Five Miles Out

I Just Can’t Believe It’s True

I Just Can’t Believe It’s True

My first school was Icknield Walk. Named after the Roman road that ran through Royston. It was run incredibly strictly by Miss Bull, who had been headmistress since it opened. I actually found it idyllic, of course I did not realise that at the time.

I spent four years there. Royston had a three tier education system – Primary (5-9 years oldf), Middle (9-13 years old) and Upper (13-18 years old). Icknield Walk was split into infants and juniors. Infants got a morning and afternoon break, juniors only got a morning break. There was also a class that would now be called an SEN unit – then it was referred to as a remedial class. The fields included climbing frames (with a rota for which class was allowed to use it) and wooden log built forts. Even though the school was only 4 years old there were already two temporary classrooms.

The school did not have a swimming pool, but the Parent Teacher Association decided to fund raise and build one. I mean they actually built it – there were Saturday mornings I went there as Dad (and other parents built it). It was about 20m by 5m – built above ground. It may not seem as great now as we thought it was then. I learnt to swim in that pool and got certificates for 5m, 10m and 20m, bot that I was ever a great swimmer. A lot of children in Royston learnt to swim because of that community commitment.

There was a definite evolution over the four years, at the start girls and boys were in joint friendship groups. By the end of it there was little crossover between the two. In my second year we had Mrs Botfield as a teacher (her husband taught the oldest children – in school they still had to call each other Mr or Mrs Botfield). Every week we would have another teacher for one lesson in the afternoon who tell us a Bible story and then we would draw a picture from the story and write a summary. My Grandad had taught me that the sky should be coloured down to the ground, not just a strip across the top of the picture. My best friend, Nadia, and I used this to make sure we never had to do any writing, colouring took ages, as well as having the most intricate clouds.

It was odd that in 1973 we went on a holiday to Pevensey and the Botfields were there with their children Graham and Susan (Susan was a year older than me, Graham another couple of years older than that). Graham was not happy with me. The Botfields had been at our house and were not happy that Graham was at middle school and could not name the continents. I was asked to name them. Despite being six I got three out of five (not a mistake, the number has been redesignated to seven since then by adding Antarctica and splitting the Americas), I got Europe, America and Africa and. I missed Australasia and Asia. This was used as a stick to beat Graham with. On the holiday he wanted to extract revenge, but Susan and I got on well and she protected me.

(Mum, me, Susan, Mike and Graham at the camp site).

(Mum, me , Nanna and Mike at Herstmonceux)

In the third year we had Mrs Pickett as a teacher. My Mum came in to help some classes, I was still young enough for this not to be a major embarrassment. I hated the fact that we had to learn to knit. I was so bad at it Mum had to constantly undo what I had done and redo it for me. Years later my friend Simon Annis and I camped at Mrs Pickett’s farm to get a scout badge. It was huge and had lots of horses. We had to muck out the stables as payment.

By far the most interesting teacher was Mrs Cranwell. She came is as a floating cover teacher. She was a real country lady and made the most amazing corn dollies. Her lessons were all about local history from Roman times. She lived on for a long time, if I had known I would have visited her. She was always heavily involved in the school’s Mayday events which included a maypole dancing (I was never selected).

(Mrs Cranwell about35 years after I left Icknield Walk and a corn dolly)

I was almost always picked for class assemblies. Every term each class had to put on a play. Acting talent was not a criteria – the ability to learn lines was. I had a major role in 11 out of 12 of them (for the last one they gave the children who had never headlined a chance, much to my chagrin). Luckily there are no photos of me dressed as Mr Mouse in my first play. At least I hope not.

My best friend in the last couple of years there was Diane Burgess. We sat together in class and we both read a lot. At middle school it was not the same as cross gender friendship groups were totally out. She dated Steve Mallen in upper school. After I moved to Brightlingsea I heard that she had become involved in drugs, but never found out what happened to her. Love to know if anyone reads this. One of our assemblies featured this song.

Sugar Sugar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9nE2spOw_o

My Music is Dynamite

This is one of the tracks which totally destroys my musical credibility, but one of the benefits of age is realising you should do what you enjoy, not what you think is cool.

Cliff Richard was not always a religious nut, born again virgin. Originally, he was a British rock and roller, his only problem is that he actually came from an older tradition. Tin Pan Alley. This really refers to the USA, but it means where songwriters produce material for singers to use, rather than the more credible way bands write their own material.

Cliff started out in an era when this was normal, but unlike other artists never transitioned to producing his own material. Like a lot of those early artists, like Tommy Steele and Adam Faith, it was assumed that a music career in the charts would be short and he would need to transition to variety and films.

Films like Summer Holiday and The Young Ones were a staple of children’s television in the school holidays during the 1970s. Summer Holiday was pretty exotic for children who had little chance of holidaying abroad.

School holiday television was a weird mix. Laurel and Hardy shorts, foreign TV series dubbed into English (like Robinson Crusoe, White Horses or the Flashing Blade), foreign cartoons (TinTin) and Why Don’t You? Actually Why Don’t You Switch Off Your TV Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead? The name kind of defeats itself (though it produced the exceptional talent of Russell T Davies). All very well in the summer, but on cold wet days in the autumn and winter entertainment was in short supply. All of it was incredibly cheap, even if you added in showing the Royal Institution lectures, (which I loved but were definitely not to most people’s tastes).

What this weird diet (of endlessly repeated) material was create a common language of cultural experience. All of us knew about silent comedies and black and white films; we were aware of dubbed foreign TV – though I was mortified to find out that White Horses had been filmed in 1965, thus the beautiful lead actress – Helga Anders – was actually 18 years older than me. She came to sad, premature end in 1986 at the age of 38. I had the same reaction to Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park.

The difference is now that there is no common language as TV is available on demand. I am not going to go into old man mode and complain about young people using phones or computers, but it is a shame that the algorithms give you more of what you already like rather than your tastes being stretched.

Cliff Richard had a renaissance in the late 70s with Miss You Nights and Devil Woman. I have a serious weak spot for this song from 1981. The video is hilarious – Cliff is obviously barely competent on roller skates and all the dancers move around him trying to create the illusion that he is doing more than rolling along scared out of his mind. He is wearing a very early Sony Walkman. He was 40 when this came out, which seemed so old at the time. He released one more great song with Phil Everly – She Means Nothing To Me, before descending into a world of Christmas songs and religious material that you could give Granny for a present.

Wired For Sound

With Total Dedication

A lot of my friends will get a dedicated entry about things we have done together and what they have meant to me in life. It is kind of embarrassing, but it is the truth.

When we went on holiday in 1991 Dave Francis led the way. He had been abroad more than the rest of us and knew a lot more about it than anyone apart from Neil. Neil does not organise holidays. He goes on them, but does not organise them. Even now Dave is our leader. Kos 1991 was complicated – booking leave from work had lots of rules for different people in different organisations. Neil could only get two weeks going from weekend to weekend – so no midweek flights. Dave did the work to find out which destinations were possible and recommend where we should go.

Our flight our was delayed by a malfunctioning toilet. After waiting for a couple of hours it flew with one toilet closed. You jump two hours forwards going to the Greek islands, so it was evening by the time we landed. It was my first experience of the Mediterranean and I thought it was bloody hot. We got the tour operator bus to Kos Town and it was dark by the time we got there. It was 8.30pm local time (though only 6.30pm UK time). I assumed that we would unpack, get some food and have an early night to be up and about early.

We were in two apartments – Dave and Andy on the second floor, John, Neil and me on the first. The hotel was over a grocers. Two minutes after we got in Dave dropped off some wine and told us it was 15 minutes and then we were going out. I was under no impression that out only meant a quiet meal….

(Me, Dave, Neil, Andy and John, Captain Louis’s Taverna, Kos Town 1991).

About seven hours later Neil and I drunkenly found our way back to our apartment and could not open the door. We were formulating a mad plan to scale the balcony from outside when John arrived to show us you had to turn the key 720 degrees. Andy and Dave had been left dancing topless on a bar in the centre of town.

One night in the holiday Dave, Andy and John went to the Kalua club that I skipped (at 2am) as we were taking out motorbikes. Kalua was dull but it did have a swimming pool where Andy went swimming. Not some small pool but a proper large swimming pool.

When they got out Andy realised that he had lost Dave and his apartment key in the pool. They decided to go back to the apartment to get the snorkling gear. Their bathroom had a window that opened onto a vertical shaft that ran up the centre of the building (at least their bathroom had a window, ours did not). It was only just over a metre across, but someone would have to climb across. As Andy had lost the key he had to do it – ending up in the toilet. His first idea was to abandon the key and unlock the door from inside – until he realised it was the type of door that needed a key whichever side you were on.

Andy climbed back out and they all walked the 20 minutes back to Kalua, stopping only to blag free entry passes from one of the kamackis still outside Club 69. Dave donned the snorkel and goggles and combed the pool. He found it – Dave had been an international class swimmer until illness cut short his career. They danced a bit in wet clothes until the bouncers threw them out.

Dave has a “what the fuck” attitude and tries things whereas I am cautious. I have tried to learn from him to be less worried and more ambitious. At the end of the holiday Andy told me that he thought that I was going to be a “boring bastard, but I wasn’t.” For me that was a complement. I changed in those two weeks watching how Dave lived.

The man has been my bridge partner for 37 years and I we have been great together. He is also the best punter I have ever seen – Cambridge resident or outsider. If you have a problem he is the man who is there for you.

(John, Dave, Neil and at me at the Acropolis, Falaraki 2018)

I am very lucky to have a man as good as this in my life and to be able to call him my friend. This song was huge when we were out there.

(I Wanna) Give You Devotion

Earth below us, drifting falling

This is a track I heard in the 80s. Some of the people from Meridian School went on a German exchange in 1983 and one time I visited Graham had a party where some of the German singles they had got were played.

I remembered it again when it was used as the theme for Deutschland 83. One of the best things (in entertainment terms) of the last dozen or so years has been the increased availability of foreign language TV series. Subtitles, rather than dubbed – people who dub shows have a special circle of hell reserved for them.

For people of my age Deutschland 83 is a flashback to our childhoods. For younger people it probably looks like a trip to an alternative world. Its depiction of the split East and West Germany at one of the peaks of the Cold War (probably only the Cuban Missile Crisis was a worse point) is chilling. These days living through the Cold War is displayed by a certain sort of person on Facebook – the kind of people who would like to say they coped with the Second World War, but were born afterwards – as a badge of honour. They particularly like to say how easy young people (inevitably described as the pejorative “Snowflakes” – but if you question their views they are the most sensitive people ever) have it not having to endure it. Sure, the post-Cold War world of America stirring up terrorist action against the West by their imperialist interventions is not a problem. Of course, a lot of them do not believe in climate change, so the doomsday level threat from that passes them by.

Make no mistake, everyone was aware of the threat of nuclear destruction in 1983. The BBC TV series Threads, showing the effect of a nuclear attack on Sheffield, is still genuinely terrifying. It was almost a given that it would happen in speculative fiction – Alan Moore’s classic comic series V For Vendetta starts from the premise that there is a nuclear action that causes fascism to take over (he was wrong there – fascism just takes stupid white people to take over).

I am not saying that this fear was a good thing, nor was The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe being dictatorships was a good thing, but… Apart from the threat of nuclear Armageddon the world was a stable place, in particular Europe had stability. If you look at maps of Europe throughout history borders shift, countries appear and disappear, then you have the period 1945 to 1990 where it is frozen. After that Yugoslavia fractures into seven countries, several of which waged genocidal wars against each other. The lack of Western intervention in these conflicts is measured against what happened with Iraq in the 90s and Afghanistan in the 80s and gives an impression of rampant hypocrisy on interventions involving Muslims. The split of the Soviet Union is still causing tension in Georgia and the Crimea. Vladimir Putin still has not got over the split of the USSR and Russia’s geopolitical aims for the last 20 years have been about regaining power and hurting the West.

Before anyone thinks I have rose coloured glasses on for this period let’s talk about proxy wars. The USA and the USSR and/or China used other countries as battlefields for the capitalism versus communism battle. Some of these are famous like the Korean Police Action (never declared a war, not actually concluded – there is something we still live with), others were less overt action, such as the attempts to arm and influence India and Pakistan.

In the West, when proxy war details are reported, they focus on Western casualties. The end of JFK reverses this when it lists the American deaths in Vietnam (under 100,000) after the two million Vietnamese casualties (boomers love to give living through the Vietnam War as a badge of honour, unless you were Vietnamese it was not tough). Is it any wonder that countries across the world do not like the USA? Some Americans see themselves as a global policeman, the world largely sees them as a global vigilante.

The most striking example is Afghanistan and the Middle East. In the 1980s the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (the reason the USA, and others, boycotted the 1980 Olympics) so the USA funnelled support to the insurgent Mujahedeen. Any enemy of the Soviet Union was a friend of the USA. The comedy series Black Monday has a wonderful scene where Don Cheadle is giving the Mujahedeen money, only to be told they were rebranding themselves at the Taliban. The Mujahedeen included Osama Bin-Laden, who used many of the donated weapons to fight American forces 20 years later.

You could argue that the USA decision to free Kuwait was a moral choice (though initially dubbing it Operation Crusader was stunningly dumb). However, Baby Bush’s decision to invade Iraq 12 years later had nothing to do with 9/11 or freedom. It was to get US hands on oilfields and allow private American business in – the Vice President was ex-Haliburton. Haliburton got phenomenal amounts of money from operating after the invasion.

The more I think about it, the more the USA appears to have been the most destabilising force in the world over the last 70 years – and that is before considering the impact of the arrival of the Orange Goblin. Russia is doing its best to catch up though with Chechnya, Crimea and interference in the West. A few years ago, I would have said at least nuclear Armageddon is off the table and humanity was maturing– but trust humanity to find other ways to mess things up.

Major Tom (Coming Home)

Spend Your Lives in Sin and Misery

This is another song I discovered watching The Rock and Roll Years with Dad. It tells the story of a bordello in New Orleans.

You have to be careful when you sing a long to a song of you are not really sure what it says. At NewVIc one of my team was Linda Daniels. A committed Jehovah’s Witness. In the holidays we played music in the office and one universally like CD was Young, Gifted and Black, a compilation of reggae from the early 60s to the 80s. Linda frequently sang along. it was only when we listened to Wet Dream we realised she was singing “lie down, stick it up” and was referring to sex with a sleeping woman. She was mortified.

We also played XXX Hip Hop, a compilation of extremely risqué Rap tracks. One of them was Put It In Your Mouth. Linda realised that she needed to listen better when she caught herself walking down the street singing that. XXX Hip Hop had to be placed on the no play list.

Linda liked to proselytise – Witnesses have to do it. One thing that always annoys me is that every religion feels free to proselytise but if you want to tell people you are an atheist and explain why somehow this is considered insensitive. Even further if you say you are an atheist they try to tell you that you mean agnostic. Apart from the insensitivity of telling someone what they think, it shows a sad default in a lot of people and something I have seen most in Christians (of many stripes).

I spent a lot of time trying to explain why atheism is logical. The problem with many religious people is they start from a default position that God exists and expect you to disprove it. My first argument rested on the fact that the default is that you have to prove God exists – Christians are very fond of saying that not believing in God requires as much faith as believing in God. Now whether I had a subconscious memory of this or happened to make up a famous thought experiment that others had also conceived I do not know. If I state that you have an invisible and intangible monkey on your shoulder and you say not which has to prove their statement?

My second argument was that if God is all powerful then we do not have free will. If that is the case our behaviour, good or evil, is pre-programmed and sending evil people to hell for what God made them do is wrong. If there is free will then God is not all powerful. It has to be one or the other.

What is the difference between a religion and a cult? About 1500 to 5000 years. Scientology and Abrahamic religions make as much sense as each other really, it is just that Scientology was conceived when people had more knowledge of the world. Let’s not get into how much editing the Bible has and how many gospels are excluded because they do not fit (and read the ones that are in there – they do not agree with each other either). What is celebrated at Christmas is a hotch-potch of elements – the biggest being a pagan solstice.

Linda could not answer either, but she would never claim to be religious scholar – in the Witnesses only men could be elders. Linda and I got on well despite these debates and the groans from the other team members when we debated this actually bonded us.

I am a big admirer of Richard Dawkins. When children are young you tell them stories about the world so they can understand it. When they are older they have the truth. In its youth humanity needed myths to understand the world. If we are to grow up it is time for rationality with the human race. There is no need for any deity in the universe.

I respect the right of everyone to their religious beliefs. Hell – I’ll defend your right to believe. I know many people find them comforting. I do object to religious organisations being funded by tax exemptions and trying to get everyone to follow their beliefs – cf The Handmaid’s Tale. You are better off in that New Orleans bordello😊

House of the Rising Sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fy7opKu46c

You’re Going To Choke On It Too

It was really hard to pick my favourite Who track – it was this or Pictures of Lily. Pictures of Lily would have made for a very different entry.

The biggest fan of The Who I have ever known was Darrin Keeble at school. Darrin made me look wild and badly behaved so was not really the influence someone as buttoned up as me needed in life. Darrin was very big on scouting, which our family had been in Royston, though less so when we moved to Brightlingsea.

I avoided the cub scouts, but I was a scout. Anne was a guider; Frances and Alison were in Brownies and Guides. I went on three scout summer camps, which all deserve an entry of their own. There are plenty of other things about the scouts that I remember.

We had meetings once a week in a large building with all the equipment stored. The end of an evening tying knots or learning First Aid would be a game. British Bulldogs was the favourite – one person in the middle tries to lift others off the ground as they run across and then they have to be in the middle too, this could get quite violent. The most amazing was whackems. All the scouts stood in a circle, bent over, one gave your bum a whack with a slipper and you would run round the circle after them to get the slipper so you could do it to someone else. These days this “game” would, rightly, be banned. Even in 1979 we thought that it was strange.

The stores were run by George Folly, he must have been in his sixties and believed that the old equipment would just keep going. This meant that when we went out on more local trips we had to carry equipment that was ten times heavier than the modern equivalent.

One particularly awful trip was a patrol camping trip using a trek cart. A trek cart is just a cart but is pulled by two people where the horses would be and another two pull ropes at the front. The bright idea was to go on a patrol expedition in the February half term for two nights. The several mile journey was gruelling – the cart was heavy and the oldest of us was only 15. On the way Mike Meitener – long time bully of mine, who had ended up in the same patrol as me – stole milk off doorsteps and shoplifted sweets.

The camp was freezing hell. It was dark by mid-afternoon and we cooked on a fire. There was nothing to do apart from shelter in the relative warmth of the tent. We had a toilet tent about 20 yards away, a hole in the ground. The local teenagers would demolish it every night. On the second night it snowed and we had to get back the next morning. By the time I got home –a further mile from the scout HQ carrying all my kit through town, attracting some weird looks, I was exhausted, frozen and probably stank.

I missed out on a patrol leader’s camp one weekend. Just before we went to leave I tried to break the record for jumping downstairs at the scout HQ. The record was nine steps, so I launched myself from the tenth. There was a reason for the record – jumping from there meant you cracked your head on a concrete overhang. I hit and then fell down ten concrete stairs. Landing with blood pouring from my skull I had to be taken to hospital to have it stitched up. On the bright side I got to spend the weekend at home. The scar remains on my forehead to this day.

I was not cut out for the scouts. Darrin is still involved in it, hopefully with less violence and accidents.

I Can See For Miles

I Lie Like a Lounge Room Lizard

It must be hard for anyone under the age of 30 to imagine a world without computers being everywhere. Under twenty and the idea of a world without smartphones must seem staggering.

In 1979 Doctor Who Weekly comic was launched and confidently predicted that there would be 6 computers in the UK by the 21^st century and we would all move around by jetpack. Maybe in some alternate reality. Our school had one BBC Micro and the people who used were definitely regarded as geeky. St Catherines had one computer in the basement for students to use. You had to make damn sure you planned an essay properly as messing it up meant a complete rewrite (on the other hand word limits could be fooled by lightly writing fake word counts in pencil, supervisors would assume they could see your count and happily accept you had reached the desired total – no way to do that now).

Grant Thornton had two laptops running DOS (Disk Operating System – how computers worked before Windows). They did not have mice – Bill Gates had not ripped off Apple yet. To run a program you typed the name and it launched. They were there to operate Grant Thornton’s Audit software package (called CBEAM). It was totally useless. Either the Ipswich office operated differently to any other office or the people who designed it had never audited anything. There were targets for using it as it was supposed to be so efficient, so we would do audits on paper then enter all the data on CBEAM at the end – just so the managers could say they were meeting targets.

When I started at Grant Thornton we had three audit managers – Steve Law (the one who interviewed me), Mike Holland and Colin Scott. Colin reminded me of a 1980s Steve Davis, his interpersonal skills were not great, either with staff or clients – how he got promoted to a position with people skills mattered so much was a mystery to all of us. After a year or so he was side-lined to be our office computing specialist. Mike Holland was far and away the best – so of course he left after ten months.

(Colin Scott)

Colin did teach me how to use spreadsheets. We prepared an integrated Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow for a company that was seeking venture capital. Just one sheet in those days, no workbooks until excel version 4. You had to use all of the spreadsheet for the work, not just the top left as we do now. This was how I learnt spreadsheets – it was nearly 30 years before I had any formal excel training to get higher skills – the rest I learnt on the job.

Colin did have one client – Raptors. A computer programming company, when this was a rarity. I did their first audit with Dodds Pringle – a white South African who regretted choosing the UK over the USA and thought Thatcher was a bit of a left winger. They were based in an office complex at the edge of Ipswich in a business park and it was like a battery farm of spotty teenagers writing code.

A year later I was in charge of the audit (by being good at spreadsheets I was deemed the person best placed to talk to programmers!) and they had relocated to Mendlesham Hall in the country, fairly close to Stowmarket. The owner had persuaded his wife that they should buy a huge country house and live in half and have the business in half. The experiment had not worked – even though he had spent a fortune converting the house and the economics only worked if the business and the family were both there. It was a lovely place to work and I was very friendly with the administrator and some of the sales team. We would eat lunch outside on the lawns together that summer.

I saw them one last time a few months later – the family had moved out and the mortgage was destroying the business. It went into receivership the day after I saw them. The administrator knew what was happening and had paid to have her salary check speed cleared by the bank, everyone else had their salary cheques bounce.

Grant Thornton never got more laptops in my time there. The cost of them came straight out of the partners’ pockets and they could not see the need. I am sure some partners get there due to talent but the ones in Ipswich were there because they could not cut it elsewhere or they were the biggest suck ups (with the exception of Andrew Strickland). The lack of IT was an even bigger shock when I started at NewVIc and everyone had a computer, yet we are always told the private sector knows better…

Colin left Grant Thornton a few years after me and set up his own computer consultancy. He even became President of the East Anglian chartered accountants group – either his people skills got better or he was in charge of the computer voting.

Weather With You

Sunshine in San Francisco

Why do you support your favourite team? Not national teams where allegiance is sort of a given (though I have known a number of people who support Brazil despite not being Brazilian or even having been there).

I support Essex Cricket County Cricket Club, but that was the nearest county club. Michael supports Ipswich because they were the nearest top-level football club to where we lived. Then there are the people who pick the best team to support – a lot of Manchester United fans fall into this category (please note that I have loathed Manchester United since I was less than ten years old so they are fair game all the time). Some people will be indoctrinated by a parent – my niece Cerys never had an opportunity to support anyone apart from Ipswich Town.

Then there are the sports that you discover as an adult. In the 1980s foreign sports started making inroads into the UK and the advent of Sky sports in the 90s only speeded this up. My big discovery was American Football. There was a weekly highlight show on Channel 4 that Dad and I would watch. I like American Football because it such as an intelligent game. Yes, it is staccato, but the thought that goes into all the plays – both on the offensive and defensive sides = is staggering. Players are assumed to be dumb, but they have to learn hundreds of plays and systems.

We had to educate ourselves on how the game worked and what all the positions were. Now there are loads of explanations on TV, as well as the internet. There was a distinct lack of magazines or books about it until the 90s.

I supported the San Francisco 49ers. Red and gold are great colours. San Francisco was famous as the centre of the 1960s hippie movement and is mentioned in lots of songs from that period and I like that music. In reality what I liked was the West Coast Offence that the 49ers ran was a thing of amazing beauty.

In American Football the traditional idea was to run the ball to set up the passing game. Runs tend to be short and passes were longer down field. Bill Walsh, coach of the 49ers, changed this, making passes shorter, done really quickly. This was used to set up the run and then longer passes. It meant that passes had to be so precise, metronomic.

American Football changes its rules almost every year. Some are necessary to make it safer – the jokes about rugby being a man’s game because there is no padding ignore the terrible injury rates from the Gridiron. Others are to make the game more “exciting” – this is mainly to make it easier to pass the ball and make defending the pass harder. This makes statistics for passers and receivers more and more impressive. It is no coincidence that the two quarterbacks with the most passing yards are still playing the game (Drew Brees and Tom Brady).

I saw a quiz asking who these famous American sporting Joes are/ were?

Joltin’ Joe, Smoking Joe, Broadway Joe and Comeback Joe?

Comeback Joe is Joe Montana. So called because he had the most number of times takimh a team from behind at the start of the fourth quarter to victory. Add in John Taylor at Wide Receiver, Roger Craig at half back, Charles Haley, Tom Rathman, Dwight Clark and other talented players. In particular, Jerry Rice at Wide Receiver – maybe the best ever to play the game at any position and Ronnie Lott at Free Safety, both still widely acknowledged to be the best ever in their positions. Montana has slipped back, though was still recently rated in the top six quarterbacks ever. If he played now with Taylor and Rice he would be streets ahead of Brady and Brees.

This was one of his earlier comeback victories – the Dallas Cowboys were the mightiest team in America and the 49ers were 6 points down in the last minute. It is still The Catch (capitals) as Dwight Clark and Montana take the 49ers to the Superbowl and start the dynasty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plt2ow0A0-Y

(Jerry Rice)

(Ronnie Lott – GOAT)

The 49ers had won Superbowls 16 and 19, but as soon as I started supporting them they did not get to the Superbowl. Finally, they made Superbowl 23 and I took the Monday off work so I could watch it on Sunday night. It was the slowest first half ever, ending three nil (and included a terrible injury where a man’s leg broke and was flapping). With the game nearing the end the 49ers were 16-13 behind against the Bengals. Then Montana did this:

Jerry Rice had over 200 yards in the game despite being injured. I had tears in my eyes as John Taylor caught that pass in the end zone. In any other team he would have been a superstar, but playing next to Jerry Rice only 49er fans seem to remember him. That is why it’s The Catch II.

The next year they played the Broncos in Superbowl 24. This was not close – it was the most one sided Superbowl victory ever.

No team has ever threepeated the Superbowl and the next year the 49ers were unbeaten and they met the New York Giants in week 13. The 49ers won 7-3, following a goal line standard holding the Giants out (it was so momentous that it is referred to as The Stand). The teams met again at Candlestick Park in the championship game (the one before the Superbowl). Montana was injured and went off and the Giants won 15-13 with a field goal as time expired. No threepeat.

The 49ers won Superbowl 29, but Steve Young was at quarterback by then. They have lost two in recent times, one with Colin Kaepernick (of taking the knee fame) at quarterback, but there were long barren years in the 90s and 00s.

Kaepernick was treated appallingly for this. He left the 49ers and could not get another a quarterback role despite everyone acknowledging he was one of the top twenty in the USA (and 32 teams need 96 Quarterbacks on role). Eventually the NFL settled with him for millions of dollars.

I was lucky enough to have a Montana number 16 shirt with my name on – courtesy of my sister Alison who went there on a world tour.

The West Coast Offence is amazing to watch – it is truly beautiful. Lott, Rice and Montana are some of the greatest sportspeople ever.

The other Joes? Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio (baseball), Smoking Joe Frazier (boxing) and Broadway Joe Namath (quarterbacked the New York Jets to Superbowl 3 against the odds).

This is one of those hippie songs that I love about the city that hosts a team that I love, despite never having been there.

Let’s Go To San Francisco

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSW_hD-nR5g

Then you know I can’t remember a damn thing

Insolvency work was depressing but at the same time could be interesting in a professional way. In August 1991 Grant Thornton were appointed to investigate the viability of a group of companies called Coverclose, based in Leiston. They had a rental company, an office drawing and equipment manufacturing company and a number of shops (kind of like Staples but for architects) across East Anglia – each shop was part owned by the group and part owned by other investors.

When we investigated businesses, we had to work out what we though the recoveries would be on the basis of the business being sold and on a forced sale basis. There were eight companies here, plus there was the complication that they all owed each other money that was not secured. There was a question, because of the shared ownership of some subsidiaries, of whether it should be treated as one entity or not. This meant I had to do 32 separate statements of the financial position.

I was actually given one of our rare laptops with Lotus 123 (what Microsoft ripped off to make Excel). This was before Windows – you typed Word or Lotus at a DOS prompt to run the programs.

We were working in a warehouse and I spent most of a week on a high stool with the laptop on a crate working on this. It was not helped by my failure to save the files one day when I was debugging the statements and losing a whole day’s work when the plug came out (no autosave in those days). That taught me a lesson – luckily as I could remember where most of the bugs were, I managed to get back to the same position by working all evening. I got a reputation for being good at this kind of thing, which meant I was increasingly used on insolvency jobs, just as far away as possible from ethical conflicts.

What it did do was cause a massive spasm in my back from working in such a stupid position. The private sector did not give two figs about health and safety – complaints to management were totally ignored and a negative mark on pay rise prospects.

The following Monday I got tablets from the Doctor and told not to mix them with alcohol. The last tablets went in on Friday morning. This was the day before my 25^th birthday and as my back was mostly better I figured that it would be ok to drink that night – there was no moderation. There was a limbo competition at the Swan that night – I was not doing that – where Andy had a really good go despite wearing boots.

The next morning I felt truly disgusting, one of the worst hangovers of my life. It was the day of my birthday and I lay in bed with the curtains closed until 4pm. A barbecue and party had been arranged for the afternoon and evening and I finally emerged swearing never to drink again (I have lost count of how many times I promised that).

This was probably the least successful attempt at giving up alcohol ever. By the time I was throwing up at 1am, with John Bonney making sure I did not choke to death, I had drunk 8 cans of Fosters, a number of vodka sprite slammers (and taught people how to do them) and flaming cointreaus, both of which we had learnt on holiday.

(In a glass put vodka and top with sprite, cover with your hand and slam it down on a table – drink the cloud in one. Light the Cointreau and put your hand over the top to douse the flame, then sniff the fumes and down in one).

John said goodbye the next morning at around 11am. Due to the vomiting I did not have a hangover (well not much of one). My back felt a lot better too.

Set Adrift On Memory Bliss

Dream Tripping

After I qualified as an accountant at Grant Thornton the British economy tanked. For my first three years there had been four people working at the far end of the office doing insolvency jobs. We viewed them as odd kinds of people who seemed to just stay in the office. It was a function of the times – often insolvency work can trail on for years with asset realisations (especially with legal cases and insurance claims) so these people were quite bookish and spent their times writing to solicitors and creditors.

Insolvency law has changed since then.

In the 1990s you either had a receivership, where the company was run by a firm like Grant Thornton , with a view to selling all or part of it, or liquidation where all the assets were sold and the company closed. Now there are voluntary arrangements with people that are owed money and prepack insolvencies – where the assets of the company are sold back to the owners, without the debts (thus shafting everyone who is owed money and potentially pushing them into insolvency). This really only regularised what was happening back in the 90s.

Now there were lots of problems with this. Creditors (the people or companies that are owed money) come in three varieties. Those with a Fixed Charge – over property mostly. That means in an insolvency they get first dibs on that money. Those with a Floating Charge – like a Fixed Charge but over assets like stock and debtors that constantly change. Again, they get first dibs on those realisations. Finally, unsecured creditors – at the end of the queue (and even within that the government ranks first for tax, National Insurance and VAT).

When banks loaned money they would do it with a fixed and floating charge to secure their money. It would also include loan covenants – typically about cash flow, overdraft limits, profitability and interest cover (how much bigger your profit was than the interest charge). It would also have a clause that if you breached these conditions they could appoint an investigating accountant to go into your business and assess whether it should be allowed to continue trading or go into receivership. This was at the business’s expense – so your company was stretched to the limit, having trouble paying staff and suppliers and would then be slapped with a big bill for this work to go with it. Of course this came straight out immediately – no chance of us not getting paid!

In a town like Ipswich there were a limited number of firms that could do this work. The banks would want to drive down costs on the investigation so everyone would quote lowish (not too low obviously) because whoever did the investigation would almost certainly get the insolvency work if that was what was recommended and that was insanely profitable. Not many reports recommended that the company should continue trading – draw your own conclusions on that.

As soon as the accountancy firm was appointed to the receivership it would implement the recommendations from the investigation. Far more importantly the lowballing of the investigation phase would be reversed and charged to the business (of course our fees came top of the pile). The banks rarely ever questioned the fees if they got some of their money back.

As insolvency work went into overdrive, we recruited lots of people – not accountants necessarily, often people we cherry picked from the businesses we had put into receivership. Now I know not many people think of accountants and ethics in the same sentence, but there are codes of ethics and we can lose our membership of the Institute if we breach them. I am not saying these people were unethical, but many of them were unaware that they were even doing anything dubious. Business was booming so much that oversight became tenuous, as the partners and managers running the team chased new business, there was just no way they could keep tabs on what was happening. Typical minor transgressions would be charging expensive, boozy lunches for the team to the costs of the work or subcontracting bits of the job to book keeping firms and then charging the banks four times as much as if we had done it ourselves. It was just looked on as business – all very yuppy.

As this happened, and as our audit clients went to the wall, we got moved over to insolvency work. It had its own uniform of double-breasted suits and long dark raincoats. The only problem was that as qualified accountants we were paid more than the others and we had those pesky ethics.

The worst day (and there were a lot of bad ones) was when a huge building firm went to the wall. It employed 120 builders plus office staff. Five of us went there and had to make all of them redundant. Scary as hell, though there was one scarier time with a family of travellers.

This is typical of the music of the time. Somehow early 90s music has almost vanished whereas 80s music is still in heavy rotation on TV and radio stations. I am told it is because the dance elements have not aged as well as 80s pop. This song sums up that time.

Insanity