Memories of Max - A Father's Story

Chapter 7 - Max

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I had seen the blood in his hair and assumed that it had caused the reddish hue. I then laughed at her delight and at my discomfort when I realised he had ginger hair. I did not care, all that mattered was that my son was healthy. After the due inspection the doctors declared that all looked normal and I let out a I sigh of relief.

Life became quite difficult after Max was born. The first reason was that he had terrible colic and also slept very erratically. Like most first-time parents we found this very distressing and also very tiring. He was also ill during many of his early months.

The second reason life was difficult was my lack of job and career. I had a degree in Mining Engineering and had worked in the North and Irish Seas in the oil industry for three years before being made redundant when the oil price collapsed in1986.

In the years before Max was born I had a varied and unusual set of jobs. I became self employed with a business called HTSI. The business involved varied building and decorating work. It was called HTSI because my mother always joked that I was a High Tech Scientific Idiot. The name was chosen as a bit of fun but became awkward when I registered the business and was questioned why I had chosen the acronym. I said that the choice of letters was random and had no real meaning.

I was convinced that with my qualifications I could re-train and get a professional job in Wales. In the event that no suitable job became available I decided to hedge my bets. I signed on for a retraining course. There were three displayed in the Job Centre. One was for Micro-electronics, one for Opto-electronics and one for Computer Aided Design. I knew nothing about any of them and signed up for the HNC in Micro-electronics because it sounded the most likely to be of use. I really did not think that I would end up doing the course but nothing else turned up so I went back to college in Swansea for a year. I completed the course and realised that this was not my vocation. Although I enjoyed the course, the qualification would essentially lead to being a technician who looked at a faulty system, discovered a motherboard was not working and just replaced the board. To use the more interesting parts of the course and become involved in circuit design would require at least another year of training. This was not for me. I had already done a degree and did not want to become caught up in the educational system again.

During the course I became interested in software design and decided that this was where my future lay. This was not as easy as it sounded. It took another two years and four hundred job applications before I started work as a trainee systems engineer.

After I found that I could not get the work I wanted when I finished my course in micro-electronics, I found work on a fish farm which involved feeding fish and building the cages for the trout. I enjoyed the work and when it finally solely involved the feeding of the fish, it was a dream job. I used to travel ten miles on my motorbike, feed the fish, and then return home. I did this twice a day and earned enough money to keep Sara and myself fed and also enough for us to go out a couple of nights a week.

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