Tales from Long Ago No. 1

I have had a career in the sense of careering from one type of work to another. In the late 1980s, I careered into working as a planner in a mental health service in Birmingham. This involved working with psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses to set up a range of innovative services. These included setting up supported housing for people with long-term disorders discharged from inpatient care, a task which required co-operation from local housing associations.

So one day, I went with a consultant psychiatrist to meet the manager of a local housing association in his office in a street of terraced housing. We waited in his office for him to arrive, while the consultant looked wistfully across the street. “I lost my virginity in that house”, he said. The manager arrived and asked his rather glamorous personal assistant to arrange coffee. This she did, using an ornate cafetiere and pouring our cups.

A few months later, I visited an area manager in the Social Services Department. By way of small talk, I commented on her unusual surname and asked if she was related to the manager of the housing association I had met. She went red with rage: “That bastard”, she said, “He dumped me for that bloody personal assistant”.

After that, I have always avoided asking if people are related, however unusual their surname.