Of Rallies, Floods, Saddles and Stowaways

Life at Myerscough College was far from dull. Making sense of the networking side of things, replacing a few old PCs with a much larger quantity of new computers that were capable of doing what students required, (that's easy but getting the funding or persuading Finance people why cheaper machines won't do what is necessary...)

It wasn't just that the existing number of students needed far more computers. From 1999-2001 the college almost doubled its student numbers. We would have had to double the number of computers just to maintain the levels of inadequacy...

I was also getting to grips with a new Management Information System, struggling to respond to requests for report output from people who had never had it explained to them how to specify what it was that was needed...

"How many students do we have?" was a common request. Asking "What sort of students?" or "What do you want it for?" or even "Do you just want one number or do you want it broken down by category?" would totally confuse or infuriate some people.

Yes I can give you just one number. But it would include centrally (Govt.) funded students, those paid for by employers, those paid for by the Local Education Authority; it would lump full-time students with part-time students; central campus students with students studying on different campuses (campii???); tractor maintenance with florists... In other words why you want it is a very important question to ask. The number of times this just got the response "Why do YOU have to make it so complicated?"

So the little forays with a camera at lunchtime or whenever an event was taking place, were a way to let all that [yuck] dissipate. This event entailed coming in on a Sunday. Sundays were when the most newsworthy events took place that I would otherwise miss. In this case it was Sunday, 8 October 2000 and the college was hosting the start of the Silva Stages Rally.

Our own rally car, the Skoda Favorit, was competing and is seen here on a weighbridge. I presume it was to check if it was heavy enough rather than the opposite... I'd had the misfortune to own a Skoda myself in 1971 and the number of plastic parts that snapped, melted or otherwise caused problems made me swear never to buy one again. That had admittedly been before the VW takeover though... And it had admittedly been my Dad who bought it, not me... It was me that crashed it causing it to be written off though.

In the college Mechanisation sheds, other, perhaps more specialised - or sidelined - motorsports vehicles could be seen.

Tuesday 24 October 2000. Immigration Officers at Manchester Airport were astounded as cargo handlers unloading a routine cargo flight came across a somewhat small stowaway. The desperate asylum seeker turned out to be a baby gecko, not yet one inch in length and presumably wondering where it had found itself!

Myerscough College's Animal Academy agreed to give the gecko a home and at first wondered where it was - it was so small that they failed to spot it in its makeshift jam jar transport! The gecko was soon resting and recovering from its flight in a special plastic tank, resting on a heating pad to keep it at the correct temperature.

31 October 2000. A few days of extreme weather left many roads in the Myerscough area with a lot of surface water as rivers rose and fields turned into lakes. Most roads to Myerscough College were open but the back road from Preston had a stretch this morning under one and a half feet of water. Even my fairly major road approach had two areas where water covered the road completely upto a depth of 5 inches, but were easily passable if drivers slowed down.

This photograph shows the effect on passing cars if some... "one" drives through too fast. I saw this Range Rover coming fast and stopped and my camera was on the passenger seat. The wave it caused swamped my bonnet and reached halfway up the windscreen.

Friday 27 October 2000. The indoor Equine arena with spectator seating to one side.

There were both indoor and outdoor arenas and paddocks. The view from the outdoor arena stretched to the Trough of Bowland, whose hills we can see here in the distance.

A booted foot in the stirrups. I took photos of various activities: washing the tail of a horse, plaiting the mane, fitting a boot to the horse...

Here students were being taught to measure a horse. They are measured in units call hands. This method of measuring horses started in ancient Egypt and was originally based on the width of a hand or the height of a clenched fist. Four inches was the given height (I and almost all people I know must have non-standard hands...)

Look on any website and on most you will see this depicted as the height of a full unclenched hand - which even on diminutive me would measure six and a half inches. Use a ruler like the teacher is demonstrating...

This is Shah. He was the oldest of Myerscough's 40 or so horses and had been at the college for ten years.

Jake had featured on TV a few times. At some time in his history an owner had docked his tail, leaving just a stump with very short hair. Cruel, because in the fields horses have a buddy system where they stand nose-to-tail with another horse and then flick their tails to brush flies away from their buddy's face and eyes. Jake was unable to take part in this sort of activity.

Plenty of this to be done in stables!

Christmas 2000. WIth the college having halls of residence, we had a local chaplain attached. She came round this Christmas asking if anyone could play musical instruments at a carol singing event one lunchtime. A few of us turned up with guitars and various other instruments and busked our way through a few carols.

Christine, who ran the Admin side of the college covering Enrolments, Exams, the Management Information Systems' data entry and other bits and pieces, asked a few of us to play at her department's Christmas lunchtime gathering. One of her staff, David Lancaster joined to ask if he could sing a few songs with us and with Bob Snape on mandolin and Helen Fenton on violin we knocked out a few folk songs.

It was the start of a group called Creeping Bentgrass that shrank over the years, until by 2010 there would be just David and myself carrying on the name as a duo, but we gigged successfully, having moved into Fifties, Sixties, Country, Rock 'n' Roll and the odd Take That and Status Quo number, right through until 2020 when Covid put a stop to performances. By the time things got back to normal again health issues forced us to reluctantly call it a day.

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