With thanks to Susan Gorman for this c2006 photo of Alan Gorman
These few days lead in to the start of term proper
Friday 8 October 1982 – Easyish day – quite busy sorting things out. Went to union in evening – got quite merry.
Saturday 9 October 1982 – Freshers Mart in morning – prospective students in afternoon. Ashley [Fletcher] stayed to dinner – went on to union.
Sunday 10 October 1982 – Up quite early. Constitutional Committee lunchtime. Planned to stay in evening – quite tired – ended up running around campus with K.A.G [Keele Action Group] leaflets.
Monday 11 October 1982 – 1st teaching day of term – K.A.G at lunchtime. Went to union in evening.
Keele Action Group (KAG) & Constitutional Committee (CC): WTF?
Keele Action Group (KAG) was a grassroots students’ response to “The Cuts” – i.e. the early 1980s reduction in government funding to Universities. While the 1981/82 Union Committee had been reasonably supportive of firm but peaceful protest – e.g. our pseudo-destructive demo in London earlier that calendar year…
…we received fewer assurances from Truda Smith and that we would get much support from her and her 82/83 committee. I am pretty sure that the protagonists of KAG were mostly the same gang – Simon Jacobs, Jon Gorvett, me and several others…
…I’m seeing Simon soon and shall update with more names if he can remember specifics…
…who basically wanted to show the University the strength of feeling among the students and encourage the powers-that-were to pressurise the government more.
Who knows whether or not that might have worked, but at least we were making our feelings known.
Constitutional Committee (CC) was a different matter. I cannot remember who it was that lent on me to take on that burden, but in the back of my mind it was people like Spike Humphrey, Frank Dillon & Vince Beasley, all of whom had suffered, while on Union Committee, at the hands of a Constitutional Committee dominated by FCS (Federation of Conservative Students) law students who, as a matter of national policy, were hell-bent on using loopholes in student unions’s constitutions to make it difficult for more enlightened student reps to get anything done. FCS candidates could achieve because the idea of being on a constitutional committee was so mind-numbingly dull that they tended to be appointed unelected…
…as indeed was I when my friends of the left persuaded me to help seize back the initiative by getting a few more enlightened people onto that committee.
Was it a barrel of laughs?
No. Anyway, the debates that ensued around KAG and CC were as nothing to the culinary debate that clearly bedevilled the early days in Barnes L54.
Culinary Debate: Name That Meal
I noticed my use of the term “dinner” to describe Ashley Fletcher’s visit to join us for an evening meal on 9th. I also note my use of the word “lunchtime” on 10th and 11th.
But I was a lone voice with such temporal-culinary nomenclature in L54 at that stage.
Chantelle hails from Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, while Alan Gorman was a Lanky from Chorley…Brinscall actually.
Those two were having no truck with the idea of naming the evening meal – which is the one we had agreed to share the cooking of rota-style most evenings – dinner. Dinner was a word they reserved for the lunchtime meal. The evening meal was to be known as “tea”.
Hamzah didn’t have a vote in this matter, as he opted out of our cooking rota, on the grounds that he ate exclusively Halal food and would have his evening meal with his/our Malay mates in Barnes Q92.
There is lots of material on-line about this sort of debate now, much of it in tongue-in-cheek terms on sites such as King Cricket, not least when discussing North/South and class distinctions:
Or the following “expert” piece which seems to suggest that I might have been right all along that lunch/dinner are terms preferable to and more consensual than dinner/tea. (If in doubt, it is surely a good idea to quote The Lad Bible as an authoritative answer.)
Actually, Alan Gorman had a more open-minded and scientific approach to this topic than most people. Firstly, he had no real problem with the lunchtime meal being described as “lunch”. He didn’t major on lunchtime eating anyway – it was the evening that mattered most for food. But Alan did object to naming of the early evening meal “dinner”.
Alan’s nomenclature was to describe the early evening, shared/communal flat meal as “tea” and a later ad hoc meal as “supper”. Both of these meals were important and Alan was most certainly a “four meals a day” person at that stage. The “two evening meals” thing ensured that the stomach was filled early evening ahead of either:
- an evening of private study which might well go on until quite late, or
- “a sesh” down the union or boozer.
In either of those instances, there would be a need for a “supper” of some sort that would soak up the booze and/or ensure that there was a satisfied belly for bed time. I joined in this “four meals a day” habit for the two years we flat shared. Remarkably, looking back, we both remained skinny nonetheless.
Actually, thinking about it, Hamzah would have probably approved of Alan’s logic on linguistic grounds. In Bahasa Melayu, including its Bruneian variety, meals are named after the time of day:
- “sarapan pagi” means breakfast
- “makan tengah hari” means midday meal
- “makan petang” means afternoon or evening meal;
- “makan malam” means late evening or night-time meal.
The Next Few Days Included The Beat & Culture Club – 12 to 15 October 1982
I actually wrote up the next few days five years ahead of this “Forty Years On” series based on a memory flash. You can read all about those days (and the memory flash) here or below:
