Oddities | Steve Woods

The reunion

19/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

It’s the first Monday of October 1973. With a sense of trepidation, an 18 year-old lad leaves home, a large proportion of his possessions and a heavy set of books in a rucksack on his back. He’s off to Wolverhampton in the Black Country to join the second ever intake on the BA Modern Languages (BAML) course being offered by Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

Let’s fast forward to May 2015. With a sense of trepidation a 59 year-old man leaves his home in Bristol, a laptop in a rucksack on his back and a suit in a holdall in his hand. He’s off to Wolverhampton to reunite with the second ever intake on the BA Modern Languages course once offered by Wolverhampton Polytechnic.

There have been lots of changes in the meantime. The polytechnic has transformed into the University of Wolverhampton. Wolverhampton itself has changed from a large industrial town with belching blast furnaces and gained city status. The Black Country either side of the railway between Birmingham and Wolverhampton – once a realistic implementation of a medieval painter’s vision of hell with flames, smoke and smut – is now de-industrialised with leafy areas interspersed with pleasant housing.

Sticking with the leafy pleasantness, the reunion is being held at The Mount Hotel in the Tettenhall Wood area of Wolverhampton, not a frequent haunt of student days when town centre pubs and night clubs were preferred to comfortable, content suburbia.

The Mount is a grade II listed manor house that was originally the home of Mander family of Wolverhampton (who made their money from paint and varnish. Ed.), which acquired the Mount in 1890 for £5,000 and refurbished it extensively. In 1929 the then master of the house Charles Tertius Mander was unfortunately killed in a hunting accident, leaving his wife Mary a widow. The Mount was far too large for post-war life without servants and the house was sold by Charles Marcus Mander at auction in 1952 after being in the family for just ninety years and started its new life as a hotel.

Once settled in, the minor worries started: would I recognise anyone – and would they recognise me? The rest of the crew were veterans at reunions, having held a couple in the intervening years, whilst I was the novice tonight. Standing outside, I scrutinised the faces of those passing, trying to see if any matched features whose recollection was dimmed by nearly 4 decades, whilst that same amount of time had etched its effects on the faces of my contemporaries.

At table: Jill, Steve and Stuart. Photo courtesy of Jill Easton.
In all honesty I shouldn’t have worried: as we assembled at 7.00 p.m. for pre-dinner drinks, the memory went into action and I readily recognised most of the faces familiar from of old, although most now came complete with a partner. There were even a few lecturers there. Apologies to those I miss, but these included course director Alan Dobson, French lecturer Stuart Williams and politics lecturer Harvey Wolf.

The 3 courses of dinner were most pleasant: I was seated between Jill Easton (née Marshall) and Stuart Williams. The meal itself, with 3 choices for each course, was delicious and passed in leisurely fashion. Between the main course and dessert a hiatus occurred for the obligatory speeches.

First on his feet was course director Alan Dobson. He passed on greetings from John White, the former head of the poly’s department of languages and praised him for his foresight in establishing the modern languages degree course; and once more trepidation intervened. Alan explained the sense of trepidation in establishing the course. At that time Wolverhampton didn’t exactly have a great reputation. It was the but of jokes. As an academic institution, the polytechnic didn’t exactly have the prestige of a traditional university, something not helped by the presence in those days of a sleazy massage parlour over the road from campus.

The teaching accommodation often left something to be desired in those days. Alan reminded us of the long-vanished St. Peter’s Hall, whose top floor was leased to the polytechnic for teaching. It was invariably freezing cold in the autumn and winter and the landlord’s use of the building’s heating system was a juggling act: downstairs was leased as a potato store and the stock needed to be kept cool. As students we were probably regarded as cool enough in one sense, but fingers stiff with cold are not best suited to taking lecture notes.

Alan was followed by Paul Sutton. Paul and his wife Gwenda had done most of the organisation of the event (and done it splendidly. Ed.). Of those in the 1973 course intake, most had been located and contacted: only 6 remain lost. One of our number, Viv Allum, sadly passed away a number of years ago. The development of the internet had been of great assistance in finding folk; Sheila Searle had done most of the detective work, I believe.

Paul praised the quality of the education we’d received and the skills gained, which have seen many of the alumni employed in fields far removed from languages. The fact most of us have been continuously employed since graduation is ample evidence that the investment in human capital made in those years at Wolverhampton had been amply repaid many times over with interest.

Paul recalled life in Wolverhampton in 1973 when we arrived: beer at 13p a pint in the Union bar, Derek Dougan taking to the field for Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. (his slipping into the Union Bar for a quick pint was not unknown either. Ed.), Queen supporting Mott the Hoople at Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall shortly after our arrival on campus.

He also reminisced fondly of the polytechnic’s first halls of residence: Brinsford Lodge. These former munitions factory buildings helped accommodate students from 1964 to 1982. Others have started documenting student life at Brinsford, including Richard Elliott’s Brinsford pages and brinsfordlodge.co.uk.

Some of the luxurious student accommodation at Brinsford in the early 1970s. Photo courtesy of Tim Baker.

Paul mentioned that there would be a further reunion in 2 years’ time to mark the 40th anniversary of our graduation. Responsibility for organising it would fall to the first member of the student body to head off to bed!

With speeches, dessert and coffee out of the way, it was time for dancing and the old crew proved that time had not diminished their enthusiasm for partying. The inevitable group photographs were taken, like the example below.

Class of ’73. Well, a lot of them anyway! Course director Alan Dobson is on the far left of the picture. Photo courtesy of Wendy Jackson.

Some group photos even took a sideways look.

An alternative group shot. Photo courtesy of Paddy Ring.

The dancing continued till 1.00 a.m., after which the night owls chatted the darkness away until long after dawn peeped over the horizon. However, we weren’t just reminiscing but discussing contemporary matters and the future too.

Breakfast on Sunday morning was a subdued affair for most.

It was wonderful to meet the BAML crew again. My time spent on the course with you represents an important stage of making me the person I am today. I now realise what I missed by not attending previous reunions; I’ll definitely be at the 2017 one as long as there’s breath in my body.

Thank you all for a brilliant weekend. 😀

Update 13/05/17: The comment below arrived yesterday (well after the end of the period for submitting comments. Ed.) from Gary (Gaz) Peters, another of the class of ’73.

Steve, just seen the blog on Wolves Poly 73. Really brought back memories and I wish that I had been found when you were trawling the net for BAML 73 alumni! I have sadly lost touch with everyone from those halcyon days and have regretted it for a long time. Do you know when the next reunion is? Would love to meet up with everyone. Very best wishes, Gary (Gaz) Peters

Look forward to seeing you again as the next get-together, Gaz! 😀
More culinary sexism

16/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Perhaps taking its lead from a city centre café in Bristol (posts passim), multinational junk food chain McDonalds has now introduced sexism onto its menu.

The advertisement below was spotted on Easton Way, Bristol this morning.

Once again bacon and sausage are apparently foods exclusively for men. If any woman is ‘man enough’ to ask for them, what would that make her – a tomboy or a butch lesbian? Or simply unfeminine?

Answers in the comments below, please McDonalds.
Inspirational motto meets immovable object

15/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

When I worked for Imperial Tobacco many decades ago, I used to hate the inspirational texts that came on the desk calendars with which all office staff were issued. Another pet hate is company mottoes, which usually have that same inspirational or aspirational element.

Given my hostility to these forms of literature, the photograph below could do nothing else but provoke a smile: a truck driver – presumably on the road to success – tries do effect a short cut of his own and reduce the height of his trailer to 10 feet using a convenient railway overbridge.

Hat tip: Harry Tuttle.
Braking bad

09/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.

However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.

Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.

You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.

The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).

The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).

Got it now?

Good! 🙂
UKIP’s Scottish manifesto – sneak preview

04/05/2015 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics

UKIP is due to launch its Scottish manifesto today, the BBC reports.

This blog has been privileged to have had a shot of the manifesto’s cover smuggled south of Gretna Green for the benefit of readers.

Enjoy! 🙂
Research shows language you speak changes your view of the world

29/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

In research that was published recently in Psychological Science, German-English bilinguals and German and English monoglots were studied to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

This research shows that bilinguals can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language in which they are operating, according to Mashable.

The past 15 years have seen extensive research on the bilingual mind, with most of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of being bilingual. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

To quote the abstract for the research paper:

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Bilingual German and Frisian police station sign. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By way of illustrating these differences, Mashable’s piece gives a handy example of these different world views

German-English bilinguals were shown video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket. The participants were then asked to describe the scenes.

When such a scene is presented to a monoglot German speaker they will tend to describe the action and the goal of the action. Thus they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. English monoglot speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action.

As regards the effect of the language being spoken on bilingual speakers’ perceptions of the world, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language in which they were given the task. Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. However, a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the UK were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

Hat tip: Katya Ford.
A chance meeting

29/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

Walking down Stapleton Road this morning, I stopped to take the picture below in readiness for reporting the fly-tipping to Bristol City Council.

The gentleman passing on the right of the picture and half caught by the camera saw what I was doing, thanked me effusively and shook my hand when I told him I was reporting it to the council.

We then had a brief conversation about how such anti-social behaviour detracted from the pleasantness of Bristol, which he described as a “beautiful city”, the health implications of fly-tipping and the way they encouraged the spread of vermin such as rats (posts passim).

As we parted with waves, he asked me whether I was a member of the Green Party. Unfortunately I have no affiliation, but that’s no barrier to being an active and caring citizen.
Sexism in café society

26/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Social Media

An unnamed café in Bristol is apparently serving his and hers breakfasts.

Yes, that’s right! Men get to scoff tortilla, bacon, sausages, 2 token items of fruit/vegetables (tomato and mushroom), Cheddar cheese, ham roll and butter, whilst women are supposed to pick their way daintily through muffin, poached egg, smoked salmon, salad leaves, cherry tomatoes, avocado, red onion, blueberries, yoghurt and pumpkin seeds.

Men can obviously let their figures go to pot (and blood cholesterol levels too. Ed.), whilst women are automatically assumed to be on a diet; women have “gotta stay slim for our men obvz” in the scathing words of one on social media.

This isn’t the first time that sexism has emerged at breakfast time (posts passim).

Update 30/04/15: The his and hers labels are being removed from the menu according to the Western Daily Press, which also revealed the name of the establishment as Caffe Be On. In addition, this post was quoted in yesterday’s Daily Mirror.

Hat tip: MarinaS.
Post exclusive: Bristol Rovers change kit

23/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s a hidden exclusive in today’s online edition of the Bristol Post. Unknown to the fans and probably the club itself, the Post reveals that Bristol Rovers now play in “blue and white stripes“, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Post journalists, here are the three strips currently used by Bristol Rovers. Please note the only stripes are on the alternative away colours and have one thin blue stripe. The pattern used on the regular strip is commonly known as “quarters“.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Post also mentions in the article that Catalonia’s CE Sabadell FC (who are in the Spanish Segunda División. Ed.) play in a strip “similar” to that of Rovers. FC Sabadell’s current strips are shown below and yes, the home strips do look very similar, even if the teams’ respective league positions do not; Rovers are chasing promotion from the Conference, whilst Sabadell are fighting relegation.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Let’s hope the players of both teams are more on target than Bristol’s alleged newspaper of record. 🙂
The pavement pizza of politics

19/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

Banksy, probably Bristol’s most visible artist since the days when noted portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence (13th April 1769 – 7th January 1830) became President of the Royal Academy of Arts, has now given allegedly given his opinion on Mr Farage’s party of right-wing xenophobes; and I don’t think Nigel will be enamoured with it.

This image will now be forever in my mind whenever the words ‘United Kingdom Independence Party‘ appear before me on a ballot paper.

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