Tag: Durham University

If you go down to the lemon groves today, you’re sure of a big surprise : 2017 : Mar Menor, Spain

 The motionless car stood sideways across the road with its four doors wide open. A road accident? Moving nearer, nobody was visible either in the car or on the roadway. The engine was running and its headlights were bright, but there was no sign of another vehicle or an obstruction the car could have hit. If not a traffic accident, then what had happened?

I was taking my daily early morning run, normally uneventful, along a straight, flat tarmacked ‘agricultural road’ that led three kilometres out of the Spanish village as far as the shore of the Mar Menor inland sea. When the summer heat became this oppressive, runs proved feasible only during the darkest hour just before dawn. Other than an occasional farmer on his tractor, the roads were empty at that time of day as village life did not awaken until ten o’clock. Something about the car up ahead of me was definitely not right.

Wherever I found myself in the world, my morning constitutional involved an outdoor run. This exercise regime had been thwarted only in Moscow where, after several attempts, I was choked by engine fumes and endangered by cars driven along pavements; and in Cambodia where even a short walk in its humid heat immersed you in a sauna-like furnace. I had started running regularly forty years ago as a university student to relieve stress, initially circling the little used 400-metre Maiden Castle racetrack alongside the River Wear a few times, then having built up my regime daily until it reached dozens of laps.

At school, a weekly three-mile cross-country run had felt akin to punishment during Wednesday afternoon ‘Games’ in winter for the thirty of us disinterested in playing team football. Regardless of what the weather might throw at us, PE teacher Graham Taylor would send us out on the footpath up Coopers Hill, passing the John F Kennedy Memorial, the site of the Runnymede signing and Langham Pond, to return to our school Playing Fields more than an hour later. For a cheap thrill at the outset, boys would hold hands in a line and the end one touch the electrified fence alongside the A30 Egham By-Pass, awaiting the periodic pulse that sent a shock through each of us in turn. I am grateful to Taylor for having unwittingly initiated my fitness regime, despite his indifference in the face of my disdain for competitive sport. When I visited his office on my final school day after seven years to purchase a yellow ‘Strode’s’ sweatshirt, he scoffed: “Why would you want that now?” I still have it almost half a century later!

Not that I was wearing it in Spain that morning as, even before dawn, it was already way too hot. As I ran closer towards the car in the darkness, I could see it positioned across the roadway to shine its headlights into the neat rows of the unfenced lemon groves that stretched for miles on both sides. I was close enough now to make out that the car’s back seat and passenger seat were piled high with … lemons. Aha! Even Clouseau would have deduced that I had stumbled across a lemon thief operating under cover of darkness in the middle of nowhere. Despite my temptation to stick around and view the perpetrator, I had no desire to be shot at dawn. Instead, I ran on into the darkness, reached my end-point where sunrise was emerging over the sea, paused and returned along the same route to find the thief long gone as daylight was starting to seep across the landscape.

Friday was ‘street market day’ along the village’s ‘High Street’ where, that week, I spotted a stall with a man selling loose lemons, rather than those from marked agricultural crates. Was he the fruit bandit whose nocturnal handiwork I had witnessed? I never knew and, apparently, neither did the pair of municipal police who ambled through the market. It was an example of the combination of audacity and pettiness apparent in Spain. In the centre of another village, already I had watched an old woman nonchalantly rip out plants from a municipal flowerbed in broad daylight and carry them home, apparently unconcerned who might be watching. Do the Spanish even have a word for ‘shame’?

During another early morning run on the same route, I was surprised to find a woman’s matching check bra and knickers on the ground at the edge of the lemon grove in the middle of nowhere. My initial instinct was to leave the road and walk into the grove to convince myself this was not a horrific crime scene. Then I realised it might not be construed as civic duty for the police to find me possibly standing over the remains of one of the five thousand women murdered annually in Spain. So, yet again, I simply ran on … after photographing the evidence.

The only regular sign of life I saw on my route out of the village during daily runs was a group of men who stood outside the ‘Sport Bar’ at six in the morning on weekdays. They would await the arrival of minivans whose drivers shouted out the number of men required for that day’s work in the surrounding fields. As I passed the group, they would jeer and shout at me as if the notion of an old man running in order to maintain his health was a completely alien concept to them … which in rural Spain it probably was.

There was a memorable morning when, following their usual taunts, one man emerged from the crowd and started to run alongside me. I was not intimidated. I imagined he might continue a short distance, tire quickly and return to his mates. However, once we reached the limit of the village’s lit streets, he continued into the darkness of the lemon grove. Now I began to feel intimidated, particularly as he insisted on running so close beside me that our elbows touched, despite the unlit road being sufficiently wide for two vehicles. If I were to stop running, or to say anything, I was worried that he might turn on me, so I continued and ignored him.

After a while, he switched to running behind me, but so close that I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. It was a stupid and dangerous move, as he could have easily tripped me up, so I responded by picking up my pace to pull away. This must have been misunderstood as a challenge rather than self-preservation, as he caught up, then ran closely beside me once again, then switched to running inches in front of me. If I had maintained my speed, I would have been in danger of stepping on his heels and tripping up both of us. I slowed my pace and watched as he continued to run on ahead into the darkness beyond. He must have felt so proud that day to brag to his mates how, during a quarter-hour, he had run faster than a foreigner three times his age. Angry and upset, I cut short my usual routine, turned around and re-entered the village on a longer route to avoid the ‘Sport Bar’. After that, I ensured that my morning run never passed there again.

Even everyday village life proved a challenge. Each occasion my wife and I shopped in its supermarket, we would be the only customers in the checkout queue humiliated by having to empty out the contents of our knapsack and handbag. We observed locals in its aisles pocket items from shelves with apparent impunity because it seemed self-evident that only foreigners were thieves. We also aroused ire because we paid by debit card, which the checkout person would insist on grabbing from us, inspecting this strange technology and ramming it into a prehistoric machine that only functioned sporadically and required a wait of several minutes to display ‘approved’.

Having spied a poster for an ‘open day’ at the village’s modern theatre building, we thought it would make an interesting diversion. However, before our visit inside had even reached the auditorium, we were confronted by an angry group of women who ordered us out of their building. Many such municipal projects become ‘white elephants’ created by the mayor’s ego simply to impress his chums and the electorate, regardless of practicality or cost. Belonging to neither category, we were evidently not welcome. From its published schedule, this particular theatre only staged productions on about a dozen days per year.

To make explicit this village’s unfriendliness to outsiders, it would have been an easy task to simply stick two huge posters on the outside of their building that state in big red lettering ‘DO NOT ENTER FOR NO MEMBER OF THE SOCIAL CLUB’ in English. That is exactly what the village’s social centre had done to ensure that no foreign tourist dared to cross its threshold, pointedly warning in a language we found no local spoke.

Scuttling back to our rented terraced house near the village centre, we were left to the mercy of our neighbours. On one side was a couple in their fifties who argued and watched television late at maximum volume. Friday evenings, a minibus would arrive to unload a group of primary school age children into their tiny house. Group sing-songs at high volume ensued … continuously. In pyjamas, I knocked on their front door at two o’clock in the morning to ask politely if the tuneless singing could be curtailed. The door was slammed in my face. At three o’clock, I knocked again as the noise had continued regardless. Nobody answered. Their ‘party’ ended at dawn. By afternoon, the minibus would return and take away the children. Some kind of cult?

The first we knew of our opposite neighbour’s business was our living room filling with smoke from an unidentifiable non-tobacco drug. I traced it to the electricity meter on the party wall, built so thinly that smoke from next door seeped through holes made for cables connecting the adjoining houses. Thick insulation tape had to be purchased to block the gaps around the meter and prevent us suffering involuntary highs. Noises from this neighbour’s kitchen, audible through the wafer-thin wall, sounded as if he was chopping vegetables all afternoon … but then it continued through the night. Eventually it dawned on us that he was a drug dealer cutting up supplies for customers. Why else would he drive a black sports car with gold wheel rims, darkened windows and a windscreen inscribed ‘PSAddicted’ that was parked out front? Not the kind of delinquent with whom to raise a neighbourly complaint, even though we often passed him sat outside on his front doorstep during daylight, openly smoking drugs.

One day there was a flurry of activity outside his house, including a brief visit from a local policeman. Later, a smartly dressed, middle aged man arrived and we could hear loud discussions inside the house surprisingly in French, a language never previously heard there. We could make out the lawyer instructing the dealer that he had a stark choice: negotiate with the family of the young girl he had hit while driving his car outside the local school and pay them an amount sufficiently persuasive to drop a prosecution; or flee to his native North Africa. We did not stick around long enough to learn of Kid Charlemagne’s fate.

Had we been staying in Sodom or Gomorrah? God may not have inflicted a plague of locusts on this village but he had dispatched its inhabitants a stern warning by infesting the whole place, not just the odd house, with cockroaches. You could exit your home in the heat of the noonday sun and see large bugs scuttling up the exterior walls and along the streets, totally oblivious to daylight or humans. Because household drains had been constructed without U-bends, the vermin could travel with ease through the sewers into buildings. Everything that we witnessed there resembled a biblical tableau … of a godforsaken village that was determinedly stuck in feudal times.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/09/if-you-go-down-to-lemon-groves-today.html]

The man who mistook his wife for a hat : 2006-2009 : Enders Analysis

 1976. With trepidation, I knocked on the door of the Durham student newspaper to volunteer, opened it and encountered a cacophony of shrill, loud voices in an office no bigger than a two-up-two-down front room. A dozen people in close proximity were conversing at sufficient volume for their voices to project into a distant corner of a non-existent adjacent room. Never had I heard so few people generate so much noise. Not a chummy American loudness, but a commanding-the-troops ‘I’m in charge’ harshness. When one woman spoke, it sounded exactly how I imagined a horse might talk. I had stumbled into toff-land, the privileged world of the privately educated, a parallel universe of entitlement I had observed in television historical dramas but not realised still existed in the late twentieth century. Did I grow accustomed to their gratuitous noise pollution? No.

2006. With trepidation, I started my first day’s work at Enders Analysis. Its location in elite Mayfair, opposite the rear entrance of Park Lane’s Grosvenor Hotel, conveyed ‘class’. I was given a desk in a cramped room shared with colleagues who spoke loudly in plummy accents. The previous occasion I had endured transportation to toff-land, thirty years earlier, at least my commitment had been voluntary. Now I was indentured to spend forty hours a week in this socially hostile environment. Each occasion I opened my mouth seemed to confirm my appointment as the ‘accidental analyst’ to a job usually pre-ordained for yet another privately educated chap. Within days, the questions started.

“Why do you arrive at work so early every day?” asked Ian Watt one morning.

“My wife has to start work early, so I leave home with her,” I replied.

“Your wife is a banker?” my colleague suggested. I struggled to maintain a straight face at such a bizarre presumption.

“No,” I responded with hesitancy. “She works in an NHS hospital.”

There was a gap. I sensed a sharp intake of breath.

“Ooooohhhh,” said Watt with evident disappointment that betrayed a palpable disregard for public service, whether someone worked in a hospital kitchen or the deputy chief executive’s office.

If boisterous office chit-chat (“I’m off on holiday to Brazil next week”) proved insufficiently distracting, it was accompanied by personal phone calls made from colleagues’ desks, sometimes communicating disturbing content. Do I really need to hear you phoning a credit card company to increase the limit on a card in your father’s name for which you had applied and use? We all carried personal mobile phones and could go outside to make calls but, for these colleagues, there was evidently no shame or embarrassment in broadcasting their latest Famous Five-ish japes.

One regularly phoned his wife and, instead of a loving message, he would bark orders to her at the top of his voice as if she were a half-deaf scullery maid in his medieval castle. The tone of his phone calls disturbed me sufficiently to glance around our room to determine if the others had similarly felt they were being forced to eavesdrop on a suspected witch undergoing torture by the Inquisitor. None of them looked up or flinched during his tirades, as I did. I felt so alone in this workplace, observing that such humiliation of a fellow human appeared not only acceptable in toff-land but might be practised by my other colleagues.

“My wife is an opera singer,” he would turn around to tell us once his aggressive phone diatribes ended. I was uncertain whether this occupation was some kind of toff codeword for ‘slave’, or perhaps his entire household was staging a never-ending operetta in the ballroom where he had to phone in his part as the angry, posh analyst husband from Mayfair. His behaviour made me contemplate walking over and committing workplace violence but I was restrained by my poor chances in a pistol duel at dawn.

I soon discovered that ritual humiliation appeared to be my new workplace’s predominant management style. Within weeks of starting the job, I attended my first one-day radio conference at a Mayfair hotel a few hundred metres from the office. During the opening morning session, I received a text from a colleague telling me to return to the office because our boss needed me to do something unspecified urgently. Reluctantly leaving the conference, I returned to the office to be told that our boss was not there but would return soon. By the time the conference ended, I had wasted most of the day sat at my desk waiting for something, anything, to happen that required my presence.

If your private schooling imbued you with the notion that Miss Havisham was an ideal role model, such behaviour must simply propagate down your family money-tree. Many more humiliations followed, all of which I accepted with the uncomplaining resignation that a servant is forced to adopt to remain in the employ of an unhinged ‘big house’. The consequence is that the master progressively ups the ante in order to prompt a reaction, any kind of reaction, to their extensive repertoire of humiliations … and so it was.

2008. In front of my colleagues, boss Claire Enders told me she did not appreciate my work clothes. My suits were too baggy and my shirts were too patterned. I had not changed my dress style since starting work there, so I recognised this as her latest attrition. I wore a black or grey suit, a ‘designer’ work shirt, a subtly patterned tie and black shiny shoes. Once a month, my wife accompanied me on a Saturday hike around local men’s outfitters to peruse and purchase sale items. As a result of my daily cross-country run, my shoulders were broad but my waist was narrow, making any suit look ‘baggy’ on me. It was not my fault that many of my work colleagues were Billy Bunter-like!

In response, I resorted to wearing a plain white shirt and black tie every day under one of my existing suits. Then, in front of my colleagues, Enders complained I looked like an undertaker and ordered me to go to gentleman’s shops on Jermyn Street to buy new clothes. My patience with these workplace humiliations was wearing thin by my third year there. I neither agreed nor refused. As the only parent in the analyst team financially supporting their child’s university education, I could not suddenly throw my earnings at hideously expensive clothes. I had kept to my employer’s dress code at all times. I hoped that this latest humiliation might blow over … but I underestimated the persistence of my protagonist.

One week later, colleague Ian Watt told me he had been instructed to take me to Jermyn Street to buy new, more suitable clothes. We took a taxi, something I never afforded. During the one-kilometre journey, Watt wittered on about stuff while I shut my ears and stared vacantly out the window. I had decided to go along passively with his mission, as if he were demonstrating his superior breeding to a servant or slave … or wife. I did not lose my temper, argue or contradict him. I was merely a lowly bit player in his ‘Downton Abbey’ roadmap of British society. In my head, I was amused at the ridiculousness of this situation.

Inside the Dickensian shop (“Suits you, sir!”), Watt chose a new wardrobe for me. Bright pink shirts, elastic braces, ugly black shoes. I offered no opinion about his preferences. All I would have needed was a red nose to join a touring circus. He took my ‘outfit’ to the cash desk and unexpectedly asked me to pay. I refused. There was a standoff. Frustrated at not fulfilling the ultimate humiliation of making me fund my own unrequested makeover, he stormed off to replace most items on their shelves, before proffering his credit card to pay for the remaining two. During our taxi journey back to the office, I remained detached even when I heard him bellow at me:

“If you had attended a public school*, even a minor one, you would know how to dress!”

There, laid bare, was his contempt for me. It mattered not one iota that I had started working in radio more than three decades earlier and had successfully launched commercial stations attracting millions of listeners in the UK, Europe and Asia. It mattered not one iota that I had earned more mass media coverage for Enders Analysis with my published reports about the radio industry than all my analyst colleagues combined. All that mattered to him was the type of school I had attended many moons ago. The five-figure sum that his parents must have paid each term for his private school education seemed to entitle him to treat me like … you know what.

Unlike Pip, I harboured no desire to be accepted as a ‘gentleman’ by London society. You could stuff your flouncy shirts, your waistcoats, your pocket watch, your braces, your uncomfortable shoes, your sickening attitude to people like me. I knew who I was and was perfectly content in my own skin. Born in a council house, I attended school on a council estate and was obliged to become male head of my single-parent household at the age of fourteen. That is who I was. I refused to lick your … overprivileged ego.

Back at the office, the clothes bought in Jermyn Street sat in a bag beside my desk. I refused to even look at them. Naturally, further humiliations followed until, within months, I was forced out of my job. When I left for the final time, I placed the bag of new, unworn toff-wear on my empty office chair. There were no farewell drinks. There was no gratitude. There were no goodbyes. One day I was at work, then I had gone. Exiled from toff-land.

Several months later, I received an unexpected call on my mobile from Ian Watt. There was some work Enders Analysis wanted me to do. I knew from experience that Claire Enders could humiliate to the bitter end former employees who had been edged out of her workplace by asking a staff member to renew contact on her behalf. Watt droned on for a while and, though I was sorely tempted to shout an expletive at the same volume he reserved for humiliating people like me, I simply responded ‘no’ and put the phone down.

I don’t wanna go to Jermyn Street … ever again.

[* In British English, ‘public school’ confusingly means a private secondary school requiring fees.]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-hat.html]

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you hobnob : 1980 : Durham University Careers Advisory Service

“The Treasury,” said one.

“Banking,” responded another.

“The Civil Service,” replied another. It was my turn.

“Radio,” I said.

There was stunned silence. I felt all eyes turn toward me. Time seemed to pause while my colleagues processed their apparent incomprehension.

“What do you mean by ‘radio’?” eventually enquired the Economics professor in whose dark, dingy Old Elvet office our tutorial group was meeting.

I was somewhat taken aback. Who does not understand the word ‘radio’? Had he never read about Marconi? I grappled to maintain my decorum. I looked around at my fellow students dressed in three-piece suits or dress shirts or lavender cardigans with slacks over shiny black shoes. They appeared to have already been moulded into mini-me versions of their fathers (naturally there were no women). Their appearances were as dull and middle-aged as the careers they had said they desired. I was sporting my usual cheesecloth shirt, flared jeans and platform shoes, de rigueur 1970’s student-wear. Evidently, I inhabited a different dimension from my colleagues. Had Ann MacGregor twiddled the dials of her SAGE computer and sent me back a whole century to an era before radio had been invented? Where were Doug and Tony? I hoped they had not landed the other side of the street, inside Durham Prison.

“’Radio’ as in ‘broadcasting’,” I answered, struggling to control my patience, “where I want to produce programmes for a radio station.”

“Oh … kay,” said the tutor with the weariness of a grizzled academic attempting to explain monetarism to the village idiot. “So why are you here studying economics?”

“Because economics interests me,” I replied.

That was my second faux pas of the day. I looked around again and realised that my fellow students were not there primarily because of any enthusiasm for the subject. They were simply fulfilling their destiny, determined from the day they had been born into families who had then spent huge sums over two decades on their private education. For my colleagues, a job within the top echelons of government or commerce was not a career ambition. It was a birth right. It was simply the ‘payback’, the ‘return on investment’ expected as reward for the six-figure sum that Tarquin’s parents had spent to secure his social status. He and his former school chums felt entitled to their guaranteed shiny futures.

In the 1970’s there was no degree course in radio. No degree course in media. I was amongst Britain’s 94% of children who had attended state schools. Now I was amongst the 14% of the population to attend one of the country’s 45 universities. I had been forced to choose the academic subject in which I performed best at my school … and in which I was interested. With minimal career guidance, I had selected the university which I believed offered the best reputation. What nobody had advised me was that Durham was stuffed to the gills with toffs whose academic record at private schools had not proven exemplary enough to win them a place at Oxford or Cambridge. As someone who was certainly not ‘privileged’, had I wished to spend three years in a ‘Chariots of Fire’ theme park?

In my tutorial group, when one fellow student had spoken for the first time, I failed to understand a single word he had said. I assumed he must have been speaking some unidentifiable foreign language. Then I looked around and noticed my fellow students nodding in agreement as if they had understood him perfectly. I was confused. The next time he spoke, I struggled harder to comprehend his speech and managed to pick out the odd word in English. Only then did I realise that he habitually spoke in an upper-class accent so cut-glass as to prove almost incomprehensible to someone like me. Hand on heart, I am not exaggerating. I would have understood every word spoken by The Queen, but this young man’s speech was so stilted as to be easily mistaken for a parody of an upper-class twit.

I cannot recall a single conversation about economics with a fellow student on my course. Our academics never asked us to work in project groups. The toffs were being groomed to assume their rightful place as ‘captains’ of industry or government, for which there was no apparent necessity for them to converse with someone from the lower classes. It was evident to them from my accent, dress sense and demeanour that I resembled the servants or the ‘help’ their families employed at their mansions. I was similarly invisible to them, not having the ‘right stuff’ conferred by a private education, as had more than 90% of students at Durham. Worse, I betrayed no ambition to try and join their ‘club’. Unlike them, my parents had paid nothing toward my education, which made my chosen career very much my own affair.

I already subscribed to ‘Broadcast’ magazine and bought ‘The Guardian’ on Monday for its media job advertisements. Now it was time to visit the university’s Careers Advisory Service to locate suitable job vacancies. Its one-room office in a modern two-story building in Palmers Garth was filled with standalone shelf units of file holders, each collecting documents from one employer. I made an appointment to talk with an advisor but the earliest date was more than a month away. During the waiting period, I worked my way along every file on every shelf, searching for any employer within the media. What surprised me then was how few of the 4,000 Durham students seemed to require the facility. What I failed to understand was that most jobs for the upper classes were the outcome of who they knew or who their family socialised with, rather than requiring the bother of a formal application.

On the day of my appointment, I brought along my articles published in the student newspaper in a portfolio I had created from sheets of thick A3 black card stitched together. The advisor I met was an elderly woman with grey hair and John Lennon-style wire-frame glasses, like Granny from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’. Asked about my career choice, I replied it was ‘radio’.

“We cannot offer you any help if you choose to pursue a career in the media,” she said sternly, staring at me over the top of her spectacle frames. What? I felt outrage that I had waited more than a month for her so-called ‘advice’.

“But I started producing radio programmes seven years ago in London and …” I told her.

“I’m sorry, but getting a job in the media is all about the people you know,” she interrupted and then stood up to go.

I was abruptly left alone, not even having been offered the opportunity to show her my portfolio. Or explain to her the details of my prior radio experience. Or my election as editor of the student newspaper. Or my election as editor of the annual student handbook. Or my election as deputy president of the students’ union. Or my success arguing with the University for an unprecedented increase in the student union’s subscription income. Or my success turning around the student food shop from loss to profit. None of that seemed to matter. I was appalled by the ‘careers advice’ I had just been given. My long awaited ‘interview’ had lasted less than a minute.

Eight months later, I received a letter from the Careers Advisory Service. I presumed it must be a circular sent to former students to update its records. But no! It was a personal letter requesting my help to advise an undergraduate who desired a career in radio and asking me to show him around my workplace. My initial thought was to tear this letter into little pieces and throw it on the living room fire. How very dare they! … However, a few days later, my benevolence got the better of me and I realised I should help a student who might be in a similar situation to mine not so long ago, regardless of how much contempt I felt for the letter’s sender.

I now had a full-time job at Metro Radio, the commercial music radio station in Newcastle, which I had achieved by responding to an on-air announcement I had heard asking for candidates. The vacancy had not been advertised in either ‘Broadcast’ magazine or ‘The Guardian’. I resolved to contact the student and arrange to chat and show him around the station’s premises. Whether he went on to pursue a career in radio I never discovered.

By then, I had learnt precisely how ‘selective’ the university was about recruiting students. In 1978/9, I had been the student representative attending Durham University’s ‘Admissions & Matriculation Committee’ where statistical reports showed that some years certain of its colleges had accepted not a single student educated in a state school. These data were never published.

Four decades later, surely things must have changed? Er, maybe not. A 2022 headline in the Durham student newspaper screamed ‘Durham has lowest state school intake of any UK university’ and quoted student Keely Brown:

“… many [Durham University students from state schools] have no prior knowledge of what awaits them at university, let alone experiences of classism or discrimination and, alongside feelings of imposter syndrome, it can feel like Durham isn’t the place for them.”

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/it-aint-what-you-do-its-way-that-you.html]