A good wife..? 17 11 28 (14) 25 1 30

When I was young and fool hardy I used to juggle my part-time study courses with an expanding social life which for me increasingly meant going to new places and meeting with all manner of new people away from the town, or more correctly the village, in which I grew up saddled with a bad press for wildness...

The year was 1962 aged 22 when instead of taking a "proper job" I thought I could work permanent 11 hour nights 5 nights per week at this company that finished rolls of textile materials on a Stenter, and go to College one and a half days a week during the winter months, to finish off my course of studies for the Higher National Certificate in Chemistry. Normally with a proper job the employer would provide the 1½ days free time in exchange for 4½ days work, working all told 5½ days each week for much lower wages.

A Stentor was a machine for saturating cloth in a size press, a bath-like vessel where the cloth entered an aqueous solution containing the finishing chemicals and then passed through two rollers which squeezed out excess liquid to continue its journey over more rollers before travelling beneath these wooden boards where I sat to ensure the next stage of the operation took place without problems. From travelling on rollers, clips now grabbed the cloth on each of its 2 edges to pull it tight as it entered a drying oven of about 50 metre say 55 yards in length, so it could dry under tension. 

In my stupidity I thought I could forfeit a bit of sleep to accomplish these two feats but after a few weeks I was well on my way to a nervous breakdown because I began falling asleep wherever I sat for more than a couple of minutes in an involuntary manner. Then after 2 or 3 months when I took my 3 exams of the 3 chemistry subject Organic, Inorganic and Physical all within a few days of one another with the unsurprising result that I flunked the Physical which meant waiting a whole year to take a re-sit… And spending the rest of my life practically with a non-negotiable sleeping pattern.

Some years later in 1966 I was back in a proper job as a Project Leader in a paper company Research and Development Centre when I met my wife to be and we began to see more and more of each other although at the time she was shortly to leave the country to return from UK to her Scandinavian home.
At the time she was living in student nurses’ accommodation whereas I had my own place though it was a train journey to where we used to date in Central London. Well in the fullness of time she came to visit me and ended up staying over but, because of my problem I didn’t make the gargantuan effort to escort her the ½ mile journey, about 1 km, to the Railway Station the next morning at maybe 5:30 am so she wouldn't be late for her job, as I should have done and I came within a hair’s breadth of ever seeing her again despite my profuse apologies and long winded explanation…

Well I was grounded for a long time and then just before she departed for home in the next month I persuaded her to accompany me for her first visit to the North of England to meet my family and spend a weekend in the English Lake District where I had a climbing friend and where we climbed a few hills together staying 2 or 3 nights in hotels which meant of course single rooms…


What can I say in conclusion except that she at last forgave me and that the rest is history as the saying goes? Now when my eldest grandson is just dating his first girlfriend and converting my old colour transparencies to digital images I am reminded how young and pretty my wife to be was in those far off days and how unbelievable it is that it all came to pass… Have a good day everyone I’ll bet most of you don’t know what a “transparency” is, hahaha

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No blogs without their bloggers..? 18 1 19 (16) 25 2 18

Which query came to mind just the other day as I started re-reading some old blogs from 5 to 10 years ago from the time I used to post my blogs on MySpaces..? And then with my elder grandson, A, this past month, during the time he has had this equipment to scan old transparencies, he has been engaged in scanning some of mine from the 60s, 70s and 80's during my days of film cameras, I got to reviewing the best part of my collection of old pics, and in the process ran across slides of my wedding day to A-E, my wife of 50 +years, and far better than the ones we had done in a studio on the morning of the day of the ceremony...Then one slide box containing pics of all my old girl-friends, not an enormous collection and not all pics of girls I was very serious about... So then I got to reviewing my memories of these events and situations to be impressed yet again how one's perceptions change about who we were and what we did during our lives, and because I happen to have a...
Read more

Or Fillings 16 9 14 (8) 25 1 21

Image
We have all heard this expression and I expect those of us with a good imagination can conjure up in our minds what it must be like. But I do not fall myself into this category of person but instead in order to imagine what it must be like I have to experience something similar which is the subject of this particular blog... You see I have just returned from the dentist and her technician when at the beginning of the week I felt something akin to the condemned man on death row with his imminent demise rapidly approaching: in a very small way it has to be said but, nonetheless... And growing old is in a bigger way rather like the condemned man waiting it out on death row as little by little all the things dear to him and his belongings are stripped away... Not that I am complaining you understand but only reflecting on what it is like. Like before in these blogs I have quoted from the bard William Shakespeare: “...sans teeth sans everything.” Powerful words indeed and ...
Read more

When I last visited a Rotary Club Meeting...25 3 18

I was just 20 yrs of age plus maybe 7 months. It was subsequent to the 17th July since that was the day I first stepped onto Finnish soil. 10th of August to 30th of September to be precise, the time I was employed by Kymene Ab or Kymin Oy, the one Swedish the second its Finnish name. So some time between these two dates after Engeneer Örnhjelm, the Manager of one of the two Production Plants, one for Wood Pulp Production the other for Paper Production, invited me to accompany him to their next meeting and tell something about my background. What I told them was that I had worked at a Paper Mill, New Bury Paper Mills Ltd., belonging to the Wiggins Teape Group, for 5 years since leaving school in July 1955. A Paper Company that used Kymi's Bond Special grade of Bleached Sulphite Pulp. That I had studied Chemistry via the O.N.C. and first year H.N.C. part-time day release courses, the former the Ordinary National Certificate: in Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics in the first year; ...
Read more