History part two - late teens

[discodoris]

After I left Guides, I went into Venture Scouts – again with a big active set of people.  Several of my friends regularly went kayak racing, rock climbing or sailing.  Age 16 and age 17, I spent my summer holidays from school living and working as a sailing, canoeing and windsurfing instructor at an adventure holidays centre – out on the water for about five hours every day and also hauling boats about and maintaining/repairing them in the yard, when not instructing. This came about mainly as a mulish refusal to go on holiday with my parents any longer and them countering that they weren’t going to leave me in the house alone.  A live-in job solved both of our requirements – it was a voluntary job, but bed and board were included, so I didn’t really have too much in the way of expenses either.  I was maintaining a weight around 11 stones, but I was muscular, active,  fit and healthy.  The food at the sailing centre was basic, but nourishing - toast and cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and fruit for lunch (they had to be packed and taken out on the boats with us) and then an evening meal of meat and three veg, followed by a pudding of some type, often fruit based.

Looking forward to leaving school, I decided that I didn’t really fancy a job that involved sitting at a desk.  Scouring the local newspaper, I discovered that there was a local laboratory, doing research into the marine environment, in need of a lab technician.  The job advertised was working in sedimentology – that’s playing with mud, in case you didn’t know.  It sounded perfect, so I applied and was duly offered an interview.  This was in early March 1986, just after my eighteenth birthday. Twenty three years ago and I remember odd snapshot parts of the interview, but not the totality.  Before the interview, after I arrived, they informed me that they’d had another resignation, so there was a second job on offer and gave me the specification to read.  This was for a benthic ecologist – a specialist part of marine biology, identifying the animals living in and on the seabed for population studies.  I did the interview and it went well. So well, that they offered me either job, whichever was my preference.  I accepted the latter, but insisted that I wouldn’t start before finishing my A levels in June.  They agreed with that too. So I finished my exams in June, went on holiday, on my own, to Corfu for a week, then started at the laboratory on the 7^th July.

The laboratory was about six miles away from my parental home. I had a driving licence, but no car.  I did, however, have a bicycle and duly began cycling to and from work.  It wasn’t too bad until October, when the nights began to get dark and wet and cold.  I worked flexitime, my days were already shorter than when attending school, since I left at around 7.15am and got home at about 4.40pm.  And no homework! Cycling was keeping me fit, and there were regular sports played with work colleagues, as the laboratory was next door to playing fields and a council run sports centre.  No swimming pool, but a modest gym and an indoor multi-use court, which we hired regularly at lunchtimes or evening, for volleyball and indoor hockey.  But, as the weather deteriorated, I decided to buy a moped.  My father came out with me and we bought a hardly used moped (an elderly lady had bought it originally, but found it too heavy, she returned it to the shop with only 400 miles on the clock – they replaced it with a different model) and a crash helmet.  

In September, I started to attend college one day per week, sponsored by work, to do BTec exams in Applied Biology. I also had a lot of rows with my father, who had been harbouring aspirations for me to go to university (I had a place at Newcastle to study Physiotherapy – I’d been keeping my options open) and was still intent on telling me how to run my life. I’ve always been independent, but now I had money of my own, transport of my own, employment and considered myself an adult. He insisted that I still had to be home by 11pm in the evening, that he knew where I was going all the time and that anytime he wanted to go through my bedroom, he would.  I continued to be evasive and to come home when I wanted to.  After one particularly big row, he exploded and told me that it was time to move out. I think that he thought that I’d follow the normal path and rent a room with others in a house and that I’d find it terribly difficult and come home chastened and more co-operative. That wasn’t quite what happened. I agreed to move out, but I teamed up with a friend who was earning good money, working nights in London, servicing the printers and keeping the computers running for Lloyds Bank HQ, as they worked 24 hours. We bought a three bedroomed house between us. However, she was earning three times my salary on paper. I have my wage slips still – so I know that I was earning £3, 612 per annum and I had a mortgage to service of £23,500. Even in the heady days of before the credit crunch, they only loaned up to five times your income solo – back then they were much more circumspect. I should point out that the mortgage company weren’t at fault, my friend was earning ~£15k so there was no reason we couldn’t afford £47k between us.  We moved in in January 1988, just before my 20th birthday.

I couldn’t really afford to live that way, so I took on an extra part-time job working behind the bar of a pub. At least I could be social in the pub, even if I was behind the bar. I was working from 8am until somewhere between 4 and 5 pm, getting home, having a bite to eat (not much either, there was so little money, that I basically lived on porridge with sugar for breakfast, marmite or peanut butter sandwiches and a piece of fruit for lunch and pasta/ sausages/ fishfingers followed by a yogurt for dinner), doing some housework and then going out to the pub to work from 7pm until 11.30pm, getting home and studying for another couple of hours before going to bed. Rinse and repeat. Because of this lifestyle, I stopped doing any sport after work and I’d already stopped cycling to and fro. My activity levels were gradually dropping. Because I was working in the pub, people would frequently offer a drink for myself.  Rather than have anything alcoholic, I normally had high sugar blackcurrant squash, or Coca Cola and a pack of crisps or sometimes a pickled egg, because of being hungry. So the food habits had already started to slip to being unhealthy. Marmite is cheap, but it’s very high in salt. I wasn’t eating anywhere near enough fruit and veg. I was loading up with high sugar and high fat snacks.  

Aged around 20 - out sailing...