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I was raised in a most unusual milieu—the American South during segregation. My political views were set quite early. I’ve added extensively to my outlook over the decades, but it’s all been of a piece and consistent with the original view.I was born in Seguin, Texas, in the summer of ’49, four years after the end of World War II. The town is significant, as it was the choice of my Tips forebears as a place to settle in 1849 when they arrived from Germany. They chose Seguin, a town roughly 30 miles east and slightly north of San Antonio, for another significant reason—the town was roughly equal parts Mexican (named for Juan Seguín’s father), Anglo and German—it had a reputation for being able to get along. The family felt they would benefit from exposure to Americans and Mexicans in ways unavailable had they moved to a strictly German community like Fredericksburg or New Braunfels.After the Civil War, Seguin was the first city in the South to open a trade school for former slaves. Apparently, my ancestors volunteered there, as blacks started taking family names in the years following Emancipation, and the (originally) Dutch name Tips is used by black families in Texas and New York.One of my fondest memories ages 4 to 6 was of walking (by myself, at least the last couple of years) the five blocks west across downtown from my grandmother’s house to the “Ranger Station,” a one-room smithy shop in a ramshackle wooden building easily close to a century old on a rocky bluff over Walnut Creek. The smith was a black man with a full, thick head of snowy white hair. I’m pretty sure my dad told me he was in his 80s and had been there “forever.” [I imagine his father learned blacksmithing at the trade school, and this man learned the trade working side-by-side with his dad.]He would not let me enter the shop. But I could stand in the doorway (big enough for a large wagon to enter). He’d show me everything he was doing and keep up a congenial dialogue of explanation. It was magical.My mother was a Lee, of the Lees of Virginia, with two signers of the Declaration of Independence and a famous Confederate general. Only she was a member of a branch that moved to Mississippi in the hopes of getting rich on cotton only to become sharecroppers during the Great Depression. They lost the farm when my mother was 8 or 9. From that point forward, she never had a store-bought toy nor store-bought outer clothes. From age 11, when not in school, she worked long days with a hoe in her hands or picking cotton.My earliest political memory was of mom dandling me on her knee and cooing, “God made each and every one of us, and He doesn’t play favorites.” Only, just before I started first grade, we moved to the Dallas suburb of South Oak Cliff.Ours was just about the first house finished on the block. One summer day before I started school, a lone carpenter showed up to work on the house across the street. In tow was his son about my age. I grabbed my next younger brother and we went over to play. At length my mother came out in the front yard and hurriedly called us home. Once inside, she told us we could not do that; we could not play with black children.“But, mom…” She would not address the objections I raised… refused to discuss the matter. It was my first major conundrum in life, made all the more perplexing by her subsequent behavior…My mother was a fun-loving, easy-going, exceptionally charming woman. Once I was in school, she headed up every canned-food drive (common in those days) for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’d help her distribute the goods. We’d walk up the sidewalk to a black apartment to usually a cool reception; only, soon, my mom and the lady of the house would be at the kitchen table hooting and hollering like old times, while I was out in the living room playing with the children of the family. I developed some suspicions about my mom, indeed, her whole family, that would not be confirmed for almost sixty years.My dad was Central Texas German, but with an Irish grandmother whose own grandfather had fought with Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto and with a mother who was French. We were Texans, by God, and don’t you forget it.He’d been a captain in the Army Air Corps during World War II after losing his deferment as the sole support of his mother, with two brothers already serving. My grandfather, a pursuit pilot in World War I, had died in a training accident in ’40 teaching RAF pilots combat maneuvers at nearby Randolph Air Field. He had to sell the family business.Because my dad was an excellent typist, he spent the war as head clerk to a colonel stationed at Hickham Field in Hawaii. After the war, like all of his peers, he stayed in the Reserves in order to collect the extra $35 a month. And like most of them, he was called up. My earliest memories are of Albuquerque, where he was billeted on some nuclear mission. He spent a year in Morocco. I don’t know if it was Albuquerque or Morocco, but he was commandant of a base with nuclear weapons.When he was called up for Korea, he had to sell the family business a second time, to the same gentleman, who this time insisted on a five-year non-compete clause to prevent losing all the customers he’d purchased as he had the first time. Not being able to live, after being released from service, in his home town irked my dad for decades. He tried working as an accountant, but soon we bopped to Houston and then Dallas.I loved my neighborhood in South Oak Cliff. I loved my friends. I focused on school work and play with my buds until sixth grade, when Kennedy ran against Nixon. My parents did not tip their mitts. (It was not until Johnson-Goldwater I discovered that both were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, a rare thing in the South.)The funny thing was, with the great majority of my classmates being from Democratic families, they’d go down the school corridors between classes chanting in unison, “Nixon! Nixon! He’s our man. Kennedy belongs in the garbage can!” Southern Democrats had no use for Catholics, even from their own party. The funny thing was, the more I paid attention, the less I liked Nixon and the more I liked Kennedy… the Democrat!And that year, the first black family moved into our neighborhood. Before I knew it, I was white-flighted out of my neighborhood, but not to the other Dallas neighborhoods where my friends fled. No, dad spotted a little town an hour north, twenty minutes north once Interstate 35 was completed shortly after we moved, and that was the attraction. My dad had been in insurance and real estate, and he spotted Lewisville as the epicenter of a coming growth boom.The city limit sign, posted after the ’60 census, boasted something like 3586 souls. I soon found out that they were mostly related to each other and that their parents, often both, worked as furniture assemblers or grocery store butchers or owned a service station. My first day of 7th grade, first period, Jesse Peters had his switchblade confiscated for carving his initials into his desk, and Leland Davenport had his Zippo confiscated for setting his desk on fire.I went home and pleaded with my mother, “Please, please get me out of this place. I’m going to DIE!” She just chuckled and assured me I’d be fine. I was one bitter little bugger. I would wait out my sentence in hell—screw ALL these people—and bolt away to college as soon as I could.I was resentful as hell toward my father. It was his racism that had landed me in this purgatory. Why couldn’t we live side-by-side with black people? Go to school with black kids? God doesn’t play favorites!!! Remember?It was another fifty years before I had my suspicions about my dad disconfirmed.The two big political influences in my teen years were Martin Luther King, Jr—everything he said in those years went straight to a spot in my brain that instantly stamped it TRUTH—and Hugh Hefner—I never missed an installment of his Playboy Philosophy, which basically claimed the government had no business getting involved in personal morality or consensual sexual activity (of which I was yet to have any).At 14, a seminal and galvanizing event occurred. I was in freshman Spanish when a commotion could be heard in the hallway minutes before class was to be over. A senior who helped in the principal’s office scurried in with a worried mien, leaned and whispered to our teacher, an ardent Conservative Democrat. He beamed. “Oh, maybe nothing’s wrong,” I thought. Minutes later, when the bell rang, as we filed out, he chuckled, “By the way, kiddies, your president has been shot.”I had never experienced such depth of hatred. Oh, several times already, towns people had called me “nigger lover” to my face when they suspected my parents were Republican (back in those days, one dared not put any bumper stickers on the car or yard signs on the lawn—but then, if you didn’t put Democratic ones up, you were suspect).With the KKK also active in the Deep South and committing atrocities, it suddenly hit home why my mother had been so distraught at my brother and I playing with that black boy—harm might well have befallen him and his father. She did not want to discuss it because she did not want to tell us how ugly the world actually can be at such a tender age.It wasn’t getting any less ugly. My sophomore year, we learned we would be integrating the following year. Teachers were urging resistance. Taking a test in one class, I went to the window to sharpen my pencil. The teacher walked over, put his arm around my shoulder and pointed to a young black male coming into view down the street. “That’s the kind of nigger trash that’s going to be going to school next year. What do you think about that?” I ducked his embrace and went back to my seat, where I glowered at him.I was young, but there was no escaping taking a stand in those days. The most memorable instance had come a couple of years earlier visiting family in Mississippi. I went with a cousin quite a bit older into a Delta town, where he was joined by a friend. They chatted, when suddenly the friend blurted, “Look at that nigger buck walking down the sidewalk.” Then, right in my face, “I wouldn’t walk across the street to spit on a nigger…”I hoped my cousin would intercede, but I wasn’t sure of his politics. I knew I was being forced to declare. All at once I realized I had a clean way out, “neither would I,” I remarked perfectly honestly. It seemed good enough for that young tough, and he went back to chatting with my cousin. My heartbeat slowly returned to normal.And so my politics was formed at this time in this crucible. As a Lockean lover of liberty, I was a liberal, in the unambiguous usage of the time. Progressivism had not yet revitalized to renew its phony claim on that label, originally stolen by Franklin Roosevelt when he dared not run for the presidency truthfully after progressivism had taken a huge black eye over Prohibition.And so, I marched off to college, mere days after my graduation, a libertarian, radically liberal. It was the Summer of Love, 1967, and I couldn’t wait to wade into politics.But before we go there, I had two years of integration to go through to finish high school. I arrived fall of my junior year expecting to have to take a stand again. There was only one other classmate from a Republican family—all the rest, Southern Democrats, more properly known as Conservative Democrats. Instead, it all went seamlessly. My classmates openly welcomed our new students. Half a dozen were in our class, and the story was the same in the other classes. There was never an untoward event, and the teachers who’d been urging resistance kept their mouths shut. Obviously, there had been some considerable planning on the part of the student body, but I hadn’t heard of it. All of a sudden, my classmates didn’t seem like such clods to me.I had just ridden one of the great tidal waves in American history, but what exactly went on was a mystery to me for another 41 years.The day after graduation, someone casually mentioned that one classmate had been Catholic. “What! I know a Catholic!?” It was a shame I’d missed the chance to know him better. Once in Austin at the University of Texas, I wasted no time getting into the thick of things. Because I had a notion that publishing might one day be a good career field for me but wanting nothing to do with journalism school, I volunteered for the school paper and was accepted as an editorial page editor writing a weekly opinion column, which put me right in the thick of the political ferment of the times.At meetings to plan rallies and resistance, the “soshes” outnumbered us libertarians three or five to one. Indeed, it was a matter of years before I could reliably tell political stripes apart. I was shoulder-to-shoulder with individuals who could recite Gramsci or Guevara or Mao or Fanon. Half the professoriat was radicalized, and I was assigned Marcuse and Brown and Freud and Marx.At first, we were all brothers in arms. Then my take became “politics makes strange bedfellows.” Finally, it became, “you’ve got your politics; I’ve got mine.” Fortunately, that occurred before I had to read Derrida, Foucault or any of the other postmoderns.But I got restless early on. I had been raised WASP in a sea of other WASPS. While the three black girls in our class had readily socialized, the three boys had not. I felt I had not known anyone different. In typical Charles Tips “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” fashion, I hitchhiked to New Orleans, went to the Seafarer’s International Union hall and signed up for the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship. Next thing you know, I’m flown to San Francisco and put aboard the S. S. Steel Executive bound for Pusan, Korea.I spent three years off and on hopping freight ships, and you could not get farther from WASP culture. I sailed with crews from Baltimore, Mobile, New Orleans, Houston, Long Beach, San Francisco and Seattle. Crews consisted of every race and nationality you could imagine. I spent good chunks of time in many countries and, in port, I palled around with Germans, Danes, Yugoslavs, Liberians, Spaniards, Chinese… you name it.It was a great education. But it was also more. It was confirmation that my mother had been thoroughly correct—there is no differentiating people by externalities. But moreover, it was eternally amazing how well the crews functioned in such a confined living arrangement. The crews could not have been more diverse, but it always worked… to the point I decided that the age-old suspicion of others is a mistake in need of correcting. We will reach our optimum as a species once we embrace our great diversity.But three years of bopping around the world put me graduating during the Watergate imbroglio. Slowly it dawned on me… hey, Nixon was the progressive back in ’60, Kennedy was, like me, the civil-rights loving, supply-side liberal [true sense of the word]… the only one ever elected president from the Democratic Party.By 2003, it was clear that California was headed in the toilet. I’d met my wife and raised three sons there. We decided it was time to move and Texas was the place. I wanted the glorious hills around Austin, but my wife insisted we be closer to her elderly parents in Kansas. So, we ended up in the same county where I went to high school, a place I thought I’d never return, a county that had been eighty percent Democrat in my youth and was now flipped to eighty percent Republican.We chose the school carefully, so that our middle son, going into his junior year, would have a top-notch baseball program. That put us here in Flower Mound, my old school district. And we were off to a baseball game in South Oak Cliff that next summer. I recognized that we were a mere five minutes from my old childhood house. I dragged my wife and son there.I knocked on the door. A black woman older than me answered. “Yes?”“My name is Charles Tips. I lived in…”“Come in,” she demanded.It was suddenly old-home week. She introduced me glowingly to her daughter and grandson (who had my old bedroom). At length, after asking about my father’s health, she inquired, “Do you know about your daddy?”“All I know is he moved us away in ’61 when blacks started moving in.”“You need to know. You see that dining room table right there? He sat there two nights a week for months. New people would bring their purchase contracts and home insurance contracts to him, and he would sit there with his ruler and his ballpoint pen [my dad alright] and strike through line after line and write new terms in the margin. His rewrites were never challenged. He saved every one of us a ton of money and a ton of grief, and he never asked for a nickel. When you see him next, tell him we all still think of him and wish him the best.”Well, I was dead wrong about dad. People in my parents’ generation were tight-lipped.My mother had passed away more than a decade earlier, but her youngest brother, Uncle Joe wanted a ride to Starkville to visit his brother John who was ill and didn’t seem like he would make it.That gave us eight hours there and eight hours back to talk, and Joe was the one talker in the family. What I learned was that on the farm they worked in the Mississippi Delta, they had been the only white family for miles around. All their hunting buddies and fishing buddies… black. All their “aunts” and “uncles”… black. Their “grandparents,” the elderly couple that lived on the backside of the farm with their “forty acres and a mule”… not just black but slaves in their youth.No wonder my mother had volunteered to head every canned-food drive. It was the only way she could socialize with blacks in the South of the ’50s! No wonder she had counseled my brothers and me over and over never to judge anyone on any basis other than their actions.In 2007, it was time for my 40th class reunion.Lo and behold, four-fifths of my classmates, the sons and daughters of racist Conservative Democrats, were now Republican!!! the same percentage as the county as a whole. The more I listened, the more I realized, the growth of the Republican Party in the South had been a generational thing. My Baby Boomer generation, in school at the time of integration, wholly rejected the old Democratic politics. In the South, you demonstrated your lack of animosity toward other races by joining the GOP, and that’s what they did.Afterward, my wife gave me holy hell. “How did you lose track of these people!? These are some of the greatest people I’ve ever met! Start inviting them over.” And I did. And she was right, and I had been wrong for four decades.But there’s your explanation for one the great schisms in US history as an entire generation broke with its parent generation.And there you have my personal political odyssey, still a hardcore libertarian after all these years.

13,288 runs in Tests; 10,889 runs in ODIs, a total of 508 matches which includes 344 ODIs and 164 Test matches to his name- yet when The Wall stood facing the BITSian junta he looked every bit the epitome of humility, patience and perseverance which he symbolizes and which we have grown so used to seeing on the pitch and off it. The prolific batsman and Wall of India's middle order for almost two decades, Rahul Dravid was the Chief Guest to this year's convocation at BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus. The event also witnessed the Board of Governors of BITS Pilani University- Chancellor Dr. Kumar Mangalam Birla, Vice Chancellor Dr. Jain among several others descend upon the Goa Campus. The fact that BITS is celebrating its Golden Jubilee added further sanctity to the event, something which passing out students forever cherish and remember fondly even after many many years. Rahul Dravid's presence made it a truly memorable convocation for the 2013 passing out batch.Dressed immaculately in black suit, the Wall was welcomed into the campus at around 10 am on 11th August. After a quick meal followed by a friendly interaction with students, the Great Wall descended into the Auditorium amidst loud cheers and applause. His address to the students won the heart of one and all present- graduating students and their parents, the BITS Senate and governors and some lucky students who had managed to sneak into the auditorium to hear the great man. Mr. Dravid's speech, which lasted for a little more than 11 minutes was a beautifully crafted one, laden with knowledge that he has accumulated over a period of 20 years playing at the highest cricketing standards. He spoke about his early life as an average boy in an average middle class family, how he grew and developed as a cricketer and how cricket has given him a more complete perspective of life."It is an honor and privilege to be among you today to deliver an address on the graduation ceremony. It is very humbling to visit an institution like BITS that has set a very high standard and made significant contribution to our nation's progress. Actually I am also really lucky. I have been told that the minimum marks required to come to BITS is 75% in Maths and Physics. Luckily those standards do not apply in selecting your chief guest.A year and a half since my retirement has been a wonderful period of introspection and an opportunity to reflect on my career. Looking back I am certain that cricket has made me better, a more well-rounded person, it certainly gave me the opportunity to mature personally and the platform to experience both success and failure, learn from them and accept them both as a part of life. I am often asked for advice, how to be successful-honestly there are million ways to be successful and I am nobody to tell you which is right for you. Each one of us has to find our own path. Having this opportunity to speak to you, I wanted to share a few stories from my own journey, in the hope that they might resonate in some way.I had like you to picture a boy from a typical middle class family. I was that boy. What made us different was that my uncle played alongside CK Naidu and my dad represented his university team and he was completely cricket crazy. The radio commentary was always on at home during test matches and my father followed every single match, international or domestic. He took me and my brother along to stadiums to watch the game in action at every possible opportunity. To his mind, there was no better use of our time. As a young boy I hero-worshiped my father and my curiosity about this game that he was so passionate about, grew progressively deeper and I spent more time watching the game with him and playing it in my backyard on the streets- my curiosity gave way to interest and before long this interest gave way to love. I remember at some point, feeling deep inside me, what I wanted to do. Finding myself in the Dravid household was no accident of birth, it appeared. I learnt that sometimes inspiration just stares you in the face.""Through my school days I was getting more and more into my own world of cricket, winning the inter school tournament felt like winning the world cup. Captaining the school and state teams was my greatest mission. However there is an interesting story from my school days which I would like to tell you. My love for cricket notwithstanding, my parents had the same doubts and fears as any other parents of our time. What was to become of me if all I thought about was cricket?When I was in 8th standard, they took their concern to my school principal. I had just made the state under 15 team second time in a row and tournament was out state and during the school term. My parents met my principal and apologetically stated that as my cricket would interfere with my studies and school attendance, they could not ask me to go to play the tournament. They therefore sought his advice on the way forward. Father Coelho after giving them a patient hearing, told them, you leave his studies to me, I will handle that, you let him play cricket.""Had my school principal agreed with my parent's concern, there was a chance I would stop playing serious cricket altogether, got better marks-life would then have followed another script, I learnt that support sometimes comes from the most unexpected places and it make all the difference.Borrowing class notes from friends and furiously preparing for school and college exams at the last minute, I was growing as a cricketer. At that time we played many league and junior state matches on bouncy batting wickets. We traveled by train across the length and breadth of the country, staying 5 or 6 in a room in some cases. It was a chance to know to know our country and its wide variety of people. The hard sessions at the nets and my performances at the junior level won me a state cap and before I knew it I was playing the Ranji trophy for Karnataka in 1991. I did well from most of the opportunities I got, and I ended up playing with the best in bowling I had ever encountered right at the very start of my career in the domestic circuit.Though we did not have the chance to regularly play fast bowling of international quality, I made up some unusual drills for myself. I would tell colleagues to throw down tennis balls from 15 yards, to simulate what playing the top bowlers might feel like. I got many puzzled looks, to many it seemed like a waste of time. For me it left like essential preparations for everything that was to come. By this time I was being talked about as a national probable, I even captained the Indian under 19 team, the question I got wherever I went was : When are you going to play for the country? Now this is not something I had any control over, but the question began to dominate my life and my game. I ended up playing five years of domestic cricket, before getting my national grade. It was frustrating. I remember putting a sticker on my kinetic Honda which read, "God's delays are not God's denials." It was a gentle reminder to myself to keep faith when I started the scooter engine and loaded my kit bag in the morning.Looking back now, I do not think I would have been prepared for the success I had at the international level had I not gone through the finishing tool that domestic cricket provided. Spin or fast bowling, easy or difficult batting conditions, I was well prepared for anything. The opportunity that I had had to play experienced spinners in the Ranji trophy helped me play Warne and Murlitharan with confidence. Those tennis ball drills did not seem all that silly, when I played the likes of McGrath, Akram and Donald on tough pitches. When I speak to youngsters, I like talking about this phase of my life, likening it to a fascinating plant which I am going to entangle.You can take a Chinese bamboo seed and plant it in the ground, water and nurture that for an entire year. You will not see any sprout. In fact you will not see a sprout for 5 years. But suddenly a tiny shoot will spring from the ground. Over the next 6 weeks the plant can grow as tall as 90 feet. It can grow as fast as 39 inches every 24 hours. You can literally watch the plant grow. What was the plant doing in those 5 years, seemingly dormant? It was growing its roots. For 5 full years, it was preparing itself for rapid massive growth, With its roots structure the plant could not simply support itself for future growth. Some say that the plant grew 90 feet in 6 weeks. I would say it grew 90 feet in 5 years and 6 weeks. This period tested my faith and my willingness to believe in my own talent at the beginning of my journey.Overall I had an extremely gratifying career- many highs and several disappointments as well. After the tour of Australia last year it became very clear to me that the time had come to move on and make way for the next generation of talented young batsmen to begin their journey, just as I had done 16 years ago. It just felt right and I was happy to call time on my career, with my family, colleagues and friends around me. I was touched by all affection I have received. I have no regrets, no unfulfilled professional goals and nothing left to prove to myself. I have climbed my mountain, one which I had originally set to climb as a little boy. As I began climbing the mountain I had set my eyes on, I received lots of support along the way. As a sat alone dealing with my success and failure I got to understand myself better. The climb became everything to me and I immersed myself in it. As I got closer to the top of my mountain, I managed to remain focused and keep my eyes of the destination. When I finally got there I thoroughly enjoyed being where I stood, sense of peace and parity, because it is then I realized that you do not have to be the number 1 in the world, you have to be number one yourself. Reaching that peak is the highest peak there is.""Like a good mountain climber I am now in search of the next mountain to climb. The uncertainty makes me nervous- it also excites me. I am back to being like a little boy, listening to the cricket commentary coming from my transistor in my father's studio. I would like to wish all of you- the graduating class of 2013, some of the brightest minds in the country today, as you embark on an exciting journey ahead of you.May you find the mountain that is right for you. Give and receive support along the way, be patient and persevere through the ups and downs that you will face. And importantly learn to enjoy the journey you are about to embark on. All the very best!"The August gathering had taken in every thing the Wall had to say and it had done so in rapturous silence. Now as he left the podium he was greeted with thunderous applause and a standing ovation. The packed auditorium was on its feet, saluting the man they had seen perform on the field, day after day but had never quite "experienced" . Mr. Dravid also paid a short visit to the Cricket Lawns where he was greeted by the college cricket team.Harsha Koneru, who got a chance to shake hands with the Wall, described it as the best 10 seconds of his life. Divya Verma, of the Department of Arts and Deco, known for her brilliant artistic skills presented Mr. Dravid with one of her works and Dravid's remark that he would put it up on his wall, made her go berserk with happiness. Dravid's " God's delays are not God's denials " found its way to almost every BITSians Facebook Wall.Finally at about 2:30 in the afternoon as Dravid's BMW zoomed out of BITS Goa, he left behind memories in students' hearts and minds - memories which they will keep with themselves for many years to come!Quote 2 - THINK BIGBenjamin Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan. His mother Sonya had dropped out of school in the third grade, and married when she was only 13. When Benjamin Carson was only eight, his parents divorced, and Mrs. Carson was left to raise Benjamin and his older brother Curtis on her own. She worked at two, sometimes three, jobs at a time to provide for her boys , she performed domestic work to keep her family financially afloat.Benjamin and his brother fell farther and farther behind in school. In fifth grade, Carson was at the bottom of his class. His classmates called him "dummy" and he developed a violent, uncontrollable temper.When Mrs. Carson saw Benjamin's failing grades, she determined to turn her sons' lives around. She sharply limited the boys' television watching and refused to let them outside to play until they had finished their homework each day. She required them to read two library books a week and to give her written reports on their reading even though, with her own poor education, she could barely read what they had written.Within a few weeks, Carson astonished his classmates by identifying rock samples his teacher had brought to class. He recognized them from one of the books he had read. "It was at that moment that I realized I wasn't stupid," he recalled later. Carson continued to amaze his classmates with his new found knowledge and within a year he was at the top of his class.The hunger for knowledge had taken hold of him, and he began to read voraciously on all subjects. He determined to become a physician, and he learned to control the violent temper that still threatened his future. After graduating with honors from his high school, he attended Yale University, where he earned a degree in Psychology.From Yale, he went to the Medical School of the University of Michigan, where his interest shifted from psychiatry to neurosurgery. His excellent hand-eye coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills made him a superior surgeon. After medical school he became a neurosurgery resident at the world-famous Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. At age 32, he became the hospital's Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery.In 1987, Carson made medical history with an operation to separate a pair of Siamese twins. The Binder twins were born joined at the back of the head. Operations to separate twins joined in this way had always failed, resulting in the death of one or both of the infants. Carson agreed to undertake the operation. A 70-member surgical team, led by Dr. Carson, worked for 22 hours. At the end, the twins were successfully separated and can now survive independently.Carson's other surgical innovations have included the first intra-uterine procedure to relieve pressure on the brain of a hydrocephalic fetal twin, and a hemispherectomy, in which an infant suffering from uncontrollable seizures has half of its brain removed. This stops the seizures, and the remaining half of the brain actually compensates for the missing hemisphere.In addition to his medical practice, Dr. Carson is in constant demand as a public speaker, and devotes much of his time to meeting with groups of young people. In 2008, the White House announced that Benjamin Carson would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.Dr. Carson's books include a memoir, Gifted Hands, and a motivational book, Think Big. Carson says the letters of "Think Big" stand for the following:Talent: Our Creator has endowed all of us not just with the ability to sing, dance or throw a ball, but with intellectual talent. Start getting in touch with that part of you that is intellectual and develop that, and think of careers that will allow you to use that.Honesty: If you lead a clean and honest life, you don't put skeletons in the closet. If you put skeletons in the closet, they definitely will come back just when you don't want to see them and ruin your life.Insight: It comes from people who have already gone where you're trying to go. Learn from their triumphs and their mistakes.Nice: If you're nice to people, then once they get over the suspicion of why you're being nice, they will be nice to you.Knowledge: It makes you into a more valuable person. The more knowledge you have, the more people need you. It's an interesting phenomenon, but when people need you, they pay you, so you'll be okay in life.Books: They are the mechanism for obtaining knowledge, as opposed to television.In-Depth Learning: Learn for the sake of knowledge and understanding, rather than for the sake of impressing people or taking a test.God: Never get too big for Him.i request everyone to watch his documentary "THE GIFTED HANDS"

Life in the UK 1970s through the prism of puberty.Monday, January 5th, 1970. Mrs. Line, our class teacher: “Now children, open a new page and write the date. Don’t forget, it’s 1970 now. Not only the start of a new year, but a new decade!” I was 7.Life was idyllic then. We rented a huge 17-room Georgian country house for the princely sum of £8 per week, caught the bus to school from under the Chestnut Tree at the end of the lane, and sometimes rode there on the backs of cows being led from the milking parlour next door. My Dad had given up his job in the “rat race” of mechanical engineering and was trying to make a go of being a maker of fine bespoke custom furniture.My bedroom was on the middle floor, right-hand window.We made friends with some children along the lane, who at first I thought were brother and sister. I was surprised when the ‘brother’ told us her name was Sarah. Once I realised she was a she, I developed a huge crush on her. I’m not sure what that says about me… But it was never to be, she was 12, rode a horse, and was way out of my league anyway.We ran free in the countryside, exploring the woods and fields, finding a spooky “gibbet” at the top of the hill beyond, on which dangled a variety of gruesome corpses of crows, squirrels and other unidentified animals. No idea what that was about, in hindsight. We built dens, played in the hay loft of the farm next door, “helped” them out with milking, rode our bikes around the lanes, played cowboys and indians, helped ourselves to apples, pears and plums from the trees in the orchard. We paid little attention to popular culture at the time - all of our leisure time was spent outdoors, come rain or shine, snow or flood (which was a feature of the area come winter, when the Severn burst its banks).I vaguely remember some kids at school talking about some pop festival that was supposed to be really cool, but I had no idea who any of the bands were (Isle of Wight 1970). We had a TV but it was black-and-white, and as far as I can remember, we almost never watched it. At Christmas, all of the villagers were invited up to the manor house (the whole place was still run along the same sort of feudal lines that it had been for centuries) and we were taught to ring hand bells to accompany a rousing round of carols. Then we’d tour the surrounding lanes, singing our little hearts out and ringing the bells. It sounded amazing, like a touring choir, not a half-hearted and out of tune doorstepping that seems to pass for ‘carol-singing’ now, if anyone still does it at all.1971 brought the first of several downshifts in our circumstances. The country house, as I mentioned, was rented. It was owned by the manor house, and one of the ever-so-posh daughters decided she needed our house, so were were summarily evicted and had to find somewhere else. My Dad’s little carpentry workshop was in the town of Tewkesbury, so we found a place to rent there, but oh my, what a come-down! My brother and sister had to share a room though I was lucky enough to have one for myself, albeit about a fifth of the size of the previous. It was on a council estate that just seemed so bleak, and while it had interrupted views over fields, it wasn’t the same. I remember being overcome with grief at this change, and cried myself to sleep every night for weeks.Typical housing in the rougher end of Tewkesbury, though we had a terraced house, not a flat.Still, as kids do, we came to terms with it and adapted. Starting a new school, I fell foul of a difference in culture on day 1. When taking roll call, the class teacher called my name. “Here!” I replied, and he stopped. “Here what?” he said, angrily. “Here I am!”, I replied, oblivious. All the class laughed, but I didn’t know why. “Here what, boy!?” he asked again, even angrier. Luckily another kid helped me out, hissing in my ear: “here, sir”. “Oh! Here, sir!” I said, and after a pause he accepted it and moved on. Phew! It was my first encounter with mindless authority - at no previous school had we ever had to call a teacher sir or miss. I wasn’t being cheeky, as he assumed, just ignorant of the system. Still, as I settled in I realised that he wasn’t a bad teacher, in fact he became one of my favourites, teaching ‘Practical Maths’, which was a sort of Science Lite.In 1971, Tewkesbury celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Tewkesbury, which settled the Wars of the Roses. The town held a huge festival and parade, with many floats. My mother, a teacher at Tewkesbury School, organised an enormous float for the school, with a Tudor theme. On the back of a flatbed truck, a scene from a banquet at the Tudor court was laid on, with a jolly King Henry throwing chicken bones over his shoulder, surrounded by courtiers and pages. My brother and I dressed as pageboys. We all sat around a huge refectory table my father had made, and the King sat on a huge wooden throne he’d also constructed. The truck itself was disguised as a Tudor castle. It was all very creative. Amazingly, footage of this parade was captured on ciné film and posted to YouTube a few years ago. Discovering this clip was like finding a time machine. Our float comes by at around the 13 minute mark, and I’m the geeky looking 8yo kid with the mop of curly hair in the foreground at 13.03.We made new friends including some very saucy girls from the neighbourhood who opened my eyes to a whole new world of erotic possibilities. Yes, even at 9. Curiosity of that type was normal then. I started to pay attention to the TV more than I had, and started to watch Top of the Pops regularly. Still black-and-white of course. Another distant crush from the time was on Eve Graham from the New Seekers, and then Clodagh Rodgers. Very fickle. I fantasised that Benny Hill was my jocular uncle. I also bought my very first record around then - ‘Rocket Man’ by Elton John.Unknown to me, my Dad’s business venture was failing. At first he had been very successful and had more orders than he could fill, so a waiting list developed. That wasn’t a problem, people were happy to wait, as his work was very high quality. But he decided he needed to expand, and went in with some other artisanal businesses to buy a derelict old building on Tewkesbury wharf. The plan was to renovate the building as a communal enterprise, move the furniture making there, and rent out the rest of the space to other similar ventures. Unfortunately the hippy ideal of everyone pitching in to obtain raw materials and so forth hit the rocks, and the various partners fell out over spiralling costs. By 1972 the plan fell through, leaving my dad with huge debts. He decided that he couldn’t continue, and would have to get a ‘normal’ job again.So another move was dropped on us kids out of the blue. We’d only just got used to this place, and I had started to quite like it. It wasn’t the country idyll, but it had its compensations. Mainly in the form of Jane and Sandra. To sweeten the deal, it was agreed that in the new place, we could get a colour TV. This move was right across the country, to the new town of Hemel Hempstead. The house we ended up in was bigger than Tewkesbury, and we all had our own rooms again. So unlike the Tewkesbury move, it didn’t feel like a grievous loss, even though we were once again leaving our friends and having to start from scratch. We moved in in the spring of 1973, and at once set about exploring our new environs. The neighbourhood we moved into was quite new - the house was just 5 years old. Hemel was expanding, and at that time, our house was on the very edge of the expanded town, overlooking fields. That was a sort of continuity, since the Tewkesbury house had overlooked fields too, and we felt like country kids at heart. But that was soon to change, and the house (which my mother still lives in), is now in the middle of the neighbourhood, surrounded by many other houses. The fields can’t be seen any more.I had a Gloucestershire accent - something akin to a west-country burr, but a bit posher. Hemel Hempstead was filled with Londoners. The culture was completely different; I didn’t fit in at all. My accent was mocked, which I could take, but I was also called “posh boy”, which I couldn’t, because it was so far from the truth. I encountered my first experience of bullying, though at this stage it was mild. Much worse was to come. Even understanding what people were saying was hard at first - passing a new acquaintance in the street on my way home from school, he called out “Wotcha!” I said “what do you mean?” He looked at me like I had two heads, incredulous that I didn’t know that ‘wotcha’ was the usual form of greeting around here. Oh well, he put me right on that one.Hemel was actually quite a cool place to be, we thought. The neighbourhoods were modern and separated cars from people. As kids we could move around freely without crossing any roads (main through roads had underpasses), and the area was filled with small play areas and parks. The entire neighbourhood was ours to play in and we had extensive games of hide-and-seek that ranged over the whole area (a square mile or so) and would last all day. A strange disembodied road disappeared from the end of our road over the cultivated fields. It went nowhere, but ended after half a mile or so. One day an enormous quantity of bricks was delivered to the end of this road. It was the start of building work on a new housing estate. But before that happened, us kids would use the bricks to build a “house” or two of our own. These were built up using proper staggered courses, but no mortar. They even had an open fireplace, and a roof made from the polythene sheeting the palettes of bricks came wrapped in. Needless to say it was very dangerous, but we were somewhat aware of it, and were careful not to lean on the walls. In places they were even buttressed to keep them upright. Impossible to imagine adults not being paranoid about kids playing with thousands of bricks today!After one term at junior school, I started high school in September ’73 aged 11. This was a year of strikes and political disruption, culminating in power cuts. We were oblivious to the politics, and the power cuts were quite exciting. Seeing industrial strife and problems on the nightly news was all part of ‘normal’, then. At least we could watch them in colour - that part of the deal was honoured, though like most people, we rented our TV set. Actually there was little to watch - there were only 3 channels, and one of them (BBC2) was still part-time, showing either the test card or ‘trade test transmissions’, odd random documentaries that we nevertheless watched because it was better than nothing. On the other hand, kids’ TV was great - we had Blue Peter and Magpie (Jenny Hanley, another crush), Banana Splits and all the rest of it.One day in early 74, my Dad got a phonecall. Afterwards, he told us he had to go out. He never came back. He left my Mum and us for another woman he’d been seeing at work. While at the time this was just another change, a blow to be dealt with, it affected me very deeply in ways that took years to understand. But the immediate effect was a kind of withdrawal into myself, which made me a further target for bullies, against which I had no tools to deal with. I was bullied relentlessly, frequently and mercilessly for the next several years. My situation was made worse by the fact that my mother taught at the same school. While she never took me for any lessons, thank goodness, it was bad enough even having the connection to ‘one of them’, as the teachers were thought of by pupils.I daydreamed my way through the first few years of high school, getting poor to middle grades, constantly under threat of yet another beating up. I was good at a few subjects - maths in particular, though it was nevertheless hard work and never a passion. My parents divorced, and my mother started seeing a few new people. Between her job, the divorce and these new dates, she seemed to have very little time for us kids; we were just left alone to do our own thing, cope with stuff unhelped and unguided. We didn’t even help each other - for some reason, this atmosphere of all being in the same boat yet having to deal with it in our own way, separately, meant that we grew apart as siblings. To this day I only have distant relationships with my brother and sister.One of my real interests at the time (and still) was aviation. A benefit of moving to Hemel was that it was close to Luton airport, and planes flying out of Luton would come up over our house and school at a still low altitude. Plane-spotter’s paradise, with a mix of Comets, Britannias, BAC 1–11s, Boeing 720s, 737s, 727s, and the brand spanking new TriStars (L-1011) that had just entered service with Court Line, based at Luton. A passion for planes was my one way to make friends, and even still at primary school a new friend and I decided to cycle over to Luton after school to watch the planes. After all, they were so low over the school, it couldn’t be that far away, could it? It was 9 miles to be precise, but as 11 year-olds, that was far enough. We also didn’t know how to get there, though we knew the rough direction, and ended up lost in the back lanes, so the eventual distance must have been much more! We made it though, and had fun watching the planes close up. Court Line - wow, those colours! So modern, so exciting, so seventies! We didn’t get home until 9pm; my mother was sick with worry! We did the trip a few more times, but always told her we were going, that was fine, as long as we told her, the distance or the negotiation of a very large town like Luton was never an issue.In late summer 74, as I was struggling with my Dad leaving, Court Line went bust. Those colours were no more. The one bright spot in my life, as tenuous as it sounds, was gone. It seemed to be part of a pattern. At the same time, we watched as Nixon’s presidency unravelled. It didn’t seem that important to us as Brits, but we still sensed it mattered. Turmoil and despair were the order of the day, at every level from the personal politics of the playground to the leader of the free world.At school I became friends with a lad called Mark through our shared interest in planes. He’d built a cockpit of a Lancaster in his Dad’s garage out of a bunch of old aircraft instruments and some plywood. It wasn’t a very authentic reproduction of a Lancaster, but it was fun to play in, and he’d even rigged up an authentic-sounding machine gun sound effect, using a relay and a speaker. He explained how the relay switched itself on-and-off repeatedly, and how a capacitor wired across it slowed it down to the right sort of rate for a gun. I got it, and an interest in electronics was kindled from that. What I didn’t know was that Mark had a bit of a bad streak of his own. As a result of our friendship I fell in with a group that enjoyed making mischief, and I was very eager to please. They encouraged me to do bad things ‘as a dare’, and I would, readily. This got me into a lot of trouble. On the plus side, Mark knew a lot more about popular music than I did, though we had a mutual like for Bowie. But he also introduced me to lots of other stuff like Led Zeppelin and Queen. When “Bohemian Rhapsody” was released, it was a phenomenon.At that time, I’d been goaded into stealing some light meters from the science lab as a ‘dare’, on Mark’s behest. We got caught, though not straight away - it was not until the afternoon games lesson (soccer on the top field in late autumn rain) that the deputy head called us off the pitch to confront us with the evidence. As a child of a teacher, it was extra humiliating for her that I’d done this, and I knew I’d have merry hell to pay when I got home. I didn’t really understand why I’d done it myself, but the despair I felt at finding myself in this position on top of everything else that was wrong seemed overwhelming. I couldn’t face going home, so I went for a long ride on my bike. It was cold and wet and grey, and Bohemian Rhapsody was going round my head, “nothing really matters”, and I decided to end it all. I was riding up a road where oil tankers passed regularly, coming from the Buncefield depot (which infamously exploded in 2005, creating the biggest peacetime explosion ever heard in Europe). I decided to deliberately swerve under the wheels of the next tanker. Well OK then, not that one. The next one. No, the next one, really I will. Obviously, I didn’t. At the time I felt I’d chickened out, so it seemed like another failure. I did go home, and I did get hell. In fact my mother broke my nose. But I felt it was deserved.The humiliation wasn’t complete though, because I’d been stealing stuff for months, and had a big box full of it in my room. Stuff that seemed cool, but which I had little use for really - it was all just to show I could be as bad as the other boys. Badder even. I wasn’t a wimp you see, despite being beaten up so often. The school had noticed stuff disappearing, but didn’t have a handle on who had taken it, until the light meters. Then it all became obvious, and my mother had to bear the embarrassment of another teacher coming to our house to recover all the stolen property.In the outside world, 1975 saw the UK inflation rate hit more than 24%. This must have been appalling for adults, but as kids while we noticed the rising prices of our favourite sweets, we just asked for (and got) more pocket money. Mine went up from sixpence (old money, 2 ½ p new) to £1. The exact same thing was happening in the country - prices shot through the roof, so workers everywhere simply asked for more pocket money. In most cases it wasn’t so readily forthcoming however, and so strikes went on. And on. And on. As a family we struggled. My Dad never paid any money to my Mum for child support, and we had to live off very cheap food, and not much of it. I remember nearly always feeling hungry. Sometimes I’d manage to save enough pocket money to supplement my daily diet (luckily we had school dinners, which while uninspired and often quite poorly made, were plentiful, nutritious and very welcome) with Mars Bars bought from the school tuck shop, a new idea they tried that year. But it was painful watching a Mars Bar’s price slowly slip out of your grasp.Christmas 1975, and another teacher at the school suffered a house fire in which her 8yo daughter was killed. They were family friends and my mother offered to let them stay with us over Christmas as the teacher (another single mum) and her son (similar age to me) were homeless. At the time I didn’t understand about grief or the loss of a child, so though we were sympathetic, we didn’t really empathise with it completely, as children. The son in particular was having a very hard time dealing with it, and was extremely angry and emotional. In hindsight I feel so sorry for them, but at the time it just seemed like someone having a toddler tantrum every few hours, and being annoying not wanting to join in with our fun outside in the snow (it was a rare white christmas). What a terrible tragedy, utterly heartbreaking for me to recall now.By this time my Mum was seeing a new chap, and it was getting serious. At first I liked him - he had a deep interest in aviation too, so I thought that was a real bonding point, but in the longer run we had extremely little in common. He took an authoritarian approach to parenting, and quite quickly I grew to dislike him. We were always butting heads, and while I was probably craving a father figure, this wasn’t what I had in mind. When he and my Mum announced their engagement, I was left feeling pretty desolate. Essentially, his ‘style’ of parenting amounted to just another source of bullying. In January 76, Concorde entered commercial service and my stepdad-to-be took the day off to go and watch. I could have gone, but I had to obtain the headmaster’s permission to not be in school that day. He refused, as due to my recent misdemeanours involving the theft of school equipment (resulting in no more than an official caution for all of us), I didn’t deserve it. My parents agreed, and this was obviously why they told me I had to obtain the head’s permission personally.My mum and stepdad married in April of 76, and of course being a teacher, her name change was announced to the whole school. As it was, all eyes turned to me, blushing a bright red. I don’t know why I reacted like that - I hated attention of any sort, and was hardly in favour of the marriage anyway, but still, it was nothing much to do with me. But bullies had a new angle! My name didn’t change, only my mother’s did, so they’d taunt me about what my surname should be. Even my basic identity was under attack.You’d think being caught stealing from the school would have taught me that lesson, but it didn’t. I merely switched targets. Mark and I would go and steal model aircraft kits from Woolworths and W.H.Smiths, both easy targets. Our MO was to simply walk in, pick up what we wanted and walk out. No furtive glances, hanging about or anything that would give security staff time to latch onto us. As a method, it was remarkably effective, and between us we built up plastic airforces the envy of any schoolboy. Getting away with it was a kick, further reinforcing the behaviour. We had a close shave when I got stopped leaving the store and asked to show a receipt for what I had in my hand. At that, Mark abandoned me immediately, leaving me to my fate. But as it turned out the staff member was a bit half-hearted and I was able to leave the store (without the goods) when her attention was elsewhere and escape. Mark and I felt we’d pulled off a great escapade, and had a big laugh. Bowie’s “Golden Years” was the soundtrack to that episode.A few months later I went to Woolies to steal something, this time alone. I got caught by the main security staffer, and this time he left me with no way to escape. I was taken to a back room and the police were called. I was driven home in a panda car and delivered to my mother. She was strangely quiet and seemed to have been crying. I was merely sent to my room. Later my stepdad came in and told me my mother’s dad had died that day. The news was flung at me with contempt, as if it were my fault. Because of this unfortunate conflation of the two things, I was excluded from the whole grieving process, funeral and aftermath of my grandad’s death - a person I was very fond of. It was as if, for me, it had never happened. It was so weird, and became a big burden of guilt for me. Years and years later, I remember it all came pouring out when I was talking with some friends about our grandparents.Because the police were involved, my parents told me I had to face court for my crime, and what happened would be up to the judge. I didn’t know anything about legal proceedings, but I did know that criminals were sent to prison if the case went against them. I couldn’t see how it wouldn’t for me because I had done it, no question. So for months my parents made me fret and sweat about what would happen ‘when I went to court’. Once again I was feeling suicidal, but somehow day after day I didn’t do anything, just got through the day.At the time, my stepdad decided that a good dose of hard discipline was my solution, and made me join the air cadets. After all, National Service hadn’t done him any harm; made him a man, toughened him up and all that bollocks. I went along with the idea, because I liked planes. The reality was an awful lot of being shouted at, “square bashing”, etc. That was all fine, no problem, just a bit boring. I learned how to strip down a gun (.303 rifle, WW2 vintage!) and even how to shoot it. Quite well, in fact. But cadets was mainly another theatre for bullying. In particular, one older lad Dallyson, made life hell for me and several other younger cadets. His bullying was both overt, and indulged by the officers, and covert, which was much worse, and went unwitnessed by his superiors. One time a friend and I ran into him outside of cadets, and on the excuse that we’d somehow caused some trouble for him at cadets, beat us both up, leaving us with bloody noses and our bikes unridable with bent wheels. Eventually it got so bad I stopped going, making excuses. This was the peak of being bullied - at school, at home and doing stuff like cadets. I eventually chucked it in, but when asked to explain my reasons, I didn’t expose the bully (or bullies, I have no doubt it wasn’t only Dallyson, he was merely the worst). I wish I had, it might have worked, but by then I was pretty meek - years of bullying with nothing ever happening to the bullies had taught me that ‘telling tales’ to a teacher or other authority figure (which I already had issues with) had no effect. In fact it often brought down more bullying on me, as one teacher did on one occasion by siding with the bullies against me.The summer of ’76 is remembered for being long and hot, and the summer holidays were largely spent lounging about in the back yard, waiting for the ice-cream van. If we were feeling particularly energetic, we’d take our bikes out into the country lanes, or set up a course through the woods. I remember very little of it, my thoughts almost totally occupied by my imminent imprisonment, or whatever fate awaited me, but I did have one thing to look forward to. My Dad had by this time emigrated to Canada with his new woman, and invited me to visit for a few weeks. This was to be my first time abroad, my first flight, and my first time travelling alone. My parents couldn’t wait to have me out of their hair.While I was angry with my Dad for leaving us and turning our lives upside down, I still didn’t understand it properly or know how to consciously express it, so I was happy to visit. My Dad was living in a mobile home in a forested park near a lake in Nova Scotia. While it was very low rent, it seemed like a lovely spot to me. Also, my Dad was such a different person to be with compared to my stepdad. He didn’t shout at me or talk down to me, he shared his plans with me and asked for my thoughts. One of the things he wanted to do at the time was to fit a pump to a new borehole and plumb it across to the house for the water supply. He took me on the shopping trips to get all the parts and explained what everything was for, and how pipes had to be fitted together with sealing tape to ensure they didn’t leak. One day I was left at home alone while he had to go to work, and I realised that everything was there to do the pump. So I just decided to do it to surprise him. When he came home, we had running clean water on demand, all neatly installed and without a single leak. He didn’t say much but checked it over and told me it was as good as he would have done. He later took me out for McDonalds as a treat (my very first, they weren’t in the UK at the the time except for central London). I was very proud of myself and realised for the first time there were useful things I could do that wouldn’t earn me a shouting at. The trip was 3 or 4 weeks, and was wonderful. I saw most of Nova Scotia as we took a few road trips around the state, and enjoyed my time with my Dad very much. The only thing tempering it was the thought of my ‘court date’ when I returned. I wanted to talk to my Dad about it but I was too ashamed of myself. In hindsight I’m sure that would have been a huge help, but I never did bring it up. I flew back to the UK by DC-8. I saw England through fresh eyes for the first time in my life - I had grown accustomed to Canada with its dark greens, pine forests, lakes, telegraph poles and wires everywhere. It was sunny and warm and driving back from the airport I was struck by the lush greenness, as if I’d never seen it before. It was a pleasant experience.Anyway, soon the date for ‘court’ arrived, and I was driven to the police station, where I received a caution and that was it. Obviously they wouldn’t be taking a 13yo to court for shoplifting, it had all been a trick played on me to make me mend my ways. In that, it worked, and I never stole again, but the other effect it had was to make feeling depressed and near-suicidal ‘normal’, which it has been more or less ever since.1977 I turned 15. I was still a withdrawn, daydreamer type, but a little more self confident. The bullying I’d suffered for years eased off a lot, it was as if the bullies grew up and realised that it was a bad thing to do, but also by then it had become so normal I just didn’t care any more. It had no further effect on me. They’d done their worst and I was still alive, so perhaps I’d won, sort of. Punk was happening, and I really liked it. There was something about it that connected with an unspoken anger I had below the surface. I never became a punk, but I enjoyed the music a lot. At school we were supposed to be focussing on ‘our futures’, but at the same time punk was singing its stories about ‘no future’, and industrial unrest and turmoil rolled on the news every night. It was hard to be optimistic about the future, and no-one seemed to have much ambition or clue as to what they were going to do. I was unequivocally told by the careers advisor that I ‘wasn’t university material’, so I’d better start thinking about a job and soon.My mooning crushes also rolled on. I was hopelessly shy and unable to act on any feelings I had for anyone. An apple-cheeked girl in my class called Leslie Schofield (how provincial it sounds now!) was the target of my blushes at the time. I wonder what she’s doing now? She lived around the corner from me and I’d often contrive to ride my bike past her place, hoping to catch a glimpse. But I never spoke to her once that I can remember.In the summer we had a holiday in Wales, and again I was struck by the magnificent landscape of the country. I’d been to Wales a few times before, but this was the first time I really noticed it. Seeing the sun reflected off the tops of the dark hills in the Dysynni valley is a powerful memory. I later discovered I had many ancestors from this area, so perhaps I felt a kind of spiritual connection to the place?1978 was the year I took my ‘O’ levels. They’d been building up to it for a year or more, and you’d think it was the most important passport to your future life imaginable, the way they went on about it. I still had no idea what I wanted to do, but I did know that it would probably be something technology oriented. I’d long given up my childhood dream of being a fighter pilot, I knew deep down I wasn’t the ‘right stuff’ for that. Maths I was good at, no real issues there. Physics I liked, but I was a hopeless student. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand it, it was just that our teacher was so inept and unable to command authority that every lesson descended into chaos and mischief. I took great delight in deliberately not learning a thing, having pornographic pictures pasted on my exercise book, and generally acting the fool. At one point the teacher gleefully expressed his belief that I would fail my exams miserably, and that it would ‘serve me right’. I laughed it off, but in private I realised he had a point, and that the last thing I wanted was to give him the satisfaction of having me fail. Perhaps this was his psychology all along, but in private I doubled down on getting Physics down pat, while keeping up my moronic appearances in public. Come the exams in May/June, I breezed through them, scoring As in Maths, Physics and Geography, and Bs in everything else except German, for which I got a miserable D. These were decent grades, and I definitely could have gone on to do ‘A’ levels in spite of them all, but I decided I’d had quite enough of school, and left at 16.So now what? At the time, tertiary education was split among colleges, polytechnics and universities. Later all the polys became universities. I visited Herts poly and throught it was pretty cool, but I couldn’t quite decide that more education was what I wanted. I fancied having some money, so perhaps a job was a better option? I was very interested in electronics by then. I had very little money to spend on it though, and most of my tinkerings involved sourcing parts from old radios or bits of electronic scrap that came my way, while reading a lot about it in magazines and library books. I decided to apply to a few electronics companies, such as GEC Marconi (part of a telecoms giant), Data 100 (mainframe computer manufacturer), someone else who I forget, and Dymar Electronics (radio manufacturer). Data 100 took in a lot of local school leavers and had them sit an aptitude test, which was a combination of IQ type puzzles and simple mechanical and electrical puzzles. I scored 100%, and was told I was the only student ever to have done so. But I later failed the interview for the company because I had no idea how to present myself in a positive light - it was all new to me. I also had an interview at Marconi which was little better, for various reasons, and the one with the unremembered company was a wash also. Dymar took their time getting back to me, and it was last chance time (or A levels at college). This interview was totally different to the others. Very informal, and without any real stress of type that some interviews put you under. It was like having a chat with a pleasant old uncle. I relaxed, opened up and talked myself into a job that came with a great apprenticeship.The first year was to be full time college, but with pay. It was awesome. I learned lots of real trades, like metal machining and fabrication, welding, casting, etc. but also lots of electrical and electronic stuff. There was also higher maths and physics that counted towards A level equivalents. Having money, albeit only about £20 per week, was simply amazing. While I was still living with my parents I paid them some nominal rent and keep, and that didn’t leave much left, but it was enough to socialise with friends. During holiday periods, I would go and work at Dymar, doing the rounds of the factory to learn all about various commercial operations. The first was working in the stores, a vast warehouse full of components. It was menial work, very tedious, but relieved by having a fellow apprentice working alongside me who was good for a laugh. Also, all those components! A godsend to electronics as a hobby, thanks to the odd part getting ‘lost on shop’ as it was called.The winter of 1978 was the usual chaos in the country at large. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ they called it. Teachers and Nurses striking for pay. Public sector workers of all kinds taking action. Rubbish piling up in the streets. The government threatening an imposition of martial law and a takeover of essential service by the Army. Honestly, it was apocalyptic. But we had Bob Geldof on TOTP, singing “Rat Trap” while tearing up photos of Olivia Newton John and John Travolta (who’d been No 1 forever until then) and all was well enough in our little bubble.By this time my relationship with my parents was going downhill fast. It didn’t hit bottom for a few more years, but with my step father in particular it was almost open war. It was especially obvious in contrast with my brother, with whom he had a good relationship. I didn’t resent my brother over it, but despised my stepfather even more for using it as a means of scoring points against me. When my mother wasn’t around he would abuse me verbally and occasionally physically, calling me names and telling me I was a wimp and should toughen up. On the one occasion I did fight back he laughed as he punched me clean across the room (he was about twice my weight). Obviously that’s what he wanted to do all along, just needed the excuse. I didn’t try it again, and I’m certain my mother never knew anything about it. In her eyes he was the perfect man, the perfect Dad, and could do no wrong. She always took his side, so my relationship with her was rarely much better.In 1979, Margaret Thatcher swept to power. I wasn’t old enough to vote, but if I had been, I probably would have voted for her. I wasn’t very politically aware, and hadn’t signed up to any particular ideology of any kind. But it did seem as if the chaos couldn’t continue, and perhaps her approach would work. It turned out to be right, but also a very painful adjustment for a lot of people. I can recall the day the election result was firm, our teacher for electronics couldn’t help but have a very broad grin on his face all morning. Even our usual shenanigans couldn’t dislodge his pleasure. I had no idea why he was so pleased. As the 80s unfurled, Thatcher’s policies had remarkably little impact on me personally - I neither prospered especially, nor suffered as the miners and traditional manufacturing industry did. It wasn’t until the middle of the decade that I was able to finally move out of my parents’ home and get a place of my own, despite it being my dearest wish for years.’79 was also the last year of full time education. from then on, my apprenticeship worked on a day-release basis, with 4 days a week working and 1 day of college. It was also the year that I first got really drunk, and more than once. Not being keen on beer at the time, I drank ‘shorts’, and typically sweet ones like Southern Comfort. Not a good choice for getting drunk on. Often this was led by going drinking with mates from college; one of them worked for ICL, a computer company with a heavily subsidised social club and bar. When I turned 17, I started driving lessons. On one occasion, I went out drinking with my mates at ICL the night before a lesson, and it was a major headspinner that time. My sister woke me in the morning telling me my instructor was here, and I woke up to find I was still drunk. I did the lesson anyway, in a terrible state. My instructor must have noticed, but nothing was said! Later that year I was able to buy my first car, a 1970 Vauxhall Viva for £200. I didn’t pass my test until 1980, but having the car gave me a lot of practice ahead of the test, so I passed easily, first time.That car was a heap, but it represented freedom to me. The 70s hadn’t been the best years of my life, though here and there it held fond memories. Thanks to the car, getting out of school, new friends, paid work and prospects, things were looking more optimistic than they had done for a long time. My social life was about to explode, though I didn’t know it, and the 80s were fantastic years, especially after I left my parents’ home.