Dispatches From a Dilettante (27 page)

Before I had switched the engines off the joint owners of the firm came rushing towards me in apoplectic rage. There has been enough foul language in this book already so there is no need here to add to it here and anyway they calmed down after about two days. I looked behind me to see what all the fuss was about and there, standing magnificently aligned on the back of the three-wheeler, were five of the rustiest old bins in the market.

I knew straight away that the switch had been made at the top of the ramp and so did my purple faced bosses. But in the macho market world to even admit you had been duped would be to lose face and they knew it. The next day on the unloading run I pretended that nothing had happened although, still impotent with rage the night before, I had dreamt vividly about pushing the three lads into the incinerator and seeing them disappear into the flames.

Fitness Instructor – Two Days 1971

A lot has changed since 1971 and if that seems like stating the obvious it might be worth considering the world of sports leisure, health and fitness as it was all those years ago.

There were no gyms to go to unless you were a gymnast or a boxer. The phrase ‘going to the gym’ simply did not exist in the parlance of the day and even the concept would have been an alien one. Video and DVD were light years away and so there were no home fitness videos encouraging us to writhe around in the privacy of our own homes. There were no home fitness machines that are so relentlessly flogged nowadays on Bid TV. Come to think of it as there was no digital TV there would have been nothing to flog them on. The three existing TV channels had virtually no programmes on healthy lifestyles.

It is only recently that cigarette smoking has been banned in public places but that followed a gradual closure of smoking options over the years. In 1971, a lot of every day social and work interaction, whether you indulged or not, was conducted through a fug of tobacco smoke. Offices, staffrooms, cinemas, buses and trains and pubs all allowed smoking and tobacco products were brilliantly marketed in the media.

Joggers were only spotted on rare occasions and often mocked. Female runners on public streets and in parks were simply never seen. Health statistics and life expectancy, in northern industrial towns particularly, provided the evidence of the appalling health of great swathes of the population.

I offer the above as mitigating evidence of my abject failure to improve the health of a small number of the female population of Leigh, Lancashire, as opposed to Leigh, Greater Manchester as it now seems to have become.

A brave and robust group of women had started a keep fit class there, which ran on Tuesday evenings in the concert room of a local working men’s club. About thirty attended and the class was taken by a woman who had been bucked the local trend and become a successful swimmer. When she became ill my girlfriend’s sister, who attended the class, volunteered my services on the basis that I had done PE at college (I had originally gained a place to do History and English but on realising that his involved things like reading and essays quickly switched). She informed me of this after I appeared to have been signed up. This effective ‘fait accomplit’ left no room for escape as she firmly made clear on the Monday before my debut twenty four hours later.

Even I could see the irony of choosing me to lead a fitness session. This was about the only period during my life where I wasn’t doing any exercise. I was skinny as a rake, wore hippy clothes and sported a huge afro hairstyle. These unsuspecting women were going have their fitness sessions taught by a psychedelic brillo pad.

I was informed that in reality that the instructor did very little apart from walking on to the stage and switching the cassette tape of music on. “They know all the moves after that” I was assured. “All you have to do is offer encouragement”. Nevertheless I felt that a little preparation was in order. I dug out a Fred Perry type shirt and ironed it. Tragically, as ironing was an entirely unknown concept to me at this stage of my life, I managed to burn my finger quite severely. When I had returned from the hospital with it heavily bandaged I decided that any further preparation would take place in the pub, which would have the added benefit of dulling the pain.

I arrived early on the Tuesday evening with my girlfriend’s sister who was carrying the all important tape cassette. I was still carrying the residue of a hangover from the previous night’s ‘pain management’ session. The concert room reeked of tobacco and stale beer and the stage was fringed with a sort of tinsel with gold lamé curtains as the backdrop. An old cassette player rested precariously on a broken bar stool at the edge of the stage, but at least appeared to be hooked up to the speaker system.

We did a sound check without realising it was on full volume and ‘Yellow River’, a hit of the day by Christie, blasted out. The club steward came rushing in from another room shouting “I’ll ‘ave fo’go to th’ospital wi me ears” as he simultaneously switched the sound down, after which I was introduced. As my right index finger was bandaged heavily I offered my left hand for the handshake. It was refused on the basis that the bar steward, viewing what was in front of him, had clearly come to the view that this must be the method of greeting that signified membership of some weird hippy cult.

Not the best of starts I felt, but as women were starting to drift in, I climbed back onto the stage. From there I counted twenty eight women chatting at the end of the room as the appointed hour arrived. Twenty one of them were smoking.

Word had got round that I would be taking the class and these strong, friendly, confident, and it has to be said quite large women were now waiting for me to start the class. It seemed quite logical at the time to open my first night as a fitness instructor with “Good evening ladies…..now if you could just put out your cigarettes and take your places we can begin”. Fitness classes of whatever variety normally start with some stretching and loosening exercises and I thought they were going rather well until I heard a women in the second row whisper to her friend “When’s ‘ee goin to get on wi’it?”

Taking that constructive criticism on board I clicked on the cassette player, now at normal volume, and they were off.
‘Yellow River, Yellow River is in my blood it’s the place I love’
. Not only were they all singing but they were doing a kind of breast stroke with their arms which, during the middle eight changed to big arc like movements, before reverting to the ‘swimming’ again. I was clearly superfluous to requirements as I watched them exercise on auto pilot. Even with my limited anatomical knowledge I knew that this was not much of an aerobic workout. I did however, at least have the sense to realise what they instinctively knew.

That is to say it may have had little value as a serious attempt to increase fitness, but as a life enhancing social gathering it was a clear illustration of enduring friendship in a small town and, without coming over all ‘sociological’, was genuinely touching, enjoyable and bloody funny.

By now Dave Edmunds was part way through ‘I hear you knocking’ as I plucked up the courage to turn the volume down a little and offer some minor suggestions as to how they might gain more from the boxing punches they were throwing to the drum beat.
‘You went away and left me long time ago…now you‘re knockin’ on my door…I hear you knocking… but you can’t come in’.
Now there were overhead claps interspersed with the punches and the semblance of jogging on the spot. By the time Rod Stewart came on with ‘Maggie May’, they were actually beginning to work up, if not a sweat, then at least a glow.

Unfortunately, after Rod it was break time and by the time I had got over the shock of knowing that there was a break, given that we were only ten minutes in and just getting going, many had already reached into their handbags pulled out their cigarettes and lit up. With almost a post coital smugness and entitlement they inhaled deeply and then enjoyed the break which was full of laughter and cigarette smoke.

We resumed to ‘Proud Mary’, which at least was the faster version by Ike and Tina Turner and they then kept going for another thirty five minutes. I made further forays to the microphone to add exercise hints which were by and large ignored, and then the track came on which I had been tipped was the final and ‘warm down’ song.

To the violin and piano swirls of Perry Como singing ‘It’s impossible’, twenty eight women made movements like birds flapping their wings in slow motion. ‘
Should the ocean
(slow flap )
keep from rushing to the shore
(slow flap) …
if I loved you
(slow flap)
could I ever ask for more
(slow flap)
It’s just impossible
(huge piano swirl through the scales to faster flapping).

After three minutes when they were all flapped out and schmaltzy old Perry having confirmed the impossibility of it all thankfully faded to a halt, the cassette clicked off, the session ended and we all headed to the bar.

Any minor gains in fitness were quickly negated as lagers, bitter shandies and a few bottles of stout were ordered and quickly downed. Nobody would have considered wine as an option then. I learned more about life in the next hour than I had done at college in the three previous years and laughed my way home.

19.
INADEQUATE INSURANCE 1966

Mine was a pitiful entry into the adult world of work. My abysmal GCE results, which arrived by postcard to our holiday caravan in Wales, were excused by the school on the grounds that my father had died weeks before the exams. On that basis I was allowed entry into the sixth form. The truth was that I hated the constraints of my Catholic grammar school with a passion and consequently had never done a stroke of work.

I stumbled around in the sixth form for a couple of months achieving only a consistency of unpopularity with staff that was almost matched by my lack of friends among the pupils. Finally, as I mention in the prelude, I was dispatched into the wide world after the most of the staff had tired of my shortcomings which were outlined in detail by the Head after he had summonsed me to deliver the coup de gras.

It was a Thursday and the same evening I wrote off a response to a small advert in the paper for an ‘insurance clerk’ and started ten days later. If there was ever a job that I should never have been allowed to do then this was to be it. If there was ever a career that was totally unsuited to my personality and character it was the one I was just about to enter. The world of insurance and I were about to meet head on.

The Chief Clerk looked over his glasses and through the windows of the cheaply partitioned box that indicated his status and kept him away from the rest of the workforce in the dismal open plan office. He signalled that I should go in whereupon he handed me some luncheon vouchers, a bar of soap and a small towel while informing me that I would be allowed two toilet breaks each morning and afternoon. In the six months that I worked for the insurance company those were the only words he ever spoke to me.

Before the trousers of my new cheap suit had touched the chair of my desk I hated it even more than school. In the long run it helped me enormously because, although I probably could not have articulated it at the time, I knew that I would never do a boring job again – whatever the implications.

I fell in with two other equally disillusioned young men and we had six months of anarchic fun interspersed with quiet periods pretending to work. We were on the fourth floor looking across a city centre road where we could see quite well into the offices across the way. Occasionally someone would wave, and one day we held up a sign saying ‘We are prisoners’ with a sad face on. Immediately, a group of girls congregated by a window of the building opposite and held up a phone number. When dialling it we found that they too worked for an insurance company and were equally bored and unfulfilled.

We applied our creativity and energy to setting up a series of ridiculous bogus claims and enquiries about policies. We sent them to their managers and vice versa. Eventually we met in a pub and compared notes on the chaos we had caused, which actually was probably minimal. Although we came up with other more creative scams to slow down work, we never did quite hold our nerve to carry them out. Perhaps the mooted death threats to the chief clerk would have been a bit much.

After three months I was sent to head office in Manchester with other aspirant insurance managers and was stunned to find that there were hundreds of young people there doing equally mind numbing repetitive tasks in a new style sixties high rise office. “We have a ‘beat combo’ playing music from the hit parade live at lunchtime in the canteen” a senior manager told me, proud of the company’s munificence and his own grasp of popular culture.

I was packed off to night school to ‘study’ for some ‘critically important’ insurance exams. It was a talent free zone in the lecture room with a series of charisma free teachers boring the already bored and listless. The unspoken truth that bound us all was the certain knowledge that our lives were going nowhere. I failed all three exams with one of the lowest cumulative scores ever recorded. The kindly manager of the office who lived quite close by understated it when next he saw my mother “We were a little disappointed in Paul”.

I fell on my sword with unseemly haste soon after and beat it back to a college of further education to do ‘A’ levels. The embarrassing suit was dispatched to a downstairs cupboard and I had more enjoyment in eleven months of cramming for ‘A’ levels than I had experienced in the last five years. We were uniform free and treated as sentient human adults by benevolent ‘leftie’ lecturers. After the rigidity of a boys’ grammar school there were now attractive females out of uniform sitting right next to me. On the top floor of a terrace house owned by the college I learned that the words ‘study’ and ‘enjoyment’ could sit easily together in the same sentence. Life was looking up.

20.
THE YEAR OF HUMILATION 1980