Andy Tilley

In Manchester there are only two serious choices that a young man has to make; which football team to support and what to wear to the match. I chose United, (wisely as it turned out) but perhaps not so clever was my fashion choice. I was a 'mod' back then, and in early eighties England , mods were an endangered species. I guess we asked for it though. I mean it wasn't ever going to look right for a fourteen year old kid to hit the streets wearing a two-tone suit, Ben Sherman shirt and shiny black brogues was it? Kids dressed as men is just wrong, like we'd escaped from a Bugsy Mallone set, and if that wasn't na've enough, we would finish the look by draping ourselves in heavy ex-NATO army parkas that served no useful purpose other than to slow us down as we ran from gangs of rockers and skins, punks and Goths. Looking back though, my lack of pace turned out to be not such a bad thing as invariably those short lived chases would give me just enough time to get my mouth into gear and talk my way out of a beating. It was a tactic that worked well and the sharp wit that I relied on then has continued to serve me well in my adult life. It earned me some life long friends at Salford University where I studied engineering and it still works today if I ever find myself cornered in the board room. Oil is my primary trade now, and at the moment I do this in the middle of Algerian Sahara. It's a job that I enjoy tremendously, but it is just a job and to be honest, one that takes me away from my loved ones for more time than I feel comfortable giving. But, like my parka, this necessary inertia to the pace of my life has its upside. In this case the pay off is the opportunity to write. Time spent alone far away needs to be filled and in my case it yearns to create otherwise it would be truly wasted wouldn't it?