As this is the latest part of “A Life: At Seventy” I'll publish before I actually reach seventy years of age this coming Saturday I've been resisting a mild temptation to write the special day its own chapter. Because? Well, my experience has been that the most special of days sometimes only become special on looking back. And only sometimes are these the big official and looked forward to days. More often they're like the one at the beginning of this story of the 1990s. Where the moment that made the day special enough for me to be writing about it here, thirty years later, happens by surprise and while I’m dangling off a cliff.
Here's the story.
It's some time in the spring of 1994 and I'm leaning back and pushing myself away from a cliff face somewhere near a village called Hope in Derbyshire, to show how confident I am that my team members have got me roped up securely and safely for this first go at abseiling any of us have ever done. We're on an outward bound course and this is the day job, but not as we'd all normally know it.
By now I'm a Director at Liverpool Housing Trust and the dozen or so faces peering down at me from the cliff top are all the members of the Central Services Department. We do all the support things the other departments need. Planning, personnel, training and development, computer services, equal opportunities, health and safety, P.R. and anything else that doesn't quite fit anywhere other than with us. That's right, if you've read earlier chapters about me wanting to work in housing, I'm now the Director of pretty much everything except that. And yes, after a few years away from me the computer, and a whole grown up network of its technology is back in my job again.
But at least the job is allowing me to do occasionally interesting things like hang off this cliff face. While I think. Is this really what I want to do with my life?
Not the abseiling bit, that was great. Though I've never done it again. But everything else. Everything else about working at Liverpool Housing Trust is being thought about. And by the autumn of that same year my thinking will have come up with an idea. An idea that's going to get me out of the day job and into a whole new adventure. And one of the idea's beginnings happened there on that cliff face.
This is the story of my 1990s.
Until the outward bound days the decade so far had involved lots of organising things and house moving. Organizing regular times with Clare and places where we'd live until we could get somewhere permanent.
When I'd driven away from home that day after Christmas in 1989 I'd gone to stay with my friends Andy and Lynne in their house on the Avenues between Ullet Road and Smithdown. This had been fixed up between the two of them and my other main friend Janet, as the three of them reckoned I'd be best off being with some friends after I'd done what I was so hesitant to do, and left Clare. At Andy and Lynne's there was a room waiting for us both with twin beds. So Clare wouldn't be on her own during her first nights away from her mum. Then downstairs we had our own sitting room where, very thoughtfully, there was a record player already installed. As well as a dining table for us, which was also just the right size for my portastudio. They'd thought of everything and we were more than ok there. Thank you Andy, thank you Lynne and thank you Janet.
Next was a flat in Grassendale, right down by the side of the river. Followed by the borrow of a house in Wavertree for a few months. This last just across the Mystery from the terraced house where I'm writing this. Home now since September 1992, the longest I've ever lived in one place.
In each place we moved to, and don't forget her and Diana were also moving once our divorce was sorted, Clare would adapt, explore and keep her toys for when she came safe in the places she made for them. I think we did ok.
During these years I've also "met someone" as a romantic novelist might say. Though it wasn’t so much a case of "met" as someone I already knew becoming more special than either of us had been expecting. This is where Sarah Horton enters the story.
I’d already met Sarah when she'd briefly passed through Liverpool Housing Trust a few years earlier. Then I'd become her unofficial employment law adviser when the next job she went to, a shop designer at TJ Hughes and Owen-Owen, wasn’t working out. And we'd stayed friends. Long enough by the early 1990s to realise we were more than that, while she'd meanwhile moved on to jobs as an installations designer, think big art at garden festivals, airports and other public spaces, then to be a housing association PR person in Manchester. Meaning we'd regularly be up and down the M62 to stay with each other for a couple of years, before eventually moving in together. Which was to here in Liverpool, closest to Clare. Time in Manchester with Sarah though, having given me interesting new places for my walking around. Near where she’d lived in Didsbury, and Victoria Park, as well as the regular joy of second-hand record shopping together at Vinyl Exchange in Oldham Street.
Once we were set up here in Liverpool Sarah and I became the opposite of when I’d been her employment law adviser. The two of us became a kind of joint Escape Committee, from either of us needing to be employed at all. Sarah because she didn't like having these jobs she'd keep restlessly moving to. And me because there had to be more to life than being Head of Admin, my own title for the housing job I'd long had enough of. So we wondered whether, maybe, there might be some way we could earn our livings doing some newly interesting things and maybe even together? Which thought took us one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1994, for a long sit on a bench by the windmill at Lytham St Annes, to talk about how.
And we didn't know how, except that whatever it was would probably best be built up from the things we liked doing anyway. For Sarah that was definitely some sort of being an artist. It's what her degree was in and was what she spent her spare time doing, lots of that on textile and collage art. Quilts being her current and sometimes very big things. So to get going we decided that afternoon she'd go into work and talk to them about becoming a part time PR person there, so she could have more time for her art. Meanwhile for me I'd go and read a book, always my first option. The book being a classic career advice thing called "What Colour Is Your Parachute.” Which, after weeks of list-making and practical exercises shook out the idea for me that what I most wanted to become was "A DJ who works with small groups of people on what they want to do with their lives and places."
Hmm.
Well anyway and before that year of 1994 was done, the bringing together of our two ideas became A Sense of Place. And a year later we’d bet our lives on it. By walking to a wall at the end of our road, holding hands and jumping off it together. As solemn a ceremony as we've ever taken part in, and one that worked. Our “Leap of Faith."
By then I'd also managed to stop being a Director, go part time at the day job, and we’d begun trying out our idea with friends and, soon, at events. Events with music and art and opening up people's senses, dreams and memories by walking round their neighbourhoods - and getting paid.
So more than a bit like the “DJ working with small groups of people” idea from that book I’d worked through. And titled after that “A Sense of Place” song I’d written a few years before and had never felt was quite done. Now we’d found it was more than a song.
Oh yes and the "walking round their neighbourhoods" and opening up senses bit had come from that abseiling day. Wondering whether all that being outside stuff, the energy, the map reading, the working out how places work, might be put to more immediately practical, and usually urban use, than some bogus imaginary exercises on a cliff-dangling team building course.
Right here I’m interrupting this story to let you know about a related whole other story I’ve already told. The ins and outs, the what we did and who we worked with story of our years working together as A Sense of Place. I’m sketching and summing up all of that here. But to avoid repeating myself I’m also linking to all of its own episodes, for especially keen readers. As if all these “Stories of A Sense of Place” are appendices at the back of the book.
So, the links below cover the 1990s. Then there’ll be more of them to follow as “Seventy: A Life” reaches the current century in its next chapter.
Stories of A Sense of Place: The 1990s
We’d invented A Sense of Place then.
And working on it day after day with Sarah, for years to come, would turn out to be one of the best adventures of my life. An early best thing about it being that our big idea worked at all and that we both took to it so well. Running our events instinctively, together and like we’d both been born to it. Loading up the car on so many early mornings with art materials, music, maps, flowers, cameras and everything we could think of for the day (drums, cushions, guitars and even the portastudio came once or twice). Then driving off down our road to wherever, singing World Party’s "Put the Message in the Box."1 Our theme song for those days, out of our jobs and into our lives.
And yes I’ve kind of skated past the leaving of my own housing job after those twenty years. How the last of those years, when I’d gone part time, was one of the best. I’d loved taking my Director suits to the charity shop, and standing over our swing bin cutting my Director ties in two the day I stopped needing to dress like that.2 Then going back into the day job (in jumper and jeans mostly, if you’re wondering) and finally doing some housing work in the short time left there. Trying out some elements of what would become A Sense of Place with tenant groups around Liverpool and in Runcorn.
All good, but both Sarah and I leaving our jobs in the same week and neither of us ever ever having a boss again, was better.
Then we got married.
Just when we didn't have the time to organise that, what with the new company to get going, we organised it. As getting married seemed both the romantic and the realistic thing to do now we were entirely dependent on each other. It also fitted with our favourite Paul Simon song:
“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together”3
And if you go to the full story of those days at the obvious link above you’ll see we had two weddings. One a registry office with a couple of friends. And a big do. And of course the me of these days looks back more fondly on the quieter of the dos. Either which way the marriage has worked, and that’s what matters.
As for the rest of the 1990s, there was quite a lot of travelling. Because we weren’t getting any work in Liverpool at first. Which I would always attribute to a sort of Scouse cynicism of the “who do they think they are” variety. But maybe it was more like we were having the kind of fairy tale where we’d been sent travelling to prove ourselves first? So we travelled. To Edinburgh, Manchester, York, London, Bristol and even Hebden Bridge before one day, walking along Church Street in Liverpool, someone I knew came up to me and said:
“How come you two never work round here?”
Then the local customers started to arrive.
And anyway we didn’t work all the time. Eventually we’d steer clear of all Monday mornings and avoid working on Fridays too. But even in the getting going years there was always time for us, and for Clare. Clare and I would go on holidays together and sometimes with Sarah. And several memorable times we three had our holidays at home. A week-long mixtures of games, art, riddles, music, collaging, photography, treasure hunts and outings we called the “Earlsfield Festival” (after the road we live in). Our friend Janet, who’d moved to Dunbar on the east coast of Scotland by now, so liked the sound of these she invited the three of us for a holiday at her’s and we ran a version called “Dunbar Del Mar” with Janet and her daughter Lilly.
I want to mention our families before the decade finishes.
By the time Sarah and I were getting married I was well out of touch with all of mine. But we invited Rose and Joe, my mum and dad, to the big do. “You do, don’t you?” we’d thought. Sarah invited her’s too. Jane and Frank. So they were all there.
But for me and mine it wasn’t the beginning of a reconciliation, nor was there ever to be any open-hearted welcoming of Sarah. As for Sarah, who’d also not seen her parents for a couple of years, at the wedding Frank wasn’t looking well. And even though he was only approaching his mid-sixties, he’d die two years later. Though not before some days out and quiet times in the garden were had with his daughter. As well as him educating and enthusing me about some of the basics of jazz. So though work had got busier than ever, our century ended more quietly than we’d been expecting.
But it had been a very special decade, this 1990s. One I’d dreamed about back in Andy and Lynne’s. So here I am back then, to finish. Portastudio all set up and ready to record, singing this one day early in 1990. It’s called “Walking Into Being.”
Everything was always getting better again, now.
And next, it’ll be a different century
“Put The Message In The Box” by Karl Wallinger of World Party.
A consciously semiotic moment that, the cutting of my ties. To credit Dick Hebdidge and his lesser known branch of sociology, concerning the science of signs in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style.” Which I learned about decades ago from my friend Paul, always a man of style.
From “America” on the Bookends album.
Thank you Ronnie, for giving me something interesting to read in a world of rather mundane sponsored articles on social media. Reading your chapters gives me time to concentrate not only on your inspiring content, but also on things that happened in my own history. Thank you for sharing your story and for your honesty.
Thank you Ann, glad what I’m writing is working for you in that way, of helping you to see your own history from a different angle.