Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Two - Entries and Exits

Much as I had enjoyed my job over the summer I could imagine how in winter it would be a different proposition. I was often slow to finish in fair weather. When foul weather slowed down my delivery rate a lot more, then the management would be unhappy with me. Working over Christmas and New Year and then being sacked for it was still fresh in my memory. Another winter sacking would look too much like carelessness. I wanted to leave on a safe, no fault, basis. I did not want to be blamed for losing my job and penalised by the benefits system again. Though by 1990 I knew my way around the reduced benefits penalty: do two or three days short term agency work and let the agency terminate the job and clean my employment slate enough for the benefits system to grant me full basic benefits.

As a postman teamwork meant being included in the gossip. So early on I knew when one postman of many years experience was leaving, amongst other matters shared whilst sorting post and finding our seats in the van. The departing postman told us first But the information sat on me rather. I would like to have told the management, as a favour to them., if I could. They would need to replace him. Except that the management were always too busy to listen to me. My contract was for one of their short term last in/first out positions. They said nothing to me about any possible extension of the contract. By the time the management thought to ask me if I wanted to replace the departing employee I had formally accepted the expiring of my contract. I had to say to the manager that I could not have the job because my contract had expired. If I had been able to catch your attention earlier it might have been different. It is too late now. So I got my win-win exit.

I partly regretted leaving but not enough to think that an alternative outcome would have been better. I returned to the relative safety of the dole queue. There I used the time I had to apply myself to thrift and better living on less money, a sort of non-work/life balance. In both the care home and the post office I had been no better off, financially, for working than if I were unemployed. Nor would I have been better off in the long term. My sense of reward came from being part of a team. In the post office the seemed to know more about the job than the management. I was always the weaker team member for being the newest. Some things cannot be helped. With the exits from both jobs I learned the hard way the early lesson that mother had repeated until we both stopped listening to each other; in any situation that I got into I had to make sure of my exit out of it.

My family could not teach me that particular lesson because, well, if I applied the lesson they were teaching me to them then I might know that I had applied by the lesson by the distance I was from them. But how would they know I had applied the lesson beyond the lack of evidence of who I was and what I did? As a child I had taken them on trust and at their word. That is what dependents do. When as an adult I went over how they explained a lot of the choices I was presented with they quite crudely divided them into 'decisions that worked' and decision that failed' and credited what worked to them and what failed to me. The presentation was a lot more blurred than that. It took me until my exit from Windrush Nursing Home to recognise the pattern of credit and blame, then it seemed like my working at Windrush Nursing Home was an echo of the life I had with my family.

My family had no use for ideas like repentance or being forgiven, or admitting being wrong. They disbelieved that relationships often needed break points in them, to repair and be reset, to make the relationship sustainable. Sometimes mother would set times aside for a serious discussion in which when she booked the time my first thought was 'back to the head mistresses  office again, what have I done wrong now?'. In these discussions she appeared to listen and spoke in tones of humility for having to say anything at all. There the logic of her argument of 'I am sorry, but you were wrong when you did [insert name of deed here]' was difficult to unpick. That I was wrong was clear, what she was sorry for, having to talk or me being wrong, was unclear. Saying that 'I was only following orders' to explain 'my error' simply did not fake my sincerity well enough to appease mother. I had to take the blame for her needing to be so insincere as well.

By the time I got out of the postman job my view was that if making myself wrong by other people, and apologetic for being wrong, then where the wrong was a gain for them job done. It was a win for me to manage being a loss to who blamed me being the winner. When I had to learn how to own being railroaded then I had to also learn how to make the best of the ride.

The highlight of my autumn, was seeing The Grateful Dead live. I first liked them ten years earlier. Back then I was rather awkwardly living with my parents. We were all caught in the stalemate where every way there might have been for me to agreeably move out quickly proved to have too many downsides for it to seen to be a viable exit. To make Christmas more palatable to me Christian Youth Group leader, would-be mentor, and friend John Sargent had lent me the 1977 Warner Bros double vinyl compilation by The Grateful Dead 'What A Long Strange Trip It's Been'. John did not know what a foment of rebellion from family he was starting when he lent me that album.

In one way it was 'just music', albeit with imagery that led towards the wayward and uncanny. Plenty of the music I had heard up to then had embodied the idea of rebellion as lifestyle choice. But most of it did not sustain the idea of rebellion. The nearest I got to rebellion as a teenager was putting holes in one my vests in imitation of Freddy Mercury's selectively torn T shirt in the glossy Queen video for 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love' on the Kenny Everett Show. I wonder now how many deeply closeted young gay men who saw that video did what I did, realising it got them nowhere.

There was something anti-image, and a certain aesthetic charge, in music of The Grateful Dead that got to me about the material on the double album I was lent to put on tape that Christmas. I had my NME book of rock to look the band up in. The entry for them in that was some help, but it left me few clues as to why they wrote, played, and recorded, in such a different way to all their contemporaries.

I don't remember now how I found out that the band were playing two dates at Wembley Arena in late October 1990, or from where and whom I sent off for my one ticket to see the band. What I can say for sure was that after a decade of connecting with them via a UK based fanzine called 'Spiral Light', and the live tapes that the band encouraged the audience to record and swap copies of, by post, including with deadheads who were in American prisons, they were making their once a decade visit to Europe. It was time for me to connect directly. New material by the band, 'In The Dark', released in 1987, was their first studio album for seven years. It raised their profile in the media much higher than it had been before. Just as they stepped up to the plate, with 'In the dark', then so it was time for me to step up to the plate and complete what was started for me in Christmas 1980.

But long before I got to the gig I got a shock. We all have memories of where we were when we hear news that changes how we recognise things. On Thursday 26th July the band's keyboard player, Brent Mydland, died. He was a youthful thirty seven thirty seven years old. On the Saturday I delivered my post as normal, came home and changed, then set out for the town from Lady Bay. Before I got to the bus stop I bought 'The Independent' from the nearby newsagents. It seemed to be a lunchtime like any other. I started reading the newspaper whilst waiting in the queue for the bus. In the paper was the first report that Brent Mydland was dead and the band were in consultations about what they should do next. I was stunned by the news and then mystified about what that meant for their European tour and my ticket to see them. The band had always presented life the way they presented music, a mix of continuity and change. This death put a rather dark full stop at the centre of that presentation. Getting such bad news from so far away that I nonetheless felt quite a lot about at the bus stop near the school in Lady Bay both sharpened my awareness of my surroundings and made me feel separate from them.

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and did not know how wide of the mark our attempted appropriation of that image was.  e, one stage prop being leant against another in the hope that each prop held the other up well enough for the musicians to make the money they were in the business for making. I had none of the means to even begin to imitate what the bands I listened to did live. The nearest I got to the music in myself was