Driving With a Shattered Steering Column

I was talking in an earlier post about how problems with your house can seem mysterious, obscure and hard to solve. As often happens when I make such a statement, I then recalled a case that suggested the same could happen with cars. I remembered a problem we once had with a car, that could also have been much more dangerous in retrospect. There were just two of us (my partner and I) at that point and we had a yellow Mini. Our previous car was also a Mini but had been wrecked by a BMW driving slowly into the back of the car behind us in a traffic queue. The Beamer driver was just bending down to pick something up with his brakes off. His car pushed the car behind us into our mini's boot and his insurance didn't match the quality of his car. To fix the dented boot would have cost more than the car was worth, so we gave it to a scrap metal merchant for twenty quid.

So the next car (another Mini) we got was a bit nicer and more reliable, except after a while you could feel it pulling the steering wheel a bit to the left as you drove. You could keep pulling it back and it didn't seem like a bad problem because the car still ran alright, but we took it to the garage several times trying to get it fixed. The garage tried wheel tracking and replaced the bearings and said it would be OK, but it wasn't. We must have been driving it for six months or so after first noticing the problem when we took it back in again and said the things they had tried so far had not worked. They looked again and this time said they had found that the head of the steering column was shattered. After we'd let it sink in we felt relieved that we'd kept trying to get it fixed!

Plumbers and Builders

I've had a bad relationship with plumbers and builders. I'm trying to think of the word that means a relationship isn't working very well, (is it disfunctional?) This probably stems from the fact that I'm not a confident handyman, not well-endowed (steady...) in the arts of manipulating resistant materials. "Resistant Materials" is what woodwork, metalwork, and plastics are now called at school, instead of just woodwork and metalwork (see, we didn't make anything except model airplanes with plastic when I was at school). I wasn't good at making them do things at school and didn't develop much in the way of DIY post-education. When we moved into our current house, I met our next door neighbour, nice guy, and the first thing he said to me was "Are you 'andy?" So I thought he'd misheard my name, but he meant was I good with tools.

I was about to say that this lack of ability with hammers nails and saws has led us to pay for some bad work, but actually we've probably been lucky, because most of the work we've had done seems to have been good. So why the dissatisfied feeling? Well, it is often difficult to get them to come round to do a quotation and then sometimes they're just too busy to do the work, though I must admit to once having got a plumber out to fit a washer on a bathroom tap that I had broken by trying to fix it myself, on a Bank Holiday. He did come out and fix it, but it was expensive. I know not to try to fix plumbing on Bank Holidays now. Or, it could be that half the time we don't know what the problem is, so we try various fixes for the same problem that don't seem to fix it, for instance damp walls are a mysterious phenomenom that can apparently be caused by all sorts of things, and if only we could know the spefically relevant thing we'd be happy. Fixing car problems has been less difficult, why should that be; are cars more insulated from Nature? Or just always newer and subjected to that endless cycle (spiral?) of renewal, ditching your old car and buying the newer model with all its improvements; better brakes, side-impact bars, better fuel consumption, whereas fixing our house is like keeping a rusty old Ford Cortina on the road. And perhaps that I don't feel at all guilty about not being any good at fixing cars.

Actually what prompted this post - become whinge was a story over on the Velo-Gubbed Legs blog about nmj's boiler engineer being very young. She talks about standing over his shoulder while he worked and that reminded me (obscurely) of my daughter when she was small, standing behind a plumber that we had got to work on our heating. The plumber was recommended to us by friends. He was middle-aged and had a family (he was the guy that came out on a Bank Holiday; at that time I asked him about his family but he wasn't too bothered. I know I'd hate to work on a Bank Holiday, but he seemed happy enough to get away). So my daughter was following this guy round watching what he was doing, she was fascinated (twelve years later she's a lot more self-concious), but I'm not sure what the fascination was, probably just curiosity; I think she was too young to be concerned that he was doing a good job. I must ask her whether she remembers that plumber - she did have a bit of a thing for older men (I mean when she was four), she loved meeting a Father Christmas at my sister's house. She followed him around until he gave her a kiss, then went back for a couple more.

Saatchi Gallery

We went to the Saatchi Gallery in the 80s when it was in St. John's Wood. A few years ago it moved to the old GLC (Greater London Council) building and now it's in Chelsea. They have setup a virtual tour on their new website "Stuart" (sounds like a bit of a phoney name; Stu[dent]+Art??). The website's a sort of MySpace for artists. I like Julie Bennett's paintings

The Yorkshire Ripper

Between 1975 and 1981 Peter Sutcliffe killed thirteen women and severely injured seven others in horrific attacks in Northern England. The attacks betrayed Sutcliffe's real nature as a deeply disturbed man, a nature hidden to his wife and both of their families.

Sutcliffe's attacks actually began early in 1975 when he attacked women on two separate occasions with a hammer, but the police didn't link them to the other attacks until years later. It was later in the year and then in January 1976 when two women were killed in very similar circumstances that the police knew they were chasing someone who had already killed twice in very disturbing ways.

The first woman he killed was drunk after a night out in Leeds. He then killed several prostitutes, so the prostitutes in the area started to go around in couples and make notes of clients' car registration numbers. Cooperation between prostitutes and police was not good though, and general public awareness of the crimes remained low until June 1977, when the newspapers reported that an "innocent" young woman had been viciously killed. In fact four other women had been killed between the first and this latest one. The press and public had not shown much sympathy for the victims of the killings so far because the victims were thought to be all prostitutes. They had not yet linked these murders to the first two attacks, which were not on prostitutes.

Once the news of the latest murder got out, the police were drowned in information.

Some of Sutciffe's victims survived, though they were often disabled for life or suffered depression following the attack. One woman attacked in Bradford in 1977 had major surgery and six weeks in hospital before she was able to go home. The following year she appeared in court charged with stealing from shops because she couldn't make ends meet.

The police were thrown off course by some anonymous letters and later a tape from Sunderland which claimed to be from the killer. The speaker on the tape had a geordie accent and police later issued instructions to their forces that they should be looking for someone with a geordie accent.

I remember hearing about the Yorkshire Ripper at the end of the 70s and 1980-81. In November 1980 Sutcliffe killed a woman who was studying at Leeds University. Around this time I was at university in London and I remember women marching at night in "Reclaim the Night" protests.

Sutcliffe wasn't very careful to hide his tracks when committing the murders and over the years left several clues which detectives followed up, but they never got anything that would single him out and they were not good enough at handling the information (computers were in their very infancy) to piece together the bits that they had. They were also distracted by the hoax letters and tape. Sutcliffe had given the police alibis that were backed up by his wife. A friend that visited red light districts with Sutcliffe had written to the police and got no response. In the end it was just luck that he was stopped in a car with a prostitute and the policeman who stopped him radioed in the registration number of Sutcliffe's car. It was still lucky that one officer was sharp enough to go back to the scene where Sutcliffe had been picked up, because that officer found a ball-pin hammer and a knife, weapons that Sutcliffe used in the attacks.

Extensive article about The Yorkshire Ripper at the Crime Lab

Parallel Trousers and Bags

Clothes were never very important to me, but there was a time when I very much wanted to get specific styles in clothes. I was at school and must have been thirteen or so. Suddenly certain clothes were very attractive; I think it was all about being part of a gang. It started with parallel trousers and platform shoes. I don't know all the cultural history of these trousers, but a few of my mates wore them and they seemed the biz. This was around the time Slade were wearing their outlandish garb of high heeled boots and trousers that came just above their ankles. The best of the trousers were made of a shot cotton material that looked different colours in different lights. There's a good page here about 70s clothes, this guy seems to know his stuff - I remember Scratch 'n' Sniff t-shirts! We also liked shirts with round collars; nice deep colours they were. I think the shirts were called Brutus; they looked very good. I think a bit before that Ben Shermans were supposed to be very cool (worn a lot by skinheads; did mods wear them as well?) Later the trousers got wider and were called Bags or Oxford Bags and the shoes got fatter with less of a heel. That was round about when the Bay City Rollers took the nation's female youth by storm - 1974 apparently, though that seems very close now to the start of Punk; well I guess things were moving faster then. Anyway, the Rollers wore their bags high with tartan trim. I remember we asked each other a lot how wide each others bags were (! Idiots). Anyway I don't remember it lasting long, so that was my brief flirtation with fashion then.

My First Visit to New York

The first time I went to New York, in 1985, I had to get a visa from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London. I turned up in Manhattan without anywhere to stay and walked around a bit and found a little place that rented rooms in Chelsea (that's around where the Empire State Building and the Chelsea Hotel are). The owner was a middle-aged guy called Art who was a bit eccentric (sorry Art). He was involved in a local cable television channel, and I did see a bit of one programme that was a discussion, but I don't remember what it was about, and I don't remember watching anything else. He had a set-top decoder that allowed him to receive loads of channels, but when I tried to look at some of the programmes he got mad because I left it set wrong. Art let me do a couple of odd jobs in return for free rent. I painted his shopfront and rearranged a big load of books for him, but I'm sure I didn't do a very good job. Art had a good heart, but he was a little paranoid - he thought people in a garage next door were trying to get rid of him in order to expand their property; he said he's found a gas cannister on his roof and he took this as a threat or a sign that they could blow him up. They had offered him money for his house at some point but he'd refused and now he thought they wanted to get rid of him by other means. He put a sign up in his window with some kind of demand or accusation that I'm sure no one would understand (probably not even the people in the garage). His place was decrepit and the rooms were tiny, but I stayed there for several weeks and walked around Manhattan (my idea of New York was Manhattan). I walked south to the World Trade Centre and Battery Park and Fort Tryon Park in the north. I saw free dance at the Lincoln Centre and I walked around the Metropolitan Museum several times, not forgetting the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection and the Guggenheim Museum. At the Met I thought the Persian miniatures were lovely and I was blown away by the tribal carvings of the pre-Columbian section, particularly the fertility totems and canoes with wonderful carvings on the prows. I don't remember what I saw at the Guggenheim, the building itself is what makes the impression. The Frick Collection is a smaller gallery based on a private collection of old masters. It had some masterpieces that floored me.

Music Players Through the Years in my Family

Writing about "the family stereogram" earlier started me thinking about the different things we played music on in our family. We weren't musicians, except for the obligatory recorders soon given up on and my sister's piano similarly foresaken, but we certainly loved music, well I did anyway; I won't speak for the others except to say Dad had a Roger Whittaker cassette with RW singing, playing his flute (he did play a flute didn't he?) and whistling. By the way, don't click on the link for Roger's fan site if you don't like his music, you'll get an earful (I suppose you could turn your speakers down) and Mum only really listened to music when she did the ironing - she liked Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz. No, I mean the music machines we used, as in:

The first I remember was a light blue transistor radio with an extendable aerial. It had a plastic case with holes and my memory of it now is as a dinky little thing, like something you'd see in the Design Museum. I had a quick look for some pictures but I don't see anything like it and having looked I think our radio must have been mid-sixties, because the early sixties models look much bigger and older. I remember hearing "She's Got a Ticket to Ride" on this one. That link goes to an interesting story about how John Lennon got the idea for the song, but I'm not sure I believe it (also, check out the small gold heads of the Fab Foursome in the top left gif). So I guess the design of transistor radios went through quite a revolution in the first half of the sixties, Japanese designers at the top of their game I guess.

We also had an old record player. It was the property of one of my parents, can't remember which, and I can't reliably remember when my brother and I started playing records on it. My parents had some old 45s, including Tommy Steele's "Little White Bull". The player was red and cream and had a stacker pole where you could pile several records and lift an arm across the top of them to hold them in place. If you piled up too many though, they would start to skate and slip.

The next thing I remember was called a "stereogram". It was a kind of sideboard record player that you could also keep records in and I think ours was a kind of teak colour. No idea what we played on that, perhaps Dad upgraded the player to the stereogram and my brother and I got the old player.

There was a small radio that I got for Christmas because I wanted to listen to pop music. I think it was a Ferguson. My memories of it are of lying in bed listening to John Peel's Radio One show.

Dad replaced the stereogram with a Sony music centre. I think that was the start of his love affair with Sony, because since then he's always regarded their stuff as likely to be good quality. I listened to my Christmas present for 1973 ("Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd) on that.

But the best thing I ever had to play music on (after the radio) was a turntable, amp and speakers that Dad bought me for my eighteenth and yes it was a Sony machine. I loved that thing.

Remember Remember the Fifth of November

I remember this rhyme from my youth:

Remember Remember
The Fifth of November
Gunpowder Treason and Plot

But I can't remember the next bit! I searched and I found this (watch out for the annoying animated ads in the left sidebar; the mosquito one is particularly irritating), so I can now remember the rest of the rhyme:

I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

We used to have great Bonfire Nights round us ("are you comin round us?", I just remembered is what we said, not even "Are you comin round to our house?"). I thought the bonfire in our back garden was really big, but our back garden wasn't that big, so it can't have been so massive. Just a big pile of wood probably made a big impression on the young me. Dad got some fireworks and Mum baked and cooked (sausage rolls, baked potatoes, wellington squares, soup in mugs). I don't think we did much in the way of a guy, that was supposed to be the kids' thing, make a figure using newspaper and tights and an old coat and a painted face (ten or fifteen years later when I was just out of college we made a "Maggie" guy), rather we found the wood and rubbish and Dad built the bonfire out of it. Fireworks are a lot louder and flashier now, I think the bonfire was more of a deal then. The extended family would come round and join in; my favourite cousin / uncle was called Michael, he was a cool guy and he was into Art and rock music. Yeah it was good.

I don't remember anyone I knew getting hurt from using fireworks then, but since then I have heard of some, mostly from being drunk and messing around. The fireworks we had were pretty much the same as today; rockets, roman candles, catherine wheels, bangers and sparklers. Everybody said "Oooooh" when the rockets went up. Our bonfire was quite an event in our little bit of the estate.

The first single I bought was Telegram Sam

I started buying records when I was about 10 in 1971. I got 50 pence pocket money and that was enough for a single. Singles were more important than they are now and being able to buy one per week was great. I don't remember the first one I bought, I think I might be romanticising to say it was "Telegram Sam" by T-Rex, but that was probably the coolest thing I bought around that time; brilliant song, very slick and sexy (probably as much to do with Tony Visconti's production as Marc Bolan's lyrics and looks). Heh, I just found a lyrics website with Telegram Sam on it. Reminds me of Disco 45, this raggedy mag I used to get around the time I'm talking about. I wrote about it here. So Telegram Sam was ace. I also remember something by Chicory Tip called "Son Of My Father" - here's a site with all the UK number ones (they claim) since it started. That's enough lyrics sites. Like I say, it's probably romanticising to say the first was "Telegram Sam", because I also bought lots of rubbish.

The group I really got into at that point was Slade. Noddy, Dave, Don and Jim had a lot of energy and made a lot of noise but the only song of their's I still like much is "Goodbye to Jane". There's a blog by Fury Animal called Musicnews with a piece about Slade featuring the cover of "Slayed", an album of their's I bought later. I did buy Jean Genie by David Bowie but I can't remember much else.

As for albums, the first one I bought was "A Nod's as Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse" by The Faces, who later became Rod Stewart and the Faces. I still play this, usually just for one track called "That's All You Need", as much for Ron Wood's guitar as Rod's voice. When I bought it there was a poster inside and this site has a copy of it. The album cost £2.50 and I still love it for "That's All You Need", though at the time I probably bought it on the strength of "Stay With Me", a classic v. sexist Rod Stewart rocker. I bought other albums as well, but I haven't played "Slayed" or Gary Glitter's album for ages now. The only other album I bought around that time that is still worth playing is "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" by Bowie. It's even possible that I didn't get that until later, when I was at Secondary School (the equivalent in those days of high school). I do remember getting "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd one Christmas and playing it on the family stereogram.

Losing a Finger

I was twelve (about that anyway) when I lost part of my right hand middle finger. A friend had just got home from hospital and I was going out with a bag of bananas to visit her. My parents' house had a big heavy front door at that time and if you left the back door and the middle door open, you created a through draft that could blow a door shut. I had the bag of bananas in one hand, so I pulled the door shut by putting my hand around the end and pulling. That's OK, you just pull your hand out before the door shuts, right? Well not in this case, because the other doors were open, so the door slammed shut, just catching the tip of my finger and leaving a piece on the inside. I don't remember making a lot of noise, though I guess I did, anyway, I ran down the road to my mother, who was chatting to a neighbour, and waved my hand in front of her, shouting "Look!"

The next thing I remember is sitting in our next door neighbour's car with my hand in a handkercief and it felt very cold. My brother had been in the house and heard the door slam, so he went to the door and found the tip of my finger on the inside, so he brought it out to Mum and me. I've never asked him to describe exactly what it was like (note to self).

I don't remember much else of that day, except that when the nurse stitched me up it really hurt. They told me there was a one in two chance that it would be OK, but nothing else.

I had to wear a sling for a bit and I was off school for a couple of weeks. During that time I practised writing left-handed, but I must be very right-handed because I was useless. The bandage smelled a bit funny and when I went back they told me it had infected further down my finger, so they had to cut off just below the top knuckle. That was the one time I've been in hospital overnight (except when my daughter was born; I mean I stayed by my partner's bed and that's another story). I remember just before the operation a nurse telling me I had nice eyelashes, afterwards a pakistani doctor came to see me and wasn't very impressed with my french and there was a teenager in a private room who had crashed his motorcycle. He had some music, Led Zeppelin I think, must have been on a tape recorder. I thought he was very cool.

Most people don't notice that I'm missing part of a middle finger and it doesn't affect me much. Occasionally I find that I can't lift as much as I should be able to because there's a bit of leverage missing and a few years ago it used to hurt in the Winter, even slightly opening up and my index finger has leant over slightly into the gap where my middle finger would have been. Later when I worked in a print shop several people assumed I'd got injured at work.

Remembering Punk and My First Spam

I was 15 in 1976 when my rural North West town started to hear about Punk Rock. In fact I don't remember it as Punk Rock, but New Wave (was that later?). The first record that seemed different as I remember it was "Do Anything You Wanna Do" by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It had energy anyway. The first nw record I bought was a double A-side by the Stranglers called "London Lady / Get a Grip on Yourself". The stuff I listened to was The Jam, The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello and The Damned. I wasn't really an angry punk, more a fun punk, but I thought The Clash were great - they talked about making their own clothes and they had a reggae track on their album. I listened to a lot of this stuff on John Peel's show some time around midnight, in bed with a transistor radio next to my ear so my brother in the top bunk wouldn't hear. Peel played that kind of music mixed with Ivor Cutler's stories called "Scenes From a Scottish Living Room". I remember one about a bird called Fremsley (if you've never heard Ivor Cutler, give the linked site above a go, it's worth a listen). The Peel Show was a strange and wonderful mixture.

It was sometime around then that I picked up a Disco 45. I'd not looked at one for a long time since I used to get them when I was around 10 (I wrote about that here. Disco 45 was an awful magazine, consisting of the lyrics of top 40 hits. I bought it every week). I'm not usually good at remembering dates, but I remember I did a project at school which consisted of copying the lyrics of songs from Disco 45. I don't know what the project was supposed to be - poetry? I was shocked when Mr. Brown thought my efforts were not that great! I did concede to myself that the the T-Rex hit "Deborah" was perhaps not the right choice - it went something like:

Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Deborah, you look like a Zeborah
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug

...and so on. I wrote down the whole thing concientiously and Mr Brown must have wondered if I was on drugs (he wasn't very hip man). Perhaps I could have chosen a better example by Marc Bolan (he and Micky Finn, who played the bongoes, were T-Rex), but anyway, that was when I loved Disco 45. The time I'm talking about now was about 5 years later, so I think I would have been slightly embarassed by it - it was very uncool. I don't know how I came across it but I was interested in the competition inside. Disco 45 was probably one of the opposites of Punk (there were several opposites of Punk and pappy Top 40 pop songs as a bunch were one). The editor said he wanted people to write in on a postcard what they thought about Punk and the winner would get an album (see how things have changed? I was excited at the prospect of winning an album!) I sent a letter and a few weeks later he phoned our house and asked to talk to me. He said I'd won and would it be OK for him to put my address in the magazine so that people could write to me (heh, see how things have changed? Put my address in a magazine?!)

So I started getting letters from girls who found my address in the next Disco 45. I never wondered why I didn't get any letters from boys, but then I did get one from a boy / man / bloke, I never worked out his age, but his letter certainly stood out and I've still got it. It was my first spam, before email was invented. I can't scan it because it's faded now, and I don't want to write it all down (as you'll see). Difficult to know what to leave out here, but all the square brackets and *** are mine (as if my skinhead penpal would use square brackets). Anyway, knock yourselves out:

TO THE F***** IDIOTIC C***, [my name] WHAT A SHIT NAME.
NOW LISTEN ERE MOUSH I
REALLY HATE PUNK ROCK
WE GO PUNK BASHING UP LONDON EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT AND IF
YOU COME DOWN TO THE ROXY AT COVENT GARDEN WHICH IS A
SPUNK POCKERS CLUB I'LL
[offers to modify my looks] LIKE WE
DONE LAST FRIDAY TO A
C*** WITH GREEN HAIR. WE
WEST HAM SKINHEADS AND
WE'RE F***** RULE EVERYONE
MATE ESPICIALLY PUNK
ROCKERS WHO WE REALLY
HATE. YOU ARE DIRTY, SMELLY
F****** C**** AND IT'S A
WELL KNOWN FACK THAT ALL
PUNK ROCKERS ARE QUEERS
AND YOU MUST BE WITH A
NAME LIKE THAT YOU F*****
SNOB C***. I'M GONNA DRIVE
UP TO [my home town] ONE DAY
AND WAIT FOR YOU AND
[various graphic details] THEN
WHEN YOUR DEAD I'LL PISS
ON YOU AND KICK SHIT
OUT OF YOU AND ANY OTHER
PUNK THAT WE SEE
SKINS RULE AND DON'T
YOU FORGET IT C***
I'LL DO 10 PUNKS TOMMOROW
REALLY BAD AND
I'LL BE THING OF YOU. BY THE
WAY ALL PUNK GIRLS ARE
F***** OLD SLAGS AS WELL.
6 OF US [you don't want to read this bit]
COS SHE WAS A PUNK SLUT
ANYWAY ONE DAY I'M
COMING UP YOUR PLACE
WITH THE BOYS. SO START
SHITTING YOURSELF MATE,
AND REMEMBER
SKINHEADS RULE OK
AND KILL ALL PUNKS
PAKIS AND TEDS
WEST HAM
YOU CAN'T HELP IT
IF YOU YOU SMELL

Comics I read when I was young

When I was little I remember going to my nanna's house on Saturday mornings. She bought us comics and I was thinking about them today. The first I think she ever got me must have been Look and Learn; it makes me cringe now. Apart from the cringeing (aargh, so wholesome! It looks like a Watchtower!), I remember the smell. It had a similar kind of smell (must have been the paper / ink) to Jackie, which was also more appealing because it was a way into the world of girls, but come to think of it, I didn't see Jackie until a few years later when girls had it at school. My sister was too small to get Jackie when I had Look and Learn, I think she got Bunty instead. My brother got Victor, which was more of a strip comic. Victor had some good characters though; I remember "Alf Tupper, The Tough of The Track" Later I must have given up on Look and Learn because I started getting Shoot, a football comic (in that picture of a Shoot cover I think Martin Chivvers of Spurs is about to be taken out by Tommy Smith of Liverpool, the team I supported). At that point my brother was getting Beano or Whizzer I think. Later again I got Disco 45, a collection of the lyrics of pop songs at the time. I'll tell you about that another time.