A high-speed night of great entertainment

One of my most enduring memories of growing up in Kidderminster in the mid-1970s is of the man who lived over the road from us. 

If my fading brain serves me correctly, his name was John Foley and he owned a butcher’s shop on the council estate where my grandparents lived.

There are two things I will never forget about him, though; he had the most spectacular ginger sideburns and he was a fanatical Cradley Heath speedway fan (to my knowledge, the two facts are not linked).

Every week, he and his family would head off to Dudley Wood to watch the Heathens race motorbikes which had one gear and no brakes and could reach speeds of up to 70mph.

In those days, Cradley were one of the best-loved sporting clubs in the Black Country; they had a rivalry with their near-neighbours at Wolverhampton, as well as those across the West Midlands at Coventry, which made speedway hugely popular. The crowds were in their thousands, meetings had regional and national TV coverage (on proper television not pay-TV, which didn’t exist) and the riders were national names.

For a few years before I went off to university in 1982, I became infected by John’s passion. I, too, would drive the 20-odd miles to Dudley Wood on summer Saturday nights and inhale the pungent smell of the methanol which powers speedway bikes; marvel at the skill of riders who could swing a motorbike around a corner at 70mph with consummate skill, only occasionally ending up with a broken bone or three.

But then, things turned sour. Dudley Wood is now a housing estate and although Cradley Heath still have a speedway team, they race in the National League (the third level of the sport in Britain, below the Elite and Premier Leagues) and do so at Monmore Green, the home of Wolverhampton. 

Yet speedway is still alive elsewhere in the West Midlands. Wolverhampton and Coventry have teams in the Elite League, as do Birmingham Brummies. The Brummies have been around on and off since the sport’s heyday in the 1940s and ‘50s, but their latest reincarnation, which began in 2007 and is based at Perry Barr greyhound stadium, has risen to the Elite League and they are looking very likely to reach the four-team end-of-season playoffs, which begin at the start of October.

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the Brummies take on Kings Lynn Stars last week and although it was my first speedway meeting since at least 1981, I felt instantly at home. The familiar smell of methanol, the roar of the bikes as they flew out of the starting gate and yes, the ‘how do they do that?’ feel as the riders flung their machines around the four bends, seemingly losing control and then, a split-second later, bringing everything back into line and flying down the straight for a few seconds before reaching the next turn (the average race takes about a minute to complete four laps of a 300-metre track).

Mrs W and I watched the first two races of the night from a rickety wooden stand on the pits bend, loving the smell and the noise and getting covered in shale dust, before we headed up to the directors’ box to wash down the final 13 heats with a pint and a really quite splendid curry.

Plenty of the spectators watched from the bar area, where huge plate-glass windows shielded out the noise but still gave an excellent view of the races, while the really hardy stood outside on an increasingly chilly night, with just the width of the greyhound track between them and the action; if Mrs W hadn’t been with me, that’s probably where I would have been. I’m a firm believer in standing up at football matches (one of the many reasons I love non-league) and sports like speedway need to be viewed close-up to get a sense of just how brave and skilled the riders are.

The riders, incidentally, are a story in themselves. Heats are scored three points for a win, two for second place, one for third and none for fourth and last place. Riders get paid per point so if they struggle, they don’t get paid. 

That’s why a lot of the best riders travel Europe, earning money by racing for teams in speedway’s heartland in Poland, Russia and Scandinavia as well as in the UK. So they could be in Coventry on Monday, Sweden on Thursday, Poland on Sunday and so on, throughout the summer season from March to October. It’s a tough life, never mind the constant risk of injury and, heaven forbid, death.

If you’ve never been to a speedway meeting, I urge you to give it a go. We enjoyed two hours of thrilling entertainment which saw the Brummies stage an impressive mid-meeting comeback to win 51-41 and further boost their play-off chances. 

 Generally, I don’t ‘get’ motorsport. I would rather paint the kitchen than watch a Formula One Grand Prix or a MotoGP race, yet my first visit to speedway in 30 years reminded me why I loved those Saturday nights at Dudley Wood. I’ll certainly be going back. 

Cut off from the world....or so it seemed

How can it take 20 days to unlock a mobile phone? Regular readers will recall that my last post was largely concerned with a nasty incident involving a Nokia handset, a car dashboard, an open window and a sharp left-hand turn into Mill Street, Tamworth. 

I had hoped to be reconnected within a couple of days, having bought a cheap handset from a well-known supermarket and acquired a replacement SIM card, but a cashflow crisis and then the fact that my new handset had to be sent away to be unlocked scuppered that.

But TWENTY DAYS? As anyone who has tried to contact me will know, at times I’ve felt like I was living in Outer Mongolia. Of course, there are times when it is useful to be incognito (the Friday afternoon of Derby Beer Festival, for a start!) but such is the nature of our all-pervasive communications world that not having a mobile can sometimes leave you feeling as if you have had your arm cut off.

Is anyone trying to contact me with offers of work? How many millions of text messages have I missed? How many of them were not viral jokes or cold calls, but actually important? Is there a problem with the switchover? Will I have to change my number? If I do, what happens to the £75 worth of swanky new business cards I have just had printed - which feature my current number?

It’s not been a fun three weeks, although I must say ‘Thank You’ to the man in the repair shop, who looked at me with increasing concern as my weekly visits became twice-weekly, then daily.

However, I’m now back in the land of the mobile phone and spent most of yesterday trying to fathom it out. It’s not a smartphone; it doesn’t make the tea, it just allows me to make calls, send texts, get on t’interweb and play games, should I wish. But it’s still complicated enough for someone who spent a few minutes trying to extract the SIM card from inside the handset to get at the authentication code. 

 And, of course, although I have been able to retain my phone number, I've lost everyone's numbers because my old SIM card was smashed. So if I haven't already asked and you think I had your number on my old phone, please PM me on Facebook or e-mail me with the details. It might help me feel as if I am back in touch with the world.

Up, down, broke, smashed - but still loving life!

It’s amazing that it’s been two-and-a-half years since I had what my wife insists on calling a ‘proper’ job. 

She defines that as one where you go into work at a given time of day, come home at (more or less) a given time of day and your employer drops a wedge of cash into your bank on a given day of every month.

The reality, of course, is that ‘proper’ jobs are few these days - especially in the world of the wordsmith. Since I was last in full-time work, my previous employer has had another two rounds of cutbacks and I learnt this week that the disease has spread to Australia. 

A friend of mine on a newspaper in Cairns could soon be faced with uprooting his young family to Brisbane (just over 1,000 miles away) or leaving the newspaper world which has been his life since the age of 16 - nearly three decades. 

There are jobs in the media, of course; I could move to London, while the work I do from home and which I love dearly as editor of British Naturism is as good as it gets, in my view. 

But apart from BN, I am one of many thousands of freelances scrambling to find work at a time when the market keeps diminishing. 

And after two-and-a-half years, following 24 years in newspapers, the ups and downs of this lifestyle are still the hardest thing for me to cope with. Take last week, for instance; I had a meeting in a smart Birmingham hotel with a client and a web designer over a project which could be one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done. We made good progress, continue to do so and although the rewards are not great at the moment, the future looks bright.

On Sunday, I saw the lead story of a column which I ghost-write appear on the back page of the Birmingham Sunday Mercury. We rarely admit it but weatherbeaten old hacks like me still get a thrill out of seeing something we’ve written appear on the printed (newspaper) page. 

Yet last week also saw letters demanding that the family car be given its MOT and new tax disc. In years gone by, that was just an annual distraction. At the moment, the financial side-effects of having the two land at once have knocked us sideways for a while.

Then, this week - to be precise, yesterday, Thursday July 5 2012. It began in great style as I gave a presentation about naturism and my work at BN to the Tamworth branch of 4Networking.

It isn’t me, but the 4N area leader, who has gone on record as saying that “Martin had the room riveted as his passion and delicate advocacy of what can be a debatable subject was handled beautifully’ Thanks, Debs!

The meeting got even better as I then met up with a local businessman I have been trying to engage with for a while to talk about work. We have a meeting lined up next week and if our proposals go ahead, it will be another big boost. 

This sits alongside a separate project I was discussing on Tuesday; one that I’m sure can work although I don’t want to jinx it.

So, all good, yes? Until I rested my phone on the dashboard of the car while driving Mrs W home yesterday evening, then watched it fly out of the open window when I turned a corner.

With hindsight, stopping on a busy road and trying to retrieve handset, SIM card, battery and cover was not the act of a sane, rational 48-year-old with a 2:1 degree. I could have been run over; I should have just shrugged my shoulders; but you don’t, do you?

So I ran the risk, gathered all the bits together, reassembled the phone - and realised that the screen was bent and shattered beyond recognition.

I’d really love an iPhone (purely for work purposes, obviously..) but I can’t afford one at the moment, so off I went this morning to our local branch of a well-known national supermarket to buy a cheap handset which I can get unlocked at a store in town.

Unfortunately, this tale ends on a note with which all owners of small businesses will be grimly familiar - the cashflow crisis. I have three hefty payments due in next week; they will be paid, I trust implicitly the people involved. But the money’s not there yet. The bank account contains nothing; nada, nowt, zilch, as they say. 

The phone will have to wait. So if you’re trying to reach me by phone this weekend, I’m afraid it’s the old-fashioned landline. Just like back in the days when I had a ‘proper’ job.

Fun in the sun? Well, we certainly had fun....

I shocked myself this morning when I realised that I’ve been blogging here for just over 12 months. It was on June 6 2011 that I first put finger to keyboard with a piece about my interest in a wide-ranging number of sports. That first post ended: “Those that can play sport, do; those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, write about it, talk about it, express views of varying relevance and validity.... With a nod in the direction of my other interests, including real ale, as well as an occasional look at my professional life as a magazine editor, that is what this blog will do.”

In the 12 months since, I hope I’ve lived up that promise. It’s certainly been an enjoyable 12 months and if you delve into the archive of this blog, you’ll see that it has indeed been wide-ranging.

Football and ale have featured prominently, politics has nudged its way in occasionally, I’ve covered journalism, naturism, genealogy, business networking, my loathing for Dominic Littlewood..... I’ve never been short of topics and if there has been the occasional hiatus, it’s simply been down to time constraints rather than lack of ingenuity on your blogger’s part.

However, one thing doesn’t seem to have changed in 12 months - the dismal British summer weather. My third post, 366 days ago today, was about Nudefest, British Naturism’s annual seven-day extravaganza at Newperran Holiday Park in Cornwall. While acknowledging that those present had really enjoyed themselves, I posted: “The weather? Oh, the weather was dreadful. Howling gales, pouring rain, glowering stormclouds, only brief glimpses of the sun which is supposed to be the raison d’etre of naturism.”

Nudefest 2012, which took place from June 10-17, was equally storm-tossed. When Mrs W and I arrived on Thursday at about 1pm, there were already campers packing up their battered tents and heading home after less than four days. Once again, events which were designed to provide fun in the sun were moved indoors or simply abandoned (indoor nude archery, anyone? Thought not...).

It seemed to rain constantly, with an accompanying storm-force gale, from about 2pm on Thursday until late on Saturday evening and it was frustrating, to say the least, to wake on the final Sunday morning to see light clouds, blue sky and more than a hint of sun.

Still, as we did last year, we made the best of it and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The editor of British Naturism magazine gave a well-received talk about his work, a visit to Skinners Brewery in Truro will hopefully be repeated in 2013, the Eden Project played host to what I am told was an entertaining evening on the opening Sunday and there were pub games and a riotous quiz, as well as some excellent musical entertainment. 

BN members Billy Bottle and Martine played a unique brand of soulful music at what should have been ‘Picnic in the Park’ but which twice became ‘Picnic in the Bar,’ the traditional sing-along around the piano on the final night seemed to be delivered with more gusto than ever before and Nudefest gave a couple of excellent young student musicians the opportunity to shine before an unexpected audience.

Lily and Meg are first-year Popular Music students at the University of Falmouth. A chance conversation saw them become part of the programme at the Eden Project evening, before they wowed a crowd of over 200 naturists at Newperran on the final night. I’ve seen a fair few musicians at BN events in my time, but never have I seen a hushed room so spellbound by what they were seeing. 

As we made our way to our caravan late on Saturday evening, still full of adrenalin from conga-ing through the bar, out into the car park and back to the strains of “Is this the way to Amarillo?” Mrs W turned to me, smiled broadly and said: “You know, I really enjoyed myself tonight.”

Given the appalling weather, there can be no better praise for Nudefest 2012 than that.

Growing my network - and yours?

One of the hardest things about working for myself from home is the isolation that can come from working five days a week (often six), with only the family pet for company.

 Ideas that sound great when I run them past Muffy sometimes sound stupid when I mention them to a client. Convincing myself that I am doing the right thing, when there is no-one in ‘the office’ to agree or disagree, is more challenging than I would like.

 Which is why a lot of owners of small businesses go business networking.

 A whole raft of groups have sprung up across the country offering breakfasts, lunches, or evening events, where we can go to widen our business network, enhance our ability to pitch for business and get invaluable tips from those who are in the same situation.

 I’m currently a member of two of the more well-known national groups and since I started networking regularly, I’ve found that business opportunities are becoming more common.

 I wouldn’t yet say that Martin Warrillow Publishing Services is anything like a roaring success, but I do feel much more confident about the future than I did six months ago.

 If you’re a part of the networking world, you probably won’t need to ask the names of the well-known groups; if you aren’t but feel you should be, reply to this blog and I’ll email you some details.

 One of the things I’ve learned about networking etiquette is that you should never denigrate another group in public. It can be embarrassing when someone you meet turns out to be a member of a group which you have just been loudly denouncing in another conversation ten feet away.

 So I won’t do that but I will tell you about one of my favourite groups. Shortly before the end of summer 2011, a friend who is a lifecoach and fellow naturist told me about the Nationwide Alliance of Business Owners. He is a member of one of their groups in Leicester and although I felt that was too far to travel at 6.30am every other Friday, a spot of Googling uncovered a group in Solihull. That’s just half-an-hour down the M42 at that time of day, so I decided to give it a try.

  Part of the secret of business networking in this fashion is finding the right mix of people.  I’ve been to groups where you could feel noses being turned up at you. I’ve been to groups full of interesting people, but out of which I was never going to get any paid work.

 And then there was NABO Solihull; I’m not one for joining things straight away (I can’t afford it) but I joined after just one two-hour meeting. It was full of friendly people going through the same problems which I was facing, as well as people with years of experience who knew how to put us right.

 We had a laugh and a smile, some interesting discussion and I felt this was going to be the right thing to do. Within two weeks, I had won enough work to pay my annual membership fee.

 Since then, a lot of the group have become good friends, people I can turn to for advice as to how MWPS can move forward. That’s what business networking is designed to provide but I think very few groups do it as well as Solihull NABO.

 Our members include a web designer, a couple of business advisers, a learning and development consultant, three accountants, an acupuncturist, some life coaches, an estate agent, a photographer.....oh, and a freelance journalist and writer.

 But we would like some more members; it’s a cliche of business that if you stand still, you go backwards, so we are keen to increase our membership. 

 We meet every other Friday from 7.30am-9.30am at St John’s Hotel, Solihull. Breakfast costs £12 (although we do a starter deal for new members) and if you’re interested, I can let you have details of annual fees. Just reply to this blog

 And if you decide to try us, you’ll hear some of the best elevator pitches on the circuit...

Warrillow - that's an interesting name......

It is rather inevitable that with my surname, I am regularly asked: “That’s an unusual name, where does it come from?”

 And believe me, I’ve tried to find out. Even before ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ became a hit on the nation’s television screens and even before censuses stretching back to the 1870s could be easily searched on a computer screen, I was looking for my ancestors.

 I’ve trawled through ancient records books and newspaper files in libraries as far apart as Worcester and West Yorkshire; I’ve spoken to my few remaining elderly relatives; I’ve stood in graveyards in Bewdley and Dewsbury looking for signs on gravestones. And I’ve come up with........... precisely nothing.

 Watching ‘WDYTYA?’ drives me to distraction because the celebrities featured obviously have teams of archivists and researchers searching through the records before the programme is even commissioned. I, as the only son of an only son, have just me to do the research.

 And as the years go on and I become ever more aware that, as the childless only son of an only son, the Warrillow line will expire when I do, I become ever more determined to find some answers.

 So here’s where we stand at the moment. My father, whose 76th birthday on May 18 2012 coincides with the writing of this post (Happy birthday, Dad!) lives pleasantly and healthily in retirement in southern Spain.

 The death of his father is my first memory of the loss of a close family member. My grandfather spent all his working life in a carpet factory in Kidderminster, in the days when the industry provided employment for almost all the working-class men of that Worcestershire town.

 He retired in 1972 and like so many men of his ilk, even today, had no clue what to do with himself when going to work in the factory didn’t dominate his life.

 I still remember the telephone ringing early one Saturday morning in 1973 and waking me up, before my dad rushed out of our house to where his father lived, less than a mile or so away.

 I don’t remember my great-grandfather - and that’s where the problems start. Albert Warrillow appears to have been born in 1872 and died in 1963, a year before I was born. If you follow the obvious trail through websites such as ancestry.co.uk, it leads you back to a family who lived in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent in the 1830s. Yet family stories put the Warrillows in the 1870s in West Yorkshire, somewhere around Heckmondwike or Batley. It seems that they moved from there to Kidderminster, following the carpetmaking or woollen trades from the White Rose county.

 And I can find nothing in the records to support this. It seems that my great-grandfather was married twice, following the tragic early death of his first wife; when asked about it by my father when I was still a toddler, his second wife appears to have refused to say anything. These things were not talked about in Victorian England.

 So here is where the brick wall starts to be constructed. I have found records which suggest that Albert Warrillow was either born in or placed into a workhouse; I can’t find anything to confirm that. I have a piece of paper which purports to be Albert’s marriage certificate; where his father’s signature should be, there is a simple ‘X’

 This, of course, is not wholly surprising because many working-class people in these times were barely able to read and write - but it is of no use to those of us trying to trace the family history!

Now, I may have a name for Albert’s second wife but if you key that into the 1911 census records, it brings up roughly a dozen possible answers. The researchers and genealogists on ‘WDYTYA’ may have time to sort through them all in search of the right one; as a freelance journalist trying to keep the financial wolf from the door and the bills paid, I don’t.

 So I guess this post is aimed at those of you out there who have done this and succeeded. Is there a right and a wrong way to go about it? In the internet age, is it still necessary to spend hours in libraries and local records offices trawling through ancient documents?

 Of course, I don’t expect to find the answer in five minutes; I would just like to know that I’m going about it the right way - and that my dad and I can discover it before it’s too late.

How to lend a hand to British Naturism

Regular readers will have noted that there hasn’t been much activity here in recent weeks. Having initially started with the good intention of blogging at least once a week, it has slipped back since the New Year to being once a fortnight and this is my first post in almost three weeks.

 Shameful.

 Of course, blogs aren’t like newspapers, which have to come out on a particular day; that’s one of the good things about 21st-century technology but something which those of us weaned on daily press deadlines have to get used to.

 With blogs, you say something when you have something interesting to say and have time to say it.

 This hiatus hasn’t been due to a lack of ideas - my life is so full of interesting stuff these days that I could think of six different subjects a week - but rather a lack of time. I’m pleased to say that while my business career isn’t exactly booming, there seem to be enough things going on to keep me busy and, crucially, to keep financial despair at bay.

 But Mrs W and I have just spent the weekend at an event which I couldn’t fail to blog about - the first-ever British Naturism National Convention.

 Held at the picturesque Ilam Hall, a National Trust property right on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border and high in the Peak District, NatConv was a conference and training weekend for everyone involved in the naturist community – clubs and swims, regions and individual members. 

 BN hoped that members would see it as inspiration to ‘do something’ with their interest in naturism, rather than just lying on a beach or jumping into a pool.

 Despite having around 11,000 members and putting on events all year round including extravaganzas such as Nudefest and the Alton Towers weekend, BN has a full-time staff of precisely zero.

 There are three ladies based in Head Office in Northampton, who do all the administrative work on a jobshare basis; there is general secretary Tracey Major, who oversees them and there are three paid consultants including commercial manager/marketing supremo Andrew Welch and yours truly as editor of the BN magazine.

 A lot of members think Andrew and I are paid employees whereas in fact, we are on annual contracts and have other work outside BN.

 Given that, how do we put on events such as AT, Nudefest, Great British Skinny Dip, Natconv and all the swims, saunas and ‘Big Days Out’ programme, as well as do all the promotional, marketing and campaigning work for the cause of making naturism ever more   acceptable?

 We do so with the sterling help of a small band of volunteer members, who give up their time to devote some effort to a particular little part of each project. That group is difficult to quantify, because people like to help out with things going on in their area, so that someone living in the south-west may put a lot of effort into Nudefest in Cornwall, but may not even attend our Blackpool weekend.

 So we are always in need of more willing help and NatConv was a weekend of talks, workshops and practical sessions designed to broaden the number of members equipped to help make a difference to naturism in the UK.

 The sessions included looking at how we sell naturism to the media, getting the best out of BN’s regional and club structure, a look at the progress being made on BN’s rolling three-year plan to improve the organisation and so on.

 It sounds quite intense but the 80 members who attended between Friday afternoon and noon on Sunday thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and all said they came away inspired to do their bit for naturism in 2012.

 That’s crucial; it’s a mantra of ours that although the age profile of BN members is not exactly teenage and the organisation could always do with more money (why not leave us £50 in your will?), BN wouldn’t die through old age or lack of cash, rather a lack of hands to help put on the growing list of events that help improve our revenue streams.

 Our growing band of Young British Naturists members (for the 18-30s) is really helping to spark some positive things, but more members mean more hands, more brains, more ideas... 

 If my ramblings encourage you to try naturism this summer (yes, we will have summer eventually!), why not join BN and get involved? It costs less than £1 a week for a couple, you could meet some fabulous people, visit some great events (Nudefest 2012, our week at Newperran in Cornwall, is just five weeks away)...and enjoy the special experience which is naturism.

 You could be helping keep BN alive for the next generation of naturists.