I am not a deep thinker. I don’t remember when I first realised it but thinking too deeply about anything is rarely a good idea. I am a “glass half empty” kind of person too.
In any situation, I imagine what is the worst-case scenario and then work out strategies to cope with it. If the worst-case doesn’t happen (and it hardly ever does), everything is a lot better than just all right.
I was thinking about my father the other day and I remembered something that he had once said to me, and it started me thinking. You may find it a little morbid but it interests me.
When I was 19, my Mum and Dad, my girlfriend and I went on holiday across Europe to Yugoslavia and Greece. I remember being on the beach with my Dad at Zadar in Croatia when he said something about being more than halfway through his life. The date was August 10th, 1966.
Dad was born on September 22nd, 1923 and so on that day, he was 15,664 days old. He died on July 28tth, 1993 having lived for a total of 25,513 days. So, he was right. In fact, he had lived through 59.67% of his life.
(Yes, I know! What kind of nerd works out that sort of thing?)
I have wondered since, what my Dad was doing on the day that was exactly halfway through his life. I have worked out that it would have been on August 25th, 1958. It was a Monday and just less than a month before his 35th birthday. I was eleven and a pupil at the school where he taught physics. Peter, my brother was nine.
We spent that summer in Lowestoft and didn’t have a family holiday. We rarely did. Lowestoft’s north beach was better than any French, Spanish or Italian beach and that’s where we went almost every day in August.
I can’t remember when I first realised that I was more than halfway through my life. I still find it hard to accept that I am and only last week I was trying to persuade Caroline that my 111th birthday party should be particularly spectacular - much grander even than my 110th.
The only thing that I remember from reading ‘The Lord of the Rings when I was 12, is the name of Gandalf’s horse (often useful in a pub quiz) and that the book begins with Bilbo Baggins’ “eleventy first” birthday.
I think that twice in my life have I come near to death. The first time was when I was riding on my motor scooter in Durham City in June 1968. In those days, Durham University was very popular with public school students who had failed to get into Oxford or Cambridge.
Durham’s narrow streets were choked with the Morgans, Lotuses, Healey 3000s, MGs and at least one Marcos, bought for some of the more privileged students by their parents. I had a ten-year-old Lambretta 125D motor scooter that I had bought for £25 with the money that I had earned from my summer vacation job with the Birds Eye frozen food factory in Lowestoft.
Working 12-hour shifts on Quality Control (no skill or training required), I could earn as much as £95 a week. To give you some idea of how good the pay was, in September 1969, my first ever monthly paycheque for teaching was £61.
Working on Quality Control at Birds Eye was a doddle. The shift was from 6 until 6, day or night. Sometimes my task was to put a sample of peas through a machine called a "tenderometer" to work out whether the crop was ready to harvest or not. The samples would arrive from the fields in dribs and drabs but I was paid whether I was busy or not. Some night shifts were very slow.
Occasionally, I would assess the quality of the work done by women on the production line but the women whose output quality I was controlling, either worked 7:30 am until 4:30 pm or from 10:00 pm until 6:00 am. That meant that every working day or night I had lots of free time.
I learnt loads of useful things during that time like how to play bridge and cribbage and from Stan, a 55-year-old full time, permanent employee, I was told of a foolproof way (he said) to chat-up women. “It usually works,” he said, “and if it doesn’t, you’ve saved a lot of time and money pissing about!”
One night, I was controlling quality as usual, when things took a nasty turn. I was in a large, isolated shed and inside there were three parallel conveyor belts. There were 20 women seated on each side of every belt and so there were 120 women in the room - and me. They were the last check before the peas disappeared to be frozen and then dropped into 4 oz packets.
As the zillions of peas passed them, the women removed extraneous vegetable matter (EVM) of which stalks and daisy heads were the most common. Whatever got past the women went into a packet and was frozen minutes later.
My job was to take random sealed packets as they came off the line before they went into the freezer, open them, spread the contents on to a tray and check for EVM. I filled in a form tabulating my findings and then I analysed the results. If too much EVM was found, the line was stopped and all the peas that the women had checked went through the line a second time. If a batch had to be rechecked the women lost bonus pay.
One night, at about two in the morning, I warned the shop steward that I was finding a lot of EVM.
“No, you’re not!” she said emphatically and walked off.
Half an hour later the line stopped and 120 women glared at me in a way that I had never experienced before. They sat in sullen silence for about twenty minutes and then the peas started to come through again.
At 4:00 a.m. the line was stopped again. I was in my work area sifting through a tray of peas. I suddenly became aware that I was not alone. I looked up to see eight women - big women - including the shop steward, surrounding me.
Not a word was said. They lifted me from my seat and carried me into an adjacent office. Resistance was futile as any one of them could have probably manhandled me on her own and within a minute they had completely removed my overalls and my clothes. Then, they left, taking all my clothes with them.
As they went out into the main body of the shed there were huge cheers and much applause. One of them was waving my underpants around her head.
Anyway, my first dice with death came on Elvet Bridge in Durham City in June 1968. Final exams were over and I was crossing the bridge, helmetless on my scooter, rushing to get from one pub to another. A bus had stopped ahead of me and I overtook it as another bus was coming towards me.
As that bus approached, a dog ran across the road and the bus driver swerved to avoid it. (Don’t say he got his priorities right!). My right shoulder and elbow were scraped along the bus’s entire length but I just managed to stay upright and alive.
My second close call came on the day that I had my liver transplant - October 6th, 2008. I remember lying on my back on the table in the operating theatre. I was a little drowsy but I was completely aware of what was going on. I was somewhat apprehensive and I knew that ‘this was it’. A man in a surgical gown, wearing a mask came over and introduced himself to me as my anaesthetist.
“How long will all this take?” I asked him.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just curious,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “If you wake up, it won’t matter how long it took and if you don’t wake up - you’ll be dead!”
Of course, I don’t know when my ‘halfway day’ actually was but I rather hope that it was then. You’re all invited to my eleventy-first birthday party. Make a note! February 8th, 2058. It’s a Friday.
Make a long weekend of it and please don’t buy me socks. I want a jet pack or a single-seat, anti-gravity, long-range hopper.
No comments:
Post a Comment