Stories: Joined Up
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'Stories' is back, soliciting tales of joining: clubs, societies, boards, unions, churches, political parties. How was it for you? Traumatised by Girl Guides? Made for life by MENSA? Troubled by the rugby club? Or just loving being no longer alone?
60 Responses
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I recall my flatmate & I meeting two attractive women at a university "hop" in the early 80s. They invited us to attend an "H Block Committee" meeting the following morning. Ignoramuses both, we had no idea what an "H Block Committee" might be, and no access to google to find out.
That was our only foray into IRA sympathising.
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I was lured into joining Brownies at the age of seven with stories of horse riding, artistic freedom and exciting adventures. I was bitterly disappointed to find out that it was mainly about arcane crafts that I was no good at and grumpy authoritarian ladies.
The last straw came when we had to play indoor hockey using a stuffed owl as a puck. Not being able to tolerate that level of animal cruelty (or stuffed toy cruelty? - probably about the same thing to me at that age) I walked out in tears and never returned!
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They invited us to attend an "H Block Committee" ... That was our only foray into IRA sympathising
Obviously you didn't go to Waikato Uni then...
Of course they knocked down H block a few years back, place hasn't been the same since.
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At about the same age as Renee, I was lured into Girls' Brigade - I can't remember how, and it baffles me now. The only thing I remember is deliberately cross-stitching my napkin to my skirt out of sheer boredom.
But when I went to uni, I joined KAOS. It was the making of me, I swear. And nobody tried to make me cross-stitch anything.
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I wanted to join KAOS, but being an avid follower of jesus at the time, I made the mistake of praying about it first. Indulged in a bit of church-endorsed stichomancy: opened the good book at random and plonked my finger down, and the verse was:
When sinners tempt you, my son, don't give in. Suppose they say, “Come on; let's find someone to kill! Let's attack some innocent people for the fun of it! They may be alive and well when we find them, but they'll be dead when we're through with them! [...] Don't go with people like that, my son. Stay away from them. (Proverbs 1:10-15)
So I stayed away.
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This has nothing to do with joining anything, but is connected to H Block.
In 1981 I was working for the Mount Cook National Park. Part of the job was to maintain the mountain huts. It was mid-May and the end of the climbing season and three of us flew by skiplane to the Tasman Saddle hut at the head of the Tasman Glacier 27km from Mount Cook Village.
We spent a couple of days cleaning the hut and replacing the 12 volt batteries for the two way radios.
One of the delights of ski plane access was being able to take in large amounts of quality food, none of your dehydrated, boil in the bag tramping nonsense. On the last night we had a really slap up meal. As well as big steaks cooking on the kerosene burners we had luxury canned fruits like lychees and South African guarvas. The first of the Irish hunger strikers in H Block in the Maze Prison had just died. He had refused food since the beginning of March. So we dedicated our sumptuous repast to him, calling it the ‘Bobby Sands Memorial Dinner’.
The next morning was fine and clear. We had some quite awkward loads including two car batteries to carry down to the skiplane pick up a couple of km down the glacier. The planes could drop us off near the hut but late season crevasses stopped them picking us up there. We had a child's sled for the batteries and packs full of rubbish and tools. It was a bit awkward traversing the frozen snow with our loads but we got to the pick up point at the appointed time and it seemed to us still fine and clear. The plane duly arrived and overflew the spot to check the landing conditions, but the pilot declared it was ‘too turbulent’ to land and promptly flew away again.
It was a bit far to hike back to the hut and the weather forecast wasn’t great so we decided to carry on down the glacier. I think we abandoned the batteries at some point but it was still quite a struggle to get to the hut halfway down the glacier where we arrived about dinnertime.
Small problem. In our confidence about getting picked up by plane we had left our remaining food back at Tasman Saddle. We scrounged as best we could but I think only came up with a couple of spoon fulls of rice and some mouldy cheese left by an earlier party some time ago. Breakfast the next day was a cup of tea and it was a long and very hungry trudge down the moraines to civilisation, reached gratefully that afternoon.
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So I stayed away.
Nah, see, if it had said something like
Suppose they say, "Come on, you don't need to go to this lecture. Stay and have a couple more hands of bastard gin. Then we can discuss the relative merits of leather and PVC until it's time to go to the party, where we will drink, and dance to goth-rock, and watch fifty guys still be too scared to hit on the six women,"
THAT would have meant 'stay away from KAOS'.
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So we dedicated our sumptuous repast to him, calling it the ‘Bobby Sands Memorial Dinner’.
Unrelated to the thread, but this reminded me of attending a Rangers versus Celtic game in Glasgow in the early 1990's, and one crowd was singing to the other, to the tune of "She'll be coming round the mountain" a charming ditty called "Could you go a chicken supper Bobby Sands, could you go a chicken supper Bobby Sands, could you go a chicken supper, go a chicken supper ...".
You get the drift. My story of not joining.
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I started life as a non-joiner. My mother kept me out of brownies and the like knowing it wouldn't be my thing so all I joined during my school years were music and drama classes.
When I got to university I joined KAOS which sucked up entirely all of my life for a few years (mostly in a good way). Joining KAOS was the result of peer pressure more than anything and I still wasn't a natural joiner.
Then I had a baby. Starved of adult company I eagerly joined a Plunket sponsored coffee group where I quickly established myself as the weird, hippy outsider and found myself increasingly on the defensive. After a few months of that I ran away and joined La Leche League instead where I was more of a middle-level hippy insider. From LLL I was persuaded to join Playcentre and (after my second baby) the Homebirth Association. I've been suckered into office bearing positions and sub-committees in all three organisations so for someone who was once described as "a reticent loner" in a school report I seem to have evolved into a serious joiner.
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My story of not joining
I was in Standard Four, which I presume was 1974, and after school one day I was invited back to another boys house (with his three friends) to join their club. Considering the four of them were considered fairly cool (as cool as you can be at that age, in a white middle class neighbourhood) I went along, even tho' they wouldn't tell me what their club was called or what it was about.
I found out when we got to the boys house. It was called The Streakers Club and I was invited to take my clothes off. I declined but they didn't care and they all took all of their clothes off. And then they grabbed their little tiny penises (__peni__?) and pulled them taut and proceeded to play 'guitar' with them. That was quite a band they had there, but I was horrified and left immediately.
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In 1973 I joined London Village. The first and last social club I ever joined.
London was a big, anonymous place, and I was living there alone and in need of an extended social life. Leaving it to chance, or picking people up in pubs, held no appeal.
London Village was a search engine for people, founded by a sociologist. A social club with entry by interview, it required that you fill in an interests card which was held in a central file. All card files in those days - computers would have been a godsend. Your phone number had to be accessible to other members on request (more innocent times).
LV held monthly get togethers of various types all over London, organised by members in each region. These were advertised in the monthly social event calendar posted out to members.
The second way of finding events was by ringing LV's telephone tape that changed daily and featured events organised since the calendar came out.
The third way of finding a social gathering was to organise your own - by ringing the LV office and asking for the phone numbers of, say, "three Italian speaking Bridge players in Highgate", for example, or "six people in Ealing who might feel like going out to dinner tonight".
LV had about 7000 members at the time, I believe, and I enjoyed all sorts of excursions, dinners, car rallies, parties, visits to stately homes or exhibitions, poetry readings - you name it. I met all sorts, mostly really interesting people - from a West Indian architect trying to discover her African roots, to a Hong Kong billionaire's son and old Harrovian wanting to come out to New Zealand and work for the Values party.
Each area had anchor people who held a pub night once a month to catch up with locals and plan an activity or two. For a laugh, I went to a pubnight outside my region. Never been to that district before or since. A nice young Londoner, a museum administrator, had also gone out of his region that night for a bit of a change. We got talking, and he arranged to come and visit me at a later date, to borrow a book I had on a topic he was interested in. (I was fresh out of etchings.)
And that is how the present Mr Daleaway and I met.
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Obviously you didn't go to Waikato Uni then...
Of course they knocked down H block a few years back, place hasn't been the same since.
Knocked down? H block was never built at all!
The S-shaped C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L blockstravaganza was planned in the 1960s, but since then the building code had changed, somehow prohibiting that many buildings all linked together.
They say, sometimes, when you're strolling down from Hillcrest Road and the sun is at the right angle and the wind blows just so, sometimes you can see the eerie ghost of H block shimmering above the grass, and you might hear it whisper, "Build me! Realise my brutalist vision!"
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H Block. Where a couple of pretentious friends and I formed the Beer and Poetry club, drank jugs and read the odd poem.
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and read the odd poem
I think I've read that one too.
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On my return from Terezinstadt Concentration Camp on the hour long drive back to Kafkas cnr in Prague I was huranged by the wife of an otherwise pleasant American couple to join her retirement fund, otherwise known as AMWAY.
The coward I am nodded agreeable and looked for help from the rather embaressed husband. -
My only experience of a scouting-like group was during my brief membership of sea scouts when I was 8 or 9. The appeal was that I'd get to go sailing, fishing or swimming. I started attending the group's weekly meetings and we did stuff such as lighting fires, camping and first aid. All good, but not sea-related. After six weeks we still hadn't left shore.
One afternoon before the session began I decided to swim out to the platform anchored out in the bay. Older kids were already there. It was a lovely summer's day and as I came back to shore I felt very pleased with myself. I thought the scout leaders would be impressed, but apparently I had broken a rule. So I was kicked out of sea scouts for swimming. (And soon made friends with a kid outside sea scouts who had his own boat).
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H Block. Where a couple of pretentious friends and I formed the Beer and Poetry club, drank jugs and read the odd poem.
Ah, that nickname never made it into my social circle. (Obviously didn't stay long enough at uni). I think it was mainly called "The Hillcrest" (pronounced "Hoowcress") or the Hilly to my group.
But, wtf, demolished! I saw the Mutton Birds play there once. A lonely man tried to pick up a friend of mine. After the gig he was hanging around and said it had been, "Quite good. Nothing like a bit of heavy metal." Oh dear.
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I saw the Mutton Birds play there once. A lonely man tried to pick up a friend of mine. After the gig he was hanging around and said it had been, "Quite good. Nothing like a bit of heavy metal."
Well, I've no doubt he was 100% correct.
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Heather:
I wanted to join KAOS, but being an avid follower of jesus at the time, I made the mistake of praying about it first.
How do you know that was a mistake?
PS: I am getting concerned about degrees of separation and convergence in this community.
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Jason: written with the same whimsical intent of a rule of thumb that was commonly cited in my old circles - don't ever pray for patience or humility.
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Ah, yes doomed. And of course you had no control over which Great Old One answered that prayer.
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PS: I am getting concerned about degrees of separation and convergence in this community.
Ruh-roh.
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Emma,
Blazing Saddles town meeting reference? Or am I drawing too long a bow?
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PS: I am getting concerned about degrees of separation and convergence in this community.
Ruh-roh
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Are you talking about the six degrees of separation thing, Jason? I like that aspect of living in a small country. I know a couple of the people who post here (I'm even related to one, I think) and it just intrigues and delights me, really. I like when the Gracewoods post - what an extraordinary talented family, and how proud their parents must be. I like when Russells boy posts his videos - bit of a family thing. See, I love the personal. And this forum has enough of both political to read, and personal to engage with, to keep me a very happy PAS reader and contributer. -
Just so, Jackie.
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