It’s All Dropping Into Place
If I look at my father, he had breathing problems and I suspect so did his father as he suffered from asthma and died of pneumonia and other complications in his forties. Both were pretty heavy smokers and my grandfather was a heavy drinker too. My father used to tell stories of picking his father up late at night from various clubs in a very bad state and that’s probably why my father was a sensible drinker and why he brought me up to be the same. I never for instance ever saw my father drunk. My father’s only addiction other than his pipe, was industrial strength menthol catarrh tablets, which he consumed virtually all day, to try to get his throat clear.
As a child, I suffered similarly with my breathing and throat at times, but then we lived in a cold house, heated by electric fires, which must have made the air exceptionally dry. From about the age of eight, I had a south-facing room with big picture windows, which was very warm at times. I regularly, lost a term, usually the spring one, in my schooling. My doctor had no idea, about what was the problem, so they took my tonsils out, which was an all-purpose remedy in those days.
Things improved when I got to about twelve or so, and my parents just felt, I’d grown out of it. It could be that we were spending increasing time at Felixstowe, where my parents had bought a house to retire to, or it could be that I spent more and more time at my father’s print works in Wood Green. Who knows why? I don’t even have any medical records from that period, as my medical records restarted some time about 1969. So you can see why I’m all in favour of computerised medical records, which the patient can access when and where they want through the Internet!
I can remember my late teens very well and can’t ever remember going to the doctor or feeling unwell, especially at University in Liverpool, whilst working at Enfield Rolling Mills or in The Merryhills, or generally riding about on my bicycle.
I certainly didn’t feel ill, either in the early years of my marriage to C, either in Liverpool or in Melbourn near Cambridge. The first entry on my medical record, is a visit to the doctor in Melbourn about excessive diarrhoea, which looks like a classic glutening.
However things got a lot worse, when we moved to Shannon Place in St. John’s Wood. The flat was damp and cold and I can remember going to the doctor with lots of knee and arm pains. He recommended knee surgery, which I didn’t accept.
But then when we moved to the eleventh floor in Cromwell Tower, everything got better and in the three or four years we lived there, I never saw the doctor on my own behalf. But the flat was comfortably warm and the air was very fresh.
We then lived in Suffolk for forty years and only at odd occasions did my breathing problems come back.
That is until Celia died and I think in certain ways I reverted to my childhood habits; like wrapping myself in the bedclothes, keeping the house as warm as I could and avoiding going out. I started getting what looked like hay fever soon after C died in 2007.
Since my stroke and also since moving to London it has got a lot worse, but I’m now in a particularly airless house with little ventilation.
It might need to have heat recovery ventilation. Wikipedia says these are the benefits.
As building efficiency is improved with insulation and weather stripping, buildings are intentionally made more airtight, and consequently less well ventilated. Since all buildings require a source of fresh air, the need for HRVs has become obvious. While opening a window does provide ventilation, the building’s heat and humidity will then be lost in the winter and gained in the summer, both of which are undesirable for the indoor climate and for energy efficiency, since the building’s HVAC systems must compensate. HRV introduces fresh air to a building and improves climate control, whilst promoting efficient energy use.
Certainly, a proper system will be better than I’ve got now.
Letterpress Rules OK
This is an older post, that I have re-dated and brought up to date.
My father was a printer. And he was all letterpress. He would have used machines like this Original Heidelberg, although his two were probably older.
Original Heidelberg
Letterpress printing with movable type is one of the classic technologies that was invented in the Middle Ages by Johannes Gutenberg.
Movable Type
I spent most of my childhood in that printing works in Wood Green. I used to set the type for all sorts of letterheads, posters and brochures, but perhaps my biggest claim to fame, is that I used to do all of the handbills for the Dunlop tennis tournaments, that were held all over the UK in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Sadly, I do not have one of those handbills. If anybody has one, I’d love a photocopy. I’ve searched for years for one, but none exist. Even the archivist, who wrote the history of Dunlop, knows nothing about the tournaments and couldn’t find any reference to them.
I also learned to read and write with poster letters. These are of course backwards and you’d think that it would have caused me to have some sort of reading and writing problem. I suppose it may be one of the reasons for my atrocious handwriting in that I learned that printing, computers or typing is much better from an early age, but it did give me a strong mental alacrity in turning images through 180 degrees.
This involvement in letterpress also left me with some habits and pedantic actions.
For instance, I always refer to exclamation marks as shrieks, which I have inherited from my father.
I’m also very pedantic about spelling and some aspect of structure like apostrophes and plurals. I spell words with the proper use of ae and oe for instance. I spell archaeology with the diphthong and not as archeology. The difference is explained here.
The one thing I don’t seem to have inherited is my father’s good handwriting.
My father also had one of the oldest proofing presses, I’ve ever seen, but sadly there are no images of it. Mpst old ones you see tend to be Columbias made in the UNited States.
Proofing Press
This one is from about 1850 and was at least fifty years younger than my father’s. His probably ended up in a scrapyard, when a museum would have been a better bet. Printing museums are rather thin on the ground and there isn’t even one in Heidelberg! Although I did find a whole section in a museum in Belarus.
Wartime Printing in Belarus
My father’s letterpress business died.
Offset litho technology was coming in and because of the bizarre purchase tax system in operation in the 1950s and 1960s, it was cheaper for companies to do their own printing. Tax on plain paper was zero, but if it was printed it was 66%, so work it out for yourself. VAT would have solved the problem.
But now letterpress is coming back and like the printer who provided the pictures in this note, it is doing well.
There is nothing like the feel of a properly printed card or letterhead! And you can do so many clever things with a proper printing machine, like score, number, decolate and perforate.
A few years ago, I met one of people my father used to deal with at Enfield Rolling Mills. He explained how my father would use his skills to create production control documents and cards, to smooth the flow of work through the factory. That was the pinnacle of production control and workflow of its times.
It is a strange irony, that I made my money by writing software for project management. Is it in the genes?
You Can Go And Do It Yourself
There is an article in the comic of the Times today about Jamal Edwards and he uses this phrase and they say it could be his motto.
I like it! And it could have been my motto!
My father always used to say that we’re all the same, sitting on the toilet and to never be afraid of approaching anyone.
Lunch In Copenhagen
I had lunch in Copenhagen, by a canal that was lined with restaurants.
A Restaurant-Lined Canal
The food was good, but it was probably served at the slowest pace I’d ever received. I was so bored at one point, that I took to taking a photo of the chair opposite.
An Unsuitable Chair
Why do you put such a chair in a restaurant? It’s impossible to put your coat over the back of it, so I used the chair next to me for my coat. So they might have lost a cover because of the unsuitable chairs.
In the end, this restaurant ruined my afternoon, as they were so slow on service, I didn’t have time to visit the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. I’ve always been fascinated, as was my father, about how the Danes got most of their Jews out of the country to Sweden, after the Nazi invasion.
At least though I ate well! Albeit very slowly!
Is There A Cardigan Gene?
My father liked to wear cardigans and so does my son. So is this in our genes?
I obviously don’t have that particular gene, as I’ve never worn a cardigan.
On the other hand, C had lots of them!
By The River Rhone And Lac Leman
You’re never far from water in Geneva.
I tried to get a picture of the sun creating a rainbow in the fountain, but I failed.
Note that I have called the lake Lac Leman. My father said that he lived in the city for some time, when he worked at the League of Nations. He may or may not have worked there, but he was particular, that it was called Lac Leman. According to a friend, locals always call it thus. In some ways my father was secretive about his past, but the more I find, the more his tales ring true.
The Duchess Wows Them In A £38 TopShop Dress
This is another story from the Standard. Here’s the intro.
The Duchess of Cambridge has got great legs and she’s not afraid to show
them. Nor is she afraid of a hefty spring breeze. This morning, attending a
tour of the studios at which the Harry Potter films were created, she wore a
thigh skimming polka-dot dress from high-street retailer Topshop.
One of the pictures on the site, shows Lady Verulam meeting the Duke and Duchess. I suspect, that her father in-law was the guy who gave me my first real job at Enfield Rolling Mills. As the company was my father’s biggest client, he just phoned up the Earl and asked if they had a suitable job for a sixteen-year-old. My father was a great believer in the old maxim, that if you don’t ask nicely, you don’t get!
An Afternoon Of Rhinitis
Yesterday was fairly typical of what I go through. My nose seems to run from the time I get up until I go to bed.
An Afternoon Of Rhinitis
The picture shows all the tissues I got through in a couple of hours.
It used to be bad when I was a child, I can remember my mother constantly boiling up handkerchiefs on the stove, both for myself and my father, who was similarly effected.
But it’s never been as bad as this.
It seems to have started when I was in hospital in Hong Kong, and it just seems to be getting worse and worse.
Could it be long term effects of the Warfarin?
Mothering Sunday At Carluccio’s
I got to Carluccio’s in Canary Wharf for a late breakfast.
There were obviously a few parties celebrating Mothering Sunday, but surprisingly, there were several singletons of both sexes. There certainly appeared to be more than usual, but then I was half-an-hour or so earlier.
You’d have thought that on this day, where mothers and their partners and children tend to celebrate, that dining alone wouldn’t have been so common.
I know that as a widower, who has lost his mother and contact with his two daughters-in-law, I am a bit short in the mother stakes. But my family has always been like that, with no woman having given birth on my father’s side with the coeliac gene, since 1820, that I can find.
Still those genes, when linked to my mother’s Huguenot ones gave me a strong survival instinct and I like to think an active and fertile mind.
Gareth Bale, Cliff Jones and Taffy O’Callaghan
Tottenham Hotspur have a tradition of Welsh players, who were fast and skilful.
The one, I’ve seen most was Cliff Jones, who was an integral part of the Spurs double side and a few years afterwards. On form he could be brilliant and he could tear defences apart with his speed, in a manner not unlike that of Gareth Bale. What is often forgotten about Cliff Jones, is that on the death of John White and the retirement of Danny Blanchflower, he played much more as a midfield playmaker, rather than an outright winger. In some ways, isn’t this how another Welsh footballer;Ryan Giggs’s career has progressed at Manchester United?
I’ve put Taffy O’Callaghan in this post, as my father felt he was an amazing footballer from before the Second World War. He was supposed to be fast and my father told me that the team of those days was nicknamed the ‘greyhounds’, which is confirmed in Wikipedia. My father always said, he’d never seen anybody hit a football so hard. And they weren’t the lightweight balls of today!
We all know that Gareth Bale is good, but I won’t compare him directly, with his two predecessors. Although, it is informative to read Cliff Jones thoughts on Gareth Bale in this report on the BBC. In the article Cliff Jones doesn’t say that Real Madrid and others courted him continuously in the 1960s, but he stayed at Tottenham.
Perhaps being Welsh, he preferred the green grass at home?
There is also this article on Gareth Bale in the Guardian, which has this priceless quote from Blanchflower about yet another Welsh football legend; John Charles.
Everything he does is automatic. When he moves into position for a goal chance it is instinctive. Watch me and you’ll see I am seconds late, but all my thinking has to be done in my head. My feet do not do my thinking for me as they do for him.
The article says this could be applied to Gareth Bale. But then Blanchflower knew his football, both on and off the field. He was a unique talent himself!
