Ali Dabbs – Still Crazy After All These Years? – link to his “thing” 40 years on
I was rummaging through an old copy of Concourse looking for something completely different, when I came across this “freshers” account of the late January UGM.
I was transported back to the event in ways that my diary entries and my own pieces could not transport me.
I hope that this piece pleases some other people as much as it has pleased me. I smiled…I even laughed at one or two 40-years-old jokes.
Alistair (Ali) Dabbs soon went on to become part of the Union, of course, as my “forty years on” account will soon reveal. He was at that time, after all, one of the “Liberals with infeasible names”. He then went on to a career in journalism – who would have guessed on the back of a deft debut of this quality.
Any thoughts on this Ali? – they’d be most welcome.
By way of contrast, my H Ackgrass column, which mentioned the same events in the same edition of Concourse, did so like this:
Re: my UGM report in ‘Concourse’ Jan 1984.
I just read this from behind the sofa but was relieved to find that it wasn’t as embarrassing as feared, given that I was such a newbie. For context, four months before I wrote this I had already been unemployed for a year after leaving school with shit A-level results in 1982. Good old Keele, they accepted any old fool in those days, even after clearing had ended. I secured my place to study there by sitting down with the UCCA handbook in early September 1983 and phoning every university in the UK, one by one in alphabetical order, until one of them said they had a free place in a subject for which I might qualify. I reached K.
The UGM report is free of spelling mistakes and I spotted just one typo – which I righteously blame on the union office admin secretary who we paid to type the galleys. She had an electric typewriter that could run out narrow-measure columns with automatic hyphenation.
My first sentence is notable for the way it reminds readers of the date of the UGM, just in case they had forgotten since reading it in the subhead a few millimetres above. The cliché “it was ironic that” is cringeworthy too. Universityboy error. Avoid clichés like the plague, as they say.
My biggest regret from my time at Keele was not committing to ‘Concourse’ in year 2, instead choosing to piss away my free time trying to get involved in deadhead union politics when I could have had more fun writing about it. And yet today I still serve as a minor official in my trade union. It is ironic, that.
Ali – great to hear from you. I love your story about how you ended up at Keele. Not dissimilar to my own from three years earlier. https://ianlouisharris.com/1980/10/08/getting-in-starting-at-keele-university-8-october-1980/ . I seem to recall that you were not only involved in Union politics in my sabbatical year but you also had fun writing about it – as did I. Those old copies of Concourse I have uncovered aren’t going to read themselves, but I am going to read them as I continue to plough my way through my Keele diaries March 1984 to Summer 1985 over the next 15 months or so. Watch this space…from behind the sofa if need be. Cheers – Ian.