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.

Work Index

Myerscough News Jan-Mar 2000

The year 2000 dawns. Everybody was raving about a new millenium. I was trying to say it was the final year of the old millenium. Nobody listened. At Myerscough College I was trying to make the website more interesting to prospective students and employers with staff who they might want to send on training courses.

At the same time I was creating for the first time an internal Intranet that could be accessed by both staff and students. Obviously the layers of public website, staff intranet and student intranet had to be kept secure from unauthorised access. Yet each had to have a consistent look and feel about them.

So I designed each page with a coloured strip down the left hand side. The public website had this brown strip, so beloved of my Deputy who said admiringly most days, "Can't you get rid of that sh***y brown stripe???" What? I was trying to use earth colours - it was a land-based college! Besides I thought it rather fetching...

The Student Intranet (also accessible by staff but not the public) had a green stripe - similar to the green on the college logo. Finally the Staff Intranet had a red stripe. Maybe not so much an earth colour, but the college's cars were mainly bright red so that's where that came from. And by looking at the colour of the stripe those people with access to all three levels could tell which one they were currently viewing.

I pestered all the departments for news and tried to put at least one new page up evey day on the public website.

The college had bought a second-hand Range Rover to use in training students how to safely tow horse boxes. These were the most favoured type of vehicles in use for that purpose and it was important to make courses as relevant to the out-of-college experience that most students would experience.

Also whilst on the topic of cars, this is the college's very own rally car. It was a Skoda Favorit and had been rebuilt to rally specification by the students in the college's Mechanisation Unit. They had won the Grizedale Rally a few weeks previously with it and BBC Radio Lancashire came to the college to interview one of the lecturing staff and to record the (rather disappointing) sound of the engine. Skoda Favorits don't generally have a throaty roar...

There was a period where the college seemed to be featuring regularly on TV and radio. The principal of the College, Professor John Moverley, was invited to participate in the 2020 Vision debate on issues affecting the North West region, which was part of the NWDA Regional Conference in Manchester. The debate was recorded by the BBC and was shown on the BBC2 Sunday political programme, North Westminster.

On February 8 2000 Professor Moverley was on BBC Radio Lancashire talking about issues facing rural communities and plugging the college's upcoming student careers advisory open days. The very next day he was at No.10 Downing Street for a meeting with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair and Minister of Agriculture, Nick Brown who later visited the college.

Later in February 2000 the college was featured on Granada TV's show Granada Tonight in a segment appropriately named Show Me the Ropes. Appropriate because reporter Simon O'Brien was shown ascending up into the canopy of one of the college's many trees to do a bit of pruning under the careful eye of Myerscough Arboriculture Instructor, Mick Cottam.

On 23 February 2000 presenter Rhodri Williams of TV's Animal Hospital came to film a segment about a rescued pot bellied pig called Rasher. Perhaps an unfortunate name for a pig, but she had been kept as a pet when small and cute, fed inumerable treats and then when she grew to adult size had been kept in less than ideal conditions in the garden of the house. Rasher, having been used to food treats whenever she wanted had grown a little belligerent at having a more suitable diet prescribed and entering her pen without a large board to keep between your legs and her teeth was something of a risk...

Early March 2000 and a number of bird cages appeared in the central corridor of the Plant Centre. They added movement and colour and interest to a visit, the Plant Centre being open to the public.

I kept thinking I must keep going in at dinner and attempt to teach them to say "Hello John!" Though to be honest I hadn't a clue as to whether they could learn to talk or not and remembering the choice language of a parrot in the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor one time I decided to leave well enough alone... The last thing I needed was someone saying "I've seen John Burke talking to them a lot!"

The grain store. Or that's what it was on this day... There were plans to turn this into an exhibition centre. The amount of grain stored in the barn had gone steadily down since I started in October 1999.

A group of riders alongside the Plant Centre. This was a Sunday and I had gone into college in order to take a few photos of a dressage event that was taking place in the Equine Arena.

This was one of the contestants in the dressage event. Horses seldom used the I.T. equipment of the college so I didn't come into contact with them all that much and would have run a mile had I been offereed to climb on the back of one! Actually I did get the offer and whilst I may not have run a mile, I didn't take them up on their kind offer...

Work Index

A Flutter On The Nags

Well this was something I'd never done before! On Saturday we went to Haydock Racecourse to spend an afternoon at the horse races.

I had a spell of having a small daily flutter many many years ago, but somehow had never actually been to the races. Fran used to go with her Dad when she was little and has said every now and then that we should go.

Anyway Eddie persuaded us to trot along (whoops sorry!) so with Gill, the four of us braved the weather and saddled up (oops!) the old jalopey (which now has springs again after having to leave it with the menders whilst we were away on hols!) and once we'd had lunch we shook off the nose bags (I apologise!) and got into the car.

The going was good (eek!) on the motorway and we got there ok. People in jeans and casual stuff. People in very posh suits and their ladies in posh frocks short enough to show a shapely ankle or two and ...er... someone dressed as Fred Flintstone... Which, I have to say, wasn't as effective once he'd taken the wig off...

We watched the horses being led around before the race - totally meaningless to me as once I'd ascertained that they all had the correct number of legs it was beyond me to spot any advantage in one against the other.

Eddie said I should look at the form - so I watched the gals in the posh frocks for a while. Very edifying but it still wasn't helping me choose a winner...

Then we went to stand at the rail for the first race. I had the camera out all expectantly but then found that there were dirty great white rails right at my head height... So any photos from this position had white bars across them. No good...

Not to worry we'll move somewhere else for the next race Ed - er... what do you mean half an hour? Half an hour??? The race only lasted 2 minutes - why do we have to wait half an hour for the next one?!?

Agh! My ears are now being assaulted by both Fran and Gill telling me they have to get the horses ready for the next race. But they are different horses for Heaven's sake! They could have been getting them ready whilst the last lot were still running! I mean - where would the band be if we played one song and then made the audience stand around for half an hour...?

I'm not getting any sympathy here, so we'll go off and get a burger or something. Ohhh yes - fried onions, tomato sauce, none of that McGrotburger King stuff! Wonderful! It rained for the next race so we sat in the stands - too close to the front so we were still getting wet... I could take photos from there too and see all of the horse!

I had a flutter, but the girls in the posh frocks took no notice and Fran was looking at me in that way so I gave up and had a bet on the horses instead.

I was positive I'd come home rich... Ah well...

Fast Track To Edinburgh

Here's a first!

Updating the blog from a moving train! I'm on my way to Edinburgh and so far there seems to have been hordes of rugby fans travelling today. (Sorry!!! Footie fans - I don't follow it as you can tell!) Thankfully they all seemed to be in a good mood, though I'm not sure that the young lady felt all that tranquil getting off the Blackpool train at Preston for what sounded like a very raucous male voice choir singing or chanting "Bouncy, bouncy!". Herd mentality - everyone of them would have been appallingly affronted had the young lady been their girlfriend or wife or sister...

Anyway, all quiet on the Western Front. Or West Coast line anyway.

We played a gig at Witton Park, Blackburn on Sunday, setting up in our usual spot in the courtyard which was set out with straw bales for the audience to sit. Quite a number turned up. It was a nice day (until later - see below) and we ran out of straw bales but thankfully not out of songs!

There was a lot going on besides us. There was some chap dressed up in a duck outfit collecting entries for a duck race. I couldn't resist the temptation and called to him over the mic - "Collect a bit for charity, there's a duck..."!

From lunchtime we kept hearing thunder rumbling in the far distance, though it remained warm and sunny through the afternoon. Then as we were considering calling it a day and just as we were halfway through the last chorus huge raindrops started to fall. We finished, yelled "Thank you, goodbye!" and yanked plugs from sockets and dragged the equipment into the shelter of the ex-stable that we use as a base.

Almost immediately the Heavens opened and thunder, lightning and hailstones the size of marrowfats were bouncing all over the place.

A great day with none of the usual requests for "just one more", as the audience dived for cover too!

Up until then though it had been so sunny I couldn't read the LCD display on the keyboard which led to this rather unfortunate necessity...

For now we are still rattling on. Carlisle has just faded behind us, a mass of greenery against blue skies and sunny enough for a man to be sunbathing in just a pair of shorts on a grassy bank against a wall.

There's a relaxed air on the train. In fact I've been having to put up with the barely restrained antics of not one, but two sets of lovers in the seats before me and diagonally opposite. I noticed them first (the diagonally opposite ones) as his hand slid casually down the (admittedly splendidly inviting) rather loosely fitting back of her jeans.

Then there was a somewhat frenzied slurping noise coming from the seats directly in front and the sight, between the seats of two sets of lips locked in mortal combat. Lucky sods.

Only once have I undertaken a long train journey with a member of the opposite sex who was mutually attracted to me by way of being something of an item. There's something about the motion of a train apparently that makes couples who share an attraction experience deeper feelings.

On that journey long ago, my friend and I sat across a table, holding hands whilst both reading. Without stopping the reading every now and then she would raise my hand to press it against her cheek whilst I would occasionally pull hers towards me to gently kiss the fingers, knuckles, armpit...

This teasing continued until she came to sit cuddled next to me and it was a dreamy wonderful journey that really train companies should anticipate and provide a drop down set of curtains, sound-proofing and a plushly cushioned horizontal surface.

As we cross the border into Scotland (it could be just in front, just behind or a long way away right now) the view is of rolling low hills and bright green grassy fields with rows of trees or hedgerows hinting at streams and rivers that remain out of sight.

A herd of cows - heard of cows? Of course I've heard of cows! - is sitting in their field chewing the cud and probably passing polite conversation amongst themselves. "Mildred dear, you're drooling" or "What's wrong with Daisy? Off stomachs?"

Does it mean rain if cows sit down? Or just that they're fed up of standing?

The first set of lovers got off at Carlisle, walking out under the arched exit, locked in each other's arms to an extent that looked as if it made walking difficult.

The second set in front of me have disengaged and from the faintly heard conversation I've deduced she is an Afrikaaner and he is not. She trotted off towards the end of the carriage and I half expected him to follow after a discreet interval - though sex in a train toilet can't be all that satisfying I would have thought. Anyway to my surprise and possibly to his, she returned with a little food bag. "That's not what I was hoping for!" he could have protested, but he managed instead to look as though that's what he had had in mind all the time - so now I'm back to the slurping noises...

By now the streams and rivers are coming close enough to see - The Clyde I imagine is the tranquil stretch flowing lazily by. Not now - quite fast this train! There's a half dome of moon up in the deep blue sky. Somewhere... Perhaps we've changed direction? Ah yes, there! I knew it wasn't my imagination even with all this romance on my mind.

The cows have now turned from black and white to brown or brown and white from which I deduct, Watson, that we are indeed in Scotland, even had I not seen a river that could be the Clyde. I'm ignoring the fact that due to the lack of handy signs and information hoardings it might well be the Severn, but if that's the case then the train has most definitely changed direction.

Ah, the last set of cows had a red plastic bucket to drink from. "Ermentrude! Come and look at this! What sort of bloody pond do they call this then???"

Now we have entered a land of endless Christmas trees and a large lake or loch or tarn stunningly blue under this reflected sky and complete with a couple of boats with fishermen/poachers. We swept by too quickly to see if they were using rods or dynamite...

Well, I'll pack the laptop away in happy anticipation of arriving at Edinburgh, where hopefully Clive will be joining me to run a workshop tomorrow. We must be getting somewhere close. Just passed through a small station called Kinkerton or Kinworton or even possibly King's Scrotum - something beginning with "Kin" anyway. Train stations just weren't named with trains in mind that might speed through at over 100 miles per hour without stopping!

The cows have now turned into horses - which in conclusion I have deduced is no mean feat...!

Horse Droppings!

I'm not sure what it is with the horsey lot... The room my company rents for me to work in is on a site where facilities are rented out to the horsey brigade at weekends.

Now, it's very rare, I admit, that I have ever set foot in a stables or hacking yard or whatever they call them. I do honestly seem to remember, though, when my nephew was young and foolishly decided he wanted to sit on one of those strangely-shaped horse things, that their yards and so on were fairly clean places. At least there was sufficient space to walk in between the piles of stuff that falls out of the back end of the afore-mentioned strangely-shaped horse things.

Here, on most Monday mornings, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is because they issue an edict that "no strangely-shaped horse thing will let anything fall from its back end until ordered to do so..." Once upon our premises and out of the horse boxes, I can only surmise that the grooms and groomesses line them up and then at the opportune moment someone shouts "Now!!!"

From the state of the car park I deduce that what happens next is that hammer-wielding horsey people climb aboard and they play polo with the resulting "balls" until all balls have fallen apart or become flattened and are spread all over the extent of the car park.

I can see that it would be a job and a half trying to pick up through a carrier bag as you quite hilariously see dog owners do. The picking up should be reasonably feasible but I think it would come unstuck - if that's the right phrase - when it comes to the "folding over and tucking in pocket" bit.

I have a separate pair of shoes for "office days"...