It's been a while, hasn't it? I've been avoiding you all because I needed to "sort my head out"! To do this I have been employing many methods; CBT (some use), Mindfullness (some use), Horticultural Therapy (in a big, peaceful garden, very useful), and a few courses (including 3-d printing and rustic stool making) with a lovely couple, Rachel and Steve, known as The Company of Makers https://www.companyofmakers.com/ (have a look at the stuff that Rachel produces out of old uniforms, she's...

Before I post this to my blog I would like to point out that I am not looking for sympathy, empathy or support, I'm just trying to explain my absence from the Lab.

Since being "retired" from work I have had too much time to wallow in self pity and the past, I have gone way passed the "self pity" part but the past has caught me up!

I have been experiencing a deep depression coupled with painful memories and have been diagnosed with PTSD. I am getting...

Before continuing to bore the arses off of any passing labbers who haven't got the energy to click away with my riveting tales of school life I thought I'd give you a heads up on what troggi's cave is like!

To give you a bit of a geographical perspective anyone who has travelled by train to Portsmouth has probably seen our house. I suspect that Ms. Jackson has seen it many times when either approaching Fratton Station from Portsmouth & Southsea or leaving Fratton Station going...

I am going to zip through this period of the late 1960s as there were few changes until 1970.

It was '67-'68 when I became a junior schoolboy and we had a pretty new young teacher called Miss Griffiths. She was obviously too pretty because she soon became mrs. something-or-other and had to leave to have a baby but for now she was our Miss Griffiths. She took us on a trip to the City Museum at Weston Park, near the Sheffield University Arts Tower and the Henderson's Relish Factory...

I am going to try to limit myself to not wandering off at tangents and not spending too many keystrokes on seemingly trivial incidents, who wants to bet I can't do it?

September, 1966 The Year of "Simba!"

It was "Tag season" at school only, oop north weir it's grim thi don't call it "tag," it's "tiggy" oop theer! To be honest tiggy season was a "fill in" thing, we played tiggy all the time, well tiggy and "hiddy"...

It's 1966, just after Easter, and my third school in a year! We now live at number 89 Mason Lathe Road, Shiregreen, Sheffield. My dad now works at Ambrose Shardlow, crankshaft manufacturers in the Forge, he works on the 54 ton "Big Beshy" hammer and at night we can hear it and almost feel it's seismic force even though we live about a mile away from it. This hammer was the biggest in Europe at the time and stamped out of orange-hot steel billets some of the bigger crankshafts that the...

The Tinsley Viaduct. The M1 runs on the top deck the lower deck carries a local link between Tinsley and Blackburn, both industrial areas of Sheffield and Rotherham respectively. This photo looks to be ten or fifteen years after the building of the road. The white car is heading towards the traffic Island that was where my home stood!
...

Long time since I've been in 'ere, y' ought t' see t' size o' t' spiders shudder

Well, what did I come here for? It's like findin' yourself in t' kitchen an' not knowin' why!

Oh! That's right there's been a bit of talk about friendship and it's meaning to me and it had me feeling a little nostalgic and isolated so I thought that I might tell anyone who wants to read this drivel about some of my friends, past and present.

My first real friend outside...

For the whole of this week I've felt lazy. Not the "I'm not gettin' up t'day" sort of lazy or the "lay on the couch with a family sized bag of 'Doritos' watchin' daytime tv" sort of lazy. No, this is the sort of lazy that says "hey! Y' know that job y' w' gunner do? Do it t'morra!"

I want to do some gardening because my garden is such a mess, I want to re-decorate the dump, er, I mean, STUDY, no. I was right the first time, it's an absolute dump. AND...

Now I know that some of you kind people out there think that working in a school is a cushy number; short days, long holidays, clean environment, and so on... Well I'm here to tell you that you're completely and absolutely correct! Go to the top of the class and while you're there give the text books out. I've got two weeks holiday now and I don' have to do any of that nasty marking or lesson planning 'cause I'm NOT a teacher!

Don't get me wrong here, the teachers I work with are...

I used to have a problem with words. Ordinary everyday words that just drip off of the tongue in an ordinary everyday way and then become unusable due to their being harnessed to a different meaning, usually sexual or social. "Queer" once meant unusual and "gay" was carefree and happy. These are just two examples of the most prominent changes in usage over the past fifty years.

I used to get the bus through Darnall, Sheffield, occasionally in the mid to late '70s....

Right! Back to pointless nostalgic ramblings.

Believe it or not I used to read books:shocked And not all of 'em had pictures in, so there!

From the age of about 8 I would go to the public library and take out as many books as I could. At about the age of 10-12 I discovered a 2 volume, printed for children, collection of Poe! YES! Poe for kids! With pictures 'n' ev'rythin'! I remember that they were almost square with hard backs ('course they were hardbacks, y' didn't get...

When I was very young I used to get British comics; The Eagle, Look and Learn, The Beano, The Dandy, The Buster, The Sparky, Topper, and Beezer. I loved them so much that there is one issue of The Sparky that I recall so well that it is ingrained on my psyche, I would give away organs to get that one issue again!

On Friday nights and Sunday lunchtimes we would go to Wincobank and Blackburn Working Men's Club and I would be bought a comic as a bribe to keep me quiet during "t'...

Of course films good or bad do not make up the whole of a person's cultural make-up. Culture is a very complicated attribute to categorise as any sociology student will tell you, at length if you'll let 'em. I like to keep stuff simple, like me, so I will only talk about what drove me down this trail we call "Cult" and not about the minutia of my tastes.

Of equal importance to film, or possibly greater judging by the sheer weight of subcultures spawned by it, is music. You...

This snippet is about what is in my bag, man. Y' know, the cultural fripperies 'n' fineries that made me think I might feel at home at Cult Labs.

Way back in the halcyon days of my childhood, when summers were long and filled with the whirr of grasshoppers singin' in the tall dry grass and winters were bitterly cold and the snow drifted deeply, when I was in the second year of middle school (about year 4 in today's money) I remember an argument between Tubby Taylor and me. I must...

Sorry about the political rant but I hadn't had my shreddies then, hunger always makes me a little abrasive and Northern.

My Curriculum Vitae

Left Hinde House Comprehensive School in 1976 and spent the glorious summer having a lot of fun.
I started work as an apprentice crankshaft grinder at GKN Shardlow until work dried up in 1983 due to the (gritted teeth) lovely Mrs Thatcher said we didn't need industry in this country as it made such a mess (stop gnashing,...

Y' know when y're gettin' owld cuz y' wanna start tellin' folk 'bout "the good owld days", "eeh, when I were a lad/lass", 'n' "thi don't make 'em like they useta!" I'd like t' say that mine's gunna be different but all that stuff'll creep in, it all'us does.

So, let's start wi' a potted biography.

As y' can prob'ly tell from t' accent I'm not a native of Pompey but an ex-pat from t' Socialist Republic o' South Yorkshire, Sheffield in fact,...