There was a pretty decent turn out for Tony at
his funeral, the church was packed, pity he couldn’t have been there to have
seen it. Events like that certainly make
you reassess your own life. I suppose it
makes you think about things you usually normally wouldn’t consider. I used to pride myself and still do, believing
that advertising does not affect me. I
love listening to adverts and dissecting the absolute hogwash they come up
with. Especially the hair, or beauty,
treatments for both men and women, that have these special new-fangled ‘scientific’
treatments. So if I believed that multi
million pound advertising campaigns didn’t affect me then what hope did one
fellow and a painted sign at the side of the road have?
It was never there first thing in the morning
but during the day when I would return to the office I would see the sign at
the side of the pavement advertising a tattoo parlour. It was something that interested me as we had
often discussed whether or not getting a tattoo, or a piercing, was borderline self-abuse,
self-harm. It is an interesting discussion and continues to this day; however not
many tattoos can be seen as self-harm. People
who get tattoos tend to want to show them off and talk about the pain they
endured getting them. People who self-harm,
tend to hide their scars and almost never talk about the pain they experience;
so on that level no, tattoos are not self-harm.
I suppose like many people I associated tattoos with prison, or bikers,
and that they were dirty in some way or another.
There had been a fellow, an American Marine,
down at Shotley who would go off on a Saturday morning and sit in a pub at Pin
Mill from eleven in the morning till they closed at two in the afternoon, then
stagger his way over to one of the house boats where a tattoo artist plied his
trade. He would then come over to the families
club where he would show us all his latest addition. He eventually found a side kick, a local
teenager who like the Marine would get himself tattooed but nothing as grand as
the Marine was having done. The Marine
was having leopards and tigers applied to his back. One day the pair of them staggered in to the
families club and the usual game of, ‘I bet you can’t guess where we were
tattooed today?’ would begin.
This day they pulled down their lower lips to
expose the inside of their lip where they had had their names tattooed. Yes, it does make your toes curl. The Marine, as with all military people moved
on and the teenager joined the British Army.
He was back the following week as the army didn’t think his range of tattoos
were acceptable for a serving member of the armed forces and he had been asked
to leave. My only other experience of tattoos
was when the television presenter Donal MacIntyre ran an investigation into a gang
of football hooligans associated with Chelsea football club, the Chelsea Head-hunters. MacIntyre was trying to make a name for
himself as a tough, no nonsense, type of reporter, and at the time the story
was relevant as he was able to show the connection between football hooliganism
and white supremacist organisations such as Combat 18, the National Front,
Loyalist paramilitaries in the North of Ireland and the infamous KKK.
Macintyre let himself down badly as for authenticity
he decided to get a Chelsea tattoo on his arm.
He was filmed as the tattoo was applied and fainted as the process
began. I could see that tattooing was
becoming more popular and not just with young people, so perhaps like a lot of
people I always wondered if it really did hurt.
It was one day after a particularly serious bout of paperwork that I stood
up, pulled on my jacket and announced that I was “Off down the street, for a
message.” It was about a ten minute walk
to the tattoo parlour which was just opening for the day. I went in as the tattoo guy set his equipment
up and as you might expect was drawn to the Gaelic themed tattoos. I chose a
small, about two inch square, Celtic knot and asked him to apply it to my upper
arm.
The tattoo was high enough on my arm so that no
one would ever see it as even if I was wearing a short sleeved tee shirt or
shirt it would still be covered, which for me was an interesting fact as people
tended to show off their tattoos. Did it
hurt, well, not really; in fact it was that sort of pleasurable pain. It didn’t take long and it didn’t cost much. It wasn’t long before I was in the local
chemist buying some cream for the tattoo and then back at my desk with no one in
the office being any the wiser. I consider it to be more of a brand mark rather
than a tattoo, and at least I hadn’t fainted.
Tony would have been impressed. I
tried to get a bit of a session going, a wake if you will, after Tony’s funeral
but no one was having any of it. We all
dispersed and dealt with our own grief in our own way.
I now found myself, and my new tattoo hammering
up the M6 motorway toward Lancaster and its university. The course was full of social workers from Manchester,
Lancaster and Liverpool with a fair old smattering of people like myself from
the private sector. There were four of
us from NWCS Manchester; I knew a lot of the people who were facilitating the
course and it was nice to see that respected people like John O Brien, the
American, had a lead role in the whole thing. It was nice too to see him turn up again in
his denim jeans with the bib while we all sat sweating cobs in our business
suits. I really hoped that something good would come out of it all but as the
first day wore on I began to think that this was pure unadulterated social work
bullshit. I attended a workshop where we
were discussing the best way to support people who opted for individual payments
who would organise their own support. I began
to ask how we could protect them and was ignored.
It was so frustrating to have people refuse to acknowledge
that people with learning disabilities could be cheated out of their
money. I didn’t want to stand up and
declare the absolute mess I was involved in cleaning up in Manchester and
Liverpool, but it was as if we were back to the intransigence of the equality argument. By lunch time on day one I was convinced that
ninety nine per cent of social workers are absolutely useless. I wasn’t impressed with my colleagues from
NWCS who couldn’t stay that night at the University as one of them couldn’t miss
her game of bingo. They would be back
the following morning. That was fine
with me as I paired up with the deputy boss of Manchester social services and
we went off on the rip, visiting as many of the student bars as we could.
We helped each other into the bar that had been
designated for our course and were surprised to find a live rhythm and blues band
performing. What was really surprising
was that it was comprised of social workers from Lancaster and even though
quite a lot of drink had been taken I have to admit there were toe tappingly good. The food was good, the beer was good, the entertainment
was fantastic but the best thing about Lancaster University was the showers. My room was on the ground floor of a tall
block of flats and when you stepped into the shower the water would try to
flatten you. It was brilliant, never
mind washing away the dust and grime of the day it worked a treat on the
hangover the following morning.
We were asked to write a five thousand word
essay, or report, about the problems people with learning disabilities might
face if they opted for personal payments and tried to arrange their own support
package. I could already see a whole new
industry springing up as support staff, who knew how to use a ball point pen,
were now offering their services as consultants to people with learning
disabilities who would like to opt out of the system and arrange their own
support. We had been told that one five
thousand word essay would suffice from all of us. About three days after our return from Lancaster
at a senior managers meeting I announced that I had already started the essay
on the computer. I had written about two
and a half thousand words. I asked if
anyone want to change what I had written they were free to do so, but if we all
chipped in the exercise would be complete in no time at all. The service manager who was a bingo addict announced
that she didn’t know how to switch on the computer so she wouldn’t be contributing.
Pauline stated that as I had already written half of it I could finish it off
and Delia concurred. I would do the work
but we would all receive the credit. I
suppose that is the point I began to wonder if I was actually being appreciated
or being used.
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