We have booked the Paramount for the next full-scale get-together on Wednesday 15th May 2024 starting around 12:00.
The Paramount, 33-35 Oxford St, Manchester.
Please put this date in your diaries.
I’d guess that a lot of you will have come to one of the previous events. For those who haven’t, it’s a pretty informal affair held in a pub that serves food (its a Wetherspoons) with around 40-50 ex DEC North UK folk.
For those travelling by tram, it’s the St Peter’s Square stop. Walk down Oxford St and it’s on the left by the corner with Portland Street.
For those coming via Piccadilly or Victoria stations, there’s a free shuttle bus (Metro shuttle 2) which runs every 10 minutes or so on a circular route with a stop opposite the Paramount.
It’s pretty close to Oxford Road rail station too.
In all probability it will continue into at least the early evening (it has previously) and it is not unknown for a few people to go for a meal together afterwards. So don’t worry if you can’t get there until after work; let us know and come along!
It’d be very helpful if you could respond using the Facebook mechanism and/or let Ken Punshon know by email, morse, or carrier pigeon so that we can print those large-print handy name labels which become more and more useful each year as we forget our own names.
Note that +1s are very welcome.

 

 

In his 1989 book “Megamistakes”, Steven P. Schnaars explained that technology prophets err in two ways. Few of the innovations they predict ever amount to much and they often completely overlook the most world-changing developments. Prediction is complicated. Small, hidden snags kill promising ideas. And things tend to stay the same. Sometimes unforeseen innovations snowball to astonishing dimensions. It’s interesting to contemplate what someone from the 1950s/60s teleported to today would think of the world.

Houses, streets, and cars look much the same, as do buses, trains, and aircraft. Radio and TV programming has diversified but the media are more or less unchanged, as are newspapers and magazines.  Clothing hasn’t changed much – although personal appearance has become less important to many. The Rolling Stones are still performing!

But humans have not explored the Solar System beyond the Moon. More books are published, and they look just like the books of the 1960s. However, most titles are in electronic formats including audible. One novelty would be the Kindle, which brings us to computing: central to many products that would seem most remarkable to our 1960s selves.

Computers haven’t changed much at all – and they have changed beyond all recognition. They work on the same principles, but are incredibly small and powerful. In his SF novel “Starman Jones”, published in 1953, Robert A. Heinlein based his plot around the proposition that in the future spaceships the size of ocean liners would fly at vast speeds to distant star systems, but computers would be too heavy and bulky to carry on board! Specially gifted humans would memorise vast amounts data and perform complex calculations.

Link to data source

The key breakthrough was the invention of the integrated circuit in about 1960, then circuits got smaller  and faster. A cheap laptop PCwas more powerful than 1960s mainframes. No one predicted that an industrial process would “run away” so fast and for so long. Simple economics led to cheap and cost-effective processors taking over the hardware market, killing the competition.

Huge improvements in software followed. The World Wide Web is pretty amazing, and search engines more so. For decades corporations sought to develop practical “videophones”. Today anyone can connect free, with full video across the world using Zoom, Skype, etc. Smartphones would astonish people from the 1960s, especially their power to reduce human beings to hypnotised passivity. Seemingly trivial things like bar codes have revolutionized shopping, security, and travel.

People in the 1960s might be surprised to learn that scientists have found over 5,000 planets orbiting distant stars and identified at least one solar system with planets in another galaxy. About as unbelievable as nearly 200 years ago, Auguste Comte would have found our knowledge of the exact constitution of the Sun, thinking that. unknowable. Later scientists used spectroscopy to analyse the composition of the Sun and stars with great accuracy.

We can’t predict what may come of discoveries we haven’t yet made.

My Very Best Wishes to All for 2024. I hope that the Christmas/New Year holiday was a chance for relaxation and enjoyment.

During 2023 Dexodus membership continued to grow with the addition of 23 new members, making the total membership 1164 at the end of 2023.

The Reading Museum project continues to make progress and the next phase should see the oral history interviews begin. Peter Thomson’s more detailed update can be viewed at https://dexodus.uk/reading-museum-updatejan24/

I am pleased to welcome Shirley Borrett as the new Editor of Newslink. She is taking over from Tony Corbin who managed the publication for almost 10 years until his passing in August 2023. Thanks to Phil Hadfield for stepping into the brink to produce the Autumn NewsLink edition.

Shirley was one of the founding members when Dexodus was established back in 1990. We are very fortunate to have Shirley on board as Editor and the Dexodus committee look forward to working with and supporting Shirley to ensure that Newslink remains relevant and interesting to the Dexodus membership.

At the January Dexodus Committee meeting we agreed that the long–standing quarterly £50 prize for the best Newslink article would be discontinued. Instead, there will be an annual prize of £200 to be paid to a charity of the winning author’s choice. At the end of the year, all contributing authors’ names will go into a ballot and the winner drawn out at random. At the end of this year, after the first £200 has been won, the committee will review whether this annual draw will continue.

So, a big thank you to everyone who has already contributed the articles so essential to the success of NewsLink. I hope many more of you will be inspired to write by the possibility of a £200 donation to your favourite charity!

Also at the January committee meeting, the date for the 2024 Dexodus AGM was set for 15th May at the Calcot Park Golf Club commencing at 18.00. We have moved away from March in response to those who are reluctant to drive at night. Having listened to feedback the AGM will not only be later in the year, when the evenings are lighter, it will also be more interactive. The technology for remote attendance will be set up as a meeting rather than a webinar. This means that those participating remotely will be able to join in discussions, make comments and vote. More information regarding agenda etc. will follow in due course.

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who responded to my request for articles. Please keep them coming, because after every NewsLink edition, there’s another one coming up that also needs filling with words and pictures!

Secondly an apology: by the time you receive this edition it will be at least a week late. Christmas and New Year got in the way a bit, but the main reason is just getting to grips with the technology and making the design layout work for the pdf and online. My thanks to Benny Placido, our webmaster, for his great support; I couldn’t have done it without your help.

I hope you like the new look and find it easy to read – some of the changes are to make it more accessible to those of us who are visually challenged as we get older. You will also note that generally articles are shorter. With apologies to some authors, I have edited articles to hopefully make them punchier with an ‘active’ rather than ‘passive’ voice. Like all editors, my aim is to grab your attention. Online you can also participate.

Every item, including this one, allows you to comment. We all have memories of a working environment that was exceptional at the time, and we’ve all done lots of things in the three decades since. We’re a unique community and it would be great to have lots of commentary to make it feel like an active community. So, please have your say: do you agree with the author’s approach, were you there for the events described, have you had a similar experience, or struggled with the same issue? Some items may evoke memories or stir up emotions, so please share those thoughts with the author and other members.

This edition has two articles seemingly illustrating very different aspects of DECs organisational culture. The two challenges were a decade apart and one wonders what difference that decade made. Doing Nothing is in the pdf and online. Secondly the inside story of the 1985 London Marathon is here . It would be good to hear your views on the two stories, so please do comment. There is also a photo of the marathon team – are you in the picture, or do you know who is? Please let us know!

In the decades since DEC, many of us have retired or are semi-retired. How do we all spend our time, I wonder. Three articles offer different ideas – could you become a shedder, a learner or a writer? Tell us what you think of these options, or/and write an article about what you do.

The How Predictable Are Predictions article might surface some interesting thoughts from members.  What do you think about how different life is today versus say four or five decades ago. In fact, sharing those memories and ideas could be a series that runs and runs in future editions.

Similarly, it would be great to have a regular Regional page, with items specifically relevant to those areas, whether it’s memories or later activities. Please add your comments about what to cover. Incidentally, did people find the DEC ‘culture’ the same, or different, in different areas?

As I write this it is not quite the end of January, so  I feel there is still time to wish you a happy and healthy 2024, and please keep those articles coming throughout the year.

By 1984 DEC had three years experience supplying and operating systems supporting the Reading half-marathon, a 5,000 runner event sponsored by DEC. Based on that experience DEC took on the challenge to adapt these systems for the 1985 London Marathon, a significantly larger event involving 22,000 runners. The 1985 Reading half would be a ‘dry run’ as it was about a month before the London Marathon.

Unfortunately, on Reading race day all did not go according to plan. The results and the awards ceremony were delayed by around half an hour. As UK ADG (Applications Development Group) Manager, I was there to see how the system performed. I had to reassure Geoff Shingles, who was conducting the awards ceremony, that the software problems were being dealt with and a lengthy delay was not expected.

After the Reading race I called my management team together to discuss the situation and evaluate options. We discovered that DEC’s commitments to Chris Brasher, the race director, were not clearly defined and our results system required significant changes in order to function correctly. I realised we had serious problems and the London Marathon was only a month away.

Given that DEC’s reputation was at stake we decided to meet the challenge by forming a project management team to focus on and co-ordinate our efforts. Individuals then took on various tasks, with the agreement that we would meet regularly to review progress and plan our next steps.

My task was to arrange a meeting with Chris Brasher to agree precisely what DEC would deliver, particularly on the race day and immediately after. Then I would feed this back to the project team. Subsequent meetings followed with Chris to ensure that our mutual expectations for the day remained fully aligned. Meanwhile UK ADG’s two Software Consultants undertook a detailed analysis of the current results system.

Reconvening a few days later, it was clear that the results system would fail to meet Chris’s requirements and would have to be re-written. To achieve this, we needed a couple of VAX 11/730’s to develop and test the new system. But, due to extremely high customer demand, getting hold of VAXs, especially at such short notice, was virtually impossible. Our colleagues in Information Services eventually managed to ‘divert’ a couple of machines recently arrived at Heathrow and point them in our direction, so our two consultants could get to work.

A caravan on Westminster Bridge, just after the finishing line, would house the results system on race day. To protect against hardware failure, we decided to duplicate everything. Four networked machines would work in parallel with two MicroVaxs collecting data from the finishing line Seiko timers in order to gauge the running time of each runner. The timing information would be checked against data on two VAX 11/730s, giving the sequence of runners completing the course. Checking these two sources of information was intended to greatly reduce human error. The system was designed to function on one processor should multiple hardware failures occur.

There were three lanes at the finishing line, each with separate Seiko clocks under which runners completed the race. Each of the lanes was continuously videoed to capture both the time and each runner’s number. The videos would provide the ultimate proof of the accuracy of DEC’s results system.

Beyond the finishing line, chutes directed runners along Westminster Bridge to three London buses where they handed in their bar code badges. These were entered in sequence into a DEC word processor. This was intended to ensure that, if all else failed, a labour-intensive process utilising all DEC’s staff working on the bridge could deliver the race day commitments made to Chris Brasher. A MicroVax containing a complete runner database was also provided to BBC race commentators enabling them to access information by entering runner badge numbers.

Led by Keith Saunders, Field Service (F/S) played a crucial role throughout, installing and maintaining all the hardware underpinning the software systems. Without their commitment and participation, the Marathon project would never have succeeded. A potential and critical vulnerability that F/S identified was the power supply. Power would be supplied to Westminster Bridge from County Hall. A power cut in the middle of London was virtually unheard of, but to mitigate this risk, Keith insisted that two generators be craned onto Westminster Bridge.

On the day, at almost exactly the time the race started, County Hall suffered a power failure. One of the generators cut in and the Vax’s continued to function flawlessly.

Given the race day problems encountered in Reading, we decided to bring the results team, of about 40 people, together to hold a fully-fledged test run a week prior to race day. The caravan with computers on board was moved to DEC’s Viables building in Basingstoke and the team took part in a full-blown rehearsal. A number of important lessons were learnt but overall, the exercise was a success and gave us confidence that we had a good chance of delivering on our race day commitments.

The team moved into a hotel near Westminster Bridge. Early next morning, Sunday 21st April, with the caravan and generators already installed, the team walked onto the bridge for final checks and preparations for the day ahead. Some hours later the race started and the team waited expectantly for the first runners to cross the finishing line.

This project gave us our first experience of mobile phones. They were used by the team to communicate during the day. I set up my base on the top deck of one of the London buses equipped with a Vodaphone ‘mobile’, which was the size of a brick.

During the day, overseen by DEC’s staff, the results system performed flawlessly and, as committed, the elite runners, team results, etc. were delivered to Chris and his team. So far so good. The runners were home, the winners were celebrating and the organisers were satisfied.

Afterwards, the caravan generators were removed from the bridge and the caravan was transported back to DEC premises. The data from the caravan VAXs was transferred to a VAX 11/780, That processed the information and produced a paper record of results for the overall race and for each of the three lanes. This was completed on Monday 22nd .

Here is the marathon team, with Chris Brasher and the medal awarded to DEC
The photo includes Chris Brasher and some of the project team, plus the winner’s medal presented to DEC in recognition of its achievements. I am on Chris’s left and on his right is Marcus Palliser from the UK Marketing group who was Chris’s initial DEC contact.

On Tuesday 23rd, Chris and his team were welcomed into a DEC park conference room which had three large video screens. Beneath each was a stack of line printer paper. Chris and his team looked at numerous random points in the video recordings to cross-check the times displayed on the SEIKO clocks with the printouts. These checks confirmed that the results system times exactly matched the finish line recordings. The results were then fed directly into DEC’s typesetting system to produce a fully documented set of results and certificates for each of the race runners.

DEC’s London Marathon team comprised some 50 staff, who devoted significant time to ensuring DEC’s success in taking on this major challenge. That they succeeded and overcame all obstacles in order to meet each and every customer requirement is evidence of the talent, tenacity and commitment of DEC employees. Something I witnessed numerous times during my 22-year stay with the company.

To say that Chris and his team were delighted, is a gross understatement. Here you can read the letter sent by Chris Brasher to Geoff Shingles praising the whole team and awarding them a special medal.

Wow! What an organisation.

This is a blog that John Harper wrote a couple of years ago, but is particularly appropriate right now, because his partner in crime here was Dave Brennan, who passed away recently. It has been edited down a bit, but you can see his original blog about the doing nothing contract here

About a year after I left DEC in 1995 and started a consultancy business, I ran into a former colleague. He was involved in a huge project for a major European telco. Did I know anyone who could help? Well yes, me! But my daily rate was over double what DEC would normally pay. No problem, because they were assembling an elite team of top-level architects to get the overall design right. Within a week I had a purchase order for three months, 40 hours per week, at my much higher daily rate.

When I showed up at DEC in Reading, there were two others in the “elite” team. One was Dave Brennan, who I knew well as, like me, he had spent 20 years as an employee.

The proposed project was very interesting on an oft-repeated theme. Telephone networks built using proprietary systems by specialized suppliers like (then) GEC and Alcatel. They cost at least ten times more than normal computers. This client had figured out it was just a big distributed computing application. They therefore wanted to run their national telephone and data network using off the shelf computer hardware and, as far as possible, software.

It seemed like a wonderful idea, but has been tried several times and so far has never really worked. The problem was that 25 years ago, and even now these telcos were their suppliers’ only customer. They made incoherent or outrageous demands, confident their suppliers would have to follow. The price tag reflected this, but the engineers weren’t paying the bills, so those dots never got joined up inside their huge bureaucracies.

Anyway, our mission was to use off the shelf DEC computers and software to build the switching control system at the heart of the network. Not a hard problem, as the basics are simple. Translate a number that someone has dialled into a series of instructions to the physical switches, e.g. connect channel 92 of trunk 147 to channel 128 of trunk 256.

What makes it hard is the scale. It must work for millions of users and concurrent calls. But none of the actions have to be synchronised. Not like Facebook, where something you upload becomes instantly visible to a billion users around the world.

Within a week, Dave and I had figured out how to put the available software components together and have a working, scalable prototype within a couple of months. Turning that into a production system would be a much bigger job, needing integration to the telco’s dozens of management systems, but that was all low risk, routine stuff. We started writing code.

What we had failed to take into account, was the DEC bureaucracy. In a large open-plan office nearby was a large team of project managers, program managers, project documentation specialists, and for all we knew telephone sanitizers as well. They operated in blissful ignorance of any actual technical details whilst they came up with the cost estimates that would be at the heart of the formal bid for the project.

As well as being a computer manufacturer, DEC had a large and thriving Systems Integration (SI) business. They had procedures and processes for managing such projects. Mostly small, (integrate a driver for a new piece of hardware into an operating system, or build a user interface around a database application) some big (tens of person-years) a few were really big, like our telco project.

Part of the established process was to know when the project was too big for the current level of project management – that project then escalated to the next tier of project management. They then brought in their team to look at the design, the business aspects, the risk, and everything else.

First the new team multiplied all the existing work estimates by two or more, as a matter of principle because that was nearly always right. (A very successful SI company CEO always multiplied all engineering estimates by pi. He claimed it worked every time). Then they added a new layer of program managers, project documentation specialists, telephone sanitizers and all the rest. Then they looked at the details, invariably resulting in another increase by a factor of two or so.

Our project had already been through two such escalations. Realistically this was a 50 person-year project. Estimates were already in the hundreds, maybe 20 times the original figure. So, yet another escalation, to the ultimate level, the corporate Large Projects Office (LPO) in Geneva.

The LPO was to SI what J K Rowling’s Dementors were to Hogwarts. Their job was to suck all joy, and possibility of success, out of a project. I have no idea whether they actually delivered any Large Projects, but I doubt it. Within a week they had doubled all the existing estimates and added yet another layer of program management. The project had now reached a size (approaching 1000 person-years) that just flat-out terrified the country management. A project on this scale, if it went wrong – which was just about guaranteed – could take the whole company down, and result in some very senior people seeking new career opportunities.

The whole team was called together. DEC had decided to no-bid the project. Permanent employees would be reassigned. All contractors were terminated immediately.

This is where things got surreal for Dave and myself. We pointed out that there was no provision for termination in our purchase orders. DEC had bought 90 days of my time, and 180 days of Dave’s, just as if they had bought a thousand cases of beer.

“That, we were told, “is covered by our standard terms and conditions. It is implicit in the purchase order.”

“Maybe,” we replied, “but what isn’t in the contract, isn’t in the contract. The only contract we have is the PO, which has no mention of any standard terms and conditions.”

They accepted our point: “OK, but you will have to accept to work on any other project for the duration of the contract.”That was fine by us. Soon a project cropped up. We started reading documents and figuring out what was needed.

A day later we were called into our original project manager’s office. “The new project is refusing to pay your much higher than normal rates. They say we agreed the rates so we have to pay. But we’re not willing to subsidize other projects. So you must stop work on the project immediately. You are not to work on anything else either. You are forbidden to work on any project except the one you were originally hired for.”

That project was cancelled, so there was nothing to do for it. So we were forbidden to do any work at all. It was Dave who came up with the name “The Doing Nothing Contract”.

I was commuting from Nice, flying to England on Monday, staying in an hotel and flying back on Friday. I was not permitted to do nothing from home, I had to do nothing in the office. That was the weirdest few weeks of my professional life.

Dave, who lived locally, and I would roll up to the office around 10, read the news and chat, then go off to a pub for lunch. We’d be back by 2.30, spend another hour or two nattering (no web to surf back then), and go home. I never spent an evening on my own as I still had friends around Reading, but I definitely put on weight during that time of doing nothing.

After a couple of weeks, the project manager called. “Look, this is silly. How about if we pay off half the remaining contract, and call it quits?” That was fine by me, I already had other work lined up and this was just free money. I left that afternoon and went home.

Dave and I stayed in touch. Because his contract had a lot longer to run, his suggestion to do the same had been turned down. But few days later, he was told they would terminate the contract “in breach”, i.e. they would stop paying him. Dave was at DEC for years and knew exactly how things worked. “But if you do that, I’ll sue” he said.

“Sure, yes, off the record, that’s what we’d advise.”

“DEC won’t contest it, so you’ll settle and end up paying the full amount, plus costs.”

“That’s true. But that will come out of a different budget, not ours.”

Even they could see the silliness of all this. Soon afterwards they settled with him on the same basis as with me. He walked away with tens of thousands in unexpected cash, and went back to his day job doing IT projects for insurance companies.

That was the end of the Doing Nothing Contract.

At age 16 I started work in a steelworks laboratory whilst studying for an ONC on day release. After 2 years I started a 4-year sandwich course at my local technical college doing an HND in Metallurgy. It was a lot like going back to school. In fact. because the college had taken over the buildings vacated by my old grammar school, I really was back at school, even the same classroom. Each year consisted of seven months at college followed by five months in various steelworks departments. I can’t recall much, but three placements stick in my mind because of the dirty and dangerous situations in which I and my fellow students found ourselves.

Conveyor belt at sinter plant

The first was at a sinter plant. A sinter plant converts iron ore fine particles into a state suitable for charging into a blast furnace. Putting the ore fines straight into the furnace would clog it up. The fine ore, mixed with powdered coke and limestone, is heated until it fuses together in larger lumps suitable for charging to the furnace. A cast iron moving conveyor in the sinter plant carries the mixture under a series of gas burners. The burners ignite the coke and melt the limestone which fuses the ore particles together. At the end of the conveyor the ‘sinter’ falls off and is cooled and taken to the blast furnace.

A sinter plant is a very dirty place.  The one I in was built in the early 50’s when less attention was paid to health and safety. The atmosphere was full of very fine particles of ore and coke which hung in the air. Despite overalls, the dust seeped through to your skin. Without face masks you breathed in the dust laden air. The town next to the works had the highest incidence of bronchial diseases and deaths than any town in Britain.

Because of the conditions students were not normally sent there. However, one of our lecturers was carrying out research for his PhD and his students carried out sampling of material and instrument readings on a 24-hour basis for two weeks. It was not an experience I wanted to repeat. So, several years later I declined an invitation to apply for the job of shift manger.

The second instance also involved a research project, this time on the nearby iron making plant, where there were three blast furnaces. It involved taking molten iron samples around the clock. The molten iron leaves the furnace at about 1500 degrees centigrade. It runs through open troughs into the ladles which run on rails and take the molten iron to the steel furnaces. The students had to take samples from the molten metal stream. We were given glass phials on the end of short poles. The phial had a vacuum inside and when stuck in the molten stream the end melted and sucked up an iron sample. This was a delicate operation because only about a quarter inch of glass had to enter the metal. So, we were only a couple of feet from the molten stream. The heat was intense and the only safety equipment was a visor to protect the face.

We students resented the fact that we were doing a very unpleasant and dangerous job on a shift basis to earn the lecturer a PhD, whilst he turned up once a day to collect the samples. What he did not know was that on the night shift we took the entire shift’s samples from the very first cast and then slept for the rest of the shift. I’m not sure how he explained those results in his thesis.

The third experience was when we were sent to the coke ovens. This turned out to be the worst experience of all.

Coke is made in a series of vertical ovens known as a battery. The basic process is simple: fine crushed coal is poured into each oven and then heated in the absence of air. All the volatile hydrocarbons are driven off leaving hard metallurgical coke suitable for the blast furnace.

Each oven in a battery has four circular ports on top, each about 18 inches diameter. It’s sealed with a cast iron lid. A charging car runs along rails on the top of the ovens, loaded with coal. When an oven is ready to be charged all 4 lids are removed manually by operatives walking on top of the oven. Ordinary shoes would melt because the oven top was so hot, and wooden clogs were worn instead. Only two ports were used for charging the coal. The other two allowed the displaced “air” inside the oven to escape. Once the oven was full the lids were replaced and the car moved on to the next one.

During my stint at the coke ovens the operatives went on strike for more pay. Management decided that the white-collar staff, including us students, would take their places.

I thought it would be fun to drive the charging car, so volunteered for that and took my place on the car next to the foreman who showed me what to do. He called for the removal of the four lids, then positioned the car over them. He released the coal into the oven through two of the ports. Immediately thick yellow sulphurous smoke streamed from the other two ports and totally engulfed the car.

I could not see my hands in front of my face. Tears poured from my eyes and I dared not breathe in. After what seemed an age but was probably about 30 seconds the smoke cleared and I was able to breathe.

I leapt off the car shouting “I don’t know how much you pay these poor b******s but whatever it is it is not enough.

And that was my worst experience of all my placements.

It is now 2024, the 60th year since Digital Equipment, a little-known computer company from the USA set up its first UK office in Reading. Dexodus is planning to celebrate this anniversary year in several ways and is working closely with the Reading Museum to preserve some of the history. DEC’s arrival is seen as the start of Reading’s Digital Revolution, with other technology companies such as Microsoft and Oracle following.

With help from Dexodus, DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users Society), The National Museum of Computing and others, Reading Museum has started gathering information about DEC. They have sifted through the 500 responses to their survey and identified people who have an interesting story to tell. So far, they have carried out 12 in-depth interviews with ex-DEC employees to capture oral history. They will be extending this further to include customers and anyone else who has an interesting view on the impact the company had on the region. In due course they will also be collecting physical items from people who have offered. The plan is to have a major display in Reading Museum later this year and a focus on DEC in the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.

Up to now the project has been ticking over with a steering team representing the various interested parties, including Dexodus. A project manager is about to be hired as a dedicated resource to drive things forward over the next few months. There will be an update at the Dexodus AGM but meanwhile we are planning a Zoom session for people who are interested to know a bit more. This session will be at 11am on Wednesday 20th March. There will be presentations from people running the project and an opportunity to ask questions about it. You should receive an email soon with more details.

I suspect that for most retirees the time soon arrives when jobs delayed whilst working are done and the rest of retirement stretches ahead. Afternoon TV and snoozing on the sofa perhaps, or golf or walking football?  I reached the ‘idle’ state after about a year and began searching for new ways to engage my interest and fill my time.

An advert in the local classified said: Mens shed opening soon. Originating in Australia, they are as described – a shed where Men get together. They talk, laugh, build and repair things, sometimes including pet projects.

I spoke to Richard on the number listed.  He was similarly recently retired and had agreed to look into starting a Mens shed in Midsomer Norton, my local town. The Mayor was enthusiastic and supportive and there were buildings we might use.  Richard and I kicked the idea around for a while and then met the Mayor to flesh out the details which all sounded positive. Once up and running we could be covered for insurance by the Community trust, and the Mayor could point us toward local charities who might fund us.

Fired up with enthusiasm we put together an advert announcing that the Mens shed was opening and inviting members to call us. A little premature since we had no money, no tools and no shed, but who cares about little details like that?

Soon we had three more people join us and agreed that once we had a shed we’d charge £5 for annual membership and each visit would cost £3. That would buy coffee or tea and keep the lights on! We then began asking around for surplus tools and put notices in local papers.

I was amazed by the response from people who wanted to both clear their garages and support our group. Sadly, many were recently widowed and wanted us to clear out their dear departed’s shed. We visited everyone and soon amassed a stack of old tools and ‘stuff’. We never refused anything, so we also picked up a pool table and a lathe!  One donation was a car welding kit . That went on eBay and the £30 it made bought a set of chisels for the lathe, so it all worked well.  We auctioned the pool table later.

The Mens shed has now been running for five years and is well established in the community. It makes items for local schools and helps out in the community. It won the local Community Trust cup for Best local project a year or two ago.

We were well advised by Pat Abrahams in Frome who runs a very successful shed. See also https://menssheds.org.uk/ for information and where to find your local shed.

Many people say “I’d love to retire” but unless you have something you actually want to do, retirement can be pretty boring.

Conversely, a man in his 70’s told me that he had loved working but retiring at 67 was too late. His passion was walking but, through a leg injury, he could not do the long distance walk he had been planning for his retirement. However, he gave me some good advice. I already knew it, but when somebody else puts a thought into words, it somehow hits home harder. He said that between the ages of 60 and 70 you, hopefully, have three things: Time, Money and Health. You must take advantage of these benefits and decide exactly what you want to do with your time.

We want to retire, but sometimes, we waste our opportunities through lack of forethought. Others of course take full advantage of their retirement time and enjoy many activities, stay in contact with friends, or perhaps give their time freely to benefit causes that they support.

Classroom scene with one person looking at multicoloured post-its on the wall and two male and two females sitting at a table watching
Find out more about Don Quijote language courses

When I retired, one of my friends had recently returned from an Italian language course in Sicily which she had really enjoyed. She suggested I find a similar course. I started with a two week “new learner” Spanish course in Madrid with a company called “Don Quijote”. The school was very smart and professional. No English was spoken on the course, as the students came from all over the world, e.g. Italy, Germany, Brazil, USA, France. The school wanted you to be immersed in Spanish. This was the start of me going to different Don Quijote Spanish language schools in Salamanca, Valencia, Granada, Barcelona, Seville and Tenerife over the years.

Typically, I would take lessons in the morning and wander around the city in the afternoon/evening. I went to museums and art galleries, or sat drinking coffee in a street café, watching the world go by. Accommodation was organized by the school and was always good, but certainly not luxurious.

I was often the oldest student on a course, but always accepted by the younger students who were all very dedicated. They were keen to learn for specific reasons such as wanting to work in Spain or Latin America, or perhaps needing Spanish for their existing work. There were also courses for over 50s if you didn’t want to be with younger students, or courses organized around a love of Spanish cooking, wine or culture.

I continue to study Spanish every week in the UK via Zoom with a group of friends who I have known for over ten years now. So, learning a language has given me a reason to travel, an ability to communicate with local people (despite my bad grammar!) and an interest resulting in a group of friends here in the UK too.

Learning languages is obviously not for everyone, but finding an interest which is genuinely engaging, social and can grow with you, can help us all enjoy our retirement more.