Past Life Regression

Some years ago when I was a journalist I was asked to cover a session with hypnotist Joe Keeton* in which a number of invited readers were asked to undergo initial tests to see if they were suitable candidates for hypnotic regression.

Joe, from Meols on the Wirral, was at that time featured in a TV series and had brought out a book based on some of his more involved cases.  Before we started Joe warned that people who claim to be descended from Julius Caesar or Marie Antoinette were frequently disappointed to find that actually the lives they remembered were ordinary, humdrum and often squalid.

We persevered and a small group of us – myself included – met whatever standards Joe was looking for. We actually met up with him several times and underwent hypnosis about five or six times in all. Each of us was hypnotised and “taken back” to a time before our current life’s birth. 

Before I go any further let me explain how it went… We all gathered in a small room and went through some exercises – mainly visualisation – and Joe would decide who was most receptive and that person would be hypnotised with a particular phrase. (I can still remember mine and it still helps me get to sleep some times) Then we were asked to go back to a particular time, either a date given by the group or to a significant event in the character’s memory.

In my case I had three sets of memories that emerged.  One was (I think) Victorian but I never really managed to get past a rather scary memory of a fire.  The “group” interpreted it as my having died in a fire but actually it seemed more like some sort of public bonfire and I’d been pushed to the front and I was just scared.   A second character was the one previous to my present life (Going back to five years before my “current” birth takes me to the last few years of the previous life)  That one would say nothing but answered every question with a giggle or a strange noise. I THINK I was in a lunatic asylum and shut away by myself but I don’t have terribly clear memories of that either.

Number three was more interesting. She was daughter of the gamekeeper on an estate somewhere in Surrey – near Farnham – and the first time we encountered her she was cooking rabbit in the kitchen of the house she shared with her father.  One of the group suggested that maybe she shouldn’t be eating rabbit but she was quite indignant and insisted that they were “allowed rabbits”.  She also fancied the squire’s son who was a hunky blond guy in a scarlet army uniform.  Some romantic suggested finding out if there was a happy ending and we went to the squire’s son’s wedding day – sure enough he was walking out of a house by the church with a very beautiful dark-haired beauty befitting his station.  And my character was standing in the crowd watching, like the good estate worker she was!

The bit that fascinated me most, however, was actually a mistake.  For some reason the group wanted to find out where she died. The breathing got very rattling and uneven and everything was quite dark and they mistimed it. Joe actually let her die. Yes – I really got as far as walking along that corridor with all the hands and the light at the end.  Since which time I really haven’t been scared of dying.  I still wonder if I’d have come back if I’d been allowed to walk all the way. Maybe not.

*Sadly Joe died in 2003. I'm sure he's sadly missed by everyone who ever had the opportunity to work with him.  If you'd like to know more about him you can read it here. 

Not Nano 18 November 15

One of the things I always promised myself was that I would never work for a newspaper that didn’t print on the premises. I couldn’t keep that pledge because times changed and printing was very quickly outsourced to other places, some even as far away as the Netherlands because it was cheaper than doing it at home.

However, when I first started working at Lincoln the print machines were still on the premises at Waterside North. It seems odd that the printing system, the network of huge rollers, was called the web. It was because it looked like a spider’s web, and had nothing to do with today’s world wide web. But I find it odd that the same word has ended up being used for two very different forms of communication.

The machinery was actually called web offset, because the printing rollers were inked and then rolled on to an intermediate felt covered one which then rolled against the paper. This means that the original roller is the right way round – you could read it normally. So the offset bit on the intermediate roller was back to front, as if you were looking at it in a mirror, then it transferred onto the paper the right way round.

What you also need to know is that when you create type on a lino type machine you can’t just fit them onto a circular roller. Imagine you have a pack of cards and you try to roll them into a cylinder. Unless they are very well fixed at the central point you will have a shower of cards.  And that’s what happens to the lines of type if you try to set them up then curve them around. So what happened was that the slugs of lead with the words on them were set up into a flat tray – called a form – and then a slab of wet card was pressed onto it to take the shape of the words.

Once that dried it could be lifted off and curled round to create a new mould. That was used to create a curved metal shape that could be fixed onto a roller to begin the offset process. It was a very complex series of actions and it was needed for every page. 

One of the things about ‘hot metal’ was the smell. There was a distinctive aroma around the print works. It was the kind of smell that triggers amazing memories. It wasn’t like any other hot metal smell I’ve ever experienced.  You might be familiar with the smell you get from steam engines and the hot metal print smell was almost but not quite the same. It was distinctive and if I ever smell it these days I will be straight back in the building at Waterside, wandering through the print works.

And something else about having the web on site was the noise. You didn’t quite hear so much as feel the machines starting up. They were huge and heavy and had to start up gradually but built up slowly to a fast, rumbling  spin. Knowing that the web had wound up was a really exciting time. Everything was finalised. It was too late even to add ‘stop press’ by then, In spite of what it was called it never happened. You had to have everything ready for when the switch was thrown.  

It was the final stage of getting newspapers ready for delivery. A proper web offset machine would have cutting and folding systems at the end of the run. So we put news in one end and papers came out the other.  I loved it. And I swore  I would never work anywhere that didn’t have the print works on site.  Sadly, Lincoln was the last place I worked that had printers in the same building. And we soon moved out of Waterside and into offices over a local supermarket. It was never the same and I missed it desperately.

Sometimes we helped ourselves to a freshly printed paper off the end of the web to be among the first to read it, Genuinely they were still warm from the presses.

Not NaNo 16 November 14

Once I started work at Lincoln I realised quite how wrong I’d been about my image of the job.  Far from being an ambulance chaser and dealing with corruption every day, I was faced with a great deal of routine that everyone had to do to make sure all the bases were covered.
For example, one of the first jobs every day was known as ‘calls’ and it involved phoning the emergency services to check whether there had been any incidents during the night. It wasn’t the big stuff: if the cathedral had burned down during the night we’d have been called out to it to watch the flames and gather local response. No, this was the everyday small stuff that happens all over the country. It’s a big thing to the people involved, but to the rest of us it’s just a chance to gloat and think, rather them than me.
It was the small fires like when someone let their frying pan overheat. The fire brigade wee called out, the kitchen’s a mess, but the house is still there. Needs decorating and smells of burned chips, but everyone is OK and there’s no structural damage. Don’t get me wrong – a chip pan fire that someone’s daft enough to throw water on will explode and you’re lucky if all you get is a black ceiling. No, that kind of fire gets out of hand quickly and your house burns down.
 But there are all kinds of other fire that need professional attention but don’t threaten life and limb. Someone has a bonfire and builds it too close to the fence.  Pretty soon the fence catches light and then half the garden’s in flames. That kind of story was a great opportunity for the fire brigade to issue a warning about having safe bonfires. and we’d duly oblige y passing the advice on as part of our coverage. You’ve probably read similar things or heard them on TV: The fire brigade has issued a warning to people who are planning to burn their garden rubbish. Make sure you construct your bonfire well away from fences and other flammable items. Have a bucket of water or sand close by in case the flames start to spread, and don’t try to burn too much at once. I can still write those in my sleep.

Then there’s the ambulance call. They didn’t tell us about the ordinary, everyday crises that people face. No heart attacks, no food poisoning, but perhaps if someone fell off a roof while clearing their gutters. Yet another warning to the public to take care.”If you aren’t confident about heights and ladders, perhaps consider calling in a professional”. That kind of thing.

Of course they’d tell us about car crashes they’d attended, and chances are we already knew about them from calling the fire brigade if anyone had been trapped.  They didn’t call them car crashes, of course.  The official term was RTA or RTC, which stood for road traffic accident, or road traffic collision.  And pretty soon you got used to using the jargon when you spoke to the pros. But you made sure to talk about collisions and accidents when you wrote the story.

Technically a collision is an impact between two moving bodies. So two cars can collide but a car can’t collide with a wall. Not unless the wall was collapsing at the time! So you had to take care how you phrased things just in case it appeared in court later. No word or phrase should imply blame on anyone because if you wrote a story, however small and innocuous it seemed at the time, and you made it sound like one party was at fault when they weren’t, that was libellous and you could face a prosecution of your own. 

Last call was, predictably, to the police. They would tell you about all kinds of things that had happened since the previous morning. They would have been involved in many f the things the other two had already told you, of course, but they also knew about street robberies, shop raids, suspicious looking people hanging around old folks’ homes. Usually they wanted your help. “Police are asking anyone with information...” You know the stuff.  They often wanted witnesses to accidents, because no-one was sure who was to blame and there might be careless driving charges pending.
This was the bread and butter stuff that filled the pages and that the majority of people wanted to know about. Perhaps they’d seen ambulances tearing off along their street.  A couple of days later they read about a three car pile-up in a nearby area and so they know a little bit more about what has gone on in the town.  I’m not sure people still care about that sort of stuff unless the ambulance is parked outside a neighbour’s home, then they want every little detail. But we didn’t tell them that. Calls were very formulaic and mostly you could write them up without much effort. They were good on days you had a hangover. They were also how most junior reporters cut their teeth. Meaty stories but a safe area to learn on.  Most were only a couple of paragraphs long, but they were your copy. You knew you’d done them.  They were also small enough to cut out and send to your parents to say “Look what I did!”
Another easy way to start a junior reporter, or someone who just joined the firm, was Magistrates’ Court. You didn’t need to find your way around town. You just had to turn up, sit down and take notes. Preferably shorthand notes, in case you ever had to defend what you wrote later.  I only ever had to do that once and it was Crown Court and many years later when I was an old hand. If I remember I’ll tell you about it later.

Magistrates’ Court handled small time crimes and petty cases. (Petty is, of course, derived from ’petit’ meaning small in French. ) Sometimes the court sittings were even called ‘petty sessions’ but there’s a whole law lecture on why that happens and I’m not going to start it here. If you really  care, go look it up on Google.

So the stories at Magistrates’ were bigger than calls yielded, but they were rarely page leads. Although they could be, in a slow news week. They were governed by a whole host of rules that we’d learned during the pre-entry course. You had to understand the rules of defamation, of course, because you could defame somebody remarkably easily if you didn’t take care how you write about things. But Magistrates’ Court was a minefield. Accuracy was priority. That’s why they taught us shorthand. If you got the facts wrong you could be in trouble from all directions, including the court itself. Magistrates and judges have remarkable powers if they think you’ve held them or their proceedings in court. Contempt is the only offence left on the statute books that still holds an indefinite sentence. In theory you can be put in jail and left to rot until the offended person decides you’ve suffered enough.  That doesn’t happen, of course. In effect you’re sent down to cool your heels then hauled back before the beak in a couple of hours to apologise. And as long as you are contrite enough you’re sent away with a few sharp words ringing in your ears.

It never happened to me, but I did once see a magistrate lock up a member of the public for being unruly. He warned the guy several times and called the ‘officers of the court’ (that’s a couple of local bobbies in case you didn’t know) to be on hand for the final warning. The idiot continued to shout about the injustice that was going on to his mate and so he was dragged kicking and screaming down to the cells. There are always cells under Magistrates’ Courts and iften they link directly to the local police station by means of tunnels. Sometimes they even are the police cells. At the end of that day’s session they brought the bloke back up, now quite restrained and looking deeply ashamed of himself, and he apologised profusely, admitted he’d been an idiot and promised not to do it again. Heaven knows what they did to him in the cells. I’d like to think that all they did was talk to him harshly and point out the error of his ways but I’m a cynic after years of journalism and I know that police officers are human like the rest of us.  I know I’d have been tempted to give him a thick ear if I’d been in charge of him (which is why I’m a writer and not a law officer!) so I doubt if he got away completely unbruised. He might well have bumped against a doorway or two on the way down.  But I digress again, and risk a charge of contempt of court myself for talking like that!

When you covered Magistrates regularly you got to know the returning customers. In a later job, where I became unofficial court reporter, just because I always enjoyed it,  I found a lovely bloke who was homeless.  Without an address to give he was always remanded in custody, because that was how the world worked back then. I’m not sure if it still would, but there you go. Charlie (Let’s call him Charlie for want of a better name and because I can’t remember his proper one. I can still see his face, but his name escapes me.) would wait till about mid-to-late November and would walk into Tesco, where he would pick up a very large, not particularly expensive item, tuck it under his coat, and attempt to walk out.

He made it so obvious that he was picked up by the store detectives every time. At least I assume he was. Maybe they missed him, or chose to ignore him, a couple of times.  He’d be escorted to the police station and put in the cells, where he was fed regularly and kept warm, then sent up before the bench at the next court session.  With no fixed abode he had to be remanded in custody so he spent most of the winter indoors, warm, safe and well fed, awaiting trial.  Some time in spring his case would come up, he’d be sentenced to three months prison but allowed out straight away because he’d already served his time on remand.

What should have happened is that he should have been helped by social services, but e seemed happy with his lot and went on like that for five or six years that I knew of.

Not NaNo14 November 12

The first office I worked in at Lincoln was what I call a proper old fashioned newsroom. It was small, and dark. There were no windows and we spent all day in artificial light, unless we had to go out on a story. That was when journalists still went out on stories and didn’t spend all day at a computer screen emailing, phoning and rewriting press releases.  There were six reporters, or thereabouts. I’ve been trying to picture the exact layout of the office to determine how many of us there were.

We all sat round a large table that was divided into ‘personal space’ by means of very low battens fixed to the surface.  They weren’t high enough to stop anything drifting over from your neighbour’s space and there were frequent squabbles over people who didn’t keep control of their paperwork.
Everything was on paper back then, especially the stories we wrote, so there was a great deal of scruffiness going on. Life was quite hectic on the days running up to the deadline. The Chronicle – or The Chron as everyone called it – was a weekly paper, so it went to press every seven days. For a couple of days after that we were reasonably quiet, but the pace picked up as the week went along and the day before deadline was busy. Far too busy to let anyone tidy up.

We sat around the table, two down each side and one at each end, with a typewriter in front of us and surrounded by bits of paper. There were phones on the desk, of course, so we could contact the outside world if we needed to, and there were low-slung lights hanging from the ceiling, with cone shaped shades so they cast all their light downwards towards our work area.

If you needed space to work by hand, such as when you made a phone call and were taking shorthand notes of the conversation, you tipped your computer up onto its back and pushed it towards the centre of the table to make room. Consequently the space between the typewriters, at the centre of the literal ‘newsdesk’ became stuffed with crumpled sheets of paper from a huge variety of sources.

Once in a while we would have a sort out and throw some of it away, but mostly it was a tip. I can’t imagine how anyone would get away with it these days because we all smoked back then. It was common for a work place to be shrouded in a thick fug of smoke. No going outside for a ciggie back then. Ashtrays overflowed into the paper pile at the centre and it’s a miracle that no-one went up in flames.  In fact the only time I ever saw an actual fire was when somebody decided to empty an ashtray into a waste paper basket.  It was a metal one, and some quick-thinking person threw the remains of a cold cup of tea over it and doused the conflagration.

There was another pretty serious hazard in the old days too. Everyone had a lethal piece of kit on their part of the desk called a ‘spike’, because that’s precisely what it was. It consisted of a long, thick wire, sharpened at one end and set into something heavy at the other end. The sophisticated ones could be unscrewed from their base so that you could reach the blunt end easily but others were just set into something heavy, like a lump of lead. The purpose of this ridiculous item was to serve as a filing system. If you had a sheet of paper such as a press release that had important details on it, like how to contact someone, or figures that you’d used in a story, you would slam the paper down onto the spike so it could be stored on your desk.

Sensible people bent the top of their spike over so they had to ease filed papers onto it gently, rather than risk putting the wire through their hands. It also meant that if anyone tripped over something and landed on the desk (not as unlikely as it sounds – we were quite unruly people!) they didn’t end up with a sharp needle through the chest! Everyone’s spike was personal. You wouldn’t dream of filing something you’d used on someone else’s spike, and you wouldn’t dream of looking through the old papers on anyone else’s spike without their permission.  I used to fold papers up before I spiked them and put them on carefully so they didn’t take up much space. Others just spiked them flat, so the surface area of desk they took up was about A4 by A4. To make matters worse we still had a few people using foolscap back then for officialdom, so an occasional piece stuck out even further.

But I folded mine and left them neatly arranged parallel with each other. It meant  that I could find information easily and didn’t have to take anything off the spike to get at what I wanted to know. Letter heads would have addresses and phone numbers and even logos neatly in the  top right corner, so I could sift quickly through the folded bits to get to what I needed.  Of course once in a while you had to get at the rest of the information on the page – especially if it was a letter or a press release. That was when the scruffies had the advantage because they could ease the upper items away from the paper and read across, ignoring the wire through the middle. With my scheme I had to take the paper off the spike and unfold it.

That was where the unscrewable base came in handy, because you took off the base and slid all the papers down the  wire and off the bottom until you got to the piece you needed. (Or you slid them upwards if it was a more recent paper.) But at least with a removable base you had a choice.  If you were really in a hurry you’d just rip the thing away, remembering to ‘keep the place’ by creating a gap where the old thing was. And if you were sensible you put it back when you were done, because you never knew when you’d need that information again!

When you wrote a story back then it was put onto small pieces of paper. They were about two thirds the size of modern A5 and they were used landscape, not portrait. That was to make it easy to fit onto the printer’s compositor machines.  The ‘comps’ as we called them, had clips on their machines to fix the paper at eye level and copy type into the mechanism.  Their keyboards were a mystical arrangement based on the old drawers of loose type from centuries ago when type was first invented. The commonest letters “ETOIN SHRDLU” were closest to the bottom of the keyboard, just as they were in a drawer of type, and the less common ones like Q, X and Z were around the edges.

A modern ‘Qwerty’ keyboard uses a similar system, except the arrangement includes a mechanical dodge to prevent the typewriter from jamming. The keys are arranged so that the commonest are close to the centre, but they are also set up so that the mechanical arms were less likely to get in each other’s way.  So S and H, for example, are on opposite sides of the keyboard so you use opposite hands and they have time to return to their proper places whenever you type ‘sh’, which happens more than you’d think.  None of this is relevant in a modern computer keyboard, but the existing qwerty layout is a throw back to mechanical typewriter days.

So, when you wrote a news story it was set out in a special way to help everyone who handled it after you. If you look at a newspaper you might find that the first word in a story is in all capital letters. If it’s a main story on the page you might also find that the first one or two paragraphs are in a larger type face.  (Font size. That’s another hangover from the old days. A ‘font’ was what they called the complete set of letters in the drawer of type. It’s also why they call it upper and lower case. Because the capital letters, which weren’t used as often, were placed above the little letters. Imagine a type setter having to reach out for each individual letter to set out a line. The ones that were most used were near the front. The lesser used capitals were further up. To save on the arm movement.  This bracket should really have been a footnote because it’s a lot longer than I planned!)

In order for the typesetter to know which font size to use he had to have instructions written on the bit of paper with the text on. It was the sub-editor’s job to plan pages and work out the layout. An upper page or lead story was probably in a larger font than lower down the page. Often the first two paragraphs were in a different, larger size than the rest of the story.  The sub would write on the paper an instruction that said something like “first par 14 point first word all caps” Par 2 12 point”.
The journalist would never put more than two paragraphs on the first piece of paper so the sub had room to write and the comp had clear instructions.  Paragraph three and beyond went on to another piece of paper.

There were two other things that needed to be traceable along the line through the print system. One was who wrote the story, the second was which paragraphs went together, in which order. Your name (in full so that they knew how to spell it if you got a byline!) went  in the top left hand corner. In the top right hand corner you put a single word that summed up what the story was about.  For example, if I was doing it with what I’m currently writing I might use Lincoln.  So, the first sheet was labelled Lincoln 1, the second sheet was Lincoln 2 and so on.  You had to choose a word that wasn’t being used elsewhere, so a four page pull out about the city of Lincoln would get very confusing if everyone used that. So I might use layout, or newsroom, or something like that. If it was desperate I could use Lincoln newsroom, but two word catchlines were frowned upon.

The phrase was set with the text by the compositor and continued the journey until the pages were laid out close to the end of the process. In theory the setter removed them all once the type was in place, but sometimes they were missed. And that’s when you realised why they drummed into you from the very beginning not to use anyting comical, offensive or potentially defamatory. Because you could be sure it would be the one time it got left in and was seen by the thousands of readers.

Not NaNO13 November 11

Once I completed my pre-entry course I found it fairly easy to get myself a job in Lincoln on the Chronicle. I’d secured a place before the end of the year and I even had chance to work on the Lincolnshire Show for a day before I started. It  was a way to meet some of my new colleagues and to find my way into the job in a relaxed kind of atmosphere. Not to mention chance to try lots of great food and drink produced in the county and to get my feet muddy.  It was massive fun, and I didn’t have to do very much. Just follow round one of the others and go with them to cover various tings to do with cows.

I didn’t know about the parade of the beasts back then. Apparently they walk some of the finest animals around a ring on one day and the judges pick the ones they think are ‘best’ for some reason. Then the ‘winners’ are taken off to the slaughterhouse to be killed and brought back to the showground the following day and be shown off as meat. Yes, I know that’s what beef cattle are for. And yes, I’m partial to a bit of steak when I can afford it, but I’m not used to meeting my meat, so to speak. Or at least I wasn’t then.

Douglas Adams did a bit about that in one of the Hitchhiker books. He probably went to an agricultural show before he write it. One of the Doctors Who played the cow in the TV series, I remember. I can remember he, or it, offered Arthur Dent a piece of liver. “Should be lovely and tender by now. I’ve been force feeding myself for ages.”  Arthur declined. I felt a little like that myself at the time.

So I was taken on at the Linolnshire Chronicle, initially based at the Waterside North offices in the city centre, as a junior reporter. We had seven editions and I was responsible for one of the northern ones, so I got North Kesteven Council in my folio as well as the Minster and castle. Back then the castle wasn’t quite the tourist attraction it is today. Back then it was a working court house. (still is, a bit of it.) where I went to cover inquests. The coroner’s court was in the bit that’s now the souvenir shop, if you ever go and visit. The view out of the window was stunning and I’d often stare out in the more boring bits, and look at the glorious Virginia creeper on the crown court building at the other end of the castle grounds.  You could see it turn from light green to dark green and gradually to a stunning, rich red as the seasons progressed from spring through summer to autumn. Magical.  It’s odd the memories you keep,isn’t it? 

Not NaNO12 November 11

Latest update on the word count. I’m still about 4,000 and a few short of where I should be by the end of today.  I’m not sure how that happened. I only missed two days , though I also missed two days before that, but I did my best to get caught up with those, or at least not to get further behind.  I need the calculator again. Four days at 1667 words a day is 6,668. So how am I still 4,000 words short if I’ve written more than 3,000 already today.

Another quick count... IN fact I’ve written 3,398 today so far. So if you subtract that from 6,668 you get 3,270.  Oh well ,it’s still the equivalent of two days writing so I’d best get on with it.  While I’m on the stupid calculating front I might do a really silly calculation. If I’m managing about 30 to 35 words a minute, let’s go for the lower target of 30, that means it’s going to take 1,667 minutes to finish. (Now that’s creepy!) Or almost 28 hours.

So theoretically if I can manage to type for an hour a day I should have it sussed before the end of the month. But I’m not managing an hour a day am I? Today’s gone well. In fact I think I’ve been typing for about three hours today. I could just let it go, I suppose and do more tomorrow. But I want to do things for my life tomorrow.  I have a life, believe it or not, and I want to spend a bit f it on me tomorrow. So let’s not waste any more of today.  I’m counting these progress discussions, even though they’d never form prt of the finished work, even f there ever is one.  But it’s not getting my story told.

Back to my days at Sheffield learning to do this mythical subject of ‘journalism’. They also took us to other places to experience life. We attended a Derbyshire County Council meeting; planning if I remember rightly. I had very little idea of what was going on, considering I studied public administration as part of the pre-entry course. It showed us what we were letting ourselves in for, because I suspect all of us at some point in our careers sat at a very boring council meeting and tried to work out what was going on.

They took us to the House of Commons to see the mother of parliaments in action. It was quite impressive, even if I did decide that being  an MP was a doddle.  The idea was that we were supposed to see how our laws were made. Badly, as far as I could tell.  We had a great day out in London and our soppy public administration lecturer let everyone go off and enjoy themselves if they wanted. Two of us stuck with him all day, though and were treated to lunch in a pub in the City and a night at the theatre. We saw Alan Aykbourn’s Confusions, which was odd because I’d seen it before at the Theatre in the Round in Scarborough, back when it was still over the library in Vernon Road.  I knew that being at the back of a huge London theatre in a box where we almost needed oxygen took a lot away from the performance.  There were so many details you just couldn’t see from there and I was used to being at most two rows back from the central stage where you were almost in the action.  I saw the opening night, for one thing, and Alan Aykbourn uses a lot of local people in his work. One of the characters was actually sitting in the audience that night and not a few people realised who it was based on. We got none of that in London.

But it gave us an experience we hadn’t had before. I’d been to the theatre in London before but only to see big productions and musicals; not intimate theatre. Take my advice – if you ever want to see an Aykbourn play go to a small theatre and sit as close to the front as you can.

That’s what the journalism course was all about. It was to give us as many experiences as possible so that when we finally went out into the great big world, armed only with a notepad and pencil we wouldn’t be fazed by it. It certainly prepared us for the opportunities we would get working in newspapers. The people we would meet; the places we would go. The chances we would have.  They even sent us for a day working at a real newspaper – the Sheffield Star -  with real, qualified journalists, who took us out to do proper stories, or at least to watch them do them.  We were all allowed to write something that had a chance of reaching print by the end of the week. Nothing massive, of course, we weren’t qualified for the big stuff, but a short press release that needed rewriting, an announcement of an event, things of that sort.  I was delighted a few days later to spot my piece on a paper being read by someone on a bus. I wanted to rush up to them and point to the story and say: “I wrote that! Read it now!” I didn;t of course, but I had a huge smile on my face for the rest of the day. What I should have done was go out and buy a copy of the paper and cut out that story to begin my cuttings book.  I didn’t do that either though.

I didn’t get quite the same thrill again until the first time I bought a portion of chips and found my byline on the paper wrapped round them. That was a few years later, when I worked in Lincoln and had taken over the Market Rasen office to prepare for my final exams.

I’ve not explained yet about the qualification system in journalism, have I? It’s different these days. They’ll take on anyone who’s prepared to write for buttons and work long hours.  But back then you were expected to know your stuff. You had to understand people and how the world worked and what would happen if you libeled someone and how you could libel someone.  After completing a full academic year learning the basics of the trade you were taken on by an employer and signed up for a two and a half year indenture, near the end of which you took a qualifying exam called the proficiency test.  It was a tough day. Four exams in 10 hours. And you had to pass them all. You were on something like two thirds of a qualified wage until you passed proficiency and didn’t get a proper wage until you did.

You couldn’t leave in the intervening time and you had to do more or less what your employer said. We had a strong union back then. In fact the NUJ had a long running strike at East Midlands Allied Press in Kettering just after we all finished the pre-entry year and the struggle resulted in much better wages and conditions than before. For example, you used to have to work as many hours as there were stories to fill, so if you didn’t get everything done by five you just kept typing. Often you wnet straight from the office to a council meeting in the evening, covered that, returned to the office and carried on typing till you finished everytign that had been on the agenda.  But the Kettering crew fought for a fixed hours week (well fortnight actually) and a maximum working day. They also got a pretty hefty pay rise.  Once EMAP cavedin it was only a matter of time before the rest of the big publishers saw the writing o the wall and gave everyone the same. The NUJ was a strong group back then, and got what we fought for, even though the printers didn’t back us.

Thing as, the printers held the power back then. If an editor was prepared to break the union agreement and get part timers in it was more or less possible to produce a newspaper, because the printers would still set it and print it. But if the printers went on strike – no paper.  The thing was, when the computer revolution finally hit newspapers (actually it was pretty early on i the life of the work computer.) Journalists accepted something called direct input. It meant that we could put text into the computer, the sub editors (who were journalists) could edit on computer, and then send the finished article through an automatic system to come straight out of the machines and onto the rollers.  We no longer needed the skilled compositors who had been the ones to put our copy into the system and set up the pages.  Their union tried striking, of course, and asked us to support them, but we told them where to go. They hadn’t supported us, so we didn’t really care if they would be out of work.  What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.. Some of them retrained. Most of them were out on their ears.  Serves them right for not supporting their brethren in the earlier fight!

I’ve digressed again haven’t I?  I was talking about what journalism lessons were and then I moved on to the exam system and indentures and somehow got onto unions and sticking it to ‘the man’ to get the best pay and conditions we could.  Some time later we secured what EMAP had started by having a national strike and every local newspaper in the country was affected. By then I was working up in the frozen North for a wholly different newspaper group but I’ll get on to that eventually. Perhaps. If I think it’s relevant to the tale later.  I suppose it might be included in a chapter about meeting famous people. Because that was where I spent an afternoon watching Elton John get drunk, and learned the recipe for a Slow, Easy Comfortable Screw Against the Wall cocktail. But that is another story.

Not NaNo 11 November 11

So by the time I get to the end of this bit I shall have at least written something for every day, even if I didn’t write every day. I’m still four thousand words behind where I ought to be by the end of today if I want to meet the November 30 deadline of 50,000 words.  I’m about 35,000 short to be fair. But I guess I can write something every day so I dn’t  fall too much further behind. I just need to get caught up on today’s total.  So I think I should try a bit harder. I’ve timed myself and I knocked out about 400 words in 20 minutes, which isn’t bad as this sort of thing goes. It means I’m tying at about 20 words a minute (doesn’t it? There goes my maths again. 400 over 20 is 40 over 2. That’s 20. yes. )
I should be able to type faster than that but of course I also have to think of something to write about. And I also don’t realy like typing on a flat keyboard because as I think I already explained somewhere I’m used to a sit up and beg manual machine and I could probably type just as fast on that and be less uncomfortable.  I’ve got myself a cushion to boost my seat because the table’s higher than my chair. I also switched on a the little air bower heater because it’s old in here and our proper heating isn’t due to come on for a few hours yet.  Hence I’m rather hunched over trying to stay warm while I’m typing and it isn’t doing me any good st all. In fact I hurt rather badly.   If my health and safety manager at work saw this she’d have a fit!

I’m also coming down with a cold I think. I had a sore throat during the week and I’ve coughed and sneezed a few times and this morning my nose is starting to run. (The only part of me that ever does!) I blame the children’s swimming lessons that go on at the smae time as i ever go swimming these days. Change of routine means I’ve had to change my swim time and so the little darlings are in the other side of the pool while I’m swimming and they’re wiping their snotty little hands all over the changing room where I have to get undressed and shower. Not good.  But this isn’t supposed to be a rant. This is supposed to be a memoir about my writing life. So here we go.

Moving on from the trip down the mine we were also taken around Tinsley Wire Works, also near Rotherham, I think. It was a huge factory place with a lot of hot things that scared the living daylights out of me. Frankly, I suspect if I’d had to choose between the steelworks and the pit I might actually have chosen the pit.  Fortunately I didn’t have to. My overwhelming memory of the wire works was that everything was very big and very hot. White hot in fact, and if anything had splashed or spilled on me I would have died quickly in agonising pain.

There were also huge hammers that crashed down onto the semi molten metal to begin the shaping. |if you imagine they were trying to make a massive block of steel into a very long, very fine wire, you can see how much pounding and rolling and general brute force was needed to make it happen.  Of course they had to make the steel first and they put lots of stuff into a furnace to create it. I know there was iron in there because that’s how you make steel. and there’s carbon too. I know that much from chemistry and my archaeology degree. Not sure what else went into the mix though. I suppose they told us, but I was too busy being scared to remember. So they mixed everything up in their huge furnaces and when it had boiled for long enough they poured it out into blocks.

I an vaguely remember something from my early childhood about pig iron.  It’s called tat because they used to think the iron ingots looked like piglets feeding from a mother sow. It’s to do with how it’s poured. Into one long channel with side channels so that eventually you get a shape like a huge capital E with extra arms.

So that’s sort of what they did. They tipped the molten steel into the ‘pigs’ and left it to cool. There were sparks. Lots of sparks. I remember them, like massive fireworks going off very close to us. I hated that bit. It was noisy too. Like rockets and Roman candles.  I’ve never liked fireworks that much.  Huge, public display ones a long way off are fine. I can appreciate the colours and the light and the fountains, but I’ve never enjoyed back garden ones that I had to stand within a few feet of and watch them thrown fire into the air. And please don’t ever hand me a sparkler. Those bits might not have enough latent heat to burn you because of their size, but it sure feels tome like I’m being attacked by something tiny that’s armed with sewing pins!

So you can imagine my terror at standing within a few feet of a massive vat of melted steel being poured into a hole in the ground, throwing off presumably large sparks that were all a dull red. Not white hot any more – but dull red was enough to hurt, I’m sure.

and that was just the start.  After they made the pigs they had to bash them out into longer, thinner shapes. They were kind of square in cross section and they started by hitting them under the drop hammers. Each one had to be pounded along its length and then turned through 90 degrees and thumped again to turn it into a  longer, narrower pig. and this went on until they were small enough to fit between the rollers.

Once they were narrow enough they were run through a series of rollers that got tighter and tighter until the slightly longer and slightly narrower block of steel became a much longer (by a couple of miles) and very very much narrower wire.  And at the far end of the factory were huge winding machines that were gathering up the finished product and twisting it onto drums so it could be transported.

The whole place was large, loud, hot and, as far as I was concerned, very frightening. It all seemed to be happening without warning too. At least in teh mine we were told what would happen where, and more importantly, when. In teh steel works it seemed like huge, unpredictable monsters had been let loose and some of them even breathed fire!

I wasn’t popular in a later discussion when we were asked to talk about our impressions of the places we’d been. I said I found the steel works much more frightening than the pit and I think I would prefer to be a miner, if I had to be either. Many of my colleagues were  from mining families and a few had even lost people in various disasters over teh years. Grandfathers, uncles, even dads had perished. Or most of the locals knew someone who knew someone, in that tight community kind of way.

Whatever, the places were both well outside my experience and not something I ever wanted to try again. I’ve been down fake mines and heritage mines since then, always on railways for some reason. Perhaps the old cage idea is too dangerous to turn into a museum – because that ‘s what all British mines are these days, either closed or museums. I’ve seen the sanitised versions that never seem to manage to portray reality. They concentrate on the sense of pride and the skill that was needed. They don’t talk about the dirt and teh cold and the damp and teh coughing diseases. They show the intricate coal carvings that some of the miners did.  You can even buy souvenir coal ornaments to put over your convenient, clean and safe gas fire mantelpiece.  Heck, I’ve got one! It’s a dragon.

But you don’t get the sense of ground in dirt. About however much you scrub in the pithead showers you’re never going to get the coal dust out of your wrinkles and your private places. About the colour of your snot from breathing the dust, and how miners developed a taste for snuff because it was the only way to get the filthy dirt out of your nostrils. And how miners’ handkerchiefs were always brown, to cover up the stains of the coal dust and the snuff.

They talk about the unions and the union bosses who fought to keep the mines open and a fair wage for the workforce, and how eventually the spirit was broken by a Tory prime minister determined not to let the workers win. 

I wonder if others who go down those show mines feel the same way I do. I wonder how many of them look up and think, how thick is the rock over my head and just how much of me would be left if it suddenly collapsed?  Not to mention how long it would take them to dig through it and perform a rescue if I did survive a rock fall.  And I wonder how those men who used to work the pits ever managed to forget the crushing weight of that roof above them.

Let’s just say that I’m pleased I didn’t ever have to do either of those jobs. and in the end I didn’t have to talk to miners or steelmen as part of my job. I left the Sheffield area when I became a journalist and had to deal with farmers and others involved in a rural economy.

Not NaNo 10 November 11

I’m way behind with my writing this week because I’ve been really busy at work and sometimes after you’ve spent hours editing a 14 page document that grew to 28 pages over the space of three days you just don’t feel like anything other than a large gin and tonic when you get home.  Actually it was a grappa or three, but let’s not quibble over alcohol.

A writer’s job is to imbibe. Bck in teh Victorian and earlier times the best writers would all partake of various semi-poisonous substances that inspired visions and feelings of elation. It’s not a new idea for writers to enjoy their recreational drugs. My drug of choice happens to be alcohol. I was a hevy smoker once upon a time and could quite easily type like a mad thing with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of my mouth. You had to develop a kind of squint to stop the smoke getting into the eye above the fag end so you could always recognise other journos in the pub because they all had a sort of lopsided expression and half closed eye.

Actually in your local pub you were almost certain to recognise other journos because you either worked with them or they worked for a rival publication, and you had to know who they are to see what they were up to. Chances are you had already met them in the press gallery at the local court or bench at the local council and you almost always ended up in the pub with them afterwards anyway.  But once in a while you spotted someone with teh giveaway ciggy scowl who you didn’t know and you assumed it was one of the Fleet Street hacks looking for a follow up on something big, juicy and newsy that had happened recently.

Funny how we always referred to it as Fleet Street even after most of the nationals moved to Wapping. The Grauniad was never at Fleet Street anyway, and it didn’t move. Everyone else moved out East and newspapers were never really the same again. It was a sad demise, and it’s gone even further since the heady days of national strikes.  The internet has killed local journalism because nobody wants to wait overnight for their news any more. Where’s the point in waiting for a piece of paper that leaves dark marks on your hands if you can scroll through your phone in front of Strictly It Takes Two and get everything you want to know.

You don’t get the garden parties and the 100^th birthdays any more, of course, but I never thought people actually read them anyway. Even if I enjoyed writing about my little old guy who lived to about 106 in the end and insisted on a birthday kiss every year! Deaf as a post but lovely and still had an eye for the ladies.

Whatever, I was in the middle of talking about Sheffield and learning how to be a journalist before I got side tracked. I get side tracked very easily. You might have noticed by now, but I think it’s a symptom of Nano that every word counts, even if it’s junk and completely off topic!

I slowly got to know Sheffield after that first lonely, cold, rainy night at teh bus station and I gradually made a few friends. We were an odd bunch. There were only about 20 of us doing the pre-entry course and we were tagged onto the end of a secretarial college. (Which in itself was part of a technical college) So we weren’t exactly like the other students. We were all under 20 at the start of the course, but I was the oldest in the group. A couple of other had done some sort of gap year but no-one else had messed up a totally different course and worked for a year. So I had a bit more experience of the world than most did.

I remember one lescture where Gerry came in and said: “Right I want you all to imagine you’ve been sent to a cocktail reception to meet a bigwig. What are you going to order?” Most of the group looked blank but I thought for a moment about a bar I used to work in and tentatively said: “Can I have a Manhattan?”

“Sure you can,” came the reply. And Gerry started making mixing motions with his hands before passing me my imaginary glass. “Do you have any idea what’s in it?”

“Not a clue,” I said. and took an imaginary sip.

“Well don’t have too many,” he replied before going on: “Anyone else?”

Of course some clever sausage said: “Can I just have a gin and tonic, please?” which rather took the gilt off my gingerbread, but there you go.

There were other topics I knew nothing about, however, and the locals were much better prepared than I was when it came to finding out about them. This was all taking place in 1975/6 which was a time of great employment upheaval.  There were strikes in many places and the government  was doing its best to destroy the unions.  Some of the biggest arguments were in the mines and steelworks. And it was clear that some of my colleagues would end up working on newspapers in the local areas that had mines and works.  Those in charge of the course were determined to give us as wide an experience of life as possible.

I can remember one of the lecturers telling us: “We don’t want you to be faced with an angry miner who tells you that you can’t possibly understand his plight because you don’t know what it’s like down the pit.  We want you to be able to turn round and say yes you do know because you’ve been down and crawled along the coal face. ”

So that’s what they did. They arranged for us to visit Kiveton Park Colliery near Rotherham, where we met miners and travelled down in the cage with them to the working galleries where we could experience the dark for ourselves. Except it wasn’t dark. Mines are very well lit places, at least near the entrance they are. They took us on a sort of train that carried us deeper underground until we reached the ‘sharp end’ and they showed us quite how narrow some channels were.

You don’t waste time digging out rock if the only bit you want is the seam of coal running through it. So your tunnel is as tall as the seam you’re mining. And they still did mine by hand for the smallest seams back then. Yes, you can send a machine through, but then you waste time and effort sorting out the black gold from the duff rock.  A man – and they were always men – can choose which bits to hew and which to leave behind.

The tunnel we crawled through was about three feet high; apparently not one of the narrowest.  We were led through by one of the miners, who pointed out that he was going first so that we wouldn’t be in his way if anything bad happened!. “I’ll be faster that you in an emergency, that’s a fact, and I’m not going to get trapped down here because you lot can’t crawl quickly!” Thanks pal!

Janet was claustrophobic and really didn’t want to do it. She’d been incredibly brave even to get that far. It was very oppressive to think about the tons and tons of rock above your head. But, bless her, she did it. She asked to be at the back so she could determine how fast she moved, and not be in anyone’s way if she panicked. And she crawled along the face. That’s guts! 

I’d already faced my own challenge in the cage on the way down. I hate lifts, and ones you can see out of so you can watch the walls going up past you are particularly scary to me. Not to mention that the way they prevent everyone suffocating down there is to pull air up through a ventilation shaft so that fresh air goes through the network way below ground. f course all that carbon dioxide has to go somewhere  and it leaves by means of a narrow channel that comes out near the top of the lift shaft. If you breathe it at the wrong moment you don’t get fresh air, you get stale, heavy air that’s laden with old breaths of hard working men. You feel like you’re drowning. We had been warned not to breathe in at that point, but of course I mistimed it and got a lung full of nothing.  

 As you crawl along the face you realise how horribly dark and restricting the place could be if the mechanisms designed to keep you alive broke down for any reason. The lights, for example, don’t penetrate far into a three feet high tube. You have a light on your helmet, of course, so you’re never in the dark entirely, but the view you get when you look up is of the backside of the person in front of you. So you don’t look.  You crawl, facing down, watching your hands reach out one after the other and you are deeply grateful that you don’t have to work down there.  But at least you can say to a striking miner that you do know what his work conditions are like.

Kiveton Park was also a fairly dry mine. Not all of them were. Imagine adding an inch or two of mucky water to crawl through and you really know that you are lucky not to have had to be a miner. And you appreciate every piece of coal you ever burn afterwards.  These days most of the coal in the UK has been mined in Russia or similar places, by machine, and it’s not such a good quality as the shiny black stuff that used to be hewn by hand in Britain. It’s rarely used to heat houses directly, these days. It’s used in power stations to make electricity. It means fewer of us have asthma and similar lung diseases, not to mention the poor sods who wrecked their insides by digging it up for us in the first place!