It has been interesting to keep an eye on the media
over the last few days and read about the shenanigans surrounding the former
public relations guru Max Clifford.
Clifford always admitted being a self-confessed liar and I don’t know
how I feel about the fact that I tried to get him to represent me against the
thief Paul O Grady. He seemed to have
some form of control over the media and that is where many of his successes were
pulled off. We all know that Freddie
Star never went near a hamster, never mind bite its head off, that David Mellor
did not have sex with his mistress while wearing a certain football club top
and that the Hamilton’s were in fact innocent of his claims that they raped Nadine
Milroy-Sloan. When we discovered that Clifford
would want between ten to fifteen thousand pounds per month to represent me, both
Jeffrey and myself thought that it was a bit steep.
Well ‘steep’ would be the wrong word. I really thought that the, ‘litigation expert’
I was consulting in Liverpool was just as big a con artist as Paul O Grady so
Clifford with his monthly stipend certainly surpassed the pair of them. And now we see that he wasn’t a public
relations guru, he was in fact a liar and he must have been quite a good one as
people like Simon Cowell paid him two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year
to keep certain stories out of the media about them. I often wonder what stories Simon Cowell,
once described at the beginning of his career in pop as the biggest Queen in
London, would want kept out of the newspapers?
It would appear that the fun might just be starting as Clifford has been
pestering his old celebrity mates for cash to help pay his legal fees. It’s not just the women who have successfully
had eight guilty counts upheld against him and seen him convicted and sent to
prison for eight years that he has to pay for, but according to the police more
women have now come forward. Clifford is
threatening to spill the beans if his celebrity mates don’t fork up the cash. Come on Cowell get your purse open ducky.
From a public relations aspect I was doing
quite well, I attended the second session at big school and was pleasantly surprised
to find that the American delegation knew all about me and wanted me to
participate in their discussions. It was
nice to be recognised but I still wanted to make it as a writer and only viewed
the world of learning disabilities and mental health as something that interested
me and where I could actually make a positive contribution. NWCS had noticed how effective I seemed to be
and even Delia gave me career advice, which was basically I would proceed no further
unless I had some sort of university degree behind me. They actually suggested that I could attend
John Moore’s University in Liverpool and they would pay for my course, the unfortunate
thing was that it was a degree in social work.
It made sense that as the recruitment process I had experienced so far
in the learning disability world would not get any better the further up you
travelled, so a degree it would have to be.
But I wasn’t convinced that a degree in social work
was the answer, Richard was an accountant and the further up the greasy pole
you moved the further away from people you were and the more business orientated
you became. So I felt that rather than
just get any old degree I should study subjects that would actually contribute
to my career. If the truth be told I
would have gone to Manchester and studied creative writing with Carol Anne Duffy
but I think that even the most brain dead social worker might see a flaw in that
plan. Instead I opted for the Open
University which meant that I could study in my own time and I would study
accountancy, management and English. It
certainly meant that I would be busier than ever, but as it was all new ground
I was covering thankfully I found it interesting and threw myself into the
work.
The other service managers in Manchester had
become bored with the course at Lancaster so gave up attending, the hope was
still that I would complete the course work and they would receive a
qualification. I thought Delia had a bit
of a cheek saying that I could complete the initial essay on my own and the
others could benefit but I now discovered that a new qualification, that had
been brought in for the team leaders, an NVQ, a National Vocational
Qualification, was my domain also. One
of my own team leaders approached me and told me that she had a problem with
her course work but that Delia had said I would help. We were approaching a point where there
simply would be far too much work for me to handle. For example the new accounting system I had
introduced in to both Manchester and Liverpool wasn’t complete.
The system was in place and it worked, in fact
it worked very well, but I still hadn’t decided the best way to store the documents
once they had been received and checked.
I was positive that I had managed to stop most of the cons that had been
going on and that the new system was simple and straight forward but I needed a
system to store all the receipts. At the
moment they were stored in a brown envelope with the house name and relevant month
written on the outside. It would have to
do until I decided whether to have a special storage case constructed or find
some suitable filing cabinets. I hadn’t
given up on the writing either and was still approaching celebrities through my
agent Jeffrey. Although I detested
anything to do with Simon Cowell I realised that his shows provided some good
fodder for what I was up to.
I had heard Susan Boyle sing once and thought
she was terrible, there was no depth in her voice at all but the sheeple
refused to believe me. Cowell was a genius
as far as music was concerned. I was
quite embarrassed to approach the clients we were after, but sadly I was pushing
a book deal for Jedward, the two young Irish boys managed by Louis Walsh. They were so cringe worthy it was difficult
to watch them prance about however the sheeple followed them in droves and it
was up to Jeffrey and myself to try and divert some of the huge stream of cash
that followed them in to our own bank accounts.
The Irish situation didn’t help either.
Not that I was getting any hassle from Ireland, in fact there was still
zero communication from my family, either of them. I was told that my cousin who had a holiday
flat in Warrenpoint would visit my mother on Sundays after attending mass and
sit and talk with her. It would have
been nice if one of them had lifted a telephone and told me how she was.
I had to get my old girlfriend Pat to visit my
mother and report back to me. Luckily most
of the girls who worked in the home where she was, knew me so they all helped and
kept me in the loop as they say. So for
a period things seemed to settle out, I was back to playing the waiting
game. Waiting to hear from Jeffrey,
waiting to hear from Ireland, waiting for the next ‘situation’ to erupt in
Manchester. As her newly created deputy
Delia kept me informed of any new developments as and when she thought fit. I was called in one day to be told that we
were going after some contracts in a place north of Manchester known as Chorley. Delia wasn’t sure if she should go to Chorley
and supervise the setting up, or if I should be sent, either way, one of us
would be supervising Chorley and the other Manchester.
I think most people in Manchester prayed,
myself included, that Delia went to Chorley.
If I was to say that she was full of surprises that would be the
understatement of the year. Many of the
people supported in Manchester wanted to stab her, which I think spoke volumes
about the way she treated them in Caldertsones.
I was invited to sit in with a meeting between Delia and a senior female
social worker. She was a nice woman, and
I would have said a little bit above the ability of the average social
worker. Delia was sitting behind her
desk and I brought the social worker in, we both sat down but the moment our
arses hit the chairs Delia launched herself at the social worker. She was spitting and screaming, I’d never
seen anything like in in my life. It was
all verbal, but such an attack I had never seen before, really, really, vicious.
I think the worst she did to me was I had a team
leader who was not very good, she was going to have to be replaced so I was
going to have to ask her to step down.
This would involve a loss of money for the girl although I have to say that
I found disciplinary decisions very easy to make on behalf of people with
learning disabilities. If I was right, I
was doing my job to support and protect them If I was I the wrong then; sorry. Delia suggested that I bring the team leader
to the office and she would fire her. The
house where she worked was twenty minutes away so I went and picked her
up. All the way back, she kept asking
why Delia wanted to see her and I lied through my back teeth saying I didn’t know. The moment we walked in to Delia’s office, Delia
said “She’s your team leader you can deal with this.” If that wasn’t bad enough that I had to
dismiss her, I had to spend the next twenty minutes driving her back to the house
so she could collect her things. The only
certain thing you could say about Delia is that she kept you on your toes.
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