Walk The Black Dog

Category: Background Braps

  • Odyssey, Pt 1.

    Southampton

    I left England on December 22nd 2011. My day would start in Millbrook Rd East, Southampton, and by evening would finish at College Avenue Pittsburgh, USA.

    I can’t tell that story without telling the story of my time in Southampton. This is the move from the North of England, and some of the reasons for it.

    July 27th, 1997

    I left my parent’s home in Trinity Lane, York, the beautiful walled city of which I now have deeply nostalgic, postcard memories, to take the train to Southampton. I would go on to live in Southampton for almost 15 years, which is the longest I have remained anywhere. And I went there pretty much on the flimsiest of notions. Basically, I’m going to blame my dear friend P, whom shall remain mostly anonymous as he’s very private and I’m happy to respect that.

    I was not a stranger to the city. I’d stayed for an abortive semester at the Southampton Institute (Now Solent University) from late ’93 to spring ’94. I didn’t love Southampton, it was, at the time, a place I knew. A place to go, not a place to end up. As I wrote, It stands as the place I lived longest during a nomadic life, even if I managed no less than 12 residence moves in the time I was there. I’ve been in the United States over a decade now, and I’ve never really missed it, and yet I think about it constantly. I look up the roads on Google street view, peruse various Facebook history groups for the town (the only good use of FB, I think), so clearly the city left its mark.

    My first impression, in September 1993, was not good. I had visited the boat show with my parents in 1986, and thought it a dull, ugly place. Concrete, dreary, grimy high street, docks and cranes, a sliver of waterfront. It had the shit bombed out of it in the war, and it looked it.

    With my mum at the boat show

    It was little different six years later, although I do remember the hull of a freighter towering over what must have been the Eastern docks, reminding me of the purpose of the place. Southampton hides its maritime industry and heritage remarkably well. You would be surprised at the number of plummy home counties boys that go to Solent because they think it’s on the coast. It’s basically Hull, without the benefit of being in Yorkshire.

    I took a walk with my Mum through East Park, noting it was full of homeless people (I never saw as many as I did that Sunday…) And yet, as a student with little interest in academic work, but plenty of interest in everything else, it wasn’t a bad place. I had a fun time, until it was no longer fun (because I had to drop out) and I left in May 1994, fairly sure I’d have no reason to return, unless I would somehow be buying a boat in the future.

    A close friend – P – from Sixth Form college had been in Southsea (up the coast, in the locally verboten territory of the demon-haunted Portsmouth, very much Mordor to Southampton’s Shire, or so the locals say) and was set to enter nursing school in Southampton. My friend from college days, P would frequently write to me (remember that?) and in March 1996 I decided to pay him a visit. I scrounged the 35 quid bus fare from my Mum, plus some beer money, and I got the National Express bus to Southampton, via Birmingham. It took all fucking day. I remember going through Doncaster, having never seen it, and never wishing to do so again. It was the Monday after the ’96 Brazilian Grand Prix and I had a copy of that day’s Telegraph with the race report on the back page.

    I got in late evening (around 9, I think), had no mobile back then, and had to find a pay phone to call P and let him know I’d arrived. I knew the town, so started off toward the area of Newtown (where he lived) and encountered him half way, coming to meet me. We hit the beers straight away, and the night ended with a curry. That set the tone. What followed was a fairly pivotal week, psychologically. I had a good time, perhaps too good a time, because it put something in my head that didn’t quite go away: The thought that, perhaps, I could move there. It was everything I was missing – independence and a built-in social life.

    I extended the trip by a day, which was all I could (money rather than time being the limiting factor), returning on a Saturday, and I fell into a pretty bad funk when I returned to York. I was depressed enough on the bus home, and it just got worse. The boredom and loneliness was really eating me up, and I was ignoring or seemingly unaware of the fact that my routine was neither helpful nor healthy for a 22yr old.

    My closest friend in York at that time was Jamie; we’d been at college together (although he was a year ahead) and he was a chemistry undergraduate at the University of York. By this time he was very much doing his own thing (between a tough degree and a busy private life) and could not really give me the friendship I wanted. The effort of the long walks to and from campus in Heslington seemed to characterize my building resentment. Jamie was distant, in every way that mattered to me. It wasn’t his fault. I don’t think Jamie understood that I comprehended his struggles, especially in the rigorous second year. I felt very much like an outsider, and I had just come back from a place where I’d be treated the opposite. It was like magnetism, in retrospect. It set something in motion.

    I spent my weekends volunteering at the Yorkshire Air Museum in Elvington and I had aspirations of getting my pilot’s license (and actually came close). Around this time either me or my Dad had the idea (I forget whom) I might join the RAF. I was still easily young enough, and although I didn’t possess 20/20 vision I could still enter as an officer candidate. I was, frankly, scared by the idea. I was unfit and actually quite intimidated by the prospect. That fear turned into the perception of being pushed against my wishes, so I bottled it, didn’t do the the interview and had a bit of sulky fight with the old man about it.

    My dad was generous to me, paying my flight school fees (GBP55 an hour(!!), he never asked me for any of it, even when I worked) and was understandably keen that I pick a direction and do something for myself. He didn’t know how to motivate me, but didn’t recognize that If I didn’t know, there was no possibility anyone else would. He hung in there with the flying in the hope I’d get something out of it.

    These things have to come from within, and a part of me felt like I’d done my time with that during a very unpleasant time in secondary Grammar school. I really thought I was finished with other people’s ideas of structure and discipline. It’s fair to say it as a delayed rebellious impulse, and I should have known better, but I wasn’t mature enough to see it.

    I should have gone through with the RAF interview at the very least. I can see that now. You never know where these things lead. An older gent at the museum told me to go in, do my five years, and do what I like. He was 38, and to him it was a simple matter of pragmatism, and what’s five years, anyway? I was 22, that was nearly a quarter of my life experience. It felt like forever.

    I have learnt that you can have your differences with your parents, occasionally very serious differences, but having lived their own lives, they generally know what they’re doing, even if they appear to go about it in a heavy-handed way.

    In my there and then, I decided in the first instance I’d better get a job. It would give me money, something to do and get my dad off my back. My mum gave me a tip about a contract job, at BT’s call centre on Stonebow. I started 22nd April 1996. Mums always know what to do.

    Stephen Richards / Telephone exchange, The Stonebow, York

    This turned out to be, as they say, a good move, gaining me money and a social life that would not have been out of place at a student union. The place was a hoot; easy money, constant boozing, girls, a 22yr old’s dream. It would also enable me to visit Southampton another three times that year, in June, September, and December. Writing this now I look back and can’t understand my priorities at all, but it is what it is. People do things they don’t understand. Holding down a job is good for most people, it just gave me more money and time to piss about. The flying fell by the wayside, which I regret to this day. I flew solo, so I’ll always have that.

    The June visit South was memorable as I have a specific memory of sitting in the smoking room at work the day before I left, talking to Mandy. Mandy was a very beautiful brunette I very obviously had a crush on (I think everyone fancied Mandy), and I was getting on like a house on fire with her, and of course I was about to bugger off for a week. I clearly remember lamenting this fact.

    Mandy Mandy Mandy

    This second visit to Southampton would go on to be as much fun as the first. There might not have been Mandy, but there was Hannah, Imogen, Karen, and Lou to distract me. No downer on return this time either, as I had something of an existence to go back to.

    And so it went. I had, in a brief time, built quite the life for myself in York, I had a lot of friends, but the reality was I was spending most of my wages behind the bar at Fibbers, and going absolutely nowhere. But who cares? I was living and enjoying myself with practically zero responsibilities. The only thing I had to do was get to work on time, a rule you’d be surprised to learn accounted for many, many dismissals among my friends, oh, and don’t get shitfaced at work. Another infraction some had issues with (It’s the North, after all). Looking back, I don’t think I would have changed anything. Some of the friends I made, I still think about to this day. It was weird in a way because this part of my life in York was entirely unrelated to what had come before. I made it from scratch. All new people, all new experiences. I wasn’t especially close with some of my old college friends (although most were still around) and at this time everyone was in that transitional period between university and the world of employment. I hadn’t completed university and so could not, and probably did not care to relate to them, but that was very much on me.

    Jamie had long since graduated by this time and like so many others had come back for a temporary spell to work at BT while he figured out his plans. BT was one of those word-of-mouth gigs everyone seemed to pick up at some point. It was clear to me we had grown apart. Still friendly, but he was on a different path. I don’t think he was overly keen on my indolent and somewhat townie lifestyle, and I didn’t resent him for it. Jamie appeared laid back on first appearances, but he was smart and driven. He left to do an MA in Norwich in December 1996, and I have not seen him since. We were out of touch until relatively recently.

    As 1997 came around, I had some choices to make. I was drifting, I knew it, my parents knew it (holy hell did my Dad know it, because it was a source of continual friction) I was living high on the hog, getting pissed most nights, something had to change at some point, although at this time it didn’t feel urgent. I was edging towards the daft notion that moving cities would fix all this, and so I decided to spend an exploratory fortnight in Southampton, and talk to the employment agency that place my job with BT to see if they could arrange anything down South. They said yes of course, because employment agencies are universally incompetent and habitual liars, and promised me a job at the BT office in Southampton. I decided I would pitch the idea to P, make preparations to move there, visit employment agencies, talk to the bank about moving my account, all the admin… I don’t think I’d told my parents any of this, but really I just thought they’d be relieved.

    I put the idea to P. Being a terrific mate, he was absolutely thrilled. I would ultimately spend all 14 days down there, and get virtually nothing done except getting pissed most days and enjoying the finest Indian food Southampton had to offer. Looking back, I think it was time well spent, because no amount of planning would avoid the work situation I encountered in my first month there. Because getting a job was so easy in York, I overestimated the efficacy of employment agencies. I worked at one a few years later, and I can happily wish they all burn in hell, assuming they don’t find gainful employment there.

    P and I, May 1997, Tennyson Road, Southampton.

    I don’t ever remember planning a date to move, because I didn’t plan anything then, but I also noted a hint of outstaying my welcome in Southampton, because I’d been there over a week, and it was something like my fifth visit in a year. I was no longer new, and neither were the people I’d met. The shine was wearing off. Recall that I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t an undergraduate at nursing school, I was just some mate of P’s that was around quite a lot. Looking back, it was nothing out of the ordinary (I would been annoyed by me, tbh), but it bugged me at the time. I’d got used to being Mr. Goodtime, but that’s no more real than a holiday romance. Part of the intent behind a longer visit was to see if I could get on with these people outside of a week, despite the fact that at this point there was no plan to move in with them once I arrived. There was not, at the time, a place for me in that house.

    The problem with visiting people who are essentially students is that you get the impression life is like that all the time. Beer every night in the RSH social, lazy days in the Alexandra pub (where a lunchtime pint can end at 11pm) Of course, it is not. It can’t last. The other consideration is the illusion you’re one of them, because they like you and appear to accept you. You are not, there will always be a distance between you and persons of a collective experience you were never part of. P would probably tell me this was all in my head, and he might be right, but it was how I saw it. It did not discourage me because it was part of the reason I’d spent more time there.

    My plan was lazily simple. Figure out somewhere to live, get to Southampton, and pick up contract work at BT, effectively translating my existence from York to Southampton, with minimal effort. Hah.

    Things never really came to a head with my Parents back in York. They never put any pressure on me. They knew I wasn’t really up to much but working and pissing my wages up the wall. I just announced It was time to go, I was 23 by now, long past the time I should be living at home. I remember my mum’s look of surprise and – I think – disappointment, as if it were a resolution, but not necessarily what she wanted. I couldn’t tell, and we never spoke of it later. My mother had a way of seeing things though. I cannot comprehend my lack of motivation and direction with the benefit of hindsight, and I did not have a hope in hell of understanding it when I was 23.

    It all went off with little fanfare. I handed in my notice, after a marathon of overtime to get a fighting fund in case of problems on the flip-side (this is called foreshadowing, what I’m doing here) and I was alone with my plans. Nobody tried to stop me, nobody had any reason to. It was what I wanted. My sisters were supportive, and I think they thought I would inevitably get pulled into London’s gravity well once Southampton pinched out (nearly happened once or twice) but I had little intention of anywhere but sunny Southampton.

    I had my leaving do at work, got suitably hammered (although I do remember having a bit of a flat day, I was tired and grumpy) and I have this memory of being in The Blue Bell on Fossgate and telling someone I was leaving for Southampton and them looking at me, wide-eyed, saying “What do you want to go down there for?” With the benefit of hindsight, I should not have left York. Not at that time. It wasn’t the answer, but at that time I didn’t fully comprehend the question. The moment had a definite feel of ‘not with a bang, but a whimper’. This was it.

    On the train to Southampton with all my belongings in a brown and black holdall, I’d be heading to the same house I rented a room in, 4 years earlier in my student days. A terraced house on Wilton Avenue, in the Polygon, Southampton’s student hinterland. It would be a wobbly first month.

    Arriving on a Sunday, at the very end of everyone’s final semester, the atmosphere was subdued. A lot of people I’d met would be moving on. They were just starting their careers. Even the house I had come to know during my visits, the splendid shithole of Graham Road, wasn’t the same. I remember sitting in the RSH social with a pint thinking “Now what the hell do I do?” It felt very different, and yet I can’t say what I was expecting. That hazy week of March 1996 in perpetuity, like a sort of razzed-up Groundhog Day? So far it was a grey July evening, and a trudge back to a quiet and lonely room, to think about the start of my new life. So far, it wasn’t quite how I envisaged it.

    To be continued…

  • Odyssey, Pt. 2

    Endless Shit Jobs

    I’d moved to Southampton. I had a place to live, I did not have a job, but I was confident that was just a matter of days from being resolved. I turned up at Manpower Southampton and reminded them of their commitment to get me set up at BT. There was (surprised face) a problem. At that time they only had part time positions, which should convert to full time ‘any day now’. I should have walked, and shopped around, I didn’t. My rent was under £50 a week, I could make it work, short term. I had not yet learnt to go with my gut in these situations.

    Next morning I reported to Friary House, a modern(ish) brick building next to BT’s towering main office, the imaginatively named ‘Telephone House’. Next problem: This job was dealing with small business customers, filtering them through to the relevant departments. It was right on the margin of requiring enough knowledge to not be able to do it it on autopilot, yet still be utterly boring. Also, it was staffed almost entirely by old people (they were probably in their 40s) and I hated it. It was a four hour shift that lasted approximately 100 years. We didn’t even have internet to distract ourselves. Fucking Stone Age, I tell you.

    I’d been optimistic in my ability to get by on the money. It wasn’t desperate, but I had beer to drink, and takeaways to buy. This would not do. I asked about the possibility of going full time. Soon, I was told. Somewhere deep down, I knew what it meant.

    Socially, I was in what felt like a tricky position. Every friend I had in the city lived a mile away from me, and I started to feel a bit awkward calling P practically every day to do something. I think I was needy, and it wasn’t his job to entertain me. I can’t have been a lot of fun, being uncertain of things, broke, and wondering if I’d made a huge mistake. P however was a saint, he helped me a huge amount at this time, buying my drinks, bunging me the occasional bit of cash when I’d (frequently) overextended myself, but I had enough pride to not enjoy this version of myself. I had become rather depressed and flirted with the idea of packing it all in and bailing out.

    I took walks up to the end of the street to the phonebox, where I would spend one of the newer, thinner 50 pence pieces on calling home, arguably making myself feel even worse before trudging back down the street.

    I flirted with the idea of going to London, I’d just been up there to spend the weekend with my sister, Leona, and I’d be close to family.

    I came to my senses. Everything in London would be worse. It’s more expensive, I hardly knew anyone, and It would probably crush me. Big cities can be cold and lonely places when you’re on the bottom rung of the ladder. Fuck that. At this time, one of P’s housemates, Jason, seemed to pick up on something and went out of his way to cheer me up. He even made me a cassette tape of songs. That’s right, a grown man made another grown man a mixtape. It was the 90s, kids. I don’t think he understood what a difference it made. The gesture and his general demeanor really did cheer me up. I resolved to try and make it work.

    I went to another agency, Kelly Services on Hanover Buildings (this is, oddly, a street name), and asked if they had anything. The manager was a lady called Jo, and I remember she had a teal trouser suit and was, I estimated, pretty attractive for an older woman (age: 33). They had a job open at Hampshire Constabulary. It had a very good hourly rate, way higher than I’d get anywhere else (for some time actually…) and I could start the following week. Downside? It was maternity cover, but she didn’t seem to think that would end the contract as they were understaffed. Both things weren’t true. I can tell you’re shocked.

    I let manpower know, and they immediately – as if by magic – offered me full time hours at BT. I told them it was a day late and a dollar short, and they told me leaving at short notice would reflect badly on me. I told them I’d live with the burden of disappointing a recruitment consultant, thank you. Why do recruiters always forget it’s a two-way street? And anyway, it was bollocks. You can leave anytime you want, there’s no notice needed. How much notice do you think you’d be given if they no longer required you?

    In a rather Jungian turn of events (no you get over yourself), Jason was moving away from Southampton, and, would I like his room? Rent at Graham Rd was just over £100 a month. Insanely cheap, but not without reason, because it was a tip, in a shit part of town, but it was where I wanted to be. My entire circle of friends was contained in that house. Graham Rd was ‘inner city’, in one of the poorer areas of town. The gang liked it, because it was right next to the hospital and the adjoining nursing residence where they all lived as students. For all that, I never felt unsafe down there, not once. There were routinely prostitutes at the top of the street, but that was about the only sign it was a dodgy area. P got mugged coming through the city park one day, but that was bad luck and the parks today remain a high-risk area for sexual assaults and robbery, especially after dark.

    Things were coming together nicely. There were some hitches though, mostly unexpected. Disappointingly, one of the girls that lived at the house expressed some objection to the idea of me moving there, with the complaint to the effect of “I was an outsider”. This was curious as to me as we got on very well, and I wasn’t happy about it as my mindset was already quite agitated with how things had gone thus far. I was in no mood for it.

    I did not deal with this well.

    I took it very personally, felt that somebody was screwing with my housing plans at a delicate time, on top of behaving as if she didn’t know full well who I was. I ended up yelling at her and she left in tears. This created a very awkward situation with P, who had known her for some years, and here I was wading in with my size twelves and blowing up his harmonious household. That said, I apologized for the scene, but he did not appear to consider it a big deal. This was fortunate, because she was also (I think?) romantically involved with one of the other housemates, Kevin. She left shortly after and I never spoke to her or saw her again. It was a shame, because prior to this inexplicable episode we got on, or so I thought. So unnecessary.

    It was September. I’d taken over Jason’s room, at the far end of the house on the top floor. I missed Jason a lot, he was the person I knew the most after all my visits, one of those guys that was always there, but he was off to make a new life with his partner Emma. I shared the house with Rob, Kev, and Phil. Everyone’s still talking a quarter century later, so it was clearly a good mix. Things were looking okay.

    Then after about three weeks, I got fired from my job.

    I had to sign the official secrets act for my work at the Constabulary, so I can’t disclose much, but it was a very basic admin job involving distributing paperwork to various desks in an administrative function. The office had four middle aged women in it, and I can tell you there is a certain type of middle-aged white woman that in a group becomes an absolute nightmare. It remains the most hostile environment I’ve ever worked in. The boss was a nasally little weasel called Mark, and his deputy a former police sergeant, a very old school copper. He was the only one in the room I got on with. The women in the office very, very obviously did not want me there, and I persistently complained of having nothing to do after 11am, for which I was told I had to come in earlier to “…avoid work being taken by the earlier starters” but my hours started at 0830 and if they wanted me earlier they could make it official. I also pointed out this would probably mean I’d be asking for more work even earlier, but nobody ever credited civil servants with much imagination.

    I of course decided to work at a pace that fitted the workload, which clearly was the ethic of the office. On my last morning there, I came in and the boss said to me that an unopened letter containing a cheque had been found in my waste disposal, and I could complete my hours for the remainder of the week but after Friday they did not expect to see me again. I told him that wasn’t going to work for me, and I walked out. You can do that when you’re a contractor.

    I’d never had the slightest issue at any job I’d done, and I was upset and shocked to be let go. With hindsight, I was annoyed I did not make more of a fuss because the whole thing was very strange. Was it possible I’d been negligent? Absolutely. But the work was so sparse, so plodding, it seemed unlikely. How was it found, and by whom? I had the feeling I’d been stitched up by one of the awful women in the office. I’ll never know. One thing I took from that whole thing was I got on with actual police very well, but the civilian employees are a different story. They’re a certain type. Bunch of arseholes, as Dickens might put it.

    So, that was that. I got myself on the dole immediately, along with housing benefit as I had no idea how long this might last. Everyone in the house was great; if they had concerns they didn’t say anything to me.

    Some years previously in York my friend Jamie told me, of his year off, that if you are the sort of person that can cope with doing nothing, it’s a surprisingly pleasant existence, being on the dole. I had a lot of social conditioning about this kind of thing, my dad however made it very clear to me it’s there to be used, and you’ve worked and paid taxes, so take it.

    I was out of work for nearly six months. Some of that was the situation, a lot of it was me just taking my time and getting a bit too comfortable doing bugger all.

    It was an easy existence, bumming around in the winter of 97-98, playing on the PC all day, having the odd evening out. If you were careful with the allowance, it was quite possible to live an okay if not excitable life. It was somewhere between Withnail and I and The Young Ones. Rob was the only person that expressed a little concern. He wasn’t being shitty, he was worried about where my head was. Kevin for his part told me to stop relying on agencies and get ‘a proper job’, and he wasn’t wrong, but there weren’t that many options. British Gas had a big call centre just at the end of the street, but they didn’t want me.

    I figured enough dust had settled that I could talk to Kelly Services again. I got a little lecture about personality conflicts at work, but also the admission that the constabulary gig was ‘a difficult environment’ (my eyebrows almost jumped off my head, I can tell you) but that they had something for me. It was a job on the transportation desk at Meyer Panel, a timber importer.

    This was something of a return to normality; it was a decent place, not bad people, but shipping is full of lifers that have been doing it for 100 years and hate everything about the work and themselves. My boss was an uptight Geordie named Warren, who could see his future every day in the walking cadaver occupying the office upstairs, and boy did he know it. This office, in scale and atmosphere, was the closest approximation I ever observed to David Brent’s Wernham Hogg. Warren was a company man. Not a bad guy, but we got on each other’s nerves a bit as he felt the occasional need to get on my case. I had a go at his opposite number in the Newcastle office once and he let me know in no uncertain terms to never do It again. My explanation that the guy was a twat was not seen as an acceptable reason. I had so much to teach.

    If it sounds like it was all a bit of a game to me, I will cop to that. At this stage in my life, I tended not to take things seriously. I’d turn up on time, do all my work, but I had a glib attitude that I think was palpable to some people, and it wound them up. There are people that take the importation and distribution of plywood extremely seriously, believe it or not.

    Around this time I’d started taking regular trips to see my dad in his flat in London. It felt like a little holiday into luxury for me, sitting in his riverside flat, visiting the local pubs with him. It was just the two of us, and I really loved those weekends. It showed me another life that I enjoyed stepping into once in a while. I used to lament the drive from Rotherhithe to Waterloo on a Sunday afternoon. I can still transport myself to that feeling now when I think about walking up those steps into the terminal. I

    Concourse of Waterloo Station by Matt Whyndham

    In August ’98 it became apparent I wouldn’t get a permanent position at Meyer, and Kelly told me that there were some prized temp-to-perm placements back at BT, this time in the corporate office. The money was good and the work actually sounded interesting, so I handed in my notice to an entirely unsurprised Warren. I encountered him some years later on a night out. He was in good spirits and there was no drama, and I was glad to see him doing alright.

    I squeezed in a trip to York during this period, spent a week with my old buddies. Only now writing this did I realize I was starting to think the same way about York that I did Southampton before. Things had reversed. I was missing my old home, but there were signs that people were moving on there. The pub that was the locus of everything for me – Fibbers – was now sported a canary yellow interior, a casualty of this trend for everything to become a ‘bar’. I don’t want to look at people in a pub, thank you. Let me hide in the darkness. I still felt something of a pull toward the city. I had a huge amount of personal history there. One thing I’d forgotten was the energy of a Northern night out. They were raw, booze-fueled jaunts through the city, and had an energy I’d never seen in the South. “Down South for five minutes and You’ve gone soft, you poof” Observed Darryl, during my exit interview on the pavement of Micklegate as I turned for home.

    BT was great. It was in their corporate clients office, looking after leisure (hotel and travel) customers. The money was good, the office was nice, the people were nice, it was Summer. Things were looking great.

    I’d been there about two weeks, when I encountered Beth.

    I knew her only by name because she’d been out on leave, and I was at her desk. She came in one morning, chest pushed out, conspicuous tan, strutting towards the desk, eyes fixed on me, in her space. The only thing missing was dry ice and ominous music. Beth, even all these years later, is traffic-stoppingly beautiful, long blonde hair, big eyes, and best of all, she could drink. She was from Durham, but I didn’t hold it against her.

    The Summer at BT was marked by interesting work, dreadful senior management, no small amount of institutionalized sexism (easily the worst I have ever encountered in any job) and frustration with converting the role to a permanent position. Along with Beth came Helen, a mathematics graduate, if memory serves. They were chalk and cheese, but I adored them both. Great reasons to go to work. Helen was laconic and had a stillness, versus the ball of charisma and intensity that was Beth. Whenever I see Better Call Saul’s Kim and Jimmy smoking in the garage, It reminded me of Beth furtively slipping away to the basement of Friary House for smokes and gossip.

    Friary House Parking Garage, Circa 2000

    As November came around, we moved house. It was time to say goodbye to Graham road, and hello to a smaller but much nicer property on Burlington Road, about a block away from where I first lived those nascent weeks after Arriving. The rent was about double (£225 pcm each) what we paid at Graham Rd, but we could all afford it. It was a nice street, but the football stadium was at the end of the street which made for noisy Saturdays. I have a lot of memories of late nights on the Playstation with P and his late and very much missed brother Neil, playing split-screen Gran Turismo between cigarettes and beer. Neil had a YouTube channel, and sometimes I’ll watch and listen to him because it takes me back to those happy times.

    My Second trip of the year to York occurred then, and I spent a lot of time with my friends Gav and Darryl. I always thought these two really got me, and I told Darryl I hadn’t ruled out coming back North if the opportunity presented itself. I don’t know how serious I was. Truly. My mum was still there so anything was possible.

    Back in Southampton. I had a lot of nights out with Beth, when she wasn’t with her bloke. It felt good to have a life outside of the house circle and I needed that. I don’t think it’s coincidence that Beth and I were both outsiders to the city.

    There was an emerging issue at the house, namely the council had a stupid rule about parking (because all these houses were multi-tenant) where only one vehicle was allowed per household. This became a big problem for Rob in particular, and would contribute to our relatively short tenure at at Burlington Rd.

    In the new year, I got involved with a South African girl working as a nurse at Princess Ann. We’d known each other through mutual friends for a while. This turned out to be the beginning of what was then my longest and most serious relationship. It would end about as pleasantly as the Hindenburg, but I’ll get to that much later.

    I don’t recall much standing out from the first half of 1999, things just ticked over, but at BT the first signs of trouble started. I did not have a degree, and this was normally a condition (why?) of the permanent post. However, this was not a hard limitation, and If I took on more responsibility it would look good in my case for the position, or so it was sold to me. I effectively took on a service-manager role in a newly organized team. I was the only member on Contract, everyone else was permanent. Everyone involved knew this was not a fair arrangement. I had to pretend to be an equal to people that had job security and a pension, while earning £5.50 an hour. BT had some great staff, but it had cultural leftovers from the early privatisation days, and it was a boy’s club of incompetent city wankers. Operationally, there were good, knowledgable people.

    Summer Brought the first and only argument I ever had with P. We had to find somewhere else to live, and I was difficult about this because I liked Burlington Road and didn’t really feel like any of this was my problem – I didn’t own a car. I did want to stay with the lads though, and I went along with it, with a minor tantrum about the contract length (they wanted 18 months, I wanted a year) and so we moved to Middle Street, in the North of the city. it was…alright. I liked this place the least of all the houses we lived in. It was the most distant from everything and at the risk of sound like a wanker I just didn’t like the vibe. I spent most of the time at my girlfriend’s so it wasn’t a huge deal. Rob also had his girlfriend Harriet living with him, and it was nice to have another face around, and even I’d known of Harry for years. Women, when they can tolerate it, bring something to a house full of lads, it shaves off a little testosterone and prevents everyone from going full caveman.

    I loved these guys, I really did, and it makes me sad to remember it, because that house was the beginning of the end for us. The last place we lived in before we all scattered.

    Despite promises of progression at BT, I started to get the impression I was being fucked about. I was overworked and irritable, and I grew resentful. Beth quipped that “…if you had a pair of tits you’d be permanent by now” which made me laugh, but didn’t do much for my mood.

    My girlfriend told me to just pack it in if it wasn’t working, don’t worry about the money, she said, with the implication she would help. She was a theater nurse and relatively well paid. And, so I quit. Walked away, no notice, as was my prerogative. For the second time in Southampton, I was unemployed. I had about two months runway, and my girlfriend lent me a month’s worth, giving me three months. I did not claim dole this time. I did not anticipate being out of work long.

    My memory of that summer is heat. It felt like it went on forever and in my memory it was perpetual afternoon brightness. I got invited on a boat trip (booze cruise) with my former BT colleagues (I’d do the Xmas parties as Beth’s +1 for the next 3 years) Got so drunk I was throwing up for the entirety of the next day (still can’t drink vodka and orange, to this day) and worked the odd temp job here and there. I was an office mover for a while, and even – gasp – a recruitment consultant. Then an auditing job at City College came up. It was September 1999.

    This introduced me to Southampton City College. A further education college (community college in US terms) in a former Victorian workhouse (the principal had heard all the jokes, but it didn’t stop me)

    John Savage, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    Colleges get paid based on the returns they send to the DofE. This data includes number of achievers (passed), number of completions (including non-passes), withdrawals etc. You get paid based on the first two. The college was facing an audit and their data was incomplete. They were under-claiming. This was costing them money, plus the record keeping was an inspection criteria. They hired a team to clean it up. My boss was Ray Howell, part of the college’s senior management, and an absolute all-round top bloke.

    For several months we went through the data and had to interview several members of staff about their student records, which ranged from “Here’s everything from the last decade” to “I remember him, he was a right little bastard” all the way to “we had some students once, can’t tell you more than that” (thanks, Trade Union studies!). We got through it.

    It was my habit to take lunch at the greasy spoon over the road, often with Ray. We’d talk a bit ,and he seemed to have a sense I was a bit lost, and clearly saw a solution of sorts. One day he said to me, over my coffee and baked potato “Why don’t you do an engineering foundation degree for the University? We do them right here.”

    Hearing it from someone like Ray sounded like a very big deal. I sensed a great opportunity. It felt like the right time, and Ray put me in touch with the people I needed. I filed a UCAS application that week. In time, The University of Southampton wrote back to me with an invitation for an open day, maths assessment (shiiiiit!) and interview early in the next year.

    That’s for the next part…

  • Odyssey, Pt. 3

    FAIR SEAS, BUT A Storm warning

    The millennium had arrived. 2000 was upon us, all the computers kept working, the apocalypse would have to wait for now. My auditing job at the College was coming to a close. They were trying their best to keep us on, but the urgency for the work was no longer present, and by February it was clear I’d need to move on. Martin, the curriculum manager at that time, told me to call him if I needed to keep the wolves at the door. I appreciated that. City College would feature in my future, in a significant way.

    A note on memory and perception of time – I had been in Southampton less than 3yrs at this point, but in recollection it felt more like ten. Memory is an odd thing. Jobs I did for six months felt much longer, and it’s curious to me that this is not a long period of time I’m describing, but it feels it, perhaps because of the high number of events.

    The university interview was one month away. It was not a certainty, I had an assessment to get through. In the meantime I needed work. On the way home to Middle Street I dropped into an Agency I’d noted in passing several times, they were small and I think Independent. I registered with the desk and they told me there was actually a job available In their office – talk about landing on your feet – and I could start when I liked. The rate was decent, just over £6 an hour (seems nothing now but it was enough for a modest living in Southampton in 2000) but it dead mean long days, 0830 – 1800 which I knew would be a drag. That was not the only issue.

    The owner was a whip-thin middle-aged woman whom referred to her banana yellow German convertible as her ‘baby’ and seemed exceptionally highly strung. She barely spoke to me – ever – and instead relied on the office ‘business development manager’ Bernie, who was around 40, ex Royal Navy, and your stereotypical idea of a sales guy. He would schmooze customers, but was overbearing and brusque with employees. Between him and the owner, you never knew what you were walking into. The office manager was a German/English woman called Chris, who was quiet and a lot more even, but she also seemed ineffectual. Bernie was the owner’s bagman, and he knew it. An interesting feature of this workplace at that time was it allowed smoking, the only place I witnessed this, before or since. They all smoked. I could not, as I was out front.

    I would deal with assessing employees and passing off leads to the consultants. A recruitment consultancy is a sales operation; the product is people; they stand or fall on their ability to secure staffing contracts from local business. This means most of the consultants day is spent trying to sell the company services. The staff are seen as lightbulbs, unscrew one, put another one in. This consultancy was an industrial recruiter, meaning factory workers were the majority of their business. I was the last ‘commercial’ (office) placement – in their own shop.

    One morning I was at my desk writing some notes, and the phone rang. One ring. Bernie charged over and told me pointedly “You’ve got to be picking up that phone! Don’t let it ring!” Also keep the desk tidy, and stop going to the toilet so much (I mean, was I?). The owner was glowering at me, or us (I could not tell) in the background. For whatever reason, Bernie was on my case. One of the other consultants told me not to worry about him, that he did this to everyone – which he did – but I was already of the opinion that life was too short for this. I had my interview to look forward to. Whatever this was, I knew it wasn’t forever.

    March had me attending the Lanchester Building at the back of University of Southampton’s Highfield Campus. It was a sunny day. I had an introductory talk about the foundation year (which lead into a full BSc engineering degree either there, or another university, for a total of 4 years). The head of the Foundation year was Dr. Anna Barney. Dr. Barney would, from start to finish, be fantastic. She asked me to do a single page mathematics assessment, which I was dreading. It was not difficult, about GCSE Maths level. She talked me through my performance (I could not remember how to do some fractions) and she was happy with the results. I’d got over the worst part.

    This is important because maths was the big thing I was worried about and it didn’t seem to be the mountain I feared and I convinced myself it would be alright.

    That said, I’d already made the first of many errors here. The crucial point I had underestimated is that I had been given a reading list and a table of topics I was expected to understand in fluent terms at the time the course started, i.e. it would not be covered, you’d be expected to know it already. The course starting point would be beyond these topics. This matters in mathematics because it is a semantic tree; you need to know the roots before the trunk, the trunk before the branches, the branches before the leaves. I emphasize this because it’s highly relevant to what came later.

    I was in. I’d be starting October 4th, 2000. I went back the office, Bernie picked up on my good mood and did his best to ruin it, but it didn’t matter. This was my break. I would finally embark on a meaninfgul degree, start exploring my potential, and it made my modest existence completely tolerable, but I still had seven months to fill.

    P, for his part, had also decided to go back to school and was prepping for a chemistry degree. In Leeds. He’d already taken a preparatory A-Level at my old shop City College, as he needed it for entry requirements. P, in retrospect, got it right. He is incredibly intelligent and I had the feeling it all came easily to him. What this also meant was we would definitely be parting ways, that the Southampton epoch was coming to an end. For him, at least. I would remain for another decade.

    For me, I had to sort out my work situation. I was in my sixth week with the recruitment people; they had secured the contract to staff the Tall Ships Festival in Southampton that April. The resultant workload had caused objection from one of the consultants, Jackie. They sacked her on the spot, it was very ugly stuff (she left in tears, humiliated in front of everybody), and Bernie was the axe man. He came to me and told me “We’ve terminated Jackie’s contract, so any calls for her are to be directed to me”. It was all quite unpleasant. I understood the owner had a business to run but this seemed a bit much. I also realized that if that was how they treated tenured employees I was probably not going to last long.

    On some days, Bernie would have his young son in, and I’d keep him busy with the pinball game on the desktop computer. Bernie can’t have been all bad because his lad was a terrific boy, but I caught Bernie glowering at me when I was talking to his son, as if I were about to offer him some heroin, but I hadn’t brought any with me that day.

    when I was filing away paperwork in the main office something on a consultant’s notepad caught my eye. It was a telephone number and the word ‘Receptionist?’ written next to it. We didn’t do commercial recruitment. Reception was one of my responsibilities. I knew my number was up. I asked the consultant the next day and she told me I wasn’t supposed to know but yes, they (meaning the owner and Bernie) wanted someone else for my job. Bernie got wind I’d asked about it and called me upstairs to grip me.

    He told me that “..You are not the world’s best receptionist” And I reminded him this was not a requirement of the job, because this was not the world’s best recruitment agency. This didn’t go over too well, and he told me I wasn’t a great employee, took too many breaks, ‘hovered around’ too much. I told him I didn’t plan on doing this forever, and he actually took a lot of interest in my plans. I had the impression office Bernie was a totally different person to the actual Bernie.

    I didn’t care for the man, but I didn’t hold anything against him, he had his ways and that was it. He’d taught himself this overly assertive management style, but I think he needed to get out from under the owner, this was obvious to me, because it was toxic. I walked out at lunchtime and headed straight to the pub. That recruitment agency would be gone within two years, leaving just their head office in Basingstoke. Southampton has an abundance of employment and letting agents, most of the smaller ones get bought or die off.

    I knew this was coming, so I’d already applied for a job at P&O Nedlloyd (herein PONL), the container line that had an operations office in Southampton. I did not disclose I had no intention of staying beyond October. The job was on the imports side, arranging land-side movement of containers coming into Southampton, and other UK ports. My prior experience at Meyer basically secured the job. There was a probationary period whereafter you’d be a permanent employee. It was about six months, the starting pay was decent. There was a week’s training, too.

    This would be a very social place, it was a full floor of young people, with old bosses. My desk boss Mike, was a good guy but he picked up an air of indifference from me that drove him mad. I overheard him once talk about me to another employee. “The problem with James is that he thinks this place is a holiday camp.” I did not. I had no idea what he was on about. Perhaps it was the fact I continually ignored his repeated complaints about my work. You had to do a lot of billing calculations and I always left it last minute, because I didn’t like it. Then I would go and ride the ferris wheel.

    It was all a little too much like hard work, and I knew that this was not going to be my career, so it was difficult to find much motivation. The high spot was the very active social life the place offered – I really enjoyed it.

    By now I was doing regular study at night, for the first time in years. I was working through the foundation mathematics workbook as instructed by Dr. Barney. Progress was steady, and I wasn’t concerned, I just needed to keep at it. This isn’t foreshadowing, I did keep it up, but I realized I’d not complete all of the topics in time. I did not fret on the basis that I hadn’t struggled with any of it and so assumed that would be the case for the remainder.

    I wanted to see if I could secure some part time work to help offset the cost of my education. University was no longer free, and my accomodation plans (I decided I wanted to stay at the university to get the full experience, leaving my girlfriend free to continue living in her very small apartment). I was concerned that if I tried to keep a foot in two worlds It might affect my commitment to the whole endeavour. My accomodation would be about £80 a week and anything I could do to offset the student loan would help. I got in touch with some old colleagues at BT, and they asked me to come back as a contractor but wanted me full time until October, wherein I could pick my hours. It was more money than PONL.

    I gave Mike the good news who wished me good luck, and told me “not to fuck it up”. And so ended my time at PONL. I wasn’t especially sad to leave but I did miss the people, it was a fun scene. I never saw any of them again, which is a weird and repeated phenomenon given it’s a small town. PONL no longer exists either – they got swallowed by Maersk. I still see branded PONL containers here in the US. The former office was Carnival Cruises for a while, before being converted to student flats.

    By now I’d fully realized a separate life from the people I’d come to live with and love. I had my own friends, had my own social circle. We still hung out all the time, but I no longer felt dependent on them, which was good because before long we’d all go our separate ways. This is one of the reasons I felt less positive about the Middle Street house – I associate it with this terminal period in our friendship.

    BT was going through some changes. The corporate clients people had all moved into Friary House (where it all started for me), Telephone House would be sold, and the office was divided into fulfillment (back office) and services (talking to customers). I floated around fulfillment, handling work orders. My mate Beth was still there, and it was great to be back in regular contact with her. She was heavily pregnant, but it didn’t slow her down much. Helen was around too, and there was a lad called Matt who was another contractor, who I’d get to know. There was also Vicky(?) (I am not certain of my memory of her name), yet another Northerner who was a little stand-offish at first but we became good friends. This would be the most relaxed time at BT, nothing like before, and I felt the duties were appropriate to contract work; none of this bullshit of treating them as if they’re fully-signed up employees but with none of the rewards.

    The Boat Show takes place around every September in Southampton. I didn’t usually bother going, it was expensive even for locals and attracted a lot of the hooray Henry and Henrietta types. All Range Rovers and hockey sticks. Not my people. For whatever reason, my mum decided she wanted to spend this weekend with me prior to me going back to university. It stays with me because we had a really pleasant time together, and it was the last time she would visit me there on her own. We looked at the brand new West Quay shopping centre (Europe’s biggest city-centre mall at that time) and around the boat show, laughing at all the yachties and marveling at the gin palaces. I had the impression she was worried about me, for some reason.

    I think she knew something I didn’t.

    TBC.

  • Odyssey, Pt. 4

    Disaster And Defeat

    “Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches.”

    Hyman G. Rickover

    The time had come. The band was breaking up. P was heading back North, to begin a new adventure in Leeds, Kevin would stay in Southampton with his fiancé, Rob would eventually wind up back in his beloved Wales, and I was starting a foundation degree at the university. I have a distinct memory of helping P load his parent’s car for the journey home. I rather stupidly wondered if he’d ever return. I knew he didn’t love Southampton, was entirely unsentimental about it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he never looked back, but I would see him – and everyone else – that Christmas.

    I would stay with my then-girfriend until the start of Semester, in October. Like the year before I recall it was a bright and sunny summer, all the girls wore designer sunglasses and cargo pants, tramp stamp and visible thong seemed to be the thing. The All Saints look, as I thought of it. The lads all looked like they shopped at Fat Face because they did.

    There was a definite feeling of change though. I was equally excited and apprehensive. I was 26, technically a mature student (anyone would testify I was anything but mature) and I was a long way out from any kind of academic study. I was wondering how I’d get on. There’s not much time between school leavers and 26, but it’s also another world, and I’d be living among them. Would I hate it? The work I wasn’t too worried about. I was telling myself I had done enough.

    I would discover under the most difficult circumstances, that I hadn’t.

    I’d wanted to live in halls, but the only availability was in catered; in other words they served breakfast and dinner, which was easy, expensive, and kind of novel. I wouldn’t have to worry about cooking, which is fortunate, because I couldn’t, as the lads would testify.

    My move-in day was Monday October 2nd. Most people were already there. I pulled all my belongings out of the boot of my friend’s little Peugeot hatchback, got my keys, and took stock.

    The university accommodation fruit machine had allocated me a room in K Block, Glen Eyre Halls of Residence. Glen Eyre was a large housing complex just North of the Highfield Campus, featuring several blocks of varying vintage. K block was part of three identical blocks, 3 stories of concrete in brutalist style. It could have been made in Minecraft. In 2005 they were extensively redeveloped with an additional floor and extra wing changing their plan shape from a ‘C’ to a square. Back then, I think the fixtures and fittings were all original, it had a distinct 1960s feel to it. Shared bathrooms on every floor, blue-tiled kitchens (2 on each floor), white hardwood cupboards, knackered microwave and cooker, and the hot water came from a small electrical header tank over the sink.

    The corridor was grey carpeted, seemed perpetually slightly-too-warm, and varnished wood panelling punctuated the painted concrete walls. It was all very beige. My room was tiny with the window looking out onto the middle space of the block, a single bed, scuffed-up old wardrobe and a basic desk. There was a telephone socket and an RJ45 port but these were extra, and not cheap. and I don’t think anyone I knew paid for them. No internet otherwise. Seems unthinkable now, but that’s how it was. A single computer room on the first floor allowed access to the delights of email and the web. If you needed to download something substantial – say a large patch for Half-Life – you had to use sneakernet – walk to the labs on campus with a writeable CD-R.

    I was the oldest person on my floor, but nobody really cared. The kids, as they say, were alright. My previous experience at Southampton was at the Institute, which some people unkindly referred to as the Chimpstitute. It was a different class of school. One morning Sarah (a neighbor on my floor) told me she would be spending the day in the Library. I laughed, assuming she was joking, because obviously going out for a daytime pint or two was a better idea. She wasn’t. She pulled 8 hours in there like it was nothing. She did this often. These kids were dedicated.

    Here there were lots of Harriets and Tims, rather well-to-do kids who were also very, very bright. The first person to introduce himself to me was Joe, who is still in touch today, and was my closest friend there. He seemed shy, talked himself down too much, but also possessed a keen and sardonic wit. Josh was a tiny computer science nerd from London, Ellie was a very sweet girl from the home counties somewhere, and Tom reminded me of every kid I went to grammar school with. All confidence and tall good looks. Sally was 17 and at university early because she was super clever or some shit, and Nina was the most local, from Bournemouth, and super cool, when you could get a word out of her. Sarah was striking, a bit plummy, very bright, and carried herself as if much older. Alex was a bear of a lad, awkward, but a heart of gold. Joe told me he thought Alex looked up to me. I didn’t even look up to me. There were plenty of others but these are the ones I remember the most. Joe recently reminded me about Rachel, who I didn’t remember at all until he mentioned her, and she lived on our corridor! Memory is a funny thing. It’s not as reliable as you might think.

    The floor was its own self-contained entity – we did not know anyone upstairs – and had further subdivision into different corridors, forming cliques and alliances. There was a kid called Tony from the other side (the floor, not the spirit realm) who had seen too many Guy Ritchie films and talked like Danny Dyer. He walked around repeatedly with his hand on his crotch like an Italian pimp and was a bit of a plonker, but definitely amusing. I think he was from Tunbridge Wells. People we didn’t know but saw regularly (the entire block had breakfast and dinner together) acquired nicknames like ‘badly-dressed girl’ and ‘ponytail twat’.

    People slowly figured out I was a little different due to background (but not a serial killer), and I was really quite fond of everyone, which was fortunate, because I didn’t really like anyone on my course. The first week was full of things like orientation (“this is what a bus looks like” etc) and motivational talks from course leaders. The actual classes would start the following week. There was an orientation day at City College (foundation year is delivered there, but run by the university) giving me the odd experience of forced trivia about a place I knew back to front. The rest of the time was spent exploring the union bar (really very nice) and the Glen bar (local to the halls) watching South Park and The Matrix about 2 million times and generally enjoying myself. The difference in age, while small, melted away completely.

    Monday morning would be right into it with double maths. About fifteen minutes into class during which some fundamentals were rattled through – simultaneous equations, quadratic identities and so forth – I realised I was in the shit. I wasn’t up to speed on this stuff. Not enough. The remainder of the day featured physics (which went a little better) but my apparent lack of preparedness for the maths had given me a sharp jolt. I returned home to halls and went over the material. I could do it, but not anywhere near quick enough – and it was only going to get more difficult – and there were some concepts I still had trouble with. I lacked confidence.

    The rest of the week was more of the same, logarithms, binomial theorem, polynomials…I was struggling to keep my head above water, and more complex physics theory started being introduced. I enjoyed Stress and Strain (irony) but struggled with some of the electrical theory. The big problem from my point of view was the tempo was crazy fast, I felt like I was drowning. My habit was to retreat back to my room and figure it out in my own time – I got very stressed out trying to make progress in class with someone standing over me.

    The college had a half term in its own timetable, during which it was closed. The university called this a ‘reading week’, essentially a break from class. I got endless shit from my K-Block mates for this, perceiving it as a holiday (which it was) but I knew it would have to be fruitful or I was fucked. I resolved to head to my parents, by now in Cambridgeshire and take a breather. This may have been a mistake. I still don’t know. I should probably of got my head down and stayed in Glen if I was to have any hope of avoiding what happened.

    At my parent’s place, I had something approaching a nervous breakdown. I was suddenly fixated on the idea that I did not want to go back, that I could somehow stay in rural Cambridgeshire indefinitely. I discussed it at length with my mum, and my dad tried his best to assure me it was just a wobble. He told me stories of his own experiences and It helped, but I was having an almost complete failure in confidence and I could not see past it. I think I completed one homework assignment (of two) and could barely stand to look at the reams of printouts of algebra worksheets for fear I might burst into tears. I overcame the panic and returned to Southampton.

    At this time I did something very stupid. I stopped going to class. I spent my days idling around, very occasionally looking at some work before changing my mind, and shooting the shit with my neighbors. There was always somebody around, and something to do. Get lunch on campus, spend the afternoon in the union bar watching MTV, anything to avoid thinking about work. Nobody knew what was happening. I kept it all to myself.

    Eventually, inevitably, the system caught up with me, and I started getting pressed to go and talk to one of the tutors. I put it off for as long as I could, before going in. He was very understanding, told me to keep my chin up, collect the work I’d missed and knuckle down. I came back armed with an enormous amount of course material (they continued to move fast) and after Christmas there was the first final, a maths exam, which would determine progression. A retake was possible for this one, but what I’d need was a miracle.

    It was December. I’d started to seriously consider finally fucking it all off. I was not so far in that this would cost me much, I could quit and cut my losses right now. I decided not to do anything too hasty, see how study over Christmas went and assess if I had the slightest chance of passing the first assessment. I was nowhere near where I needed to be. I’d started behind, and it was only getting worse.

    Fate also had a part in a particularly terrible way. On the evening after my birthday, during a reunion with my old housemates, there was a serious fire at my girlfriend’s place. It is believed a candle had started a fire near the sofa, causing that to be completely destroyed, and the whole apartment contaminated by smoke damage. We had to live with a friend for a couple of weeks, while the flat was completely redecorated. It was just one more thing on the plate, even though it was sorted out remarkably quickly.

    I tried to find a way out of things.

    The best analogy I can make is being able to run a competent 5K, and entering a marathon. You’ll never make it, have no hope to get up to standard during the race, and are just going to damage yourself trying.

    I started to let people know that I would be leaving after the break, in January. Everyone was great about it, we’d all keep in touch, all the usual platitudes. Dr. Barney, for her part, expressed absolute confidence in me and insisted I re-apply the following year. She said I just needed more time. And with that, I withdrew. My return to education, the thing that was meant to change my life, my big opportunity to really do something for myself and launch a career, had completely shattered, after just three months. I felt completely defeated.The experience was so wounding, and left me so soured on it, I would never return, and resigned myself to finding another path. It haunts me to this day.

    Writing it now, with the clarity of hindsight, I should have bailed much earlier – the moment I realized I wasn’t ready – and come back the following year. It was a much more realistic plan, but at the time, I just had no sense of it at all.

    Over the years I asked myself if I could have pulled it out of the fire. I just didn’t have the right mindset to even begin to do that, it would have taken a work rate I had never demonstrated, confidence I didn’t have, and aptitude I thus far hadn’t shown. Adrian Newey, Southampton Alumni and world-famous aerodynamicist for Red Bull Racing, struggled badly with maths during his engineering degree, and the answer he discovered was for him to simply knuckle down and try harder. So really it is simple, but also not so simple, unless you’re Adrian Newey.

    More preparation was required, but I didn’t realise it. All the clues were there, I just had failed to notice the competencies – in black and white – were absolutely literal. I had a false sense of security from doing alright in the initial assessment and had made the fatal error of believing it would be alright on the night.

    P had got it right, he’d done an A level, and this gave him practice at the standard near where he’d be starting university at. I should have done the same, because A level mathematics was pretty much the starting point of the course. I wasn’t used to academic work, to study, to organizing my time, or to pacing myself in lessons. It had been a long time for me and the level I’d achieved off my own back was only really a starting point. I should have done ten times more.

    I packed up my stuff and moved back to my girlfriend’s newly refurbed flat, and would try and pick up the pieces. For her part, I think it planted the seeds of a perception of me that would eventually cause the end of the relationship, because from her point of view, I was going nowhere.

    To be continued…

  • Odyssey, Pt. 5

    ctrl-alt-delete

    2001 would be a big year for history and something like a reset for me. There would be a change of tempo, and stability at last, but all that was ahead of me.

    I had arrived in Southampton just under four years prior. I had been through eight job moves and six home address changes in that time, three of which were in the last year.

    I had an ace up my sleeve in the form of my job. They enabled me to return to full time hours seamlessly. Thus, in the pit of despair about the failure of my university ambitions, I could simply go back to work on Monday, as if nothing had happened. This might not have been the most healthy approach, but like pulling out a tooth, it would be effective.

    No postmortem was needed at this point, it wouldn’t have helped me and would have changed nothing. My eyes were fixed forward.

    I was sharing my girlfriend’s flat in Cranbury Place. The gravity well of SO14’s Bevois Valley had pulled me back in, as it would in future. The address was the other side of the Royal South Hants from Graham Rd, the place of my early Withnalian existence (there’s a blue plaque), and about five minutes on foot from Middle street, the last address I shared with the lads (and Harriet). The flat was alright, and no longer on fire. It would do. The neighbourhood wasn’t great, the street apparently having a number of halfway houses. Shouting matches in the small hours were common, as were police vans.

    I had my first overseas holiday in seven years that March. A week in off-season Cyprus, a dirt cheap package deal. It was a welcome change of scene and I could have done with more time.

    Summer passed by, life rapidly came back to normal. The question of returning to University loomed, as I had to make a decision. I decided against re-entry. That door was closed and I did not want to open all that up again. it was mentally in a steel box, under permafrost. Besides, I had not looked at a maths text since I’d left.

    I returned from lunch one September afternoon. It was about 1pm, and the buzz in the office was a plane had apparently struck New York’s World Trade Center. “What fucking plane? Don’t be daft”. It was hard to find a news page that would actually load, but the BBC showed the famous image of WTC 1 ablaze with thick black smoke against a perfect azure sky.

    In the Walkabout pub (now long gone) after work with my colleague oxbridge Rob, a news channel looped UA175 repeatedly slotting into WTC2 like some absurdly overblown disaster film. “Turn it off, I can’t watch it anymore” barked the Australian girl that managed the bar.

    BT, in yet another example of spectacularly awful leadership, had overextended itself financially in gobbling up 3G wireless licenses. Consequently the telco giant would have to sell off its mobile business, Hence, o2 was born. Oh, and also, you’re all getting fired. It’s a gas gas gas.

    A colleague had tipped me off that all agency staff would be let go in 2 weeks, as a cost-saving measure. I don’t know who told him, but he saved me a lot of hassle. The rumour was categorically denied.

    I knew Natwest bank were hiring at their mega call centre in Charlotte place, two minutes walk from my flat. It was direct hire, no agency involvement. I was finished with that game, and applied with haste. I passed the phone interview (“Are you a moron yes/no?”), the background checks, and got offered a start date. Three weeks training. I’d be there in November. BT duly sacked all their contract staff and I walked away feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. I also had a full-time post at a reputable (at least for now…) company, with an implied ability to progress with them.

    My job was a so-called ‘customer service manager’, basically a phone monkey, albeit better trained than most. Natwest had built a very good reputation for their phone banking, due in no small part to a very good training department (whom they cut not long after I started). There was a small sales element when I started, basically lead-generation for the branches which I would learn were little more than shops. That was retail banking in 2002. Royal Bank of Scotland bought Natwest in 2000, and I joined in the middle of their profit drive.

    After training I was assigned to a team on the phone floor. They all had nautical names, mine was ‘Armada’ and the manager of the team was this prick named Neil who lamented – right in front of me – that I wasn’t one of the attractive girls in my training intake. You’d get handed your cards for that nowadays, and rightly so.

    The job wasn’t difficult, pay was…okay, but I wasn’t good at sales and they were an increasing part of the role’s KPIs. You had to make so many leads in a period of time (I don’t remember more, I’m afraid) and there was a leaderboard on the wall that showed where everyone was. The prize was you got to keep your job. I hate being sold to, it makes my skin crawl, so you can imagine how motivated I was to do it to other people.

    There was a system called an ‘action contract’ that you would placed under if you underperformed. I think I was on it about a half-dozen times. It was a precursor to getting the boot (although I don’t know anyone this happened to) because it was pretty easy to grit your teeth and talk some old dears into going to a branch for a review just enough times to float yourself up the leaderboard. It made me feel dirty though, and not in a good way.

    I was at RBS/Natwest for the longest uninterrupted period of any job prior. 19 months in all. Neil gave way to Nicola (who was my favorite person in the whole place by miles, love you Nic!) and then to Mike. Mike was a bit older and I didn’t mind him at all. Generally pretty kind and friendly. The ever increasing sales targets became a dealbreaker for me though, and I knew unless I developed psychopathy and started topping the leaderboards, my future was not with this company. Mike told me I could be the best at every other part of the KPIs, but if I was behind on sales none of it mattered. That was the situation. To be fair on him, Neil, Nic and all the others, they had to make this happen, or it was their necks.

    University felt like a distant memory. Another life. My old K-block buddies would all be graduating now. In the multiverse another me would have been completing the 2nd year of my own degree. Time marches on.

    In the middle of 2003, I took a two week holiday to Spain with my girlfriend, to visit my parents at their flat in Nerja. I have this strong memory of swimming in the mediterranean – I have always loved the sea – and the meditative quiet of my head dipping below the surface, like being in nature’s womb. It was this feeling I remembered as I looked at the wet pavement on my way to Charlotte place, the Monday after coming back. “I was swimming in the sea this time yesterday”. A man needs certain things, being boxed up in an office doing a job I didn’t like would no longer do. It was time to move on, and I had found something.

    BT, in the meantime, asked me to come back as a contractor. I’ll let you imagine my response.

    TBC…

  • Odyssey, Pt. 6

    Big Things Have Small Beginnings

    – David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, 1962.

    Cranbury Place had started out too damn small, and only got worse. My girlfriend of the time (herein referred to as SG) was already fussing about it and had one day announced she wanted to look at a flat in Portswood. I explained I’d rather be sealed in a pit of my own shit than live in Portswood (all that wasn’t good about Cranbury Place, but even further out), so we found a much nicer flat right on Southampton’s High Street. It would become one of my favourite homes. Excellent location, right at the liminal space where town started to quiet down some between the centre and sleepy waterfront, High ceilings and Edwardian vibes. I loved it there. I think it was around £500 pcm, which was at the upper end of what we could afford but easily worth it. I had, for now, escaped the clutches of SO14’s gravitational pull.

    I’d firmly resolved to get out of Natwest, and saw an ad for a position at none other than Southampton City College, as a coordinator for an IT basic skills program. I leapt at the chance, and in July got an interview, and – despite not a huge amount (just the audit work) of educational experience – got the job. I’d start early August. I had entered the world of education, one I have been in ever since. To give you some perspective in how my days of chopping and changing were behind me, this was only two employers removed, from my seat in the USA Today.

    The college was in a transitional period. It had undergone serious financial hardship and was under some kind of special fiscal management. This was a huge deal at the time and a lot of people were relieved their jobs were safe. Colleges can, and do, go under. What this also meant was a new sheriff in town.

    City College senior management was dominated by women. The principal was Lindsey Noble, the director of HR Tania Burton, and together they’d introduce a lot of – not always popular – changes. Performance related pay was one of them. SCC had a fairly militant staff, and strikes were not uncommon. I wasn’t union (strike was teachers only) and so I crossed the picket lines a few times. I was on good terms with all the union people, and had a lot of time for them. There was zero acrimony.

    My outfit was part of an ‘enterprise’ (quote marks doing some heavy lifting there) initiative, meaning we were supposed to make the college money, but my specific bit was state-funded so we didn’t really fit in, and in time we’d be spun out from them. We ran three types of basic skills courses: Learndirect, CLAIT, and ECDL. The latter two were pretty good – and they were free. Learndirect was well-intended but from my point of view all they did was print endless glossy reports and send them by the tonne – It seemed intensely bureaucratic, and the tutors didn’t like delivering it.

    The department was run by Fred, who disliked me, and Julie, who did not. More on Fred later. Becky was my immediate boss, and I liked her a great deal. Sadly, as is often my luck, she’d leave not long after I started.

    We were based in the library, and teaching staff initially had crazy long hours (I think it was very tough on Becky and her family) but I was 9-5 thankfully. We dealt with a lot of foreign students (Asylum Seekers and economic migrants from the EU) and I liked that part of it. It played to a lot of my strengths in desktop computing – I’d been into computers for years – and this lit the spark of what would come next.

    Lindsey Noble set the college on an aggressive redevelopment plan. The campus was a bit of a dump, and prior to the Noble era the most recent building was the 1995 library. She did a great job here, completely changing the appearance of the campus from its Victorian edifice to something modern. And we were moving into the flagship new bit!

    We occupied the ground floor of what became known as Z-block and set up shop. We shared it with an art class, and occasional health and social care students. A large number of the latter were single mothers that were doing the course as an incentive from the local Council, and it was my first experience of being some kind of supervisory person, because I had to learn to deal with them as well as my own students. I learnt (after a rocky start) to like them a great deal. They’d tell you all about themselves if you gave them a minute. Nobody really cared about them outside of college, and they were a Tory bogeyman. They all wrote me a lovely leaving card, which they absolutely did not have to do.

    I got to know Nick at this time, whom would play a much bigger part if my life in due course. He was one of the library staff, formerly managed a big comic shop in town, and we would share many lunchtimes and the odd beer together. His girlfriend of the time also worked there, as would his future wife. It was a place I built a lot of relationships, and that had really started back in 1999 with Ray Howell.

    As much as I was satisfied, SG was restless with my lack of any real profession and the fact I was still on a low salary. She had ambitions to start a family and get a house, and honestly I didn’t care for any of those things. Be that as it may, she did have a point, and I decided to get my ticket in IT support, which was a City & Guilds qualification the college offered. I could do it for free.

    I spent one day out of my working week taking PCs to bits and putting them back together, as well as some learning some theory. I loved it. It was my first ‘class’ as it were since the university fiasco, and, reader, I aced it. I’m forever grateful that the college gave me this chance, because it started me down a road.

    The IT manager of the college, a real card called Andy, tipped me off that he had a Helpdesk position going. He wanted me for it. Excellent news. I completed my application that same day, and dropped it off directly at HR. And waited. And waited. And waited. Something wasn’t right.

    Andy later took me aside and apologetically (I could see he wasn’t pleased about it) gave me the bad news: Fred (now Andy’s boss) had vetoed my application, for reasons unknown. In weeks to come during weekly pints with my old gaffer Ray, the story would evolve thus: “For some reason Fred did not want you in that role.” Then, “For some reason Fred did not think you were best for that role.” Finally (actually much later): “You know, Fred never liked you.”

    During this period my mother got diagnosed with terminal cancer. The autumn of 2004 was, in memory, a long black march towards trauma and the realization my mum was almost certainly going to die. The final chapter of that is described here, and I don’t need to say much more. For my part, I would be drinking a little more than was healthy, put on a lot of weight, but I would survive. I was not easy to be around at this time I am sure, and it didn’t help things with SG. Becky’s successor, Susan Vance, was absolutely fantastic throughout. If you ever read this Sue, you have my gratitude, and I don’t think I showed it nearly enough. Sue was one of the best managers I ever had. My mother would pass away February 25th 2005. It would be one of the defining moments of my life. I didn’t know that yet.

    When The Student Is Ready, The Teacher Will Appear

    – Some good-sounding bullshit

    One of the computing lecturers, who I shall refer to as AJP, was a great bloke, and a Northerner to boot, so of course I liked him. He told me of a new Higher National Certificate program for IT Systems Support. An HNC is essentially equivalent to the first year of a degree. This was a 2 year part-time program they intended to compress into one year, and would I like to enroll? I had to get approval from the department head. I was allowed, but I would have to make up the hours. That was one full day a week. I’d take it. Fucking right I’d take it.

    Things were deteriorating at home. SG had a close mate whom had a new boyfriend, and SG had fully immersed herself in their social circle, to an extent that concerned me as it was beginning to get uncomfortable. One of these lads is now her husband, if that lends any perspective. Her mother had also made no secret of the fact she didn’t want us together. I gave us a few weeks.

    Relief had presented itself in the form of her colleague offering us her old home at a very discounted rental rate. It was in Calmore, well outside of the city, but as a conciliatory measure, I was willing to give it a try. It was, I knew at the time, a stupid mistake. We should have called it there and then. It was the natural, synchronous point to go our separate ways. Instead, I left a flat I adored, letting the zombified corpse of our relationship stumble on for a while longer in a house I fucking loathed, out in some anonymous shithole suburb. Plus, I had to ride the bus. The indignity! I am still angry with myself I let this happen, but it wouldn’t be for long, as it turns out.

    My outline notes for the end of this just say “Strap in for 2006”.

    It’s a fun one.

  • Odyssey, Pt. 7

    THIS IS THE WAY

    On the third of January 2006, I came home from work to find SG in what would be the finale in a long line of sulks. On pressing what was wrong, she told me she thought we should split up. We’d been together seven years. We’d shared this house in Calmore since September.

    It had been less than a year since the death of my mum. When one of the worst possible things in your life happens to you, the premature loss of a loved one over an excruciatingly slow and painful period of time, things change in you. I am not saying I am over it, because I don’t think I ever will be, but getting through this had changed something in me. Hardness and perspective. I felt like I’d been battered into some of other form. If I could get through that…

    I decided to go quietly. There was no sense in friction as this had been coming for a while. I can’t say I wasn’t upset, because this had been half of my twenties seemingly down the drain, but deep down, I didn’t truly see it that way.

    I was good friends with my colleague Nick by this time, and short term he let me stay at his digs in town just a street off from Bedford Place. Nick, on his good days, always knew what to do. He took me out to lunch and we had some chips and a pint as I lamented things. Just then, Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ came on the jukebox, and we both burst out laughing, because it reminded us of this:

    Nick, It turned out, would have to vacate his current place as the landlord decided to renovate and/or sell up (I don’t remember the details). We would look for a place together.

    There was a friend on the Eastern side of the Itchen River Nick wanted to be close to. We looked at one or two places, but this whole area was Mordor to me, I didn’t like it, too far out, involved a bridge, and orcs (probably). I wanted to be close to Work and the city. We eventually settled on a little rental on Avenue Rd, a very short distance from my last house with the gang on Middle St. SO14 had pulled me back in.

    All but two of my addresses up to this time were in that same square mile. I can’t explain why, and there would be two more during my time in Southampton.

    The snag was, this place would not be available until February 15th. I would be at the house in Calmore until that time, and we’d just have to deal with it. Six weeks. It sounds awful, but actually it wasn’t bad, SG was out frequently with her mates and the bloke she didn’t know that I knew she was seeing. I didn’t particularly mind. What difference does it make? She would be out on holiday for a week during the day of the move.

    I was getting on with my HNC and completed the first module, and was surprised how well I took to the academic side. I found I could sit down and sweat out study for hours on end if I needed to, which was revelatory to me.

    Moving day came around, and Nick recruited his cousin George (I had a lot of time for George) and a Sprinter van from SixT (why do I remember this shit?). I realized I actually owned very, very little, which made things easy. It was about an eight mile shuttle between Calmore and the new place, and we did it in one trip. We did not, however, have room for my bicycle, a Halfords heavy old thing which had kept me sane in Calmore. I decided to leave it and collect it later (editor’s note: never). I’d also left my ironing board, which would be returned to me during a puzzling reunion with SG a bit later.

    We emptied the van and headed to Nick’s, and after collecting what I estimate was about 300 tonnes of comics and the rest of Nick’s stuff, slammed the van door shut and headed to Avenue Road.

    That evening, I remember looking out just after sundown at the melancholy blue light on the dusty roofs of the houses opposite, and having this sinking feeling of starting all over again, back here in that same square mile, like a giant fucking loser. It was odd and left me feeling quite low. The mood was gone by morning, and never came back.

    80 Avenue Road was a small, two bedroom house with a garden. I was sharing it with Nick and his Dalmatian, Anya. I came to absolutely adore that dog, she was such a character. The house was unfurnished, we had very little stuff, and this minimalist setup (front room was a TV and futon) would remain for the duration. I even had to buy a bed, but I had my desk, shelves, and a basic chest of drawers. I made it work. Money was still tight at this time, and living in the city meant much higher rent, but the tradeoff would be worth it.

    Nick, from his time managing the local comics destination, seemed to know half of Southampton. I met an incredible number of people through his network of acquaintances and the Friday evenings in Goblets (long gone, sadly) were a highlight for me.

    About two weeks after moving in, I got a cryptic text message from my ex SG, telling me she needed to meet in person for some very important news. I had a brief moment of panic wondering if she was pregnant (it was possible), as did Nick, whom I had of course immediately shared the text with.

    It turned out the purpose of the meeting was twofold: Firstly, I needed to know she had met someone – she considered it important because she believed that I thought it possible we could get back together, oh, and here’s your ironing board. Okay.

    None of it was anything I didn’t already know, I was completely over it by this point. There is obviously more to all of this – there always is – but my dad told me once that it doesn’t do to dwell on these things, so I took his advice and moved on. I wished her luck and asked that I be allowed to get on with my life, no more texts, chats, or any of that. And that was that. I would never see her again.

    I have nothing but good memories of Spring in that house. Carefree sunny days, dog walks on Southampton’s spacious common, sitting in the garden on the rickety lawn chairs. I don’t remember much about work, because it was all routine at this point. It was a 2 mile walk there and back, and I lost a bunch of weight, not least because I’d regressed to a decidedly student diet of beans on toast, and various pasta creations. Weekends I’d splash out on a kebab from Lodge Road, or – if I’d just been paid – the hallowed Chinese takeaway feast.

    I’d spend long hours sitting with Nick watching LOST (red hot TV at the time) and the excellent reboot of Battlestar Galactica, or sometimes watching him noodle about on the Xbox, with the ubiquitous can of Fosters in my hand (4 for a fiver from the corner shop!). I reconnected with my older sister in London, and started going up there regularly on my weekends. I had started to see a wider world, one I could maybe be part of. I was single, debt free, and could do whatever I wanted, go wherever I wanted. When you’re 32, that’s a superpower. I toyed with the idea of going to London in the future, but never that seriously. Nothing was keeping me in Southampton.

    Our friend Stacey came to visit our house at Easter. She was the daughter of one of the library staff, and I’d spend many work lunchtimes with her. It is safe to say I had no small feeling towards Stacey, but she always seemed to have a boyfriend or something going on. She had bags of charm, and had that quality of treating you like you were the only person on earth, on the occasions you got her attention. Nick was of course greatly amused by it all, and gently ribbed me whenever she visited, although he was kind about the clearly unrequited nature of it. She stayed very late after one night after an evening out, and we of course didn’t have anything to eat, but she had previously spied my Lindt Chocolate easter treat in the fridge, and demanded that. That was Stacey to a tee. Stole my heart and my chocolate bunny. We’re still in touch.

    Summer Brought in a change of mood and tempo. Nick had met the person he would eventually marry, and I was spending lots of time with Alexandra, a recently-divorced colleague that I had developed an on/off thing with. She was from Northallerton so of course I liked her. I was still very carefree and didnt care that it was nothing serious, but I liked spending time with her. She was highly intelligent (a mathematics graduate and trained teacher) and seemingly very sorted out. She’d bought her own flat at 23 (miraculous given the housing market at that time), got married young, and had it all fall apart on her. I just liked being around her, but she had some latent, severe mental health issues I would come to see in time.

    Out of the blue, my younger sister got in touch and asked me if I fancied a trip to New York with her. She’d pay. I could not believe it. This was an act of incredible generosity – there is no way I could otherwise have afforded it – and we would go for a few days in July. I went up to London to stay with her prior to departure.

    What followed was five perfect days in the Big Apple. I loved every second of it. The city was all I had thought it would be, Paris being the only other place I’d been that really delivers what you expect of it. There was a heatwave but it didn’t slow us down. It was pivotal for me, it created a spark in my head that life could be so much more. There’s an electric, thumping can-do attitude that seems to crackle in the streets. This markedly positive first impression of America would play a big part in what came later.

    Times Square, New York City
    Times Square, by me

    I came back, utterly exhausted, feeling a bit like NYC had thoroughly had its way with me (it had) and got the National Express back to Southampton.

    I was late completing my HNC. the new, compressed format of the course had meant some reorganisation of of the delivery and subsequently deadlines, and it wasn’t yet critical, but I had to get it done before July ended. It felt like the last mile of a marathon (not that I’d know…) but I got it in just under the wire.

    I’d started to recognize some issues in Alex. She would periodically keep me at an arm’s length, but when she wanted me around she was aggressive about it. I went out for her birthday, and she introduced me to her friends, not as a partner, not even as a friend, but as a colleague.

    View post on imgur.com

    I remember telling myself there was no point putting myself through this, it just didn’t fit my low-drag lifestyle I presently enjoyed, so I told Alex I’d be stepping back and letting things cool for a bit. This was fine, for a time. Until it wasn’t.

    Days later she ordered a cab to collect me at 2am after I’d told her I didn’t want to see her, followed by a torrent of abuse on the phone. When that didn’t work, she responded with threats of self-harm. I didn’t bite, and kept my distance. I told P about this, who had plenty of professional experience at the sharp end of mental health support work. He told me to block her number and change my locks. P knew what he was talking about and I took his opinions seriously. I stayed away. Not long after, she didn’t turn up at work, and it turned out she had taken an overdose while previously at the office, and they’d put her on paid leave. Whatever contact I had with her would always end in the same way – late night phone calls and erratic behaviour. Eventually she changed jobs and I heard she was working in Basingstoke, had been put on anti-psychotics and seemed to be doing well.

    We lost touch, but much later on, in 2009 a mutual friend informed me she had returned home to Northallerton at some point, and had subsequently taken her own life. I was shocked, but not completely surprised. On her day she was an amazing person, someone I loved being around, but there’s a terribly high price for untreated (and she’d implied she’d resisted help for years) mental health problems, and when it came out, it consumed her.

    Between Christmas and New year I would see P for the first time since the previous December. I travelled up to his new home in Hertfordshire, and spent the break there. This would set a pattern, as I don’t remember P ever coming South again.

    It had been a decade since my first set of visits to Southampton from York.

  • Odyssey, Pt. 8

    Up and up

    January 2007 would kick off another period of big changes. It would see me back in another relationship, a change of occupation to the profession I am still in now, and start the final chapters of my time in Southampton. I would leave the country within five years, but I didn’t know any of that yet.

    I had quietly – and by my standards calmly – calculated that I needed to move on from City College. As detailed previously, while Fred was around, I had no prospects, and I had resolved to start shopping around for a career in information technology. I’d take whatever I could get. I was on my fifth boss by this time at SCC, could practically do the job in my sleep (some would argue I did..), and I had the sinking feeling the department wasn’t going to last (and it didn’t…) The amount of managers that had been thrown at us was not a good sign. They were all put there on their way to something else – nobody wanted it. We were also charging more and more money, a sign funding was drying up. I’d been around long enough to see the writing on the wall.

    Around this time I met Alice, a vocational student that on completion of her IT skills course, asked me out for a drink. I was a bit taken aback, this didn’t usually happen to me. Alice was a perennially serious Polish expat (Southampton having a huge Polish population since joining the EU in 2004) and she was definitely the right person at the right time, seeing more in me than the low-drag lifestyle I’d sort of lazily eased into. She civilized me a bit.

    In February I spotted a job opening at Solent University, for an IT technician in the business school. Solent was the new name for Southampton Institute, which had achieved university status in 2005. I’d applied to Solent previously (I think it was a library job) with little success, but this time I reckoned I’d found a good score.

    I took the risky step of contacting the administrator (named in the job posting) to introduce myself, and asked if it would be worth applying, given my lack of experience. I would never do such a thing now, but at the time I remember thinking they might remember my name and show me a little sunshine. She was very nice about it, probably thought I was a bit of a wanker, but It gave me some cheer.

    I applied, interviewed with John Ince (Senior management at SBS), Nick (who managed the main campus IT operations), and Malcolm, a faculty member. I wasn’t sure how I’d gone over, but I really liked Nick, and I’d given it my best. The biggest obstacle was despite having the right ticket I did not have direct experience – I know from recruiting in my present world how this can be a problem for applicants. Usually they just don’t stack up. I left just as another candidate stepped into the interview room, and kept my fingers crossed.

    I got the job. My foot was in the door at Solent, a growing organization, and it was doing work I was interested in. I don’t think it can be overstated how much that job would come to mean for me. If you were to imagine a pretty much perfect support tech job, this was it. I’d be largely responsible for myself, had all the resources I would need, and was encouraged to learn.

    I handed in my notice at City College. They had been good to me over the 3.5 years I’d been there, but I knew it was time to go. I would see Fred quite a bit over the next few years (usually passing on his bicycle) and there were no hard feelings, but to me this was a lesson in how not to treat staff. If you fuck people about, they’ll just leave. And tell their friends. My housemate Nick would follow me to Solent about a year later. It was a complete coincidence, but migration of staff between neighbouring educational institutions is pretty common.

    I had my own office. it was a nice little perk. It overlooked the quad between the canteen and the library. It was great being at a university; there’s an energy from the kids that creates its own atmosphere; I still enjoy it today. I was one of three techs assigned to the different schools of the university, we all worked independently and ran our own little fiefdoms, with escalation support from the central office when needed. I was in a corridor of lecturers, and the place wouldn’t have won any prizes for modernity, but it was cozy, especially when filled with cardboard boxes of toner and computers. My immediate neighbors were Stewart and Matt, the sports science guys who paraded around in football kit and were clearly living the dream, and Bryn, who would talk at enormous and occasionally exhausting length about any subject. If you were procrastinating and wanted an excuse, go find Bryn.

    Most work came from supporting the administrative offices, which were scattered about the building, but the most concentrated was a large open-plan room on the main business school floor. Everyone was great. My whole time at Solent was marked by the notable fact that I did not encounter a single person I disliked. I don’t know if the feeling was mutual, but they’re not writing this.

    Shortly after I started I got a pretty big bump in pay, as HR had done some kind of calibration exercise to bring salaries in line with the rest of the sector, nationally. This study concluded the university underpaid us (and quite amusingly, HR themselves, of course). For the first time in my adult life, I was making some decent money. My dad always told me money wasn’t everything, it was an enabler, but it was definitely nice to be enabled. I was able to take regular holidays for the first time, and finally upgraded from Asda value baked beans to Heinz. This was the life, folks.

    Alice lived in a tiny little apartment on Lodge Road, about five minutes from my rental house on Avenue road. I preferred spending time at hers, as Nick frequently had his partner over and I had no desire to be in the way, plus Alice spoilt me with great meals and her library of DVDs. We decided we’d move in together when my lease was up, in August. I recall Nick remarking he thought it was a bit soon, which I did not welcome at the time, but he was probably right.

    Alice had a colleague who owned a one-bedroom apartment on Queens Terrace, at the Southern end of town, close to what Southampton pretends is a waterfront. We could rent it at mate’s rates, not perhaps as cheap as you might think. It was easily the nicest place I’d ever lived in. It wasn’t big, but the space was well organized and the living area was perfect for two people. It was an older building that had been extensively refurbished, so it all felt very modern. The bathroom was all black tile and chrome. It was a bit Scarface and I loved it. P visited once (on what must have been a rare occasion, he didn’t come down too often by now) and remarked “The 80s called, they want their bathroom back”

    I liked this end of town. It was behind Oxford Street, which is easily the nicest street in central-ish Southampton, a weird little oasis sandwiched between the docks, a dual carriageway, and a housing estate. There was one minor downside. Southampton has dead zones either side of the busy town centre. Businesses and places to go just sort of evaporate, and on the Southern side it gets very sparse until you reach the rather spotty waterfront developments. It feels like a sort of hinterland. Oxford street is really the only place to go. There is the absurdly named Ocean Village a bit further along the road, but even that didn’t have much apart from a tired multiplex cinema and a couple of pricey bars, intended to service the housing blocks sitting atop them. Beyond that, it’s the Itchen River and Woolston. I was going to make some pissy remark about nobody wanting to go there, but thought better of it.

    Itchen Bridge 2
    The Itchen Bridge, about a 5 minute walk from Oxford St. By me.
    Oxford Street, Southampton (license: See watermark)

    Nick would move in with his partner, and find a place not too far from Avenue road. We’d not really spend much time together, and our respective moves had left us quite far apart. That chapter would close for now. We’d both had over a year of fun and hedonism in the little house on Avenue road, but it now felt like we were rejoining civilization and being all grown-up, like.

    That August also brought a two-week holiday in Poland, which was utterly fantastic. I saw a lot of the country, swam in the Baltic, and camped in a tent for the first time in about 20 years. I liked Poland, against all my expectations, knowing nothing about it. Krakow is a beautiful city, like Prague but without the insane tourist numbers, and the mountains around Zakopane are breathtaking. They like their beer and food, too. I was startled to realise I’d been staying within a few miles of what used to be Auschwitz the entire time, but it’s just part of the history, and history is all over Silesia.

    Gubalowka, Zakopane.
    Zakopane, Tatra Mountains. By me.
    Wawel Castle, Krakow
    Wawel Castle, Krakow. By me.

    Work would give me a golden opportunity. They ran evening classes for Cisco System’s CCNA certification. This remains the single most useful knowledge I’ve acquired in my career. It’s golden, and it only cost me my time. Being able to do this was highly influential in informing my own attitudes to professional development. It was three hours every Tuesday, and was taught by a lovely bloke named Imran who worked in IT for the National Air Traffic Service (NATS). Instructing was his side gig. The knowledge continues to serve me to this day. If you work in IT you should take the CCNA. It’s unbelievable how handy it is.

    Solent had a pretty fast social life, and Brought a lot of new friends into my life. Andi worked in the office upstairs, and we became good friends over time. Through Andi I’d get to know his friend Jen, whip smart, very beautiful, slightly intimidating, and great fun – if you could keep up. Then there was Berenika, another lovely Polish girl who was absolutely on my wavelength, and an absolute blast. I always felt a bit guilty around Berenika, because I liked her so much. She could charm the dead, that girl. Tessa worked right next to Andi and started around the same time as me; she’s in virtually every photo I have from the nights out. You don’t realise how much you miss people until you think of these things. Everybody got on with Andi, he had that kind of character, and he would go on to do me a huge, huge favour much later on.

    I finally had something I could call a profession. I had come a long way. Maybe I could go a little further?

    Life comes at you fast, as the internet likes to say. In Autumn 2008, a position for a support analyst opened in the main computing office in Solent. In IT terms, this would put me behind the curtain. It would take me away from directly supporting users, which I liked a lot more than I’d ever admit, but it was necessary to learn more and start taking on more responsibility. I’d been in post about 18 months, I didn’t feel too bad about moving on from the business school, on the very shaky assumption this would go my way. I remember thinking I had an outside chance, but didn’t think I’d swing it. I knew everybody up there, maybe that would count for something?

    I applied, and to my surprise, got an interview. I recall being pretty stressed out about this, because I considered landing the job a bit of a stretch, but still definitely within reach. In hindsight, it really wasn’t a big deal, I just wasn’t familiar with doing well so quickly, after years of trundling through bumfuck go-nowhere jobs.

    Nick (another Nick, not my old housemate) would be on the interview panel. He was already technically my boss, but in this role I’d be a direct report. Also on the panel was Stephen, and John, who ran the whole show. I gave an okay account of myself, but very much kept my feet on the ground. The worst that could result would be staying in the business school, but I had a feeling I was tantalizingly close, and I remember It driving me a little mad.

    To my astounded delight, they offered me the job the next day. I was elated. It was an exciting position, and a good bump in pay. It might seem strange but I felt like after years of fucking about, I was finally doing something decent.

    I would lose my own office, and join the cramped but cheery computing office on the top floor of the library. I’d be an understudy to Neil (my de facto supervisor), and Nick would be in the corner diagonally across from me. James was the Mac specialist and was directly opposite. A team of techs would fill the rest of the floor. Veejay was the nearest to me, and I’d known him since he oriented me on my first day at SBS. My job was essentially image creation and application packaging for the configuration management infrastructure, which was looked after by Neil. It was a time of transition to Windows 7 (remember that?) which offered different methods and would have to all be learnt and tested. Neil would do most of this work during my first year, then it would be up to me for the full switch to Windows 10 and a new configuration management solution the following year.

    Before starting the new role I’d spend a week in Spain with my dad; the 2nd of that year, on top of yet another trip to Poland in Summer. I’d also go out to Poland again in December. I travelled so much those days, thanks to the liberal UK holiday allowance and increased means. It is something the US could definitely learn from.

    I’d also started journeying to Hertfordshire on the regular to see P, who by now was well established in his Pharma career. I’ve got many happy memories of evenings watching films in his flat, with the warm buzz after a few beers down the pub, then the subdued feeling at 3pm on a Sunday of having to get the train to London as the first leg of the journey home. It was a long 90 miles when you’re feeling a bit blue. I don’t know why, but I preferred to go to Herts rather than host him in Southampton. I put it down to a slight feeling neither of us really cared for the place that much. We had spent a lot of time there, after all. There was nothing new to be experienced.

  • LOST Is back, I have some feelings

    Netflix, in their absolute unquestionable wisdom, have bought LOST. This is the show that is now regarded as the ‘Golden Age of Television’ in some circles. It’s not, that title will forever be owned by The WIre, and I am sorry, I will not be taking notes. LOST was the defining show of network TV, in much the same way Climie Fisher were the defining band of the 1980s.

    So of course, I watched the fucking pilot, for the first time since the absolute crushing disappointment that was the original broadcast run of the show. LOST was a glorious mess, a one-trick pony the likes of which we will never see again, because you can only pull this shit once, and everybody sees how it is done. It killed Westworld, for a recent example. “This show feels a bit like LOST“, I remember thinking, shortly before it died early, before really doing, well, anything.

    Mystery boxes – a perennial theme for showrunner Damon Lindelof, who got so badly broken by LOST he ragequit Twitter because people had the audacity to suggest his handling of the show was, like, shit, have a very short shelf-life. You can’t keep doing it. It’s boring, and it is not a substitute for solid storytelling. They were spinning plates, and they knew it, and by Season three, the audience knew it, too. Sky TV’s promo posters for Season 3, and I remember them very well, used to say “answers are coming”. It was an admission that the show set itself up for failure and had no hope for a resolution. We wanted to believe that they “knew what they were doing”. They didn’t.

    Ironically, LOST had fucking spades of great stories. It remains one of the greatest character-driven shows ever made. On form, the show was magic, but the writers never nailed the big picture. I remember in Season 2 with ‘The Hatch’ and the endless exposition the uneasy feeling the audience was collectively having its pisser pulled.

    Now the zoomers have got hold of it, and are fully embracing it in their weird little fanatical way. I wonder if they too will feel that burn of disappointment as the show goes on. Much is made of the ending. It’s okay, it’s just the show goes stale long before the finale.

  • 45 pt. 2

    Eyes

    By March my vision had continued to deteriorate to the extent I was becoming quite afraid. I made an emergency appointment to try and figure out what the hell was going on. I got a visit with an ophthalmologist that just happened to be a retinal specialist. She is French, had only been in the country a few months, as luck would have it, she was absolutely brilliant.

    Generally speaking, nost of the senior female medical professionals seemed better listeners, and thus far I wasn’t convinced I was being heard. My wife describes this as a ‘specialist trap’, in other words if a doctor can’t diagnose a problem, they become indecisive and fail to advocate for the patient. You must see the right people. The right doctor at the right time makes all the difference. In the US system in particular, you must learn to stamp your feet. It’s very hard for me, as I am a classic British never-complain type, but when you’re really sick, that attitude can kill you.

    This particular specialist took complete ownership of everything, and the more difficult the case got, the more interested she was.

    I had some images taken of the eye, and she immediately identified inflammation of the nerve bundle behind the retina. This is generally known as posteriour uveitis, and it’s potentially very serious.

    I had to undertake a lot of tests, includng tuberculosis and syphilis,(symptomatically similar) which amused me (yes it came back negative, you shits).

    I ended up being prescribed an oral steroid (prednisone) in a shock dose, tapering off as time went on.

    Steroids do odd things, it felt to me like I was highly caffeinated; I couldn’t sleep, put on a load of weight (yay!) but avoided going crazy -Apparently some people don’t respond well to them.

    My vision stabilised, you wouldn’t call it good but at least it wasn’t getting worse. Uveitis is idiopathic in about half of the cases. In simple terms, it it not known what causes it. At this point it was purely hypothetical that my vision problems were linked to whatever was growing under my arm, immunology is complicated and requires highly specialised domain knowledge, there isn’t a magical test for it. The test is basically ruling out everything else.

    Tumour won’t wait

    The mass under my arm was no longer leaking, had fully re-accumulated, and was now starting to press on surrounding tissue, which caused pain. Around 1am on the 3rd of Aoril, I realised I could no longer sleep. Heat, painkillers and and ice-packs did nothing. I remember sitting on the bed in front of the wardrobe mirror thinking that I have to do something.

    My wife had a continuing concern that it might burst, which could be life-threatening. My plan was to go to the ER, perhaps they could drain it, or at least get me some pain relief.

    The emergency room reception wasn’t busy, a TV played one of house-hunting shows where a couple have an incredible budget. It was set in Fareham, just a few miles from my previous home, which made me laugh at least. I got triaged quickly. The feeling of the nurses – rarely hesitant to give an opinion – was that this thing needed to be out. No shit. A young doctor told me she couldn’t do anything invasive as if it was potentially malignant as that could be harmful. so, no drain. In the meantime she saw me wincing with pain and suggested an analgesic. I got a long lecture about opioids “You’ve seen the news, right?” And then they injected something with a long name into my IV

    It felt a bit like the drop off the lift-hill on a rollercoaster, I actually held on to the sides of the bed, I felt a kick of nausea, thought I might throw up, then it passed. I was now, to use the medical term, as high as fuck.

    The doctor got on the phone to the surgeon (I think it was 3am) and got it done – I would be operated on the next day. My bed was moved to a remote end of the ER and I entertained myself sending Beavis and Butthead gifs to my sister.

    Beavis_Butthead

    I don’t really know why, when you’re stoned everything is funny. It had to bag up my clothes and belongings and put on a gown.

    .

    Dark, dreamless sleep

    I got visited by the anaesthetist, who explained that I would be asleep through it all, and a reflexologist, as the surgeon was concerned my nerves were getting damaged by the tumour, but this was luckily not the case.

    My abiding memory of ‘serious hospital stuff’ is the flourescent lighting scrolling overhead as you are moved on a stretcher,that and the smell of alcohol swabs and the chirp of ringing telephones. The operating room actually resembles a hotel kitchen, lots of stainless steel, aluminium, and dark tiling. Only the huge overhead lights set it apart, and large pieces of equioment that go ‘beep’. I had to move laterally onto the OR bed and had my inflatable stockings switched on, which feel a bit like a python constricting around your shins. That’s all I remember

    Waking up from a general anaesthetic is abrupt, it sounds like people are shouting.You wake up with a start, It’s such a deep sleep. I wasn’t aware of any pain, but my armpit felt like it was completely gone, which was weird but also a relief. My treat was a cup of crushed ice. I hadn’t eaten in about 17hrs.

    I spent a night in the hospital in a very pleasant room, and stood up for the first time in hours. I had a drain fitted, which is a plastic line from the surgical wound terminating in a rubber bulb.

    surgiclvwound
    Wound and drain line

    This fucking thing would be the bane of my existence for a week. A fwwnurse ran in and told me if I needed to urinate it had to be into a plastic flask about the capacity of a litre. I filled that fucker to the brim, handed it to her and said “enjoy”. She didn’t even smile- heard it all before, I expect.

    The surgeon visited and instructed me to monitor the drain, as he did not want it in there any longer than necessary, as it’s an infection hazard. He also explained the surgery was a success apart from having to leave some tissue which had tied itself around a vein. This would cause almost 5months of discussion as nobody seemed to think anything should remain in there, given how fast the tumour developed, but that story will have to wait.

    At home, I had to learn to live with the drain, which was a great annoyance as the slightest pull on the tube was sharply painful. I had to sleep on my back (which I never do) so it was a tough few nights. On the very day I had just got used to it, I made the appointment to have it taken out.

    It would be many weeks, and several labs before the tumour’s classification was known. In the meantime my oncologist wanted to discuss options. At that time it was possibly some radiation therapy along with some chemo. Great.

    Black May

    I had so many appointments in May I lost count. I’d had my drain and stitches out, my oncologist informed me that the mass was classifed as a ‘metastatic melanoma of unknown primary’ in other words, skin cancer, but no skin lesion would ever be found. This supposedly true in 10% of cases. I had the feeling the onvologist was not that convinced, but genetic markers gave him treatment options. I would be put on immunotherapy, which had the reputation for miraculous results.

    I would require immunotherapy every three weeks for a year. I watched an educational video about chemo, and I mostly learnt to be grateful I wasn’t having chemo. The treatment building is a squat, brutalist structure near the mall. It struck me that nearly all of the people there looked very worse for wear. I asked the nurse if they looked like me when they walked in, but I don’t think she saw the funny side. </p

    To be continued