Head Rambles

Grandad September 17th, 2007

I haven’t mentioned my mother much to date.

There are reasons for this that I won’t go into.

My mother was English and proud of the fact. Despite the fact that she lived in Ireland for the best part of 60 years, she always managed to retain the English accent, and would always listen to the BBC rather than RTE.

From the day I spoke my first words [I think they were 'f*ck off'?] I had English expressions and intonation drummed into me. After all, I couldn’t grow up like the coarse Irish peasents around me, could I?

This was all well and good [I didn't know any better], but things changed when I went to school. Back in the fifties, history was taught in a very unbiased manner in Irish schools - the Irish were downtrodden heroes and the English were a bunch of marauding invading imperialistic bastards. The teachers loved telling us about the Plantations and the Famine. They taught us expressions like “burn everything British except their coal”. I had a very balanced education.

However, because I had quite an English accent by that stage, I got a lot of stick. Or rather, I go a lot of compass.

My classmates used to take great delight in waiting for some anti-British lesson to come up, and then they would whisper nasty things at me and then ram a compass into me.

I got the point.

I had to rapidly become more Irish than I actually was. I had to develop a thick Dublin accent and curse the Bloody Brits in every second sentence I spoke. It was a matter of survival.

I have matured [a little] since then. The thick Dublin accent is gone. So too is the English one. I bear no ill will towards the British. What happened in the past is ancient history. But when someone asks me if I’m English, I subconsciously wait for that sharp pain in the buttocks.

So if you want to instil a nationalistic fervour in your children - you can’t beat a jab of a compass up the arse.

• Times past
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Grandad September 3rd, 2007

I bought my first car in 1972.

It was an Austin Mini and was clapped out when I got it. It was red, which was great, because when the paint flaked off, the rust underneath was the same colour.

Few of you will remember the first Minis. They had a few distinctive features. One was that to start the car, you turned the key in the ignition, and then pressed a button on the floor to actually start the motor. The other was the windows. They didn’t wind down - they slid sideways.

My Mini was well ventilated. In fact, if you pulled the passenger floor mat back, you could watch the road passing underneath. And it was always damp inside, so I grew a couple of beautiful ferns in the passenger door. Actually, I didn’t plant them - they just appeared.

It was a bit of a squeeze driving that car because I’m over six foot tall, but I didn’t mind that.

It had a personality of its own. Lots of things never really worked properly. The heating never worked, and the breaks used to fail on a regular basis. On one occasion, I was p*ssed out of my mind and the breaks decided to fail completely just as the lights ahead changed red. That car had a wicked sense of timing. I smacked into the car in front in an explosion of glass and rust. The car in front wasn’t damaged as the rust had taken all the damage. I had to get a taxi home. That cost more than the car was worth.

I had long hair in those days, and the police took great delight in stopping me to examine the car. I used to get away with it, as the tyres looked good, and the tax and insurance [£50!] were always up to date. On one occasion I actually got a summons - ‘no illumination on my rear identification plate’.

I went to court. The judge was in foul mood. All the cases before me were for similar trivial offences and as the plaintiffs’ excuses got more frantic, so the fines increased. By the time he got around to me, the fines were running at around the £100 mark.

“What’s your excuse?” the judge roared at me.

“None.” I said, “I knew it was broken but didn’t think it was that important. I was going to get it fixed the next time I was in town”

“At last.” he shouted “A bit of honesty! Fined £5.”

I loved that car. It was always breaking down, but the mechanics were so simple, it was very easy to fix at the side of the road. We had many very happy adventures together.

One frosty morning I went to go to work. I pressed the floor button to start the engine. There was a loud thump from the front, that didn’t sound healthy. I got out and opened the bonnet. The engine had fallen out and was sitting sadly on the ground between the wheels.

I knew its time had come.

I went and bought myself another Mini.

But it wasn’t the same.

• On the road , Times past
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Grandad August 12th, 2007

It’s amazing how much we take for granted these days.

Herself went to the dentist during the week. She got a prescription for antibiotics which violently disagreed with her. So we rang the dentist and he promptly faxed through a different prescription. I was able to nip down and get her the new medication. All in the space of less than half an hour.

Just think about it.

Not many years ago, I could have phoned the dentist, but I then would have had to drive over to collect the prescription [a long journey], and by the time I got back, the chemist would have been closed. Or else he could have posted it, which would have taken even longer.

If I want cash at any time of day or night [you never know when you might need the odd €50 at 3am!] I can nip down to the ATM and withdraw that cash.

Not that long ago, if you needed cash, you had to go to the bank and withdraw it. And the banks had very awkward opening hours. It usually meant taking time off work. So if you wanted to go an the batter on a Saturday night, you had to make sure you had enough cash in your pocket or you were done for. Pubs and shops didn’t take Laser cards [they hadn't been invented] and might take a cheque if you had your passport, a valid cheque card and were closely related to the owner of the establishment.

If I want to phone someone, it doesn’t matter where I am - I just whip a tiny box out of my pocket and phone them.

In the old days, it would have meant a hunt around for a phone box [80% of which were probably vandalised] and then I had to pray I had the right change.

If I want to talk to my blogging friends in America or Australia, I just plug in my microphone and call them on Skype. Free!

In the old days, it would have meant booking a call with the exchange operator. They would then give you a time to call. Even then, when you were making the call, and having a chat, the operator would cut in and tell you that another three minutes were up, and did you wish to continue? And it would cost a fortune for each extra three minutes.

For those of you who have grown up in the modern world of mobile phones, the Internet and the World Wide Web, it must seem like they were around forever. There weren’t. They seemed to descend overnight. and they changed the world radically.

Even now, I find it very strange that as I type these words, that shortly they will be visible in just about every country in the world, for anyone who cares to read them.

It’s no wonder I’m getting paranoid about my spelling and grammar.

• Times past
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Grandad July 4th, 2007

Background:

In 1968, I was a student in Dublin, and obtained a job in the ‘Cave Man’ in Cheddar for the summer. The ‘Cave Man’ was a restaurant/snack bar/lounge/bar complex. I travelled there on my motorbike [a Yamaha 80cc].

On arrival I was assigned the job of running the Snack Bar at the exit to the Gough Caves [it is the first floor block in the photo below - Pic 11].

There were a few Irish there that summer, and one of them [Peter Pilkington] features in the story.

July 10th, 1968

On the morning of the 10th, it was a hot and heavy day. By midday, it started to rain. It was the heaviest rain I have ever seen and within minutes, the pavements were overflowing and the road had become a minor river. As the afternoon progressed, the water on the road became deeper, and stones started to be washed down.

As the ground floor entrance to the Cave Man Bar faced up the Gorge, we became concerned. They were steel doors, and were locked with a bar, but Peter and I decided to try to place an old door across the outside to buffer the rocks that were now being washed down the road. In the attempt, Peter was washed away by a wave and managed to grab a building further down the road and clamber back over the roofs. The attempt to barricade the door was abandoned.

At this stage, large boulders were being washed down from the Gorge and the building was taking quite a battering. The water on the road would have been a couple of feet deep at that stage, and with the slope on the road, it was flowing very swiftly.

I was in the downstairs bar when the steel door finally gave way. I managed to fling myself through the kitchens and I reached the back stairs just as the water arrived.

The Cave Man was bounded on one side by a river, on another by the sheer overhanging cliff and by the road, which was now a raging torrent of mud, boulders and water. We were trapped.

We spent that night in darkness, apart from the lightning hitting the cliffs. That was almost continuous, and was the worst I have seen [and I've seen quite a few lightning storms!]. Downstairs was flooded to a depth of several feet, and there was a constant crash of rocks falling off the cliff onto the roof. Our main concern was for the structure of the building as it was receiving a bad battering. My overriding memory of the night was the noise of the boulders grinding around downstairs, the rocks bouncing off the roof, and of course the constant thunder. It was not a happy night.

By morning, the rain had stopped, and the water had more or less stopped flowing down the Gorge. However, the underground river in Geogh’s Cave had overflowed and was pouring out the cave entrance, so we were still surrounded by water, and the ground floor was still several feet deep. We managed to escape by making our way up, over the entrance to the cave and down to the village by clambering over the hillside on the far side of the torrent.

When the cascade had subsided a bit from the cave mouth, Peter and I roped ourselves together and entered the caves [I had quite a bit of caving experience], as there was some concern that people may have been trapped inside. Fortunately, everyone got out in time. We then explored up the Gorge. The devastation was incredible. Huge boulders blocked the road and great swathes of road were entirely missing. As the Cave Man had acted as a buffer for the rest of the village, it sustained the worst damage, but the sheer volume of flooding was incredible.

We thought our summer jobs were over, but we were kept on to work on the clearance. It was hard work, and I’ll never forget that smell. My motor bike, incidentally was completely buried under water and rubble. I found it because of the wing mirror sticking up out of a pile. I dug it out, and it worked on the second kick!. That must say something for Japanese motorbike technology of the day.

Note that all photos are original with the exception of the last two, which I ‘borrowed’.

• Times past
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Grandad July 3rd, 2007

Yesterday was a very strange day.

It started at six, which wasn’t intentional. I just woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. One of those things that happens with age.

I pottered around for a while and then toddled down to the village to meet a friend for coffee. He is from Somerset in England, so the conversation turned to Cheddar [yes - of cheese fame]. I had spent a summer there in 1968. When I was there, there was a very severe storm that washed out whole swathes of the area.

You lot thing you invented Global Warming and flash floods. You don’t know what you are talking about!!

Anyway, I went home to have a quiet doze, but of course the coffee had kicked in. Anyway, for some strange reason, this blog wouldn’t leave me alone. It was as if the whole world had suddenly discovered it. So I had to spend the day replying to comments, and trying to get my brain together.

Then I got an e-mail from my friend - he had discovered a website that documents the floods of 1968. I read through it. Wow! I was mentioned. OK, it was a little bit obscure, but if you go to Part Twelve, and look down to the bit about Cheddar, you’ll see how “Mr.Gerald Robertson and eleven of his staff were trapped all night”. That was me! No. Not Gerald Robinson. I was one of the eleven. My moment of fame on the web, and I didn’t even know about it!

I wrote to the website. Well, I wrote to the bloke who wrote the website, if you want to be pedantic. I got a reply this morning. He wants my story and my photos, because apparently photographs of the flood are rare. I suppose people were being too preoccupied with saving their own skins and forgot about cameras. Some people are very selfish.

I discovered later yesterday that someone had Digged [Dug?] one of my old posts which accounts for some of the traffic. It actually got 7 Diggs. And it was an old post.

Life is never dull.

And today I have a hangover.

I never touched a drop last night.

Honest.

I hate that.

• Rambles , Times past
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Grandad June 14th, 2007

When I was ten, I was sent to boarding school.

I soon discovered that this wasn’t a place where merry chaps played cricket and then had a pleasant evening roasting a first-year pupil over an open fire.

This was more like Colditz - a dark place where survival was the name of the game. For this was Ring College [or Coláiste na Rinne, as they liked to call themselves] where we could only speak Irish, and you were flayed to the bone if a word of English slipped out.

Mercifully, my memory auto erased itself to spare me the nightmares of the place, but one or two still linger.

One of my memories was of Cheffy’s Vomit. This was the main meal of the day on Friday. It was revolting stuff. It had the look and consistency of wallpaper paste, and had little things like diced carrot floating in it. It was bland, and had a taste of desperation about it. It was served up in a soup dish and we all ate it or starved. I’m sure we should have been entitled to Red Cross parcels, but we were too young and scared to argue.

But why do I think of Cheffy’s Vomit now?

Strangely, it was the news of the Greens’ pact that brought the memories back.

Our current selection of political parties are the Cheffy’s Vomit of the modern day. They are colourless, tasteless, and we put up with them because that’s what we are given.

But there was always that little bowl of peas at one side of the soup dish. I don’t fancy a diet of peas, but at least it was there, providing a bit of colour, and an alternative if you were that desparate.

Now the peas have been thrown into the Vomit. It is the end of alternatives. It is the end of the mildly eccentric bit of colour. We are now stuck with Cheffy’s Vomit for the foreseeable future and it makes me want to throw up.

I know some will say that there are still different flavours in government. But it is very hard to tell the difference. Maybe a 1% difference in proposed tax rates, or a difference of opinion as to where private hospitals are built, but essentially they are all the same recipe.

What we need now in Irish politics is a bit of spice. A vindaloo on the menu, or a bit of bolognese. Even a traditional Irish stew would do to liven things up a bit.

Anything but Cheffy’s Vomit.

• Politics , Times past
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