Day: 6 May 2007

A Ten Year Old’s Happiest Memory

The happiest memory I have is the time I visited the studios of Piccadilly Radio in Manchester in the Easter holidays in April 1981.

As I’ve previously written, when I was much younger,  I was a huge fan of Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio. So much so that when I was eleven, I spent hours writing a letter asking to see their studios. That didn’t quite work out, but I got there anyway. A couple of days ago, I was sorting through some old papers and discovered that, apparently, when I was in class J3C at Standish High School, I declared that visit to Piccadilly as my happiest memory. To read it amuses me now, but it’s recreated here for nostalgic reasons:

My Happiest Memory

The happiest memory I have is the time I visited the studios of Piccadilly Radio in Manchester in the Easter holidays in April 1981. We were shown around by Julian. We got there at quarter to four.

First, we went into the master control room in which programmes are recorded, and it is where the producer sits to make sure the programme is running smoothly. At four o’clock we went into studio two w(h)ere DJ Phil Sayer was getting ready for the second hour of his show. As the news was on, he told us how the cart machines work (cart is short for cartridge). The carts are jingles, and advertisements are played on the radio station.

As Piccadilly is an independent radio station, it plays advertisements to cover the running costs. Businesses can buy an advertisement to be played at the time of day they pick. It can cost them well over a hundred pounds! There are a maximum of nine minutes of advertisements in each hour.

After the news finished and Phil faded down the record, he announced the first competition of the day, ‘Beat The Intro’, in which you have to guess the name of the record before the words start. It was a phone-in competition, but nobody could get through because Julian had pressed some buttons and jammed the lines. When somebody got through, Phil read out one name, there was a crackle, and somebody else got on the air. Phil Sayer was in a panic, so he put another record on after the competition and looked in the control room window, saw what happened and told the phone girl to put things right. We left quickly …

Julian then showed us the editing and commercial production booths. When we left, my dad bought me a t-shirt. I also got a lot of stickers.

It was a very interesting day. We were there for about an hour.

June 2009: I scanned a photo of the original; my ten-year-old handwriting isn’t that bad, really.

Fly Away

I never really had a fear of flying – at least not in the sense it stopped me doing anything. I just get nervous at take-off and then, generally, I am fine.

Why do I put myself through this on a regular basis? Occasionally, I have to travel for work. Travel, they say, broadens the mind, and I am sure that it does. But sometimes I wonder why I have to put myself through the ordeal.

I am not the greatest person to get on an aeroplane, but for the best part of four years, my working life has meant dealing with (and visiting) customers across Europe. I really enjoy these trips, and it’s great to meet people face-to-face that you would only normally deal with on the telephone or via email. And, although I shouldn’t moan, the downside is that I never get to see any of the fantastic places that I go to. I’ve lost count of how many times I have been to Milan and never seen anything other than airports, offices, and taxis. It’s such a shame.

I never really had a fear of flying – at least not in the sense it stopped me doing anything. I just get nervous at take-off and then, generally, I am fine. I like a decent-sized jet with seats that have sufficient padding on the arms so that, when I grip them, my knuckles can go white without serious injury to my hands. Once in the air, I am OK. Nothing to bother me until the return journey. So it’s not really too bad travelling to most of Europe for business. I appreciate the fact that I can travel and count myself lucky that it’s only a few minutes of unease.

So, here I am today in Dundee. I have customers to see here who are very pleasant people to work with. I’ve been planning this trip for a couple of weeks, and I had planned to take the train until I realised that, at best, it was going to be a six-hour journey. I had to take a flight to give myself any chance of doing some other work today.

Now these flights are the worst. I can’t stand the small 30-seater planes (that seem to be a cross between propeller and jet-driven) that bring you here. My nerves are shot, and my palms are sweaty. At take-off, it’s easy to mistake the arm of the person in the next seat with that of the plane. Again, I am fine once high enough not to be shaken around by a passing air current that, I suspect, has desires to knock us 500 miles off course. That moment, however, as we’re picking up speed and racing down a runway, sends a panic through me that I hate. Unlike those other journeys, these small planes seem to make me sweat and grip for longer than normal. The planes don’t go as high, and so I can see the land, which I don’t think is good for me.

The fear is, of course, irrational – at least these flights are no different from the others. The more nervous I get about taking this short flight, the worse I feel. I know that it is silly, and I become annoyed by my own fear – I’ve taken so many flights, it should be like taking a bus (which I think I do less than flying). I can’t stop the sick feeling. Every lurch of the plane, every shake and noise is analysed in a way I do not do with larger aircraft. Every expression on the stewardess’s face was analysed for a sign – should that clunk have happened? Should that beep be sounding? Should this window rattle so much?

And the very worst bit of it all? I know I have to do it backwards tomorrow evening.

Next time, I’ll take the train (maybe).