Marine Engineering Cadetship, Phase Two: MV Amenity

After a few weeks leave I was instructed to join the Amenity at Grangemouth in Scotland. Fortunately my time on the vessel was brief. After the fun and excitement of the Somersetbrook it was dreary and monotonous. I joined on the 20^th of January 1981 and the first two weeks or so were spent alongside at BP’s Grangemouth refinery. It was the middle of winter, and winter in Scotland is dull and cold. Furthermore, since I had been away there seemed to have been a cultural shift away from the happy, up beat, largely optimistic 1970s to the more dour, pessimistic and introspective 1980s. All I seemed to hear on the radio was the slow, depressing Vienna, or Fade to Grey delivered to us ad nauseum by the arbiters of public taste. The ‘us’ decade had finally given way to the ‘me’ decade. Disco was dead, funk lost, punk long since sold out, and the cheeky working-class comedians, with their wisecracks and gags about race, marriage, in-laws and the other things that ordinary working people talked about in the canteen replaced on TV by the middle-class ‘alternative’ comics and their condescending drawing room or college-boy humour. Although only some five months, it seemed as if I’d joined the Somersetbrook in the exciting, flamboyant, irreverent, anything-can-happen, 1970s and paid off in the boring, conservative, politically correct ‘80s. The party was over and the hangover had begun. Being stuck in Grangemouth only made it more depressing.

To compound the misery, the chief was a former alcoholic who had substituted drink with work. From alcoholic to workaholic he never stopped, and we frequently had to remind him of our smoko or lunch break. I never really liked Grangemouth, which I found to be a dull, monotonous place. It was a typical small, one-industry, working town: unpretentious yet bland and boring, with little to do and nowhere to go. The nearest pub was called the Bon Accord. I visited it a few times but after repeatedly and persistently being somewhat aggressively propositioned by a large, overbearing, homosexual man I stopped going there. I have no idea whether it was a gay pub or not, but there were very few women in the place in any case, so why bother? Eventually the ship did move, and we got as far as Inverness, but that was about it really. On return to Grangemouth it was the 20^th of February and time to pay off to go back to tech for Phase 3 of my cadetship. I couldn’t wait to go! Little did I realise that the post ‘70s, post-Somersetbrook hangover was to continue for the rest of the year.