke out. Oh the cursings! Oh the stompings! Oh the fuming of both socks and rage! Everyone came out of their rooms, everyone fell about laughing, and who could tell which of those creased with laughter was the incendiarist? Only me, and I never did.

In the early 1970s one of my first jobs as a "support programmer" with ICL was writing software on F.W.Woolworth's site in Castleton outside Rochdale. This often involved working at night and over the weekends because we needed access to the computer when it wasn't running "real" work. We mostly kept to the computer room and its associated offices, but we were warned that if we had cause to leave that area we absolutely must ring the security guard so that he could retrieve Fang the alsatian. Fang was a very single-minded guard dog. So far as he was concerned, no one had any right to be anywhere in the buildings except him and his security-guard master. Once the place closed down for the evening, and the last worker had gone home, Fang would be let out of his kennel to roam the corridors and stairwells at his leisure, and on his own.

On one particular day Sam, one of the computer operators, was sent to go out and get some hot meat pies for the team from the pub up the road. As per SOP, he rang the guard who retrieved Fang so he could get out of the side door in safety. Somewhere communication broke down, the guard thinking that Sam had gone home. Sam thinking that Fang was being held in limbo until he got back. Happily letting himself in through the side door he set off for the lift with his pies. As he arrived at the lifts he heard a scrabbling noise from down the corridor and saw coming towards him an enraged Fang. He just had time to jump into the lift and press the button for the computer room floor - the top floor. Relief was short lived however, because the doors opened to reveal Fang just negotiating the last flight of stairs to the landing. Quick as a flash Sam slammed the doors close button and set off back to the ground floor. As the doors shut he could see through the windows Fang turning in his own length to set off back downstairs. This happened a couple of times until Sam thought of delaying Fang on the ground floor by throwing him a meat pie. This appeared to work, because on arriving back on the top floor Fang was nowhere to be seen. To get back to safety Sam had to get through the canteen and he was half way across when he heard the crackle of claws on vinyl. Fang was back! Sam had no time to get to the opposite doors and climbed onto the serving counter just ahead of the enraged Fang. 

At this point Sam got really scared and began screaming for help while simultaneously throwing his remaining pies, one by one to Fang. Fortunately someone in the computer room heard the commotion and rang the security guard. The story has a happy ending in that Sam's pies didn't run out before his luck, but it was a long time before he'd risk going through those corridors even when he was assured that Fang was firmly restrained.

Does your first real kiss stick in everyone's mind? Does yours? Mine certainly does. 

Those of you who have read other entries in this blog will have realised that I was a child at a time in the past so distant that it would have been unsurprising if you had seen the odd dinosoar passing the window. When I was a kid village life was pretty much unchanged, certainly since before WWII and possibly even earlier. We still had village pantos that everyone went to, and parties in the school building that all the children went to up to I don't really know what age, under the supervision of of a gang of village ladies acting as mentors and chaperones. I can't remember the details of this particular party, or really how those parties worked, given the variety of age groups involved but I do remember the circumstances of my first real kiss.

Among all the other things we must have done we were playing some version of "postmans knock". It went something like (1) kids form a circle of alternating sex. (2) one kid goes out to other room. (3) kids spin bottle, nearest child of opposite sex to the out-of-room one is next to go out. Before s/he does so everyone shouts "kiss or stamp"? Kid in other room (not knowing who is coming) has to decide if they want to kiss that person or have them stamp on their foot. (4) exiled child shouts "kiss" or "stamp", and when the selected kid comes out they transact the deal in private, and then the first child comes back and the whole process starts again with the second child in the other room.

I guess I was about twelve years old when this game happened. The first time I was called out it was to give a kiss to a slight girl of about ten years old. We exchanged, as you might imagine, very chaste pecks on the cheek and off she went. Now it was my turn to choose the forfeit. From the other room comes the shout "Kiss or stamp?". "Kiss!" says I, the alternative being deemed spineless, and in comes Elaine S. Elaine was probably about fourteen and more or less a woman, but only the same height as me. I leant towards her for the expected peck, and found myself clamped to her body like a limpet to a very attractive rock, while she gave me an extremely adult "snog". It is clear to me now that she had spent not a little time with older boys, much to my advantage. After a few seconds she put me down and I staggered back to the rest of the company. I remember across all the years the smiles on the faces of the adults who were there, which I now realise indicated that they knew that Elaine had promoted yet another boy from childhood to adolescence, or at least had imbued him with aspirations that up to that moment had been nothing if not ill-formed.

Of course Elaine would remember absolutely nothing of this, any more than I remember any of the other people I met up with in that game. I don't really remember what Elaine looked like, but boy, do I remember that kiss.

It's impossible to believe, as I watch my friends' daughter playing with a smart phone, to think of our amusements at that age. Our big Victorian house had a kitchen with scullery attached, I mean "scullery" what sort of word is that in the 21st century? Anyway in those days there were very few sorts of cleaning products, in fact I think that my mother had at her disposal a donkey-stone for doing the steps, a bar of red kitchen soap, a carton of Vim, and luxury of luxuries, a box of Lux soap flakes!

It was these soap flakes which formed the basis of one of my happiest summertime pastimes. My mother would put some warm water in the sink, sprinkle in a handful of flakes, and stand me on a chair so that I could swirl the water around and make huge frothing castles. I've no idea why this was so endlessly fascinating, but I never tired of it, and would only give up when the water had gone cold, and my fingers were wrinkly as prunes.

When I was a bit older my friend Clive and I would go out in the field at the back (the house had belonged to a tailor who had kept a couple of horses) and build small bonfires. These could be much enhanced by the addition of any old plastic macs that we could find. These would create huge billowing clouds of black smoke, delightful to small boys. PCBs and the like hadn't been invented then, though the smell of the oily roiling smoke did suggest that it was best not to breath it in too extensive quantities. Where the plastic macs came from is anyone's guess.

In one part of the garden was an orchard, and this had against one wall a large bank of blackberry brambles. One day Clive and I contrived to set fire to these (are all small boys pyromaniacs?) with terrifying results. We were used to little bonfires burning under control. Suddenly we were faced with flames snarling and crackling and twice our height. Should we run? The brambles were against an outbuilding, if we ran would the whole world burn down?. Fortunately we did exactly the right thing. Spotting an old door we managed, with super-boy strength, to fling it onto the flames and crush the fire out of existence.

It was in the orchard that I came to grief. We had some chickens which ranged freely and their droppings resulted in copious quantities of apples each year. On this particular day Clive and I were emulating the throwing of hand-grenades by picking up windfall apples and hurling them against the wall. We might have got away with this, but when we shook down the entire crop of eating apples from one of the trees and destroyed those too we were in big trouble. My father quickly found out, and for the only time in my life I got smacked. Even Clive got his pants dusted a couple of times, because in those days all parents stood "in loco parentis" for other children they could catch. Clive probably thought himself lucky, because if his dad had delivered the smacks I'm sure they would have been more extensive and harder.

When was the first time you ever used a power tool? Chances are, that like me, it was an electric drill. And I guess that whatever tool it was, drill or saw or whatever, you had a few dummy-runs on some odd bits of wood or waste metal. Well let me tell you, that's for sissies. The first time, and I mean absolutely the very first time I ever held an electric drill in my hands, I was asked to drill a hole in the casting for the high-pressure section of a steam turbine. It must have weighed twenty tons.

I was an apprentice on the shop floor of a massive engineering works in Manchester, and I'd just arrived in this particular department to do a few weeks as a trainee. Now admittedly the hole I had to drill was trivial - one of several that would accept screws to hold on some sort of pressure gauge, and no doubt the blokes on the shop-floor thought they'd given me the easiest of easy jobs, but I can't help feeling that the question "Have you never done this before?" might have been asked before I'd made a kind of 20° off vertical hole and then broken the drill bit off in it. I suppose I could have refused to do it until I'd done a bit of practicing, but I was just 18, and this was 1963, and you did what you were told in those days.

This happened right at the end of the shift, and I was so paralysed with fear that I had ruined the whole casting, or that I would be the victim of some horrible retributive ritual by the full-timers, that I took the next day off sick. When I went back the incident only got mentioned by one of the craft apprentices who made some disparaging comments about my abilities, both specific and general, but all in all I felt I'd got off lightly.

Since then though I have never been able to pick up a drill without remembering that horrible day, even though I became quite handy in the end.

Colossal, nay gargantuan he speeds across the plain,
In a bucket of perfect filigree he carries his second brain,
His efforts, though magnificent are generally in vain,
While the song he sings is haunting,
Like a subtle silver flame.

The bicycle he rides upon is made of jet and gold,
The bell upon the handlebars exciting when it's told,
Because it tells of distances astonishingly old,
The sound of its extolling both indifferent and cold.

Far from the realms of anthracite his phosphorescent track
Stretches out behind him though he never can look back
Through complex crystalline spectacles kept in a nebulous sack,
Woven of possibilities embossed with a sense of lack. 

Elemental optimism draws him on his way,
Through fields of susceptible somnolence where inelegant cattle play,
And he adopts an indifferent expression, for he has nothing useful to say
To creatures whose subtle persistence might lead his heart astray.

The night falls like a catastrophe, the horizon drawing near,
He pedals down the edge of time, with little time to fear,
The chiming of his intellect, or so it would appear,
Takes him over the edge, and into another year.

There's many a person who's been pissed off without a doubt. There's many a man I guess, who has, at some time  while half awake and after a bit too much beer, pissed in an inappropriate place. It is an unfortunate juxtaposition of this kind of situation that led to my having the less than edifying experience of being pissed on.

When I worked in Bristol in the early 1990s - a period which seems like yesterday to me, but which is now over twenty years ago, I lived in a bed-sit in Cotham. It was a very nice "gaff" - the house was owned by a gay couple who lived upstairs, and on the same floor as me lived a very pretty and sociable young woman and a gay bloke, so the place was interesting and eventful.

Anyway, on this particular night I was off to see The Walter Trout Band somewhere in Bristol, and this other bloke from work had expressed a desire to go, and I said I would let him sleep on my floor. Eventually a third chap decided he'd come along too, but he'd go home on the train as he lived locally, let's call him Declan MacSweeney, just to protect the innocent. He wasn't innocent, so that was his name..

The evening went along pretty well. It was a stand-up gig, and the audience was the kind of audience who need treating with respect, but Declan got more and more pissed, downing lager like there was no tomorrow, and escaping getting thumped by the skin of his teeth on several occasions. Eventually we got out and Declan revealed that he had missed his train home, so I agreed to let him sleep on my floor too.

When we got back to my room it was clear that Declan was still absorbing the alcohol from his last drinks, and was getting more and more pissed. When we put the light out he was in that rolling about and moaning state of complete drunkeness. The other chap and I kept telling him to shut up, and in the end and only when I threatened to chuck him out, did he finally go to sleep.

Next thing I knew, but actually it must have been an hour or so later, I woke up to find a muttering figure looming over my bed, and before I've even got my bearings he's pissing on my feet. I shouted at him of course, and he managed to stop, at which point I dragged him off to the lavatory down the corridor. It says something about my good nature that I let him back in the room at all. It also suggests that I had drunk my share that instead of ripping all the bedding off my bed, I just got back in and pulled my feet up out of the damp patch. In retrospect this seems pretty disgusting, but at the time I was a bit bemused I guess. Next day I bundled all my duvet and other damp bits and pieces in a bin bag and gave it to Declan to take home to his wife to wash and dry.

At work the following day Declan, who was anyway one of those rather cadaverous fellows, sat at his desk moaning slightly and looking like a ghost.

A few weeks later Declan was sent to Frankfurt to sort out some software, and as luck would have it the whole thing went belly up and I was the only person who could fix it, so I flew out to rescue him. We never mentioned the pissing incident again, which I suppose was an omission on my part since I should really have made him sweat as I dragged him out of the mire. Really though Declan was a good bloke, and a lot of fun, so if I had to be pissed on by someon

When will little old grannies disappear? For as long as I can remember there have been a little old grannies. They have ill fitting cardigans, oversized shopping bags, they are frail and hunched  and very often their white hair is in a loose bun. When I was very small they used to have blue straw hats with hat pins, then for a long time they had plastic macs and rain hoods, indeed even now occasionally a granny can be seen with a rain hood. My granny was a little old granny when she was only sixty. We used to go round and visit her and she would give me a tin of condensed milk and a teaspoon. She used to add up her finances by writing sums on the wallpaper in copy-ink pencil. Nevertheless even though styles have changed, and fashions have come and gone, for the most part the grannies have remained exactly the same, as though no matter what women have worn throughout their lives, at some point, like butterflies, they enter a life stage which necessitates them metamorphosing into grannies. The question is, will the current generation of baby boomers approaching granny age go the same way? Will women who started out as hippy chicks, and who still dress and have life-styles more like a forty year old than sixty, nevertheless one day waken up and find themselves drawn to the flat shoes and lisle stockings of the granny? Or will the granny pass from our sight, like the passenger pigeon, Ajax scouring powder, or real Victory "V" lozenges?

Cancer: I suppose you think it'll never happen to you. Especially if like me you are reasonably fit and have had few chemical vices. No smoking ever. No vast intake of alcohol or even meat. I mean, you always know intellectually that something will get you in the end, that no life is without its limit, but to find that you might be dealing with your nemesis, especially out of a clear blue sky, is a bit of a facer. Bizarrely "out of a clear blue sky" is probably right. One bad dose of sunburn when you are young can tip the scales against you, and I did have one such thing at the age of about 26 on the Isles of Scilly. So maybe what caused me to get cancer was being out in the fresh air! Ironic or what? Still what can't be cured must be endured, literally.  For the moment, at least, it hasn't shown up anywhere but locally to where it first appeared, and the only thing they do at present is cut it out. Things are moving with melanoma, bright new horizons may be opening, but we are rather more in the era of barber-surgeons than anywhere else. Genetic and immune therapies are being tested on those with advanced cancer, but for those of us in the earlier stages, it's cut and come again. Wait and see. What's that cough? That headache? That twinge in the stomach? Hypochondria is a side effect when the grim reaper could be just around the corner. You'll be wondering why the dandelion clock? Melanoma is like that. Grab the clock. Did you get all the seeds? Maybe, but if not, perhaps the odd one  is drifting on the wind to who knows where? Read more here.

Actually, I think there has been only one moment when I have consciously stared death in the face. I'm sure there have been times when the grim reaper's sword has narrowly missed me, but I haven't been aware of it. This was through no fault of my own either.

The time I do remember, was back around 1973. I think that was the year. Anyway it was long before there were nice connecting motorways all over the place, and I was on my way to London. I'd driven down the M6 to somewhere north of Birmingham and was crossing over to the M1 on the A45, or so I remember. Anyway in those days, I drove a Ford Escort van. I came to an uphill section just as I came up behind a large articulated lorry. There was plenty of room to overtake it, and no oncoming traffic in view, however as I began to overtake, I saw that the lorry was driving right on the tail of a second one, so close that I hadn't seen the leading vehicle.  There was still no oncoming traffic so I carried on, thinking I could get past both lorries in one go. However, just as I got level with the gap between the two, another truck appeared coming flat out towards me. There was clearly no time to get past my leading lorry, so I started indicating that I needed to pull into the gap. Instead of the rear lorry making room for me, he just carried on, leaving me hanging out on the wrong side of the road. I then decided - if that's the right word - to force the gap open by nudging in towards the cab of the trailing lorry, while meanwhile the approaching truck is making no attempt to brake and is nearly on top of me. Only when I heard the massive wheelnuts of the lorry beside me scoring the side of my van, did I realise that nothing would make him give way, and that I now had almost no options left. Good luck rather than good judgement make me slam the brakes on, the lorry whizzed up the inside of my van, and at the last possible second, I swerved in behind him as the downhill truck roars past blowing its air-horns, and with the driver waving two fingers at me and bawling invective.

I then trailed the lorries to the top of the hill, where they stopped. I stopped too and went to speak to the drivers. I asked "why wouldn't you let me in?". The driver from the back truck said "Can't you see, he's got a bit of summat loose on the back of his lorry. If it had fallen off it could have been dangerous!". I think I thought about calling the police or getting insurance details or whatever, but it was in the days long before mobile phones, and I was just glad to have escaped in one piece. I'm not even sure if at that instant I understood just how close I'd come to dying, but in the years since, that scene has come to replay itself more than once, and I'm sure now it was pretty close.