The Food Parcels Have Started Again……

Tan’s parents are here once more. I remember vividly their visit last year. Once I’d pointed out where all the herbs were hidden in the garden, a regular supply of delicious Turkish food would arrive at the front door. Indeed, such was it’s regularity that I don’t think we needed to cook for some 4 or 5 days one week. Esin, Tan’s mother was the creator of these wonderful dishes which, whilst Turkish in origin, made me recall the many wonderful holidays our family had in Corfu. Obviously cooking techniques and ingredients were similar throughout the eastern Mediterranean but it was terrific to taste food which I had not had for some 16 years. Ok, I’d eaten in Greek and middle eastern restaurants in London but there’s something special about home cooked food especially as you knew that your garden had provided some of the ingredients.

Esat, Tan’s father is blind but I didn’t know this for a day or so after his arrival. I’d watched him play with little Violet on the terrace making her scream with laughter and joy, her happy sounds floating over the short distance between our two homes.
Then I saw Tan leading Esat down to the edge of the pool where he promptly dived in and swam a few lengths before getting out. It was only when I saw him from a distance ‘playing’ with his white stick like others do with their worry beads which made me realise that he had impaired sight. Later on we were invited over for dinner and I found out that he was totally blind.

I was astounded that he could do all these things whilst not seeing anything. And very brave – can you imaging diving into a pool without having seen where it was, what shape it was and with only a description about it’s depth and length ?

That was last year. They arrived here again last Thursday and left on Tuesday – all too short a time to talk to a very interesting man who tells wonderful tales of life in ‘old Cyprus’ and who suffered his impairment whilst relatively young. Thankfully, before the accident he had witnessed life and retains memories of colours, shapes and most importantly his sons’ faces when they were young.

We had a long chat last night about life in Cyprus in the old days (Tan and his family are Turkish Cypriot) and how life then was vastly different from the lifestyle we lead today and take for granted. There was one fridge in Esat’s village so in order to keep things cold, people would lower their large green melons and other fruit and perishables down into their wells where the cold water would preserve, for a few days at least, the staple items which made up their diet. At a very young age he and presumably the other children in the village would have to work on the farms, collecting the crops and harvesting the grain but always mindful that machinery could take and arm or a leg off if you strayed in the wrong direction. It sounded a tough childhood but he spoke with affection for those long gone days.

Today, I think Esat is a happy man. He and Esin live in London and have three wonderful sons and a loving extended international family. He talks about life in the metropolis and how at 67 he enjoys his council run course in pottery making and sculpture. His latest project was to make a piggy bank, a bright blue rabbit which the children loved so much. I have to tell you that even with full sight I could not have come close to capturing the beauty of Esat’s rabbit.

So Esin and Esat have now left for London. We’ll miss them and we’ll miss their love of life and the obvious pleasure they get from having their family around them once again.

The Green Green Grass of Home……

I don’t think so. Not for me, not for Gordon Brown although I’m stretching it a bit to align GB with Glasgow East. Especially now !

I went to bed last night knowing that a thousand miles away in distance and a million miles away in deprivation and culture, my old stamping ground, the constituency of Glasgow East was counting the votes of the latest UK by-election. I didn’t think for a moment I would wake up to the astonishing news that Labour would lose the seat. It doesn’t matter a jot that it was the SNP which won, the significant thing is that probably one of the most staunchly labour areas in the UK had issued its damning verdict on Gordon Brown, one of its own. This wasn’t a vote about a ruling government. This was a vote about a fellow Scot who, they believe, has ruined their already blighted lives. Let me explain.

Glasgow East includes an area called Shettleston. I was born there. It is officially the most deprived area in the UK. Average male life expectancy is 54 – yes 54 years. In theory if I’d stayed there I would be dead by now – a sobering thought. The constituency as a whole has a 25 per cent unemployment rate, 40% of children are being raised in a workless home and the teenage pregnancy rate is 40% above the national average. These statistics and others put this area of the UK in the same deprivation category as many developing countries but this is the big picture, it’s the microcosm of life in the east end which has been affected and turned them against GB.

Although I left Shettleston when I was about two years old, I only moved about 3 miles to another part of the constituency, Bridgeton where I spent the next 9 years before moving to Easterhouse, the gun-totting, sword-wielding, overspill housing estate which also forms part of this sprawling, deprived land mass. I lived there until I was about 18 and although, housing has been improved, transport and communication has moved ahead, the culture of the people will forever stay the same. It’s a comedy and a tragedy wrapped up in deprivation and despair.

At one stage when I was about 14 I had the largest paper round in Easterhouse both during the week and at the weekend – it was a 7-day a week slog. On Friday night’s I would collect the week’s paper money and would have ‘safe houses’ where I could seek shelter if one of the gangs had tried to rob me of the considerable amount of money I was carrying, particularly towards the end of my round. At many doors I knocked on on those tricky Friday nights I would be met by a child who looked as if they were straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. I would say ‘Paper Money please’. Without a second thought the child would shout from the open door, ‘Daddy – it’s the paper boy’, to which the reply came, ‘Tell him I’m not in and I’ll pay it next Friday’.

This was the comedy element. The grim reality was that most of these people were long-term unemployed but still drank, smoked, gambled and had cars, oh and took between 7 and 9 papers per week ! Drinking, smoking and gambling were their escape routes from the daily grind. When he came along, they thought Gordon Brown was some sort of messiah – a good working class guy, ok from the Edinburgh side, but one of their own, one who would look after them……whatever that meant. Now they cannot smoke in their favourite pubs and when they buy cigarettes, the tax has raised the price to the point where the wife has to do without hers, which makes her nag incessantly. The price of their favourite tipple (10 pints and 6 Bacardi Breezers) now takes about 25% of their weekly income support, and the price of fuel is now so high that they have to car-pool on the way to the dog track. Life’s a bitch and so is GB !

Now I have to say that not all of these things are the direct result of GB, Scotland after all has it’s own parliament which has direct influence over many aspects of a Scot’s daily life (e.g. smoking ban in pubs) but to your average punter in the east end of Glasgow, it’s GB which has gone and done it.

The political analysis has only just begun into last night’s ‘earthquake’ result. The after-shocks will last for many months. Probably one of the most amusing comments following last night's shock was the quote from a Labour 'insider' who said about Gordon Brown's unpopularity that 'if Gordon ran an undertakers business people would stop dying'. That says it all !

Picture at top of blog courtesy of The Sun newspaper.

Sloop John B

The Beach Boys story has returned to TV and thankfully I spotted it in the schedules. I’ve been waiting 18 months for this documentary to come back so I could copy it to DVD. The Beach Boys in general and Brian Wilson in particular were geniuses. I put them up there with the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Simon & Garfunkel and you might be surprised to hear, the Bee Gees. All of these groups produced stunning, complex records. I never just listened to the basic music. There was always something behind the obvious soundtrack. Complex chords and subtle new dimensions to the normal music which was being churned out, so to get the story behind the various Beach Boy hits is a real bonus.

One of the classics is, of course, Sloop John B and hearing it again took me straight back to 1968 when I joined a car company called Rootes direct from school (Rootes were very soon after bought by Chrysler). There are a multitude of stories about the 4 year apprenticeship I completed as a Management Trainee but the relevant one here is that Rootes’ personnel department had some budding psychologists who worked out a theory that if they took on 20 management trainees and developed them as a team, then in several years time we’d all be running different parts of the factory and would bring a more cohesive management approach to what was then a very troubled industry. The theory was brilliant, the implementation was crap – most of us were made redundant as soon as Chrysler took over !

However, the interim period between joining the company with 19 other bright-eyed, bushy tailed apprentices and our employment demise is a part of my life that I look back on and smile. I’ve only really had 3 jobs in my 40 years of employment, Chrysler which gave me the confidence to realise that I could aspire to a real managerial career, IBM which taught me how the world works and BT where I learnt that it wasn’t what you know but who you know that counts.

But back to Chrysler and those 20 aspiring managerial candidates. Within weeks we’d be in windowless vans heading into the highlands of Scotland to be dumped in the middle of nowhere with tents, cooking facilities and food and told to meet the van 4 days from then about 50 miles away. Along the way we had to climb mountains and pick up information which would prove we had actually completed the course. Now this wasn’t in the midst of summer – this was in the depths of winter where, in order to follow the prescribed trail, sometimes we had to strip naked, wrap our clothes up and walk, chest deep through mountain streams which had virtually iced over. Sometimes we ran out of food and had to find edible berries on the slopes (we had been given a basic 2 week course in map reading and mountain survival), sometimes we came across mountain bothies where we could have a ‘proper’ bed for the night and sometimes we came across tragedy with some of my colleagues having to carry the dead body of a young girl down the mountain. All in all it was tough but character forming and to the physiologists’ credit we became closer and closer as a team.

A couple of the guys (Gary and Dougie) were excellent guitar players and despite the weight of their rucksacks they insisted on dragging their instruments with them. It was on certain nights when we were all cold, hungry and morose, desperate for home that we would all sing the song ’Sloop John B’ and when it came to the line ‘I wanna go home’ it was sung with great gusto.
The picture at the start of today’s blog is of a reunion we had 25 years after the start of our apprenticeship. We held it in Glencoe where we were at our lowest as a team. Cold, hungry and the haunting image of some of our group carrying a lifeless body down the slopes meant that we would never forget that place. We all wanted to return and exorcise our ghosts.

Only Another 7 Years to Wait….

Sleepover time. This is when Kitty (and occasionally Guy) invites friends to stay overnight. Most of their friends live miles away so the only time they see each other during the summer school holidays is when they have sleepovers. Kitty’s already been away this week but none the less she wanted another sleepover last night. At about 7.30pm Julie screeched to a halt on the drive scattering gravel everywhere and out jumped Kitty and her two friends. Within about 3 minutes they were changed and splashing about in the pool as Julie, Guy and myself had dinner. After 30 minutes of splashing, screeching and general 11 year old horseplay they emerged from the deep and came up for dinner. Kitty asked me if Drew had been at the house today. I said no straight away and then realised my mistake. Priscillia has a bit of a crush on Drew and wanted to know if he had been over presumably so she could go where he’d gone, sit where he'd sat and generally swoon every time she thought of his presence in the house. A bit crestfallen, Priscillia and the other two girls sat down for dinner and things quietened down a bit. It’s difficult to scream when you’re eating or lovesick !

Drew is Guy’s friend and is a bit of a cool dude….and he knows it. He’s a handsome boy with longish blondish hair and is a bit more mature than many other boys his age which I put down to the fact that his father, a pilot, is always taking him and his younger brother off on trips to Antigua, Indonesia, Australia, Florida and the like. Anyway – I digress. The girls finished their dinner and decamped to Kitty’s room which, like Guy’s, is a complete no-go area when occupied. You have to make an appointment to enter even to clean the mess which generally meets you when you are able to push the door open, usually jammed by dirty knickers, slippers, hair brushes and the general paraphernalia which takes up every square inch of floor space of a childs’ room.

After dinner, Julie, Guy and me all sat down to watch True Lies, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie which features some amazing action. Problem was Julie had already watched the first 45 minutes of it (she had taped it a few nights ago) and being Julie she insisted on starting the movie where she left off so poor Guy had to start watching a great film half-way through. I’d already seen it a few years ago so I knew the plotline but poor Guy had to immediately try and work out who the baddies were and why a nuclear bomb was just about to go off in the Florida Keys ! The film finished and Guy and I sat and watched the first 45 minutes – a rather strange experience.

About 11.00pm we all went to bed (there was no sound from Kitty’s room) and about 5 minutes to midnight our bedroom door opened and there was Kitty still fully dressed and asking if her and her pals could have a midnight swim. I said she could if she put the pool lights on and off she went to a waiting chorus of more screams and screeches as the girls hurled themselves into the pool. About 30 minutes later the splashing noises and girlie screams were still pouring through the bedroom shutters so I thought I’d have a quick look. There they all were, swimming around and as far as I could see they were skinny dipping. I dashed inside, after all the last thing I want is some kid’s father coming round and accusing me of being an English pervert. The pervert bit is ok – it’s the English bit which would upset me ! I asked Julie to have a look and she surreptitiously looked down to the pool area and confirmed that there was little in the way of bathing suits being worn but she’d confirm it in the morning. I went to sleep desperately hoping sleepovers would still be in fashion when Kitty gets to 18 and she brings her pals over.

PS – apparently it was only the tops of the bikinis which had been discarded.