Saturday, September 24, 2011

Having a ball (or the unkindest cut of all)

Seedless!
There often comes a time when a man is called upon by his wife to do something for her which, left to his own devices, he would much prefer not to do.  Usually this is little more unpleasant than putting out the bins in the rain, or fetching something from the loft, or keeping her company during some horrendous reality TV programme.  But every now and then a man’s mettle is tested to the core, and when it happened to me I’m proud to say I rose to the challenge and was not found wanting. Bruised, battered and sore perhaps, but I pulled through.

Many years ago when our youngest son was still a toddler, we had agreed that our two children were quite sufficient, and although we loved them very much we didn’t want any more.  After some discussion there seemed to be no alternative (or at least not one acceptable to my dear wife) other than a vasectomy for yours truly.  At the time we were living in Germany where I was a MOD civil servant attached to the British Forces, and so the operation was to be conducted by a military surgeon.

Before they would book me in, we were required to have ‘counselling’ by an army doctor.  This was little more than a 5 minute interview in which he pointed out that in the event of us divorcing or losing one of our kids in a traffic accident, I wouldn't be able to start afresh in the baby making department, because the snip was as good as irreversible.

The operation to turn me into what Del Boy Trotter famously called a ‘Jaffa  was scheduled for a Friday.  This was the usual day for vasectomies, considerately chosen in order to give military personnel two days sick leave over the weekend and have them back in work on Monday. The army is very caring like that!

On the appointed day I presented myself (quite literally as it turned out) at RAF Hospital Wegberg.  Within moments I was undressed and changed into a rather fetching surgical gown which did little to cover up my bare bum.  I was handed a battery operated razor and sent to a cubicle just off the ward for a strategic shave.  The razor echoed loudly and made a hell of a clatter when I accidentally dropped it, buzzing around the tiled floor like some demented giant hornet, so what was already a nervy sort of day felt even worse when I emerged to the curious stares of all the other patients.

The procedure was to be performed under a local anaesthetic.  It’s not much fun lying back with your freshly shaved wedding tackle on display, being injected in a place no needle should ever enter.  The surgeon explained in detail what he was going to do.  Naturally I made a lame joke about the operation making a ‘vas deferens’ to my sex life, but he’d clearly heard them all before. I made one further inane attempt at conversation, asking “is it all shaved OK?”, which to be fair was probably not an easy one for him to answer without sounding a bit weird.

The experience would have been more bearable but for a small group of trainee medics popping in to observe the procedure.  The surgeon asked if I objected to them joining us.  I did actually, but as they'd already walked in to be greeted by the sight of my closely shaven and now numb genitalia, it seemed churlish to refuse.

The snip itself can best be described as stomach churningly uncomfortable but not actually painful. When it was all over I spent the next couple of days lying on my bed back home.  To her credit my wife fussed around me and fetched me food and drinks.  Friends and neighbours all seemed to know at least one person who’d had it done but unlike me, had been out and about playing football with their kids the same day.  All I can say is, they must have had balls of steel.

Years later I took my dog to be neutered.  When I collected him from the vets afterwards, he looked at me with such hurt and disappointment in his eyes.  “I know pooch, I know” I said, “but it’s for the best”.
This might sting a bit, try to relax ...

Monday, September 12, 2011

Hitch Cricket

Tuebingen. Far too pretty a town for a scruffy Herbert like me.

When studying for my German degree I was required to spend a year in Germany in order to become more fluent in the language, and also to immerse myself in German culture and so on.  Most of my fellow students were able to land well paid jobs in German schools as English Language Assistants, but no such luck for me; instead I attended the University of Tübingen about 30 miles from Stuttgart.

Tübingen was very much a university town, where students easily outnumbered the locals.  There were students from all over the world and in time I got to know Tunisians, Venezuelans, Koreans, Americans and of course Germans.  There was plenty of time for socialising, especially once I realised there was no actual requirement to attend lectures, and I decided I could just as easily become fluent in German and get to know the country by hanging out with friends and travelling around Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the cheap.

This makes me sound lazy doesn’t it? Well I was, I admit it, and I had a great time.  I knocked about with some fantastic people and although a couple of them owned cars, our usual method of transport was thumbing a lift.  Hitchhikers were a far more common sight in the early 1980s.  Many of the university buildings were situated in the town, but the majority of students lived in a ‘student village’ on a hill a couple of miles away.  There were plenty of buses but they cost money, so with typical German efficiency, the students had years before created a ‘Tremperstelle’ or hitchhikers’ bus stop.  You simply joined the queue and a succession of cars would pull over, fill up with complete strangers and give you a lift home.  You didn’t even have to stick your thumb out.

We travelled quite some distances too.  If a group of us were going to Munich for example, we’d divide into groups of 2 and arrange to meet up in a bar as and when we made it.  I always felt reasonably safe, but I did find myself on more Autobahn slip roads than I care to remember.  The German police really don’t like you hitching there, but if that’s where you get dropped off there’s not much you can do about it.

A friend and I invented a game of ‘Hitch Cricket’ in which the winning team was not the one that got to the rendezvous first, but the one which covered the greatest number of kilometres with the fewest lifts, thus allowing for variations in routes taken by the different hitching teams.  So, kilometres were runs and lifts were wickets.  We’d ask our driver to tell us how far they’d taken us and compare our scores later at the rendezvous: 150 for 9 was a rubbish score, 170 for 3 was much better.

We went all over the place and often slept rough just to save money.  We went to Munich for a Rolling Stones gig (sleeping in the ‘English Gardens’ that night with the police wandering around with torches looking for vagrants), then on to Salzburg in Austria for a bit of sightseeing (and a proper night’s sleep in a small hotel).  We also did Zurich just for the hell of it (sleeping in yet another park) and variously went to Bonn, Frankfurt and Karlsruhe, where, just in case you ever need to know, the police do not allow you to sleep in the waiting room at the railway station; “but we’re waiting for a train, officer!”

One place we couldn’t hitch to was West Berlin, at that time an island of neon and concrete in the middle of East Germany and accessible on land only by driving along the Berlin Corridor.  This road was crawling with East German police who were forever leaping out of the bushes to photograph your vehicle.  Car drivers were understandably reluctant to take complete strangers across the border with them, so instead we went on an organised coach trip over the Easter period.

A slimmer, younger me in front of the Berlin Wall, Easter 1982

West Berlin was fascinating. You hear a lot of old tosh about cities being vibrant or exciting, but this place really did have a unique atmosphere.  We did all the usual touristy things, like posing for photos in front of the Wall, but the real interest for me lay in crossing the border for a mooch around East Berlin.  We did this twice; the first time was on an organised coach trip through Checkpoint Charlie, and it was basically just a bus tour with an East German guide trying to explain away the queues outside all the shops with their empty shelves.  Far more interesting was going across unescorted on foot, which we did the following day and it gave us a glimpse of what the tour guide didn’t show us.

A lot of East Berlin still looked much as it must have done in 1945, with quite a few bomb damaged buildings still waiting to be bulldozed and redeveloped.  The ubiquitous smoky Trabant and the occasional ancient Mercedes were a far cry from the swish cars being driven around the other half of the city, and somehow everything seemed a little grey.  The underground trains were rickety old museum pieces with slatted wooden seats (I got told off by a policeman for taking a photo of one of the carriages – filming the public transport system was ‘verboten’ apparently), and the whole experience was like stepping back in time.
Checkpoint Charlie

Every now and then some shady character would sidle over and offer to buy Western currency from us. We’d been warned about such approaches; it was reputedly a favourite method for the secret police or ‘Stasi’ to entrap Westerners so they could impose heavy fines on them, although this now seems a little far fetched.  We weren’t however tempted to break the law in this way; we already had all the East Marks we could possibly use.  On entering the country you were required to exchange 25 Deutschmarks for 25 East Marks, and you weren’t allowed to take any back with you.  So we spent it on books, coffee, beer (no smoking allowed in many of the bars over there by the way, even 30 years ago) and stale sandwiches, and I even got a horrendous pair of bright red pumps from an incongruous looking department store which only seemed to have foreign shoppers in it.

My lazy approach to my year in Germany seemed to work out OK. I achieved a reasonable fluency in the language and back in the UK the following year I got my degree.  I didn’t return to Germany for nearly a decade, when my job required me to live there for a few happy years.  I was a husband and father by this time, and more to the point, a car owner.  There were fewer hitchhikers by then and to be honest I never stopped for those I did see.  The car was generally full of family and baby paraphernalia, although in truth I was probably just too selfish to pick them up.  Even so, I did sometimes wondered if these youngsters had ever heard of Hitch Cricket, and if they viewed my car speeding past them like a dropped catch.

At tea he was 127 for 6

Monday, September 5, 2011

Learning the hard way

Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff

I mentioned a while back Linky Linky about starting a degree course at Leicester University as a 19 year old.  It was done in a bit of a rush because I’d very recently been thrown out of a different college. Thrown out is perhaps a little dramatic. I’d taken some exams at the end of my first year, failed them spectacularly, and then failed the re-sits later that Summer.

I’d begun a German course at Bangor in North Wales the previous October.  In hindsight I was far too immature to be given so much freedom all of a sudden.  It was only a few weeks after my 18th birthday and there were a few things going on in my home life which had not put me in a very happy place.  So here I was with a maintenance grant, nobody to nag me for getting drunk and coming in late, and tutors who didn’t seem to care much whether you attended their lectures or not, just so long as you got your assignments in on time.

I was fine with the German.  I’d always been good at it and I liked it.  It was the secondary subjects which I messed up.  I wasn’t uninterested in ‘Linguistics’ or in ‘Education’ (a sort of first year course for people wanting to become teachers), but I just couldn’t motivate myself to make any effort.  I did the bare minimum and when the exams came round I was found out. And then at the re-sits I was found out again because I’d assumed that a miniscule amount of revision back home would see me through.

My parents weren’t too pleased and I can’t say I blame them. They hadn’t enjoyed the same opportunities for a higher education, so they’d always put a big expectation on me and my brothers to go to university.  My Mum had been clever and studious at school but she was made to leave at the earliest opportunity by her parents who needed an extra wage.  For the same reason my Dad left at 14 to work on the railways as a ticket clerk.  He went on to better things later in life, but he did it the hard way.

My oldest brother Steve avoided university by deliberately failing his A levels. My other brother Dave was far more conscientious, a bit of a swot actually, and he sailed through it all.  I wanted to go to university, but unfortunately I just couldn’t get the balance right between doing enough work to get by and going out with all my new mates.

It wasn’t all drinking and late nights.  I joined a ‘Community Action’ group which did worthy things in Bangor; this included the writing and performing of a pantomime based on the song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, which we set on the island of Anglesey.  It was full of pirates, witches, corny gags and slapstick silliness, and we took it around hospital children’s wards, a home for young adults with learning difficulties and other such places.

When I went to Leicester the following year things didn’t get off to a great start when my brother was killed in a motorcycle accident.  That made me a little more serious about things, but I was already more aware of what was needed to avoid a repetition of what had happened before.  I wasn’t keen to fail again; even I drew the line at being sent down from two universities.

So while I still partied pretty hard, I at least had the nous to make sure I also did enough work to pass my exams.  I was not exactly a fully mature adult when I eventually got my degree, but I had at least grown up a bit.  Who says students don’t learn anything?
I got there in the end