Morris

I.Am.A.Tart.

Not a Morris tart. Not yet. I’m a member of only one team. To be a real Morris tart you have to be a member of at least two teams. There seems to be a high incidence of Morris tarts. Where they get the time to dance with different sides I have no idea. One is keeping me busy enough at the moment.

I believe I may have a touch of what is known in the rock world as LSD. That’s Lead Singer Disease……not the mind altering drug. I like being the centre of attention i.e. a tart. You may have already guessed that due to my delusional ‘whistling Rock God®’ status. Probably something to do with my issues with insecurity (a word I have had occasion to use before in this blog). And Morris dancing panders to that insecurity and attention seeking. But in a safe way. I’m in a team and not carrying the whole weight of expectation solely on my shoulders (anything to avoid responsibility, but that’s another issue entirely and for the moment, left well alone). And after a pint or two any weight disappears anyway.

There was a time over the last few years where I thought I was naturally a misanthrope, hating the world and everyone in it. This outlook has been severely challenged by my involvement in this traditional and yet utterly daft practice. An attention seeking misanthrope? Yeah! I know. Just plain weird.

I started with some trepidation. I’d seen Morris men before, who hasn’t, and always thought ‘you’ll never catch me doing that’. Now I’m a complete and utter convert. Having played in the local sessions (a favoured haunt of plain clothed Morris men on the lookout for fresh blood) I was approached by Icknield Way Morris Men. I said I’d give it a try; see how it went. Now I thought I was reasonably fit what with cycling for an hour or so most days, enjoying walking and suchlike. After just three or four minutes (it felt a lot longer) of skipping and clashing staves I was a knackered, sweaty heap on the floor. And next day! Oh, my calves! I could hardly walk! The following week I did some calf stretching, placing my outstretched arms on the walls and working the muscles. I was told in no uncertain terms that the wall was fine where it was and didn’t need moving further out.

And so it continued through the winter; Wednesday nights spent in the Scout Hut, hopping, skipping and flailing away in an attempt to be in the right place at the right time and come home with all knuckles still intact. By mid February I was, I admit, struggling. Dull, repetitive and boring are three of the words to describe how it felt but I carried on after being reassured that things would be different during the season. And oh, boy! How different.

My first dance out was in the middle of Oxford in the middle of April. I could describe myself as a trifle nervous at the time but that would be vastly understating my emotional state. Coming close to soiling my pristine white trousers would be more reasonably apt. However once I had completed my first dance (‘Jenny Lind’* for anyone reading this who has an inkling about what I’m wittering on about) and quite well, although I say so myself, well it all started to make sense. The roar of the crowd (alright….muted applause) and the smell of the……crowd (???), not to mention the relief of having popped my Morris cherry, gave me a rather pleasing glow inside. With bookings coming thick and fast, dancing two or three times a week, I learnt more in one month than I’d learnt throughout the winter and now I just love it. I get to go to lots of towns and pubs and festivals I would never normally go to, drink beer, have people applaud me/us, drink beer and have a laugh (and a beer. Did I mention beer yet?) with Icknield Way and all the other teams I meet, all of whom are incredibly friendly, funny, sociable and supportive. And they’re not all old farts. IWMM have ages ranging from teens to septuign, septuajen…septigan…...errr 70 year olds.

*and scarily, available on YouTube.

I have come a long way in the last few months and I’m loving every minute. That big hole in the ground currently feels quite a distance away.

On Venues

Anywhere. The dafter the better. More usually (but not totally) confined to pub car parks or town high streets. IWMM have danced on hill tops and, to the detriment of now rusting bells, in the sea.

On Kit.

Cost; Bugger all. Especially when compared to the cost of, say…SCUBA gear, or a set of golf bats. Most people already possess a white shirt and black shoes. A cheap straw hat is…well….cheap, and flowers can be picked up in cemeteries for nowt. Bells and waistcoat are provided by the team. It has been said that once dressed as a Morris man you can enter the scuzziest pubs in the country, safe in the knowledge that the regulars will turn around, look at you, and assume that you are a harmless idiot and therefore ‘not worth it’. Holding a big stick may have a bearing on the matter too.

On Hats

Straw, broad brimmed (usually) and cheap. The more battered the better. Decorate with ribbons, flowers and badges for that authentic ‘girly’ look. In Morris one has to be utterly secure in one’s sexuality in order to dress up with flowers, wave hankies and hold hands with other blokes. I believe it was Mike Harding who once described Morris men as ‘Big blokes with gardens in their ‘ats.’ Holding a big stick may prevent any abusive comments however.

On Tankards

De rigeur amongst the morris fraternity. Like hats, the more battered the better. Always try to get a tankard that holds just more than a pint. Perfectly happy to draw short pints all the rest of the time, landlords become highly volatile when you hand over a tankard that contains a thou’ over the pint. Tankards (pewter, of course) should be clipped to the waist or bag when not in use for that authentic pisshead look. This usually only occurs on the way to or from a venue. Tankards are, on the whole, much happier when full and tipped at an angle to the lips.

On Beer

Lots of it on all occasions. Only Real Ale (or Cider) will do. None of that chilled horse pee masquerading as drink.

On Bells

One can’t be a shrinking violet with these strapped to your calves. You can be heard coming from miles around. Embrace it. Do not be afraid. You already look silly in the hat. The bells just round things off. In one pub we were in recently one patron was overheard to say ‘Those bells are really effin’ annoying’ at which point several of us needed to get to the bar for a beer, return to our seats, remember that we hadn’t bought any crisps, return to the bar, return to our seats with aforementioned potato based snacks, suddenly need to go to the loo etc. (see ‘On Kit’ above for reasons as to why it was safe to do this). The rumour that Morris men spend hours each week individually tuning each bell cannot be substantiated.

On Time

Never. Morris Time runs about 20 minutes (and 100 years) behind everything else. Wearing sunglasses and using a mobile while dressed in kit always looks incongruous……and long may it stay so.

On Hankies

The bigger the better. Big 21 inch hankies are well sought after. Clean is preferable. Greasy, snotty, ragged ones are only ever to be used for practice in the off season. Size is not important during the off season but causes a deadly game of one-upmanship between St. George’s Day and mid-September.

On Staves

Good, thick, straight and hard. That’s what you need.

Tunes 2

A short addendum

It occurred to me, having posted ‘Tunes’ last week that I’d missed something out; a bit of evidence to help arrive at the ‘Yes…Both’ conclusion. Ummm…..Let me work this through.

In the course of my ramble I mentioned that brooding, deeper, darker and more introverted music seemed to speak to me more than the lighter, upbeat, ‘fluffier’ end of things. And it does. In fact, when I’m in the Deep Dark Pit™ this music is of huge solace to me, chiming perfectly with my mood and making me feel that somebody else out there, at some time, went through something similar or had an empathy with others going through their own dark episodes. Listening to this music I can, after a bit (and sometimes quite a lot) of a wallow, feel a great sense of relief as some of the more troubling feelings are purged by this emotional connection to the music and lyrics.

So, in a complete turnaround, listening to sad, miserable music can be of great benefit. Both the cause and the cure? Maybe. Listening to it when I feel vulnerable is probably not the best idea as it could open up the pit in front of me. If I’m in the pit it can help me scramble out, or at least comfort me whilst I’m in there.  

Like everything in life, it’s probably ok in moderation, just not gorged on in huge great lumps at one time.

Listening to myself and my emotions is something I’m learning to do constantly to monitor where I am in relation to The Deep Dark Pit™. I can’t ignore them, which is probably what I have done in the past and then, unguarded and unprepared, I’ve been swallowed up by the dark once again.

Dour stuff this isn’t it?

Tunes

No. Not the ‘decond-class-dicket-to-Dottingham-please’, menthol impregnated, fruit flavoured boiled sweets. Musical (and maybe not so musical) tunes.

A question. Do I listen to sad, miserable music because I have a tendency towards sadness, depression and miserableness, or does listening to sad, miserable music make me sad, depressed and miserable? Is music the cause or the symptom? I asked this on Facebook the other day and got some interesting replies.

The reason why I ask? Well in the last year or so I have been listening to a very different music to usual and at the moment I seem to be ticking the ‘not depressed’ box quite a bit and the Deep Dark Pit™ is somewhere over that way, over there, near the horizon. Now I know it can’t be purely down to the music but surely it’s having some effect? Isn’t it? I’ll come back to that one soon as there are several other factors that I know are influencing where I am.

One is my new found status as a whistling Rock God® which isn’t doing me any harm whatsoever. My current enthusiasm for Morris Dancing, with all its concomitant socialising (alright!….drinking…….but not just drinking…..honest) and increased exercise benefits are….err, beneficial. Work is steady, not onerous, albeit a bit quiet. The year of psychotherapy has also done me good. I’ve mentioned previously that it ran for just one year (and one year only) but that year has done me more good than anticipated. That huge lurking monster; that whirl of emotion, fear, insecurity and vulnerability deep inside is, if not tamed, at least under some control. My (almost) daily bike ride and the rather sunshiney spring (hurrah and huzzah!) are all making for a rather grand time. A full diary stops the brooding as well, I can tell you. Dance outs, not just mid-week but weekends as well, music sessions and the usual social life make for a busy time.

And so to the music.

After I discovered a certain Mr. John Peel and music other than David Cassidy, The Nolans and Terry Jacks I immersed myself in rock, from great, riff driven stuff to the more complicated and twiddly stuff known as prog. My preference seemed to be for the brooding, deeper, darker and more introverted stuff. It just seemed to speak to me more than the lighter, upbeat, ‘fluffier’ end of things. It appeared to have more to say and I connected with it but was that because I was partial to more intelligent lyrics or because I was wired up to be a misanthrope? And one could hardly say that the lyrics of Yes were intelligent. In fact many of them were completely unintelligible.

Now, I’m tall and blond. The rest of my immediate family are shorter, darker, stockier. I always felt a little ‘apart’; a not quite total connection and that’s something that I can relate to, and has spilled over into, everything I have ever done, whether it was work, school, clubs, hobbies or relationships. So maybe I was hard wired from the beginning to feel music that had an otherness, a dark separateness, an element of loneliness, to the more commercial end of the market and it’s songs of love, belonging and gay abandon. Maybe listening to moody music has had an effect on the way I look at things. At the very least I think it has exacerbated what was already there.

For the last year or so I have been playing and listening to a much lighter form of music. Folk, basically. From 16^th Century Playford tunes right up to modern experimental bands like Lau, it’s around me a lot of the time, either at sessions, out at morris dances or via Spotify where I discover more. That doesn’t mean to say I’ve stopped listening to Pink Floyd, ELP, Joy Division, Nick Drake, Mahler and Shostakovich etc; I just don’t listen to it as much. My new position as a whistling Rock God® where I strut my stuff  (and there’s an image to conjour with) down at the pub with friends (or at least with very tolerant aquaintances) over a couple or so pints of Real Ale® has dragged me away from the Deep Dark Pit™. So playing with others is probably at least as, if not more important than, what music is actually played.

And those answers on Facebook?

Richard said ‘I have a tendency towards depression but mainly listen to uplifting music...I reckon it's down to taste’.

Quite possibly true, it certainly is for Richard but maybe my taste was in-built from the beginning, however subconsciously (Meh! psycho-babble…..but possibly true anyway.).

Pam said ‘The answer is... both.’

Also quite possibly true. My taste is for brooding stuff but maybe constant exposure has exacerbated the depth of and longevity of my stay in the Deep Dark Pit™. Certainly my lack of exposure to Doom Rock© and increased exposure to Folk has coincided with a distancing of myself from Major Grump™ (aka Marvin) and his Pit. I do admit that other circumstances have had a big hand in this too (see above).

Cris quoted Morrissey ‘I wear black on the outside, 'Cause black is how I feel on the inside’ (Unloveable, from the album Louder Than Bombs).

I know how he (that’s Morrissey, not Cris) feels but thankfully I feel less so recently.

And in conclusion………I think for my case Pam got it about right. The answer is -

‘Yes….Both’.

Dive 2

Or

What happened.

I met Claire a month before dad died. They never got to meet. I think they would have liked each other.

Claire had learnt to dive when she lived in Dubai with her previous boyfriend Seamus (pronounced Shay-mus by us but pronounced by the Arabs as Sea-mouse). She did it to fill the time. She’d had a job and been sacked and getting another in Dubai wasn’t easy. She didn’t realise what a rufty-tufty (well…moderately dangerous) sport it was. She probably never would have done it if she had.

Anyway, I joined my local diving club with the intention of diving with Claire. Friday night at 7.30 we would meet up for club meetings and lectures. The meetings were held in the civic hall, the lectures in the executive conference suite (a freezing cold shed out the back). At 9pm we would shuffle off to the pool; old, cold, and full of plasters (oh! And hair. Lots of hair). This was the salubrious surroundings of St. Mary’s swimming pool, belonging to that esteemed girls boarding school and, believe it or not, the inspiration for St. Trinian’s. That’ll give you an idea of the standard of the facilities.

At 10pm, having successfully not drowned whilst deliberately filling our masks with water (only to then clear them by blowing out through the nose and filling said mask with snot)  and throwing away our DVs (demand valves – the bit you actually breathe through) we’d tootle off to the pub.

After several months of this we were ready for our first open water dive. It was then that I discovered that Claire wasn’t too keen on diving in British waters. Too cold, too dark, too little viz (dive slang for ‘visibility’) i.e. you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face half the time, and the other half you wouldn’t want to anyway. Nothing to see in British waters.

But I was committed (or should have been – What was I doing??) at least financially. I’d spent a not inconsiderable sum on a semi dry suit (posher than a wet suit, not as posh as a dry suit), mask, fins, BCD (buoyancy control device ie a special jacket that acts like the swim bladder in a fish), regulator (for air) and tanks (err….for air), blobs (technical term for SMB – Surface Marker Buoy - diving has a whole wonderful language all of its own).

My first open water dive was at The Ferryboat Inn (Yeah! I know. A pub) in Weymouth. It’s where the lagoon behind Chesil Beach meets the sea. There’s a bridge now. There’s no ferry anymore. But the pub’s still there. It’s very sheltered (the water, not the pub). I remember seeing lots of weed, a sandy bottom and a pipe fish (a relative of the seahorse) before crawling exhausted out of the water with way too much weight on my belt and being hardly able to stand the kit weighed that much. Diving is quite a good way to build muscle. There’s a lot of heavy lifting involved. Oh! And it’s far from glamorous. In real life no one ever got out of the sea looking like Sean Connery or Ursula Andress. There’s just too much snot involved (See part one and don’t ask anymore. Oh! Alright. Diving squeezes your body. This includes the sinuses. Need I go on). And then there’s the sea sickness. I’d heard the phrase ‘looking a little green about the gills’ but never actually seen anyone actually looking actually green before I actually went diving. Not pleasant.

Thus began my diving career. I’d bugger off to Skomer in West Wales, or the Farne Islands in Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Weymouth or anywhere on the South Coast west of Portland (the ground is rockier so there’s less silt so the viz is better). Claire would stay at home and decorate. After the first year she got fed up of this and decided to tag along. I’d get in the RIB (a boat with a sodding gurt engine on the back) and go diving for the day, leaving Claire to wave goodbye from the quayside (how romantic). Actually what she was doing was working herself up to trying British diving by watching me go off for the day and then come back with tales of what I’d seen and done. This would make her jealous and want to have a go. It worked too.

We were in the Farnes. Claire still hadn’t been in the water although we had dived together on holidays to Dubai and The Maldives. She borrowed some kit and one morning came out with us on the boat. After the rest of us had dived Claire was going to jump in and try it out for a few minutes. The first thing she saw when she got in the water was the speciality of the Farnes. A grey seal; lithe and graceful in the water. And rather friendly as well. They come up to you and nibble your fins, play with your blob as it shoots to the surface and on the whole hang around wondering what these noisy, ungainly creatures are that have invaded their space. It’s magic. Claire was hooked.

After that we dived all over the place, either for long (and not so long) weekends around the south and even for week long holidays to Scotland, the Canary Islands and the Red Sea. It was quite handy living in the middle of the country miles from the sea. It meant you could go anywhere relatively easily. The nearest bit of coast was about an hour away. The furthest (for a weekend) 3 or 4 hours away. The downside is that you can’t dive every day like those clubs on the coast, but they tend to dive the same stuff all the time. We had a great variety to choose from.

For the first few years I loved every minute of it, but as ever, things change and the ‘been there, done that’ attitude starts. The second dive of the day became increasingly boring. After an adventurous dive in the morning, often quite deep and on a wreck, the afternoon’s dive was usually a reef dive. The ‘reef’ usually consisted of a few seaweed covered boulders strewn across the seabed. I became blasé about it all and tired of seeing the same few boulders with the same bits of seaweed stuck to them every afternoon. Sad really, when you consider how magical it is under the water.

And then the effort to get that good morning dive became rather onerous too. To save money and ensure we could do more dives Claire and I would camp. Now I enjoy camping and I enjoy diving but camping and diving? It’s just too much like hard work. Getting all the kit together (both diving and camping kit was err….substantial) took a day. After a long drive we would have to erect the tent and set up home, which was fine. It was just that, after a day of diving, you would return to a cold tent cold and tired and then have to wander over to the shower block to get clean and warm before preparing dinner. B&Bs are, generally, warm, cosy places. Not so a tent. It took another day to sort everything out when we got home.

And so what had been a joyful experience became a tiresome one. That and another visit to the Deep Dark Pit® stopped my diving. The pressure of water at depth and anti-depressants don’t mix. Apparently they can do weird things to you so I had to stop. Also I got worked up by the other personalities and the politics within the club and just as with other pastimes, a pattern set in and the joy disappeared.

Circumstances have now moved on. Jobs have changed and we can no longer afford to go diving. Mind you I’m still on the old anti-barking tablets so I couldn’t dive even if I wanted to. However, I do miss diving now and again.

Whistle 2

I’ve just spotted a repeating pattern. Finally. After 47 years I may have learned something. Woo (and indeed) Hoo. I said in my first whistle blog (and I quote)

‘I play the whistle obsessively (just ask the poor unfortunate neighbours). I will continue to do so for as long as the urge continues. Unlike photography (another story for another time [and still to come]) I don’t want to try and make money from doing it. That way lies madness, financial ruin and turning something rather pleasurable and a joy in to a chore and a drudge.’

I’ve just worked out that there’s another way of turning something that is a complete joy in to a chore and a drudge. And what’s more I’ve done it in the past both work and hobby-wise. It’s by getting too involved, too obsessive and too perfectionist about it. I’ll explain. I’ll use my current obsession as an example.

So I start whistlin’. I have no expectations about it. I’m new and no one else has any expectations either. Everyone has to learn, so, although I’m a bit crap (or even a lot crap) at the start that’s fine. There’s lots of time and lots of learning to be done. Improvements happen and everybody is happy At least I am. The neighbours probably haven’t noticed much difference at this point. Everything is still fun. Mistakes are easily laughed away. I’m new at this. I don’t expect to be particularly good. As long as improvements happen then I’m happy. But there comes a time where I’ve reached a position where I think I’m the Rock God™ of the whistle. It’s at this point that things begin to go wrong………and I have just realised that I have recently reached that point. I’ve seen the signs.

Firstly, I’m now getting annoyed with myself when I make a mistake. Why? I dunno!! Actually I do. I’m a perfectionist. I’ve only been at this just over a year yet I now believe that I should play every tune I know perfectly every time. Every change from one tune to another in a set should be perfectly executed. I am, after all, the Rock God™ of whistling. So I put myself (as a perfectionist) under pressure to perform perfectly at which point I tense up. This has the tendency to make the fingers a little less than fluid in their movements. I also stop concentrating. I don’t need to concentrate now ‘cos I’m f*&£ing brilliant me. Result? Bad playing and annoyance at myself.

Have I said before that I’m really good at beating myself up? I’m sure I have. I beat myself towards the edge of the Deep Dark Pit® and, being a perfectionist, I quite often finish the job properly by hurling myself in to it.

Secondly, I now expect that everyone else expects me to be perfect. Because I have very high expectations of myself I automatically believe that everyone else has the same high expectations of me, so when I cock up a tune I feel I’ve let not just myself down but everybody else as well. Result? Annoyance at myself and another good shoeing towards the Deep Dark Pit® for good luck.

Thirdly, because I now lead a few tunes I feel a responsibility within the session for keeping things going rather than just letting it happen. The session won’t grind to a halt if I don’t play a tune for a while. Sadly I don’t think that way and I put myself under pressure to perform. Result? Bad playing, annoyance at myself and another few inches moved towards (whisper it) ‘you know where’.

Fourthly, politics begins to rear its ugly head. Now I hate this sort of thing but I’m allowing myself to drag myself in to some of this at the moment and inch ever closer to… you know…..that over there. Big. Black. Sort of hole shaped. This has a lot to do with the various playing styles of the various individuals in the session which, on occasion, causes an undercurrent of friction amongst various players. I can feel myself being sucked in. I will not let this happen as it’s destroying my enjoyment. It also involves me thinking I’m better than others. I think I’m superior. It’s wrong. I have to stop it now. It’s unbecoming and I apologise to those to whom it is aimed. Hopefully they don’t realise. If they do then I’m sorry. I will change

Fifthly, I just take things too damn seriously and personally. Two recent incidents should have been laughed off. In one recent incident a hornpipe was played too fast. When asked if I had ever played in a dance band I said ‘no’ and was told that nobody could ever have danced it that fast. Now instead of just laughing and shrugging my shoulders and getting on with the next tune I blamed the guitarist for driving the tune too quickly. Dave, I’m sorry and I will apologise in person the next time I see you. It was uncalled for. I was leading the tune. It was my fault.

And so the joy fades away.

So what do I do? Lighten up in the first instance. Just let things flow. Things flowed long before I started playing, they will when I stop playing so why get uptight about it? I need to laugh again. I need to stop being so serious. It’s only a tune and I’m doing this for fun. Nobody cares if it goes a bit wrong except me because I’m a perfectionist. I need to learn to ‘let it go’ (I believe that’s the phrase). I’m going to have to learn how to relax and just let things happen again and step away from the Deep Dark Pit®.

I know that these feelings have been exacerbated recently. The last three weeks have been non-stop with Morris dancing, drinking ale and sessions. I’m doing too much and I’m getting tired and crotchety. The alcohol is affecting me mentally. I think a day or two of not practicing the whistle won’t hurt either. Just a little break, just for now and recharge the old batteries.

Oh! And I never got on with that melodeon. After a couple of weeks I gave it back. The neighbours and the cat were much relieved.

Dive 1

Or

Why I took it up.

This is another tale that has its genesis in my childhood. As a youngster at school I would regularly paint (during art class) pictures of spacemen (this being at the height of the Apollo missions), and, as they were termed in those days, frogmen, usually floating above a huge chest of pirate treasure stuffed with pieces-of-eight and gold doubloons, whatever they were???? Some sort of coin I surmised at the time. I was right, too. There was usually a trail of bubbles coming from the frogman’s head and a few bizarre looking fish pootling about. All very colourful.

The Space Race® was at full tilt. It was all over the telly and every other media outlet. There weren’t many of those in the late 60s or early 70s. TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. That was it. No computers, no mobile phones and certainly no internet. That was all unthinkable and belonged to the future when we would all wear silver suits, eat pills for our meals, travel everywhere by jet-pack and live on the moon (presumably to get away from the ubiquitous browness of the decade, as well as hotpants, The Bay City Rollers and The Osmonds). Anyway, I naturally wanted to join in the Space Race®  and be an astronaut. Being from the outskirts of Manchester I would probably have been a Suburban Spaceman (baby).

As the years passed the Space Race® died and with it my enthusiasm for all things astro based. Other, more pragmatic and prosaic enthusiasms took hold; Airfix kits, reading, swimming, golf (briefly), stamp collecting (very briefly), and.…well…..just being a kid and mucking about. Life continued through adolescence in to adulthood and on to my early 30s.

Then my dad died.

He was only 60. It was totally unexpected. He’d found blood in his stools and went to see the Doctor. An operation was scheduled to remove a tumour and all went well. Then it was discovered that he was still bleeding internally. A second operation took place a day after the first. His body went in to shock and he never recovered. He was kept in intensive care, all the usual gubbins, wires and pipes and machinery, connected to him, in him and around him. I came back early from a trip to Ireland. Then one day his body decided to stop. He was resuscitated. We gathered at the hospital and decided that the next time his body stopped we’d leave it stopped. No point prolonging the agony for it to happen again and again. Let him die with some dignity.He died that afternoon.

We can never be sure whether he would have recovered. The prognosis was not good. It was discovered that the tumour was malignant. It was probably better that he died when he did rather than go through a long, slow, painful decline, in and out of hospital for cancer treatments and the debilitating side effects that ensue. He would have hated all that. He was a fit and active man, always on the go. The frustration would have been intolerable.

He left my mum comfortably provided for. He’d worked bloody hard, and successfully, all his life. Some money came to me and my sister. A good proportion I saved, I spent some on a new bike and decided to be adventurous with the rest.

I went SCUBA diving (I think he would have liked that).

Booze

Or

I Am A Drunkard. I Am Not An Alcoholic. Alcoholics Go To Meetings.

Hmmmm. Where do I start on this one. My first taste of beer was as a kid of 8 or 9. That’s probably as good a place to start as any.

My dad played golf. In fact he was a prominent member of Denton Golf Club near Manchester; committee member and, at one point, the Captain. I used to caddy for him occasionally. This basically meant pulling his trolley of golf clubs about but only at times when I could be bothered. He still caddied for himself half the time, even if I was there.

One afternoon we were back in the clubhouse. I had a coke and a bag of crisps. He had a pint of bitter. I don’t even know what bitter it was although it wasn’t Boddington’s or Robinson’s, it was too dark. It may have been Wilson’s. It was certainly keg (although I didn’t know of such things at the time. This is knowledge that has come retrospectively). Anyway, it was certainly a brown beer, not a light coloured beer like Boddie’s or Robbie’s.

As a kid of 8 or 9 this was the early 70s. Everything was brown, the wallpaper was garish, my mum was wearing hotpants and the Osmond’s were in the charts. If that’s not depressing enough, cask was in its nadir, keg ruled supreme, and CAMRA had only just formed.

I was given a taste of my dad’s beer. It is a taste I will never forget. IT WAS FOUL. How could anybody drink this evil, bitter, fizzy, brown fluid? Eeeeuuuchh!!

Move on several years. It’s now my cousin’s 21^st (or maybe a wedding. I don’t rightly recall). Anyhow, it was a big family event, held in a hotel or some such. My Great Aunt Agnes was freaking me out by saying things like ‘If I were a bit younger I could really go for a lad like you’. I was probably 12-ish. She was 70-ish. I think she scarred me for life. Mind you, I was allowed shandy. Not that canned, pretend shandy that was a soft drink. Oh no! I was allowed ‘real’ shandy. Made with real beer and lemonade. In pints. I think I had three. Probably in an attempt to forget what Great Aunt Agnes had said. At least the lemonade cut through the bitterness of the brown keg beer (Double Diamond?? Watney’s Red Barrel?? Wilson’s again??) and to my untrained palate, made it reasonably palatable. I remember getting a woozy feeling. Not exactly unpleasant, but somehow slightly disconcerting. My dad and my uncle both looked at my eyes and declared me decidedly squiffy as my pupils had dilated. I also remember feeling quite bilious. In subsequent years I’ve learnt that this was the over gassy nature of keg beer and fizzy lemonade. I mentioned the biliousness to my dad, although as a kid of 12 it probably came out as ‘I feel sick’ and consequently spent half an hour wandering the car park trying to walk it off, with my dad next to me saying ‘stick you fingers down your throat’.

Move on another few years. I’m fifteen. I’d started going out with friends. Initially to the youth club disco, latterly, when we had reached fifteen, to The Hyde Away, a pub we could get in to and get served, along with every other underage teenage drinker in Hyde. It was raided regularly, fortunately not while I was there. The jukebox was full of heavy metal, the toilets were full of drugs and the beer was still full of gas. But I was cutting my teeth on real drinking. I was supping pints of bitter in the relatively safe environment of a pub. We weren’t out on the streets, hanging around causing trouble, vandalising bus shelters and park benches, drinking Kestrel lager or Merrydown cider. We went to the pub and then went home.

A year later and now we’re at UMIST. Not studying. Partying. Part of Manchester University during the week, at the weekends it held a rock disco, sporting some fine music and an atmosphere of utter debauchery. Well, what more could a callow youth desire. Beer was about 50p a pint, for hand pulled Boddingtons no less (this at a time when Boddie’s was a good pint, before it had been bought out and the recipe changed). It cost 50p to get in, and I think the return bus fare was about the same. For about £4 you could travel all the way from Hyde to the centre of Manchester (10 miles or more), headbang until your skull fell off, drink until your legs fell off and get back to Hyde with enough change for some chips and gravy. Bliss.

Boddingtons isn’t a very strong beer so I used to drink bitter snakebites. God! they were foul but you didn’t half get pissed quick (and we go on about the youth of today. Nothing changes). It was during the UMIST years that I learnt the art of the tactical chunder; relieving the gaseous symptoms and leaving the system ready for a top up. I guess that’s probably a bit TMI. Sorry!

Forward a few more years. I’d been to agricultural college and passed with……………..well, I passed at least. Passed out once as well, but that’s all in the learning curve and no more than most people get up to. Isn’t it? I couldn’t eat for three days after that adventure. I’d poisoned myself badly on cheap whiskey. I also managed to get wine banned at the dinner table on our French exchange trip for the same incident. Most of the photographs of me at the time feature me with a pint in my hand (or at least surreptitiously hidden behind my back) at the various parties, weddings and other functions I’d attended in my twenties (and even in to my thirties).

So now I’m at work. I’m on a farm in Surrey, not far from Dorking. I lived on my own in a little flat that had once been the security office at the entrance to the old Pains Wessex Schermuly fireworks factory, the land now owned by The Toad (the landowner, thus named because of his resemblance to he of Toad Hall). The flat was warm, dry and not uncomfortable, if a little sparse. But evenings were long and lonely so I started to visit the pub. I had an excuse for just about every night of the week. Friday and Saturday, well it’s the weekend. What do you expect? Sunday? Well the long working week starts tomorrow so let’s extend the weekend as much as we can. So that was Sunday lunch and evening sorted. Monday? Well that’s the start of the week. A pint was needed to keep going through the long dreary week. Tuesday? I never really had an excuse for Tuesday. I still went out though. Wednesday was the middle of the week so a break from work in the evening was required. Thursday? Now we’re almost at the weekend. Might as well get it started now. And so we’re back to Friday. And then I wondered why I was always skint. In fact not just skint but in debt. Work was difficult. Relationships with co-workers and the farm manager were strained, generally because I was hungover and grumpy all day which made me short tempered and an utter joy to be with. I lived in the Deep Dark Pit™. Sadly I dragged those around me in to it as well. I think I might have been a rather horrible person to be around. Put it this way. My nickname on the farm was Mona, basically ‘cos I wasn’t happy unless I was moaning. The morning I woke up and had a whiskey for breakfast was the morning I realised that things were less than peachy. I was drunk, skint and depressed, although I didn’t understand the depressed bit as yet.

Somehow I managed to pull myself together a bit and start to climb out of the Deep Dark Pit™ (again, retrospective knowledge. I didn’t know at the time that I was in the Deep Dark Pit™). I managed to stay at home a few evenings a week. Eventually my bank account turned from red to black and I got myself together enough to find a new job and put to use the Agricultural Diploma I had earned myself a couple of years earlier.

That’s the end of the darkest days in ‘My Struggle with Booze’ as the red tops would have it. Not the end of my struggle though. Maybe someone like me shouldn’t be a CAMRA member but at least I have a real appreciation for the craft required to brew a fantastic pint of ale. I have to watch myself regularly and keep an eye on my consumption. Sometimes it’s easier than others. Staying in during the week is quite easy now, although I go out Morris dancing on Wednesdays. We usually repair to the local for a couple of pints, but I stick to just two before coming home.

I don’t keep bottled beer in the house any more. It’s just too tempting after a bad day to open a bottle or two. And that’s the start of the downward spiral. You have a bad day so you have a drink to cheer yourself up in the evening which leaves you tired and grumpy the next morning so you have another bad day so you have a beer in the evening which makes you feel tired and…………and so on. Been there. Done that. I avoid red wine at all costs. Alcohol is a depressant, red wine doubly so. Well…it is in my case. I can cope with a few beers at the weekend. Give me a glass or two of red wine (which I love) and by Wednesday I’m ready to slit my wrists.

On the whole I’m pretty good at managing my intake although there is a fly that has just landed in the ointment. I need to work out how to flick the fly out. I’ll put you in the picture (and I won’t go on too much longer….honest).

As you may or may not know (and if you’ve been following my blog you will know) that I play whistle at the local music sessions. This is a great excuse to play music, enjoy the company of others and quaff some ale. I can usually play (to my own lowly standard) quite well for the first two pints. In fact as I relax I get better through those first two. Now, as I hit the third, things begin to go awry. To put it simply, my fingers stop working and my breath control vanishes. The resultant noise is, on the whole, rather unpleasant. Now this lack of control is not a problem when either a, driving to the pub (‘cos I have to drive back) or b, playing in a pub that is, putting it diplomatically, not the most salubrious (nuff said). As one of the local establishments has recently closed down the session has relocated to a new venue which, to put it bluntly, is overwhelmingly welcoming. The free jugs of (superb) ale that appear at regular intervals on the tables in front of us are exceedingly welcome. However this is currently playing havoc with my control mechanisms, meaning that rather too much ale is imbibed for my own good. I haven’t got the answer yet but I’m sure one will occur to me soon. 

In the meantime, your answers on a postcard please.