Cheap, Excellent Restaurants in 1990s Prague?

---

The Baumol Effect in post-Communist Prague

When Clare and I visited Prague in the 1990s, shortly after the fall of Communism, the city seemed impossibly charming. The old town glowed with baroque façades and candlelit restaurants, where we ate elaborate and beautifully-prepared meals which were absurdly, almost embarrassingly, cheap compared to what we would have paid back in the UK. 

Economists, it turns out, have a name for this tourist experience. William Baumol called it the cost disease — the tendency for prices in low-productivity parts of the economy to rise in step with wages across the whole economy, driven by the high-productivity sectors. 

In Britain, the long twentieth century of industrialisation had left wages high, even in humble trades, because the country’s great productive engines — manufacturing, finance, engineering — had dragged the national pay scale upward. On average, waiters' wages had to keep pace with technicians' - or too many would vanish to the better-paid jobs.

Prague, by contrast, was emerging from socialism: its capital stock and technology were still years behind. The waiters, the musicians, the chefs had world-class skills but all earned local wages anchored to modest Czech productivity. Their artistry cost little in pounds sterling because purchasing power parity had not yet caught up.

In competitive labour markets, firms bid for workers. Employers in high-productivity sectors can afford to pay more because each worker’s output, magnified by their expertise and amplified by the power of machines, generates greater value.

To hold their staff, firms in slower sectors must match the going rate. Thus wages converge across the economy, even where productivity does not. When Britain’s advanced industries lifted average wage costs, restaurant meal and haircut prices rose too.

Prague’s had not yet done so; our meals and accommodation were, temporarily, a bargain.

Within a decade the balance began to shift. Capital investment kicked in, productivity increased, wages in the Czech Republic rose, tourism surged, and the hidden subsidy of underpaid service labour faded. The same dinner now costs what it does in London or Paris. 

Still, I remember those evenings by the Vltava with a certain nostalgia: the music drifting from the embankment cafés, Clare laughing over a glass of Moravian wine, the quiet astonishment that something so lovely could be so affordable in a setting so beautiful. 

---

'Thou shouldst know thyself!'

---

Weakness at the Rock Face

How do we define a weakness rather than simply a trait? Perhaps it is an aspect of ourselves we find lacking, either by the standards of social approval or by our own internal self-judgement. We should, of course, be aware of our weaknesses.

But who, really, wants to share them in public?

I tend to like the idea of doing something more than the doing itself.

This leads me way too often to start activities that I later deeply regret. 

To add to my problems I am poorly anchored in physical reality. I'm clumsy, inattentive to the world around me. I lack that instinctive ability of knowing what to touch, or how to take things apart and then put them back together again.

When it comes to manipulating physical reality, I am inept. 

My countervailing strengths lie in the conceptual: I was a competent programmer, a good theoretician in computer science and artificial intelligence, and a successful telecoms network architect.

But I can never repair anything - indeed, the very prospect fills me with terror.

When I was fourteen, my school, Bristol Grammar, started a rock-climbing club on the Avon Gorge. The gorge, with its sheer cliffs rising three or four hundred feet above the River Avon, sits almost in the heart of Bristol. The idea - the concept - of climbing those cliffs I found thrilling.

So, naturally, I signed up - pretty much over my mother’s dead body, as she was convinced I was going to die, although that thought had not yet occurred to me.

But with my father’s amused support, I forged ahead.

On Sunday mornings I would cycle the few miles from our home in Henbury, down the Portway, to the base of the cliffs. The club had a few older, competent climbers who led the routes, while we novices followed on the ropes. Until then, I had never confronted the reality of being a hundred feet up a vertical wall of rock with no obvious way forward and no clear way back.

At some point, I found myself exactly in that predicament. A tiny ledge, no safe hold, a feeling of about to topple, a vast, dizzying void beneath me, my knees vibrating involuntarily against the cliff. This is the subconscious already panicking; waiting for the conscious mind to catch up.

I realised I was not, and never would be, a natural rock climber.

I continued, my pride would not let me give up. My mother remained implacably opposed, convinced I would fall to my death. My father, observing my unease, quietly asked: did I really want to call it a day? Was I afraid that quitting would look like surrendering to my mother’s fears?

Reluctantly, I eventually had to admit he was right. It was pride alone that kept me turning up, the fear of losing face: I really didn't like it.

So we devised a face-saving excuse and I left the climbing club. 

And I have never gone rock climbing again.

---

Other things I have started then given up over the decades: learning conversational french, learning piano, getting a maths MSc, properly studying physics topics like GR/QFT, learning to play the harmonica.

In Slough

Clare Remembers Slough (December 1979–March 1982)

Nigel: So this is our recollection of living in Slough - between December 1979 and early 1982. We moved to Saffron Walden when I joined STL in Harlow. So, just over two years really: 1980 and 1981, with a few months either side.

We moved to Slough because we had to leave our rented flat in Windsor. We’d broken the lease by acquiring both a baby - Alex - and a cat. Our relations with the landlady weren’t great, and it was inconvenient anyway: the flat was up a couple of flights of stairs, which was no good for a pram. So we started looking for a house.

At that time I was working for Kienzle Data Systems, a computer programming company on Slough’s industrial estate. Who actually chose the house by the canal, near the bridge?

Clare: We chose it together.

Nigel: And I was working full-time, five days a week, while you were...?

Clare: I was working Saturdays and Monday evenings - twelve hours a week altogether. You came home from work on Mondays around four o’clock to relieve me.

Nigel: That was at the International Stores in Windsor, wasn’t it?

Clare: Yes. I kept that job after we moved to Slough; I just commuted back to Windsor. On Mondays they put me on wines and spirits because they needed someone over eighteen. By then I was about four months pregnant with Adrian and realised I couldn’t stand for hours, so I gave in my notice. I could have told them I was expecting, but I thought, “What’s the point?” I wasn’t going to last another three months at the tills anyway.

Nigel: You were cute when you were pregnant - cute in a different way. So then you became a full-time housewife, right?

Clare: (primly). A home engineer, thank you. I looked after Alex and kept the place running.

Nigel: What are your standout memories of Slough?

Clare: Most of them seem to be minor disasters. Once we came back from holiday - I think one trip was a week, another about a fortnight  -  and found the whole place flooded. The kitchen leak had covered every floor; the carpet in the living room was literally floating.

Another time, after a shorter break, we came home to find twenty bottles of milk on the step. I’d left a note saying no milk until further notice, but the milkman just carried on. The postman arrived as I was looking at the bottles; he shook his head in disbelief.

Then there was the Christmas turkey. We’d bought a big one, expecting leftovers for days - turkey curry, turkey risotto, turkey sandwiches. About an hour after lunch I heard a noise in the pantry. The cat had helped himself and was halfway through the carcass. We let him have it. Foolish, since money was tight, but there we are.

Nigel: Any other disasters?

Clare: Oh yes. I remember trying to dry some sealant round the window with a hairdryer and cracking the glass, which we then had to replace. And the endless mould in the bedroom - that was a battle. We finally moved the bed from the outside wall to the one adjoining the living room, and that helped.

Nigel: Adrian was a remarkably contented baby.

Clare: He was. He slept in a cot in the alcove beside the fireplace in the living room, surrounded by ordinary domestic sounds. I discovered that children find the familiar noises of home far more reassuring than silence down a corridor.

Nigel: Since we had only one bedroom, one living room, a kitchen, hall, and bathroom, how did we divide the space between Alex and Adrian?

Clare: Alex had outgrown the cot, so he slept in the playpen in our bedroom. Adrian was still in the cot, in the alcove by the fire. Alex had always been used to being in with us - he’d been in our bedroom in Windsor too. There simply wasn’t space for two babies in the same room in Slough.

Nigel: And financially? That was the era of sky-high interest rates.

Clare: They weren’t yet at their worst, but we were always close to the edge. My twelve hours’ pay made a difference, and when I stopped, we went slightly into the red each month. You had an Access card - maxed out - and we paid the bank’s overdraft charges regularly. You finally got a small consolidation loan, which worked wonders. It stopped the constant drift into overdraft.

Nigel: I might have borrowed a bit from Kienzle too.

Clare: Maybe. I know it worked because I later recommended the same idea to my brother James, who was overstretched on his mortgage.

Nigel: Living in Slough had its other drawbacks: the traffic over the bridge, the danger of the canal.

Clare: And the neighbours upstairs - dreadful people. They said we were noisy. I finally traced the noise to a bunch of brooms I’d hung on the back of the larder door; when I opened it, they rattled. Hardly a hanging offence. But the man upstairs took to emptying his ashtray over his balcony - directly above our front step. After the third time, I swept up the ash, marched upstairs, opened his porch letter box (they had a glass door) and tipped the lot back in. Never said a word. That was the end of that.

Nigel: De-escalation by escalation.

Clare: Exactly. And it worked - he stopped.

By then the flat was too small anyway, and you’d been offered a good R&D job at STL in Harlow. I went house-hunting in Saffron Walden with the boys. I spent a day there looking at houses within our range and found the right sort of place - child-friendly, good schools, a pleasant town. We never regretted it.

Nigel: So - two years in Slough. You didn’t feel it was a dreadful place that ought to have been carpet-bombed, then?

Clare: Not at all. Perfectly ordinary. We never went to the greyhound races, though. They’ve gone now anyway.

---

---

No extant pictures, but this is how I imagine our time in Slough: this our garden next to the canal.

---

I was once in a Blues-Rock Band

---

As a teenager in the late sixties, I was drawn magnetically to the blues - not the unpolished American acoustic Delta blues but its English, electric blues-rock offspring: Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff.

As a teen, I practiced on my first acoustic-guitar-with-electric-pickup in my bedroom until my fingers calloused - blasting the house through the valve-radio amp; at university I played lead guitar in a four-piece band with a second-hand Fender Stratocaster, covering Cream, Free, Hendrix, and the standard electric blues repertoire.

We once opened for Free, blew up the university amp, and had to borrow theirs - an act of stunning kindness.

I actively disliked The Rolling Stones (pretentious strutting, I reckoned) and Pink Floyd (just pretentious).

I wanted directness and authenticity - delivered with craft and extreme volume. Unfortunately I wasn't really that good.

Now, in my seventies, I have a renewed appreciation for the virtuosity and diversity of Led Zeppelin and the stage impact of Rory Gallagher; I listen to Walter Trout, and sometimes to Ally Venable, Joe Bonamassa, and the Zac Schulze Gang.

And, as I practise blues fingerstyle, my callouses have come back.

The Catholic Church and the Comintern

---

I began my adult life as an activist in the IMG, the British Section of the Fourth International and successor to the Comintern, immersed in the rituals of Marxist politics, endless meetings, and the promise of a transformed world. Decades later, I now find myself an activist in the Catholic Church (parish treasurer and project manager for our facilities) and I am struck by how familiar it all feels. These two great global organisations, one secular and revolutionary, the other religious and traditional, are oddly similar in their institutional life, with the activists still complaining about the passivity of most of the ordinary members...

Both claim to speak a universal truth. For the Comintern it was Marxism-Leninism, the scientific doctrine of history; for the Church it is the legacy of faith handed down from the Apostles. If you hold the key to human destiny, then errors and deviations should not be tolerated.

Hence orthodoxy, hence heresy, hence the long shadow of discipline.

For both rest on centralised authority. The Party had the Central and Political Committees - and the Control Commission; the Church has the Pope and the Magisterium. Democratic centralism vs. (in extremis) papal infallibility. Different idioms, same structural necessity: following discussion, unity is determined by a final arbiter.

Both manage conscience. In the Comintern, members were subjected to criticism and self-criticism (in the IMG not so much). In the Church, we have the confessional, the insistence on recognising fault and reaffirming commitment. In both settings, the ethos is interiorised, made personal (and thus more effective).

Both are missionary - universal in scope. The Comintern aspired to world revolution; the Church, to universal salvation. Both sprawl across cultures, nationalities, and centuries, and both face the constant problem of cohesion in the face of secular challenge.

Any institution that combines (1) a monopoly on truth, (2) a universal mission, and (3) a fragile global reach will converge on the same logic: central authority, discipline, self-examination, orthodoxy and exclusion. Whether the foundation is transcendental revelation or historical materialism, the organisational necessities are much the same.

Inside both, there is reward for those signed-up. In the Party it was the intoxicating sense of being active on the side of history. In the parish it is the palpable commitment of people who give their time, energy, and skill for something beyond themselves. Work can be mundane but has its life-affirming qualities. You are sustained by a sense of purpose and by the comradeship of those around you.

So from the Comintern to the Catholic Church, structures resemble while ideologies diverge. But in the lived experience of the activist core, the resemblance is remarkably similar, and the reward is the same: a life shaped by shared labour in service of a mission that transcends the individual.

---

Personal Failure Modes

---

The Uses of Failure

Failure is an odd experience. It may be anticipated but is usually unexpected; it leaves a sting but, in hindsight, it sometimes clears the ground for something better.

I have had enough encounters with it to know its habits.

An early example came in 1977, when I decided to escape teaching and try my hand at computing. Jacob’s Biscuits - yes, the biscuit people - set me a written test in flowcharts and algorithms: I had never seen such contraptions before. Grappling against time with these weird algorithmic mazes, I missed the cut-off by a single mark.

No job.

At the time, I was furious: to fail on something so arbitrary, a contrived mess of boxes and arrows. Yet within months I was enrolled at KBS Computer Services on a COBOL programming course, which launched me into employment.

Jacob’s biscuits continued to crumble without my assistance.

A few years later, I was employed as an Assembler programmer at Kienzle Data Systems in Slough but looking for something better. ICL in Bracknell seemed promising (they later became a scandal-prone Fujitsu). By then I did have real credentials - Assembler and COBOL - but I was also married, in debt, and carrying a large monetary loan from Kienzle.

During my interview in Bracknell I asked - perhaps unwisely - whether ICL might extend a similar multi-thousand pound loan as a condition of the great benefits of employing me. 

They declined to offer me the job; in retrospect such a narrow escape. ICL slid into Fujitsu’s embrace and lost any claim to distinction, while I moved on to Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL), where I discovered software research and artificial intelligence and launched my career at a much higher level.

STL was taken over by BNR, and then absorbed into Northern Telecom, where my fortunes went up and down. At some point - wearied by Nortel - I went down to the south coast to interview with Ericsson, a telecoms competitor. I took the train, endured the hopeful anxiety of another corporate audition, and was duly rejected.

In the aftermath I struck out as a freelance telecoms designer, trading security for autonomy. This was Interweave Consulting. The work flowed in, the money was much better than anything Ericsson would have paid, and for the first time I felt I owned what I did. And Ericsson flailed in the early 2000s when the boom times ended, a casualty of the new Internet technologies.

Years later, when my own company faltered for a while, I applied to a consultancy in Cambridge (Analysys) that recruited through written intelligence tests. Pass them all or be shown the door. I stumbled on the linguistic puzzles - the to-me contrived “if this, then not that” variety - where success depends more on second-guessing the test-setter’s intent than on actual reasoning.

I failed one section, which meant I failed altogether. They had no further interest in me, my phone call seeking feedback was met with disdainful indifference. In the event, my own firm, Interweave Consulting, soon revived, and I was spared the grind of corporate clever-for-hire left-brain consultancy.

Not every failure involved trying to get in. Sometimes it was about maintaining that superior consultant-mode once inside. At Salford Quays, presenting to a client on a network design for them, on behalf of the project management company I was working with, I was blindsided by detailed questions about Cisco routers. My work had always been at the generic architectural level - designs and functions - not the details of any specific vendor’s catalogue. I really did not know Cisco's detailed product line.

In that moment I was exposed. I bluffed, floundered, and later phoned colleagues in embarrassment, asking with demeaning desperation for assistance. The project was unaffected, I got away with it, but the memory of standing there, empty-handed before the client, still has its edge. I really hate being incompetent in the moment.

What unites these episodes is not that I was right and everybody else was wrong. Each organization I dealt with was acting within its own terms: Jacob’s with its early-days flowcharts, ICL with its financial probity and commodity view of programmers, Ericsson with its bureaucratic tick-boxes, Cambridge with its sui generis puzzles, Salford with its vendor-router queries. Their standards were real; my shortcomings were real. The mismatch was structural.

Failure, then, is very ordinary. It is what happens when two sets of requirements don’t line up. The shock comes from the body, which still registers rejection as horrible; that visceral jolt is what remains in the memory. Yet, looking back, each rejection actually cleared a path. The failures kept me moving until I arrived at places better suited to what I could actually do.

Failure does not define; it diverts and redirects. And often, the door that shuts on you - it turns out in hindsight - is the very one you should not have wished to walk through.

Hang Gliding and Paragliding

We first got the idea of learning to hang-glide around 1986. I think it may have been an advert in the YHA magazine, or something like that. Clare and I, in our typically idiosyncratic and whimsical way, decided that it would be interesting to fly hang gliders. So, we paid for a five-day course and drove up to Yorkshire for training.

We were based in a rather nice country house hotel, complete with its own grounds. Each day, we were ferried out to the surrounding hills to begin our lessons. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t nervous - running down a hill with a hang glider strapped to your back, launching into mid-air, and hoping not to crash and die isn't the most calming prospect.

The first thing we encountered was the so-called "simulator" - a jerry-rigged affair, essentially a steel tripod with a hanging harness. You strapped yourself in and hung from it, gripping the A-frame - the basic hang glider control. Push it forward and the nose goes up; pull it back and the nose dips; tilt it sideways and you bank left or right. Of course, suspended on a tripod in a yard, you weren’t actually going anywhere but it was a start.

What we hadn’t appreciated, due to our failure to read the small print, was that the five-day course was weather-dependent. Getting five days of suitable flying weather in the Yorkshire Dales was, frankly, a fantasy. I think we managed maybe two, three days at most. During that time, we learned how to assemble the hang glider and how to run down a slope with it, assisted by a couple of other students holding onto guide ropes attached to the wings. These ropes were there to stop the glider either taking off prematurely or catastrophically veering into the ground. At most, we were a few feet off the ground.

Clare didn’t have a great time. She wasn’t much taken with the business of sprinting downhill while dodging molehills. In the end, we didn’t fly any actual hang gliders, and Clare quite reasonably decided she was done. She wasn’t inclined to persevere.

But I was. The arrangement was that the five days were non-refundable, but you could come back until you'd used them all. So I did. I returned later and completed the course, eventually earning my Club Pilot Certificate. To do that, I had to launch from the top of a hill - perhaps 200 to 300 feet high, steeper than the glider's glide angle - fly down, and finally land without falling over. I managed that. I also passed the required written exams on rules of the air, weather, and meteorology.

I still have the certificate, but I told the instructor at the time that I’d probably never fly a hang glider again. Hang gliders, as it turned out, were expensive, heavy, and took an age to assemble. Meanwhile, paragliding was emerging as a far more convenient alternative: basically a glorified parachute with air cells forming an aerofoil. You just unpack it, clip in, and go. That was much more appealing.

Back in Sible Hedingham where we lived at that time, I joined a club based at South Weald Airfield - near STL in Harlow - that specialised in towed-paragliding. Harlow, of course, is flat as a pancake, so we used a Jeep with a thousand-foot tow rope. The routine was simple: you'd strap the rope to your harness, set up the paraglider in a foot-high wall behind you, and face backwards. Once ready, you'd yank the glider up so it inflated overhead, spin around, and then the Jeep would start moving. 

As you ran forward, the increasing speed would lift you into the air. At around 60 mph, you’d climb quickly to 700 or 800 feet. At that point, you'd press the release, let the rope drop away, and you were free to fly - turns, stalls, spins, whatever aerobatics you fancied - until you were down to about 200 feet. Then you’d line up and land.

You could usually get four or five flights in a day. It was exhilarating, if initially frightening. I did get used to it, though never quite rid myself of the underlying anxiety. On Sunday mornings, I’d phone the club for a weather update, wondering if the trip was worthwhile. A part of me wanted to go; another part of me didn’t: fear and the thought of a day lost away from Clare and the kids. Given that I was already away five days a week, it felt a little selfish. It certainly wasn’t ideal for family solidarity.

Eventually, I decided that rather than tow-launched flights, I wanted to paraglide in the mountains. So I signed up for a course in the Brecon Beacons.

Flying there was different. You’d catch the ridge lift and fly along at 150 to 200 feet above the ground, just near the top, adjusting your line as the wind funneled into depressions and rolled over outcrops. Walkers would wave as you silently traversed above them. And when you were done, you’d simply descend hundreds of feet to the bottom to regroup.

The key was to relax, to feel the flow of the canopy. You had two control lines, one in each hand, to steer and adjust your speed. You made small corrections: if it lurched left, you pulled gently right, and so on. The art was in delicacy, in being responsive. When it worked, it was a wonderfully serene experience.

But was it safe? They said it was about as dangerous as motorcycling. Still, one thing that always nagged at me was the knowledge that if you hit a downdraft at 100 feet, you couldn’t recover. People did break their backs in those situations. And that made every flight feel, just a little, like Russian roulette. I was not reassured by Kevlar back protectors!

My final flight was at South Weald, using a new canopy - not the big, stable, square ones I was used to, but a newer, higher-performance model that was longer, thinner, and more twitchy. Going up, it bounced around unnervingly. I wasn’t sure it was going to behave. Still, I flew it, and it descended more slowly, more efficiently.

But when I landed, I had a strange realisation: I could fly these things: I’d done the tricks, the fast turns, vertical spirals, stalls and recoveries - I’d mastered it. But it was going nowhere. It no longer gripped me. So I packed up at the end of the day and never went back. That was the end of my flying.

One final observation. I was always being gently criticised by the club organisers for not hanging around afterward. “We all go to the pub or café, chat, get to know each other,” they’d say, “You never come. We never get to know you.”

And they were right. I had no interest in being friends with them. I just wanted to understand how these machines worked, to master them, and once I had, the fascination faded, just as it always does when you master any piece of equipment.

Collegiality wasn’t my strong suit, and that was plainly a deficiency. It meant I didn’t get as much out of the experience as I might have.

But it did make it easier to walk away.

Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969)

---

In the early 1980s I was a researcher at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories at Harlow, Essex, part of the formal methods group looking at new ways to formalise software specification. I was studying LISP and Standard ML, Dana Scott's denotational semantics, universal algebra and category theory; my first project was a term-rewriting system for equational logic using the Knuth-Bendix algorithm implemented in LISP on a DEC VAX-11/780.

One of the curiosities which had us excited at that time was Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969) and its calculus of indications. We were interested because of its minimalism and its central preoccupation with fixed-point recursion.

Subsequently it has had a very odd trajectory.

---

Logic and mathematics: professional logicians quickly saw that it was not fundamentally new. The “mark” is just a notational variant of Boolean algebra (you can recover it with Sheffer stroke or NOR). In mainstream algebra of logic, it was regarded as a curiosity rather than a breakthrough. By the mid-1970s it had no presence in formal logic journals.

Cybernetics, systems theory, philosophy: it survived longer here. Heinz von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and later Niklas Luhmann used it as a metaphorical resource in second-order cybernetics and social systems theory. They were less interested in Boolean algebra per se than in the idea that “distinction” is the primitive operation underlying cognition and society. That strand persisted into the 1990s.

Countercultural reception: in the 1970s–80s, Laws of Form had a cult readership among New Age circles, artists, and speculative thinkers. It was sometimes marketed as a quasi-mystical work about reality arising from distinction. This further distanced it from academic logic.

Present day

In logic and computer science: almost no mainstream research cites it. One occasionally finds enthusiasts in categorical logic or unconventional computation, but it is marginal.

In systems theory and sociology: Luhmann’s school still invokes Spencer-Brown as a conceptual ancestor, though usually filtered and abstracted.

In fringe communities: there are still societies and conferences dedicated to Laws of Form. A “Laws of Form Society” exists, and occasional workshops are held.

Summary

The calculus of indications did not disappear entirely, but in professional logic it is viewed as redundant. It found a second life in cybernetics, social theory, and a small enthusiast community. Today it survives as a niche interdisciplinary curiosity rather than a live research program in mathematics or computer science.

---

Imposter Syndrome

This morning in the library the checkout machines were out of order, so I had to do something retro: speak to a librarian at the desk. I was checking out four books for Clare.

The librarian scanned my library card, addressing me by the title printed on it: “Dr Nigel Seel.” It caught me off guard: no one usually calls me that - I rarely use the title, and when I do, it feels faintly fraudulent, like I’m impersonating some more serious person.

On the walk home, I told Clare how odd it felt. She dismissed it briskly. “They just think you’re a medical doctor,” she said, “and no one likes them anymore - they spend all their time debating pro-Hamas resolutions at their conference.”

This seemed both a little unfair and entirely in character for her.

I did feel faintly important for a second or two; I mentioned that to her as well.

But the encounter set me thinking about the PhD itself. There was a trope back in the mid-1980s, when AI was in one of its episodic summer periods, when languages like Prolog were in vogue and researchers were flushed with optimism. It was said with some truth: “what used to be a PhD thesis ten years ago is now a three-week programming project for a keen grad student and a minor paper in a conference.”

I sometimes feared my own thesis might have fallen into that category.

And yet, it was properly examined by a real logician, Professor Raymond Turner of the University of Essex: a respected name in modal logic, author of several books, an influential presence in the field. He read my thesis closely, and deemed it worthy.

What amused me at the time was that the part he found most interesting - the computational agent model I’d used, inspired by the work we were doing at STL - was something I had considered quite secondary. For me, the substance was in how the research grounded logics of belief, knowledge, perception and action in the world of situated, interacting agents. He, however, was more intrigued by the model-structure than the language-semantics.

In AI circles Turner was seen with a fond detachment. “Oh, Raymond,” they’d say. “A proper logician; he doesn’t really understand AI.” He was viewed as not quite of the community. And yet, because his work was so technically formidable, there was a sort of grudging respect, even awe. That he agreed to examine my thesis gave me a degree of credibility: borrowed gravitas.

Looking back now, I don’t think the work was as intellectually heroic as I believed at the time. But that’s how time works, with its mix of belated sense-of-proportion, misty nostalgia and hard-headed realism.

An IMG Militant

Slightly photoshopped - Peter with Tariq

---

When I moved to London in the early 1970s - after being kicked out of Warwick University - I ended up in a flat near Clapham South tube station shared with Phil and Peter Cooper. Peter was the posh one of us.

At that time we were unemployed and basically working full-time for the International Marxist Group. I had some adventures with Peter, notably our smuggling trip into the former Czechoslovakia when it was a decadent Stalinist police state (but still able to bite). I documented that episode here.

Later, he slightly mysteriously moved away to Manchester. Then I left the IMG and Peter got his fifteen minutes of fame, as documented in the image above. Here is more:

Peter Cooper 

27 year old Peter Cooper, a left wing law advisor, admitted last night that he was the spy at the dinner table who bugged the controversial "Wogs' speech by Sir Richard Dobson, which led to Sir Richard's resignation as Chairman of British Leyland, last Friday.

He was invited to the dinner for members of the Twenty Club at the Dorchester, by his father Mr. John Cooper, who after the speech was published in the Socialist Challenge whose editor is Tariq Ali - a friend of Peter Cooper, has resigned from the club.

Photo Shows: Peter Cooper seen during his press conference today watch by Mr. Tariq Ali, Editor of the Socialist Challenge who published the story of Sir Richard Dobson's speech, which can be seen on the wall in the background.

After that, Peter seems to vanish from history. It took me an afternoon, flailing around with my fading memories, to put this post together.

Dear Rosemary - a short story by Adam Carlton

 

---

Dear Rosemary,

It's curious how a young man's memory shows off its deep, deep roots - even after half a century.

I must have met you at a party in the capital. We were all so young and our organisation was not so large. We'd come up Friday afternoon, sleep in some comrade's house (a surprising number of cadres were rather bourgeois in their well-appointed mansions).

Saturday would be the demonstration, mobilised in our thousands, holding banners, chanting slogans, linked arms; "Flics, porcs, assassins !" on the anarchist banners.

Saturday evening was party time: deeper links forged if we got lucky.

Yes, I rather think I met you at a party.

-

Let me see if I can conjure you up: my memories are very clear. You were surprisingly thin, although gamine is more flattering. Your face was round, usually smiling - but from nowhere a little scowl could purse your thin lips.

Your hair was black, fine and quite long but you tidied it behind your head in plaits or sometimes a bun.

You had small breasts and your hips were narrow, not much wider than your slim waist, hence gamine. But you were quite tall, almost as tall as me.

I remember, strangely, your spectacles. I think you were shortsighted. They were quite round, and you had that librarian trick of a cloth loop attached to the arms, behind your neck, so that they could hang down in front.

For me, you were really into librarian chic: you dressed like an elderly aunt though you could not have been older than nineteen (my age). You wore an old-fashioned blouse and a thin cardigan; you generally appeared in long, plain skirts down to your ankles.

I generally thought you looked like a witch - reimagined of course as a bohemian-leftist witch.

You came to visit me in the provincial town where I was a student: it was summer at the end of my second year and everything was still somewhat-new to me: university culture, revolutionary politics, revolutionary girls.

It was the summer vacation. I said to you, why don't we hitch down to the south of France? You said, I knew you'd ask me that.

We slept in barns, in the open, and occasionally in a comrade's house. Once we were picked up by a woman who owned a ski lodge in Annecy. For some reason she took to us and gave us free bed and breakfast, a luxury room whose opulence I would not meet again till much later in my career, when on expenses. Yes, I remember that night - and the sumptuous breakfast next morning 

How weird are relationships on the cusp of adulthood. In Naples we met some guy who offered to drive you up Vesuvius. I was left to my own devices for twenty four hours. What was that about? You were evasive but not a shred of guilt or even concern troubled your face.

On our way back, we were stranded at Avignon for eight hours. The usual tricks - you standing conspicuously, looking cool and superior; I lurk inconspicuously, emerging only at the last moment to catch the grimace of disappointment on the driver's face - those tricks do not work in the absence of traffic. I think our enigmatic relationship frayed from that point on.

In March you came down to see me again, but this time it was just a flyby. You spent the night with our cell leader – who promptly whisked you off to meet his family.

I expected shock, anticipated jealousy, or the visceral jab of loss.

Nothing came: I found myself indifferent.

A CCF Night Exercise in 1963

 

---

The Mendips at night in summer. The area around Charterhouse - Bristol to the north, Priddy to the south - is rolling hills, criss-crossed by tracks; rough grass and small spiky bushes with the occasional stone wall. We're on the plateau, maybe 700 foot above the Somerset levels to the south west. It's a clear night sky and stars are everywhere.

The olive-green army truck lurches to a stop, tyres crunching on gravel; the driver comes round to let down the tailgate. My squad - four of us - climb out into the cold night air. We huddle together, clustered around our OS map. Where are we? In which direction are we to move out?

We've been briefed: navigate three miles to the rendezvous, avoid detection by the "enemy" patrols, make key observations on the way. Don't get lost; don't fall into any gulleys; don't get tangled up in barbed wire.

Don't get caught.

My VHF radio is strapped to my khaki belt along with a spare battery, the headset snug against my ears, the throat mic pressing into my skin. We fan out, barely more than shadows against the darker silhouette of the rolling terrain. No torches, of course. Just the occasional glimmer of moonlight on dewy grass. We walk in silence towards the first way-point. Surely we won't be intercepted this early? We're nervous, looking furtively in all directions.

Navigating by compass and the occasional whisper over a map, we creep along the edge of small depressions, looking for cover; we scramble over stone walls - tumbledown but we've been told not to damage them. The radio crackles in my ear: they want to know where we are. We squeeze together around the map, wondering, looking at landmarks, trying to match contour lines and icons to what we see. I press my throat mic and murmur our position - best guess. Orders come back: avoid this area; check out that.

We move lower, crouching as we near a ridge. Down in the shallow valley below, torch beams cut through the darkness - our enemy patrol. We freeze, prone on the cold damp  ground, barely daring to breathe. A dog barks in the distance, a farm perhaps, and the torches swung away. We press on at an angle, a momentary swirl of wind covers our movement. My heart is hammering.

The hours go by as we walk through the immense darkness, the repetition is calming, we move as if in a trance. We reach the rendezvous; I call it in.

The truck will come soon, take us to the barracks for a few hours sleep then back to school in Bristol for Sunday morning pickup by our parents. It's merely the shadow of a real military patrol but our imagination does its work: how would this feel in a countryside of guns and tanks and ground-attack aircraft? And no way home?

The Combined Cadet Force (CCF)

 

---

This is a simulation of a conversation I may have with my grandson when he (and I) are both quite a bit older than today. As I write this I wonder how much of my own childhood experiences may - in a thoroughly modernised guise - become suddenly relevant again in the next 5-10 years.

---

Grandson:

 "Grandfather, when you joined the CCF at Bristol Grammar School, what made you choose the army section over the navy or air force cadets?"

Grandfather:

 "I was twelve or thirteen, about your age, and obsessed with science-fiction, spaceflight and aircraft. Naturally I thought I would join the air cadet section. My father said he thought the RAF was sloppy and ill-disciplined - he was very loyal to his old WW2 corps, the REME (the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers).

There was an open day in which all three branches did a kind of 'taster' session. The army did an assault course - so much more interesting than the other two. I joined the army cadets."

Grandson:

 "What was the most memorable experience you had while in the CCF?"

Grandfather:

"We were out at the Army's Yoxter Range, in Somerset, for live fire practice. We would be firing the Lee-Enfield Mk 4 .303 rifle as used by second world war infantry. This would be around 1964. The officers were our teachers, and the most senior was Captain Lewis who was a portly and rather irascible physics teacher. He wanted to demonstrate to us that even blanks were dangerous.

He put an aluminium sheet, a metal square about eight inches by eight inches onto the grass, loaded his rifle with a blank, dropped the muzzle of the rifle to the ground, pointing it at the centre of the plate. Then, in quiet and authoritative tones, he explained that the blank cartridge was tipped with some material which stopped the powder getting out, where the bullet would normally be. He said that although the material was quite soft, nevertheless it came out at supersonic speeds and it was extremely dangerous close-up.

As he was speaking, he was quietly pulling the trigger back and as he finished there was an insanely loud bang. He leant over and picked up the metal plate, which now had a large irregular hole blasted through the centre. We were sufficiently convinced!"

Grandson:

 "What was the biggest mistake you made while in the CCF?"

Grandfather:

 "A short time after I joined up there was the annual parade on the school field, where parents watched from the stands. We were all there, all the cadets, doing drill (which I was less than brilliant at).

At the end we were all in our ranks in the July sunshine, turned to face our parents and the many guests. The cadet sergeant-major shouted what I thought was 'slope arms' which I did, swinging the rifle to my right shoulder; unfortunately, I was the only one who heard that. Everyone else heard 'ground arms' and dropped their weapons so that the butt was next to their right boot.

I stood for a second, ashen-faced, and then miserably slid the rifle down to the ground. My father said afterwards that, in his heart of hearts, as soon as he saw that one lone cadet had got it so very wrong, he knew it would have to be me. My natural clumsiness - coming to the fore again!"

Grandson:

 "Can you tell me about the time you got lost in Snowdonia one arctic Easter?"

Grandfather:

 "Thankfully I was not in command, being an ordinary member of the squad led by a cadet corporal who thought he knew all about traversing snow-covered mountains in bitter weather.

 We were sent out on a three-day exercise to navigate cross-country near the Glyders in North Wales, camping in the snow during the nights. I think they hadn't expected the weather to be quite so bad.

Remember, in those days no GPS, no phones, no breathable gear. We were wearing combat jackets and trousers and carrying our tents and supplies on manpack-carriers on our backs; maps and compasses. We were led up precipitous ascents so icy and difficult that even our intrepid leader turned us back before we fell off. Then the blizzard hit, and we sought lower ground and waited out the storm in a farmer's barn.

Unfortunately, our leader neglected to call it in. The Mountain Rescue was called, it was a national news item, our parents were beside themselves. We meandered down to the nearest village the following day, completely unaware of all the fuss. I, at least, did not get the full force of the wrath which hit our leader!"

Grandson:

 "Was there ever an incident when you really annoyed one of the officers during your time in the CCF?"

Grandfather:

 "I was in the signals section. Bristol Grammar School CCF was part of a nationwide short-wave radio net of army cadet forces (call-sign 18 Bravo), and after school I would fire up our (ex-tank) transceiver and talk to fellow cadets in schools hundreds of miles away.

One such conversation went on too long after school and the teacher ordered me to stop the conversation while the other guy (at Marlborough College near Swindon) was still transmitting. This was quite a breach of radio protocol, so I kind of ignored him.

He got really angry and basically pulled the plug and sent me home. It was the beginning of the end: I left the CCF soon after."

Telling it like it is: William Barton

Amazon link

---

William Barton’s Melting in the Sun 

So, to William Barton’s somewhat-fictionalised memoir, Melting in the Sun (2011) - stories from his young life, mostly. Barton comes across as a bright, intense young man, obsessed with science fiction, astronomy - and girls, of course. He grows up in the Virginia/North Carolina area, straddling two worlds: mixing with the dirt-poor, sometimes violent “white trash” kids on one side, and his more conventional peers on the other.

In one story, wandering by himself one sunny afternoon at the broken-down edge of town, he's accosted by an older boy who has previously bullied him. We're talking maybe 12 and 14 years old here. The older boy looks threatening and acts weird, and then asks the young Barton if he can hang out with him that afternoon. Barton helplessly agrees, but takes an early opportunity to escape, running off to meet with his friend at a downtown coffee bar.

It's only later that he discovers that the bully has been diagnosed with cancer and has only a few months left to live. Guilt haunts Barton forever.

In his late teens and early twenties Barton finds no clear career path - it's a string of odd jobs: stripping and cleaning offices, drifting into freelance work as a software contractor. Writing always presses at him, but for years he can't get published.

In a later story, the professional world of publishing is portrayed as cynical and arbitrary. He's approached by a fellow author who calls his work 'filthy'; others accuse him of writing male pornography, of being obsessed with sex, and misogynistic. Barton seems to take these accusations with mild incredulity and contempt: he's writing the truth about the male interior mind and he's being criticised by hypocrites and fools.

Publishers, however, are only interested in sales and the zeitgeist: authors are manipulated and dropped with no warning as fashions change. You are only as good as your last sales figures.

Barton seems always drawn to emotionally-volatile women who make his life difficult - they give him a hard time, cheat on him, and invariably dump him. Relationships confuse him - while he confuses his romantic partners. He’s accused of talking like he’s reading aloud from a book. He’s obsessed with sex (although that's hardly unusual  for young men). However, he never seems to get out of the cycle of dating disasters.

 'The craving for love': an emotion which dares not speak its name to the young masculine mind.

Some of the stories he recounts are bleak, even harrowing. In one, he’s hitchhiking at night in a bad part of town when the driver and accomplice rape his girlfriend while he is held at gunpoint. In another, he’s struck down by some kind of serious infectious disease, barely making the hospital: the medical staff are disparaging and try to eject him when he explains he has no medical insurance. 

It’s not hard to see where Barton’s fiction - and his recurring themes - come from. The world he writes about is harsh, unstable, and largely indifferent to the individual. If Barton was not such a talented writer he'd be just another intelligent oddball, stuck in the margins of society, invisible and unremarked.

Barton's works are very inconsistent: a lot of it is more like therapy-writing - deeply unpleasant to read. But at his best, where his searing honesty is harnessed to the power of higher ideals: we are jolted.

---

For those curious about Barton’s fiction, the best place to start is with Acts of Conscience, When We Were Real, and When Heaven Fell. These are books that take the raw material of his life - alienation, desire, trauma, disillusion - and reframe it in the deep interstellar; distance lends perspective.

I’m getting tired of Grief Memoirs

---

I recently read ‘Levels of Life’ (2013) by Julian Barnes, a literary homage and grief-stricken memoir dedicated to his wife, Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent who died in 2008.

I am in two minds about Barnes (as I am as regards his peer group of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis). They come from the same upper-middle-class milieu, cleave to the same bien-pensant views, held as superior to the ‘philistinism’ of those less intellectually- and culturally-endowed.

And yet their tragedy is that they have so very little to say, condemned as they are by history and circumstance to be subject to no significant oppression, no injustice or hardship of any real kind.

Their work is all style and no substance. Elegant and well-turned for sure, but instantly forgettable. And when it is not, it takes the form of failed experimental literature: unreadable writing-games for the sake of crude novelty.

And so Julian Barnes’s thoughts turn to that most powerful, destabilising emotion: the unbearable grief of losing a loved one. And this most difficult literary challenge is somehow beyond him. The very self-regard and self-righteousness which propels him in his elite literary trajectory now colours his own account of trauma with the sins of vanity and self-indulgence, self-pity and the taking of spiteful revenge.

‘Levels of Life’ starts with the two short stories of nineteenth century balloonists. This introduction, an over-elaborate and frankly tedious metaphor for later grief, is a kind of bait-and-switch. The manoeuvre is sabotaged by the tedium of the bait itself, which hardly encourages the reader to continue to the actual point of the book: the switch from soldierly and thespian balloonists to Pat Kavanagh and the effects of her death on the author.

Parts of this third part are worth reading - Barnes, after all, is not without talent - and the best bits are where he is the snarkiest about his friends and literary acquaintances. But his introspective account of how grief feels is only Wikipedia-interesting, and is often, one feels, coloured by a certain self-absorption.

Following the death of a loved one, grief lasts a long time and you never really get over it.

Beyond that, we’re in seriously diminishing marginal returns from this literary genre. No more!

Frederick Stanley Seel: (1925 - 2009)

My father would have been one hundred today. (A memoir).

Fred Seel drawn and painted by his elder brother Len

Here is his account of his earliest years, written before he died.

---

Some memories of my early life

by Fred Seel

15-03-2004

I was born on January 1st 1925 at 24 Dale Street, St. Pauls, Bristol, England, my parents being Frederick George Seel and Clara Alice Maud Seel (nee Feven). They had married at St. Clements Church, Newfoundland Road, Bristol on December 18th 1918.

Apparently I was a rather sickly child and there were doubts that I would be able to cope with the hardships of life in such a poverty-stricken area, where unemployment was rife, money very much sought after but very difficult to obtain, and a standard of living so poor that it would be true to say that only the toughest survived. 

In those days, to be treated by a doctor had to be paid for, so you would have to be very ill before using the little money available. Fortunately, there was a “Medical Mission” in Redcross Street which was only ten minutes walk away and was run by a Dr. Collingwood, with the help of Senior Nurse Harris and her assistant, Nurse Dunn. Nurse Harris was (in my eyes) very old, so mostly worked in the Mission Surgery, while Nurse Dunn visited the patients at their homes. 

Providing you could put up with hymn singing, prayers and the reading of religious tracts, the consultation and treatment was free so you can imagine it was very well supported by us and the staff were loved and respected by everyone. 

Because I was considered to be very frail, both Nurse Harris and Nurse Dunn visited regularly and over a period of about two years I was cared for by my Mum’s Mum, Granny Feven,  whose house we lived in with my Grandfather. 

My Gran told me for many years, that she had to feed me two breakfasts, two dinners and two teas for the whole of those two years, so you see, if anyone is not happy with the rest of this history, you know who to blame. 

Life as a child was hard, I had an elder brother Len,  born on April 15th 1921 and a younger sister Maisie, born on December 16th 1930. I  was given to understand that I also had a sister called Lilian May who was born on December 2nd 1919. It was quite usual at that time for babies to be vaccinated against smallpox and Lily had her vaccination, at a cost of two shillings and six pence a few months later. Unfortunately, she had a serious reaction which developed into pneumonia and she died on June 2nd 1920. 

To just subsist my mum had to work at Brooks and Prudential (a mineral water company) as a bottler on a production line for a pittance, my dad turned his hand to almost anything that would earn him some money and we boys were expected to work hard evenings and weekends to help out. 

A few memories that stand out include Saturday mornings in the winter fetching coke from Avon Street Bristol Gas Co. for ourselves and the neighbours(about two miles total). We would hire a handcart and Len and I would set off, often bitter cold and in poor clothing and boots. We would trudge mostly downhill to the Gas Works, put about three sacks of coke in the cart and set off home. 

Len was about three years older than me and pulled rank as you would say today. He would sit on top of the sacks and I would do the pushing, except at the steepest of the hills when he would get off and walk by the side while I still pushed. Bearing in mind I was only tiny and thin as a rake and about nine to twelve years old, that was one job I hated.

From about my seventh birthday until I was about ten or eleven, Dad decided to work during the summer months as a Costermonger (a trader who sells from a barrow) and for this he needed a cart and a means of pulling it, so somehow he obtained a pony. During this period we had the pony, a donkey, a mule and even a large (to me) cart horse, one at a time of course and stabled behind a house in Norfolk Street (off Milk Street, about ten minutes walk away). 

This was the era of the tramcar, and the rails for the tram to run upon were laid in the road with the space between the rails filled in with wooden blocks about nine inches long by four by four inches and were set in tar. Because of heavy usage these blocks were replaced on a regular basis and stored at the local tramway depot for disposal. These were to be Dad’s winter job with the horse and cart.

During the summer he would sell fruit and vegetables from the barrow, going from street to street. I, of course, was the barrow boy at weekends and went on the rounds. It was quite pleasant when the weather was fine and I very soon was taught how to put on display all the apples - highly polished and neatly arranged - the rest of the goods for sale also nicely cleaned up and displayed. All for show of course: the boxes out of sight behind the displays held the inferior goods that were sold to the customer. Things never change.

On Sundays, if the weather was fine, we would load up with cheap toys and drive to the Clock Tower at Kingswood to join several other sellers. Dad’s speciality was a bird on a stick. I had to stand by the cart and twirl the coloured, canary-like toy bird, tied to the stick with very thin string,  around my head so that its tail would spin and emit a birdlike trilling sound. They sold very well.

Back to the winter months and the tarred tramway blocks. This was a killer of a job and one I really disliked. We would drive to the Tramway Depot early on the Saturday, (Dad did this each weekday but I had to help on Saturdays) and stack the cart high with the wooden blocks and then drive home again. We then unloaded, and with an axe removed the large lumps of tar still sticking to the blocks. Quite a lot was left on, because it was too thin to remove or too tough. We were not too particular, as time was money. 

After reloading we went out on our rounds, usually some distance away from where we lived, as these blocks, with liberal amounts of tar on them, would burn very fiercely and in those days the chimneys were rarely swept. Chimney fires were common but did a lot of damage to the room, hence our rounds were well away from home and spread over a large area. The awful part of this job for me was the intense cold. We were not dressed well for the cold, and these wooden blocks were like blocks of ice to handle. I believe Dad sold them at a penny each or seven for sixpence and despite the risk they sold well, but handling them, putting them in the sacks the customers brought out was very painful and resulted in cuts and bruised chaps on both hands that never seemed to heal before the next Saturday arrived.

On the social side of life, it varied, Dad being quite a presentable type of man, full of the joys of life when he was sober and working for a living. When he was in a good mood he was a friend to everyone, very likeable and all you could wish for in a Dad. He would regularly take the family by tramcar up to the Downs to hear the Spouters, a Speakers corner where men (mostly) would stand on their soap boxes and hold forth on various topics, politics usually. It was good fun, the crowd would join in and the arguments and generally good-natured insults flew fast and furious.

Later we would walk down to a pub Dad knew (he knew every pub in Bristol, I think) and Mum and Dad would have a drink and the three of us children would sit on the wall with our crisps and lemonade. The ride home on the tramcar ended a nice trip out.

Like a lot of the men where we lived, Dad belonged to the R.A.O.B. (Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes) and his branch meetings were held at The White Horse public house in Barr Street, about ten minutes walk away at the end of Milk Street and known as The Horsefair.

He was an officer of the Branch and carried the title of Primo. I have his medal which he left to me when he died. One of the chores that Len and I had to do each weekend was to clean and polish his official regalia that he would wear at branch meetings.

One of the problems of being a member of the Buffaloes was the meeting place. They always met in a pub and, as I mentioned earlier in this write-up, Dad was at his best when he was sober. When he was with his friends at the White Horse it was very much a case of, if he had money in his pocket then he would stand his round and it usually meant that he came home the worse for wear. This often led to problems, but I do not intend to pursue this as some things are better left unsaid and it was quite a common occurrence in the neighbourhood.

Previously, I mentioned that we lived near to the Horsefair. It was a tarmac-covered area of land approximately thirty five yards square with a slope of about one in ten from the top (near St. James Church) to the bottom bordering Milk Street, where the back of Marks and Spencer’s in Broadmead is now. It was surrounded by hedges and there were benches around for people to rest. Centrally, at the bottom of the slope, was a stone fountain complete with a copper cup, securely-chained, for the use of thirsty people. 

One day, having nothing special to do, Len and I decided to take Maisie to the Horsefair for a trip out, but as she was about three years old and could not keep up with us, we put her in the pram and set off. We enjoyed ourselves running up and down and around and around but decided after a while to have a rest on the bench at the top of the slope. 

While Len chatted to Maisie I went down to the fountain for a drink, however, no sooner had I filled the cup than I heard Len shout out ”Look out Fred, catch her”, I turned around quickly to see that Len had turned the pram around and pushed it straight at me. The pram was gathering speed and handle-first, was heading for the fountain with Maisie sat inside.

Without thinking I ran towards the pram to try and stop it hitting the fountain, but I was only about seven or eight and the pram handle hit me fair and square on the nose. It stopped the pram alright, but my boyish good looks were shattered, my nose was broken and blood running down my face.

I was taken to the B.R.I. to be cleaned up and they sent for Mum and Dad. I was the hero, Len was punished, but I still had, and still do have, my broken nose to remind me of my moment of glory. 

There is still one memory that haunts me to this day. Dad’s mother, my Granny Seel, was a local character. She was a small-built woman, but what she lacked in size she made up for in aggression, especially when she was in her cups.

Granny Seel and Granny Feven were always at daggers drawn, as Granny Seel was adamant that Granny Feven’s daughter was not good enough for her son and she wasn’t worthy of him. She would often turn up outside Granny Feven’s house after the pubs closed and stand there with her fists in the air, challenging her to come out and fight. 

Granny Feven was a lovely lady and was very embarrassed by this, trying to ignore it, which seemed to annoy Granny Seel even more. Eventually things became so bad that Granny Seel was taken away to Fishponds Mental Hospital as an in-patient. 

Strangely enough it fell to my Mum to visit her, usually on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning and as you may have guessed, she would always take me with her. I was terrified of Granny Seel, her constant shouting and aggressive behaviour really scared me. Mum would take me on the tramcar to Fishponds Road and get off at Snowdon Road.

As soon as we started to go down Snowdon Road towards the hospital I would start to cry and scream that I didn’t want to go, but Mum kept a firm grip of my hand and made me go with her. 

I still can’t bear to think of those days and the fear of mental hospitals has always remained with me to this day, I was much too young to have to cope with this and in the modern idiom I suppose I was traumatised.

To close this part of my life I must mention that academically I was mostly above average for the environment I was living in. I went to St. Mathias infants school which I did not like very much and then moved on to the junior school at St. Judes in Wade Street. I cannot remember a great deal about my time at St. Judes except that there seemed to be mostly women teachers and if you were well behaved and did reasonably well at your studies you were rewarded with sweets and chocolate.

I really only progressed when I went on to senior school at St. Paul's in Wilson Street. I became very much of a swot and spent most of my time in the playground reading instead of playing the usual children’s games. 

This caused a few problems at first with the usual school bullies but as I was brought up in a very tough neighbourhood, I could more than take care of myself, I think the broken nose helped too. Anyway, I always seemed to end up as second top boy, I could never beat a lad called Bracher: he was very clever, though unfortunately he was killed in the 1939/45 war while he was in the army.

Episode Two.

From leaving school, to being demobbed from the Army.

I left St. Paul's School in December of 1939,  as I would be 14 years old in January 1940 and that was the normal age for leaving school and seeking work to help support the family.

On September 

The document ends here.