Emptying the Bucket   

An examination and assessment of

my many minor achievements and experiences 

 

I was gifted a life - probably just one. Did I waste it like most people? Well, most of it of course but not all. Finally I’m confined to a single room most of the time as my legs decline to work properly. Damn. I’ve found ways to escape for short periods but gone are the days when I could just jump on a plane overseas on a mere whim.   

So what have I done with it all? If I empty out the bucket what’s in there? Any achievements of note? Best to get them down before my memory fades too badly. I am proud of many of the things I did (and ashamed of quite a few) but feel I could have done so much more if I’d been a little bit braver. And I think I managed to maintain my sense of curiosity and amazement at the world around me. Many do not, or never had it. 

 

I’ll start with something fairly outrageous. I have eaten human flesh.  – drum roll - the placenta of my grandson Rafael (and with the permission of his mother, my daughter-in-law). The opportunity arose and so… It took some work to prepare, looks like liver, tastes of nothing interesting and so I wouldn’t recommend it. Of course you can’t just look up a recipe.   But I was only in it out of morbid curiosity anyway.  I’m proud that I’m prepared and able to eat almost anything.

 

 I never found any particular reason to believe in a God, or gods. The evidence against was too obvious and compelling. So I lived without faith in sure and certain expectation of oblivion (though of course I hope not but hope is not faith – many confuse them). 

I (helped) raise two children and caused them only moderate psychological trauma. They’ll probably never forgive me anyway. 

 

 

I managed to stay married to the same woman for over 50 years. This despite my character flaws, and hers.

 

I was reasonably intelligent I think. Others told me so sometimes. But unfortunately only just smart enough to know that I was not very smart. I’ve met people who are very intelligent indeed and found that I was far less than them. 

 

I have never broken a bone. Not one. Cracked a rib once, slightly but that  doesn’t count, does it? 

I’ve driven at over 200kph – briefly, in a mere  1.4 litre Astra on a French autoroute near Le Mans. Long, straight, flat.  The speedo showed segments up to 220kph so I wondered if it could reach 200 at least. It did, just, but struggled to make that last few kph to creep over 200 and began to overheat.  Then I remembered as the landscape flashed past that the car was tiny and nearly 15 years old. And I was in my mid-sixties. If anything went wrong with either of us, a mere blink, perhaps even just a sneeze, I would die very quickly indeed. A moment of excitement followed by pain and eternal darkness. So I backed off to my usual autoroute speed of  160-170kph and cruised down to Bordeaux. Note the speed limit on French autoroutes was 130 (110 if raining) but it wasn’t policed and so most drivers didn’t stick to that, or even on the motorways in the UK. At least then they did not. They are very safe roads after all. But that may have changed.

I saw Jimi Hendrix live. Leicester College of the Arts, 1967 in an audience of 700. And got in for free as we forged a few tickets. And got up to the wings of the stage as I knew the official college photographer. I was fairly deaf for three days afterwards as I was standing in front of a stack of Marshall amps. Later, when teaching, I was always able to say to a difficult teenage lad that, “I’ve done something you will never be able to do!”  Quite a few were suitably impressed. 

I saw a total eclipse. Stood in my garden and heard the birds fall silent, just before the terminator swept toward me across the lawn.  In the same house I experienced an earthquake. Not a big one but strong enoughtoenough to be a bit scary and crack neighbour’s window. 

 

I’ve held a grudge for fifty years. Ridiculous as the object of it probably soon forgot I even existed, I’m sure. But overall  my shit list never exceeded five. Hate is exhausting and does you much harm. 

My parents put me on a train and sent me off to France unsupervised to stay with people we knew, en famile, near Cognac when I was just 12 years old. I had to change stations across town in Paris and my French was quite rudimentary. Always has been. Can you imagine parents being that brave now? Perhaps they recognized I could cope, even at that age. I managed. And developed a lifelong love of France.  

I enjoyed the 1960’s. Somewhere there is a scary photograph of me caught  wearing a yellow pyjama top as a shirt,  a paisley pattern wide tie, dark purple velvet bell bottom pants, large home-made shoes and a short fur jacket – on a beach. Good grief. Mad even then but it’s pretty cool that I could get away with that. 

Yes I took some recreational drugs but in those days you did that to get into it, not to get out of it. I tried LSD several times, lowish doses. The colours were astonishing. I think it rewired my brain and triggered a life long creative urge. But I never developed a regular habit. I’m not an addictive personality. 

 

With graphic artist friends I rented a large upper floor in an old residential building near the prison in Leicester. We established our own arts laboratory in it using leftovers from exhibitions. One smaller room had every wall painted a different vivid colour and fake grass on the floor, as a place to trip. The other very large room had pastel recreations of Hieronymous Bosch on the walls, a sound booth for party music and a sound system based on motion sensors that generated different notes and  pitches depending on how you moved through it. The room was a giant theremin style instrument. 

When I was ten years old I had a friend Simon. He lived just along the road and his parents let him have an air rifle!  Every Saturday morning for a while, we pooled some of our pocket money and bought a pack of ten Woodbines. We would then climb a big tree in the local wetlands and smoke them all up there. We felt quite sick. We’d made the trees easier to climb by hammering in six inch nails.  

I gave up smoking when I was 25. I smoked Gitanes, a strong French cigarette. When the French tested atom bombs in the Pacific, the wharfies/dockers/stevedores protested by refusing to land French products and my supply dried up. I took the opportunity to quit, a rare case of political motivation. 

 

I once had to escape a burning building. From the third floor. The fire was higher up but I had to get down an enclosed stairwell full of smoke and panicking people. Not a fun experience and fire alarms still freak me out a bit.

I survived, as did we all, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1964. I bunkered down with a couple of other 16 year old friends at the Young Socialist League club rooms for the critical three days. We lived on chocolate bars and brown ale, convinced that we might die at any moment.  So I agree with climate change arguments – I taught it after all, in the 1980’s! – but a generalised fear of  ‘we’re all going to die sometime in the future, maybe next century.’ doesn’t not really compare with a specific fear that, ‘we’re all going to die tonight’.

I migrated to Australia at 24 years of age and never regretted that choice. Although I missed family and friends and France. It cost me ten quid and changed my life utterly. Perhaps that’s why, later in life, I was an enthusiastic traveler. 

I contracted prostate cancer in my early ‘60’s and got through it. A couple of generations back, I’d have died of it within a couple of years. I knew something was wrong with the way I peed and got it sorted early. Modern technology gained me some extra time. 

I went to the free Stones in the Park concert in London in 1969. With about half a million others. I could almost hear them two hills away. 

 

I am emotional. I once stood on a beach at sunset and wept at the sheer beauty of it. My companions, mostly my 14 year old students on a school excursion, were a bit puzzled by my quiet weeping. Equally I sobbed in the Tate Modern gallery in London in front of an Edward Hopper painting. ‘Automat 1927’. I found it unbearably sad. But the middle aged woman next to me moved away quickly.

I read proper newspapers, not tabloid rags, so I did not live in constant, low grade and ill-defined fear. I know for a fact my city is one of the safest in the world and there are almost no areas I would not dare walk through at night - if I could still walk that is. But many people prefer an unsubstantiated opinion to fact. And the less responsible news media constantly feature crime, death and violence stories. They excite and sell.  My sister had a job at a British consulate, for many years, helping people who’d been robbed, assaulted or arrested so she had that distorted mindset of fear in that way, the belief that her city was a dangerous place. It isn’t at all, far less than most in fact but that was her rigid world view.

So I lived with the presumption that no-one was liable to rob me or harm me. I was generally proved right. Insurance companies did well out of me. I was never robbed and only burgled twice, the second time unsuccessfully as they were scared off while loading up! The world, at least where I lived, was a very safe place and most people are friendly and fairly honest. 

I was almost never bored. I was blessed with an active mind so I was seldom at a loss as I could always find something to do or to interest me. I could always read something, write something  or just watch and imagine. I usually carried a book and a notebook to that purpose. 

 

I was an anecdotalist. I would make sense of the world by telling a story. I developed an anecdotal  style of teaching based on that storytelling. Whatever the subject matter of the day, I seemed to recall an event or tell a story that was relevant, to put it into context.  

 

I was a always compulsive writer. To the point of an illness, a folie de plume. For instance, I’m writing this, getting it down before the light fades.. The introduction of self-publishing was a godsend to me and I published quite a few little books of my own. (They’re available here on this website -see the other pages). The only ones that really sold were the camera collectors manuals. But still I enjoyed creative writing immensely, always had a project or two on the go and I think some of my efforts were as good as if not better than the stuff I saw in bookshops. Not great, not literature but not too bad. 

School  

I survived a thirty year teaching career with my sense of absurdity still intact. In fact, probably enhanced.

I found that I am a teacher by temperament – I feel almost driven to share knowledge and to correct the errors of others. Strangely they don’ t always appreciate my efforts on their behalf! 

I kept my teaching fresh by taking on new subjects. The list is amazing when I look back Eventually I taught Philosophy to 16-18 year olds, the best teaching I ever did. I enjoyed it and so, I think, did the students. At least they said so, even the difficult ones.

Being a teacher, I came to understand, is not a job as such. It’s not just what you do, it’s what you are. A personality trait. A few jobs define your entire life like that. But I worked with many for whom it was just a job and they ha no particular joy in it. 

I once banned computers from my Philosophy classroom for a while. I discovered that you don’t need computers and heaps of physical and technological resources to teach well. In fact they often get in the way, they can be a distraction. Some of the best teaching in the world goes on way out there, under a tree. 

My ex-students included the youngest man ever to be elected to the State Parliament (25yo). Smartest student I ever had but I failed to change his rather conservative politics. 

Two of my students, Chris and Adam, became one of the best bands Australia has produced, The Living End. And as they used to earn around half a million from royalties each year (from Prisoner of Society?)  before they even got out of bed, two of the richest. 

Another two students of mine won a Tattersalls Award for an interstate youth environmental group they set up. Clair and Lizzie. They even organised a conference in the parliament in Canberra and bussed students in from all over. I was proud to attend and even to get strong-armed into giving a seminar.

I was once asked to try and teach one of the more difficult students, one who went on to become a successful professional footballer. The infamous Brendan Fevola. But no-one managed to teach him much. He already knew it all. 

My own schooldays were rather troubled. I was eventually expelled from an English grammar school in fifth form (year ten here). Wyggeston Boys, the most prestigious government school in the city. The Attenborough brothers went there. Wyggeston Boys Grammar and I did not see eye to eye on many occasions.. I was thrown out for terrorism. I set off a small bomb in the Great Hall balcony on Remembrance Day, November 11^th, 1963. It blew the entry door off its hinges and shattered about 50 small panes of glass in the stairwell windows. They were unamused. But it was an elite school with an entry exam and so the trouble makers were intelligent. And often ingenious. I only got caught because they beat a confession out of the kid who made the reliable timed fuse. 

At that school I hated sport. Being forced to play rugby on winter Wednesday afternoons in particular. And swimming lessons in the green slime encrusted school pool, next to the Headmaster’s residence. Lessons went ahead regardless if the temperature of the water was over 47deg. That’s unpleasantly cold. So the night before Sports Day, I and a friend snuck in and dropped two kilos of potassium permanganate into the pool. I had it already as it was an ingredient of my explosives. The next morning the water was bright purple and the swimming events had to be cancelled. But at least it killed the green slime. 

Equally some evil-doers raised the red flag over the school one night. A flag that had been ‘borrowed’ from the Young Socialists League. And those rapscallions involved were clever enough to cut the cord under it so that it could not be lowered except by two steeplejacks, later in the day. As the flagpole was on top of the Great Hall and the hall was on top of a hill near the city centre, it could be seen from everywhere.

 

Unusual Holidays   

I avoided guided tours and cruise ships. I preferred more impulsive, unorganised and rough travel, all my life. And things I considered a holiday were more like hard work to some people.

 

I was remarkably adaptable and self-sufficient, it seems on reflection. Drop me in a strange place, even a foreign country and I could fairly quickly find food and shelter (not a hotel), somewhere to sleep make casual friends, get help  and find a way to get out of there if necessary . I know because I did that many times from Arcachon to Wittenoom. I could eat almost anything, sleep almost anywhere (park, beach, bus shelter), talk to anyone and no-one seemed to feel a need to harm me.  

 

The closest I got to an organised holiday was an 18-30 tour of Morocco, but that was pretty freeform. Roaring around in an old Bedford army truck and camping out. On that tour we stopped in a hotel one night but I and others soon had to escape. There was a young US Army chaplain in the group who snored so loudly that he cleared out his room and then the whole floor. I ended up sleeping on the flat roof overlooking the central market, the main souk of Marrakesh. Er, with a quite  friendly young woman also on the tour, a holiday romance that did not survive the end of the trip. There was some kind of local festival celebration that night with music and dancing in the square below and, there were fireworks.                 

 

I did the classic rough tours of Europe in 1967 and 1968 in a combi van, fitted out with old aircraft seats from a local aerodrome. We drove down through Yugoslavia as it then was, to Istanbul and back through Greece and Italy. And the next year we went north to Denmark and Seeden. 

 

I had the good fortune to have family and friends in Bordeaux and Cognac, where the brandy comes from. Some of them made the stuff. So guess where I spent my holidays. Every August in Cognac when I was young and month or so in Bordeaux every second year. I’d spend time too in England, with family, but I do miss France. 

 

I was by chance in Paris in May of 1968 which makes me a soixante huiter. Of sorts. The students and car workers joined forces, fought the CRS riot police in the streets and   almost brought down the government.  I didn’t march much and did not man the barricades unlike a couple I knew who were locked down in the Sorbonne, trapped with the students for a month. I did see tanks and smoke and bangs in the streets later in the summer but that was just the filming of a movie (Is Paris Burning?) and the tanks were American Shermans. 

 

I was in Athens just before the 1967 military coup by a group of fascist colonels which overthrew the government (in Greece, home of democracy!).We’d actually joined in a student demo earlier that day. “Do you believe in freedom? Come on then!” One night, sitting in the front seat of the combi van,  I watched a group of about ten fascist militia thugs charge into a café, drag a man out and kick him senseless in the street right in front of us. Afterwards they left and his friends dragged him away. He looked to be in a bad way, bloody and broken bones. Several were killed in the unrest over those days.  The militia beat up a government minister that same night. He was seriously injured. That was the only incident of serious violence I ever witnessed and is still a nasty memory. 

 

I was thrown out of Pisa as a group of us were caught sleeping under the leaning side of the Leaning Tower. The unamused carabineri escorted us to the city limits and told us not to return. 

 

Driving east out of Amsterdam I crossed the big dyke and stood at a fork in the road, somewhere near Bremen I think. Left to Hamburg and Denmark, right to Berlin (before the wall fell!) I flipped a coin and ended up in Copenhagen. Great place, safe, clean and cheerful. Lived on roast pork, red cabbage and potatoes in the cheap cafés and ‘danish pastries’ cut by the centimetre from metre lengths. Slept on a beach just north and cleaned up daily in the public toilets under the main square, The RadhusPladsen. Sometimes, life is a coin toss of big decisions. Some work ut well.

 

When twenty, I lived absolutely penniless in Paris for almost a week waiting for money to come in through the American Express. Completely skint, sleeping in the Bois de Bologne and on park benches in Montmartre. I and a mate shared a single beer bought with our last pocket change (calories!) and an American tourist couple were so sorry for us that they bought us another one. I lost nearly 15kg on that two month trip. 

 

I experienced the Trans-Siberian railway, from east to west, in winter. Brilliant holiday. 

 

An old French friend, Bernard, did not cope well with the unexpected. So to tease, I suddenly appeared in his courtyard one summer’s day after an absence of nearly twenty years. No warning. He lived five kilometres down the road from my sister and brother-in-law’s chateau. He was both delighted to see me and rather cross about the lack of warning. . I was supposed to be 20,000km away. I treasured the look on his face. He was a friend of sixty years.

 

Animals  

I almost always owned a dog – and many other pets. Parrots, a goat, a ferret, a lizard, several rats, chickens, ducks, fish. And several cats, but no-one ‘owns’ a cat. Everyone should share life with a dog. 

 

I’ve taken blood and tissue samples from rock wallabies – while sitting in inch of dried wallaby shit in sea cliff caves, on an uninhabited island in Spencer Gulf. That was my idea of a great holiday. 

 

I’ve argued with an emu, a face off, when we disagreed as to who was entitled to the berries on a currant bush. He won. 

 

I’ve been pecked by all the ratites, the big flightless birds. Emu (several), Ostrich (local farm), Cassowary (Healesville Sanctuary on a work placement)  and Rhea (bird sanctuary in the UK). Only the emus drew blood.

 

I made friends with a Black and White Lemur at Dudley Zoo (UK). In their open lemur enclosure.   When I revisited after a week he remembered me, ran straight over, jumped on my shoulder and resumed  grooming me. My eyebrows with his teeth, my beard with his fingernails. His name was Yeller and he had the reputation of being old and grumpy so the staff were quite surprised that he took to me. Perhaps he recognized a kindred spirit. 

 

In Australia I have – 

• ·        
• ·        
• ·      
• ·      
• ·        

 

Drink  

I could not hold my booze that well but in my early twenties, I did my best. In my early desperate ‘got my first job’ years I hung out with a group of wastrels at weekends. On a Friday night after work we would drink 8 pints of bitter, go for a curry then throw up to make room for another 4-5 pints. 

I and two friends once drank a pub out of Bacardi; a lot of it. After the hangover faded and for evermore, I could not even smell the stuff without feeling ill. But an artisanal Venezuelan white rum I tried which had hints of cinnamon was just magic.  

 

One summer’s Sunday morning some more conservative friends found me curled up fast asleep on their well manicured front lawn with a bottle of Guinness and a bar of chocolate. Breakfast. I’d been walking a few kilometers home past their place and didn’t quite make it all the way. 

 

One New Year’s Eve in London I fell in with a bunch of U.S. Airforce servicemen. They had a lot of overproof rum from the BX store and were looking for a party. I was on my way to one. I got back to work on the 3^rd. 

 

I did the tour of the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen for the free beer and food. We got fairly pissed and ended up racing off down the street with a young employee on a trolley. He was somewhat entertained and appreciated the adventure.  

 

Sport  

After my experience of sport at school – every Wednesday afternoon face down in six inches of mud with three or four big kids on top of me – I generally avoided participation in any sport. I wasn’t even much of a spectator. I was pretty hopeless at anything physical, especially requiring hand/eye co-ordination. However I did get involved in orienteering in my early years in Australia. It was the house sport at an advertising agency where I worked among those who did not play golf. Once I beat Herb Elliot. I wasn’t fast but I could read a map well. He was very fast but was two miles off the edge of the map before he realized a mistake.  

 

In orienteering, there’s nothing quite as demoralizing as standing thigh deep in a stream after missing the jump and then realizing that it’s the wrong stream on the wrong hill anyway. I did that. I did OK on the second hardest course of four but I was mostly there for the barbecue afterwards anyway. 

 

I was a first year season ticket holder for the Melbourne Storm. I was delighted that the sport had finally come to my city. I still have the ticket/card. That first year there were just a few fans and no official scarf available so a fan who worked in a care home got her patients to knit some as a fund raiser. She then sold them at the games. I still have that as well. 

The first game of any kind I went to was a Rugby League game in Manchester. The team was Swinton, I think. A cousin of mine was getting married. They got the wedding out of the way in the morning, had a quick lunch and then everyone went to the match. In their wedding clothes. I was amazed and fascinated by the brutality of the game. I still am.

 

Business

Later in life I ran my own specialist retail store for ten years. I discovered that I was quite good at it. Some customers became good friends. Satisfying but I had to wonder. What if I’d done that when much younger? I might have ended up quite well off? 

 

I was always interested in cameras but I knew enough to get work as a photographic journalist later in life writing about new cameras. I would take a sick of ork  to go off on business jaunts hosted by Sony or Panasonic or Olympus in Sydney or Adelaide or even New Zealand. The first time I wrote a camera review, the magazine editor told me that it was the first time he’d received an article he was able to print as it was. I was quite proud of that.

 

I was able to turn myself into an authority on vintage film cameras fairly quickly and developed a national reputation – as part of the retail store I ran. I had regular customers who visit from interstate and even Shanghai. Many would drop in just to talk and ‘pick my brains.