You wouldn't think that alarm clocks were worthy of any great attention. I mean they work or they don't, you'd think, but nevertheless a couple of clock-related stories spring to mind. Of course, I may already be talking to a generation for whom the term "alarm clock" is as archaic as the term "phonograph". But yes, it's true at one time feature-rich meant a clock with a bell.

When first I went to live in Manchester, I lived in genuine old-fashioned lodgings. I was an apprentice at AEI in Trafford Park, and I shared a large attic room with two other apprentices: Duncan MacLeish and Brian Graham Lewis. We used to have to start work at 7:45 a.m. Duncan had a scooter, and he and Brian went to work on that. I went on my bike, which meant I had to get up a few minutes before the others, at about 6:30. I had an alarm clock, but my bed was in that corner of the room most distant from the door, where the light switch was. I conceived the idea of attaching a string to the switch, so that when I woke I would pull the string and turn on the light. This worked OK, until Brian decided it would be amusing to reach out in the darkness, and cut the string. We were engineers, and I quickly invented a more automated solution. This was to balance my alarm clock on the edge of a wardrobe next to the door, with a string attached to its alarm winder, in such a way that when the alarm went off the whole clock was pulled off the wardrobe. A second string attached the clock to the light switch, so the weight of the falling clock turned the light on. A third string brought the clock up short before it hit the floor. I don't recall how long this arrangement was in use, or whether it lasted till spring daylight made it unnecessary, but it defeated Brian Graham Lewis who wasn't prepared to crawl out of bed to defeat it.

The second alarm clock arrangement I had was one which created my first radio alarm. This was some years later, the winter of 1967/8. My radios were always pretty battered, and at that point I had a transistor set which was really only the "mother board", being entirely devoid of a case. I also had an alarm clock which had no glass, so that its hands were exposed. I was still getting up at some ungodly hour, and I decided it would be great if I could get the radio to come on automatically. I connected the clock into the battery circuit, and fixed a contact at the 6:30 point, so that when the hour hand reached there the circuit was "made" and the radio came on. Absolutely ace. 

Crumbs. For the first time in a very long time I've got a stupendous cold. One of the sort that starts off with an actual dripping nose. Bizarre. But it brings to mind two stories relating to such an affliction, one from my own past, and one from long ago in my father's.

The very first contract programming job that I got was in 1973, and because it was to do with Air Traffic Control I had to have security clearance. During the week that this took, the firm stuck me in a temporary office off the actually site. At first this seemed like a good deal, as the office was in the Stoke Poges Country Club, but the uplifting feelings inspired driving through the beautiful grounds towards the lovely frontage were soon dispelled when I entered through a side door and found that I was to be incarcerated in a section of converted windowless basement corridor with only a rather uncommunicative bloke who gave me a pile of astonishingly boring manuals to read.

To make things much worse, I had hardly got settled in when I was suddenly felled by a colossal cold. This being the first week of a very well paid new job, I couldn't take a day off, so I just had to get on with it. My companion, who could have been no happier with his lot than me was one of those people who would lapse into staring blankly when his mind drifted. Usually this would mean he was staring at me, or rather through me. The room was far too warm, and so I sat there reading boring paperwork, fighting sleep and mopping up my dripping nose. Sadly in the end I just dropped off to sleep. I woke up to find my companion staring in a kind of horror at the middle of my chest, and found that, unserviced, my nose had dripped copiously onto my tie, which had a large damp patch right across the middle.

If possible, my father's story was more disgusting. In his junior school, the headmaster was responsible for dishing out the school dinner. The problem was that he always had a chronic drip on the end of his nose, which inevitably would fall into one meal at least. How the children watched to try not to receive the meal with this benison. An associated story was that the same master had a cat which would sit on his shoulder during the dispensing of food, and on one occasion it fell off into the large tureen of stew meant to feed the whole school. The master extracted the catpicked up the tureen and carried it back into the kitchen, where luckily there was a completely identical tureen full of stew ready to replace it.

I was equipped with a pretty acute mind, and as a small boy I was interested in everything. Really it's wrong to blame other people for how you turn out, but I think if I was going to blame any one thing for derailing my early educational opportunities, it was my bloody awful secondary school. I went in a bright, inquisitive, energetic child, third in the "A" form at the end of the first year, and came out at the end of five more years a disaffected time waster, with an extremely ropey set of "A" levels. 

You could get away with an immense amount in that school. The things I did because I didn't do the things I should have been doing, must have occupied far more energy and caused me far more mental stress than if I had stuck to the straight and narrow. An example. I would fail to do my maths homework on time, and would take the book up to the shelves outside the staff room and slip it in late. Sometimes the books would already have been marked, and though I claimed that the master had just overlooked my book, he soon cottoned on. Undaunted, I came up with the idea that after the books had been collected, I would sneak up there and extract three or four of my classmate's books, so that if he did mark them before my work was put back, I'd not be the only unmarked book. Better still, I quickly realised that if I pinched Cynthia Clegg's book - that brightest and best of mathematicians, I didn't need to bother even doing the work at all. An hours copying and it was all settled. 

Not all the subjects could be scammed n this way, because not all the teachers left their books out there. It was almost impossible for a skiver like me to get a decent mark in French, for instance, because in an exercise with ten answers, an answer had to be perfect to score a mark. I therefore frequently hit zero on the scale of 1 to 10. On one memorable occasion the French teacher said I had to take my awful work home and get it signed by my father. This was clearly a non-starter in the world of teenage revelation, and so I had to spend an entire evening perfecting my father's signature. Even then I had a false start, and left what looked to me like a pretty obvious "crossing out" to one side of the page. At this distance in time I suspect the teacher knew damned well I'd forged it, but had run out of reprisals. 

My major problem with all these goings on, was that my mother was on the school governors, and so would visit the school premises once a month. There were no such things then as parent-teacher's evenings so I was the only child in my class who suffered the possibility of his parent running into some irate teacher and returning home clothed in fury and retribution.

I  met Ann Kenyon at a dance at Manchester University Union sometime in 1968. You could go to those dances and "chat up" women week in week out with varying success. Very often you could work the room all night, you could even hook some girl into having a drink and a chat, even sometimes a subsequent date, but usually the liaison was unsatisfactory on one side or another, there'd be no spark, even though you might both hope there would be. 

Once in a while though, for me usually through a shared sense of humour, things would just click. That was the way it was with Ann. We were laughing from more or less the first dance. There was no doubt we were going to go and have a drink together. We both had hangers on - mine was a casual friend nicknamed "Rat", but they faded out of our perception very quickly. Across all these years I can't remember much more about that evening, except that when the women had gone off to catch their bus Rat said to me "I bet you wish you'd got the car with you" (I used to borrow my flat-mates car sometimes), and I said "It's OK I've got her number." He was a bit dismissive, suggested I'd probably get blanked, but I knew that that just couldn't happen, this was a relationship already made.

I really liked Ann. We both liked dancing. We had a lot of fun. And I really liked her Bolton accent. I used to take her home in the borrowed car up to her house in Bolton and go in sometimes for a cup of tea with her parents and sister. That tea was always only ever lukewarm and after a few visits I worked out why. The house had a lean-to sort of scullery-kitchen against the back wall, and that's where the crockery was kept. The tea was made in a pot that wasn't warmed, and then poured into mugs that were also icy chilled, and because the pot was so cold, the tea didn't "brew" properly. It was truly awful. When I got to know her parents a bit better I volunteered to make the tea. Knowall puppy that I was I heated the pot, and the mugs. The result was that when Ann's dad took his usual first great swig of tea, it only stayed in his mouth for half a second before spraying out on the rag rug. (I might have made the rag rug up, to be honest)

I think we went out for about a year. It's a very long time ago. She was quite a stylish young woman and I recall us once going to visit my friend Stuart. She was wearing a split skirt over gold trousers which was quite novel for the time. Sometimes I'd meet her off the train in Victoria station, and I remember her coming up from the underpass in a fur coat. These days I'd have been horrified, but she did look a bit like film star to me. I remember once carrying her over a puddle in some cinema car park. "This is what I likes" she said.

Eventually I got a new job and had to go to London to be trained. This was after we'd stopped actually going out. She came down to visit. I remember her being very excited because she'd "found" Barbara Hepworth. I remember us going to Hampton Court and getting lost in the Maze. I remember an American couple coming up and asking us if a sundial in the gardens was working.

She got her first job as a teacher up around Manchester, and I came back to start my job. When I thought to ring her, I found I'd mislaid the book with her phone number. I thought "well I can write", but with the new job and all, I left it for maybe six months. I felt a bit guilty, and thought I'd make the effort to drive up and see her parents and find out where she was. I remember her mum coming to the door. "Hello" I said, " I seem to have lost touch with Ann, what's she up to?"

"Oh, Jim" she said, "Come in, sit down, have a cup of tea.".  Her dad was in the kitchen, in his usual chair. I sat down and said hello. He just looked at me, and her mum came back and said : "I'm sorry lad, she's dead.".

I've no photograph, no letters, no common friends, nothing but these few memories, now over forty years old.

When I was younger I had stuff under control I think. When I went to Finland, that was when I was thirty four, I got all my stuff into my car. All that is, except the gardening equipment, which I left behind. Actually that might be the solution to the problem of "stuff" - keep moving around, and if you can't carry something, leave it behind; "heaven is in goodbye forever" where stuff is concerned. Now I've been in the same place for twenty five years (my god), I'm like a flipping pack-rat. I've got so much stuff in fact that I don't know what I've got. For a long time I did just let it form drifts. I mean not like one of those hoarding people, but just in drawers and in the garage and in the less used parts of the house. The kind of central areas of life, especially the parts which I share with Penny, were reasonably tidy, but at the edges there was what felt like a terminal moraine of stuff. Plants and paints and tools and books and toys and photography equipment and unfinished projects and equipment for beading and model making and calligraphy and origami and amateur radio and this and that and the other. 

In the end I decided to have a purge, and I got loads of dinky boxes with little slots for labels and collected all the stuff up and organised it and labelled the boxes. It worked great for the big stuff, or the categories with plenty of mental weight. So the box with the amateur radio set and its bits and pieces, not going to forget that, the box with all my old school books in, not going to forget that. Unfortunately for the more granular stuff organisation had the opposite effect to that intended. There were four pots of pens and pencils on the shelf above my computer. All sorts of pens, from common or garden biros to sophisticated markers. I must have decided to rationalise. Anyway, when I needed a CD marker pen, there were none. I was a bit surprised, because I thought I had at least two, but they weren't with the pens. I found a set of four colours on ebay, and bought them. Shortly afterwards I found a neat little box in a drawer, full of specialist pens. Huh! Now I'd got twice as many CD marker pens as anyone could possibly need. just adding to the sea of stuff. One day I was overwhelmed by my more-or-less lifetime collection of books, and I collected all but my most treasured titles and took them to the charity shop. Very briefly - and I mean, very briefly the bookcases had spaces in them. Now they are once more full. Where does it all come from? I mean I get all my books from the library since I retired.

In absolute contrast to what I became at secondary school, in junior school I was an easy pupil. This was, I think, because I was quite bright, and I was interested in everything, so learning stuff wasn't a chore. Looking back at my school books, of which a few have survived, it was really only my hand writing and occasional bouts of slap-dashery which seem to have aroused comment. 

This did not however free me from the risk of being included in the general retribution which could be meted out to whole classes if a teacher could not find the specific culprit for a crime. On one occasion I recall standing in a row of children,  which was being interrogated for a particular piece of wrongdoing. I think, across the mists of time, it was for drawing on a ruler. The culprit had failed to own up, and with precious playtime disappearing I decided I would claim responsibility, even though I was not at fault. I must have failed to convince, because the teacher said "It wasn't you Jim, was it?" under which bludgeoning I cracked, and revealed that I thought the innocent were suffering unjustly (though I suspect not in those terms). After a few harumphs we were all allowed to escape, entirely illogically.

The worst case of generalised retribution though was at the hands of the Head Mistress when I was in the "top" class, and was entirely inadvertent on her part. In those days it was quite commonplace for some teachers to blow their tops in the most histrionic manner. On this occasion Miss S. had worked herself up into a fine lather about something, and was almost apoplectic with rage (were these teacherly rages real or imitation? I have no idea). Part of the act was for her to wave her arms about madly while hurling invective at all and sundry. This was entirely normal. Usually however, she put her pen down before she "went off on one", but this time she was holding her fountain-pen, the one full of red ink, in her hand. As she gesticulated wildly, a fine spray of ink left the pen and peppered the class, both skin and clothing, with a fine measles of red dots. On arriving home my parents were amused and uncomplaining. That's just the way teaching was in the 1950s.

I remember when I escaped from Upper Cumberworth, when I no longer had to live as an only-teenager in a bungalow with my mum & dad. It was the day before my eighteenth birthday : 24th September 1963, and I remember arriving in the middle of Manchester at dusk. Manchester you know, not Huddersfield, but bloody Manchester. I must have come in to Exchange Station, and walked up to the bottom of Market Street. I must have been told what bus to get, although I don't remember any of that. Manchester has become so familiar to me in the intervening years that I can't really remember the real excitement of the moment, although maybe something still lingers in the frisson I feel whenever I visit the city, even today. The lodgings the firm had arranged were in Sale, and I remember watching the road junctions on the look-out for an off licence with a Sandeman's port sign - that was the corner of Barker's Lane where my lodgings were. The whole think was massively scary, and massively exciting. I have no idea what all this homesickness stuff that modern kids are supposed to suffer when they fly the nest. I was like an arrow loosed from a bow.  I was just ruthless. I never thought how it made my parents feel, especially my poor mother. I was her only child, and I didn't even look back. But maybe that's the way it has to be with young men. From a room of my own I was now sharing an unheated attic with two strangers in a lodging house in the suburbs of Manchester. Next day I was going to work in a huge factory doing heaven knew what. I loved the whole business! In fact I was so overwrought that for the one and only time in my life, I recall I was actually sick with excitement!