Who were YOUR role models

[Serial_Apologist]

Stephen, I just happen to possess a little hardback titled "Guide to Modern Music on Records (1958)". It was my first readings on 20th century music, and it includes a very good chapter by Ottoway on 20th Century English Music.

[Chris Newman]

Chris - drifting off topic for a mo - I have on cassette a piano piece titled "Grooving Through Old Tombs" by, I'm pretty sure, a Chris Newman. Would that be you, by any chance? It was from a broadcast of piano pieces by Howard Skempton, John White, Cornelius Cardew and, yourself? - played by a certain Michael Finnissy.

Sadly no, S_A. I wish I was so talented. That CN lives in Berlin, composes and is also a successful painter and writer. Neither am I the popular folk guitarist, the professional rugby player nor the film star. I twice had some confusion with the folk singer. Firstly when the bank sent me his bank statement and I thought I was rich until I found I did not recognise the cheques. The second time was when my local paper asked me to review a local guitar festival weekend in the seventies. I went and found Chris was sharing the bill of the last concert with Bert Jansch, so I had to write my review under a pseudonym.

Cheers, Chris.

[teamsaint]

not really sure about role models. certainly its a term that is used very badly, (how can , for example, david beckham be a good role model for most kids?)

However, on a personal level, the most influential person was a teacher who really believed in me, even at a time when I hadn't earned it.
I really think that, when you are young, having someone believe in you is absolutely central to your chances. Ideally this should be both parents and others...its great having your parents believe in you, but someone from outside makes such a huge difference.
I do think the education system fails badly here. We push kids through the exam sausage machine without really finding out what makes them tick, or what they might be really good at, or importantly, what potential they might have.

[Lateralthinking1]

I was raised to set an example to others. It wasn't drummed into me heavily but was simply a part of everyday life. I wore it very lightly and could be surprised when I was seen as such. I was the child who teachers would choose to read others stories or even to sit with to help them with their reading. These things were welcomed as I had a sense of the problems in their lives. They would confide in me. One, dismissed by all as a "naughty" and "disruptive" boy, was virtually a brother to me. He had anxiety issues behind the misdemeanour which actually triggered a complete falling out of his hair. This was linked to a persistent arguing between his parents, ultimately leading to divorce, and a macho older brother who he respected but was harangued by. Another was such a slow learner that he should have been placed in a special school. The poor lad looked dense too. While they were dissed by most as losers, I must have felt that I could learn from them. We were equals just with different strengths. The academically slow are good for those who are brighter because they teach the need for patience. As for the one who was always getting into trouble, he could get me, an only child, out of the house more and away from my books. He could never understand why I would find it so difficult to walk up to families we didn't know and say "we want to borrow your kite".

So just as I calmed him down, I had to adjust to what could seem quite frightening uncontrolled situations. He had no sense of causing danger and I had little comprehension of how to negotiate it. He once asked me to watch him to see how fast he could go on his bike and I just stood there. Inadvertently he ran me over and there was blood spurting out of my leg. What I recall from this incident, and many others, was just how remote adults were. Never seeing themselves as having much of a link with their sons' personalities - and I would include my parents there - they were more observers using stereotypical pigeon holes. It took ages for me to reassure his mother that he didn't deserve a clout because there was no malice in it and it had been my stupidity for not moving. There is so much irony in life because I have ended up as someone to whom no one would aspire. Almost everyone overtook me. Those I knew at that time would be gobsmacked where I am now. It is almost as if I became the problems that they had as well as academically successful. Fortunately, my parents have been the solid rock. My Mum has a combination of strong emotion and a remarkable stoicism, practicality, common sense and independence. Dad is very sociable and helpful and he introduced me to music which has often been a bit of a life saver, not that we have, in any sense, similar musical tastes.

One of the things I wanted to do in recent years was to find a concert which we could both attend and enjoy. It marked the end really of my associating music with youth and enabled him to find some greater link with the "modern" era of popular music. We went to see Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys at the RFH performing "Smile". He couldn't get over how late 50-somethings danced in the aisles like teenagers! My uncle, my mother's brother and my godfather, was a big influence in a robust, outdoorsy, way. Country walks. He was old enough to be my grandfather but very energetic, blunt speaking and always laughing. A man's man. My Nan and I were very close - an illiterate woman who was tough, warm and generous, honest to a fault, again always laughing and sometimes seen dancing on tables, a greengrocer who had to deal with sometimes very dodgy market traders, the absolute example of a person who is viewed both as the pivotal point of a family and a pillar of the community. And Carmita Reid, my lovely Jamaican teacher, who I have mentioned before. While she was forgotten by others within days of leaving our school, we used to write to each other when she had settled in her new home in Trinidad. No other teacher did anything but disappoint.

Joey Deacon lived half a mile away and gave me a respect for the mentally ill and disabled. I guess too that there were political and sporting heroes but the former were figures who helped develop outlook and the latter just respected for what they did. Sort of overly godlike but only in concept. There was also a fearful reverence of professionals which I never got over. I couldn't identify even when I was one. I think the fear involved a confusing mixture of my parents' reverential attitudes towards them and, often for good reason, my dislike. My parents were good at budgets - they had to be - but both were useless at wheeling and dealing, quite incapable of negotiation, let alone sharp practice. They find it difficult to give a line to take rather than saying what they mean. They were - and are - very neighbourly and while this is often appreciated, it is also a bit outmoded. The manner in which some now hurt them can lead to a huge fury on my part. I used to visit neighbours just to talk to them when I was young. They were worth it then. My parents are also good at routines. I look at the rioters. I would never have dreamt of going to the larder and helping myself to a biscuit and I doubt that I have ever actually asked my parents for anything. It didn't seem at all strict. There was with this always a sense of both ordinary seriousness and fun. A lot of humour, some naivety, a lot of board games.

I disappeared from view almost whenever I could in my teenage years. I just found the attitudes even then overwhelmingly impossible to cope with. Radio and music were hugely influential. I related to presenters who were in their 30s when I was 15. Later, at university, there were worldly friends who I looked up to considerably and, while slightly younger than me, they seemed so much older. A combination of radio presenters who gave out the message that "fun was to be had out there", and those at university got me to places where I would never have had the nerve to go, mainly for the better. I think though that I always found it all difficult to deal with in many ways. It was at the point when those of my own age and older began increasingly to display juvenile traits that I saw my room again as the safest place. I was too parental for my own good until I was 11. It made me vulnerable in the longer term. Ever since I have needed people around me who are older which until my 40s I could only associate with real age. Learning that it is more a series of character traits has been a very tough, recent, lesson to learn.

[Serial_Apologist]

not really sure about role models. certainly its a term that is used very badly, (how can , for example, david beckham be a good role model for most kids?)

However, on a personal level, the most influential person was a teacher who really believed in me, even at a time when I hadn't earned it.
I really think that, when you are young, having someone believe in you is absolutely central to your chances. Ideally this should be both parents and others...its great having your parents believe in you, but someone from outside makes such a huge difference.
I do think the education system fails badly here. We push kids through the exam sausage machine without really finding out what makes them tick, or what they might be really good at, or importantly, what potential they might have.

I find that a remarkable insight. Until I just read this post it had never occurred to me. Come to think of it, I had nobody who believed in me until I was 26 years of age, when (1) I had my first serious relationship - with a German girl who really went out of her way to make me feel wanted; and (2) had the great fortune to make friends with a man of enormous intelligence (sadly no longer here) who convinced me to try for university. Finally faced with incontrovertible evidence my father only came to believe in me right at the end of his 92-year life - by which time I had lost all belief in him.

[eighthobstruction]

Thinking about the second 30 years of my life, it has to be my partner....who is incredibly intelligent, and broad in her interests....but most important, a person who tries to be a better and more interesting person EVERYDAY....

[Serial_Apologist]

I was raised to set an example to others. It wasn't drummed into me heavily but was simply a part of everyday life. I wore it very lightly and could be surprised when I was seen as such. I was the child who teachers would choose to read others stories or even to sit with to help them with their reading. These things were welcomed as I had a sense of the problems in their lives. They would confide in me. One, dismissed by all as a "naughty" and "disruptive" boy, was virtually a brother to me. He had anxiety issues behind the misdemeanour which actually triggered a complete falling out of his hair. This was linked to a persistent arguing between his parents, ultimately leading to divorce, and a macho older brother who he respected but was harangued by. Another was such a slow learner that he should have been placed in a special school. The poor lad looked dense too. While they were dissed by most as losers, I must have felt that I could learn from them. We were equals just with different strengths. The academically slow are good for those who are brighter because they teach the need for patience. As for the one who was always getting into trouble, he could get me, an only child, out of the house more and away from my books. He could never understand why I would find it so difficult to walk up to families we didn't know and say "we want to borrow your kite".

So just as I calmed him down, I had to adjust to what could seem quite frightening uncontrolled situations. He had no sense of causing danger and I had little comprehension of how to negotiate it. He once asked me to watch him to see how fast he could go on his bike and I just stood there. Inadvertently he ran me over and there was blood spurting out of my leg. What I recall from this incident, and many others, was just how remote adults were. Never seeing themselves as having much of a link with their sons' personalities - and I would include my parents there - they were more observers using stereotypical pigeon holes. It took ages for me to reassure his mother that he didn't deserve a clout because there was no malice in it and it had been my stupidity for not moving. There is so much irony in life because I have ended up as someone to whom no one would aspire. Almost everyone overtook me. Those I knew at that time would be gobsmacked where I am now. It is almost as if I became the problems that they had as well as academically successful. Fortunately, my parents have been the solid rock. My Mum has a combination of strong emotion and a remarkable stoicism, practicality, common sense and independence. Dad is very sociable and helpful and he introduced me to music which has often been a bit of a life saver, not that we have, in any sense, similar musical tastes.

One of the things I wanted to do in recent years was to find a concert which we could both attend and enjoy. It marked the end really of my associating music with youth and enabled him to find some greater link with the "modern" era of popular music. We went to see Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys at the RFH performing "Smile". He couldn't get over how late 50-somethings danced in the aisles like teenagers! My uncle, my mother's brother and my godfather, was a big influence in a robust, outdoorsy, way. Country walks. He was old enough to be my grandfather but very energetic, blunt speaking and always laughing. A man's man. My Nan and I were very close - an illiterate woman who was tough, warm and generous, honest to a fault, again always laughing and sometimes seen dancing on tables, a greengrocer who had to deal with sometimes very dodgy market traders, the absolute example of a person who is viewed both as the pivotal point of a family and a pillar of the community. And Carmita Reid, my lovely Jamaican teacher, who I have mentioned before. While she was forgotten by others within days of leaving our school, we used to write to each other when she had settled in her new home in Trinidad. No other teacher did anything but disappoint.

Joey Deacon lived half a mile away and gave me a respect for the mentally ill and disabled. I guess too that there were political and sporting heroes but the former were figures who helped develop outlook and the latter just respected for what they did. Sort of overly godlike but only in concept. There was also a fearful reverence of professionals which I never got over. I couldn't identify even when I was one. I think the fear involved a confusing mixture of my parents' reverential attitudes towards them and, often for good reason, my dislike. My parents were good at budgets - they had to be - but both were useless at wheeling and dealing, quite incapable of negotiation, let alone sharp practice. They find it difficult to give a line to take rather than saying what they mean. They were - and are - very neighbourly and while this is often appreciated, it is also a bit outmoded. The manner in which some now hurt them can lead to a huge fury on my part. I used to visit neighbours just to talk to them when I was young. They were worth it then. My parents are also good at routines. I look at the rioters. I would never have dreamt of going to the larder and helping myself to a biscuit and I doubt that I have ever actually asked my parents for anything. It didn't seem at all strict. There was with this always a sense of both ordinary seriousness and fun. A lot of humour, some naivety, a lot of board games.

I disappeared from view almost whenever I could in my teenage years. I just found the attitudes even then overwhelmingly impossible to cope with. Radio and music were hugely influential. I related to presenters who were in their 30s when I was 15. Later, at university, there were worldly friends who I looked up to considerably and, while slightly younger than me, they seemed so much older. A combination of radio presenters who gave out the message that "fun was to be had out there", and those at university got me to places where I would never have had the nerve to go, mainly for the better. I think though that I always found it all difficult to deal with in many ways. It was at the point when those of my own age and older began increasingly to display juvenile traits that I saw my room again as the safest place. I was too parental for my own good until I was 11. It made me vulnerable in the longer term. Ever since I have needed people around me who are older which until my 40s I could only associate with real age. Learning that it is more a series of character traits has been a very tough, recent, lesson to learn.

Odd, isn't it, that such differences in terms of family background support can, if one is grossly oversimplifying, appear to result in two people with such similar outlooks on life, lat - re-raising once again that awkward question as to how much of us is inborn.

[Lateralthinking1]

Yes S_A, I do agree. I don't fully buy into the "is it this or that?" discussion with anything. We have seen it with the riots - behaviour as nature or nurture, family as more or less important than wider influence, society as too harsh or too soft. It seems to me that where a range of factors are suggested in regard to thoughts and actions, they are all likely to have some relevance.

While there is the likelihood that people will come down on one side or the other, it may well be that this is mainly to do with self-concept. You can generally find when looking at others' statements, however polarized the presentation, hints of the opposite arguments. The same is probably true of perceptions of confidence and even notions about psychological health. Increasingly, I tend to think that almost everything is most accurately defined by where the emphasis is placed.

Ultimately, I find it reassuring actually that quite different types of people reach similar conclusions. Whatever the reasons for it, it suggests to me that life has an inbuilt mechanism for bridge-building just as it has for warring.

[Stillhomewardbound]

An very importrant role model in my early was a man that I have since come to style as my 'gay godfather'. He was Kieran Hickey, an Irish filmaker and a family friend, and, I believe, the first adult to see the gay in me.

Although he was in his 40s and I in my teens when we were first introduced, we drifted into an easy friendship and in a gentle hand-on-shoulder kind of way he nurtured my growth into early adulthood.

I'd never suggest he drew me towards a gay lifestyle but that just happened to be the world he lived in, and through his example I could see that the condition of being gay was as real and as valid as one of being heterosexual. Not some perverse aberration as society then felt compelled to insist.

Sometmes he could be a dauntingly stern and private figure. Growing up queer amidst the bigotry of a holy catholic Ireland, wholly unlike the gay-friendly society of today, had made him acutely cautious and untrusting and at the first opportunity he was away to London's less repressive lights to work as an insurance clerk. Anything to escape.

Although he was the son of a working class railway worker growing up on Dublin's South Circular Road - about as glamorous a location as any city's circular road - he was determined to move on. Not to shirk off his lowly origins perhaps, but more to feed an innate appetite he had developed for all things artistic. He always wanted to know what I was reading, what I had been to see and he never tired of urging me to write and expand my own horizons.

Eventually, Kieran, his self-education complete, returned to Ireland to carve out a successful niche for himself as an independent filmmaker. Actually at a time when there was scarcely such a thing in the land. He would also host an informal Open House (the same one he had grown up in on the South Circular) at which fledgling young Dublin gays could take their first steps in a still deeply hostile environment.

Looking back, I suspect he can't have failed to see that I was gay, but he never ever brought up the subject with me, nor did he ever drop any hints. I think he knew that I would find my way in time.

Anyway, even if he had said anything, as had another friend, I would have ignored him.

I last met him in London in the summer of '91 following a call out of the blue. I was working for the BBC World Service in Bush House and he was across the road at the LSE visiting a friend. 'I'm coming across in five minutes!', he declared. I vividly recall him strutting across Aldwych and marking the change in our times: out, loud and proud in a check shirt with cropped hair and a trim, butch moustache. Masculine but with a sparkle in the eye.

He was utterly in his prime, flitting between San Fran, New York and Sydney, making up for decades of closet living and sending me postcards regular as clockwork.

It must have been about eighteen months later when I was checking the messages on my answerphone. There, between work and social calls was a muted message from my father informing me that Kieran had undergone by-pass surgery. He'd not revived after the operation. He thought I should know.

Well, thanks for that, Dad, I murmured as the first tears stung my eyes.

Now, fifteen years on and with a straight marriage behind me, I'm fully out and able to strut across the Aldwych myself, but how I wish I could spot Kieran coming the other way. As ever, he'd be in a mad rush to make his next appointment, but even so, I'd hold him just long enough to say, 'I made it, Kieran. God love me, I made it!'

He probably never doubted for a moment I would.


SHB

[Lateralthinking1]

These descriptions are so good, and wide ranging, that we could almost make a book of them. One tends to think of Platform 3 as the place where classical and other music interests converge. Well, I do. And then there are the political discussions which give a feeling of familiarity as they are set at any time where the media are focussed. Perhaps this thread more than most brings out the character of individual contributors and the content has a much richer quality.

Maybe it is my background - and I am very pleased to have been in the family I was born to - but when I read the posts of serial_apologist and Stillhomewardbound, I feel intellectually a little shallow. University degree or not, there is something about mine that draws any depth it has from the bottles of ketchup on the dinner table. I quite like it - but as the regular host of the thread for "The Verb", I feel that there is room for improving on my literary, artistic and philosophical reading. Calum's excellent posts often make me feel like that too.

I don't quite know all of our respective ages. I just wonder though whether school education was better for those in older groups or if young people were once deeper. While I can speak highly of J S Mill, e e cummings and even Vaughan Williams, and like to feel that I know a little of what I am writing about, I am from a generation which has huge amounts of popular culture in it. I am not sure whether this has been a good thing or not.

[eighthobstruction]

>>'I just wonder though whether school education was better for those in older groups or if young people were once deeper.'<<

....not in my case....

[Serial_Apologist]

>>'I just wonder though whether school education was better for those in older groups or if young people were once deeper.'<<

....not in my case....

Oh go ON!!!

"Wear your immodesty like a "

(Misquote from... somewhere)

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

...apologies lat, not how i would want any one to feel .... but i have been pondering this thread and i think we should separate the influencers from the models .. the former intervene helpful or no, the latter we aspire to like or completely unlike [role models can be negative] so leaving the influence to one side .... as a parent my father was a paragon of existential challenge .. who are you ... who are you becoming but uttered with no hint of control or manipulation ... his honest 'non-directive' parenting i found exceptionally tough to deal with but i thank him for it and have actively sought to follow his example ...

of all the books i have devoured over the decades a few authors strike me as models of endeavour and values ...Orwell, John Dewey, Harold Searles and Harry Stack Sullivan and for sheer intellectual clout Stuart Kaufman for his 'Investigations'...

many teachers and colleagues have proved to be negative role models and i am such an awkward sod i would not care to name them as i am sure it was reciprocated ...

as for music Mingus Mingus Mingus ....

[umslopogaas]

I realised as I started to think of a contribution that I was not quite sure what a role model was, and my dictionary doesnt help, but I am restricting my choice to people I have actually known at various times in my life and who have inspired or encouraged me, rather than the famous whom one might have admired from afar, such as Ghandi, Beckham or Geldorf.

The first is the man who lived across the road when I was a child, Uncle Frank (he wasnt a genuine uncle). I think in fact my dad owned the property and Uncle Frank rented it; a small bungalow and a ramshackle collection of outbuildings, in one of which he had set up a full-scale chemical laboratory. He was a freelance industrial chemist, a profession that must have died out these days, strangled by the complexities of Health and Safety legislation. He was an expert on the foxing of paper, among other things. He must have had very tough hands, he only had one light bulb in the entire building, he just left all the light fittings turned on and when he moved to another room he would simply reach up, unscrew the bulb, carry it with him and plug it in again next door – apparently without the need to turn it off and let it cool down. He and his wife had no children, but he was a kindly fellow and took a keen interest in my parent’s brood. He awoke my interest in science by providing me with all sorts of chemicals for me to play with in the potting shed, some of which were very dangerous. “Some more concentrated sulphuric acid, boy? Just bring your bottle over and I’ll fill it up.” I’m very grateful to him, though its a miracle I didnt kill myself with the stuff he gave me.

I’ve never forgotten the smell of his bungalow. He was known locally as the man with the ether, and everyone brought their surplus kittens to him to be destroyed. However his wife was too kind-hearted to let him do it, and rescued them. They must have had about thirty cats, sunning themselves on the bungalow roof during the day. Inside, the smell was overpowering.

Other role models have been a succession of inspirational teachers. Excellent botany and zoology teachers at school, who ensured I got good grades at A level and propelled me into Cambridge. And there, the wonderful Professor EJH Corner, I was lucky enough to be taught by him in the final year in the last classes he gave before retiring. It was Corner who encouraged me to go and work in the tropics. “The British flora? Sixteen hundred species of highly modified little weeds. Go to the tropics, my boy, that’s where the real plants are.” He was right.

Finally, to avoid running on too long, one more would be the director of the research institute where I ended up when I returned to the UK. A very strong and determined personality, not an easy man to work for, but one who commanded great respect and who had single-handed kept the institute going through difficult times in the seventies and managed to get it a new building and a steady expansion under his direction. He gave me a job when I really needed one and guided me into the biggest and most complicated research project I ever got involved with, I’d never have made it work without his help.

[Ariosto]

I'm surprised, Simon, that you have not admitted other role models, but perhaps you are being circumspect ...