4 of 50

It seems there is too much horror in the world at the moment, so I thought I’d write about something a little more light hearted this week.

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In the late 70’s and early 80’s money was tight and it wasn’t uncommon to be given hand-me-downs. Clothes that an older friend or relative had worn and grown out of and was then given to you and which if it survived the rigours of your use would be passed on again.

Some of my old clothes regularly went to one of my cousins families who had younger children and they in turn passed them on to another cousin. This included clothes from their daughter which obviously were of no use to me, but often we transported them if we were going to see them.

On one such trip on a weekend we’d gone to see my Uncle and Aunt with a bag of those clothes. These were duly handed over when we arrived and nothing more was thought about it. After lunch my Uncle suggested that we go for a walk as it was such a nice day and have a look at the new housing estate that was being built at the end of their road.

I think it must have been a Saturday and there had been workmen there in the morning but they’d obviously now gone home for the remainder of the weekend. This was also in the day before health and safety on building sites was a thing and you could walk around and look inside the partially constructed buildings with no one to stop you.

I remember we’d looked inside a couple of houses and were about to walk into a third. I was in front and went to walk across the concrete driveway of the next house up to the front door. Only the concrete driveway hadn’t set yet. It was still very wet cement, obviously newly laid that morning. I took a couple of steps and quickly sank up to my knees. I managed to extricate myself with a little help from my Uncle and we went back to his house to quickly wash off the cement before it had a chance to do me any damage.

I was lucky, no skin burns or other problems, but my trousers were beyond salvage, and they certainly wouldn’t be entering the hand-me-down cycle now either. The only problem though was that I now of course didn’t have a pair of trousers to wear. No problem there was of course a big bag of hand-me-downs from my other cousins. However they were all girls clothes. After trying to get into some of the trousers and realising that they didn’t fit, the only thing that came close was a skirt. It wasn’t even as if I could get away with pretending that this was a kilt. This was most definitely a girls skirt.

I was mortified. Late 70’s me having to wear a girls skirt for the rest of the day. A GIRLS SKIRT! the shame of it. Fortunately no one would ever know, oh no wait, that’s my Dad taking a photo of me. I was of the age when girls were a thing to be reviled, oh the foolishness of youth. This was a punishment of the severest kind.

Of course I got off pretty lightly. I wouldn’t have liked to have been around on Monday morning when the builders returned to site to find the footprints now cast forever into their set concrete.

Anyway, when we did finally get home that evening, as you can probably imagine, I changed my skirt for something more suitable almost instantly we got in the house, and I have had a new found respect for wet concrete ever since.

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I’ve just come on here to write up a book review (it’s embargoed until 6th March, so pop back then to read it) and realised that the weeds have been growing a bit in my absence.

This is mostly due to concentrating on my Fifty From Fifty newsletter which has been going for a few weeks now. I’m not cross-posting those entries to the blog as I wanted it to be a stand alone venture which ultimately will come to an end. If you’re interested in reading it you can do so at the link above and you can also subscribe there to have it delivered directly to your email inbox. I’ve also had a couple of busy weeks with work, trips to the vet and sorting things out for my Mum which has left me little time to write or at least write coherently (if I ever do).

I am hoping that perhaps I can free up some time to write a little more here going forward but I guess we’ll just have to see how that pans out.

3 of 50

The UK has been swept by quite a few storms recently, many areas in the North of England and Scotland have been without power for many days and weeks as high winds have brought down power lines. Until this last weekend however there hasn’t been much to speak of in my part of the Country, but now we’ve had Storm Eunice.

In my fifty I can remember many storms, some with silly names and many more that were just storms. The ones that stick in my mind though were in 1987 and 1990.

The hurricane of 1987 (it technically wasn’t a hurricane, but that names sells more newspapers and books) was a proper storm. Fortunately it arrived in the middle of the night which probably saved many lives, even though 18 people were killed. I would have been 15, and I was woken in the night by the howling winds and sounds of things being thrown around, breaking and general mayhem outside. The power was off and it was difficult to see what was going on outside so I did what any 15 year old would do, I went back to bed. I lay awake listening to the sounds of breaking glass (the greenhouse in our garden being dismantled by the wind) as the mayhem continued, and ultimately went back to sleep.

In the morning I woke as usual and went about the usual routine before heading off to school. I said goodbye to my Dad (my Mum was working nights at the time and unsurprisingly hadn’t made it home yet), so he was seeing me off to school before going to work (he couldn’t actually get to work, so eventually they came and got him). He worked for BT and was about to have a very busy number of weeks.

I walked out of the house and to the end of the drive and started to realise just how bad things were. Looking in one direction I realised that the school bus was going to have to find an alternative route as a tree was down across the road. Then turning to walk to the bus stop realised that there probably wasn’t going to be a school bus that day as there were another two or three trees down in the opposite direction as well. No school bus, no school.

Looking back, those trees were much older than I am now and probably than I will ever live to be. Trees hundreds of years old wiped out in one night.

The storm of 1990 hit in the middle of the day, and as a result more people lost their lives. I was at college at the time studying A-levels. By early afternoon we were told that lectures were cancelled for the rest of the day and we were to go home. For me this meant trying to get a train home. I tried walking to the station from college but it was virtually impossible to walk upright and in anything resembling a straight line. The wind would push you over or just as you were making progress by leaning into it at 45° would cut to nothing so that you would fall flat on your face.

Of course when I did eventually get to the station there were no trains, nothing was running on time. A train did come along after a couple of hours and we were all advised to get on it. It was going to the end of the line or as far as they could get if they found the line blocked, and stopping at every station along the way. We’d made it about halfway to where I needed to get to when the train stopped. Eventually a guard appeared and told everyone to sit on one side of the train as there was a tree partially blocking the track but the driver thought he could push through it. Sitting on the other side of the carriage meant that if any windows broke, hopefully nobody would be covered in glass. [A couple of thoughts here. This is before trains had recorded announcements, so the guard literally had to walk the length of the train and say the same thing in each carriage. Secondly these trains were already pretty beaten up and had been in service for a long time, they would ultimately stay in service for many more years, but it’s clear that the driver wasn’t bothered and probably those old trains were better built and more able to stand up to a bit of tree pushing than anything we have now].

We managed to push through the tree, no windows were broken, but a branch did manage to unlatch one of the doors and we carried on to the next station with the door open until someone was able to shut it when the train stopped moving. We made it to where I in theory had to change trains, only that was as far as I was going to get on a train that day. The winds were starting to ease and I made the rest of the journey home uneventfully on foot.

So how does Storm Eunice compare? Well it (I’m sorry I know the storm has a female name, but I can’t refer to it as ‘she’), started for me at least as an Amber wind warning and then rose to a Red. We never had pretty colours to describe the wind back in the 80’s and 90’s. I appreciate weather forecasts have never been an exact science and I think we got off pretty lightly.

Through the red phase we had a few strong gusts, no real damage that I’ve seen locally – a few fence panels down and an odd branch and the power stayed on throughout. I haven’t yet seen anything significant locally close to what has been reported elsewhere.

The yellow wind warnings that followed over the weekend and is still in force as I type this has been much worse. We’ve had a much more consistent high wind speed with higher gusts and it’s been going on for much longer. Hopefully it will be slackening off in the next few hours.

I think we’ve been lucky though, a few miles to the South wind speeds of 122 mph have been recorded and sadly people have lost their lives. Eunice appears to have skirted us without any real drama and certainly nothing approaching the 1987 or 1990 events, although there has been some comparison to those storms. I’m not complaining, I’m glad that we are safe.

2 of 50

In the back of my right earlobe is a bit of grit.

I was knocked off of my bike when doing my paper round one morning. I was turning right, the driver of the car behind me wasn’t paying attention and the piece of grit is the remnants of the gravel rash that I received on that side of my face.

I’ve never really ridden a bike since that morning. Although the driver’s insurance paid to replace my bike, which was a write-off, I didn’t bother. I did my paper round on foot after that day (and once I’d recovered).

Funnily enough I don’t really remember the pain, but I do remember the sounds of the rather late braking of the car behind me on the damp tarmac and to this day that sound can send a shiver down my spine.

I still don’t want to ride a bike, my thing is walking. Despite the encouragement to ride because it’s better for the environment, I can’t. If anything my view is that the roads are less safe today than they were 40 years ago. That said I find it’s also not all that safe being a pedestrian and that is in part due to cyclists (and electric scooter riders) riding on paths and pavements where they shouldn’t be, and probably because some of them feel safer doing that than riding on the road.

At the end of our road is a bus lane and cycle route, no cars allowed. It’s controlled by a set of traffic signals on a three way junction. I’ve seen many a cyclist come down the bus lane and jump the traffic lights rather than wait for them to go green in their favour. Everytime it makes me wince because sooner or later one of them will misjudge the oncoming traffic and perhaps end up being knocked off and injured or worse.

Even if I hadn’t been knocked off my bike as a kid and was still riding, I doubt that I’d be coming down through those lights unless they were green anyway, but the piece of grit in the back of my ear certainly wouldn’t let me do it now. It’s that kind of a reminder.

1 of 50

Hello! Firstly thanks for subscribing to Fifty From Fifty and welcome to the first post proper. You can expect around about another 50 of these, unless of course you choose to unsubscribe which you can do so at anytime via the link at the bottom of this email. Obviously I hope you’ll stick around though.

You are a small select group at the moment, and I hope if you like what you read you might do me a favour and tell your friends? You can do so by clicking on the button below.

I suspect this will at times be a little self-indulgent nostalgia on my part, after all it’s me looking back over 50 years of life and remembering things that have happened to me and the lessons that I have learnt but I hope it will be interesting too. I’m conscious that memories are notoriously unreliable at times but in preparing to write this first post, I did manage to list well over 50 things to talk about, so hopefully some of it is more or less accurate. Which brings me to what I want to tell you about today……

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As I’ve gotten older I’ve developed more of an interest in history than I ever had as a child. In particular military history and political history. In terms of military history my main interest is the Second World War, but from the perspective of war correspondents, artists and photographers. Whilst some were signed up as soldiers many of them never carried guns, their weapons were their pens and pencils, paintbrushes and cameras.

I’ll come back to talk about some of these again I suspect but as a primary school age child I really had no concept that these people existed. The Second World War to me was about Commando comics and playing with my mates reenacting scenes from movies we’d watched on the telly – if only we’d known then that most of those movies were completely inaccurate!

At that age though I was an avid reader. One of my favourite books was Clive King’s “Stig of the Dump”.

I dare say that you’ve read this too at some point? The cover above is pretty iconic, created by Edward Ardizzone who earlier in his career was a war artist:

I own both of these books, purchased probably 40 years apart, not realising at the time that they were the same person, and that those drawings (and words in the case of the latter diary) would peak my interests at such different times in my life.

Edward Ardizzone died in 1979, but had such a profound influence on my young life as a children’s book illustrator, which was his career after the war and his role as an official war artist. He illustrated many children’s books and wrote and illustrated many of his own too.

In my later life he were to have that profound influence again as I tracked down various books, articles and other media on war correspondents, artists and photographers. Many of whom died doing their unarmed duty but bought the war to the civilian populations at home through their words and images long before we had a 24/7 news cycle or social media was a thing.

I came across his name in a compendium about war artists and doing further research suddenly realised who he was and where our paths had crossed before. I had no clue that the war artist and the children’s writer/illustrator were the same person.

This wasn’t the past haunting me but it does prove that you never know when something from the past will appear back in your life at a later date.

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I’m aiming to post something once a week for the next 50 weeks or so, but I haven’t quite yet worked out a timetable, so service might be intermittent to begin with.