A Four Letter Word Most of Us Need to Have.

I am officially retired and trying to live on the British State Pension which is not a lot and has been even less since the Pound has fallen against the Euro. So this last week, with some great help from another Englishman who has spent a lot of time in France, my new friend, Alan, I have been working hard, making my place seem clean and tidy for my first AirBnB clients. I'm not obsessed with housework, in fact, rather the opposite, keeping the kitchen fairly good and the bathroom and toilet, but rarely hoovering or looking for cobwebs in corners. But by the time my clients arrived, the place was spotless with the exception of my living room where they will not be coming and where I will be living all summer, hoping for a succession of 'guests'. I hope all the hard work was worth it and I will get a top notch review, important for getting more guests: I'm only getting 15 euros for this first time but AirBnB has now raised my prices to reflect the apparently high demand throughout the summer.
I have always been used to hard work and have never expected anything less. I was born in 1948, grew up through the hard times of the fifties, saw the big improvements in the sixties and have witnessed the booms and busts since then. My father was a church minister for most of my life at home, mainly for the free, independent, evangelical churches where pay was at the survival end with free housing being the only financial blessing. Although they fed and clothed me (in school uniforms mainly), my parents had little money for extras and what there was tended to go on piano lessons for my sister and me.
So, from the age of thirteen, I always had part-time jobs. A newspaper round before school and delivering fruit and vegetables, evenings and Saturdays, meant I could buy records and clothes for going out (and cigarettes). Then, at sixteen, I started working in hotels during the school holidays. We lived in Sidmouth by then and there were loads of hotels and loads of jobs. I started at the bottom end, dishwashing, and slowly moved up to portering and waiting, better because you got tips on top of the pay (if the Head Waiter didn't pinch them all). Another bonus of working in hotels was being able to live in and therefore able to go out without parents knowing, but this demanded more money as pubs and dances came into their own. The only other jobs I had before leaving home were being a postman for the Christmas mail rush and working the till in a self-service cafeteria.

With one of my language students, Hugh, who worked for the Chinese TV Sports Channel and was in Bristol to improve his English ready for commenting the Olympics in Beijing. Interestingly, his first words to me were,"I am Hugh and I am gay'"

To finance leaving home during the wait to start my business studies degree, I signed up with ManPower in London and was sent to a mail order company where I spent a boring couple of weeks sticking address labels on envelopes, and then to City and Guilds, an institution that offered qualifications for more practical subjects (nowadays NVQs). There, they didn't want me to work much and told me to bring a book in to read. I was covering someone on maternity leave who was to be back soon, so they couldn't be bothered to teach me the job and just used me as a gofer, sending me to get drinks, do photocopies and such-like.

With some of my language students in Wales.

Then, for the three years of my business degree, I spent 6 months of the year as a trainee accountant with Courage's the Brewers, where I mainly learnt I didn't want to be an accountant, but did learn quite a bit about that side of a business, and I acquired a taste for beer, doled out free at lunchtime and beer breaks. But having learnt I didn't want to do that sort of work, I  quit and spent a few weeks working for Morphy Richards as a line labourer, where I learnt that women can be quite rude (sexually).  After a summer away at the Isle Of Wight Festival (1969, Bob Dylan) and living the hippy life in the Scilly Isles), I met my future wife, we moved to Bristol, got married and I worked for a short time for Fison's, the agricultural chemicals business, trying to track down their missing railway tankers, without ever leaving the office. Then we went back to Sidmouth and hotel work, saving to go to India, but living with my parents turned sour so we went to Cornwall and then the 1970 Isle of Wight festival and back to Bristol.

Caring for my mum. Here, in fact, it is my daughter-in-law, Murielle, cutting her hair.

Then, using my accountancy skills, I got a job as cash-flow controller at the Bristol Bus Company, manufacturer of famous buses, going slowly down the tubes due to non-payment by their customers, price-raising by their suppliers and strikes by their workers.

This was no good so, with my wife pregnant, we moved right out into the country, to the wilds of North Devon where I was unemployed for 6 months waiting to start a teaching course at Exeter University: my first time on the dole. My first son was born the week I started which sent my student grant (oh yes, those were the days) up through the roof. Having qualified, I didn't want to teach anyone except my own children but, in order to get a colour TV, I did work for a few weeks in the Ulster Chipboard factory which was a mixture of boredom, danger and fun.

Playing with Lastwind at the Fleece in Bristol.

It was during this North Devon period that I started playing in bands (with Ark) which has remained a feature of my life ever since. It was also the start of my teaching career. I did 5 years teaching maladjusted children. Towards the end of this period, I got involved with playing with Hawkwind and eventually went to playing with them full time, touring the USA, but the disharmony in the band got to me and I left and we moved to France.
There, particularly with my lack of passable French, my work choices were a bit limited and for a year or so were a mixture of building work, working on our small farm growing vegetables and hens, ducks, geese and, for a short while, rabbits, selling our produce on markets and teaching a little English, as well as playing gigs. With the kids getting older, the pressure was on to earn more than survival income so we moved from the small farm to a bigger house and borrowed money, so easy back then, to start a full time Language Services business. And so, besides actually teaching some English, I had to run the business, finding clients, finding teachers and translators, doing the billings, paying our bills and the staff salaries and many other things ( but still finding the time to play in bands, including a short stint with the Topper Headon band. It got quite big. I had 17 employees at the end, sold out to an Australian businessman who kept me as director, got involved in a huge localisation project with an American software company and was working my socks off when the Australian went bust which meant we went bust and I headed back to the UK looking for work.
After a few weeks living off doing several paper-rounds, I'd been out of the country too long to have any rights to Unemployment Benefit, I got a job in a boarding school doing what was now called working with Emotionally and Behaviourally Disturbed children.

The computer room we installed in the language school which was very popular.

That place was quite brutal, it was just before the Children Act became law, and they didn't pay the going rate for the job, so I looked for another such post in a more decent school and found one in Lymington, in the New Forest where I worked first as a teacher, then Deputy Head and then Head. It was when I became Head that I stopped playing with Cropdusters, a folk/punk/dance band.
I was then head-hunted, literally, to become Head back at the school where I had first started which went well till I upset the owner and was suddenly replaced by his daughter. This job had been really hard, 24/7/365 pretty much, so no time for playing in bands at all. I had a heart attack, took the owner to court with the support of the Head Teachers' Union, won a year's salary and moved to France for a bit to live with my wife who had moved back there previously being fed up with our life in England.

I took this photo when about to address a new intake of students at the language school in Bristol.

Soon I was back in he UK as a co-director of a new project for looking after difficult teenagers, split permanently from my wife and got a new life partner, a black social worker, and soon was leading a new project in Bristol for mainly black kids and with mainly black staff. We had 5 very successful years but worked incredibly hard with no band playing for me at all. Then I got ill, went away to try and get better, discovered I had cancer and basically was unable to work for nearly two years. With me not around, the business of looking after young people collapsed.
We basically lost our house and it all affected our relationship badly but the good thing was music came back big time and I started the band Lastwind, touring with Hawkwind in the autumn of 2006.
I tried supply teaching when I was totally fit to work again, lasted one day and then started teaching English as a Foreign Language, ending up as Centre Manager after a few months. That lasted for 3 years till I got ill again, diabetic problems, so I had to give up and spent the last 3 years of my working life looking after my very sick, old mother. She died finally in December 2013 and my working life (and my life in the UK) was over.
Retirement is fantastic provided you can live on a low income and have plenty to occupy yourself!!!

My farewell dinner at Bristol Language Centre with my now ex-partner, Liz, on my right.

PS I have no photos of my earlier jobs, so all these photos are post-2006 showing me working at the Bristol Language Centre, playing with Lastwind or looking after mum.