mstow literature art music philosophy health&socialcare walthamstow E.17.
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I am. Graduate B.A. Philosophy (hons) University of London 1981 M.A. Social Policy&Research University of east London (dissertation Independent Living with Adults with Learning Disabilities London now retired statutory Social Worker in residential&daycare community outreach&fieldwork with Adults with Learning Disabilities & Mental Health&Social support needs.
I was born in Walthamstow (then part of Essex, England) London E.17 and and went to school in Highams Park, Chingford London E.4., and on leaving school without sufficient qualifications for higher education at that time, I went down (or up?) to Oxford, not for higher education, but to work voluntarily (room&board) with the Simon Community, a homeless persons hostel along by Oxford Station formerly railway worker’s dormitories serving as a night shelter and alcoholism and drug misuse drying-out residential, where men mostly could stay for a few weeks at a time provided they were dry&drug-free (apart from tobacco).
Subsequent to this, I returned to Highams Park, where I rented in a shared house with my figurative/abstract artist friend PHW (Walthamstow School & Chelsea College of Art https://www.youtube.com/@paulhowardwilliamsartworkv4157) and where I first met the mother of my first child, daughter.
I worked as a factory shopfloor ‘labourer’ (unionised as ‘production assistant’) at the BOC at Edmonton taking the oily swarf barrow from the lathes where parts for welding equipment were manufactured the lathes operated by engineers and I would take the trays on another barrow to the degreasing tank in the middle of the shopfloor.
There I would lift the trays of finished parts onto a sling hoist lift them by chain hoist up across and lower them into the heated acid degrease tanks for a brief enough period to hold my masked breath and goggled eyes while lifting the cleaned welding torch part’ trays out and lowering them onto the other side of the tank for taking into the assembly line.
I also took orders from the tool makers for rods of metal in different shapes and sizes for the lathes. Brass, aluminium, copper and steel, round & hexagonal. I had to wear a hairnet hat, and protected boots at all times, and the degreasing was limited to 10 minutes at a times after which I was to go outside, for 20 minutes (union rules) where I would chat with the swarf man in the yard, where the swarf was loaded into barrels for materials recovery elsewhere, and we would drink tea and smoke a cigarette.
That factory was moved to Skelmersdale in the north of England and this was my next taste of union activity, as we stood outside on strike demonstrating for fair and decent redundency for all those who didnt want to move 250 miles.
I didn’t stay to collect. I was on a short contract and when that finished I went back to the Labour Exchange where I was put onto a Plumbers Mate course. I had filled in a series of questions (on an early computer with printout sheets much like the timecards at the factory) auto-punched with holes at each of my single answers to sets of 3 questions like would you rather be a astronaut a farmer or a factory worker? work inside, outside or both? identified for myself for outside construction work.
I then became a mostly maintainance plumbers mate in Leyton E.10. for council housing. This entailed collecting worksheets in the morning, completing as many jobs as you could as quickly as possible to pre-set hourly rates for each job, a time-work allocation union negotiated, to either finish early each day or accumulate more hours than the basic 8 hours with additional breaks each day taken or not, to recieve more wages over time, or more time over wages. Your choice.
I was then sent on a Plumbers apprenticeship course at Brimsdown Indusrial Estate EN3, where I learned lead tin and copper welding and braizing, soon outdated, with pipework fitting and various skills after that, when I got my cards, I passed my driving test and bought a car (Ford Popular).
I went back to the council as a plumber, mostly maintainance of council properties, using my car then to carry my new tools that I was very proud of. I didnt stay long, as I then wanted to work on building sites and did several stints with local building water and heating fitting firms, including at The Tower of London EC3 and Ministry of Defence Strand WC2 buildings where passes were required, large houses in Hampstead NW3, and the work was more interesting then.
I worked on the Georgian Arcade Bloomsbury WC1 restoration, where I could use some lead welding skills for the window weights and roofing and gutters, raising stack soil pipes and fixing signitured lead brackets.
I had spent easily and still accumulated what was then a wealth of paper money that I threw into a drawer and when it came time to travel, having outlived the shared house and needing to experience the world, I left with a friend for France, in the long hot summer of 1976.
We went on to work the Vendange near Toulouse, before setting out hitching rides to Marseille, Toullon and Nice, where we stayed at the youth hostel on the cliffs overlooking the Promenade Anglais. We then continued to Pisa and Rome, staying at the youth hostel in the old Olympic Park there, before going on to Pompei and across country to Brindisi, for the ferry to Corfu.
We stayed at the hostel in Corfu, took the further ferry to mainland Greece, where taking the lead from a group of American youngsters we took a bus across country to Athens. We stayed in a basement hostel in Athens, visited the Parthenon, and I gave blood for money, twice, to enable us get to Piraeus and a ferry to the island of Paros.
It was while in Athens that I looked up the Athens Encyclopedia Brittannia copy for the ancient Greek philosophers that I had heard of from the American students, who were clearly taught this at basic school, yet Ionly knew otherwise as the names of Brazilian footballers (players Plato and Socrates may have played in the 1966 World Cup in England).
On Paros we found a tiny cottage for rent from Paros town fishing port on the far side of the island and stayed there for a month eating fresh fish and bread with water from the well. I was reading poetry and started writing influenced by ancient Greece and then prior biblical references, especially since we were then headed back to Athens (where we slept in the upper foyer of an open office building) and the airport, for our then planned trip, to Jerusalem. My first ever air flight. We arrived at Tel Aviv scruffy hippies, our baggage was emptied in the middle of the floor in the airport, by security, and clearly to humiliate us as poor young travellers. This was not the first attempted humiliation in the militarised state of Israel. We stayed at Mr A(rmenian)’s hostel at St David’s Gate, toured the surrounding walls and visited the sights, ate fresh falafels and took in the walk of the cross, wailing wall and mosque.
We met a Norwegian friend, and continued hitch hiking to Eilat, where we could find work.
We travelled past the Dead Sea, were separated and interrogated at an army checkpoint, and found a lift we then stayed at a friendly Moshav in the Negev, before eventually ariving at Eilat. I worked at The Neptune Hotel, first in the kitchen stores, then serving at the bar and restaurant, then running the swiming pool snack bar with a Yemeni friend, making Turkish coffees sandwiches. I had done restaurant kitchen and barwork before since I was 15 years old, so I knew the ropes. When I left the Neptune to meet up other friends from the trip, this was at what is now a large resort on the Red Sea, then a nude hippy’s holiday camp on the beach and in the coral sea. We bought bread from Bedouin women who would visit eyes averted with their donkeys from Sinai, saw Moses’ mt. Sinai and then I returned to Eilat to collect my wages (that had been held back) travelled back by bus to Jerusalem, where, being homesick and wanting to return to the yet to be mother of my yet to be concieved and born daughter I had to haggle hard to change sheckels into dollars for the airfare back to Athens, and Magic Bus all the way via Venice, Paris, home to London.
I had written letters all the way (poste restante) and had started writing short stories from my experience and imagination, reading Eliot and Stevens and discovered some books that I may not have otherwise have read (Hesse and Durrell, swapped for Sartre and Lawrence I had taken with me).
I returned to various agency work in factories, driving etc. then my final plumbing jobs and some self employed odd jobs. I worked at the new GPO building in Romford, Essex (where the mother, yet to be met, of my son yet to be born, was she was born and raised). I worked at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, where from the back of the audiotorium (on maintainance duty) I saw Pavarotti perform and I saw ballets and operas I would never have otherwise seen, in performance and daily rehearsal. I walked through the set design rooms, costume making rooms and had my own workshop. There was little to do, but I watched and learned, this again was useful for the development of ideas, and was well paid, unionised. I watched spellbound when the ballet corp and orchestra went on strike, and marched up and down outside for better touring rates (as I has at the BOC works at Edmonton).
The first child (daughter) was born while I was working at ROH and soon after I left to parent as much as I was able. We both parents had to work, and I applied for a mature student philosophy degree course at University of London with a full grant and no qualifications.
I was out of my depth, knew no one, mostly younger than me and from private schools expected to pass because it was ‘easy’. I attended few lectures because of this, was ejected from my first tutorial, for asking an impertinent question. I learned something about the then new computers and spent most time in the library reading taking notes and taking out summaries of the great works rather than the great works themselves, that I would otherwise struggle with both in time to study, and comprehension of difficult language that I had not been brought up with.
I quit the penultimate term; I was working throughout despite the grant and sharing childcare. I worked at Leytonstone House Hospital E.11. This was a Victorian asylum, when closure and community care was starting to be introduced. I worked as a nursing asst. in the recreations dept. where basic domestic/community skills, some travel outside the hospital grounds was starting to accustom insiders to the outside world. Inside had been rife with financial corruption and physical and sexual abuse, but now things did begin to change, the inside world was getting out.
I started a psychology degree (evenings) whilst still working at the hospital, where I had dubious honor of being Father Xmas that year, and then I decided to return to complete my degree.
I still worked in between swotting like mad from basic philosophy course books, that I could repeat in the final Kings College exam hall, in my own personal philosophical context (Existential Relativism) that I had clashed with my first tutor over (Oxford Platonic Kantian Analytic language philosophy).
I revised and visited during those final exams, my artist friend PHW (1954-81), and after his death from childhood leukemia, at St Josephs Hospice E8, I found work in my by now chosen arena, health&socialcare, in the community, at a day centre for Adults with Learning Disabilities, where some tremendous work was taking this daycare centre from industrial unit to training centre for Community Care. People remaining at their family home supported living on to independent living or in small family size residential care homes safely and continuing developing skills for life in what were regarded as homes for life.
I was co-parenting our daughter, and living in squats and then a one bed council flat on the nearby council estate, where I met and lived with the yet to be mother of my next to be born child (son). We met on a planned holiday as both day care residential outreach and community care workers. I had furthered my education attaining a day-release Certificate Qualification in Social Work. I went for every vocational training I could, then completing an MA at University of East London (paid for from my salary at evening classes).
I had extensive experience and training for Community Care and this was most satisfying, in that it showed that despite regular funding crisis’ (L. House funded closure had ended) and local authorities took on costs of Community Care from health authorities. This social-health model was and continues to be successful, with a measure of this in my dissertation, where I used a self-defined user-satisfaction key from service users themselves.
I had moved from a temp. position managing an independent living respite care unit in Leyton James Lane E10 to setting-up and managing a small transition to adulthood team in Newham E.16. and now E.20 project managing towards a new Integrated Health&Social Care team between childrens and adults services. Following the ground-breaking Children Act of 1989, I became then an Independent Social Worker, as a statutory Independent Review Officer specialising working with children with dis/ability in child protection court care orders, and then also secure accommodation statutory reviews of court directed community care plans, bringing my career full circle from the dreadful asylum system of the past, to the continuing need for well-funded independent statutory oversight of child and adult family&community health&social care.
During all this time I had both read extensively for leisure and purposeful writing. I was never academic, and barely scraped through higher education.
I enjoyed education in-service and vocational training much more, probably learned more too, to put into my belated interest in philosophy, literature & poetry, that I have now brought to substack.
https://mstow.substack.com/publish/post/195866351
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I have done some short writing evening courses in adult (formerly workers) education and at City Lit. WC2. I took up word processing as soon as it arrived and copied and self published (KDP) my early short stories and sketches from my travelling and post travelling days taking in both wanderer and domestic simplicity with hopeful and thoughtful I hope philosophic tones.
I am interested latterly in the limited-analytic non-idealistic but philosophically humanitarian relativistic and non-reductive ethics of Midgeley (What is Philosophy for?) and existential ethics of Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity).
I am aware of my shortcomings in respect of not having learned precise grammar, punctuation etc. now using these to meld into modernist stream of consciousness and further a relatavistic personal existential philosophy of scientific-mythological story-telling (Beauvoir in particular) that does not follow the analytic logical language that I was attempted to be taught (Russell, Austin et al).
I was rather for Wittgenstein & Sartre with limits of shared meaning non-absolutism authentic selfhood self-defining in social-cultural contextual contingency other-defining (in so far as that is possible) embracing multiple ambiguityies’ rather than constantly challenging in:finite de-finition…this in order to perhaps better keep engaging with the world, and with other people…
such as (y)ourselves, dear reader or listener, or watcher of words as pictures etc.). I:-have si(u)m-ult(i)an(e)(nou-sly…) with my social-philosophical education a life interest in science, and specifically honed (homed?) New Scientist magazine, popular science books, science fiction-faction faction-fiction as my poetic-prose novels
EarthCentre(illustrated) &WarFair4.com
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writing/speaking to the ever more revealing great mysteries of the micro/macro telescopic and microscopic Universe with general& particular animal and human rights and responsibilityies’ over climate-change ecology and the animal-human social-wor(l)ds’-of:both science&/or(?):-literature writing open-poetry with-now:a(b)last-of/f-no(d)(t)e-re.g(u)arding philosophical-po(l)emical metric-verse non-metrical with-both:airy&/or/c-on:crete i-magi(n(e)))at:-ion’s(i)will now conclude and invite you to …
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https://mstow.substack.com/publish/post/1958663514more much-more…thx
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