About me. Or at least what I can remember.
I also figured it would be fun to write a bit of a background and you know how that goes right? You start with the intention of doing two paragraphs to explain your entire existence and end up with a novel, so please forgive me if this entire explanation things is a little long. That is, of course, if anyone actually reads it...
It begins
My long fear on penguins started from the day I was born in a cold, drafty house of "God" one day in June in the 1960's somewhere in the North of England. Of course I don't mean the cute Arctic dwelling, clumsy flightless birds wearing dinner jackets, but Nuns. This wasn't because my parents had been beaten with a bible or I was destined to be priest fodder. It was because back then it was the only place where you could get a private hospital bed.Luckily for me I grew up quite the opposite. My parents both were atheists and enjoyed their booze and fags like proper adults and I was brought up in a time where people didn't need a sign on their hot water tap saying...hot water.
The good old 1970's brought me many things and one of those being chronic bronchitis which meant I spent half of my younger days looking like Darth Vader in a permanent filtered mask so that I couldn't breath anything nasty in and end my days. This also meant I was whisked away from the city and stuffed in the middle of nowhere, or, as some people call it, the countryside. At first I thought it was going to be awful. No friends, nothing to do, didn't know anywhere and did I mention I looked pretty stupid?
This wasn't to be. It was fookin' awesome. Three rivers met not 200 yards away from my front door where Salmon and Trout were jumping. There was a pine forest to the left and dense oak woodland to the right. Just what a seven year old wanted to see. The closest village was miles away and that looked like it had been there for 400 years. It had.
It wasn't just these things that made it great. It had a castle! Just how many seven year old's had the run of a ruined castle and the left over ruins of an ancient abbey on a daily basis? Not many I'd bet but I did.
Looking at this is it any wonder I love Morrowind?
I think I had a charmed childhood. School was a little strange for me. Half of it surrounded by this and another half in the city once my chest had calmed enough for me not to walk around looking like Bane from Bat Man.
Even when I came back to live in the city my weekends and holidays, entire summers were spent with the ruins, the woodlands and animals. Back then, fishing was my thing. Always at the rivers edge fly fishing and spinning for salmon. When I wasn't doing that I was out riding race horses or exploring the vast empty spaces that sprawled everywhere.
Then it came. 1978. That year would change my life forever. I found Punk.
I'd always been an awkward little twat. You know that guy, the one that wont follow the herd? If everyone was wearing stripes I would want to wear spots. If everyone had round hats then I would want a square one. Didn't matter what it was as long as I wasn't the same as everyone else. Punk made this possible and instead of awkward it was now cool.
I had already attended the Royal School of Music in Manchester because growing up we had a piano and my father was a great player. Oh no, not that classical stuff. He played rock 'n' roll. I of course used to play a bit back then and my normal school had noticed I had something more than the other kids and I became the teachers pet. By the time I was eleven I had already passed all the exams for the RSM (usually you are 16) and then I sat my biggest one. A recognised degree in the theory of music. Twelve years old and sat in a room with a bunch eighteen and overs sitting the exam. I not only passed it but I got the highest score in the country and I was awarded my certificate by the lovely Queen Mother. I was very proud of myself and my primary school teacher than put me on that track was even more proud of me. I wonder if she's still alive? I reckon she would be in her 90's now if she is.
Regardless of this I dropped it all like a brick when I had gone shopping with my mother in the city and saw the one thing I really wanted in a shop window. A shiny blue, left handed Aria Pro II guitar with built in phase shifter. By the end of the day my mother and I were in that shop and she had her cheque book out laying down the law of how good I had to be for the next thirty years if she signed it. It was a very expensive guitar.
I was not only good but I was more than good. I never left my room and my fingers melted playing that thing. By the time I was sixteen I had nine guitars and a bass hanging on my bedroom walls and you couldn't move in my room for wires and amplifiers.
For the next few years I played in several bands and did some very dubious things that only musicians will understand. What do they mean by relationship? I had a new one every night. People always think that it's the singer that gets the girls. Well. I got news for you....
Not only did I love my music but I loved one thing that had just popped up on the radar. Home computers. I saved up my cash and bought myself a ZX Spectrum and spent many a night neglecting my shag plank (guitar) to abuse my fingers once more by typing in massive amount of basic from a magazine that promised me nothing more than a square bouncing around my screen. This wasn't enough.
I became much more interested in computers than I ever was in music, even though I was still playing in a band and reaping the sexual benefits of said hobby. No one ever heard of someone getting the girl because they could type the fastest that's for sure.
At night I may have been a string fondling rocker but during the day I was an apprentice in thermo-electronics for the company that made the nose cone for the space shuttle (most of it is made here in the UK and put together like Lego in America).
After my apprenticeship I left the company and joined another electrical company repairing wonderful things like hair dryers and coffee makers. My move there was brought on for several reasons. Firstly I could walk there from home and secondly it was rumoured they were buying Sinclair. Of course Sinclair made the ultimate stupid business move when they invented the C5 and completely ruined their future.
Just look how happy Sir Clive is in his invention.
Alas we did not buy them out, Amstrad did instead. On the plus side I did get to meet Sir Clive Sinclair but very briefly.
After a nasty break up with the girl of my dreams I became very down and gave up the band to sit in my room playing depressing tunes and hammering out code on my Spectrum. After a string of guitar fuelled relationships that all lasted weeks I finally met another girl by accident. A friend had asked me to quickly stand in as a baby sitter for her as hers had let her down so I dutifully accepted after she had stocked the fridge with fried chicken and cheap beer.
Two hours later the baby sitter turned up and to my surprise she wasn't all 80's. She was indeed a "rock chick", about an hour later she was a cock chick. An Australian lass that had moved to England. Does it get any better than that? Apparently I now know that it does.
It took me about a month or so but I managed to get her pregnant while I was also banging two of her friends and unfortunately I had to drop them and be all responsible. We spent the next six months at my mothers house happy as I ever was. It was great. I had indeed acquired an Amstrad and we played a Gauntlet together every night and Bubble Bobble.
We realised that living at my parents house was not a great idea and I got off my arse and got us a house. A nice big empty house. We had no money. No idea what to do. Never live off the fruits of love. You will keep slipping on the skins.
We man handled the house with the aide of our parents and eventually had it all decorated and ready within a week. The baby (now six foot plus and almost thirty) came several months later. I remember her words as she was up the ladder on the stairs painting the woodwork. "Simon. I think I've pissed myself". She hadn't...
Needless to say, not long after he was born, the above mentioned sodded off back to Australia, tail between her legs and crying how she couldn't handle life anymore. Evidently it was post natal depression. She did leave one thing behind though. My big fat, milk guzzling, shitty arsed son. Early twenties and a single father. Shit! Muuuuuuuuummmmmmy.
My mother helped me a great deal when I was left alone with him and encouraged me to go out and find a replacement mother for him. I did my duty and tested a whole bunch of them but they mostly only lasted until the morning. (I know. I was a slut).
I couldn't do my job any more and had to quit which left me a bit tits up on the money front. Borrowing from mummy and daddy all the time isn't good. An old school friend of mine was nothing more than a shelf stacker in the local supermarket and lived quite close to me now. He had dreams. Bigger dreams than I had. At this point I had an Amiga (bought by mummy of course) and he had an ST. Both used the same assembly language which meant we could talk down the pub without losing each other in specifics.
It wasn't long before we came upon the idea to write a game. We had both had Spectrums before and still had them and we were at this point both very good at Z80. "World Cup 1990" was born.
We failed miserably but didn't give up. Writing libraries and routines we continued with ideas and I even managed to sneak myself in to some real games by real companies. Namely Ocean Software. After a while we drifted but I stuck at it and ended up doing loading screens for games and bits of graphics here and there. I did meet a lot of the famous coders of the time at parties and functions. These geeks partied like rock stars in that era.
I was struggling badly until one day my father called on me. He owned a maintenance company that dealt with rubber and plastics machinery and one of his clients had just purchased a new fangled machine with a "computer thingy" on it. No one knew how to get the damn thing running and I was his last resort (he never trusted them and said they would never do a thing for engineering....right Dad).
I arrived at the dirty horrible dark dingy company and looked at this huge machine. It must have weighed a hundred tonnes and had conveyors and shoots and all sorts of things coming off it. I had never seen anything like this before in my life. (It made Lego bricks). He sat me down in front of this little box with it's guts dangling out of it consisting of wires and "God" knows what. To my surprise I picked up the manual and on the first page it said the words that would turn everything around for yours truly. "HIMA Z80 PLC controller"
My luck had changed and had changed for the better. That night I went home with a bundle of cash in my pocket from my father and a happy heart knowing that I had earned it.
My father also hadn't realised that the six years I had spent in electrical engineering had actually sunken in and I knew what I was doing. I could not only program these new machines coming from Japan but I could fault find and fix the old things from the 1940's that most of the rubber companies here still used. If it ain't broke. Don't fix it.
I spent the next year close by his side and as his eyes faded, mine replaced them. He become a narrator that just gave me encouragement and advice when needed. Things changed again at the end of one big job when I spotted an old machine sat in a yard waiting for the scrap man to do his thing. I took my wages and went to the owner of the company and I bought it. My father thought I was insane but I bought it anyway for £300. We had the thing delivered to our unit and I worked on it over a weekend and then sprayed it all up in nice colours. On the Monday I spent the morning on the phone calling companies we had worked for (and sending faxes. Do you remember those?) and telling them we had one of these machines for sale. It took me a week but eventually someone looked at and I got my first big pay day. Five grand.
Instead of doing it down the boozer which would have been true to form I started looking for more. Used, scrap, broken. Anything that I could fix up. We eventually started a new company to handle everything I was buying and selling and had to employ people to do the work on them.
This is where I gained the name "The Rubber Man".
It got to a point where we were buying complete factories and stripping out their machinery, modernising it and shipping it around the world. This was a seriously big step for me as the buyers now wanted us to install the machinery as well. Not only did they want "us" to install but more to the point they wanted "me" to install it.
If found myself flying more miles than half the pilots in the airports put together. Staying in plush hotels in the Middle East and Asia with their golden taps shaped like dolphins and solid marble floors and tiles. I also found myself in the Eastern Bloc in hell holes with scary people. Then came the greatest one of all. I found myself around the table at a board meeting in Marseilles. Somewhere I just found out I still can not spell even after going there over forty times!
I spent the next two and half years helping them move (amongst other contracts) from France to India. Another charmed life indeed. I was treated like a "God" in India and when I went back to France for the progress meetings I had the luxury of staying in the best hotels in the South of France. Nice was nice. St Tropez, not so much but at least I could spell those two.
Sometimes I used to stay over night in Rome but I have always had a deep seated hatred for anything Italian. I can't stand the food (yes. Including pizza which is just stale bread topped with vomit and cheese), the language is awful and so...stereotypical and it's my right as an Englishman to hate everything that isn't English if I so chose!
Because of my geographical position I was hired to go such fantastical places as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Always coming back to India. My India. For those of you that don't have a history with India like the British then you will never understand how it was for me. They did have a Dutchman on the books and of course some Frenchmen but they was never treated like me. The British are still the Raj over there no matter how you look at it and they treat us like kings.
The Return
I have missed out a great deal but I didn't really plan to ramble on this much in the first place so it's probably for the best I did so I'll just continue from the day I had finally finished the job in India and got off the plane at Ringway Airport in Manchester.Back home in blighty on a hot summers day. It felt like the middle of winter. I had the best sun tan of anyone in the city and the strangest accent after spending so much time with the French and Indians that some words had just left me. I had spoken mostly French out there and my accent was pretty good. I later went to Paris for a weekend and some guys I met there was amazed when I told them I was English! If only my French teacher could have been there. No. Wait. That would have been a little weird.
I remember it was a Friday. Early morning when I returned. I had gone straight home in a taxi and jumped into bed suffering badly from the 14 hour flight I had just gone through along with the 3 hours I spent in a room in New Delhi airport with guns pointing at me. Tip: Never put reels of wire in your suitcase. They don't come up well on the x-ray machines.
I didn't wake up until 7 p.m. that night and there was a few things I really wanted that I had missed. My parents had taken my son on holiday and wasn't due back for several days and no one knew I was back. I showered and got dressed up and ready to go hit the thing I had thought of a lot. The pub. A nice, cool, British pint of German lager and a greasy Turkish kebab. All the things you just can't find abroad.
I had one problem. My wallet was bulging with cash and I was ready to rock but unfortunately the only thing I had was Dollars, Francs and Rupees! You don't get very far with a pocket full of $100 bills in a British pub I can tell you that much. Lucky for me I had the coolest neighbours on the planet and even though they hadn't seen me for so long they had a whip round and managed to make up £100 for me in minutes. I was set for the off.
I went straight to my local boozer where they were setting up that timeless wonder. The karaoke and the place was full of all my mates on their usual Friday night piss up. The hugs went around the wives and girlfriends and the punches in the arm and general jokes from the lads were dished out in good humour and the beer started to flow like, well, beer really.
Two hours later I had had copious amounts of alcohol, a bit of a sing and a few good laughs. A girl had walked in the bar alone with the shortest mini-dress on I had ever seen and then I realised the other thing I had badly missed. Titties! I had the beer already so it was only natural that I needed titties as desert. I hadn't lost it. Took me all of 5 minutes before I was sat with her chatting shit as we do. I must have looked like the Fonz that night because everyone wanted to get me a drink and wave at me. Didn't take long before I was sharing my bed...
Long story short...
We got married a year later and another year my youngest daughter popped out of her. I was still flying all over the place but only in short bursts this time. A week in Hungry, a day in France, a weekend in Kuwait. That sort of thing. We got a house and all the trimmings and even I didn't really want to be with her I did want to get it right this time with my kids. We failed of course. Court battles raged, tears were shed and awful things were said and done.
In the end she got my daughter but I won a court order saying I could see her every day and any other connection with her was between me and my soon to be ex-wife. I did manage to lose my business with all the long drawn out court battles and bull shit but I did get to be with my little girl whenever I wanted and money didn't really bother me because I had made enough cash not to worry too much about it.
That little girl is now twenty and has supplied me with a grandson. Until recently I did speak to her mother quite a lot as she re-married an old school friend that I hadn't realised was a cool guy. (Also he played the bass).
Apart from her the one thing that came out of that marriage was the fact I met my current wife. A beautiful Portuguese woman that looks a damn sight younger than me (but isn't!). I had finally managed a relationship with someone that would last the test of time but we never had children together. In fact, she never had children at all which I know saddens her greatly but, on the bright side, I had enough for both of us and I have donated them to her for the duration and we all lived happily ever after.
Fin!
I skipped all the fun parts like the death of the parents, cancer and depression.
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