March 1989, I was probably just doing my GCSEs, or at least pretending to revise for them, and The Stone Roses released their first (self-titled) album.
I have to admit, this one passed me by at the time. Most of the Madchester scene did, to be fair.
It wasn’t until I went to an open day at Sheffield Hallam Uni, and I met a guy who was into Indie music, that I knew who they were. That was probably around 1991.
I tend to be like this: I either am there from the beginning and love a band for an album or two, or I am there after the fact. I am cool with this. It’s just how I am.
Oh, and this is another one where the link to the track is tenuous, but it’s there somewhere; I am sure I’ll work it out!
I left school in 1989. I decided to go to Chesterfield College to do, of all things, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, General Studies, and Art at A-Level. It was a bit of an insane mix, and I am not entirely sure why on earth I threw Economics in. It really wasn’t something I was arsed about. But, hey, I did!
The point being, I failed everything spectacularly, except Art.
The thing with college was you didn’t have to go to lectures; you could sit in the common room with your then-boyfriend, listening to Black Sabbath, eating chips, putting the world to rights and smoking the odd Marlboro Red if you felt so inclined.
That’s what I did.
Sometimes I had the urge to go and fiddle with experiments in Physics or listen to where the blurry lines interplayed between Physics and Chemistry. I also quite liked destroying my lab coat with various concoctions, where I probably should have washed my hands, but a wipe always worked…
But I failed, and I needed to do something else; totally dropping out wasn’t an option.
I really wanted to do Graphic Design. But that idea was put out pretty quickly: not enough jobs, I might not be good enough, blah blah blah.
Then I came upon a genius idea.
I’d been lucky enough to get a two-week work placement at an architect’s office whilst at school, so I thought that might be an option. I could still do stuff that was design-related (and I was good at Art) and also do something I was excited about.
Then I got a slap in the chops.
I decided that if I was going to be an Architect, then I needed to understand how buildings worked, from the ground up. I decided that I would do an OND in Building Services.
Oh, how foolish of me!
I went to see the head of the course; as I remember (just about), an older guy in a suit jacket sat behind a desk. He wanted to know what I wanted to do, so I told him.
‘No’, that was the answer to that.
I was a girl… Top marks for noticing that, mate.
I wasn’t strong enough to carry a hod of bricks. No, I’d not just dug a trench for phone cables for my mum and dad’s house they were building…
I am sure there were a tonne of other reasons why he didn’t want me on the course. But rather than tell him to go and play with himself, I just walked out.
That was the first time that I realised that perhaps my gender might be an issue…
So what is a girl to do?
She does an OND in Computer Studies because her boyfriend thought it was a good idea, and so did her parents… So that’s what I did.
I had never touched a computer, had no interest in coding or anything like it, but I gave it a go and managed to pass. Despite the draw of the common room and the sounds of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath like a siren call.
The next kick in the teeth was to come from a university.
I won’t name names, but it was a Nottingham one… I applied to do a degree in Microelectronics. Thinking back now, I am not entirely sure why, but I did. I went to the open day… Still with the boyfriend (we did about 3/4 years, I think), and boy, was that an experience!
All the way around the uni tour, the head of the course was talking to my boyfriend.
Telling him all about what he’d study, all about how good the campus was. Sold the course to him good and proper. Until we got to the end, and he said to him, ‘What do you think?’ My boyfriend turned and looked at me and replied, ‘She’s the one doing the course, not me!’
I think we all know what happened next.
I told the head of the course there was no way I’d go to his establishment, and I enrolled at Sheffield City Polytechnic instead…
I could go on about the number of times I’ve been told I can’t do something, or to check that I’ve done something right. The best one at (then) Sheffield Hallam University was a lecturer questioning if my oscilloscope was plugged in, when it clearly was the display that was shot (if you know scopes, you know they do that odd thing where the wave just doesn’t display and there is a ‘glow’ up in a corner somewhere).
I think he might have got told where to shove his scope…
Or the time at work, when someone demanded to speak to the technical analyst, when he was in fact speaking to a senior one, ie me!
But this isn’t really about misogynistic replies from lecturers in further and higher education, or indeed customers that should have known better. It’s about the weight I carried for so long about not being good enough…
All those experiences chipped away at who I thought I was. I carried that weight for so long.
Which, dear readers, is where the track comes in…
The pack on my back is aching
The straps seem to cut me like a knife
I’m no clown, I won’t back down
I don’t need you to tell me what’s going down
I spent ages carrying a pack that was someone else’s. Someone else’s idea of who I should be, and what I should do.
In the last six months, that pack has been put down, and I am living my life more or less how I want to live it. OK, it’s taken me fifty-three bloody years to get there, but we’ll just gloss over that a bit, eh?
If you’ve read any of these blogs, then you’ll know that around the time of my GCSEs, my mental health started to give me some issues. That pack has been carried for nearly 40 years. Sometimes it’s lighter, sometimes it feels like a load of bricks. Often, the bricks aren’t even mine to carry. But every now and then someone questions why someone would listen to me, in my role as a director for a CIC supporting families where there is a young person with mental health concerns.
At one time, I would have listened and made myself smaller; now I just think that head of Building Services didn’t realise how much I can carry, did he?
