In 1977 things were changing, Disco was was being savaged by Punk, the Queen was celebrating her Silver Jubilee, The King of Rock'n'roll died, whilst our Glam Rock king, Marc Bolan was driven into a tree by his partner. Things were all a little topsy turvy then, the Government were kept in power by the Liberals, the Firemen went on strike and Manchester United lost their Manager, wait a minute.......
AND we were only on our fourth Doctor, Tom Baker.
In and amongst this mayhem a wet behind the ears 17 year old kid was offered and took his first full time job working in a Supermarket in a suburb of Birmingham. I was lost, a little lonely, shy and had absolutely no life plan. Within the next 18 months there would be massive strikes, bread shortages, 3 day working weeks and to top it all the Sky Lab was about to drop out of orbit and nobody really seemed to know quite where it would hit the earth. All I really knew was that a 'Hard hat' wouldn't be up to the task!
Frankly that Autumn when I started my first job just seems like light years away now but rest assured that there are still kids out there in villages, towns and cities throughout the country and, I guess, throughout the world going through the same process with the same fears and concerns for both their futures and indeed the future of us all.
However life went on and time passed by, we didn't run out of oil as they predicted and I put my head down and knuckled on and 30 something years later after marriage, kids and several cats I resigned and ran away to Norfolk with my wife Alison to open our little holiday business.
And once again it was all a little bit scary and unknown, but this time I didn't feel lost, I wasn't alone, I probably couldn't be accused of being shy and my life plan was finally drawn up.
We opened in a modest way with just one B&B room so we could generate an income whilst we created an attached holiday self catering cottage and then a second (and final) B&B room.
We chose to break with the 'safe' life in Corporate land to try to steer our own destiny even if it meant a less affluent one. Not quite Barbra and Tom from The Good Life but certainly on their side of the fence. We obtained an allotment and have grown much of our own vegetables, make & sell our own jams, Alison teaches patchwork in the village hall and I've started to sell some of my photographs.
The B&B, we thought, would generate a small amount of income to keep the wolves from the door.
However plans were made to be scuppered and very early on the hand of fate slapped us in the face as Alison was 'displaced' from her job at HSBC which required her to either look for another job within the organisation or face redundancy. This was not part of the master plan as there is still a mortgage to pay off and the B&B and cottage on their own could not cover this.
So shit happens and whilst we had a healthy concern about how we now progressed one thing was for sure Alison wanted to take the redundancy and get out of the bank and find work more locally based so she could enjoy The Old Bakery and what we were building here.
Time moved on and Alison now has a temp job (although by the time it is due to end it will have been going on for a year!) at a local NHS trust helping me at weekends and some mornings before going in to work and helping serve dinners after work. Meanwhile our hospitality business has steadily grown year on year and the workload too.
We have won an award for our breakfasts and obtained separate 4 star ratings for both the B&B and the Holiday cottage as well.
Alison has also spent the last year completing a diploma in Coaching and Mentoring. After about 200 hours of study and practice (or at least that what she tells me she was doing) she has passed and can now describe herself as a professional, qualified coach. She's started working with a local journalist to write some press releases to publicise coaching retreat weekends which she'll launch in the spring. The idea is to get people to come to us to stay in peaceful surroundings with great food and spend some time being coached either in the chapel or out on the beaches or in the woods of North Norfolk.
Oh and when we get a spare five minutes (or more like five days) we'll be putting together a course on 'How to Run a B&B' based on our experiences of the last few years and Alison will coach them once they've completed the course as they set up their own B&B.
So here I sit looking back at the 17 year old remembering all the old haunts that I had worked in, some 40 supermarket branches. So many weird and crazy things have occurred in that time a few of which I have documented through this blog over the last few years.
We happened to go to Coventry a week or so ago and whist there I persuaded Alison to let me try to find a few of those odd haunts of mine. We drove around that ring road several times whilst I struggled to get my bearings. In the end we gave up trying to find two of the stores and headed off to a third in a mining town called Keresley.
My memory was poor and we drove around several times before we finally found what I recalled to be a small village stores in the middle of a mining village. My memories offered that of a nostalgic sense, not unlike the feeling that you get when you watch that lad on the Hovis bread advert pushing his bike up Gold Hill in Shaftsbury. But memories can be fickle and as most of the time I didn't know what day of the week it was I guess it is of little wonder that the image of Keresley in my tiny little lost in a world of his own brain just didn't tally with reality.
Back in a blog in March 2012 I recalled a little about my time there......
When we at last found the collection of 6 small shops most of them were boarded up. My old store is now a church and the estate did not appear as I remembered it. It was a Council owned estate filled with larger than life people each with a miner at the head of the household. As I looked at it today it seemed to have lost that 'life', I wondered where all the people worked now the pit had closed, probably in one of the shiny Malls in Coventry itself. The huge winding gear wheels were always in sight at the top of their tower but not now, no they now live half sunken into a patch of grass by the side of the road as a monument to Keresley's heritage. A sense of melancholy came over me as I stood and looked at this sad row of half empty shops, perhaps it was the icy cold rain whipping my face or the realisation that actually the good times really were not that good, which ever it left a bleak feeling inside. I think my memories just lost their virginity. That nostalgic warm glow blew away as did we, leaving nothing but a distant memory in the rear view mirror of a lost boy on an unknown path about to start a 34 year career in a business that he would never quite feel suited him.
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