7.
Father's and Sons
I think my Dad was rather happy when I was born.
Not that he was any less happy when my sister Jane arrived two
and a half years earlier but I was a boy. That fact meant he could
anticipate weekends playing with 'my' train set. Hehe, I had other
ideas though, trains just didn't interest me, I was a Car lover
through and through. Even after his attempt to combine my first
real love Lego with the delights of engines, trucks and level
crossings I wasn't having any of it.
It was my birthday a couple of days ago and
my girlfriend bought me a fantastic book entitled 'Scalextric
- The story of the world's favourite model racing cars'. The book
itself perhaps might not be the best written thing I have ever
read but the memories it invokes as I flick through the 1970s
section is enough to bring a tear to the eye. After his failed
attempts with train sets Scalextric was the closest my Dad would
get to building something with me that had vehicles going round
it.
Ely today (in blue t-shirt)
A bit of background about my Dad will give you
a better picture of the man. See, he's a bit clever my Dad. Starting
as an apprentice at British Aerospace when he was 16, he continued
to go through the ranks and by the time we left East Yorkshire
he was a major player in the company’s wind tunnel. By then
he had accumulated the lofty title of Aerodynamics Engineer. Moving
to Bedford in 1989 he worked at ARA, a private company with their
own wind-tunnel-for-hire. Here they ran all manner of tests for
the aerospace industry. Dad retired last year and he spends far
too much time modelling Saturn V rocket and Space Shuttle blast
trajectories from Earth to space on his PC.
When I got my Scalextric set (the '300' set
with racing Minis) at the tender age of nine, I was thrilled.
Dad though was un-happy. Being a clever sort and a hobbyist with
electronics he diagnosed a rather glaring fault in the Power Supplier
of my 'toy'. The problem was that when one car fell off the track
(a constant problem) the other track got all the power, thus speeding
up the car with the inevitable result of it also crashing. His
simple solution was to stick the original PSU in a wooden box
along with a second PSU so each lane had now its own. I was the
envy of my friends, because not only did it work, but it also
had flashing stop and start lights, wow! This would set a trend
which meant everything in our house that required a bit of tinkering
was fixed and in most cases improved.
We used to get electric shocks off ours
I owe him a living, I realise that now. Without
his interest in all things tech I might have missed the early
computer years in the same way I missed video recorders (something
Dad refused to buy as we already watched too much TV). So when
the decision to buy a home computer in 1982 for the 'family' surfaced
I think he really wanted it for him so that more tinkering could
be done. The machine though was soon ushered out of the living
room by my Mum who, surprisingly, liked to watch TV despite our
lack of a VCR. My sister quickly got bored as well, so in the
end it was left to my Dad and me to fight over who got to use
it and when. He built my first joysticks with parts from the Maplins
Catalogue, had the thing hooked up to temperature gauges for house
heat analysis and played with assembler to generate sine waves
from the sounds chip. He made me want to learn too.
I do love this man.
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