Westoby Commentary

But why not start at the beginning?

I was born on 16th May 1932 in a nursing home on Hunny Hill, at Newport in the Isle of Wight. My mother, Ivy, nee Barker, was 38 years old and my father, George Westoby, 51. I guess I was a surprise, since my brother George was already 11. I was christened Alfred Jonathan, but no-one at home ever called me anything but Jon and now everyone who knows me does so too, mostly because I fought kids who called me "Johnny" and old habits die hard. I was named after each of my grandfathers, and never met either!

My father owned a fish shop in Newport at the time and my mother helped in the shop. She had two girls to help in the house, Joyce and Vi. Vi had been engaged - as was the country custom then - eventually for about 15 years to Ron Etheridge. They pushed me in my pram and most people thought I was their child until we moved to Hastings in 1937.

Joyce came with us but Vi stayed behind and married Ron. It was to be another 11 years before they had their own son. One of my early memories is receiving from them on my birthday (5 or 6?) a wooden crate, which proved to contain a pedal car with battery operated lights. Hastings is hilly, so the pedals often whizzed round by themselves, while I concentrated on the somewhat erratic steering!

This first seven years of my life have sheltered me ever since, hence the title. I had parents who were fond of me, two young women who spoiled me and an older brother who was more like a kindly uncle. When I was two, he bought me a full sized trike with chain drive out of his own pocket money. My mother worried that he would be upset because, of course, I couldn't ride it, but my father turned it upside down and I'm told I spent many happy hours whizzing the wheels round by turning the pedals by hand. Is this why I've always been interested in engineering? I only remember some of the detail, but the idea that people are good-natured until proved otherwise has stayed with me ever since. 

Before I was born, my brother George fell ill and my mother took him on holiday to convalesce, leaving my father to look after himself. This must have been before the advent of the sisters who worked for us. My mother returned to find that Dad had coped with washing up everything but the saucepans (soda and elbow grease removed cooking fat in those days). Every pan in the house was dirty - and that included the new set he'd bought when he had dirtied the old ones! 

I guess household chores were chores in those days; vacuum cleaners a rarity, open fires with dirty grates and dirtier chimney sweeps, the washing done all Monday with a copper boiler, a posher (a hand operated tool for agitating the clothes and water) and a mangle. The mangle was BIG and stood outside in the glass-covered, whitewashed yard. 3 ft long wooden rollers pressed together with a leaf spring and turned by a 2 ft diameter cast iron wheel could squeeze nearly all the water out of double sheets folded in half, with the water running out of a hole in a wooden trough below the rollers. It also could surprise the cat, especially when it stuck its tail up through the hole and had the end wound into the rollers. A howl, a lifted sheet to reveal the cat suspended, a rapid reversal of the handle and an equally rapid retreat by the cat. We didn't see it for three days and thereafter it always had a kink in its tail. 

Mondays always smelt of wet washing and cabbage. A mains radio was big and made of wood and bakelite. Only the very rich had a radiogram and that was a floor-standing piece of furniture. We had a wind up gramophone that played 78 rpm records using steel needles or rose thorns. My father ran his business without a telephone, as did most of his contemporaries. I was the first in our immediate family to have a phone, in 1957.

For three years my father prospered in Hastings in a modest way but, over my head, world events were moving to a climax. My brother, at 17, had joined the Territorials, much to my parents' dismay. On the outbreak of war, he was sent immediately to France in the 7th Sussex regiment and was posted missing some days after Dunkirk in an action which halted the German advance for the first time. We subsequently found that he must have been killed in that action but, until my mother received a photograph of his grave, she kept alive a spark of hope, questioning returning prisoners of war for news and writing to any organisation that helped trace missing soldiers.

Until death entered my adult life, I did not realise how necessary it is to bury your dead and mourn; grow through the grief and live on. My parents must have suffered deeply and, as far as I was concerned as a child, in silence. As for me, I could not really comprehend my brother's death.

Later, after my father died, my mother told me that I had never really known him as she did; that George's death had changed him radically. In fact, it was in that year, when I was 7, that our lives were changed, for better or worse, irrevocably, for in 1940 France fell to the Germans and England was about to be invaded. Hastings was evacuated, adults as well as children, and became a ghost town. Hoping against hope that my brother would return, and needing to nurse the business, my parents sent me away and stayed, but as hope faded and, when one day's takings amounted to two old pence, they too left for Somerset and Joyce returned to the Isle of Wight. 

We had lived on West Hill and some of my schoolmates were from the old town, the sons and daughters of fishermen. They enjoyed a vocabulary strange to me and one of the very few times my mother clumped me was when I surprised her, aged about 6, by asking what "fuck" meant. She didn't tell me, either.

Another experience, maybe at 5, was being told in school about God. My parents were nominal C of E, because everyone without strong religious convictions was assumed to be, but they didn't tell me much about religion, just instilled Christian-like morality into my behaviour. At school, however, some teacher told me I had to be good, because God was watching me all the time and writing my behaviour down in a big book. Even at 5, I didn't believe her and, secondly, it seemed a poor reason for being good rather than bad. Where's the virtue in being good if you only do it while you're watched? To me, good was good because it felt good. If bad felt good . . . but what do 5 year olds know? More later.

One early memory was of being taken to the dentist and raising hell when he tried to give me an injection. Another, far pleasanter and much more fascinating was when my mother went shopping at a sort of haberdasher cum clothing shop. The cashier there sat in a glass fronted box high up in the shop with wires leading to every counter; money was put into little trolleys which tinged, then shot upwards as if by magic to be cashed and returned with change.

I also had a 'stick with an 'orse's 'ead 'andle', to paraphrase Stanley Holloway, and stood on the bed to hit the lampshade with it. I fell off the bed, hitting the wardrobe and fracturing my left forearm, which had to be put in a sling. This was the month I started school and I learned to write etc with my right hand. I had previously been left-handed and I still do some things left-handedly. My left eye is my master eye. Being a bit ambidextrous can be quite useful.

I also liked climbing the sandstone cliffs on East Cliff, which had (and has) a funicular railway from the fishermans' old town to the top. It was especially exhilarating in winter, when the Channel gales threw waves and shingle over the front. Children played in the street and in each other's gardens with very few toys, but lots of imagination. With a single steel pole and a muddy patch, two of us started to dig to Australia. We got quite a way down, but gave up when we didn't strike daylight at the bottom. We could also sit in the gutter on very hot days popping the tar bubbles the sun created, or on wet days, sailing paper boats down the rushing water to the drains. We got pretty wet and dirty but I cannot remember that anyone cared.

My father, at this time, had a very strange vehicle. It was a three-wheel motorbike. The front wheel had been substituted by a zinc-lined insulated box on two wheels, steered by a bar at the back of the box. My father would collect fresh fish from the local market in this thing and one day he came off it to be brought home on a ladder with a long cut on his forehead and concussion. When the doctor applied iodine, he exclaimed, "Ee bah goom, that bloody hurts!" He hadn't spoken with a Yorkshire accent for 30 years.

He taught me to read before I went to school and read to me as well. I do remember being curled up in his lap, being read to and following the words as best I could. I rapidly grew out of infant texts and by 7 was reading William books to myself - only half-comprehended, but wholly absorbing.

Our surname, Westoby, is an anglicised version of a Viking (Danish) name meaning "west of the village". Whether that was downwind or not, I don't know, but lots of us seem to have rowed across to Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, hit the local farmers' daughters over the head and settled down. Someone once wrote to me saying she had been born a Westoby and that there were only 200 families of that name, however you spelled it. She was going to research them all in her retirement, but I never heard from her again.

My father was estranged from his family in Hull and I knew nothing about them in his lifetime, but I later found his a solicitor’s invoice re his father's will, which showed he shared with his two brothers and two sisters an estate of three houses. My father's share came to £84.

I know more about my mother's side of the family, the Barkers. Her father was a trawler skipper out of Grimsby and she was the youngest of seven children. After her mother died, her father married again. While he was at sea, the stepmother beat the children, all of whom left home one by one until my mother was the only one remaining. She was often kept home from school to look after her two baby stepsisters and be beaten with a piece of rubber hose, threatened with dire consequences if she told the school inspector or her father and generally made miserable, until she left to go into service in Derbyshire.

At 18 or 19 she shinned down the drainpipe and eloped with my father, who was 13 years older. They moved to the South coast and my father managed a series of fish and chip shops before starting his own. My mother had a little girl who died in infancy while my father was serving in the first World War

He remained alive by catching shingles. He was in hospital when his battalion went back to the line and was one of only a handful of survivors. The brasshats didn't want to put them with other untried units because of the terrible tales they could tell, so he spent the rest of the war guarding prisoners, learning German and matriculating.

After the war, my parents picked up the pieces of their lives and in 1921 my brother George was born. My father painstakingly built up his business again in the Isle of Wight. 

In those days tourism for the masses was unknown and my parents were "overners" - people from over the water. They remained overners - although with many good friends - until the day they left. Tradition and inbreeding abounded. Many families had someone "under the Clock" - the clock was in the tower of the local mental institution at Carisbrooke - and Queen Victoria had a house, Osborne House, at Mottistone. Even after Queen Elizabeth had ascended the throne, you could never be sure which Queen an elderly islander was referring to, until the context made it clear.

I did fairly well academically and athletically at the grammar school, near the top of the A stream, later in the first eleven at cricket and football, captain of athletics for my house at 16 (over the heads of 18 year olds) and playing football and boxing for the local boys club.

This latter was run by an ex-Commando colonel (a hero of D-Day) with strict discipline of a permissive sort. Confused?

Let me explain.

There were lots of things you could do at the club and, while we were blasé about everything adults wanted us to do, we were keen to play in the best teams, act in the amateur dramatics, have the best boxers, wrestlers (Cornish style), judo club; in fact, be top dog. Colonel Menday had a simple recipe. 

If you didn't train, you didn't play. 

There were no prima donnas. Nobody was indispensable or more important than the team. You didn't turn up for training? You ain't playing this week. As a result, everyone who turned up was a good team player. The high motivation did, indeed, make us top dogs very often. I played in the football team, which was good enough to win the under 18 double (League and Cup), but I couldn't train on the usual night, because I was studying for A levels at night school. I therefore trained with the boxers. They had a rule, too. Train with them and you had to box. 

I had a broken front tooth, due to standing in front of a boy rubbernecking as he disassembled a German pistol (a Luger). It came adrift in a rush - straight into my mouth. This meant that I started sparring fairly tentatively until I was hit in the mouth and bled. After that, I couldn't be hurt, I was concentrating too much on getting my own back. It taught me two, no three, things. To lose my fear of being hit in the face. To control my temper (you got hit a lot more if you were careless, some of these guys were good). And not to go on boxing. My brains seemed quite loose inside my skull and blows to the head left me with a headache. I switched to judo and wrestling instead.

By this time, we were a gang of three; Gordon, Mark Butler and me, three boys who went everywhere together from the age of twelve to sixteen, when girls at last began to intrude. I did my homework in lodgings, with two smaller children from our landlady's family (the Rees's at 17 Bythe Mount) around and the radio on all the time. ITMA, standing for It's That Man Again, with Tommy Handley, was the comic programme we all listened to, although Much Binding in the Marsh ran it a close second. A great deal of the music I absorbed was classical, with the result today that I love many pieces of whose titles I am ignorant.

After the war, my father sold the house (No 44) in St Georges Road Hastings for a relative pittance and I was somewhere between thirteen and fourteen when we moved into our rented home in Welwyn Garden City.

We moved all our possessions at last into our new house. A giant bookcase arrived, with crate upon crate of books to fill it. My father's taste was catholic enough, but his library extended beyond that. He used to go to book auctions and shift books he wanted into one lot - then bid for that. However, he could never bring himself to throw away the other books and a weird and wonderful collection they made. I never understood 'Inman's Nautical Tables' (for 1899) until I did navigation classes in my 40's! At seven, I had been learning to play the mandolin, a beautiful deep bodied instrument made from strips of different coloured woods. When that resurfaced from the attic, the glues had failed and it had opened out like a tulip. To my lasting regret, I never learned to play a musical instrument after all.

My school work, homework, paper round and weekend work on a local farm, (which also involved dog, ferrets, nets and rabbits in close proximity) used up a lot of my time, but I still patronised the library as well as the Beano, Wizard and Hotspur comics.

Lord Snooty and his friends, Pansy Potter, Desperate Dan and his cow pie, and an athlete called Wilson, are all characters I remember. The comic book heroes had short, broken noses and enormous craggy chins. I didn't and despaired of anyone thinking me attractive. Who'd want to be 15 again? The library books included primitive (by today's standards) science fiction and I graduated to Astounding - the most famous of sci-fi magazines - E Doc Smith, Asimov and Heinlein as some of the authors.

The rabbits we caught we sold to the local butcher for half a crown (or three and six if we skinned them). We had to leave the kidneys in; cats' kidneys lie differently from rabbits' - and cats taste different, too! We skinned the rabbits country style. Slit the rabbit from anus to sternum, shake out the guts; slide your hand under the skin round the back and pull the rabbit inside out. Cut off feet and head, discard, hand carcass to suspicious butcher. We also had slings - two leather bootlaces and a leather pouch for a pebble. They sent the missiles much further than a catapult and we grew quite accurate with them. Mark even hit a grey squirrel, which I took home and skinned to try and cure the pelt with alum. It didn't work and the pong was horrendous. However, my cocker spaniel had a kennel for the summer and I bequeathed it to him for a doormat. He loved it and lay in his kennel with his nose on the fur dreaming doggy dreams of chasing game.

But back to my father's books. I was adolescent, with new emotions fermenting inside me. Half the time I wanted to be a very parfait knight, doing brave deeds for at least one pig-tailed maiden in my class (and I've every reason to believe that in those far-off days they were indeed maidens) and the other half wanting to have my wicked way with them (except I didn't know the way). Into this mix poured the ideas of a galaxy of authors. I had two books stuffed down the settee, one in the loo, two on my bedside table and often carried one about. 

We didn't have television and the radio didn't distract me. I could pick up any book and, in half a page, remember what it was about. It was a wonderful time. Find a new author, be entranced; turn to the title page and see that he's written ten more books! 

Pickwick Papers, all of Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Wodehouse, W W Jacobs and that unsurpassed storyteller, Kipling, were my constant companions. Old-fashioned? Well, yes, but I've reread many of them with much pleasure, a different understanding and getting something new from them as my own experience has grown. 

In times of trouble, Wodehouse in particular has been a refuge and escape route. Kipling never ceases to please my sense of prose rhythm and delight in the "diversity of Allah's creatures".

My love affair with books invaded my unconscious. When playing football, I was tripped and kicked in the head. One second I was running hard and about to pass the ball, the next I was sitting comfortably at home reading a book and just going to turn the page to some marvellous denouement. 

Then someone stuffed a cold wet sponge down the back of my neck.

At sixteen, two weeks before I took my school certificate exams, life stuck a cold sponge down our family's neck. My father died from a thrombosis while at work. (Someone asked him to help shift a piano. He was 67 and had high blood pressure - and there weren't any effective treatments in those days).

My mother and I went to see him in the morgue, with me unaccountably afraid. This was my dad, but also the first dead body I had seen. It struck me then and since, that the dead clay is indescribably empty. The reality that was the person is elsewhere. I cannot doubt that there is more to the world than our five senses appreciate. I suspect, with Haldane, that not only is the world queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine. I am, therefore, agnostic, but hopeful. 

It seems stupidly egotistical to believe we shall survive in any form we could recognise, but the universe appears to be ordered in a coherent way and what more can you ask? Certainly time is not as it appears to our limited senses. We feel no great surprise when past events return to our minds so vividly that they seem "real", but few think that we can see the future. 

To my chagrin and sorrow, I have done so and I hope never to again. 

My mother, who said she was the "seventh child of a seventh child" - for those who set store by such things - saw my brother standing at the mouth of a railway tunnel waving good-bye to her and turning to walk down the tunnel. This was shortly after he was posted missing and, you would say, an obvious metaphor for death. After the war, she heard that he was aboard a train that was bombed as it entered a tunnel in France. Coincidence? Well, maybe. 

I have since researched the action from records of the 7^th Sussex regiment in Chichester and my brother died either in the train or in the battle that followed. There is no record of his surviving to go to hospital or to join the 'death march' that the regimental prisoners underwent to Poland. The record that would determine what his fate was must be the roll call I now know was taken after the bombing and before regrouping in defensive positions on a hill. That information is in the War Diaries at Kew - something yet to do. See In Memoriam for further information.

Thus ended my childhood. We had no pension from my father's job, little capital from the sale of his defunct business and only my mother's wage to keep us. At sixteen, I was the man of the house.

I was a fortnight away from taking the matriculation exams that might mean my assisted entry into University. The school suggested that I delayed until September, but I saw no point. The work would distract me from my sadness, my revision had all been done and Yorkshire parenting meant you  didn't  give  up  just  because  things  had  become difficult.

In fact, I did well (four distinctions and four 'credits' from eight subjects) and the school believed that I could, at eighteen, get a State Scholarship to University. When my mother pointed out we couldn't afford it, the headmaster lost interest.

Is that unfair? Probably. I don't suppose there was much he could do for me anyway.

So I took a job and went to night school. I earned £2 10s and gave my mother £2 5s of it.

But, I had a .410 shotgun and a cocker spaniel (which my mother bought me as a reward for matriculating), a farm where I sometimes worked at weekends, a countryside to roam and two friends. I was rich.

One of my friends, Gordon, had a bull terrier that, in its adolescence, terrorised the other dogs, the milkman, the postman and anyone nervous. He never bothered my dog, but acted as his protector. As he grew to maturity, he no longer fought rivals, merely shouldered them contemptuously into the gutter. If any dog was barmy enough to raise its hackles and walk stiff-legged around him, he never joined in these preliminaries. He just grabbed the dam' fool by the throat and tried to strangle him. There was just one way to get him off; stick a pencil up his bum.

Then take your hand away as quick as you like.

No, quicker than that!

We walked all over Hertfordshire, rough shooting, birds-nesting and gathering things to eat (rabbits, pheasants', partridges', ducks' and peewits' eggs, wild raspberries, strawberries and blackberries) as well as scrumping apples, plums and pears. 

The most unpleasant thing we ever ate was a hedgehog - and that's all the fault of reading comics. Self-reliant heroes lived off the land and adopted gipsy techniques, like baking hedgehogs in their prickly skins wrapped in clay. When the clay baked, cracked and fell off, so the stories went, it took the prickles with it, leaving delicate, steaming flesh, ho hum. The bull terrier could kill hedgehogs by clawing them open when they rolled up, and he did so to this one before we could stop him. We now had a freshly killed hedgehog we could gut with a penknife, some mud and matches to light a fire. No sooner said than done, but with boys' impatience, not done enough. The mud fell off early on - what did we know about the difference between mud and clay? - and we tried to eat half raw meat. The best you could say was there wasn't much of it and none of us went back for a second bite.

Gordon also kept a pig in what had been a chicken run in his garden. The Government would slaughter the pig for you and give half of it back (I think this scheme still endures) once you had reared it to maturity. However, what restrained chickens was no match for a 20 score pig (a score is 20 pounds or 9 kilos) and it often escaped. We have chased it down suburban streets in the company of neighbours, strangers, police and probably Uncle Tom Cobley an' all, more times than I care to remember. The old joke about someone who's bandy is "that he couldn't stop a pig in a passage". I'm here to tell you that you can't even if you're not. It just knocks you flat and runs over you.

When Gordon's father kept chickens, the eggs were preserved, (this was wartime, remember) before domestic freezers or even fridges existed, in a bath of isinglass, which sealed the pores in the shells. He also kept ducks, which were killed for the pot by hanging them up by their feet and cutting the artery in their necks to let them bleed to death.

We were, I suppose, vandals. There were too few of us to damage the countryside permanently, but we did our best.

We had birds' egg collections; good ones, too. We stole baby birds out of their nests and hand-reared them; for instance, wood pigeons (ugly little blighters before they're fledged) and a beautiful little owl. We never caged them and they all flew away eventually. It never occurred to us that we might be wrecking their chances of survival in the wild. 

They got their own back on me. I climbed a pine tree to a nest in a strange position, only to find it was just a blackbird's. One egg, cold and abandoned, so I put it in my mouth to keep it safe while I climbed down. Pine trees have no lower branches, just the dead twigs where they have been. The topmost of these broke under my weight, so did the next, and the next . . . . I came down with a rush and a heavy jolt at the bottom, when the ground broke my fall. My jaws clamped tight - and the egg was addled. The awful taste lasted an awfully long time.

The little owl was wonderful. We shot sparrows for him and fed him by hand. He would fly down and perch on your finger, gripping with talons that sometimes drew blood. When he blinked open his eyes, it was like two furnace doors revealing the orange fire within. One day, he flew away.

We carried knives and axes with us everywhere. A favourite game was to climb a sapling maybe 20 to 30 feet high and everyone else would chop it down as fast as they could. You were chicken if you didn't climb (and that was intolerable) and the trick was to be really brave. Once at the top, you should sway the tree as hard as possible. Then the trunk splits early under the axe blows and you come down slow and easy on the spring. Be timid, and your so-called friends have chopped right through before you can cry fainits and you come down with a rush.

We also, in common with many other groups of boys, built a camp in a giant pile of concrete building blocks between the ICI factory and a railway siding (off the old Hertford line, now dismantled). These blocks were oblong, with two square holes from top to bottom. Hollowing out the pile, roofing with corrugated iron and using the hollow blocks as chimneys made wonderful camps. There was even a heap of coal in the siding, which we stole from time to time. (Thank goodness for the statute of limitations!) To light the coal, we needed wood. Tar soaked wood was readily available. It came in the form of small blocks that held the railway lines to the sleepers. The rails in the siding became decidedly wobbly. We co-existed fairly peaceably, but we couldn't resist the occasional tweak. A favourite, on the way home, was to walk along the top of the pile - it really was enormous - and pee down a smoking chimney, stuffing a sack down immediately afterward. A good way to improve your sprinting fitness!

But I hadn't finished with the pig. When the lorry came for him, the driver wanted nothing to do with getting him on board. Two sixteen year old lads couldn't shove it up the ramp and we were getting pretty sweaty, but otherwise - nowhere.

Along comes an Irish feller. "Are yer tryin' to get the pig in th' lorry?," he says. We look at him pityingly. "Get us a stick," he says. Gordon fetches him a stick. He grabs the pig by the tail and positions it at the bottom of the ramp. Then he whacks it behind the ear with the stick and heaves upward on the tail. "Yip!" he yells and with a scramble and squeal the pig's suddenly in the lorry.

He hands Gordon the stick.

"Many's the pig Oi've taken to market in Dublin loike dat," he says and strolls off, pleased as Punch.

Around this time, I started to go riding from a stables near old Welwyn at the Frythe. We paid to hack, so got no lessons but, being boys, we galloped anyway and, being lucky, didn’t kill ourselves. I rode like a jockey, with shortened stirrups and standing clear of the saddle. I finally learned to ride properly on a post trail holiday in Northumbria many years later.

I also used to go to Queens ice rink in Queensway and sometimes to Streatham. Again, we had no lessons and probably looked naff, though bold and quick!

One last adventure before girls caused us to wash and shave and feel funny.

The local sewage farm produced activated sludge and, incidentally, wonderful wild strawberries; ask not their provenance. This sludge was led to a low-lying field by the river Mimram and allowed to settle, the water running over a weir into the river, where we paddled a Mosquito drop tank (a wing petrol tank from a WW II fighter-bomber) as the most unstable boat I have ever been in.

An old oak in the field had raised the ground level so it formed an island where swans had made a nest. The swans were away; were there eggs?  We had to find out. We built a rickety raft - and I mean rickety. It wouldn't hold three of us so we drew lots. I lost (or did I?) and stayed on shore. Halfway there the swans came home; not swimming, but flying hard, feet paddling the water, wings beating and hissing alarmingly. My companions turned tail and paddled for shore even harder. So hard that the raft disintegrated under them. That left them wading in knee-deep sludge.

As they dried out on the way home, I walked further and further away from them. Their mothers weren't pleased.

Around this time I went with five other lads on the Broads. They were all older than me and only one of us had ever sailed before (and it wasn't me). It became the kind of holiday you should never try to repeat. It was such enormous fun that any attempt at repetition would be bound to disappoint.

The two boats came back rather the worse for wear and we came back constipated. We didn't know how to cook. The three of us on our boat had 48 eggs between us in a week. We even had fried eggs with stew. One attempt to make porridge ended in a kind of glue that persisted in the saucepan even after having been towed behind all day.

In those unregenerate days the toilet on board emptied straight into the water and the pumping system was shared with the bilge pump by switching a water valve. One of our number discovered that by leaving the valve in a halfway position, the river water could find its way back into the toilet. . . . . We were supposed only to cook at anchor, since the cabin roof was lowered while sailing and there was little head room. We found we could sail on if the cook crouched on the toilet and fried up on the galley across the companionway. However, with the valve halfway open, going about on the other tack dumped at least three gallons of water into the cook's trousers - a joke that could only be played once!

We got lost in the reeds, we nearly sank one boat in a water fight, we rammed each other and were frightened silly by a thunderstorm. (The countryside was as flat as a turd from a tall ox and our masts were the sharpest lightning conductors around). The ramming broke a strut that raised the cabin roof on our friends' boat above the toilet. Going to the loo became far too uncomfortable, so they used to wait for darkness and crouch over the side of the boat (yes, yes, but they were young males, what do you expect?). What they didn't expect was to be lit up incandescently by our nice new flashlight! Very constipating.

On the last day, we ate up the remains (or, rather, one of us did). Like, a tin of sardines, some rather old cheese, various odds and ends and, right at the back where it had got lost, an open and rather sugary tin of condensed milk. We hitched home and one of us (yes, that one) had to ask the lorry driver to stop for a minute to himself.  Getting back in, he rather shamefacedly suggested that the diesel fumes had upset him!

I hitchhiked to the Peak district with this same Harry Wray to go potholing. I was 16 and Harry was 18. That my mother allowed me to go says something about her trust in my self-reliance and more about how safe the world seemed to be for hitch-hikers. We camped in a field in Castleton, where two horses who shared the field with us indulged in 3 am canters past our tent. Harry sat up to fend them off, but I was too tired to care. We went down a Blue John mine and turned round so many times, looking for Blue John to chip, we forgot which way we had come in. Fortunately, our random choice of exit turned out to be correct.

Later we went potholing and took a piece of twine (shades of Ariadne) and candles. Quite soon, we lost the twine down a hole, but went on anyway, in the company of a lad on a day out from Sheffield in his best suit. We came to a point where the path disappeared into a hole in the cave floor. Candles did not illuminate downwards, but pebbles dropped down appeared to hit something almost immediately. I lay on the ground with my head and arms in the hole, while the Sheffield lad sat on my feet. Harry went down into the hole until he was hanging full stretch from my hands. He still couldn't touch the bottom, but said to me, "Let go, it can't be far!" I didn't want to, but when he didn't return my grip, he just slipped from my grasp. He turned out to be about 4 inches above the ground, so we all went down. On the way back, we stood in turn on our new friend's shoulders to climb through, then Harry sat on my legs while I hung backwards down through the hole from my knees, thus letting the last man swarm up me.

When we emerged into the open air, we realised just how much muddy water had soaked into us. The nice new suit had footprints all over its shoulder pads, with matching patches randomly, but liberally, distributed. The young man didn't seem bothered, but went off thanking us for an interesting day. We went to find a river to wash in. The one we found had a notice we didn't see till later. It said, "This river comes from Peak Cavern and is 44 degrees F all the year round." 

One day, a chap in a caravan in the next field came and asked us if we could drive, because his dog had gone hysterical in the heat and he needed to get it back to Sheffield. We couldn't, but we offered to hold the dog, just about the biggest Alsatian either of us had ever seen. During the journey, the dog was obviously distressed and incredibly restive, nearly smothering us both, so we opened the window to give it air. It immediately made valiant efforts to climb right out, foiled only by our winding the window back up when it was already halfway out. It was a dickens of a job to recover it inside. The guy gave us a lift back and bequeathed all the food he hadn't eaten to us as a reward. I think he must have been a black marketeer. We ate better than we had for years!

I think I must be condensing the time-scales here, or how did I find time to start taking girls to the pictures? The days must have been longer then.

College and homework took up many evenings, but girls and rising sap meant revision taking a back seat many a time. Motorbike building, old car maintenance (none of them belonged to me) and football competed with the young Adam and often lost. I went out with one girl, just once, before she threw me over for some other acned oaf, but this meant I was introduced to her best friend, Joan Haydon, to whom I eventually got engaged and later married. 

A steady girl-friend meant I gave up football in favour of tennis, swimming and dancing, where you got to share with the girls and even, the foxtrot, waltz and quick-step being what they are, hold on to them. Another reason for giving up football was that the bruises were lasting longer than a week, so new ones began to grow over the old ones. At 18, someone headed me instead of the ball, and I lost the broken front tooth that had just been finally fixed. Penicillin would have saved it by curing the abscess that formed, but antibiotics were then only available for life-threatening illnesses. Time to stop.

I had found  a  job  in  the  laboratory  of  a  local pharmaceutical company (Roche Products) and attended college on an evening and day release scheme in an attempt to obtain a degree in chemistry.

They paid me £2 l0s (£2.50) a week and I gave my mother £2 5s (£2.25), leaving 5 shillings (25p) to spend on myself - but not all at once! As a lab assistant, I learned to handle dangerous chemicals, but the degree of protection afforded the staff was poor by today's standards. The long-term effects of many common solvents and reagents were simply not known or, maybe, disregarded. We evaporated benzene, toluene, chloroform, ether and carbon tetrachloride in the open lab (and three at least out of those five are carcinogenic). 

Research is also like being a test pilot; you think you know what will happen, but you can get very surprised. We were making synthetic curare-like compounds, to use as muscle relaxants in surgery and the homologues were getting more toxic as we added longer side-chains. I was told to complete the series by making the methyl version (the lowest in the series, which we had missed). I did, then dried the powder and scraped it into a bottle in the open lab. Within 5 minutes, my throat was paralysed and I couldn't speak. 30 minutes later, I was OK again. When tested, this material was so poisonous they couldn't find a low enough dose that didn't kill all the mice it was given to. Nobody ever made it again.

On a lighter note, we had two middle-aged women who washed up the glassware. What detergent wouldn't remove, they used mixed solvents on. (Something else that would never be countenanced today). In pouring the solvents back into the bottle from a bowl, one woman spilt the liquid down the front of her dress. She came red-faced and furious into the lab steward's office.

"What are you going to do about this?" she yelled, holding up a large circle of elastic attached by slimy pink ropes to two smaller circles below - the remains of her viscose directoire knickers. What we did do was fall about laughing helplessly.

The lab I worked in made riboflavin (one of the B vitamins) by a fermentation process, using molasses as a culture medium. This came in big square tins and all the lab assistants vied to spoon out the residues from the tins. This was 1948 remember, with all of us starved for sugar and luxuries like sweets. 

The work was also dangerous. One lad breathed in hydrogen cyanide and was given the antidote, itself incredibly poisonous. He eventually died in hospital - from the antidote, it was rumoured. 

One beautiful experiment (not authorised) was to blow bubbles filled with hydrogen and light them with a taper. The hydrogen burned at the interface with the oxygen in the air, producing a wonderful ball of quiet flame rapidly reducing in size until it disappeared with a little 'pop!'. We rang the changes by filling a rubber balloon with hydrogen and popping that with a lighted taper. The collapse of the balloon mixed the hydrogen violently with the air, producing a horrendous bang and a large pressure wave.

Trying to work, play and deal with the ferment in my hormones by going out with Joan meant my exam results suffered badly, especially as I realised I really didn't want to be a chemist. After a year's deferment, I allowed myself to be inducted for National Service. The recruiting centre tried hard to get young men to sign on for 3 years. The Korean War was in full swing and we were warned we would end up in the winter trenches if we didn't select our service by signing on.

I chanced it and was accepted into the RAF for the minimum two years.

Nine weeks squarebashing in Kirkham near Blackpool turned me from a callow youth into a self reliant young man. The rest of my two years taught me to skive. My experiences with a shotgun helped me with rifle shooting, but I took care not to score highly. Those who did ended up in the RAF Regiment, all parades and bull dust.

Basic training was everything I had been told it was - and then some. One boy was set to scrub a storeroom with a toothbrush, something I had thought was apocryphal. One lad was made billet orderly, responsible for the good behaviour of the hut inhabitants. If something went wrong, the whole hut was punished. The sergeant left discipline to two corporals, one bad guy, one good guy. It was all very effective. The bad guy drove you hard, the good guy's sympathy prevented open revolt. The absent sergeant was blamed for all the insistence on discipline.

The billet orderly was carefully chosen, not for his command potential, but for a mixture of innate conformity and a tendency to sneak. His betrayals earned him privileges, but his life was hell. We weren't allowed off camp until we were deemed capable of not disgracing the King's uniform (he died the following year, by which time I'd got the new Queen's uniform pretty grubby in her service). The orderly, however, could get weekend passes.

Beds were made up each morning into "boxes". Blankets and sheets were folded and piled with a final blanket wrapped round them, all carefully squared away. The orderly came back from one weekend to find his disgruntled hut-mates had played tug-of-war with his knotted blankets. Even his bayonet couldn't unpick them.

He wasn't the only one to suffer. A favourite trick was to fill a condom carefully with water - you'd be surprised how big it can get - while it lay in the middle of your victim's bed. Sometimes he got in with it, whereupon the reaction was instantaneous, but sometimes he smelled a rat (perhaps the air of expectation!) and peeled back the bedclothes first. Nobody ever helped; and I never saw anyone remove a 2 pint condom unbroken!

We had a hut bully, who boasted of his ABA (Amateur Boxing Association) medals and punched everyone in turn. I was a year older than most of my fellows - it felt quite an advantage at that age - and took care to mention casually that I had learned judo at the boy's club.

It didn't help. My turn arrived and I ducked a punch to the face. My legs were pushed against a bed and when I grabbed his battledress blouse, I fell backwards taking him with me. My knee and foot in his stomach and groin produced a flying mare which landed him two beds away and I rolled over expecting worse to come. He looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Aw, you know judo, don't you?" Thus ended the confrontation.

It wasn't all nature "red in tooth and claw". Many lads had never been away from home. Some went AWOL, one jumped to his death off the water tower, but most settled down with the help of their mates. After lights out, people would tell jokes, disembodied voices in the darkness  evoking companionable laughter. In the quiet aftermath, muffled sobbing might be heard, followed by soft footsteps as someone padded to the sufferer's bed to comfort him.

Everyone got injections. Lined up with sleeves rolled high, we awaited our fate, craning our necks to see what was happening at the front of the line. What was happening was a little local difficulty. "Where do you come from, son?" said the medic.  "Grimsby, sir." "They breed 'em tough there," he said, "I can't get the needle in."

There were immediate multiple thuds as several airmen fainted. We dragged them to the side of the hall, where male nurses injected them as they lay. "Tell 'em they've had it when they come round," was the laconic comment.

I spent from November to January there. The only days it didn't rain, it snowed. An RAF overcoat was supposed to absorb a bucketful of water before it dripped. Ours were two tone. The bottom foot was darker than the rest and could be wrung out. Buttons were polished in the evening and were green again by morning.

Boots were boned, and the studs underneath polished. The hut floors were lino and buffed to a lethal skidding sheen. No boot sole ever touched the floor. Felt pads were left at the hut entrance and you stepped on those, ice skating your way round the billet.

What bloody nonsense.  Yet, and yet, cameraderie, ésprit de corps, call it what you will, was engendered by this regime and we took pride in our appearance and team effort. The downside was conformance with someone else's agenda. I often felt that, if I were marched round the parade ground square a few times until I had fallen into the mindless rhythm, I would have faced about, presented and fired at some defenceless unfortunate, just on the word of command. 

Mind you, there were times when we were forced to run round the square with our rifles held at arms' length above our heads (Lee-Enfields weigh 7 lbs). As you came round the circuit back to where the drill corporal was standing, you expected him to shout "Halt!". He didn't, and you knew you had to complete another full round before he had his next opportunity. That time, all of you were praying that he would.

I came home in the New Year, in my uniform with a kit-bag on my shoulder. My coker spaniel was sitting as usual on the street corner, waiting. He wasn’t sure: then he went ecstatic. My mother said he’d come out every day at 5 o’clock and met every man on a bike coming past. I felt terrible, because I had to leave again inside a week.

I was posted to the  radio  training  school  in Wiltshire.

I continued to study for a BSc in the evenings and was taught about radio and radar at Yatesbury. There were 2000 boy entrants between the ages of 15 and 17 on the camp and 500 WAAFs among us 4000 erks. We met the WAAFs in class, but had no financial resources to meet them outside; in retrospect, just as well, I guess. There I joined the small-bore rifle team, which got me off many a fatigue - "You can't have him, he's needed." Even in those days, the military, trained by Bisley and the needs of snipers, knew that shooting accurately was all about Zen Buddhism - although they didn't call it that. So the most useful things I learned were breath and muscle control.

The boy entrants were a trial.

They did not feel well-dressed unless they had a hacksaw blade concealed about their person somewhere. Their use of it caused the jankers parade at night to be nearly as big as the parade in the morning. Did the chiefie leave his bike outside the orderly office for 10 minutes? When he rode off, the front wheel slowly peeled away, bending the cross-bar up; it does when the bottom bracket has been hastily sawn through.

Haul the flag to the top of the pole, then watch the whole thing gracefully topple into the square (not meant to be part of the ceremony). 

Move into a hut vacated by them and view the stars through the growing gap as the building settles at each end. (If you saw up each side of a wooden building and only saw through the ridge pole the night you leave, the problem becomes somebody else's).

In hangars on the airfield were old Lancasters, which were used for fault tracing in cables. One night, a gang of boys locked up the guard, ran a pair of WAAF bloomers up the flagpole and attempted to push a Lanc up the lane to straddle the A4. They managed to get a wheel in each ditch, which stuck it immovably. It had to be dismantled.

They weren't the only transgressors. Everyone in my class was punished for some infraction of the rules by a week's work in the cookhouse.

I was reduced almost to tears by beetroot. They were boiled in a copper and I was told to skin the hot, cooked beets by squeezing them through my fingers. After an hour or so, with wrinkled fingers and hands crimson to the wrists, I reported success. The cook dived his hand into the foot of steaming mud at the bottom and found the hidden ones. I followed suit, hanging upside down in the heat and smell. Every time I stopped, he found more. It seemed never-ending and the mud peeled my fingernails back halfway down the quick.

It was a low point and - horror - next day three of us were told off to peel spuds, always said to be the worst job of all. We went disconsolately to the hut housing potatoes, to find a nice old civvie slicing bread with a machine and three mechanical potato peelers requiring our attendance. No corporal supervised us and, as we never let on, no-one tried to take the job away from us!

We were supposed to shovel spuds into the machines, turn on the hose and spin the motor for a minute or two, letting the peeled potatoes down into buckets. We then had to take the eyes out with our little knives. We rapidly discovered that leaving them in for five minutes removed all but the deepest eyes, reducing our task considerably. That this method also removed a good half of the potato bothered us not a whit. It cost me some money, though, since the card school developed nicely.

Some crimes were never punished - only the innocent suffered! One heavy sleeper was conveyed, in his bed, in the middle of the night, to the centre of the parade square. He was still there, asleep, when everyone else came on parade. One corporal, much disliked, was the wheel man for an AOC's (Air Officer Commanding) parade. This is the first man on parade, from whom every other file and rank dresses. He is vital. So the night before, his alarm is silenced, his light bulb removed, his windows blacked out from outside and the squaddies in his hut got washed, dressed and departed in utter silence.

He didn't make it.

I found an old school acquaintance, Clive Waye, who became and was still, after 50 years, a friend. He had a motorbike and I wanted to get home at weekends. As aircraftsmen, the lowest of the low, we earned a 10s note one week and £1 note the next. (They didn't want to hand out silver coins). We spent many evenings rewinding an electric motor by hand (nothing much else to do with no money!) so that Clive could turn his father's hand mower into a powered one. His dad repaid his efforts by running over the cable. Motorcycle trips from Wiltshire to Welwyn were not without incident, especially as some of the bikes were older than we were. One day, when overtaking, the fibre gear on the Velocette's magneto stripped, stopping the engine dead. We were near Maidenhead and a phone call to Dave Bloomberg brought him out in his little sports car to tow us home. We tied a rope to the bike's headstock and I sat in the back of the car and held the other end, ready to let go if Clive fell off. By the time we reached home, I thought my hand had fallen off. Our families thought we had fallen off - we were six hours overdue!

After training, I was posted to North Weald, got married and lived out.

Joan and I had planned to get married anyway, but doing it while I was in the forces more than doubled my pay. North Weald was 26 miles from my flat in Welwyn and the buses simply didn't run often enough or at the times I needed. I borrowed a racing bike from a friend - a Claude Butler - (so he was quite a friend) and cycled every day. 

At first, my new wife got up at 7 am when I did to cook me a breakfast, but as I always sicked it up ten miles out, I let her sleep on and had cornflakes instead. Summertime was fine and the mornings quite lovely, but 52 miles a day in the winter became a real slog. Soon enough I had saved the deposit on a Bantam motorbike, so with a sigh of relief I gave my friend his bike back. 

I'd gone down from a reasonably fit ten stone seven to nine stone nine pounds and never felt fitter in my life.

Needing the motorbike as transport was very different from fixing motorbikes as a hobby. The Bantam's bigend failed and I nursed it along until a St Albans dealer supplied a part-exchange replacement engine. The day after he received it, I was outside his shop an hour before opening time. I took the old engine out at the roadside and lugged it into him as he opened. I lifted the replacement engine out of its packing case and wood shavings and fitted it. A pint of oil in the gearbox and I rode it straight to camp, getting there just in time.

One day, as I came through the gates in the morning, I found everyone standing about waiting (the usual response to urgency in the forces). 

"What's up?", I asked. 

"I'm on a charge, that's what," was the glum reply.

"How come?"

"Well," says my informant, "I'd got back from the pub and was fast asleep at four in the morning, when some bastard switches the light on and yells, "Get up, you're King Canute!" So I buzzed my boot at him. How was I to know he was the orderly sergeant?"

It was the weekend of the disastrous 1953 floods in Essex and Holland and, of course, the first thing the RAF had done was give it a code name. Not the happiest choice, I would have thought.

We spent the next weeks filling sandbags with mud and filling breaches in the banks with mudbags. Some of us went into Gravesend, knocking on doors to see if people were in trouble.  The roads were deeply flooded, with dinghies sharing the carriageways with military trucks. I cadged a lift in an Army helicopter (to give the radio an air test, you understand) and generally felt useful for the first time in my service career.

A wonderful combination of seamanship and road sense was displayed by one civilian watching horrified as we bore down on his dinghy in a 3 tonner chucking spray 4 feet high each side. He looked round, saw a side road, shipped one oar and rowed madly with the other, signalling the while with his free hand. He just made it.

We didn't realise we were living through history; we were just living. But the next tragedy that struck Britain was the November fog that year that killed at least 4000 people in London (some say it caused 10,000 deaths eventually) and inaugurated the Clean Air Acts. I used to ride home in the dark and fog on the motorbike with goggles off. You couldn't see with them on and I ended each journey with eyes like bloodshot poached eggs. People in cars used to follow me, because they could hardly see at all. The passengers would lean out of the windows to tell the driver where the kerb was. 

One night my headlamp failed. After falling in the ditch three times, I gave up. A queue of cars had followed me, the drivers waiting patiently (without getting out to help) each time I dragged the bike back on the road.

The expressions on their faces when I turned back and left them live with me yet.

North Weald was a fighter airfield flying Vampires and Meteors and had been a key airfield in the Battle of Britain with a control centre, now turned into the radio second line service workshop (my workplace on the aerodrome). It was windowless, had cork floors, dog-leg entrance corridors to prevent blast damage, was sunk halfway into the ground and had a roof comprising a sandwich of two feet of water between one foot thick reinforced concrete slabs. Very claustrophobic!

Battle of Britain Days produced tragedy as well as spectacle. Low flying in formation was lethal if the aircraft got too close and on one occasion two Vampires touched above the airfield. One dived straight in, but the other recovered - almost. It hit the airfield flat and turned into 200 yards of debris just short of the control tower. One chap in the tower jumped off the balcony (20 feet up) and hit the ground running. He only found out he'd broken both ankles later. Another turned his back, expecting to die and was knocked down by a blow on his behind. He'd been hit by a piece of armour plate glass from the windscreen, which had cut his wallet in half, but only bruised him. We spent the next two days clearing up. Although the medical team had shovelled up - literally - most of the pilot's remains, we were continually finding bits of him stuck to bits of the aeroplane and the smell of burnt flesh and kerosene hung like a pall over the airfield for days. Oddly, we still had a cup of tea and a wad, sitting on the fire engine, resting from our labours, but nobody had any appetite for dinner later.

Elsewhere on the field, mechanics were dispersed in Quonset huts behind the blast shelters (berms) for the aircraft. In those days of the ever warming cold war, Britain had defence aircraft and nuclear bombers constantly in the air. North Weald had this duty 'Operation Fabulous' about one weekend in twelve. In summer, the first planes took off at dawn (about 4 am) so we fitters were up at 3 am and the last sortie took place at dusk, maybe 10 pm, landing two hours later in the dark. We got to bed about 2 am and got up an hour later. 

Servicing the aircraft meant 20 minutes frenzied activity and 2 hours inactive waiting for them to land again - except 18 year olds can't stay inactive. The Quonset huts out on dispersal were hidden, not only from the enemy, but from authority too and bored airmen took full advantage. Each hut was like a giant asbestos cement dustbin with a conical roof, fitted with a coke stove and chimney stack and an inadequate number of chairs. To avoid complete anarchy, there were homegrown rules; viz. if you were sitting on a chair it was yours until you got up, then it belonged to the first to get to it. So you could be reading the paper in your (temporary) chair when the paper suddenly goes dark brown in the middle, signifying that someone has set light to it. Throwing it away, you grip tight to the chair. The paper is quickly given back to you, rumpled up under the chair, burning fiercely. Feet on the chair, bum on the back rest, but it's no good, that's too unstable and your possession falls to the next man - temporarily!

When that entertainment palled, it was out to the next hut with fire extinguisher filled with AvTag (kerosene aircraft fuel), bunk up on the roof and a pint of paraffin down the chimney. The first the occupants knew was when the lid of the stove rose in their midst on a six foot pillar of flame. We were far more danger to each other than the Russians ever managed.

Those Pyrene fire extinguishers were like giant brass hypodermic syringes (and could also be found on buses in the 1950's). They were normally filled with carbon tetrachloride, now known to be carcinogenic, which was also a dry cleaning fluid. To prevent this misuse, the fluid was coloured red with eosin. We needed dry cleaning fluid, but we didn't see the need for fire extinguishers or, for that matter, gas masks. So, by emptying the fire extinguisher through the carbon granules in the gas mask, you arrived at colourless drycleaner, empty extinguishers and useless gas masks. Just what was wanted.

There I learned to drive a Land-Rover, picking up people from dispersal all round the peritrack and trying to chuck them out the back by tyre screaming turns into the bends. Not the safest way to learn to drive! 

Those days are gone.

I returned to Roche Products after my National Service to work in the patent department, (I'd found that I preferred fresh air to the lab atmosphere - I'd become much healthier), writing patents under supervision, conducting searches at the Patent Office in Southampton Row and running the Research Library. I seemed unlikely ever to become a patent agent - not many made it - so in 1957 I moved into Purchasing, switching my studies to the BIM diploma and Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply - a bit like an MBA today - and enjoying working in an engineering environment. I bought plant and materials for major factory investments in England, Scotland, Switzerland and India as a member of each project team.

This was an interesting time. I continually met people at top level in all kinds of companies. It taught me more about business than any inward looking job, however senior, could have. In the fifties, when we built a plant in Scotland, we had to pretend it was for vitamin C, when it was really for vitamin A; otherwise Glaxo, who were also about to market vitamin A would have put on a spurt and perhaps beaten us to the punch. As it was, we were selling product six months before they came on line. Stainless steel was at a premium and the buyer was not necessarily in the driving seat. It taught me persuasion and diplomacy. It helped that Roche was cash-rich.

Non-professional buyers believe too easily that negotiation is the key: not so, competition is the best lever. My suppliers always knew others were quoting.

There came a time in 1980 when Roche had to retrench, cutting staff by 10% across the world. They told me they wouldn't be investing for at least 4 years (which proved optimistic) so, at the age of 48, good-bye. Two years salary (tax-free in those days) eased the blow and within 3 months I got 5 job offers. I gave up the idea of sailing the Atlantic and took a job with Lucas, a contract furniture company. The redundancy windfall put a deposit on the house and bought our boat, a Snapdragon named Tureena. It was a terrible name but had been British registered and was a dreadful hassle to change, so we left it. We felt, however, that we should call the dinghy 'Soupçon'.

The three months it took to find a job had me scratching to fill my time while I waited for replies. I went back to farming, with the son of the farmer I worked for as a teenager. I enjoyed it until we spent a long afternoon castrating calves. Some of them were BIG and my job was to wrestle them to the ground, by holding their horns and tripping them up. Then I sat on their heads while the farmer attended to the other end. Still, I guess the calves had a rougher time of it than I did. The farmer's Jack Russell enjoyed himself to begin with, because he was fed the now redundant bits. After a while, even he had had enough and lay on his back, too bloated to get up. For another fortnight, (I couldn't stand it any longer), I was a taxi driver. It was like being a rat in a treadmill, railway station to destination and back again. I used to take the jobs no one else wanted (no tip, see?) delivering parcels to distant destinations, just to have somewhere different to drive. Here's a tip of my own: avoid sharing the road with taxi drivers late on Friday nights. Many will already have been driving for 17 hours that day.

I joined Lucas, a family company that was recruiting to expand. My experience in several areas did make a difference and in three years I had more than doubled my previous salary. The company, meanwhile, went from under £1m turnover to over £10m in 8 years. I didn't like the next set of ideas for expansion since a recession was certainly on the way and, luckily for me, I refused a directorship. In 1990, having mortgaged itself to expand and failed to achieve sales targets, Lucas went belly up. I had seen the writing on the wall for the satellite company I was running and organised a mothballing rescue package which included my redundancy. The idea was that the suppliers would hold stocks and when a job came up, I would quote for and manage the contract for a fee, using sub-contractors.

Everything was agreed and I should have left on 12^th September with a handout, but agreed to stay on until 8^th October to tidy up. On 20^th September, Lucas went bust with nothing in the kitty. They must have known what was going to happen. I was 59.

That was interesting, in the Chinese sense!

In order to get any redundancy money from the Government (who would later have first call on Lucas assets to recover anything paid out), I had to sign on, a demeaning process, but probably good for the soul, like Jain disciples having to clean out the toilets of the Untouchables with their hair. Queuing, answering questions from illiterate, ignorant clerks, being treated with no consideration, felt just about as degrading.

I was obviously unemployable, except perhaps as a B & Q assistant, so I started my own business (Business Writing Associates) as a copywriter. This had the advantages of needing no capital or heavy outlays, working from home, living on my wits and being able to do the work. Management consultancy as an occupation was overcrowded and spurious, even for the best qualified (definition of a consultant: a man who knows 100 ways to make love to a woman - but doesn't know any women) and P R agents needed premises, front and investment in printing which the client may not have reimbursed. One defaulting client could mean ten more jobs before you got back into profit. The downside of copywriting only was the limited scope for making large percentage profits.

Still, it's been enjoyable and instructive and in 1999 I began to let it diminish. Current customers were served but I didn’t search out new ones. I still acted as a marketing consultant for my friend Peter Black, who had a conference centre in Docklands (and doing his books), so I have seen the millennium dome being constructed week by week. It looked a lot more interesting half-finished than the oversized circus tent it resembles now. In 2002 I closed the business.

Among other examples of the lack of technology in 1952 was contraception. Hit and miss would be a good description. Or maybe, seeing that even in 1999, British teenage pregnancy is the highest in Europe, it was just human nature and joie de vivre. Anyway, we became parents and even more broke.

Our little girl, Jill, was 20 months old when we had a crash with our motorbike and sidecar and she was killed instantly (1955). Joan spent some time in hospital. I was 23 and 44 years later it is still too painful to write about, so let's move on.

This was the event that I had foreseen. I don't expect anyone to buy into that, but that's unimportant. I know what I know. 

We grieved and our life together changed. We then had two boys (very much on purpose), Terry and Roger, born in 1956 and 1958, so separated by under two years, who delighted us. When Roger was six months old we re-homed a dog, which was the boys' companion until they left for college. The dog, Prince, died, still looking for bitches on heat, at about 18.

My sons' stories are theirs to tell - not their Dad's biased version. Suffice to say that I'm immensely proud of them both and love them dearly.  They are in their 40's in 1999 and Terry has a son, Jonathan, 13, and a daughter, Clare, 10, who also share my love.

There are one or two things they may not remember, like when I brought two mice home from the Roche animal farm - pretty little purple ones. They had grey fur and pink bodies; purple was how it finished up. The idea was to teach them about the birds and bees (and mice), but the mice didn't seem to want to breed. We went away on holiday, leaving the feeding to a neighbour. When we came back we had thirteen mice. Three weeks later, we had lots of mice. I had a crash course in mouse sexing to stop the rot and we sold them all to the pet shop at 5p each. I opened the car boot on our return just in time to see an escapee diving into the upholstery.

Joan asked the neighbour's wife to baby-sit one evening and she seemed reluctant, so Joan asked another friend, then told the neighbour she didn't need to. This thoroughly miffed the neighbour and she said so loud and clear in Terry's hearing. When she went away Terry said to his mother, "She spoke to you as though you were a little boy!" Rather a shame-making comment.

However, my relationship with Joan did not survive our maturing from the very young people we were when we married and, possibly, the strain of the tragedy that hit us. By the early 60's, it was clear she wanted to be elsewhere and quarrels followed by reconciliations continued far too often. Eventually we called a truce. I had seen too many divorces with young children suffering financially and emotionally and neither of us wanted to try and take the boys away from the other. So we agreed to live together separately, if you see what I mean, and bring the boys up until they were adult.

It worried me that they grew up in a household that substituted a strained politeness for affection between the parents, but we tried to show plenty of affection to them. However, we weren't honest about our intentions and circumstances and the boys could obviously (with hindsight) see the dissonance between the words and the body language. Both have been affected in different ways, a source of great sorrow and regret to me. I wish I'd been wiser and somehow done it differently.

This lasted another 10 years, but we separated, then divorced in the 1970's when the boys had left for college.

When Terry was 13 and Roger was 11, in 1969, my mother died at 74. She had had a stroke and seemed to be recovering in hospital, when a second stroke paralysed her and sent her into a coma, from which she never recovered, dying within two days. After her first stroke, we were fortunate enough to be able to say all the things, like "I love you", that 'north country folk' never said, but took for granted. I felt guilty (as usual) that we hadn't spent more time together and that she might not think that I understood and appreciated all she had done for me. That thought has been one of the motivations behind this memoire. It's not only the beginning of the contemporary history of a few of the Westoby's, but a way of remembering my parents and telling my children and grandchildren how much I love them. There's a continuity of affection here that I hope will extend down the generations. Remember, kids, life's too short to waste time quarreling.

My mother is buried with my dad, in the same local cemetery behind South Ley where my daughter is buried. There's room for me there, too, if any survivor fancies planting me close by!

For a long time after my mother died, I found myself holding silent dialogues with her. Just occasionally, I still do (and she said the same thing about my dad). It's kind of comforting and makes death seem far less final. 

Enough, enough.

Meanwhile, life went on. We built a Mirror dinghy (the components arrived while I was ill with flu and the boys sat on my bed and said, "You will be better soon, won't you?") and sailed it on a local lake and on the sea. We swapped it for a National 12 - a hairy boat made hairier by our fitting a trapeze to it and trying to sail it single handed from the wire - which we sailed on Derwentwater, and on various tidal rivers. This was followed by a 420, which I only sold in 1996. I sailed yachts with friends and with the Ocean Youth Club, a group I met when trying to find adventure holidays for the boys. I used to sail as unpaid second mate with a skipper and 13 teenagers from Brightlingsea to Holland in a 72 ft racing yacht. Two days out someone would ask, "When are we getting in?" The skipper always had the same reply. "Tuesday teatime." (Even if it was already Wednesday). I've also sailed on a Sea Cadet squarerigged training ship 'Royalist' - a wonderful experience, moderated marginally by looking after 22 male adolescents!

Sailing with an acquaintance, Geoff Thomas, could be quite an experience. He had a well-found 32 ft boat (his wife Judy used to complain she hadn't got a stove, because it didn't make the boat go faster) and confidence in his own ability. Fortunately, so did I (have confidence in his ability). One rough day, we intended to go to Newhaven from Ramsgate. As we came round the corner past Dover we met the full strength of the Channel gale, right on the nose. Everyone else was ducking into Dover, so Geoff went to Boulogne. It was a wild beam reach, with every other sea coming aboard and, as we came through the outer harbour, Geoff said, "Look back." The sea was breaking right over the outer  harbour wall. "When we go out in that tomorrow," he said, "remember we survived it today!" The next day was much calmer, but I'd forgotten to bring my passport. Customs at Dover had so many boats sheltering, they forgot to ask.

The Ocean Youth Club boats sailed in all weathers too, but they were 72 ft ocean going racers. We came out of Holland one night with the tide all wrong and were forced to make for Zeebrugge. The wind picked up to gale force on the nose and we tacked down to Belgium in the howling darkness. The skipper switched on the decklights (powerful lamps on the mast that lit up the boat) because none of the ferries would have seen us otherwise. This destroyed our night vision and the waves were invisible until they entered our thirty foot circle of light - big and surprising. The next day, the forecast was force 9 and we left Zeebrugge with a storm trysail instead of a main. 20 minutes out and it blew away, tearing free of the track, sheets and halliard. We came back under jib and mizzen doing 10 knots with wind just ahead of the beam. I helmed it for 3 1/2 hours, shipping every third sea green over the bows. The memory still excites me.

The squarerigger was something else. When helming that under full sail in 30 knots of wind, you could feel 400 tons of boat being picked up under your feet by the force of the wind. 70 foot above the deck, standing on a swaying rope, trying to furl the sail, was interesting, too.

Terry and I went on a week's course to learn to fly gliders, an even more weather dependent sport than sailing. The instructor sits behind the trainee and, after landing under instruction on my first flight I said to Terry that I thought I might get the hang of it next time. "Didn't you know", said Terry, "he had his hands on his head while you landed."

The instructor lived for flying. 

He said to me, "If we land in a field, I don't mind what you hit, it's got to come through you before it hits me, but my arse is right over the only wheel on this aircraft, so don't land it hard!" 

To keep up flying speed and avoid stalling during landing, you aim the glider at the ground at an angle of 45 degrees, pulling out at the last minute. The speed gets up to 90 knots, regulated by your operating the airbrake (if you let it get to 125 knots, the wings fall off). I pulled out when instructed and asked how you knew when to do it. 

"When you can see the individual blades of grass" was the reply. 

Well, ask a silly question. . . . Next time, I did  indeed pull out just as I could distinguish the separate blades of grass. On the last day, I had a trip in a prewar glider made of plywood and strong string (well, wires really). The instructor and trainee (me) sat side by side in an open cockpit with red leather trim, like an old Bentley. I tried a gentle turn. 

"No, no," said the instructor, "You've got to give it a bootful." 

So I heaved sideways on the stick and kicked the rudder over. We stood on our right ear and hung out of the cockpit in our straps 1500 ft above the ground. Well, he did say.

I had some problems with my health in these middle years. Two displaced vertebrae were probably due to diving, trampolining and weight-training with poor technique. I learned to build the back muscles to compensate. I had a hiatus hernia which prevented me from over-eating or drinking spirits to excess and food poisoning, which produced, as a side effect, a beard I've had ever since. A skiing accident required a cartilage operation eventually and being hit in the eye by a badminton shuttle (they fit the orbit as neatly as a squash ball) grew me a cataract which has only just been sorted.

We managed a couple of holidays in Spain, where I would practice my German on any unsuspecting German tourist I could find. Strange that all of them fought on the Russian front; I never met one who had served against the Brits. Why the hell did we have so much trouble? I was conversing thus in German by a swimming pool, looking very un-English with a tan, a beard, a funny beret and a sketch book, when two young English girls - Liverpudlean by their accents - remarked favourably on my painting. I offered to draw the prettier of the two in my best fractured English and they commented freely on my appearance, my probable intentions and how to frustrate them until I handed over the sketch and said, "How do you like that, love?" My intentions were never in question, but Terry subsequently did his best to be a substitute! 

I recall that on that holiday the boys took their new high-tech table tennis bats (dimpled one side, sponge the other) to use on the hotel's table. All their practice had been on a home-made table, full length but a foot too narrow (it had to fit in the garage), so a full size table was freedom indeed. At 11 and 13 they were beating up German 18 year olds who had wanted to show off in front of their girl friends. They soon had the table all to themselves.

Gordon Herbert came back from farming in Kenya and bought a dairy farm in Wales. I'd go down to see him on occasion and work on the farm, mowing the silage and haymaking. The farm was efficient and the cowman did the early work of milking in the automated parlour, but there was plenty left to do. I'd long ago given up shooting at live targets, but clay pigeon shooting was good fun. One long afternoon, we tagged all the cows, treated them for red water and branded them. The cows were put through a crusher, a kind of fencing tunnel ending in a barrier, which held the cow's head, and hence the cow, immobile. I punched the tag through the animal's ear with a plier-shaped punch, Gordon injected the antibiotic and a contractor did the branding.

 Now, you're not allowed to hot brand in Britain, so the brass branding irons are cooled in Drikold and acetone to minus 80 degrees centigrade and applied to a dark patch on the cow's rump. The man applying the iron wears waterproof PVC coveralls - and they do need to cover all of him. He has to hold the iron in place for about half a minute, standing close to the cow. The extremely low temperature affects the hair follicles and the hair grows back white in the shape of the brand, usually a number. As he does it, a look of surprise and consternation gradually appears on the cow's face and she remonstrates as only she knows how - all over him.

At the end of the afternoon, we stood him against a wall and hosed him down.

On another occasion, I took Roger with me and Gordon asked him to carry a bale of hay into the field to top up the feeder. Standing next to the feeder, among his harem of cows, was a large bull, complete with even larger horns. Rog, aged about eleven, set off, very bravely, I thought, since he'd not done this kind of thing before and I whispered to Gordon "Is this OK?" "Sure," says Gordon, "Welsh calves are brought up by the women and are much gentler than those handled by blokes." Fortunately, he was proved right.

Other leisure pursuits were set building at the Barn Theatre and motorbike building with my old friend Clive Waye. We built the Drag-Waye, a Volks/Porsche/Clive powered dragster that held the world record for the standing start quarter mile for 4 years and the Race-Waye, which came ninth in the 500 cc class in the Isle of Man in a Japanese dominated year that saw no other British bikes entered. I liked the engineering perhaps more than the racing and being in the paddock on race days with a job to do was really good fun. The Drag-Waye was specifically designed to take the 1/4 mile standing start record and had many examples of Clive's ingenuity as an engineer. The tubular space frame was brazed rather than welded to help avoid the fatigue cracking likely where heat would have caused carbon to migrate from the weld. Brazing could also crack, however, so the pressurised air for the fuel tank was led through the frame first. If a crack developed, pressure loss revealed it long before any visual inspection would. There were no gears; gear changing meant a non-powered interval while the clutch was free and acceleration changes could unseat the rider (as many of our competitors discovered).

Instead, the rider lay over the back wheel to put as much weight as possible down on the track and steered (very small angles only!) through wires under high tension to the front wheel. There was no headstock; the wheel rotated on a universal axle joint. Acceleration was achieved by opening the throttle fully using nitromethane as a fuel (an electronic limiter stopped the engine blowing up) and feeding the clutch (from an F1 racing car) as rapidly as possible. The slick burned off, producing a 12 ft flame and the bike disappeared through the smoke. Its nickname became 'the Dragon'.

Set building at the local drama club (The Barn Theatre) was quieter, but perhaps more long drawn out. One play finished Saturday night, the set was struck Sunday morning, the next set erected and painted on Sunday afternoon and evening and in the evenings of Monday and Tuesday. (Wednesday was first rehearsal). Set building often went on until 3 o'clock in the morning. Team effort made it fun rather than a chore and I met Migs Chandler (nee Thomas) there again (an old school friend who had married another, John Chandler and both still friends after all these years). She introduced me to Nancy Teather, then a young mum with a solid artistic reputation. My abiding memory of that meeting was asking Nancy to paint a scene of an industrial town on the backcloth, which would then be seen through a window I erected in the set. I looked on astonished as a few strokes evoked what I'd asked for. Close up, where she was working, they were just daubs of colour, but it was as though her eyes were back in the auditorium with me, building a totally convincing picture. On another occasion, at about two in the morning, I was painting flats in salmon pink emulsion from a stepladder, with a washing up bowl of paint on the little platform. I was tired; that's my only excuse, but I tried to move the ladder by standing under it with the bowl left in place. I inadvertently closed the steps slightly, the bowl tilted and slid . . . Another painter shouted a warning and bravely! held his arms out to catch the bowl. I was watching him from the safety of my ladder when he caught it and saw him turn salmon pink instantaneously - all over. That evening seemed to go on for ever.

We became friends with Nancy and her husband Bill, both families meeting on and off over the years, sometimes often, sometimes not, but always friends. Since I married Jane, we have become much closer to Nancy and Bill, through walking and holidaying together, but mostly because all four of us enjoy each other's company.

Other water sports I mastered (after a fashion) were surfing and windsurfing. I first tried to surf at Newquay when the boys were small. I had no wet-suit and borrowed a board. The first time I rode a wave right in, I went straight out again. Newquay had some big waves and I wiped out often. That holiday sent me home with a tan marred by cuts and bruises, but it was exciting.

Windsurfing was more difficult. I was already a dinghy sailor and had to unlearn a great deal. I finally achieved success on a lake in the Jura, by watching an instructor teach little kids. That was a Canvas Holidays fortnight spent with Jane and Richard, where we all learnt the skill. When we got there, most of the windsurfers were broken, but I always carried a toolbox in the car and mended them. The rep was so grateful, we always got first preference.

A friend from Roche, Bob Talbot, moved to a village called Nottage in Wales and his son Richard became a noted surf-skier and life saver. We used to go down for New Year and paddle the skis in on the winter surf on New Year's Eve. Wet suits were mandatory and even then it was bitterly cold. Skis are much easier to catch waves with, but over the years they became shorter, wider and a damn' sight more difficult to control. You sit in a little double dent on what is essentially a tiny surf board with skeg, with your toes under a canvas strap, catch the wave and adjust your body weight to stay on it, rather than under it. I gave up doing that long ago.

What I have continued to do is play badminton, characteristically not getting coached until I retired and discovering that age and guile can still (sometimes) beat youth and vigour.

I was also into DIY, before it became a national pastime, really to make the money go further. Most major things at home early on were home-made or bought trade through my professional contacts. 

Roger claims he was eight before he found out about shops.

I had discovered other women friends, but my agenda, while I had the boys to bring up, did not include commitment, and each in turn waved me good-bye. So I joined the Samaritans. That was interesting, too. There's nowt so queer as folk! Or to put it another way, 'All the world's queer except thee and me, and even thee's a bit peculiar.' I wanted to give affection and with them I felt I could do it at arms' length, offering something needed without hurt on either side.

 I'd forgotten about the other volunteers. 

I used to give talks to recruit volunteers - always needed since the burn-out rate was fairly high - and people would stay on and chat over coffee afterward. One evening I looked around for the most interesting-looking person in the room and lighted on a reserved blonde girl with remarkable blue eyes. She took time to get to know and we were friends long before we were lovers. Jane and I married in 1990, after 14 years of living together. She had a little boy, Richard, who was 2 when I met him and 4 when they came to live with me. He agreed to come because I had a colour television. You'd have to ask Jane why she agreed! 

I'm 15 years older than Jane, just one of the reasons why it took me a while to ask her to disrupt her life with her son and parents and take a chance on me. Other reasons included my feeling of being damaged goods. Until I had the house to myself, I hadn't realised the strain Joan and I had been under. We hadn't overtly quarrelled for a long time, but the place felt so peaceful after she left. I needed time to believe I could share again. 

Still, Jane and I have known each other for 26 years now and my love for her started strongly and has grown deep roots since. We share a love of sailing, walking and ideas; not that her ideas necessarily gelled with mine. Nevertheless, my understanding has been broadened by her perspectives and she finds plenty to discuss when considering mine.

We sailed together in the Greek islands and then with the Ocean Youth Club. When Jane and I first sailed with them, we joined an all adult trip by accident. They were all blokes, loading crate after crate of booze when we arrived. Their faces when they saw a girl coming on board were horror-struck. It only took a couple of days to convince them she was one of the lads, although she won't thank me for saying so.

Since then we've had trips in the Dalmatian islands (twice, once with Nancy, Bill, Migs and John), from St Tropez with Migs and John and also owned a 25 ft yacht (a Snapdragon) on the Blackwater river for 9 years. Jane has sailed from Hobart to Sydney and I've sailed and snorkeled in the Red Sea, in 2000 sailed from Gibraltar to Tenerife in a tall ship, the squarerigger Stavros S Niarchos and sailed on the John Lang with the Ocean Youth Trust in 2005. 

Chapter 8

Retirement

This chapter's in progress, since we are talking about the present. So far, my heart rate has been put up, not by poverty, but by pension funds actually putting money into my account without my having 'earned' it. I've got used to it now, and Jane is working two days a week (1999/2000) to spend more time with her family (me!). Since she is also studying for an RHS qualification one day a week and I go to Docklands on a day she stays home to look after the dog (did I mention the dog?), effectively we get one extra day together. I didn't mention the dog. In October 1999, we rehomed a Jack Russell cross bitch. She isn't cross at all, but extremely good-natured. She does possess terrier characteristics - alertness, inquisitiveness, boundless energy and, from her unknown father, longer legs and a fair turn of speed. At about eighteen months we introduced her to agility training. The dog does well, it's me who has to be agile. After four years (2003) she feels like the child of my old age. We are both fairly dotty about her, so time to stop going on about Joss. On the 13th April 2000, my old friend, Clive Waye died of cancer only three and a bit weeks after being diagnosed. He was 67 and I'd known him well for 48 years. He died in California and (it's the 16th as I write this), it still seems unreal. Coincidentally, my old school held its diamond jubilee this month and several of Clive's friends and mine were there. He obviously had the knack of keeping his friends. So having started work as a kid with horses, where have I got to?  I'm typing this on a PC in Microsoft Word and can distribute it almost instantly world-wide to a vast collection of unlucky recipients in my e-mail address book. If I made it my home page on the Web, half the world could read it. My house is centrally heated, there are two cars in the drive and many of the tasks around the home I used to do by hand are automated or helped by power tools (often cordless). I don't own a mobile phone*, but that is bound to change; I'm just being a Luddite. The NHS has flowered and now seems overblown so, while I can afford it, we have private health insurance. My employment has generated some pensions and a toe is in the stock market with tax-free Peps. *(In 2003 we have one car and two mobile phones!) In 2002 I've stopped going to Docklands and retired the business, although I still write occasionally for old customers who still remember me. In 2003 I started as a volunteer in a primary school listening to children read and running the chess club; the charity I worked for asked me to be an area organiser and very quickly, a regional coordinator. Simultaneously, I became a PPI Forum volunteer (a watchdog body over the NHS - now retired - it was a wordy frost!). I’ve now gone back to being an organiser only, but I’m a tree warden locally and an educational speaker for The Blue Cross (an animal charity). Space exploration continues (but with a reduced budget) and space travel, at least in the Earth - Moon - Mars system is on the cards. Cars seem to have seen their hey-day and will go electric or disappear (or go back to being the toys of the rich) although SUV's and 4x4 monster vehicles seem to be making a last gasp. Aeroplanes are getting bigger and faster and are forecast to crash oftener. Concorde has been grounded. Global warming is now a certainty. Capitalism has buried Communism (at least in its bastard tyrannical form), but how long can we go on producing, despoiling the planet, just to maintain ultimately unsustainable credit? A new system is needed. We in the West have far more than we need and it isn't good for us (evolutionary theory, rather than simple morality). Fundamentalist Islam (and America's violent response) seems to be the next threat. The future? No predictions. It’s January 2012 and the world has been in financial crisis since 2009. At last, those in power are being forced to see that increasing GDP year on year is not just the road to calamity, but impossible. The question is, will it change their behaviour? Only catastrophe forces change; people never look ahead if it means constraining indulgence now.

Chapter 9   Night thoughts This chapter may be about philosophy, life's purpose or lack of it or just a rag-bag of ideas that cross my mind. Let's have a disclaimer early. I'm not necessarily committed to anything I say hereinafter! As a young man, I had ideals that, although grounded in Christian ethics, did not need an omnipresent God for me to adhere to them. I think it was Pope (no, not the Pope, but Alexander) who said, "The proper study of mankind is Man". It seemed to me then, and now, that 'do as you would be done by' and 'kindness is all' were two precepts that called for no belief system except that men and women were social animals and yet led you into a life you needn't be ashamed of. Immortality Immortality on earth belongs to the bacteria and other cell-dividing clones and is not, to self-conscious beings, an attractive proposition. The fact that its DNA has survived for countless aeons does not add to the sum total of an individual bacterium's happiness. And this is the rub. We desire a continuation of our existence precisely because we are self-conscious. (A different thing from being merely conscious, like a starfish). But think what true immortality would mean for most men. In a physical body they would eventually plead for death. An entity with a non-physical body is inconceivable to us, since we rely on five senses to determine our environment and our internal view of the external world. Say that Heaven is very different and that's all you can say. All the descriptions are humanity driven and limited by our imagination. So when I die, I expect oblivion. My sense of identity, I persuade myself, is due to the pattern of electrical impulses flooding my brain. When the brain ceases to exist, the pattern disappears. (Although recent research points to consciousness being generated at sub-atomic levels, in amongst the particles existing under quantum mechanical rules). Near death experiences seem to occur at this level when measurable brain activity has stopped. Some hint here of the pattern surviving death, if only for a while.  Even the external world is an illusion, since my senses apprehend only those features that I need to see to ensure my survival and my brain produces its own internal version of outside events. It happens to correspond roughly with other human beings' versions because we share a genetic heritage. The world looks very different to a cow or a dog. So much of the universe is hidden from us (thus hope for those who do believe in an after-life). We are limited by our five senses, our heritage as hunter gatherers and our limited life-span. It's hard to envisage 200 years, impossible to realise a million and star distances may be enumerated but not truly comprehended. An enduring mystery is the nature of consciousness. Half the scientific world thinks we can't investigate it, the other half thinks that it will be explicable - eventually. The separation of I and not-I seems to belong to relatively few species and has led us to our most cherished illusions; mostly, that we are important in the universe.  "Full many a rose is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air". What anthropocentric tosh; but beautifully expressed. If the rose takes notice of us at all, it is through its thorns, to keep us off and to keep herbivores from eating it. Its scent and flower is designed to attract flying pollinators and it surely wouldn't grow in a desert! Our appreciation of our surroundings was designed to keep us alive until we had bred the next generation. That we have transmuted it into an aesthetic sense is part and parcel of the way evolution has always taken one element and modified it to other purposes.  We are infinitesimal specks of reproducible molecules on a small planet circling an unexceptional main stream star in the backwoods of a galaxy that itself is in no special position among billions of others. But the nature of consciousness is such that I am aware of these (alleged) facts. Until beings such as I arrived, the universe existed without any concept of the passage of time or the nature of change. This knowledge exists only while I think it. When I die, the whole universe dies with me. So, paradoxically, at one and the same time, I am utterly unimportant and absolutely necessary. And, of course, the same goes for you. Swift said it right so long ago: the cheese mites were disputing about the origin of the cheese. Some said it had been created in 3 days. Others said it had evolved from the curds which showed still as residues. But whatever reasons and evidence were adduced by either side, even the wisest of them could not envisage a cow. Evolutionary Psychology Much of what we regard as moral grows out of our ancestral evolution. Altruism seems good to us because the genes that favoured helping others survived better than the ones evoking totally selfish behaviour. (See Tit for Tat in Game Theory). And they survived because co-operative behaviour helped the group (and therefore individuals in it) to survive better. If we were bees we might think it moral to kill and eat our worn-out compatriots, because that helps the swarm survive. Evolutionary psychology is the flavour of the month in 2000/2002, but I have some caveats about the ideas that seem to explain so much. Nurture as well as nature has a major part to play. But these are concerns for Man alone. The universe cares nothing for us and exists for itself, playing out its destiny according to the physical rules that came into being with the initial event and governed by the random chances at quantum level that prevent the world being deterministic. (A place here for free will, at least within circumscribed limits). A good text for these ideas is 'The Moral Animal' by Richard Wright. Purpose in the Universe So why the universe? Is there a purpose we can define? Maybe, but you'd be an arrogant man to say so now. It may be possible to show a trend.  The evidence so far shows that the very early universe was small and highly energetic, only elementary particles being present. As it cooled and expanded, the only atoms to appear at first were hydrogen and helium, so the universe evolved from elementary to more complex particles. The other atoms and molecules familiar to us only arrived after gravity coalesced H² and He into the nuclear furnaces that produced them and the super novae that dispersed them. We, and everything around us (except hydrogen and helium) are made of star-stuff - a wonderful conclusion beyond the wildest imagination and a kind of immortality indeed. From atoms came molecules, which reacted with each other to form compounds - inert material, subject only to erosion and random reactions. The next stage was ordered material, such as crystalline structures, which were probably the precursors of amino-acids, the building blocks of life. So first of all we have plasma, then electrons, then atoms, then molecules, then compounds, then compounds that can replicate themselves; if the universe can be said to be going anywhere on the evidence, it appears to be getting more complex at the micro level. Its macro condition obeys time's arrow - entropy - as it decays from organised to disorganised states and eventual heat death, but at planetary scales, it seems to be getting more organised. Materials that can replicate, grow and even move are called living, but the time scales for all such are very short compared with geological time. We cannot therefore conceive of possible growth in what we think of as inert objects such as stones and rocks, but time lapse photography has given us insights elsewhere that should give us pause before we reject such ideas entirely. The current stage in complexity is conscious life and, in us and probably some other species, self-consciousness. Can we ask ourselves, "What comes next?" and if we do, what possible answers are there? Whatever it is, mutation, change in the environment and chance will render our best analysis no better than a guess. Truth Let's come back to humans and the search for truth. First, can we define truth? Scientific method is simply a powerful tool that has done more to unearth nature's secrets than any other method so far. We may now need different methods to delve deeper into the fabric of the invisible universe, since we have no handle on how to envisage quantum events. But scientific 'truth' is only true until the next piece of evidence disproves it. It is always an approximation to any objective truth (if such a thing can be said to exist). Another road to truth is faith, an inner conviction that an idea, a concept, some value is an Eternal Verity. The faith has to come from inside the faithful, it cannot be imposed and it is not susceptible to evidence or rational argument. There is, therefore, little to be said about this route to 'truth'. It is or it isn't, end of story. Supporting faith by evidence is a contradiction in terms. So does truth matter? It is true, in Newtonian terms, that the table I sit at is brown, solid and durable, but it is equally true, according to Maxwell, Rutherford, Einstein and others, that it is mostly empty space, can be considered as many wave motions and is ultimately probablistic. I'd still do well not to hit my equally non-substantial head on it. My own opinion of what is the 'truth' can hardly matter, then, since what will be will be. The passing of time is almost certainly an illusion of some sort and my efforts to control my future by my present actions will be thwarted quite often. Whatever I believe, ultimately the world I inhabit will have the last word according to what is. The only philosophy to avoid this stark conclusion is solipsism, but if I believe that, why can't I order the universe better? Time Now here's a puzzle. I'm not interested in clock time, the mechanical counting of one event after another, but rather in time as a dimension. I don't expect it is any different from all the other 11 or 25 dimensions (only 4 of which we can perceive). But when Einstein spoke of a space-time continuum he was using old fashioned language for an entirely new concept. By these words he differentiated time from the other dimensions and that may prevent us thinking properly about it.  All dimensions are imaginary. We only experience solid objects (and they are only solid, with length width and depth if they also have duration, the fourth dimension). There is only one non-dimensional object, a point. There is only one class of one dimensional objects, lines, curved or straight, but without width or depth, only length. There is only one class of two dimensional objects, planes, flat or folded, without depth (but trace the surface of the strange Möbius strip). Only three dimensional objects have solidity, but even these are imaginary, like one and two dimensional concepts, if they do not last any time, that is, if they do not extend into the fourth dimension. So forget human perception and language for the moment and consider that all real objects have length x width x depth x duration (but none of these alone - solidity is what we get). The shape of these real objects extended down Minowski world lines (their duration) is different from any snapshot of them - the measurement we make at any instant - which is, of course, like a cross-sectional cut at one point in the object's duration. The object exists for a while and to us it appears that the fourth dimension unfolds. If the world is totally deterministic, then each object comes into being and eventually disappears without possibility of a different outcome. The universe is static; everything has already happened and our human perception that time passes is an illusion of our kind of consciousness. The uncertainty principle and chaos theory seem to indicate that the world ain't like that and that the fourth dimension is subject to random change, just as the other dimensions can be given different values. (To digress about that last statement: consider the coastline of an island. The area of the island is obviously finite, even though it may be hard to measure. By measuring its fractal coastline with a one metre rule, an approximate length will be determined. By using a one centimetre rule, the coastline will be found to have extended considerably. By using ever smaller increments of measure, the coastline will continue to extend. By using an infinitesimally small rule, the coastline will be found to be infinite. A finite area, bounded by an infinite perimeter?) Maybe the plasticity of the time dimension is a function of entropy (Time's Arrow). It is possible to envisage a dynamic universe as a hot plastic body cooling from a hot, liquid future to a cold, solid past, an argument that regards the fourth dimension as a vector, not just a reversible line. An argument for the phenomenon of cause and effect (although causality doesn't appear to hold at quantum scales) which, as Hume pointed out, is still only a human belief. On this view, the past is immutable, while the future is changeable - it hasn't set solid yet. The solidifying surface is the 'Now Mark', the only bit of the time dimension human consciousness can appreciate. However, if quantum effects translate to macro scales, then the fourth dimension may be just as reversible as the other three and if the universe stops expanding and contracts to the big crunch, some interesting effects may be observed. On a human scale, I have identified several nodal points in my life (and failed to notice many others), but usually only after they've gone by. At these points, my decision to do one thing or the other (and even to do nothing is a decision!) has set my life down a new course. Each decision has not only opened up opportunities to me, but also closed off many, many others. You can't bewail this fact; it happens to everyone all the time. And it's no good striving for prescience. I've come to believe that what happens to you in the long run is sheer luck. Morality "Do as you would be done by" and "Kindness is all". Do we need more than that?  The problem is, we can all envisage scenarios where the right thing to do is not at all clear. Sometimes, you just have to do the best you can and choose between two evils. So let's enunciate a few principles. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth".  "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold".  "Don't get mad, get even".  "Before you go to seek revenge, dig two graves." "Those who seek revenge, keep their own wounds green".  "Forgive thine enemies".  "The only way to get rid of an enemy is to turn him into a friend". One group of aphorisms is as macho as you can get; the second appeals to softer natures. To some degree, I've tried both and the second is far more satisfying and leads more often to inner peace - though the process is not necessarily easy. I can understand outrage in hot blood, if you or yours are attacked and, in a way, adrenaline-fed rage is forgivable, though not to be fostered. What I cannot sympathise with, is brutal punishment delivered after the event, for punishment's sake. I'm not even so concerned about what it does to the punished (although there is some solid evidence that children who are abused often grow up to be abusers). What it does to the punisher is to brutalise him or her. I've been caned and I know the teacher wanted me to cry and hit me harder when I wouldn't. Such punishment is never done in cold blood; hormones circulate in the striker's blood that redden his eyes and tremble his knees. It makes him feel shamefully good - for the moment. I'm not saying that wrong-doing doesn't deserve punishment, but it should fit and be commensurate with the crime. It should also have the purpose of re-education and rehabilitation behind it, not simple retribution. Unless you can bring the criminal back into society as a decent member, you might as well write him off completely and kill him. Anything else is a waste of society's scarce resources. We don't think like that, because we are social animals and because we are all too well aware that we can also end up as transgressors. Also, we need to define what is really criminal behaviour - different in a democracy and a tyranny – different for libertarians than for control freaks. Some lost souls do seem to be beyond our power to give them a conscience and I used to think that such people, brutal murderers maybe, would be better off dead than locked up for forty years. However, that argues than some other human being has to do the killing and become a judicial murderer himself and, what's more, in my name (and there have been plenty of volunteers). But, "forgive thine enemies"? I once thought this was a counsel of perfection, but now I think it is the only long-term road to peaceful living. I have felt wronged and felt hatred for the 'wrong-doer'. Later, much later, I saw how I, too, had contributed to the problem and how my anger and hate had corroded me, without touching the other person in any useful way. So now, I try damned hard not to think in those terms. Maybe getting older makes it easier. So much of conventional morality has little to do with rational thinking and is much more due to hormonal changes, childhood upbringing, genetic make-up and the evolutionary history of our species. So are there 'Eternal Verities', actions that are right or wrong, no matter what the circumstances? I have looked long and hard for some such, but I can always find some kind of exception. Don't kill - but mercy killing? Don't steal - but are your children starving? Don't lie - but should I have told my mother (when she asked) as she lay dying that Joan and I would part? (I didn't and I'm glad).  Be kind and giving, but suppose that makes the recipient more hapless and unable to cope? Better, perhaps, to educate and force people to face up to and conquer their own problems. Give a man a fish, or teach him fishing?  And so on. So we're back to doing the best we can and when we fail, not only asking forgiveness of others, but learning to forgive ourselves. In the winter of 2001/2 I attended a course on moral philosophy. As usual in my life, I had spent plenty of time thinking or practising before being trained. (I had to retire before I found the time to be coached in squash and badminton). So this was the first time I had been exposed directly to the thinking of Kant, Hume, Mills and Nietzche, (although I had met their ideas filtered through the writing of others). These venerated thinkers of the Enlightenment are still taught as 'modern' and the new insights of evolutionary psychology seem to have made no dent on the humanities or philosophical thinking (but see E O Wilson's book 'Consilience'). To me, the precepts they devolve are often decent rules for living, but the axioms they work from are folklore with no evidential basis whatsoever. Their logic has giant gaps which are glossed over and make nonsense of their outdated fables. It does humanity no favours to be fed these outmoded, discredited ideas. I wrote an essay on 'how are we to live?' and 'must our lives be meaningful?', which follows. It says some of the things I've come to believe. How are we to live? Must our lives be meaningful? Of the essay options offered, it seems that these two run together and, in tackling one, the other inevitably is involved. So, if I trespass into freedom of choice, I'll try to keep it short. When Christianity in this country was in the ascendant, the answer was to be found in scripture. As secular scepticism gained ground, it fell to the sceptics to find other reasons to behave in particular ways, especially if they aspired to be 'good' or 'valuable' or lead 'meaningful' lives. Edward Wilson, in his book 'Consilience', divides the debate between transcendentalists who, with Kant, believe that morals are supra-natural, and empiricists, who believe that our feelings of right and wrong are firmly grounded in the evolutionary history of our species. For the purposes of this essay (and, indeed, for much of the total argument), I am firmly in the latter camp. For instance, it strikes me that the concentration on deconstructing the thoughts and eighteenth century prose of the Enlightenment thinkers is now a mind-game for modern intellectuals, given the advances in our knowledge of how the brain works and how its structures, evolutionary development and chemical composition constrain our freedom of choice and behaviour.   Wilson calls for a recombination of the natural sciences and the humanities and there is no need here for me to restate the arguments he presents so well. But does acceptance of the empiricist view mean that life is just more of a meaningless same old, same old?  "Life's a bitch and then you die." For many whose day to day existence is a desperate battle to survive (maybe 70% of the six billion of us), the question of meaning doesn't arise. When you spend all day, every day, trying to fill your family's bellies, you don't have time for philosophical pondering. And yet, everyone longs to live. What drives us? Wilson, Dawkins et al would say it was our genes' 'desire' (non-volitional, of course!) to reproduce but, as self-conscious individuals, we often appear to run counter to this simple proposition. We indulge in dangerous sports, go to war, risk our lives rescuing strangers and pets, take drugs and contraceptives, have abortions and generally screw up, seemingly often for the hell of it. Perhaps we mistake continual movement (in any direction) for 'progress', whatever that means. As primates, we suffer from monkey curiosity and we indulge it without considering possible outcomes. In a world too complicated for our human understanding to look ahead reliably, the law of unintended consequences rules. It follows that we are truly free only whilst we think; the moment we act, we are limited and likely to make mistakes. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It would appear that we have survived as a social species because the genes that promote social cohesion survived better than the genes coded for selfish behaviour. We can still be pretty selfish, but it feels better to be helpful. Here, buried deeply in our psyche, is a raison d'être for living a 'meaningful' life. Ultimately, personal 'meaningfulness' may all be nonsense. Our species is likely to go the way of all flesh - into extinction. Hume suggests that a moral action is what a good man would do if he were well informed. Science has pushed back the bounds of ignorance and substituted conditional truths; elegant theories which survive until they are wrecked on an ugly fact. This wealth of new information argues that we, as a species, plant a disproportionately heavy footprint on the world, our depredations threatening the stability of the climate and thus the life of future generations. If this is good information, then we have a whole new raft of moral duties ahead of us. Enough correctional causes to give any guilt-ridden human meaningful reasons for living! In fundamental terms, every life in just about every phylum is meaningful. If, for instance, individual beetles die, not much harm is done but, if all beetles die, we'll drown in detritus in two generations. The question, 'Must our lives be meaningful', is wrongly phrased in this context. Our lives are inevitably meaningful. If the question is read as 'must our lives have meaning for us', it depends on how closely we clutch our illusions to our breasts. The rise of the human race to its present pre-eminent position has depended on our cherishing - and acting on - our delusions. Without them, we'd probably still be troglodytes - and the rest of the plant and animal kingdoms would be breathing a collective, if metaphorical, sigh of relief. So we choose to believe in our lives having more or less meaning, depending on our temperaments and the illusions they foster. But then it is no good believing our lives have meaning unless we have freedom to choose our actions, values and alter our characters. At the heart of the universe lies uncertainty; the tiny perturbations that swing subsequent events in unexpected directions. Beyond this, all the constructs of nature appear to be fractal, organised and similarly patterned at every scale. Do these fundamental characteristics translate into human functioning and characteristics? The jury is still out. Indeed, the evidence is still being gathered and evaluated. However, it would be a bigger surprise to discover that we are unique than that we accord with the rest of nature - enough to turn all scientists religious! At the very least, the reductionism of the natural sciences is the most likely route to a resolution. If we believe that nature's rules govern us, we are bound to believe we are constrained in our behaviour in ways beyond our conscious ability to control. The actions promoted by our autonomic nervous system, heart-beat, breathing, ductless gland secretion, themselves operating under fractal rules, are largely automatic, although we can, with training, learn to modify them to some extent. Moreover, I know no-one who now believes there is a ghost in the machine, an endless regression of homunculi each pretending to be our final expression of a 'self,' our ego. Instead, the operations of the brain seem inseparable from its structure and electrical connections.  What we use for our rational thinking is therefore mediated by our instincts and directed learning, our emotional state, our upbringing, our cultural background and the rigour of our early training. Our rational thinking cannot be isolated from our moment by moment emotional states and we do not have under conscious control the flood of hormonal chemicals that bathe (and alter) our thinking apparatus. Better perhaps to acknowledge the facts and ride the wave, rather than swim against it. I don't doubt that we have some freedom of choice. That the choices we make are swayed by unconscious motivations, so that our freedom is circumscribed, is also part of my belief. That our senses filter the information pouring in on us from the external world and our brains concoct an internal construct to accord with our previous experience is not in doubt. We do not have direct experience of objective reality, extending, for instance into the infrared, ultraviolet, sub-sonic or supersonic ranges of inputs.   Conclusions? Our freedom to act and assign values to events is based on illusion. We are more tightly bound into our characters than we like to admit, although conscientious training can show that character is not immutable. Meaning in our personal lives is equally illusory - but comforting. There are many things, worthwhile to our fellow men, that we can fill our lives with. Just don't expect gratitude, or the outcomes you started out wanting!  There may be meaning in the universe, but it will only be discernable in the long haul; a time scale well beyond our capacity to visualise. Just a thought: if there has been any 'progress' in the universe at all, it seems to have been from less to more complexity (notwithstanding the concept of entropy). From the undifferentiated plasma of the big bang, through the elementary hydrogen and helium of the early universe and the elements of the periodic table generated by super-novae, to compounds and self-replicating compounds that became simple life forms with immortal but unchanging genes, to sex and hybrid vigour, conscious life and now, self-conscious life, nature has got ever more complex. Maybe humans really are living meaningful lives as part of a universal programme; we just can't figure out the meaning. Wasn't it Swift who supposed that the cheesemites fell to discussing the origin of the cheese? Some thought it had been created in seven days, others that it had evolved from the curd they had detected in its make-up. But, said Swift, no matter how long they debated, or what theories they propounded, the wisest of them could not conceive of the cow. And wasn't it Voltaire who, through Candide, at the end of all his adventures, said, "Let us dig in our garden." And wasn't it also Voltaire, on his deathbed, when asked to renounce the devil and all his works, said, "This is no time to be making new enemies." So let's not be too certain about anything. Jokes Anyone who knows me also knows that I do love a joke. I don't mind if the joke is 'clean' or bawdy as long as it's funny. Oh, and it's almost certain it will be politically incorrect. How do I define 'funny'? Well, it's not funny if it's just rude, merely referring to bodily functions or relying on the shock effect of swear words. The best jokes have a social message; they say something pertinent about the human condition pithily and with a surprise ending. And this too, has an evolutionary basis. Laughter, particularly the belly laugh, so often depends on the twist in the tail, the shock of the new. And this is thought to grow from the vocal grunt that many primates utter when startled, the guttural "Hunh!" that our vocal chords so readily modulate into laughter. So jokes are a modern extension of primitive surprise and valued for their entertainment content. For me, at age 8, they were a life-saver. My mother was the humorist in our family and I rapidly learned to defuse dangerous situations at my primary school with any joke I could remember. I realise I've gone on doing it ever since, wrapping up stories as a kind of gift, much as spiders stop their female counterparts eating them by giving them a silk wrapped fly. The problem with swearing in jokes or ordinary speech is that it devalues the swear words. Curses are important as verbal violence and if you don't mean to be violent, don't swear. I used to think, why is this so? These words are just vibrations in the air or marks on paper. They are as good or bad as the next word. But this turns out not to be true. Speech is a function of one side of the cortex (the 'new' brain) in Warnicke’s organ, I forget whether it is left or right. But if that speech function is damaged to produce aphasia (so that you cannot talk), Turette's syndrome means you can still swear. And the reason is that swearing is controlled by the area of Bocah, a part located in the primitive, reptilian brain and usable long before pre-humans developed speech. It was the bit that said "ouch" when you dropped a boulder on your foot or uttered a war whoop when you whacked your enemy over the head. So it's now the bit that uncontrollably says "shit" when you hit your thumb with a hammer. So, such words do have a fundamental, pre-human power that resonates deeply with the hearer. Isaac Asimov had a nice little sci-fi tale about humour. In the early days of computers, when micro-miniaturisation was unknown, he had the human race hollowing out planets to house super-computers and engaged 'Grand Masters' to ask them questions (most of the answers were known, novel questions were required). So one GM starts telling the computer jokes, pointing out that no one ever says, "I've just thought of a joke". They always say, "Have you heard this one?". The only jokes known to be invented are puns, which elicit groans, not laughs. It turns out that aliens are using humans as laboratory animals and jokes are the experimental medium. As a corollary, if the animals discover the experiment, it will be rendered invalid and jokes won't be funny any more. And so it turns out. But during the story, examples of jokes are fed to the computer. Here's one: A man is sitting by his wife's bedside, holding her hand while she lays dying. She turns to him and says, "I can't go to my Maker without confessing to you that only last week, in this very bed, I betrayed you with your best friend. . . . "  "Hush," says the husband, patting her hand, "calm yourself, I know all about it. Why else have I poisoned you?" Asimov points out, this is a terrible story of lust, betrayal and premeditated murder, but I bet you laughed. And the reason is the way the tale is turned on its head at the last minute. So jokes depend not only on their content, but the order of their telling. Here's a few one-liners: Put downs and squelches Got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t watching. A room temperature IQ. Got the full 6 pack, but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together. A prime candidate for natural deselection. So dense, light bends around him. Was left on the Tilt-a-Whirl a bit too long as a baby. Wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead. His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity. I would not breed from this officer. He would be out of his depth in a car park puddle. This medical officer has used my ship to carry his genitals from port to port and my officers to carry him from bar to bar. Since my last report he has reached rock bottom and started to dig. This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot. A nice little Irish joke, which shows what devastating logic an oral tradition can convey: An English visitor goes into the village shop in Southern Ireland and says, "Do you get the English papers?" "Yes," says the shopkeeper, "we get the Daily Express. Did you want today's paper or yesterday's?" "Oh, today's, please," says the visitor. "OK," says the shopkeeper, "come in tomorrow, then". And now, one of those squelches that sits in the mind, just waiting for the moment to use it. "Don't patronise me," yells the heckler.  "Oh," says the lecturer, "was I patronising you? How clever of you to notice." And a bawdy one which, nevertheless, tells you something about the subjectivity of time: A soldier comes home from the wars to his wife's arms after 6 years absence. They stumble up the stairs undressing each other as they go and tumble naked into bed. "Hey," she shrieks, "you've still got your tin hat on!" Wordlessly, he snatches it off and skids it into the corner of the bedroom. They really have a nice time and finally, exhaustedly and happily pause to look properly at each other. "What's that funny noise?" she says dreamily. He looks at the corner of the bedroom and sees, diddly, diddly, diddly, his tin hat spinning slowly to a halt. Young men, of course, are programmed to procreate. So when the young man fears his days are numbered, he says to his friend: "If I thought I was going to die tomorrow, I'd go out and shag everything that moved. What would you do?" His friend thinks a minute, and says, "I wouldn't move." The Mensa member posed the following conundrum: God sends an angel to find out if men are behaving themselves. The angel reports that 90% are still sinners, but 10% are doing their best. God thinks that he'd punished the sinners last time to little avail, so this time he'll try encouraging the good ones. As it's the 21st century, he sends them an e-mail. The question is, what did the e-mail say?  With the audience non-plussed, the member says, "It's no good asking me, I didn't get one either." Just sometimes the joke does need a swear word. The young couple move in while the house next door is being built and their three year old daughter spends every waking minute with the builders, carrying a single brick to the bricklayer, bringing the foreman a cup of tea with both hands. At the week end she gets a pay packet - like everyone else. Her mother thinks it’s a good time to introduce her to saving, so takes her to the building society to open a savings account, explaining the situation to the teller. She takes the child's money and solemnly gives her a passbook. "What did you do to earn so much money," she says. "I builded a house," says the child proudly. "And are you going to build a house next week?" "Yes," says the kid, "well, I will if we ever get the fucking bricks!" Aphorisms Clichés, sayings and folk wisdom are often thought to be passé, old-fashioned and tired. It is, of course, because they are often used - sometimes thoughtlessly - but mostly because they contain well-tried truths, like: Don't ask for justice - you might get it! If you're caught for speeding, think how many times you got away with it. Civilisation is a machine for living. Sure is; we are more comfortable and with easier lives than any primitive tribe, but we carry the seeds of destruction in every culture, from greed, decadence and no thought for the morrow. Moreover, the more centralised and finely honed the machine, the more easily a bit of grit (a strike, a fuel shortage, an economic downturn) brings the whole gear train to a halt, (c.f. the fuel crisis in August 2000). Then, mistakenly, people speak of businessmen and politicians as 'movers and shakers' without checking the provenance of the quotation. It comes from a poem by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, which excludes such windbags explicitly and states that poets, music makers and artists are the movers and shakers of civilisation. "We are the makers of music, We are the dreamers of dreams. We are the movers and shakers of the world forever, it seems." An ounce of help is worth a ton of pity. I'm reminded here of Jesus's precept 'love thy neighbour'. It's an easy road to a quiet conscience to put a pound in a collecting box for some far-off disaster, but if we helped our immediate neighbour and he helped his and so on, we might have a chain of helping hands across the world and wouldn't need to leap great geographical gaps to aid strangers. It's sickening to realise how little aid gets to the people in real need and how the rich, powerful, corrupt and crooked batten on the most deprived. You can't do that to someone you take a personal interest in. Life is too short to be small.  Disraeli Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.   Anon Everybody wants to be somebody. Nobody wants to grow.     Goethe Fortune does not change men. It unmasks them.   Mme Necker Nature hath no goal, though she hath law.   John Donne Learn how to refuse favours. This is a great and very useful art. In quarrelling, the truth is always lost. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools. Herbert Spencer He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but it seemed as if all of it had gone down the wrong way. Lichtenberg After fifty, you have the face you deserve. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. Santayana Nobody ever got out of life alive. In Memoriam It's the 7th July 2004. On the 26th June 2004 our much loved little dog, Joss, was run over and killed almost instantly within 100 yards of home. It has been the longest and hardest week I can remember for us both. For four and a half years she was our constant companion. We walked every day and took her everywhere we possibly could. Our holidays and recreation were organised so that she, too, could enjoy them. Since that Saturday we have been, and still often are, desolate. Accidents seem so pointless, such a waste of a happy, uncomplicated life. So, much of our sorrow is for Joss not having had longer to enjoy her days. That sadness will be with us every time we remember her, but we will also remember that what she did have made all three of us very happy. Our desolation is disabling grief for ourselves and what we have lost and hopefully that will fade with time.  In the world around us terrorism, wars and famine are causing pain and grief to people on a terrible scale. In that context, to call our loss a tragedy might seem over the top. But that's how we feel about it. It seems it is not the worldly importance of the object of our affections that determines the scale of our feeling, but the degree of affection we, the mourners, feel. We not only loved our Joss, but cared for her too. This double meaning of 'caring for' doubles the pain of losing her. One day, we hope to be able to remember all our happy times together without the accompanying sadness; but not yet. Postscript It's November 2004 and since August we have taken to our hearts another little rescue dog, Fergus. He is as lovable as Joss but, thankfully, in very different ways. We haven't, and won't, forget our much loved little girl dog. Fergus is just as loved and has filled a terrible empty space in our lives. November 2005. We seem to have lost our hearts to Fergus in just the same way as we did Joss, although he is very different - very much a male and boisterous with it. He has taken to ‘agility’ just like Joss did and enjoys it just as much. Some day soon I plan to add photos to this document and he and she will have their place in the pantheon. January 2008. We now have a companion for Fergus – a terrier bitch with more than a hint of whippet and/or collie – so we seem to have a lurcher.   Holly is a very affectionate little dog, sometimes too much so for Fergus who she dotes on. He behaves towards her like a somewhat gruff uncle, until he decides to join in wholeheartedly with the playfighting. In 2009, she is 13 months old and already showing her jumping skills in agility. Obviously, we are becoming doggie people.

So what's this; saving the best 'til last? 

So it seems to me; loving and being loved is what a social species like us, driven by our emotions rather than rationality, needs more than anything else. But how do we define it?

The Greeks had many words for love, separating erotic, filial, parental, friendly, compassionate, sympathetic and spiritual loving, but it strikes me that each can shade into the other and all partake of one characteristic that distinguishes real love from self-interest, lust, guilt, shame, duty - all those disparate emotions that pass for affection. That characteristic is defined thus: 

To love is to desire the loved one's happiness.

The more I've thought about it, the more the definition seems all-encompassing, solving the issues of altruism, sacrifice, jealousy, envy and affection. The statement does not mention reward or payback, but it's true that unrequited love will die - eventually (and, if you are sensible, reasonably quickly). The love that's given without calculation works when uncalculated love is returned; not something anyone, lover or loved, can command. When it happens, it opens your heart to everyone. It's wonderful.

Of course, when you love someone, you give a hostage to fortune and open yourself to the possibility of loss and pain, as I found with my parents, first wife and daughter. But sorrow is the other face of happiness's coin and the only way to avoid the former is to deny the latter. That solution is the saddest and most sterile of all.

As I write, my children are in their 40's, but my much loved children still. All parents will recognise the feeling. I lost my sister before I was born, my brother when I was 7, my dad at 16, my daughter at 21 and my mother when I was 40. I think of my dad a little, Jill almost every week and still hold conversations with my mum. My sister and brother are lost to me. I can still feel sad, but what I really now remember are the happy times. Would I have missed those, to avoid the anguish? At this distance in time and, perhaps, even within a year of each event, the answer has to be "No". 

That said, marriage is a special test of love. First, you're trying to live with someone who has spent the formative years of their life in another family, second, you have high expectations but probably don't plan to change much yourself and third, you are in a state of erotic madness that prevents you seeing your beloved as anything but perfect, whereas they are only human!

The comparison of marriage with a milking stool - archaic object - is apposite. The stool has three legs. Remove one or more and it falls over. Marriage needs three things to stand up.

One - be in love. It lets you make the necessary changes in yourself to accommodate your new partner. (You can't change them, just yourself, but if they love you, they'll change too).

Two - choose someone who is a friend - you need things to talk about and do together when passion cools to more enduring love.

Three - make sure you are compatible. You're incredibly untidy? Don't try living with someone obsessively neat. Spendthrifts and misers don't get on for long either.

Of course, you want to check out two and three before one happens, or it's all too late. 

Dead easy, huh? Joan and I got it wrong the first time, but for both of us, our boys were the saving grace. 

This time, with Jane, I feel blessed.

Glossary

  Ariadne.

Helped Perseus defeat the Minotaur by providing a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. Symbolically a spider and silken thread.

  AWOL.

Absent Without Official Leave. Done a bunk.

  Chiefie.

Chief Warrant Officer, the highest non-commissioned rank in the RAF.

  Civvie.

Civilian.

  Copper boiler.

Made of copper for rapid heat transfer from a fire lit underneath. Used for washing, or in this case, boiling pig swill to sterilise it.

  Dragster.

Special high speed vehicle designed for straight line speed records.

  Drikold.

ICI proprietary name for solid carbon dioxide at -80 C.

  Dunny.

Outside lavatory (not a water closet).

  Front.

Chutzpah; brass neck; façade; exhibitionism.

  Haberdasher.

Dealer in ribbons, buttons, lace, etc.

  Jankers.

Punishment drill.

  Mangle.

Two rollers under pressure. Wet clothes were fed through by hand turning.

  Möbius strip.

A flexible strip, twisted once and glued to make a circle. Trace down the centre line with a pencil and both sides of the strip are marked. Therefore it has only one surface and is one dimensional. Or is it?

  Peritrack.

Perimeter track. How aircraft get round to the landing strip.

  Posher.

A double skinned copper dome with peripheral holes on a wooden handle

  Primus stove.

A camping paraffin stove, ignited by methylated spirit.

  Range.

A black cast iron coal fired kitchen fitment with oven, hob, open fire and sometimes bread oven. The kettle was always ready to boil.

  Red water.

Cattle infection producing blood in the urine.

  Skive.

Bunk off; do nothing while pretending to work.

  Small coal.

Coal came in various sizes and qualities. Small coal was golf ball size and smoky.

  Solipsism.

The belief that only you exist. Everything else is imagined by you.

  Squaddies.

Members of a squad; erk; aircraftman; the lowest form of life in the RAF.

  Surf-ski.

Like a surf board but you sit on it and paddle. Used for life saving.

  Sysiphus.

Condemned to roll a boulder uphill endlessly. Each time it fell back to the bottom.

  Tagged.

Fitted with an identification ear label.

  Trike.

Abbreviation for tricycle

  Trunnions.

Little axles sticking out from each side.

  Tuberculin tested.

Found to be free from TB germs.

  Unpasteurised.

Not heated to destroy TB bacteria