Welcome to my blog

Well, who am I? I’m a member of the Conservative Party and a strong Thatcherite.

So, you will suppose, here is another ex-Etonian, former Oxbridge toff who has made a pile either in Law or in finance.

No bloody chance! First of all, at 56 I am not really a boy. Etonian? WRONG!! Glendale Secondary Modern, Wooler in rural Northumberland more like!

Ah! I’m from a farming background then! WRONG AGAIN! Father was a pitman, mother a pitman’s daughter who, when my parents separated, worked as Cook/Housekeeper for a couple near Wooler.

Oxbridge? Law? Finance? Don’t even think of it. After staying on for CSEs in 1968, I left school and went to the Army Apprentices College at Chepstow, following on with a less than glittering 11½ years in The Royal Engineers. After demob in 1980 I got a job at the BR workshops at Eastleigh, then part of BREL, ten years later getting promoted to a post at Derby.

A couple of promotions later, with my toe on the bottom rung of the management ladder, Mr. Major, in obedience to the EUrine diktat that ownership of the railways and services on them must be separated, committed the gross folly of privatising the Railways and I was out of a job, all be it with a reasonable payoff.

So I then spent 5y studying, first picking up an HND in Mechanical Engineering at Derby, then 3y doing a BSc Physics with Education and Qualified Teacher Status at Sheffield Hallam. I lasted two years in teaching before I finally got the message I was not enough of a masochist to continue in the job.

After that, a couple of years testing a new radio system, best part of a year unemployed, apart from a couple of temporary jobs and back onto the Railway with Network Rail.

So as you see, I have a better working class pedigree than 90% of the Parliamentary Labour Party, my fairly strongly right wing views have been built up over the years and are based on my own observations and experience.

Welcome to my BLOG!