Meet Step Changer’s contributors
Gareth George
Gareth a septuagenarian who lives in Edinburgh with his wife. He has a close family of four children and eight grandchildren.
This is a new blog and I believe a detailed personal introduction is normally expected. I very much suspect, however, that the only folk reading this will be my friends and family, all of whom know my background anyway. In view of this I’ll keep it brief:
I’m a Septuagenarian and have lived with my wife in Edinburgh since 1993. We have, by today’s standards, a large close family of four children, their partners and eight grandchildren, together with many other cherished friends and contacts. Our family all live relatively nearby and we stay very much in touch.
My career has been very varied. I joined the Mercantile Marine straight from school and served on the Ellerman Lines cadet ship The City of Lucknow followed by The City of Philadelphia. This was followed by a Pupilship with the Civil Engineering giant John Laing’s and numerous years with other companies performing various roles within the construction and civil engineering industry. I joined the New Towns movement in the early 1970’s and have had the unique experience of contributing to the UK’s largest development - Milton Keynes and it’s smallest one - Glenrothes.
I am a life long member of Cycling UK and British Cycling and have ridden competitively and coached cyclists at club level for over thirty years. In addition I have enjoyed three years as President of Edinburgh Road Club, my current club. Since retirement I have worked as Scotland’s first full time Cycling Development Officer and I’m one of the founding Directors of Cycling Scotland.
I’ve always had a compulsion to write and have for much of my life reviewed and recorded each day in my journal. However this blog is about sharing the things I’m most passionate about and I am inviting friends who share these passions to add to the narrative. Apart from presenting my own thoughts the blog will, I hope, be enriched by many contributions from others.
So what are the things I feel passionate about?
Not any particular order:
… My family and friends, Cycling, Rugby, Badminton, Sustainable transport, Politics, History, The Environment, Food and wine, Railways and Story telling.
So let’s go…
Bram Geiben
Bram is the son of a Dutch father and a Welsh mother, who has lived in Scotland for most of his life. He was extremely idle at secondary school in Aberdeen, scarcely less idle at university in Edinburgh, and is now very idle in retirement.
For 35 years in employment he put himself about a bit more. He has taught politics at Edinburgh University and the Open University, with two particular specialisms: political ideas, and the history of English conservatism. He now does some part time teaching of American students studying sport and society in Scotland. Historical interests include the rise of the Third Reich and the unfolding of the Holocaust. Current interests include world politics and American domestic politics. He has edited books on The State and Society and Formations of Modernity, and made many radio programmes with the OU, plus a television programme about the women of Greenham Common.
Bram detests celebrity culture, social media, and reality television. He deplores the polarisation and over-simplification of political debate (not unconnected to the former) and the growing tendency of voters to elect personally inadequate, wholly unqualified and occasionally psychopathic leaders. He is attempting to revive the lost art of disagreeing agreeably
Bram is not a proper Scotsman. He doesn’t drink whisky, play golf, collect Munros, or follow a football team. But he is a sympathetic observer of Scottish politics, sympathising with those who think the Scots might make a go of independence, and sympathising with Gareth on the recent plight of the Labour Party in Scotland. When young he voted for the Liberals, thus never electing a winning candidate, and now maintains this record by voting Green. He shouts at the television a lot.
Bram has three children, all in creative and artistic pursuits, who give him a hard time for not being very “woke”, whatever that means. He lists his principal pleasures in life as good food, good wine and good conversation. Also world cinema, the reproduction of music, and cats.
The only sport he was any good at was swimming. In the era before training got too serious, he was captain of the Edinburgh University team, but was too idle to get any further. He swims and cycles to keep fit, and watches Olympic swimming and athletics with keen interest. (When anything with horses comes on, he goes out to make a sandwich). He once overtook Gareth on a bike, but only because he was very anxious to get home in a cloudburst.
Tom Strathdee
Tom is deeply interested in the natural environment and how we fit into it. He has followed the story of global overheating over a period of 20 years and is increasingly alarmed by what he sees as our suicidal complacency in the face of this threat.
He believes the spread of Covid-19, the much greater danger of the climate emergency, our catastrophic loss of biodiversity, and the way pollutants threaten our children’s health, all stem to a greater or lesser extent from a reckless pursuit of wealth regardless of long-term human and environmental outcomes.
Tom experienced much of his first five formative years in a London air-raid shelter where, at the age of four, he learnt to read from the Daily Mirror, then the UK’s bestselling tabloid, very much on the Left, and so critical of the wartime government it was threatened with closure.
He terms this “bogus precocity”, since it’s unlikely he understood a word of the Mirror’s firebrand defence of wartime workers and merchant seamen endangered on the Atlantic convoys. However, his early achievement was long celebrated by his father, who had a true Scot’s respect for education. And this early learning may well have sown seeds for Tom’s later life as a journalist.
He entered this profession the old-fashioned way. Taking a job in a weekly newspaper group’s print shop, he often smuggled himself, and something he had scribbled, into the newsroom. Luckily the editor, a lovely guy closely related to the Labour politician Herbert Morrison, spotted him through the fog of reporters’ fags for long enough to sign him as apprentice.
In his late teens he was reporting from what is now Brent, Paddington and Hampstead. This was an all-round training. It included a spell as the newspapers’ sports editor in which he covered QPR when the Scottish manager Alec Stock was manager, and time on the sub-editors’ desk. He also had a spell as the newspapers’ stone sub, the longstop who in those days saved newspapers from disaster, above all fielding costly libels.
After two years as one of the last of the National Servicemen, a “civilian in disguise” with postings that included far off Berkley Square, Tom joined the staff of the evening newspaper in Oxford on the features desk. He later become its Features Editor, responsible for everything in the paper and its weekly magazine not current news or sport. Since retiring 20 years ago he has stayed in Edinburgh, regarding this move back to his family’s home territory as one of his best.
He enjoys a wide range of music, loves Scotland’s country and wildlife, all things Spanish except bullfighting, and has an interest in art, architecture, cities and how they have variously fostered civilisation, and the history of science.
Malcolm Simpson
Born a true Cockney - at Barts Hospital , yards from St Mary-le-Bow, the “Bow Bells” - growing up on Cable Street, scene of “The Battle”, my Dad stood by the barricades against Moseley and his BUF, who had police protection. That spawned the seed for the directionof my life’s philosophy; a journey you will learn through my jottings. A happy childhood playing on the streets and bomb sites of Stepney and Wapping, a sporting grammar schoolboy, who’s primary education was at St Peters London Docks. Brought up in an egalitarian working class Methodist household steeped in trade unionism, with a multicultural way of life that had been the norm in the area for centuries; I had classmates who spoke Yiddish, Urdu, Russian, Gujarat and even Welsh at their homes.
1974, I joined British Rail on the footplate after being another broke musician, I also moved to Milton Keynes where I lived for the next 44 years, where I married, had four daughters and lived life. This life included my growing love for cycling, increased trade union activism - I was an ASLEF official - and played music. Towards the end of my residency in MK, I went through the struggles of approaching retirement, cancer and the wrecking of a town by political ideologies.
2014, my wife and me bought a cottage for our retirement, in rural South West Wiltshire. After years of part time renovation and “holiday homing” we moved full time the week of the “Beast From The East.” Since retirement in the country, life has not turned out as expected, but far more interesting and fun. The music, the cycling, Covid 19, our children now as adults, rural living, fading parents and being able to drink ale at leisure.
I hope that you can join me where I try to discover how I changed from an angry young man to a miserable old sod, while being unable to take neither myself or life in general too seriously.