David Marsden

Everyone has been asking, so here’s the deal. Unless you count Butlins in a wet and windy Skegness (and I do), I haven’t been anywhere.

Nowhere that doesn’t have at least a flaky internet connection, or a sleeping family.

While I suppose I have been ill with what turned into an acute exacerbation of my chronic lung disease, that makes it sound worse than it was. I was still here, just under the weather.

Everyday activities became more difficult. Breathing became more difficult. But it’s carry on, or what? Throw in a few anti-sleeping pills and sleeping became more difficult. Concentrating became more difficult. For my sins, I did take a few weeks off work. But I did have a lot of free time on my hands.

As regular readers will know, I recently began excavating my old band Hovercraft from the analog archives of cassette tapes stored in cardboard boxes for thirty years. Why? Well, it’s not the first time, and it sure won’t be the last. It’s something I do periodically. Hovercraft were easily the best band I ever played in, and our life was cut short after an exhilarating nine months. I didn’t know why at the time, and I don’t know why now, but of course I have blamed myself aplenty. As well as Sir Gareth Southgate.

What better way to put all of that self-recrimination behind me than to reinvigorate the band, bring them back to life and tell the world how great we were-and still are?

With my old friend and bass player Aaron (aka Ron Nasty), I resurrected Hovercraft’s songs, created a website (hosted here on micro.blog), and began the boring, expensive, hard work of promoting our songs and searching for our lost singer/songwriter Charlie Pepper. We have a couple of big, exciting album releases planned before Xmas, and more than anything else this project has reinvigorated me, in between coughs and wheezes, and kept me going into the wee hours mixing, mastering and co-producing the whole package.

Another personal project I have been working on is a reorganisation of my website here, and more significantly, thinking about my “social” output and writing. I haven’t been very social recently, and I seem to be less interested or good at it as I get older. Plus, my time has been invested elsewhere. Anyway, I will keep at it, and will streamline my actual, proper writing so it all makes a bit more sense. I started by curating all my diatribes on local democracy and community activism and creating Southall Stories (also hosted here on micro.blog).

Yes, I am an investigative journalist! (According to Claude.)

Hopefully it will be a useful resource for anyone who is interested in all the political shenanigans in Ealing. Another archive restored!

Another personal project, and one I rarely talk about publicly, is my management of a one hundred strong online soccer management gaming community. This summer we celebrated ten years together - no mean feat at all. That’s kept me busy, too, and while the old website isn’t new (or hosted on micro.blog), it did get a makeover and some improvements, and another new website (hosted here on micro.blog) and community, and another archival project (created by Claude and ChatGPT with me as their copy and paste coding monkey like I was a teenager all over again).

Yes, I am a web developer! And an archivist! And a community manager! And (thanks to our AI overlords) yes, I am a coding monkey!

On the work front, which I haven’t forgotten about, before my recent illness, I developed a £1m+ funding application for a cross-borough youth project that will transform young people’s lives in two of the most-deprived areas in west London - and, we hope, support them to become our community leaders of the future. All very exciting, and not a little stressful - a lot depends on it being accepted and successful. I hope we find out soon if we get the grant.

Yes, I am a project development and sustainability lead! On an administrator’s salary!

On the home front, my kids are transitioning from Reception to Year one (so far so good, loss of afternoon playtime is the main complaint) and from Primary to Secondary (so far so good, all the other kids being so much taller is the main complaint).

Mum looks set to move at the very start of next month. Moving house is the most stressful life event, and doing so when you’re 80, unwell, and from the home you bought expecting it to be your final home in the town where you went to school is harder. She’s handled it pretty well, to be fair, although the anxiety has kicked in the closer we got to the desired completion date. It’s not been easy for me, either, as there’s a limit to what I can do from a distance. It’s mostly “ask your solicitor” or “tell your solicitor” and trying to reassure her that everything will be all right in the end.

Lastly, and least (and this has turned into a half-time team talk), I helped raise over £600 for my son’s school PTA. So not a bad half year’s work at all.

I might not have “been” anywhere, but I’ve been here, now. Breathing (sometimes with difficulty), creating, preserving, caring for others. Breathing new life into old. That’s not “nowhere” - that’s everything.

Having been so bitterly rejected both in love and at work, I started to look around for new opportunities. I don’t remember how I found it, but a nursing home nearer to where I lived at the time (Cleethorpes) was advertising for a Therapeutic Activities Co-ordinator to develop a range of meaningful activities with frail elderly people who also had - iirc - impaired memory, or dementia. Right up my street (well, just around the corner).

This was the first time in my life (I was thirty years old) that I’d ever actually wanted a job, and I was determined to make sure I did everything I possibly could to get it (the money was better, too, although not a great deal). I think I really impressed them at the interview with the presentation I did (probably bullet points, but that was all the rage back then), but more my genuine enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of doing what, at the time, seemed like it would be my “dream job”.

The role was to cover three separate nursing and residential homes in the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and Humberston area, all quite different as it turned out. I would also liaise with a colleague in Hull (where the company that ran the care homes had its headquarters), who had already been in post in his area for a year or so. Steve was a social worker by trade, and he was very upset to discover that I was not. He was also agitating for a substantial pay rise, and later on we would jointly present our case to the board of directors.

I shadowed Steve for a day or two and wrote substantial notes and reflections, before setting up my desk on the landing of the first floor next to the lift and the payphone (yes, really) at The Anchorage just up the road from Blundell Park. When I first entered The Anchorage it was a shock to the system. I was used to a welcoming, friendly, clean, freshly smelling (as much as possible), professional, and lively residential home where I used to work. The Anchorage was anything but. There was no welcome, staff looked harried, the place was so obviously run down and uncared for, it stank of piss, and all the residents appeared to be fully comatose.

That was on the ground floor. Upstairs was slightly better - at least the residents were awake. But it was like a madhouse, and brought back traumatic memories of a childhood school visit to the local mental hospital to sing Christmas carols to the moaning, leering, grabbing, drooling inmatespatients. The only redeeming factor now was that none of the inmates seemed able to move. I was going to have my work cut out here.

I think my boss expected me to have a timetable of bingo sessions, sing-a-longs, tea dances, quiz nights, etc. up and running straight away. But I would have to raise the dead first, and persuade the staff and manager to be supportive and helpful, In fact, a complete change of culture was needed. I spent several weeks getting to know everyone, not only there, but at the other two homes as well. One of the others was much larger with what seemed like a highly mobile group of very demented residents, while the other was more of a mixture of demented and simply frail elderly people. Once I got to know everyone, The Anchorage seemed to be mostly people with physical health problems, often compounded by the effects of a stroke.

The other two homes also had good, strong supportive managers, while The Anchorage had a temporary manager (one of the senior nurses), before appointing an absolute horror of a woman who mercilessly bullied me and made my job much more difficult than it needed to be. Luckily, most of the nurses and carers were good people.

To cut a long story short, we raised the dead. It turns out (who knew?) that even very poorly, very old people are up for conversation, doing things that interest them, socialising, going out, singing, dancing, moving, learning to walk again, reminiscing, and just living what life there is left. But they need help to do so. And when they get the help they need to do some or all of these things, it also turns out that they are often more continent, can walk again, need less of the carers' and nurses' time for personal care, feel better, have better health, and - crucially from the business point of view - live longer.

And when the residents are happier, have something to get up for, and are easier to look after, the staff are happier, too. We had a lot of fun. It was amazing. A highlight was organising three coaches and a disability-friendly minibus to take every resident from all three homes literally around the corner form The Anchorage to The Excel Club, which was (in the good old days), the premier night spot and bar for many of “my people” when they were young, for an afternoon of drinking, dancing, eating, socialising and reminiscing that I won’t forget (even if many of them them had forgotten by the time they got home).

The beauty of the whole endeavour was that people needing care were no longer seen as tasks to be performed and checked off on a list, but as people who had lives, stories, senses of humour, wants and needs like everyone else.

Such a great thing could obviously have no future, and when me and Steve presented the business case for expansion and pay rises to the board it was rejected outright. The most helpful training I ever did was with a trainer who advised me “don’t waste time trying to persuade people who aren’t interested - focus on those who are.” I’d tried my best, I really had. While I did really enjoy the job, I didn’t want to be doing the same thing week after week, year after year, with no prospect of advancement and for a company that clearly wasn’t interested or appreciative.

I started looking around again, and this time further afield. I felt I was in a rut, personally as well (it was all work and no play for me), and I needed a fresh start.

Inevitably, my time as a Manchester University player came to end, and I left the club by mutual consent when my contract ended.

Somewhat bizarrely, looking back on it, I joined what appeared to be an obscure and tiny religious cult in the middle of nowhere (deepest, darkest Lincolnshire), dabbling in some rather questionable therapy / witchcraft.

My role was primarily as Administrator with responsibility for making sense of the almost entirely lacking paperwork, contracts, and financial arrangements of the company (?) / sole practitioner / lead sorceress. Bed and board were included in my pay, which meant I didn’t get paid much at all, and had to do a lot of household chores on a strict rota, along with the other, er, residents.

I got kicked out about six months later for dropping acid at the weekend. Somehow, with a couple of band mates, we cleaned ourselves up and managed to persuade a friendly estate agent to rent us out a four-bedroomed semi-detached house that had one careful previous owner (the local vicar), that was ideally located opposite a big pub and just up the road from the local drug dealers.

We spent eighteen months there, mostly on the dole, getting our musical act into gear. Completely by chance (we put up a card in the local Spa shop window asking for a “chilled out lamppost”), we met a nomadic (on the run) alcoholic junkie who could actually sing, write songs, and also played a mean guitar. We rehearsed every day in that house (pity our poor neighbours), recorded a couple of decent demo tapes (got to number one in the local newspaper charts), and played some wild gigs that were generally pretty well received.

The end was nigh, though, as it always is. I’d got a job to help pay for gear, and fell madly in love with one of my new co-workers. Euro 96 appeared, and we all took a break from music to enjoy Ing-er-land’s latest heartbreak efforts. Our junkie friend wasn’t into football, or staying around, and one day he was gone. My love interest left, too.

This was the catalyst for me to focus on work for the first time in my life, as a coping mechanism for loss, as much as anything else. The more I worked, the less loss I felt. I couldn’t get enough of it.

I started at the bottom. Literally. The job I applied for was Personal Carer in a Residential Home. I assumed that it meant psychological care, and didn’t pay much attention on my first morning shift when I shadowed another carer who was wiping bottom after bottom (and more) of all these frail, elderly folks.

Anyway, I got into it (and my new co-worker), and found that, yes, there was a quite a degree of psychological care involved, too, if you had the time, skills and inclination. Unbelievably (or so it seemed to many in the industry at the time, when frail, elderly people find they have something worth living for (a friend to talk to, something fun to do, something like a day out to look forward to), they’re much more capable of getting themselves dressed, feeding themselves, staying continent.

Of course, many carers had none of those things, and in fact, got very little psychological care themselves in their own lives. Often it was just a continuation of the sadistic brutality from their school days.

But I found myself actually enjoying the job despite the low pay, and often quite unpleasant working conditions. I enjoyed the people - the camaraderie and comradeship of the staff and residents. We really were all in it together

That said, there was only so much arse wiping I could do before I got fed up with it. I’d done everything and more I’d been asked to do and applied to be a Senior Carer and even a Care Services Manager (responsible for running the shifts, and the home in the absence of the Home Manager). But I wasn’t successful - too little experience, I was told. Which might have been true. I’d only been there a year.

But I suspect it might also have been because I was too much of a threat to the darker side of what was going on. The manager was taking money from at least one of the more severely demented residents, and some of the staff were in on it, too. At least, that’s what I’d been told.