1973 – 1978 Manchester

Upon finishing the course at Hull, I soon started my first job—

North West Water Authority, Davyhulme, Urmston, Manchester. Analysing sewage, industrial effluent and sea water. Prior to the job starting I went to Manchester to find a place for us; the first night I stayed in a £1 a night doss house, the second I paid £50 to stay in a hotel in the centre of Manchester, within a few days I found lodgings for us in Urmston at Mr and Mrs Atherton’s house. Margaret moved over from Hull and found a pleasant job at Massey Ferguson in Trafford Park, working in the Personnel department. After a couple of months we were able to buy a car for £250 – a dark blue Triumph Spitfire MkII. It vibrated rather badly if it went over 50mph, but the bodywork looked good. Then we bought a colour television – ooh.
An interesting part of this job was travelling on board one of the 'sludge boats', out into the Irish Sea and taking sea water samples - I only spewed up once, during a gale; the boat was rocking from side to side and I had to carry on measuring and collecting water samples.

After two years my parents helped us to get a mortgage on a house in Flixton – a new semi-detached.

Memories of this time are eating out then going to the cinema; making home brew beer, lager and wine; shopping at Habitat for house stuff; having loads of energy to decorate the house at the end of a working day; buying our Marilyn mirror at Lymm; driving up north to see the folks. We enjoyed our jobs. We also made our first trip outside the UK – a holiday in Lanzarote.

1979 – 1990 Luton

I got interested in more ‘high tech’ analysis and this eventually led to me to my next job at what is now Glaxo Smith Kline in Welwyn Garden City. I did analytical development and looked after a beefy laboratory computer. We bought a new end of terrace house in Luton. Margaret was pregnant during the move and we had our son Jonathan on May the 5^th 1979. Margaret promptly took nine years off work to bring him up properly. After having quite a bit of spare cash in Manchester, we now had very little. I had a motor bike for a year or two to get me to work cheaply. We decorated our new home and took Jonathan to the park. I’m sure I almost looked forward to work in those days, it was interesting and I occasionally got to write software for the laboratory computer. Round about 1983 I had a vasectomy, which is an embarrassing and subsequently painful operation, but at least Margaret could stop taking the pill which she had been on since 1971.

In November 1984 I became ‘Analytical Services Computer Systems Manager’ all thanks to Alex Henderson who appreciated the power of laboratory information management systems. This proved to be a brilliant move – the job was interesting and it was eventually Alex’s laboratory that was made redundant, not the one I first started in. We were starting to get a bit more cash then, so we went through a startling number of cars – a rusty Renault, a red mini, an automatic Princess which I wrote off one icy morning on the way to work, a white Ford Capri, and finally a smart Granada Ghia, the air conditioning in this car worked for several weeks.

Margaret worked between September ‘84 and August ‘85 at an estate agents office in the centre of Luton - Weekend Secretary/Receptionist

I had a Sinclair Spectrum at this time, so used to waste bits of my life programming in Basic and Z80 assembler and playing games on it. Meanwhile Jonathan was growing up, we used to go to zoos and stuff. Luton was a bit of a dump and we lived in a rather grotty end of it, but we were happy there. Our home computer became an Amstrad (processor speed 1MHz) – don’t you throw your money away, when you look back? – all those cars, computers, carpets, hi-fi’s.

Margaret started a full time job in May ‘88 at the local ‘Lea Manor High School’ She was a ‘Resources Audio/Visual Technician’. We still went back up North fairly regularly to see our families. Holidays while Jonathan was young, were down on the South coast - we stayed in a caravan and toured - deja vous. We did get to New Jersey and Florida though, courtesy of my job. I had already had one free trip to New Jersey to attend the Beckman user group, where I had to give a 30 minute presentation to about 200 people.

By 1989 my job was getting a bit stale, so the closure of my Laboratory came as a pleasant surprise. I was offered a sizeable redundancy or a job based in Crawley – “choose cake or death!” (Eddie Izzard)

1990 – 2001 Stokenchurch

So in 1990 I moved straight on to my next job - Project Engineer / Technical Support Specialist at Beckman Laboratory Automation Operation in High Wycombe, Bucks.

In the first month or two I commuted from Luton, but we soon bought a detached house near High Wycombe in the village of Stokenchurch. This was a good move, from dingy Luton to a largish house near the countryside, we thought we would finally settle down here.

Jonathan went to a school in the village and Margaret took a bit of time off, but soon started working at Try Build Limited in High Wycombe as Secretary/PA to the Chief Buyer and his team. She had finally learnt to drive in our last year at Luton, so now had a car of her own. I was on nice new company cars at my Beckman job.

My job was a bit of a nightmare, very busy, impossible amounts to learn, all the stress associated with hot-line technical support. However, it was well paid, I got the cars and I had to make visits to customer sites all over Europe, the Middle East, Australia and the U.S.A. A list with approximate number of visits in brackets ! -
Scotland (3),
England (loads),
Ireland (5),
France (10),
Belgium (4),
Netherlands (10),
Sweden (6),
Norway (3),
Germany (8),
Switzerland (3),
Austria (3),
Italy (if I had a choice, I would have been born Italian – they are a pleasant bunch of people – French people suck) (4),
Kuwait (2),
Saudi Arabia (this country is just too different – I remember one trip where I went straight from Saudi to Amsterdam – difficult to see how these two places can co-exist on the same planet (2).
Melbourne, Australia (1).

It really was too hectic though (I don’t subscribe to the “I work better under stress” school of thought and that thing where everybody stays late at the office – get a life!). We had no time to decorate our nice big house. We did go for several holidays in the sun though and discovered Fuerteventura, which suits us fine because there are still parts of it which are not touristy and we can just lie in the hot sun.

I left Beckman in May ‘98 – wierd office politics had further compounded the bad vibes I was getting from this job. I headed for a relatively small company called Autoscribe doing the same job (!) but hopefully in a more pleasant environment. Most of their customers were in the U.K. and their software / database was much less complicated than the Beckman system. We did not have to move as Autoscribe were just outside Reading, although the 1½ hours travel to and from the office got exceedingly boring. I was leaving the house at ~8:00 and not getting home ‘til after 19:00. So we still seemed to have little time for ourselves.

In May ’95 Margaret was made redundant by the closure of her office. In my (limited) experience, women seem to take redundancy rather badly.

However, she soon found another job at Monsanto Chemical Sales in High Wycombe – ‘Chemical Sales Secretary’. In ’97 she was made redundant from this job, but got another in the same building – Searle, the Pharmaceutical Division of Pharmacia – ‘European Finance Secretary (Long Term Temp)’. She enjoyed this job, working for a quirky American boss who was high up in the hierarchy. The job ended in redundancy (!) in 2001.

While I was getting stressed out and Margaret was coping with repeated redundancy, Jonathan was taking the bus to his Henley secondary school each day. He left school in the summer of 1994 and did three years at a local college - business studies, then went on to several jobs, basically in tele-sales. Like many jobs these days there was very little inducement to make you stay with a company – so he didn’t.

June 2001 - ? Consett

So - Margaret had faced 3 redundancies, my Dad died in Jan 2001, leaving just my Mum. Living in the south was OK, but not good for the spirit. We suddenly decided to cash-in our relatively expensive house in High Wycombe, de-stress, downsize, de-junk get away from all the madness of living near London. We did not even have enough time to prepare our home for sale, Margaret’s sister Jean and her husband Terry helped to lick it into shape – thanks guys.

Margaret and I are now back in Consett, I’m still doing some consulting work for my last company, Margaret has a job at Consett College of Technology working with ‘Learn Direct’ as an administrator and we are happy, with more time to ourselves. Jonathan is still in High Wycombe, currently working for Rombull, a German company that sells netting (which is apparently, more adaptable than you might think). His page on this site has contact details.

Some Good Films

Dune, Bladerunner, Pulp Fiction, 2001 (but not the subsequent follow ups), Yellow Submarine (at the time), Life of Brian, Shawshank Redemption.

And tele

The Good Life (at the time), Sopranos, The Fast Show, The League of Gentlemen (bit scary this, it reminds me of various people one has observed over the years who were not quite normal - like the muscle-bound Neanderthal who beat his wife up in a fish and chip shop in Hull in front of all the customers).

Thoughts on life so far

We have been lucky; none of the above job changes were part of some great plan. We feel that the variety and hardships have enhanced our personalities. Houses just kept increasing in value – which is fine if you have one. As a young man I definitely ‘lived to work’ - changing times, redundancy and life have proved that this concept is flawed. Certainly today it makes more sense to ‘work to live’.