On 1st May 2022, our Christmas card list got one name less. Although it has been a while since we visited, I feel the need to record and share our happy memories of Mortimer before they slip away beyond reach. That will inevitably lead on to all the friends we made with Mortimer & our stays at Mannix Point, County Kerry & Ireland. As it will mean scanning boxes of photos and searching papers, this may take some time. It will take many posts and they won't be in chronological order, but just as I find them.
Mortimer was teaching "Special Needs" at Langold Dyscarr school, at the time, one of the most difficult jobs in Nottinghamshire Education Authority and I was at College House, the other end of the spectrum. We met when we were both providers in the early days of BBC B Computers being thrust on every school. Teachers hid them, ignored them, hoped they would go away & worst of all feared them. Our evening job at the "computer centre" after a day's teaching was to help other teachers accept them them, use them and adapt their practice. I'm not sure why they chose me as a provider, except that having read the Eagle comic in my youth, where Dan Dare had a computer in his space ship that he could talk to, I had a strange notion that we were heading that way. It was easy to see why Mortimer was doing it. He had a flare for easing people into things they thought might be difficult and his disarming gentle manner made him a popular provider for "in-service" training courses.
On one such course, he was wooing a group of nervous teachers into venturing into the realms of ICT in their primary classrooms. It was his practice to demonstrate how innocuous a BBC B was by picking it up casually and handling it comfortably while explaining that it wouldn't bite, explode or give electric shock. As he was explaining this he grabbed the machine in front of him, but didn't realise that it was Stan's machine. Stan was the head of the computer centre and was forever swapping chips around in his machine and as devices that allowed this to happen easily had not yet been invented, he left the lid unscrewed. As Mortimer picked it up the lid fell off and the machine slipped out of his fingers onto the bench. Only Mortimer could have completed the session and still convinced the group that BBC Bs were harmless objects and could in fact be very useful in a classroom. As the legend of this incident spread, Mortimer & I became friends, working on many courses together including weekends at Eaton Hall & In-service days in schools around the county. They mostly had him introducing the nervous "beginners" and me trying to open up a vision of the future for teachers working in inner city or rural schools without alienating them or undoing Mortimer's hard work.
Along the way we discovered a shared love of good whiskey and walking together with Stan. We both also loved outdoor life and nature. On one trip to Kinder Scout in pouring rain, surrounded by near liquid peat, he mentioned that he had a piece of bog on the edge of his home town in County Kerry.
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| Mortimer on the edge of Kinder Scout circa 1982 |
Kath and I made friends, explored, surfed at St Finian's Bay & wiled away the evenings with Mortimer, a glass and a guitar.
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| Me, Willem & Robin ... I'd never jammed with a fiddler before. |
By 1988 Mortimer had transferred some of the beach onto the bog for a sort of "road" from the cottage to the cordyline palms at the point and wrestled his little caravan down there.
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| The caravan just shows on the right of the sketch I did from the van window. |