Growing Up - Life After School

The next stage in my life really started when I left school and got a job and about the same time I started going out with Deb (my future wife). This phase ends when we had kids. It goes from when I was 17/18 (1981) to 26 (1989).

The first change at the start of this stage was getting a job. I had done ok at my O Levels, getting B's and C's, but didn't know what I wanted to do as a job, so I started A levels in the 3 subjects I did best in (Maths, Geography and Art - quite a random bunch). I had liked the new computer club the previous year, so I also did an additional O level in Computing (which the school was just

trialling. As the first year of A levels was finishing, I went along to an open day at Tresham college, at which there was an apprenticeship in computing being run between the college and a local phone company, GEC Reliance. As I liked computing I applied. I went for an aptitude test and an interview, however I was too young, they wanted people with A levels. A few days later they phoned me saying that they had a spare place on the course, I was in. So I left school and started a job. The job was initially a 2 year apprenticeship were we spent a few months in the different departments in the company, interleaved with periods at the local Tresham college doing a BEC/TEC in Computing. I made friends with a guy on the course, Andrew Bailey, we were paired together on most of our placements. The placements I remember were Admin (where I did a stock control system on a Commodore PET and also wrote a digger game),   

Research (where we developed a wave analyser program in Fortran) and Data Processing (where I developed data reports in COBOL and also a chess game). There were also some sessions at the companies site in Irchester where we learnt electronics, I remember these being in summer when it was very hot, I would travel to Irchester on our moped and during lunchtimes we would go down the local pub and played the Missile Command arcade game. I don't remember much about the college stints just different classes and programming assignments. At lunchtimes we would go into an arcade in town and play Space Panic and Pacman. I also remember going on a 2 week team building residential course, I listened to the album Hot Space by David Bowie and the Red and Blue Beetles greatest hits albums. There was also an Asteroids arcade machine which we played a lot.

The second change was getting a girlfriend. As described in the previous growing up blog entry,   

this happened very suddenly on my 18th birthday, when Debbie Andrews and I got together. We got on very well and spent a lot of time together, at youth group events and on our own at each other's houses. We would spend a lot of time listening to music, a big early favourite was Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits. We watched quite a bit of tv, I remember Eastenders starting and a couple of our favourite series were Brideshead Revisited and The Singing Detective. We also spent quite a bit of time playing computer games, first on a Trs-80, playing a fantasy adventure game we got from a magazine (listening to Queen II) and then on a ZX Spectrum. We played a lot of the Ulimate games (Jetpac, Sabre Wulf, Attic Attack etc) and Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. Whilst playing games we would listen to albums, I remember No Parlez by Paul Young and Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf.

After a while we stopped going to the YPF youth group and spent more time together and with Andrew Bailey from work. It was the video rental era and we watched a lot of Horror movies. I particularly remember the Georgio Remero Zombie movies and also The Evil Dead. We also went to the Cinderella/Rockafella nightclub in Northampton and I remember seeing Michael Jackson's Thriller video there on the day it was released.

Deb finished her A'levels and applied to various universities. I took her to various interviews and we stopped the night in a hotel in Wales following an interview at the University of Wales. Deb decided not to go to university but got a job at an estate agents in Rushden. After a while she got a job at Nationwide building society in Wellingborough. I remember us going on a works weekend 

with her colleagues to a holiday camp.

We went on a few holidays together during this period. One to a holiday camp down South, not sure where, with the rest of my family, and one to Devon staying with Debs family.

Deb was very musical, she had been in the church choir and she played the piano, which she taught herself. She got a flute to learn to play and had lessons which I used to drive her to each week, unfortunately I managed to sit on her flute and bend it, so we had to get a new one.

Soon I had finished and pased my apprenticeship, I was offered, and took, a job the Computing department. I did this fot a year and then I got a new job at another company, Weatherbys, still in Wellingborough and still in Computing. I made friends with Sandy Comrie. He was a member of Weavers Old Boys Saturday football team and I started going along to training and then playing on Saturdays.

Deb and I decided to get married. We brought a house in Rushden on Grangeway and I moved in on my own 6 months before the wedding. We didn't have a great deal of money so only had 2nd hand furniture people gave us. I also fitted a new kitchen myself. I remember us listening to the BBC dramatisation of Lord of the Rings.

Our wedding, March 1st 1987, was quite low budget as we had to pay for it ourselves. We had to setup the venue, Irchester hall, ourselves, which I did with my family in the morning, it was quite a rush. Deb had an accident in the morning when a chunk was ironed out of her vail, but her auntie was able to mend it. The actual wedding was at the church we used to go to, St Marys in Rushden. It was a very cold day, with snow still on the ground. There were quite a few relatives at the wedding, Debs from Devon and mine from Wolverhampton and locally. The reception was at Irchester hall. We had quite a lot of friends there from the old youth group, from my Weatherbys job and from Debs Nationwide job. Unfortunaltly we couldn't afford a honeymoon.

There was a nice Chinese takeaway just up the road from where we lived which we used to go to regularly.

During this period we had a couple of cars. A very old red Ford Escort, in which we used to listen to 10cc Greatest Hits, then a newer white Ford Fiesta and finally a light blue Ford Escort. I taught Deb to drive and she passed first time.

I remember going on a computing course in Brighton, just after the Conservative conference bombing.

We wanted a family, and luckily it wasn't long before Deb became pregnant.

The end of this period of my life came when we had our first child.