Grey Matter

Little things trigger memories.  I visited Perth this weekend just gone, but travelled without Klara and so made the accommodation arrangements just for myself.  All that was needed was a place to lay my head as a bookend for each of the two evenings.  I stayed at Perth’s YMCA and it tweaked a flashback to a place from a long time ago.

As a kid, in my family there wasn’t a great deal of cash left over from the family budget for things like pocket money.  There couldn’t have been because we never received any.  There were rare exceptions but they came courtesy of the twice or three times a year when Nan and Pops drove down from Bristol on one of their visits to us in Torpoint.   We were spoiled then.  Gifts, small amounts of pocket money, sweets, and trips in the car (we didn’t own a car and neither Mum or Dad – when he was not at sea -  learned how to drive).

I’m not going to state categorically the lack of pocket money, new clothes or expensive gifts triggered a tendency towards frugality but I’m going to suggest it contributed.  Unkind people might even call me parsimonious – bloody tight, even.  But, back then, I knew if I really needed something it would be me that had to provide the wherewithal to buy it.  To this end at the age of 14 I had two paperounds: one every morning (and I mean every morning, rain or shine, Saturday and Sunday) and one on weekday evenings.  For the morning one it was for the entire Royal Navy married quarters area of Torpoint.  Took 1.5 hours and I had to get up at 5:30 in order to finish the round, get back home, change and move my sorry arse in time for school.  Financial Lesson 101 vindicated.  Funny thing was I never saved for a rainy day - only for the specifics I needed and if you asked me to pay for something urgently I usually couldn't.

Fast forward a few years and I'd moved out into a flatshare in Plymouth for a short while.  Then, having accepted a position at Ford Motor Company Dagenham in the Spring of 1979, I quickly moved from the relative rustic simplicity of Plymouth to the smoke of London’s industrial east.  It was a fair amount of unplanned culture shock with hindsight.  Yes, I had been up and down from Plymouth to London on a few occasions for Kendo but there’s a world of difference between visiting somewhere foreign and making that foreign place home.  Sandy beaches, corner shop weekend opening hours and familiarity were replaced by dirty streets, supermarkets open all hours and alien cultures.  And I had to find somewhere to stay without a lot of savings. 

Partly it was an inability to cough up a deposit for better accommodation but I landed up with rucksack crammed full of a few possessions, clothes, kendo armour and bamboo swords on the doorstep of one of the cheapest, dirtiest, dodgiest and most dangerous parts of south London to stay.  Stockwell: near the end of the Victoria line and one stop short of Brixton.   Dodgy Central in Stockwell was the YMCA.  On the outside it was a presentable-looking building, if grimed by ages of soot. Inside it was like a half-way house for derelicts, faceless transits, youths of dubious sexual predilections and the odd normal person wondering what the hell they were doing there.  I couldn’t wait to find somewhere more wholesome.    

Now, despite being distanced by 32 years and being half a world away, you’ll be delighted to hear YMCAs haven’t changed their clientele one bit.  In 32 years time I suspect the same people will be floating around the YMCA in the Bronx.  Question is, do I want to find out??        

Dodgy Central, Stockwell YMCA, 1979.

The System takes a back seat

I'm still having staff issues and the saga never seems to end.  Just as we think we’ve dotted all the “i’s” and “t’s” HR's minesweepers turn around and ask for a change of route to avoid incurring liability.  A Manager two levels up told me the story of his Manager having to hand deliver a letter from HR to one of his staff members. What HR didn’t think he needed to know before hand delivering this was the fact it was a letter of dismissal!  Tomorrow Gilbert want’s me to help him deliver a letter from HR and think's it’s a letter of suspension but can’t be sure…….

But I’m off on leave tomorrow!  Yipeeee!   Over 6 weeks ago Klara’s arranged to fly me off to Perth for some secret ninja training with an 8^th Dan this weekend.  Secret Ninja training being Jodo, that is.  From an 8^th Dan!!  As high as they get within Seitei Jodo circles.  I’m not particularly worried about my Seitei Jodo as I’ve worked hard for my 2^nd Dan, flown the airmiles, kissed Sensei ass, am absolutely anal about attention to detail and I’ll hold my own against other 2^nd Dans.  Where there is a fluttering swarm of  butterflies is in the Sensei’s old-style,  Koryu, practical, Jodo.  Otake Sensei is a Fukuoka style Shinto Muso Ryu Jodoka: characterised by short, stumpy, get-inside-and-be-violent techniques that are in some contrast to Seitei and a little bit different to my own Nishioka-Ha Shinto Muso Ryu style.  Sensei (plural of Sensei is Sensei) are very particular over what’s right and wrong.  It’s why there is so much dissension between styles, teachers and even different teachers within the same style.  Yes, this weekend is going to engaging and interesting.  I hope to learn heaps but I’ll have to “suck it up” and accept criticism of my teachers’ style (plus a few bruises).

Courtesy of Richard Stonnell, here’s a snap of Otake Sensei (the one in the black).  He’s one of the British Kendo Association’s “gods”.

The System

After last week’s entertainment where I had to initiate disciplinary proceedings against two staff members, I was left with the distinct impression HR believes we work in Cambodia.  Not just any part of Cambodia but that portion with the largest population of landmines.  Just an impression.

When the details of the alleged incidents were first brought to my attention, in addition to being horrified, I believed it would be a fairly straightforward matter of releasing two staff members.  At the very least I’d be able to suspend these people pending further enquiries.  Not so.  HR took charge of the matter but it was almost as if they were looking for deathbed confessions written in tears of blood, corroborated by the Archangel Gabriel.

It appears to the untrained eye that such is the fear of claims of unfair dismissal that Management and HR make it exceptionally difficult to operate with any speed.  In the case of, say, the physical assault of one staff member by another, a rational person may be forgiven to assume action may be taken rapidly.  Simple matter.  There was a de facto incident witnessed by an independent team member who provided a written statement.  That’s as far as ‘simple’ goes in this matter.  Now talk to me about ‘fast’. 

From the time the incident(s) were brought to my attention until the time HR and Managers four levels above me decided there was sufficient grounds for a suspension on full pay was three days.  Wednesday morning to Friday close of business.  Everyone was called in, everyone was interviewed, Managers wrung their hands in doubt, HR senior Managers were consulted and finally, finally, we were authorised to suspend on full pay.

Like pulling teeth.  Not someone else’s but your own, with a rusty pair of 9” pliers.

The irritating thing is not the process but the speed of the process.  Where violence is an issue and the threat of further violence due to investigations taking place (and therefore being public) is a real possibility, you cannot even separate the people involved without causing offence or risking giving the wrong message.  HR quietly suggested to me under normal circumstance we shouldn't have asked one of the victims to go home that morning as it "gave the wrong indication".  It wasn't relevant I had concerns for his safety - not his physical safety (as he's built like the proverbial shithouse) but the fact he'd defend himself AND also then be subject to disciplinary procedures. 

A Manager two levels above me took me to one side and confided it was hard.  He knew of one incident where a staff member pulled a knife on a colleague but there was insufficient grounds for HR action.  Think about that.  The knife-wielder was rewarded by keeping his job (I presume it was a ‘he’) and the victim was punished by having the event sanctioned by HR as if it never happened.

Beggars belief.  I’ve come to realise it isn’t just HR but the climate of legal fear.  There are more people out there than we’d care to admit who will, without a second’s thought and in full knowledge of their own guilt, use any means possible to escape culpability.  They even take some perverse pleasure away by then punishing the accuser through expensive lawsuits.  A reward for being in the wrong.

‘Old Man‘ whinge over (for a while, anyway).     

Ferenc Puskas

Arguably the most famous Hungarian soccer player ever to grace the international fields was Ferenc Puskas.  His was a glittering career culminating with him being voted one of the greatest football players by World Soccer magazine and having amassed a staggering 1,000 goals in his top-level football career.  He was born 2^nd of April 1927 and passed away from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on 17^th Novermber 2006, aged 79.

Puskas was a Hungarian household name for generations and, when I was younger, inspired characters in 1960s schoolboy comics such as “Boy’s World”, “The Hotspur” and “The Hornet”.  He was an absolute legend along the lines of George Best, Pele and Maradona at a time when footballs were constructed of heavy leather with quagmires for pitches.  To be a terror of the English and other National Team defences at a time when these teams were the best is the world is praise indeed.

Ferenc Puskas

Klara, being of Hungarian descent, was inspired by Puskas to name one of her dogs after him.  He appeared in her life years 5 before me, having been rescued in 1999 from neglect and abuse from a man Klara darkly suspects of acquiring dogs for illegal fighting rings.  Puskas had a hard time dealing with men back then and cowered when anyone carrying a stick passed too close and frantically hid if a thunderstorm threatened.  But, he became a faithful and loyal guardian to Klara.  As she says, “He was my Boxing Day present” and he never looked back from that time. 

Eventually he came to trust men and I was fortunate to be accepted by him when we both met in 2004.  His were jaws of steel that could crush any bone and heaven help the hand that held a stick he wanted.  With over 40Kgs of bodyweight he would leap up and those jaws would clamp closed on anything in the way.  Thumbs, sticks, my chest (the stick was adjacent to my chest) and Klara’s other dog’s jowls.  Back then, he was an absolute terror but a sweetheart: everyone’s favourite “strong and silent type.”

Unless you were a cat, that is.  He’s killed at least two cats we know of (one right in front of me, but before I could make him drop it) and terrorised any cat within range of his sprinting stumpy legs.  He’s also caught Padimelons, tried for Bush Turkeys and even teamed up with Almos to pull a Goanna off a tree.  At home on the farm he has a reputation for burying bones everywhere as well as launching himself into the bush to chase god knows what, then appearing breathless half an hour later and in some panic he might be left behind.  Oh yes, he also suffers from “abandonment issues”.  He was as loyal a friend as you could wish.

Puskas, on guard at the farm.

Puskas passed away sometime on the morning of the 11^th March 2011 while we were at work.  He will be cremated and his ashes will be taken home to scatter near his favourite haunts: he had so many of them.  His was a good life and I’m blessed to have known him.  

Pseudechis Porphyriacus

Imagine an early Autumn’s cloudy, wet day in the UK and then heat it up by fifteen degrees.  That’s what Saturday was for us back at our 'farm'.  Big workload, heaps to do and it was raining.  Understand that sicknotes and wet weather bylaws don’t apply here, so forget the cosy workplace agreements where you can sit in a comfortable portakabin drinking tea and perusing the odd porno mag.  Here you work.  Remember that, potential farm slaves.  Work.

Yes, we got drenched but it was all in a good cause. Over 1,300 cloves of garlic were planted but only 5 Macadamia trees.  Garlic is one of the many crops that you can’t “hold over” till next year because there isn’t time.  Plant it or it tries to sprout, dries up and dies.  Garlic won the toss and the maccas will wait until I get back from Perth in early April.  So will the remaining 1,000 – 1,500 cloves but we’ll take a chance on them.

In the middle paddock, where the Garlic is grown, there was a mass of black plastic weed matting laid to kill off the grass.  Pseudechis Pophyriacus – the Red-Bellied Black Snake – loooves it.  Fantastic, centrally heated place where there are frogs aplenty.  Frogs love it because there are bugs aplenty.  Lucky for us the snakes in the middle paddock usually slither off when they hear us approach but this 1.25m one didn’t and followed us around for a while looking for a way to escape.  In fact, I suspect he/she is partially responsible for the periodic clutches of snake eggs found in two tyres left over from our potato crop.  It’s been christened the Red-Bellied Hatchery.  They’re elegant (if venomous) creatures and we’ll go the distance to keep them happy.

The Red-Bellied Hatchery and newly laid egg

Red-Billied bliss should not extend to when they decide to take up residence in our house though!  If an Estate Agent were trying to sell the idea he'd soon appreciate the "rustic charm" of living in a big barn has unexpected drawbacks.  Bats, nesting Welcome Swallows, leaf-tailed lizards and skinks we can live with (not that there’s a choice).  Red-Bellies not, especially when they are coiled right next to the washing machine.  A few months back I spent an entire morning chasing one (I don’t know who was chasing whom – it was a flexible arrangement) into a trap made from large piece of drainpipe to evict it.  This one wasn’t happy at me and made a hissing sound.  Not really a hissing but more of a “sh” sound: exactly like the shit sound I made when I almost walked on it…. In the end he sulked and slithered into the "burrow" but it was a very "exciting" morning.

No more farm work for now until early April.  I miss it.  I want to see the green tips of the garlic cloves poke their heads through the soil.  I want to nurture the yellow-leaved, minerally difficient new maccas until they bud new, green leaves (with spiny leaves that also contain a mild irritant, I might add).  So much to do but paid work beckons.

That and sword waving and stick bashing.  Huge amounts of that in the next three weeks including a visit to Sydney from a 6^th Dan from West Australia and a trip by me to Perth to take some instruction from an 8^th Dan.  Yes, working in the city has some benefits.  

At least our growing family of snakes will be happy for some peace.