1922 committee

Ah,

Maybe your dad, my dad, my grandad and indeed i am not so ‘ordinary’. Particularly your dad and in the timeframe you mention, me as well

You mention your father retiring from the police in 1981 aged 53

There is absolutely no doubt the police force have done rather well certainly in the period immediately after that.

I started out in the seventies as a research scientist, and had every expectation of a career path in that subject following that enjoyed by my cousin five years my senior. His parents were both industrial pharmacists running their own show, he was an organic chemist with ICI. His parents insisted he work for someone else or himself and not for them… My father was a computer hardware engineer with fingers in several defence and nuclear projects prior to his switch to a career with IBM. I began my own progress but hit a roadblock called Thatcher’s removal of state funding of science and medicine.

I switched to software engineering and quickly found a niche defence market inventing better ways to kill people. We used my salary with my wife’s to get a 100% mortgage on a reasonably decent starter home in April 1983. My neighbour three houses along was a police constable. His salary already allowed him the end if terrace house with a garage, £5000 more than my mid terrace home that cost £24850

Then Thatcher took on the miners and gave us 17% mortgage rates

Well they peaked at 17%

At that point Mike was collecting huge overtime bonuses for kicking shit out of miners, and i was collecting similar for refining ways to reduce West Germany to radioactive molten slag should Eric Honiker choose to move his Russian T52’s (??) across the border from East Germany to West

The huge salary hikes we both enjoyed meant that when the other 30 homes on the estate were reposessed as the other owners found their salaries inadequate to keep up tbe payments, Mike and I were alone in repelling the banks and their baliffs although it was a clise thing.

Things calmed down a bit after that, but then Lawson and his insane six month delay in MIRAS relief removal for those living in sin pushed the estate agent’s valuation of the house we moved into in ‘88 from the £39,000 we paid in April to £86,000 the following September and a tanking to £59,000 the first weekend after dual MIRAS ended in October. But strangely after the poll tax riots the revaluation of the council tax band used that £86,000 figure and no tribunal appeal worked.

So yes, i suppose you are right, i do think of myself as just an ordinary - if rather bright - bloke in the street because like my dad and his dad i had to find a way to work my arse off for every penny, unlike the likes of Boris De Piffle Kemal who has had a multi million pound sack of coin at his side from day one.

The one thing i share with the lowliest street sweeper is tbe scum in Parliament strive to strip me of every penny i earn.