I became sixty years old just eleven days ago. "Ah, it's just a number!" everyone says, "Sixty is the new forty!" It's true I don't feel sixty. Perhaps more fortytwenty or twentythrice! But then I can't remember what it felt to be like when I was twenty, or forty....or fifty nine. Perhaps my mind is going. But it is a number that makes you stop and think. Eric Bristow, five times World Darts Champion died yesterday. Dropped dead aged 60. Ray Wilkins, football legend, died a few days earlier aged 61. Both had heart attacks. It's on my mind. Ok, no, I'm not about to write my own obituary (I hope), but I thought I might just summarize where the last sixty years went because I can't remember it all.
I don't feel that old, but on those online pages you fill in for some official application or form where you have to scroll back to your date of birth I'm finding it seems an indecent long way I have to scroll down the page, and continue off the bottom of the page to find the year 1958. Wow, weren't things different then?
I was born in the stunning village of Richmond, North Yorkshire, with its huge 950 year old Norman fortress. My father was a Royal Signals officer, based at Catterick garrison. But military life in those days was such that after a short life in two different homes there we took the great HMT (Her Majesty's Troopship) "Nevasa" all the way to Singapore via every British Empire dominion on the way: Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Suez (Egypt), Aden (Yemen), Bombay (Mumbai, India), Colombo (Ceylon/Sri Lanka), Rangoon (Burma/Myanmar), Port Klang in Malaysia and down to Singapore.
I was just a baby and my fair skin was often sunburnt under the blazing sun where we lived on the Equator. I started to walk and swim there and spotty and jerky cine films my dad made showed me enjoying playing in my pedal car, which I never pedalled and always 'drove' backwards. It also shows my mother doing speed trials in our family car, tight manoeuvres in and out of cones, with short sprints against the clock. I was brought up loving the thrill of speed. At that time my father also raced in the Singapore Grand Prix, but it was a very different event to today's Formula One!
I believe we had four different homes in Singapore. Although my father was an Army Officer, he spent long periods with the Royal Air Force flying in Shackleton maritime patrol aircraft out over the South China Sea, as the RAF were short of radio officers and my father had the necessary skills. He also killed a venomous snake that came into the house and was making its way across the carpet towards me.
After four years we flew back to Britain on a Britannia turbo prop aircraft. I don't know how many stops there were on the way or how long it took, but it was a slow aircraft, at least 200mph slower than today's jets. And of course everyone could smoke as much as they liked so that your arms sat in the overflowing ashtrays.
Back in Britain we were posted to the little town of Tywyn in mid Wales where my father was adjutant at the nearby Tonfanau camp. Boys of 15 could leave school and join the Army, finishing off education whilst training as Junior Leaders. It was a way in which boys struggling with their direction in life could be given some self respect and discipline and make them into men who could lead by example. I went to school in Tywyn and remember trying to learn Welsh. Our large Army detached house on Morfa Crescent still stands, with a fantastic view out towards the almost 3000 feet tall Cadair Idris mountain. I still remember the fish and chip van, playing on the beach, collecting fallen coal by the railway line, and taking the train to the bookshop in Barmouth. I also remember my time in Aberystwyth hospital where I nearly died from blood loss after a botched operation to remove my tonsils and adenoids, as was standard practice in those days.
But soon we were on the move again, and we were based in four places in northern Germany......four more different homes in Minden, Bad Oeynhausen, Bunde and Lubbecke. I think in those years I never really settled at school. I barely remember any of them. Not the teachers, not even any friends, with the possible exception of one boy called Simon Panton, who I have never heard of since. I certainly can't visualise any of the schools or even any brief friends I might have had. Life was so transient. We lived in Army housing estates, nice spacious houses, but we didn't mix with the German kids and certainly not with the Russian military and their families who lived in 'hostage' enclaves near us, like human shields in the event of war. And we were right in the front line of the Cold War at that time of my life, where all the Forces did regular turnouts to exercise for immediate action on a regular basis. It used to be quite a sight, endless convoys of trucks and armoured vehicles heading out of base to their battle positions. What do I remember from Germany? Nice ice cream, trying on lederhosen, playing in the woods, my bicycles, grey towns, the adult's Sunday lunch drinks parties after church, learning a bit of German, hot summers swimming outdoors, great sledging in winter. And long, long car journeys from Germany to Caithness and back to visit my mother's parents in either a Rover P5 or Austin Westminster
And I remember starting prep school at Brambletye in Sussex at the age of nine, and flying to and from Germany on my own, to stay at school normally 3 months, sometimes more, without seeing my parents at all. My time spent at Brambletye is written up elsewhere on flickr and mysteriously has accumulated over a million views.
Whilst I was at school in West Sussex my parents and brothers moved again, this time to Dorset where my father was based at Royal Signals HQ in Blandford. I remember a very modern house there and a very chalky landscape but not much else. But it was also whilst I was at boarding school that my parents moved from Dorset nearly 800 miles north to Caithness in the extreme north of Scotland. My father left the army and became a farmer, on the farm that my grandfather, and my great grandfather, and his father farmed on, called North Calder. Having lived in so many different places this became the place I finally called 'home', the place where I had time with my parents, and brothers, to grow up in a stable family and the wild expanse of barren Caithness on the doorstep.
By the age of 13 I was finished at Prep School and my class mates moved on, many to elite private schools such as Eton, Westminster, Harrow, Wellington, etc. I went to Thurso High School comprehensive. But I was lucky. This was the nuclear age, and at nearby Dounreay Britain's best nuclear physicists and engineers were being sucked in to develop the worlds first Fast Breeder reactor and engines for nuclear submarines. I was phased into the top stream at school with all the sons and daughters of these brilliant minds, and whilst always towards the lower end of that 'A' stream class the standard was so high that something like 30 out 32 went to University and that was back in 1975 when there were only five Universities in Scotland. I grew up a farmer's son, heavily involved from the age of 13 in harvesting work, feeding and managing the livestock. The landscape was open. Wild sea to the north stretching all the way to the North Pole, and a line of mountains to the south. Mid summer days were so long, yet mid winter so dark, wet and cold. It is one of the windiest places in the world. But whilst life up there was brilliant for a soul that loved freedom, I could never chain myself to a farm for ever. I wanted to travel.
But I went to University like all the others, but all it did was make me decide I couldn't take any more of being in a classroom. Fortunately my lack of focus on studies meant I only stayed a year and that forced my hand. I wanted an adventure. In our family every other male before me had stood in uniform, and it was natural for me, partly with my military style upbringing at boarding school, to look to the Forces for a career. I really wanted to be a pilot, a fast jet pilot, hugging the contours of the land at high speed as was the tactic of those days to get under the radar. I knew I would qualify as a pilot on pretty well every criteria but to my dismay I found that the distance from my elbow to fingertip was a fraction outside the limit prescribed to ensure I could operate every control whilst strapped in an ejector seat in a high G turn. But I was also extremely keen to be an Infantry Regiment officer and again I knew all I had to do was apply. But by this time the Army was facing severe cutbacks and there wasn't such an allure to patrolling the streets of Belfast during the Troubles. I wanted to see the world.
And so I joined the Merchant Navy as a trainee Deck Officer (Navigator). Sure enough it gave me the travel and adventure I had dreamt of, seeing amazing sights, experiencing wondrous events and weather, and taking me literally to every corner of the world. I had no idea that some of those experiences would even ensure that the BBC and numerous newsmedia would keep coming back to me repeatedly for forty years looking for new angles on some of the stories I was involved in. But in all it meant that by the age of 22 I had already been to well over 50 different countries in North, South and Central America, Africa, Europe, Scandinavia, Middle East, Asia and Australia, New Zealand, and with a crew, top news story in the UK.
It had been quite a journey to get to that point, But that was the first third of my life. What's happened in the last two thirds? Where have I been, what have I done? In some ways it has been the 'consolidation' phase of my life. A hazy rush of work, wife, family and more work. But now at the age of 60 that part is coming to an end. It's the next bit I have to work on now. The end game, the last chance to have fun and enjoy myself. And do it before I end up like Eric Bristow and Ray Wilkins. I must. I've got just one life!
Who am I? With an English father and a Scottish mother, born in Yorkshire and having lived so far in 26 different places that have been my 'home', I can only call myself 'British'.
What am I?
I'm still just a boy.
PS. I feel like I want to have the life of the 100 year old man who jumped out of the window and disappeared. If you have never read the book I can't recommend it highly enough. Adventure. Exploratation. Humour. Chance, opportunity and coincidence. An amazing life.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred-Year-Old_Man_Who_Climbe...
Haven't seen the movie, for those who don't have sufficient time or imagination, but it looks quite amusing too:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-k7DUQPHfQ 