My wordpress blog has now reached three years old, updated usually on a monthly basis, although there are gaps on occasion between updates, the longest being from August through to December this year. I guess I ran out of steam or willingness to update after my fortieth year; hitting the big 40 in June and the really lack of contact with my Family really made me start thinking quite deeply about my life and my relationship with my Family. Somewhere on here I wrote about this, the fact that I had to grow up from the age of seventeen in a poky little room that was a bedsit, so this is why I suppose I have become more retrospective, more insular and such a deep thinker regarding things that have gone on in my life.
I still have a relationship with my children – I see them most weekends, although money being much more tight than it ever has been makes it difficult to afford to be able to buy them things and treat them as I want to. Struggling is not such a new thing; I remember working forty hour weeks, first on a Youth Training Scheme when I left school for around thirty pounds a week (this was in catering, and I did gain a qualification from it) then working in factories for more money (I had to pack in the catering as I suffered very severe from eczema and still do) but still I never seemed to have much money from my late teens up until I started working for a Market Research firm thanks to some Art Students that took an interest in my life, a couple that I always will be indebted too, not only for helping me climb out of a rut I was in when I was nineteen years old, but also broadening my horizons, not only for the job I started doing (Market Researcher) but also culturally as well. A time in my life that was so influential for me that I never forgot the brief spell of happiness that I experienced during 1990 till ’93.
I was not stupid whilst I was in secondary education. I was in one of the higher classes when in comprehensive school, and my chosen elective subjects were History, English Lit, Geography and Geology. I studied Humanities, because I was good at English and History. I disliked the sciences, although I did attend computing dinnertime classes (in the spare time), because I liked my Sinclair Spectrum back in the mid 1980’s. But my favourite subjects, if I had to look back and choose (which I guess is what I am doing here now) would have been History and English. Its worth noting as this juncture that I failed my ‘O’ levels, all except English Literature and had ‘CSE’ grades in Geography and I believe Maths. I never re-sat my exams, and looking back was a grave mistake, but my family life was not perfect so, thanks to advice of a Careers officer I ended up on a Government Youth Training Scheme in Catering for a small amount of cash whilst we worked and studied. Even though I dropped this scheme and ended up in a factory (for more money) I never lost what I had learnt from the chefs that taught me; I still retained the culinary skills and I still like to cook.
What I am trying to say is that it was only through luck that I met this student couple who moved into the same house I was living in; liking their music, they befriended me and it was only from them and their friends that I started broadening my horizons, listening to different music (I was a rocker prior to this), watching more interesting films, reading more than I had done since I had left school and so on. In fact I then went on to study at University as a mature student– and this is coming from a pretty fucked up youth who had nothing and then went to Swansea University to study Social History and Sociology. Not bad going no? One reason why I feel so much indebted so much to people who took an interest in me.
These blogs of mine…well….I suppose, as I think I blogged somewhile ago, were an attempt to just try and explain my life, my life of hardship and the fact that I, on my own, pulled myself from a rut of ‘no hope’ and certainly ‘no future’ whilst I was living in that bedsit, into a well educated, intelligent, cultured, creative, caring person. It was not easy to do so either, and probably for reasons that are only my own, I, along with the Woman I was living with from the age of twenty-one onwards, still suffered from hardship and distinct lack of money because I was studying and had no money. This blog I produced – I started writing this in temporary accommodation a few months after the council rehomed me from being homeless – was quite seriously an attempt, not only to open my feelings up to the internet and, at a base level the whole of the online community, but to try and write about what I felt and the injustices that happened to me from mid-summer 2008, but also now I believe a lot longer. It is getting to a stage now, for my blog, that I do not know what else really to produce here. I think I have explained what suffering I went through, the total horrors of living, briefly, in a homeless hostel, a hostel in Newport South Wales, that had seen a girl hang herself only, as far as I can remember, a few weeks before I ended up there. It really was an horrific place to have ended up, especially for a Father of two boys whom was prior to this living in Usk, Monmouthshire, living with his Wife, taking his children to school and collecting them every day, producing websites in his part time (I am so out of touch with that skill now, I never kept up to date with the scene) and so on. At this stage now, I am not so much totally blaming my wife, but my family also must and should take a degree of the blame for what happened to me whilst I was homeless in Newport. If my sons, if any of my sons had ended up without nowhere to go, then I would never, ever have allowed them to become homeless.
And the red colour fades…
Kev L Sparrow's Blog. 