My name is Neil Argue and I have been writing this blog for..let me see..something between forever and 4 years. I am not a compulsive or obsessive blogger and there have been a few gaps, the most embarrassing of which was about 4 months. As anyone else who blogs will know, the longer you leave it, the harder it is to go back. I constantly fight procrastination and the urge to almost anything else even though completing a few paragraphs usually gives me an enormous sense of achievement.

I started blogging because it was easy way to keep fresh content on my website. I had no great aspirations to write or share my thoughts, frustrations and dreams with the world. Well, not to start with anyway, now it’s hard to shut me up sometimes. There will still be gaps, but if there is one thing I have discovered over the past 4 years, it’s that you can’t force it out. I try not to let the fact that ‘nothing has happened this week’ stop me writing. Just because you didn’t foil and armed robber or win the lottery doesn’t mean your brain has stopped working or that the world has stopped turning. Personally, I rarely get through the day without either wanting to either beat someone to death or kiss them on the nose and I doubt if you are any different.

So here I ramble on about things that I see, read or hear about. Things that make me laugh, cry or spit. If they do they same to you then so much the better.

So, just in case you are interested, here is a bit about me.

The Beginning

I was born in June 1968 which makes 2007 my 40th year on the planet. There exists fairly little empirical evidence of my birth, so I am forced to rely on heresay and stories passed on from older relatives. I was born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, England. As with the date and time, there is a certain murkiness surrounding the place of the event. It was certainly a hospital because Mum has told me several times that it was only luck and the urgency of a medical staff present that I didn’t take my first breath inside the lift down to the delivery room. Within months, if not weeks, we moved house. We did that a lot due to the fact that my Dad was a soldier and they never stay in one place very long. To detail all our movements would be difficult and not a little tedious for most of you reading this, particularly if you actually Googled “Neil Young” and accidently clicked on the fifth link down, nevertheless, our life experiences are part and parcel of the magic that is me and I would be remiss if I didn’t share a little more.

After spending a fair amount of my first few months rolling around on white sheepskin rugs to the pleasure of my Mum and Nan, I was finally voted baby of the year by a large department store in Hereford. This didn’t sit too well with my Dad at the time who was taking the King’s shilling from a notably discreet regiment associated with that fair town and the child’s rampant publicity, albeit positive was slightly at odds with this.

The Bobble Years

Reluctantly then, I took to wearing more clothes and as this coincided with the winter months, everyone was happy. We spent the first 3 or 4 years of my life in Hereford and a great deal of time visiting my Nan and Grandad who had moved down to live near their charming grandson. As you can see, even dressed like a garden gnome, I pushed the cuteness envelope.

So it was in that happy way that the first few years of my life played out. My sister arrived one day and has been around ever since. I remember very little of her arrival other than she cried a lot and very loudly though a little square mouth and being very little, had to stay in hospital longer than usual. I shamelessly tried to steal the limelight on the day she first came home in singularly inventive fashion. I quite literally heralded Mum and Jo’s arrival by tooting a metal pipe, trumpet fashion as I marched around the back yard. Unfortunately, this pipe was slightly smaller in diameter than my young mouth and hence walking into a wall was not the wisest choice of action. As Mum lay Jo down in her cot and all assembled tickled, cooed and generally made a fuss, I sat on a stool in the corner and gargled salt and water under the direction of an old, nurse-like neighbour who I have invented for increased comic effect.

Camberley

In no time at all, I was a little older. 1972 saw us moving to Camberley in Surrey, a place of which I remember very little. No, seriously. I can just about remember that it was Camberley and that it was in Surrey. If I close my eyes really tightly and/or consult immediate family, a few bits and pieces come dribbling back…

I was a dinner monitor at The Old Dean Estate School and I experienced my first “not being picked up from school” trauma due to an unfortunate mix-up and the fact that mobile phones would not be invented for about 20 years. I suppose the only noteable arrival in my life during this time was Lancer, aspiring gun-dog and idiot. He was a white and brown Springer Spaniel with a fondness for jumping into canals or tearing off into thick woodland and ripping his tongue to shreds on thorns.

Aldershot

From Camberly we moved to nearby Aldershot - garrison town and home of the British Army. As Dad had now been commissioned as an officer, he and his family were entitled to a huge and spacious house in it’s own extensive grounds. Well, sort of. I remember a huge garden that stretched out behind the house and round the side of a shed and garage. There was a tree just begging for a treehouse, a big hedge/tree combination over one side that looked like a huge cave. Behind the garage, on the day we moved in was a big wooden sailing ship that fascinated me but Dad threw away pretty sharpish. My first days at infant school were uneventful and from memory, seemed to involve stopping ‘lessons’ at 10am for a small bottle of very warm milk. 2p bought you a small bruised apple from my teacher, Mrs Leaver, to go with it. Around this time, I was involved in a high-speed, head-on collision with one Sean Gunn that resulted in mild annoyance on his part and 14 stitches across a gushing head laceration on mine. To this day, I remember trying to stand up and literally seeing red. When I experienced my first migraine, not long after (possibly because of it - who knows?) the throbbing pain was (and still is) concentrated on the scar. I say that I experienced my first migraine, but it wasn’t diagnosed as such until years later. Until I was 10 or 11, my head-splitting pain, nausea and blurred vision was treated at school with ½ disprin in a tea cup of warm tap water along with a ½ hour lie down in the sick room. Following this useless recuperation, I returned to class and somehow managed to groggily struggle on until hometime. Mum walked me to and from school for a good portion of my time at Talavera Infant & Junior schools. We had a car but Mum didn’t drive and Dad was in work by about 7am, so with my sister in her pram and my hand firmly clutched, Mum walked there and back twice a day. Now that I retraced the walk on Google Maps, I can see it was a not inconsiderable 3 miles each way. She tells me that she usually walked to North Camp shopping before going home, which is almost as far in the opposite direction past Vine Close. It probably wasn’t worth taking her coat off when she got back.

At some point, my parents and some of the others in Vine Close clubbed together and sorted out a taxi to take about 6 of us to and from school. It was a big, 7 seater purple Peugot and was obviously much better than walking, but it does remind me of a story that does the 6 year old me little credit. The last ‘pick-up’ on the route was someone who lived in a run-down part of Aldershot called Duke’s Terrace. Amusingly, we had all dubbed it “Dump’s Terrace”. It impresses me that even at the age of 6, biting satirical comment was not beyond my reach. I am not sure how long we were allowed to enjoy this particular joke but one day, Mr Taxi Driver finally had enough and when we arrived at Duke’s Terrace, made us all get out and apologise to the mother of the little lad we were picking up. I was terrified, embarrassed and a gnat’s breath from weeing on my shoes. Inside I was giggling like a fool and already planning how to tell this story to my parents in such a way that I was seen very much as the victim. When we got back in the car, Mr Taxi Driver iced the cake of his tirade by telling us that he would rather live in “Dump’s Terrace” than “Vine Closet” any day. Unfortunately, it would be many more years before any of us had any idea what a closet was. One-nil to the snotty little shits I think…

The Bay City Rollers. For some reason, I can’t think of anything around this time in my life without hearing “Bye Bye Baby” as a constant, flared, tartan soundtrack. I am pretty sure that Talavera Infant School didn’t pipe music into the classrooms or playground but there it always is. As was the case all over the country in the early 70’s, every game in the playground seemed to revolve around one or possibly all of us being The Six Million Dollar Man. I don’t remember being able to run very fast or jump very high but I was very good at the du-du-du-du noise.

Moving to Talavera Junior School involved a walk of about 100 yards and nothing much of note. There is a bit of gap in the memories here and it might be that I have swapped a few infant/junior school memories about. My teacher was called Mrs Purse and most of our lessons took place in the sort of portacabin that stays up for about 30 years. I do remember that it was around this time that I started to pull ahead of the rest of the class. It’s difficult to relate this without a hint of arrogance and self-praise, but it happened nonetheless. I usually finished stuff first - stories, pictures and in one embarrassing case, needlework - and would often be tidying up or putting chairs on tables whilst other still toiled. Teacher’s pet would be a cruel term for it but at least I was not the only one.

Oh and around this time, I am fairly came into contact with someone I now know as Stan but neither of us really know for sure. Sean Gunn appeared again much later too, as did quite a few of my Talavera school aquaintances.

West Berlin

In 1976 we left Aldershot behind, took the train to Luton and boarded the finest of Britannia Airways’ fleet in a short flight to Berlin, East Germany. 1976 was long before Glasnost and the fall of communism and West Berlin was at the front line of The Cold War. To be more precise it was smack in the middle of it, located as it was in the middle of communist East Germany. Being only 9, I only felt a little apprehension at this. As an adult, I am convinced I would find sleep difficult, if not impossible. We holidayed in the Harz Mountains and once travelled to West Germany along “‘the corridor” - an aerial and ground route out of East Germany. Notable events in my life included spraining my ankle and experiencing true pain for the first time in my life and sister Jo managing to hit a car sideon whilst riding her bike (pictured left). She wasn’t badly hurt but to spent a night or two in hospital, mostly for observation.

During our time there, I moved from Charlottenburg Primary School to Gatow Senior School. Gatow school (now the museum of The Luftwaffe) was at the end of possibly the longest bus ride on the planet, or so it seemed at the time. My teacher was great and I think called Mr Briars. I was still the clever little sod that had first poked his head above the parapet a few years earlier and I remember being involved in several projects with Mr B and a few of my friends. My one clear memory of him is the constant creative freedom he gave us with whatever we were working on - posters, diaramas, models and the like. We spent months making a papermache castle and I can see it in my minds eye as clearly as if it was yesterday. Had the British Army not pulled out of Berlin in 1994, I would like to think it would be on display in the library even now.

Aldershot (Again)
We returned to England in early 1978 and found ourselves living next door to our old house in Vine Close. It sounds odd but that was how it was. The oddness continued as I returned to Talavera Junior School and the same damn teacher as before. She had done her best to add variety to my ever more predictable life by getting married and changing her surname to “Omissey” but it didn’t help. On the contrary, I embarrassed myself on a regular basis by continuing to call her “Miss Purse” when ever my concentration lapsed and you know how kind 8 year old kids can be to eachother when that sort of things happen.

Cyprus
October 1978 found us in Episkopi, Cyprus. There are two areas of Cyprus, one at Episkopi on the west end and one at Dhekalia in the east. They are known as Sovereign Base Areas (SBA’s) and each is 99 miles square. They as so sized because 100 square miles would constitute an occupation. To all intents and purposes, the SBA’s are British soil but there were no borders or fences. Cyprus was amazing. The house was wonderful, numerous beaches were minutes away and school was finished by 1.30pm. Ok, so we had to start at 6.30am but who cares? I went to Episkopi Primary School and Jo went to the infants.

I quite enjoyed going to school despite that fact that my teacher, Mr M was the most unpredicatable individual you could wish to meet. He was usually pleasant but had a temper like thunder and a fuse about an inch long. I was soon best friends with a boy called Mark Cox who lived just down the road from me. Most out of school time was spent making pretend radio programs in his bedroom, riding our bikes on the Bondu (wasteland behind the houses) or building a clubhouse in his back garden. Continuing from Berlin, I became a Cub Scout and eventually a Scout. Cyprus was a brilliant place for Scout camp. There was a huge campsite down by the beach in Happy Valley, an area of playing fields kept green by being fed with effluent on a daily basis.

It was at Episkopi Primary that I first dipped my toes in Drama. After a fine performance as ‘The Captain’ in ‘The Tinderbox’ (3 lines, 2 different costumes), I moved on to a production penned by Mr M called “The Doom Of Olympus” which we actually performed in a ancient amphitheatre on the cliffs at Curium. I had quite a large role as the slave to Aphrodite, even though I only had about 20 lines, I was ‘on’ most of the time, crouched down, wearing a small loincloth and providing comic relief. I didn’t really understand what this was in rehearsals when Mr M described it but as soon as the first chuckle was wave of laughter hit me from the crowd of parents, I got it. I quite liked it too.

The Duke Of York’s Royal Military School
If you are conscientious enough to be counting, you will have noticed just how many schools I had attended up to this point. My parents had been doing the same thing and at some point Dad decided (Mum wasn’t so keen) that I should go to boarding school and enjoy a bit of stability in my education. I don’t remember at what point I was told about this and I don’t remember how I felt. To tell the truth, at that point in your life, things that are going to happen next year seem a long way off and are seldom worth worrying about. One day, myself and fellow Mr M classmate Michael Stephens were removed from the classroom and taken to a smaller room to sit the Duke of York’s Royal Military School (DYRMS) entrance exam. We passed and soon after met up with Matthew and Charles Quare at Mike’s house. Their Dad (and DYRMS Old Boy) Tudor was stationed in Dhekalia and all concerned though we should meet and learn about this boarding school business.

September 1979 came around quickly. Dad and me flew back to England to spend the week before term started at Dad’s brother’s house in Havant. The farewell to Mum was fairly traumatic but brief. Upset, she left the room quickly and had I not been so apprehensive about my imminent new school, I might have more memory of the event myself. Suffice to say, it was not a moment she had been looking forward too.

The week in Havant flew by in haze of clothes and equipment buying - a hockey stick, a shoe horn, a wash bag…the list was endless. Tuesday 13th September 1979 arrived and we boarded the train to Dover. By 4pm we were sat in Haig House dayroom waiting to meet Mr Andrews, my housemaster. Within an hour, the formalities over, Dad said goodbye and I hid my tears under the lid of my new green suitcase. The tears didn’t last long and over the next few years only returned twice. On leaving he gave me a £5 note which I stuffed under my watch for safe keeping. Less than an hour later, it was gone. To put this into perspective, £5 in 1979 would have bought you a train ticket to London and a sandwich on the way. £5 was a lot of money. The person who found it obviously had a much better first day at boarding school than I did.

The next 7 years were the most significant in my life and I would not be who I am today without them. I made friends soon after I arrived that I am still close to today. Once a year we all make the journey back and spend a weekend talking about the same old stuff and drinking until we fall over. My years in Dover led to my first website and hence to this blog. Over 7 years, apart from my establishing my scholastic boundaries, I discovered computers (yay!), music, discipline, friendship, drama and eventually girls. One day, I will probably let you all read about those 7 years in more detail than you can probably bear, but not just yet.

I was lucky enough to have two more school holidays in Cyprus before my family returned to the UK. Christmas 1979 in the snow covered Troodos Mountains was as close to an idylic Christmas as I am likely to experience and the following Easter was almost as much fun.

Tidworth, Beaconsfield & Taunton
In July 1980, the family moved back to the UK. I was away at school at the time, but Mum has told me of the night that her and Jo (Dad was still in Cyprus for a while) moved into our new house. It was a dark, leafy road and they were so scared on that first night that they slept in one room and locked the door. In an odd co-indicidence, I had already been to Tidworth. I spent a great weekend home from school with Sean Veasey and his family, completely unaware that we would soon be moving there. Sean quickly became (and still is) my best friend at school.

The Falklands War took place in 1982 and Dad sailed away to do his bit. A bit of a milestone in his life and ours. I was playing squash with him when a young soldier came and took him back to his office. Within a few days he was leaving on the cruise ship Canberra from Southhampton. Between then and victory in June we worried and watched TV news, unsure of what we wanted to see and what we didn’t want to.

In 1983 we moved to Beaconsfield near London. This was notable for the fact that it was much closer to London and hence getting home from school took far less time. Sean had also moved to Bicester by then and took the same train home from Marylebone Station as me. Following his return from The Falklands, we spent the day at Buckingham Place feeling very proud when Dad was awarded his Military Cross by The Queen.

1984, my O Level year saw us move to Taunton, and to an almost completely deserted estate of married quarters. How Mum didn’t go round the bend with me (and now Jo) away at boarding school, I will never know. It was here, for reasons I will never know, that I started to go running. Every day. I can remember little of the physical effect this had on me and no photographic evidence to say so either. After a disastrous set of O Level results, I managed to scrape my way back to school to study a B/TEC diploma and enjoy two years of being a 6th former at DYRMS.

Plymouth
By 1985, we had moved back to Mum’s hometown of Plymouth and here I am to this day. Leaving school with a B/TEC Diploma tucked under your belt is not the cast iron key to a career that you may imagine and the fact that nobody wanted to give me a job was a little unsettling. ‘Signing On’ in July 1986 was not the promising start that my parents envisaged but as Dad said at the time, he had paid tax and contributions his entire life and I might as well get some of them back whilst jobhunting. He wasn’t so keen however, on the full and bushy beard I had been sporting since shortly after leaving school. No doubt as a very late and isolatedly pointless act of rebellion, I had forgone the barber and the razor in an effort to find myself or some such rot. I finally, and painfully removed it shortly before my first ever job interview at the BBC in Bristol. Convinced of success, I boarded a train and prepared for a life as a cameraman on the 6 O’Clock News. The worst interview of my life quickly drove any such nonsense from my mind and I was brought down to earth with a thud. Several interviews in Plymouth followed, each one showing slightly less ambition than the last. Post-school life seemed to suck.

Gas
My first actual job was pumping gas. There I said it. In one of the last two petrol stations in Plymouth to employ gas pumpers, I found a post that would ensure my first weekly paycheck. It was a terrible job. It rained a lot and I was paid next to nothing for about 18 hours work. The public were rude and ungrateful and I learnt only one thing in the 3 months I stayed there - namely that I would never work with the public ever again.

Dogsbody
Just after that first Christmas, Mum told me of a vacancy that had come up where she worked. It was basically assembly line work but the pay and hours were much better. After being late for my first shift, I embarked on about 3 months of shift work, gluing little plastic shapes and standing up a lot. The pay was amazing but the job wasn’t. It was boring beyond belief and I knew I had to get out. Luckily, a vacancy in the Computer Department appeared and I grabbed it. For about 2 years, I was the dogsbody who handed reports out and made coffee. Nevertheless, I wore a tie to work and ‘worked in Computers’.

WestMac
In July 1990, I made the wisest move of my life and threw away the job section of the evening paper without reading it. Mum reminded me a few days later that she had seen a job that might suit me in the paper and I rummaged in the dustbin until I found it. A week later, I was sat opposite Kelvin Butcher at WestMac, an agricultural machinery distributor in Ivybridge. Kelvin was the Computer Manager and soon to be off on holiday. Unluckily for him, his last assistant had done a runner and left him in the lurch. You see, without an assistant to mind the farm, he couldn’t go on holiday. Luckily for him, I was qualified to keep his seat warm and the job was mine. Two weeks after I started, he flew abroad on his hols and I worried. For two weeks, I sat in his chair praying to a newly-discovered God that the big white box in the corner would behave and nobody would ask me anything I didn’t know the answer to. Due to my “dogsbody” status in the previous job, my exposure to anything interesting or important was very limited and I was not really the impressively experienced boffin who passed the interview. Kelvin was refreshingly honest a few years later when he admitted that I was the ONLY one who turned up for interview with ANY experience. Over the next 12 years, he made up for my shortcomings and pretty much taught me everything I know about computers. Due to this and a shared love of Star Trek, he became one of my best friends. As the we approached the Millenium, British Farmers were crippled by one thing after another and eventually WestMac felt the pinch. I was made redundant in January 2002 and walked away from a place that I thought I was going to be for the rest of my working life. My modest redundancy cheque kept me solvent until around July. At that point, I needed to grab something temporary to pay the bills.

The Big Place
There it was in the paper. To tell the truth, I had noticed a similar advert just after I was made redundant but ‘Data Entry’ work seemed beneath me in Feburary and only slightly less so in July but an empty bank account is always good motivation for lowering your standards. I turned up for my assessment and they duly proved to themselves that I knew how to type and could sit the right way round on a chair. I was really depressed. It was a big, big, big open-plan place with about 300 PCs and I could feel myself being sucked into something not good at all.

The first week’s training was 2pm-10pm and sapped the life from me. When we eventually started the job for real it got better. My little team of 15 were a nice group of people, varied in age and background and once you stuck your CD player headphones on, time flew by quite quickly.

5 years later, I am still there and I really love it. The job is more varied for me these days and I manage teams on a fairly regular basis. Over the last 8 months, I have returned to the IT side of things and I couldn’t be happier. I have a many friends and a few very good friends.

Health
Dad passed away in 2006 aged only 59. It was sudden and a shock we are still not quite over. Had he not died and had my family not convinced me to get myself checked out, I would probably still be unaware of my Diabetes. I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes in August 2006 and I have been handling it with varying degrees of success since. It is controlled though medicine and diet but if I could shift the weight that has been the bane of my life since childhood, the medication could stop. For the first year, I exercised a little and cut out sugar and as much unhealthy food as I could manager. Within two months, I had lost over two stone but as is often the case, I spent a further ten months putting it back on. Dieting is hard when you don’t really know what you are doing and it is even harder when you have to eat as a diabetic as well. So, just after Christmas, I followed the good sense of a friend from work and joined Slimming World. As I write this, half way through the second week, I have lost 4½ pounds and I am really going to try hard to keep it up.

That’s Everything Up To January 2008
Too much? Too little? It’s hard to stop once you have started you see. What is so odd is that on reading it back, I just realised how much I left out.