A Boy Named Stew

Dad has previously said that he just wanted someone to say “He wasn’t a bad bloke, he did like a pint or two”. 

At the risk of embarrassing him, I’m going to expand on that slightly. Born Michael Robert Cork to parents Bob and Kath, dad was known only as Mick from an early age. He was joined shortly later by his little sister Ro and they grew up in Rossendale Road in Folkestone.

It didn’t take long for him to develop his two main passions in life – sports and music. When he was young, he would sit in the back room of their house, listening to the football scores on the wireless and moving the names of football teams up and down on a cardboard ladder.

Whilst he supported West Brom, dad was primarily a fan of the old Folkestone Town and then Folkestone Invicta. In his later years, he would often help out selling raffle tickets, and after his retirement he briefly helped out as the press officer and also as a supporters’ club committee member.

Dad didn’t play a lot of sport after leaving school, but he liked to help when he could and he enjoyed recounting the time he was umpiring a game of cricket and lost four teeth to a poorly fielded ball.

His other great passion was music. He taught himself to play guitar with Bert Weedon’s “Play In a Day” Book which he loved so much that  he got me a copy of when I was young, forgetting that the book hadn’t been updated and all the songs were about 30 years old. In the pre-internet days, he had to play and sing the songs to me so that I’d have an idea about what they should sound like. If you ever heard him sing, you’ll know that this was with dubious accuracy. 

Dad’s first band used to practise in his bedroom at Rossendale Road, often involving a full drum kit. Fortunately the neighbours were quite forgiving as they had a son who was learning to play the piano. He ended up playing bass in a number of bands including The Trespassers, The Mystices and Captain Black, and during these years his bands supported some big names such as The Who, Cream, The Hollies and Manfred Mann mainly at The Leas Cliff Hall and Tofts Nightclub in Folkestone.

Dad attended St Mary’s Primary School in Folkestone, followed by the Harvey Grammar school, which he left at 16 and became a reporter. However he became disillusioned with journalism when he had to interview the parents of a child who had fallen over the cliff at the Warren. The job also caused time conflicts with playing in bands so he didn’t stay in the role long. It would be 23 years later when he would find himself back in the newsroom.

When dad started back at the Herald in 1980, he was working as an advertising rep before noticing the vacant role of sports editor. He asked a 6-year old football mad son whether he should apply. Thinking it was the best job ever I told him that he had to. He got the job and for the next 25 years managed to combine his work and his passion.

On his final day in his advertising role, his colleagues picked him up and bundled him over the room divider that separated the advertising team from the writing team. Apparently this is one occasion when he actually managed to land on his feet.

Dad had a history of falling over. He was so prolific at it that a time when he fell over on the bus to a Folkestone Invicta away fixture was immortalised in a terrace chant. It’s not often that journalists get a football song about them. There were other instances when he fell through the loft, down a hole in the road and walking to the bar at Canterbury Cricket Ground. That’s not to mention the time he broke his arm falling on the ice two days after his retirement. 

Dad launched himself wholeheartedly into the role of sports editor. He was a great supporter of local sports and tried to include as wide a variety as possible in the paper, always feeling bad if he had to cut something out. 

Whilst working on the paper, he was always going to say what he thought – it was impossible to stop him doing so most of the time. He somehow managed to do it whilst maintaining a good relationship with almost all of those who he was writing about. What he was able to put into print was at least a toned down version of what he could have been heard shouting on the terraces on the Saturday. There were a couple of occasions when my brother Dan and I went along to watch a game and heard someone shouting abuse to those on the pitch, before turning around and realising it was our dad. 

When watching a game, he would never be found in the press box. He was always watching from the terraces with his friends, including Harry, Ted and Pete, most of whom have also sadly passed away.

With the power of being the sports editor, dad gave himself a weekly column called Touchliner. This column was almost indecipherable even to those who knew him well, but for some reason seems to have been something that many enjoyed reading. Some of his colleagues from the paper have shared stories of how he helped them when they were a junior reporter, and about how his sense of humour never deserted him even in the most stressful times at work, also praising his commitment and his loyalty to his job. Dad felt fortunate to do a job that he was passionate about for such a large portion of his working life. 

As his colleagues found, he was always happy to help out those in need – even going so far as to leave  work shortly after getting there to give me a lift to university in Canterbury as I’d tried to get a bus that didn’t exist. 

As he wanted it to be mentioned, dad did enjoy a pint or two. This was often whilst watching football – although as the song says he did also enjoy red wine. And when the paper had been signed off for the week, he could often be found at the Nailbox on a Wednesday afternoon. During a period when I was unemployed, I would often get a drunken phone call after he’d got home from the pub to check up on me. I’ve also heard that his alcohol-fuelled speeches at the work Christmas parties were rather memorable.

Dad was always keen to share his passions. From a young age he would take his children along to watch sports at the weekend when he was working, even though it must have been very distracting for him completing his job – especially on cold winter days when the only thing to escape my mouth for 90 minutes would be “how long left, dad?” He enjoyed watching his children play sports when he was able to do so.

He also loved sharing his tastes in music. When I visited, he would often put on a concert or a documentary about some old musician I’d never heard of in an attempt to broaden my – admittedly narrow – musical preferences. 

In between his two stints in journalism dad worked at National Provincial Bank, Welfare Insurance and with Thomas Cook on the cross channel ferries.

It was whilst he was working at Welfare, that he met Lorraine at the British Lion pub where they each went with their respective groups of friends. They started dating in 1970 and got married two years later. They had three children – Stewart, Nicola and Daniel – and later in life five grandchildren – Jessica, Melody, William, Phoebe and Imogen. 

After their children had left home, Mick and Lorraine enjoyed taking many trips away. They would often take coach holidays in Britain and the continent, and celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary with a memorable Mediterranean cruise. They also liked spending weekends away in London to take in a musical, and attended many sporting functions which were always enjoyable. 

Dad loved playing with his grandchildren. He was always pulling faces or trying to make them laugh. Even later in life when he started to suffer from dementia, one of the things he still appeared to get joy from was interacting with his grandchildren, even if it was just rolling a ball back and forth. 

In the last five years of his life, dad had been very unwell. Despite overcoming cancer, his general health declined and he suffered for many years from dementia. For the last two years, he has been looked after by the staff at Saltwood Care Centre who provided him with the support that he needed.

After several spells in hospital over the last few months, he was put into palliative care.Despite this, some of the care staff have commented that they saw moments of his cheeky personality even in his last week. And, right up until the end, he almost always managed to give a smile, including when Lorraine saw him shortly before he passed away peacefully last month at the age of 77. 

For my birthday last year, I was going to play games with some friends IRL. Real life plans have a tendency to get changed a lot at the moment, and this was one of them. We opted to switch to playing online using Table Top Simulator and when we were struggling to decide exactly what to play, someone suggested Subbuteo.

The idea of playing a game that relies heavily on real world physics in a virtual setting was rather amusing and so we went for it.

As soon as it loaded up on Table Top Simulator, with boxes of teams and goals and all of the other accessories memories started flooding back.

When I was a wee lad, I was football obsessed. I also liked playing games. So it didn’t take long for Subbuteo to be one of my favourite games.

I have great memories of my dad finding a big lump of wood for us to glue the pitch to in order to keep it flat, drilling a couple of holes into it to keep the goals in position and having to find a wall to prop it up against whenever we were finished. I was also pleased to find out when playing virtually that this was a thing done by others as well.

I used to save up my pocket money to buy new accessories for it – new balls, goals or – more commonly – a new team. Subbuteo teams are generically coloured so that, for example, you can buy one team that might represent Liverpool, Middlesborough, Belgium and a host of exotic sounding foreign teams.

Obviously the players would look nothing like Ian Rush, John Barnes or Kenny Dalglish but having a team in a new colour was always exciting nevertheless. If nothing else, buying a new team means that you had a full team which hadn’t had half of the players stood on and blutac-ed or glued back onto the base at a wonky angle.

My favourite team I had was the England football team because they had put more details on to make the kit look completely like the England kit at the time rather than it being a generic team to use as a representation of several real life times. It felt like I owned something presitigous.

I played mostly with a kid who lived down my road but was a few years older than me. When I was 8 and he was 11, he would be easily beating me but that didn’t matter. I was playing football. This was like the ancient version of FIFA or Pro Evo (and the computer games at the time were far from that standard). We even had a league going where would would play half of the teams each. My teams were always in the bottom half of thhe league but I didn’t care. It was great fun.

One of my main memories from this time is when I was leading a game (for once) and the time had almost run out for the game and I suggested we called it there as there was only a minute left. My friend then sat me down and made me wait in silence so he could show me how long a minute actually is!

As with many things when you are little, you lose interest in them, other things take their place and you can forget about them.

My next main memory of playing Subbuteo is when Alex Boughton arranged a one day tournament at his flat. I went along for nostalgic reasons but remembered I actually really enjoyed the game. I lost the first game to Duncan but won the next few. I remembered that the reason my friend always beat me when I was little was because he was faster and more on the ball than I was and would be flicking his players before I was ready for him, and I used this tactic to my advantage.

I ended up having to play Duncan in a rematch for the final, and was determined to get my revenge. Adrenalin and the passage of time has led me to forget exactly how the game went but Duncan wasn’t ready for my new tactics and I came away with the victory. Here is a photo of me celebrating with the trophy to prove it.

Fast forward several years to playing it online. It is obviously not the same in many many ways but it does allow a lot of silliness, such as cloning hundred of players and sending them onto the pitch to annoy your opponent. Having no idea how hard you are going to flick the players is also quite amusing. It’s not the same but as I was playing with some great friends it was a really fun experience. We split into 2 teams – those interested in football and those not so interested in football. Let’s just say that the result is irrelevant and that the fact that I both missed and conceded a penalty was just because the physics of the game are different. Yeah, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

I have done extensive research and I will accept no differing opinions.

5. George Pig

The kid is obsessed with dinosaurs. Nuff said. He’s also a modern man, not afraid to express his emotions – even though they are pretty much always expressed through crying.

4. Mr Bull

A workman whose solution to everything is to “dig up the road!” Dropped your keys down the well? Let’s dig up the road! There’s a hole in the road? Let’s dig up the road! Also my daughter is great at copying his shocked face when Mummy Pig makes the bell ring on the whacky mallet strength game, and it is really super cute.

3. Madame Gazelle

The playgroup teacher who has been doing the job for so long that she taught all the mummies and daddies and yet still plays in a rock band called the Rocking Gazelles. Also somehow mysteriously able to instantaneously switch from playing guitar left handed to playing right handed. The show’s very own Jimi Hendrix.

2. Grampy Rabbit

They got Brian Blessed in to play Brian Blessed. A genius move by the show’s creators.

1. Miss Rabbit

Miss Rabbit seems to have a million jobs and it is never explained why. Her mannerisms amuse me. She forgets she has parked her helicopter in the sky. She says “faint” and then faints when she meets the queen.

There are foreign versions of Miss Rabbit and again, it is never explained why. There is so much mystery to her character. I would totally watch a Better Call Saul version to find out her backstory, which I imagine would be very much like Orphan Black.

I’ve been wanting to write about having a baby for quite a while, but it’s difficult for two reasons. Knowing where to start and knowing where to stop. I could write for days but quite a lot of it would be boring to anyone who isn’t directly related to me.

So I’m going to start off with this hot take: being a parent is tiring, difficult and takes up your entire life.

With that piece of information that literally no one talks about as an opener, you know there’s loads of nuggets of gold coming up next.

Whilst it is definitely all those things, it is also one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced.

I fully appreciate that it’s not for everyone, and for those it is not for, I envy you and your lifestyles where you can leave the house on a whim, without needing to remember ever little thing that might be needed.

However it is very much for me and there are so many little things that make it worthwhile, such as when I went into her room to wake her yesterday and she excitedly said “DAH-DEE!” and gave me a big cuddle. Then there’s also the big things that make it worthwhile as well, such as seeing her grow into a little person with her own likes and dislikes, as well as learning things all the time. She makes me proud of her ever day.

She has been learning about her world and learning how to communicate, and each little thing she learns is just joyous.

There are two things I would recommend for any new parent. One is baby signing – we used the excellent Tiny Talk – and it meant that we have been able to understand what Imogen wants a long time before she was able to talk.

The other thing I recommend you need to get onto before you have a baby which is hypnobirthing. Whilst I got involved in this, obviously my partner felt the most benefit as it seemed to make the birthing process go a lot more smoothly. When she suggested it, I thought it was some sort of hippy nonsense, but it is grounded in science and psychology and I really liked learning how the human body actually grows a little human and then sends it out in the world.

One of the things that I found difficult was letting go, both literally and figuratively. In the literal sense, the instinct as a parent is to protect your child from any harm, but you have to let them fall occasionally, you can’t always be holding them. You have to let them learn how the world works and how to interact with it. In a figurative sense, it has been difficult leaving her at nursery. She has been going for just over half a year and initially it is really scary leaving her with other people to fend for herself – and it is difficult too when she is upset about you leaving her there.

The other thing I have found really difficult is leaving a baby sleeping. How do you know they’re still breathing? They don’t look like they’re moving. I can’t hear anything! What if they’ve stopped? How can I check? Fortunately the anxiety around this dies down over time (although doesn’t seem to have disappeared entirely yet) and also fortunately every time she has continued to breathe despite my worrying.

It’s difficult to know if you’re parenting right. But when you see your child hugging a book and saying “cuggle” you know you’re probably doing ok. I’m sure I’ll overanalyse several parenting decisions in the future – I need to keep telling myself that there is no right way to parent and you just have to do the best you can.

So in conclusion, becoming a parent made me feel scared, clueless, frightened and that I’m in way way too deep… but it has also made me laugh, cry with joy, made me amazingly happy… and on balance I’m really quite glad it happened.

Life is all about experiences. Sometimes to have the best experiences, you have to go outside of your comfort zone.

This was on my bucket list as an abstract concept. Something that I would eventually get aorund to after mentally psyching myself up over the course of one, or maybe two decades or so.

Then, for my 40th birthday a group of friends bought my some really considerate presents to help me fulfil items on my bucket list, including this one and at that point this no longer became an abstract concept.

So I booked it up with trepidation several months in advance and then forgot about it. Then Covid delayed it so I rebooked and forgot about it. Then last week I had to fill out a form and suddenly realised it was actually happening. However the only way I could deal with it was to keep forgetting that it was happening.

I’m not a natural adrenaline junkie. I can barely deal with the tamest of rollercoasters without thinking that I’m definitely going to die horrificially, or at the very least through up and die in an non-horrific manner. So my coping mechanism is to ignore my upcoming demise and try to get on with living my life.

On the morning of the event, I kissed my wife and daughter goodbye for what would most likely be the last time and drove myself off to Headcorn airfield. By the time my friends/support crew had arrived, I had already been to the toilet three times.

Upon getting there, I discovered an airfield covered in mist. After doing the introductory video which, despite being quite light hearted whilst telling you all the information you need to know, made things feel a lot more real and scary, they told us that the weather needed to clear before anything could happen and they don’t know how long that could be.

I then spent the length of a Lord of the Rings extended edition film sitting around and chatting with Natalie, Emma and her foster child and convincing myself that it wasn’t going to happen that day, especially after overhearing one of the instructors say they didn’t think they would be doing anything that day.

I didn’t want to have to go home and come back another day to do it, but at the same time I also didn’t really want to do it that day either, however it would have been the more preferable of the two options. Thinking it wasn’t going to happen made me quite relaxed about it so when they sky cleared and they eventually announced it was going to happen, I didn’t have any time to get really scared about it.

I met my instructor Simon who talked me through everything again, and he did so just before everything was going to happen later. He also asked about how I was feeling, why I was doing it and what I would be comfortable with. The staff there were all excellent at making you feel comfortable in what is, for some people at least, a terrifying situation.

I had paid for a video to be made of my jump and the camera man spoke to me before (and after) and I couldn’t think of anything funny or intelligent to say as I was so nervous about what I was doing.

The plane ride was the closest I will ever get to being in the film Good Morning Vietnam. Simon told me to relax and enjoy the ride and it was relaxing until we got quite high. I was thinking “oh we must be close to where we jump now” and at that point Simon told me we were about half way up.

We got to the jumping height and a few people who were jumping on their own went first and literally dove out of the plane with no fear. I probably could have done without seeing that happen. As we were sat nearest to the door, we were going first. I genuinely don’t remember how we got from sitting to leaving but suddenly my legs were dangling over the edge, the camera man had climbed out and was standing on the side of the plane and within what seemed like no time at all, we were falling to our doom.

The first bit of a dive is when you stabilise. The instructor tells you to basically keep yourself in a set positions and you can then throw your arms out when they tap you on the shoulder. In my head this was going to go on for a while. Getting yourself stable when falling through the air must be difficult enough, but when you have someone attached to you, it must be even more difficult even if they are tucked up in the proper position. This was also probably the most daunting bit in theory as it is the most uncontrolled. Again, I was amazed by how quickly this bit happened. It felt like pretty much no time at all before I was tapped on the shoulder with my arms out in the freefall postion.

All whilst this was happening, the cameraman had been tumbling through the air to get below us and suddenly he was beneath us, upside down looking up at us. It seems obvious now it has happened that this must be how they film you but at the time it freaked me out a little that he was upside down.

The free fall part is the bit that is the reason most people do sky dives. It feels a bit cold initially, and apparently people can subconsciously hold their breath. To avoid this, as soon as it became obvious that we would be exiting the plane shortly, I started consciously breathing and did it for the first few seconds after exciting the plane as well until I found some relative level of comfort and realised I would remember to breathe without having to think about it.

This bit also only lasts maybe 30 to 40 seconds and my brain was pretty much spending that whole time acclimatising itself to what was going on. Before I knew it, the parachute had opened, we were vertical and falling at a much more acceptable pace and I was able to relax into it a lot more.

They asked me after what was my favourite bit and I said everything after the plane – after all of the anxiety about what was going to happen had gone because it was happening, although in hindsight it was probably the parachuting bit because I was able to enjoy what was happening a lot more. There was no fear about the parachute not opening, there was a nice pace and because there was no wind it was really quiet apart from talking to the instructor and the distant hum of the plane. I hadn’t imagined just how quiet it would be away from everything.

Obviously the instructor needed to steer the parachute to get us to be where we were going – this is the reason they can’t fly without visibility, so that we don’t end up on the M20. Simon gave me the option of trying some faster spinny stuff. We tried it, I didn’t like it, we didn’t do any more. However he did steer us through a cloud which was cool although didn’t really feel like anything. I was expecting it to be cool and refreshing.

When you come in for the landing you have to lift your legs up and you effectively slide in. We practiced this and Simon said he’d tell me to do it when we were 10 seconds away from landing. I think he must have a different concept of time to me because we seemed less than 10 seconds away from the ground when he told me to do so, which is good because I’m not sure I could have kept my legs up for that long.

Coming into land was a great relief. The adrenaline was still going for a long time which I didn’t realise until I started talking to Simon and Chad the cameraman and realised how fast my heart was beating and how wobbly my legs were.

I was in a very weird state for a while after the dive. It was almost a sense of disbelief, adrenaline levels starting to reduce and starting to come to terms with what had happened and talking to my friends to try to understand how I had been feeling during the whole thing.

I was asked if I would do it again. I said I would think about it. It was a great experience and I think I would likely enjoy it again a second time knowing what is coming. However, I don’t really have any desire to find out if that is true at the moment.

Last week I put my back out whilst doing some gardening.

I’m not sure I’ve ever written a sentence that makes me feel older. I just added this to my ever expanding list of minor ailments that I have been picking up over the last few years.

I used to work in the call centre at Saga (a company aimed at the over 50s) selling holidays with insurance included. When a customer wanted to take out this insurance I had to ask them about any medical conditions they might have that could affect the insurance. The things they listed all seemed like stuff that only old people would get. Now I seem to be collecting them all like a sort of small medical issues game of Pokemon.

Yet still I think that my body can do all of the things it could do 20 years ago and I still feel in my mind like I’m in my early 20s. Ageing is weird.

Mentally however, I’m much more grown up than when I was in my 20s. In my 20s I was a massive idiot. Now I’m only a small idiot. I’m a lot more sensible, I’m a lot more reasonable and much less argumentative. And I think this is an improvement.

I’ve wanted to learn to juggle for around 20 years. At one point my housemate was going to a bootfair and I asked him to take a bunch of CDs with him. I don’t think any of them sold but there was a couple that he wanted. He had some juggling balls that didn’t sell. We arranged a trade.

I was able to throw the balls up… and they all came down again. Which is at least one of the fundamental parts of juggling.

I occassionally got out the juggling balls when I found them at the bottom of the box and gave it a go but I never really stuck at it.

One of my wife’s colleagues got married the same year we did and had a juggling themed wedding. Whilst there (and also whilst drunk) I threw up a juggling club and couldn’t even catch it once.

By this point, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that juggling was witchcraft and that you needed to sell your soul in order to be able to do it. I was resigned to the fact that it was not for me.

Then, for my 40th birthday, along with a bunch of other amazing gifts to help me complete items on my bucketlist, a group of my amazing friends got me 6 juggling balls. I resolved to learn to juggle.

With the help of the aforementioned couple who pointed me in the direction of some great YouTube videos (I really recommend this one if anyone is wanting to learn) I tried to spend 5 minutes a day practicing. And I can now juggle. The pandemic was really helpful as I had the juggling balls on my desk and in a few spare moments, I was able to get a little practice in.

Learning to juggle has been great because it really keeps my daughter entertained and is fun for me at the same time. Win win. I’ve even bought myself some juggling clubs which I spent a bit of time practicing in the garden last summer (they are definitely not for indoor use – at least not when I’m in control of them) and I’ve tried to learn a couple of tricks with the balls – although I’m not very good at them. It’s quite a fun way to pass a bit of time.

Learning to juggle, however, at least initially can be a bit boring. The method taught in the video I recommened is a lot of repetition and muscle memory (this seems like it must be the only way but I guess there could be others) by repeatedly throwing just one ball from hand to hand at the appropriate height (eye level). Then when you’re happy that you’re catching it enough, moving on to two balls, and then finally three. Once you get to three the fun begins!

Anyway, here is a video of me doing some juggles. Enjoy!