Proof of Life

More fragmented memories :

I only realised that there may actually be a God the day that one of the most annoying boys in our 1975 apprenticeship year at the Ford Motor Company, Dave Hopkins, almost cut his finger off with his term project bandsaw, even our most sarcastic and grim lecturer "Big Will" was happy that day.

I was living down in Romford, Essex hanging out with a chap called Pete Benjafield who had what we felt was a wicked Ford Cortina dressed up to look like a 1600E and one of my "best ever" friends Mark Gaskill who originated from Enfield Street in Wigan where his dad had a garage. At about the same time I was married (March 1976) I was recruited into the safety engineer program which meant they were going to bounce me around a bit, so I worked at Dagenham forge for a stint which was the most depressing place on the planet, then I was (at my request) transferred up to the Speke plant near Liverpool. We moved everything back north to Skelmersdale, Lancashire.

After planning and having our son in 1978 we settled down to quite the family life for a short time, things at Fords were not working out so I ejected and went working for a company in Skelmersdale called Wortley Conveyers, then onto a mining equipment company in Wigan (Gullick Dobson) fundamentally drafting at it’s lowest level, however they let me complete my Higher National at Wigan Technical college which is where I met Paul Martin (who, after my divorce, introduced me to Karen). Hopefully this entry isn't sounding too much like my resume.

In the middle of 1979 things went sour with the marriage and it started an 18 month spiral into divorce. Dark mental days for your host my invisible friends, dark days indeed.

In the same time zone, to reinforce the phrase "it never rains but it pours" Gullick Dobson made me redundant when the mining industry went into recession, following that I was a die-design draftsman at Alcan in Skelmersdale, likewise, within six months they folded and closed the plant down. redundant again. In 1981 I was officially divorced, broke, depressed and alone.

So, no work available because of the recession, I applied for a grant and went to a teacher training school in Ormskirk, Lancashire doing Mathematics and Art. Nice women to me ratio at the school (8 to 1), at 23 years old I was a born again teenager drinking and ravishing young women. My grant money evaporated as quickly as the alcohol so I had to get an evening job at a credit checking agency, 3 young guys and 126 varied aged women. That was a good year and certainly refreshed the parts that other beers could not reach.

At the end of 1981, early 82, unable to survive on a grant and tired of having a different girlfriend every two weeks I finally got myself the real job at APPH, as I've said, this was a Landing gear company in Liverpool (strangely, right next door to the Ford plant in Speke) and of course I had started seeing this girl called Karen from Wigan and was in with her crowd of young people at the Poacher.

Next time, we'll regress further......