I have to admit that the Mensa members I was
lucky enough to meet in Glasgow were some of the nicest people I had ever encountered. I do remember the ex-royal navy guy and the local
business man who gave me his access card for the festival, but the one I really
remember was a beautiful young man from one of the Scottish Islands. He was, to me anyway, a typical highlander,
physically huge but softly spoken with a beautiful Scottish burr to his voice. He had come to Glasgow for the festival and
we were talking about what he was doing.
He said he painted gnomes. I unfortunately
was still repeatedly running that advert from the back of the Mensa magazine
through my head, you remember the one, ‘If you so fecking clever, why aren’t
you rich?’
As this guy spoke to me it dawned on me that he
had an idyllic lifestyle. He lived on a
remote Scottish Island and made and painted gnomes for a living. There were no sharp suits, no flash cars, no
pretence, just a simple enjoyment of life.
But as I listened to him describe his lifestyle of growing most of his
own food and fishing for his supper, it began to occur to me that perhaps I had
been moving in the wrong direction, career wise. It was so easy to fall in to the trap of
chasing money, for money’s sake, to climb the property ladder, to become a
success. I can’t remember his name but
he surely did make me think. It wasn’t
just that event that started to change me; other incidents were having an
effect on me. For example Tony and Mary. When working in Leytonstone I had stayed with
Tony and Mary and the three of us would regularly get hammered.
We would sit and drink whisky into the wee
small hours, Tony would normally slope off early, leaving Mary and myself to
drink ourselves into a stupor. Mary was
quite a good looking woman and with Tony’s wealth she was normally dressed in the
finest clothes. We were great friends
and although I knew that Tony was quite wealthy I never felt jealous or envious
of his position. In a way I respected him,
for he had wanted to become an optician and had driven a taxi during the evenings
and nights to pay to get through the opticians training. So it came as quite a shock to me when you
think that your good friend who appears to have everything a man could want,
the big house, the three cars, speedboat, sailboat, weekly flying, when his
knockout wife turns around to you and says, ”He hasn’t made love to me for
seventeen years.”
I had already started to see that money wasn’t
everything and the big fellow from the islands certainly helped me along that route. It wasn’t the only thing that Mary ever said
to me that had me stop and think. Because
we were all so close she once told me that everyone in the village thought Mary
and I were having an affair. I was
mortified. However that’s not
important. With everything that I was involved
with I was certainly learning an awful lot about Civvie Street, perhaps not
enough and perhaps not quickly enough, but I was most certainly learning and building
on that knowledge. I still was getting the
odd bit of work from Mensa, acting as a member of a business consulting group,
most of that work was in London and the surrounding areas. It was interesting seeing how people made
money and I knew it would eventually contribute to some grand idea, probably.
One group that I was a member of within Mensa
was a group that had special interest in adoption. We formed a network of people who could find
answers, or get information, for adopted people about their natural birth parents. We weren’t doing anything illegal, we were
simply cutting corners, and why not. But
the one thing that annoyed me was that my old girl friend back in Ireland, Pat,
worked for the civil service. She told me
that she could access all birth records from her computer however people in
Northern Ireland, who had been adopted, were not allowed to find out any information
about their birth parents. This annoyed
me so I started a letter writing campaign, backed and supported by the special
interest group in Mensa, writing to Members of Parliament demanding that people
in Northern Ireland be allowed to access their birth records. Gerard was still eligible for national service
should he ever return to Germany, so I used this as my motivation.
I had been told that my mother had died giving birth
to me and my father had left the country so there was no real point in me
trying to find any information out about myself, but my original birth certificate
would allow Gerard to escape his stint of military service. It was frustrating knowing that Pat could press
a couple of buttons and have the information on the screen before her but she
would be in an awful lot of trouble if she told me anything. For me we were back to the old No Blacks, no
dogs, no Irish, situation. How, or why, were
English, Scottish and Welsh people allowed to access their birth records and
people from Northern Ireland were not?
It was tremendous fun writing letters to the great and powerful, well,
politicians and head of civil service departments.
I was having fun meeting all sorts of weird and
wonderful people, even the proprietor of the bed and breakfast establishment
where I stayed in Glasgow was a little bit weird, to say the least. I arrived at the place, a large house in the
centre of a long row of houses and knocked.
I actually thought I was being welcomed by Ebeneezer Balfour, and for those
literary heathens among you that’s the uncle in the book Kidnapped, by Robert
Louis Stevenson. A mean and crotchety
man, living a sparse life, alone, in a huge house. And it was a huge house as, only when you got
through the heavy front door, did you realise that it also comprised of the
house next door too. As with all weird
and wonderful people I simply had to sit down and listen to his story.
He had been living with a woman; they had built
this business up and even expanded by buying the house next door. They had been together many years but she had
died. Now her two children, from a
previous marriage, wanted this fellow out, and to sell the houses and split the
money, so his tentative approach had been him trying to figure out if I were
some sort of spy for his step children.
He showed me my room which was all Bri Nylon sheets, curtains and
carpets and perfectly mismatched furniture.
He invited me down for some coffee and I followed, amazed and I mean truly
amazed not only that tartan wallpaper existed but that the whole dining room
was covered in it. The mantelpiece was
dotted with tiny dolls in Scottish dress, both male and female and the walls
carried the obligatory stuffed and mounted stags head. It was not a room to have a hangover in.
He was worried that my fine little car might
become a target for thieves so insisted that I bring it around to the rear of
the house and park in his yard. I did
and was so pleased, as parking was proving to be a nightmare. As and when I could, I would sit with him and
listen to his stories, I think he was quite lonely but on my final evening he insisted
that he put some ‘stuff’ in the boot of my car.
It was a small gift, for being such a nice fellow and not a spy. He told me I wasn’t allowed to look in my
boot until I got home, but like any normal person, which I am of course not, I
stopped at the first motorway service station and had a gander in my boot.
It’s hard to describe what was in my boot. A collection of items would cover it but they
were so varied I found it strange why he had given me them in the first place. There were a couple of bales of tartan
cloth, but it was the finest Harris Tweed all stamped and
labelled and in the finest condition. Hundreds
of pounds worth of cloth. There was a
couple of little plastic dolls, some jerkins and a wig. People would never stop surprising me. I got back into my little car, on to the
motorway, and headed South for England but for some strange reason my mind was wandering
off North, to remote Scottish Islands and gnomes.
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