Universally Challenged

Its over 2 weeks now since my last post. Time for some gratuitous reminiscence.

I was clearing out my stuffed inbox this morning, and noticed a couple of emails from my long and thankfully not  lost University (Polytechnic to be honest) friend Simon. Its a period I haven’t thought about in a while, so indulge me if you will in some  late 80s nostalgia

Those couple of years spent in Liverpool seem like 2 lifetimes ago now and everything feels a bit detached and blurred, like I’m looking at my double through a neighbour’s bathroom’s frosted window.

I ended up at Liverpool Poly thanks mainly to the efforts of the Toxteth rioters. In the eighties, communities were being ripped asunder under the social engineering of Thatcherism. Mass unemployment was apparently a price worth paying for the rich to prosper. In 1981 the civil powder keg that was Liverpool borough of Toxteth exploded in a week long riot between the disaffected and the police, who even more so than today were seen as an arm of the government. 

Qualifying Round

So how did those events 5 years earlier impact on my choice of higher learning. August ‘86 found me anxiously awaiting the doormat plop of my A level results.  I had completed the ritual grand tour of prospective Universities and Polys over the previous 6 months and had a few offers contingent on grades. These were mainly from lower league universities and a smattering of Polytechnics. I had my bases covered. My lowest offer was for a place at Portsmouth poly if I got a C and 2Ds, the highest offer was 3Bs from Salford university. I was not fooling myself that I had any likelihood of reaching the lofty heights of Salford academia, but Pompey Poly was surely in my reach. Plop went the innocuous but so important envelope on the mat. I opened it and peeked inside as if just taking a sideways glance would trick the letter out of its bad news…. it didn’t work, bad it was.

Maths – O  (back in the day they took sympathy and gave  you an O if you just missed out on an E). This meant I had the symmetry of an A at O-level and an O at A-level.)

Chemistry – F Actually I had pretty much given up on chemistry by then. I could never tell my Arsenic from my Alkaloids

Physics D – a pass, yay. Not the greatest pass I admit, but as I had applied to do degrees in Physics it was sort or important I passed the subject at A level, and D was a pass, just about.

General Studies B – yay and yay again (actually I dont think we said yay in the eighties! ace and brill then). Now General Studies was a bit frowned upon as unworthy compared to the other more lofty A-levels, but for me it is the king of qualifications, as it relies on just knowing about stuff, rather than all that constant swotting. Which was a plus for me as I was about as diligent with my revision then, as I am with housework now.

So there I had it, 1 frowned upon B and a below average D. Oxbridge here I don’t come. My only hope for a future as a famous Physicists would be left to the lottery of the clearing houses. The summer was drawing to an end and I was about to give up and resign myself to a career in food vending, when another letter plopped. It was from Liverpool Polytechnic offering me a place on a BSC hons course in Physics and Electronics. It seemed that Liverpool was a city still struggling to attract students in the aftermath of those riots five years hence. My life as a mad scientist was up and running. As I said every cloud an all that..

F=mc² ?

Why I chose Physics as a degree I still don’t really know,  it just sort of happened. Somehow it was expected that I did physics. I did have an excelent inspiration though in my teacher. Mr Edwards has since gone on to win both Mastermind and a million on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. As far as I know a unique double. Mind you getting me to pass A level Physics must be his greatest achievement. I’m sure that’s what inspired him to TV quiz glory. A Physics degree was a beast of a course, with more hours of lectures than any of the others. I secretly wished I’d been artistic, as the art students appeared to only have a handful of lectures a week (although the downside I discovered was that art students had real trouble finding digs). The other aspect to a physics degree was the time spent in the lab, which for the most swung between maddening and downright frustrating. With lab experiments the mantra goes like this:

If it smells its Chemistry. If is moves its Biology. If it doesn't work its Physics.

I had all the right gear. A white lab coat, goggles, a pencil behind the ear and a permanently puzzled expression. If I ever understood the point of any particular experiment, then it was guaranteed not to work for me. Many sessions were spent tweaking knobs and fiddling flanges and finally banging things, just to stare unblinking at an unflinching flat lined oscilloscope. I did become very efficient at appearing like I understood everything and was working diligently. A skill that still serves me well today. However, there was one aspect of being a late 80s science student that was so much more frustrating than the uncooperative lab experiments and that was the Mainframe Computer back in a time when windows was but a glint in Bill’s bespectacled eye.

Up to that point I’d learnt all my computing “skills” from my ZX81 and later the Electron, which was the BBC micro for the working class. I became an avid viewer of the Micro Live broadcast on BBC2 on a Sunday morning and I was even able to write the odd little programme in BBC Basic computer language.  I was all set for a life of computer geekery. For the only time in my life I was cutting edge. That was until I met my nemesis that was the DEC 20 and its evil computing language Fortran 77. My love affair with computing was shattered.

A Rant at a DEC

The DEC 20 was the mainframe computer used by the Polytechnic and for its time was probably state a of the art system for multiple users. Problem was that the   art was equivalent to scrawling with crayons held in a fist. The first barrier put up by the DEC was the interminable length of time to log on. It was a good job the film Tron wasn’t set in a DEC 20 else it would have bee 10 hours long. Now if you had managed to log on before the end of the college day then you had to endure a tense session holding your breath for fear of being kicked off the system,which happened at least every time.

I cannot adequately explain the brain mangling hell that was FORTRAN 77.

To me Fortran 77 made as much sense as a Klingon / Esperanto Dictionary put through a German Enigma code machine to be read out backwards by Kenny Dalgleish in a big echoey cave. If that version was the 77th attempt God knows how impenetrable the previous 76 drafts. Anyhow the inventor of Fortran now resides in my ever expanding nemesis list. Can you have more than one nemesis ? and what's the plural ?  answers please…I choose nemesissies.

My tolerance for studying Physics lasted for 3 whole weeks, which for a course that was 3 years long meant that my ambitions to be the next Stephen or indeed Stephanie Hawking were always doomed. Its funny I would struggle to now recall Newton's Laws, but the memory of my computing hell was burned deep, and it took a full dozen years for me to log in again.

My Nemesissies

Thatcher (natch.)

Alan Ball

Hugh Jackman’s wife

Messers Cadburry and Kipling

Sixth Sense quiz team

The Bankers

Mr Fortran