Three out of four ain't bad.

1200  feet underground is a long way down and getting there was a quite a ride.

As coalminers we had to take that journey squatting four to a small cage,there were three other cages on the lift  so that was 16 men in total, it was essential that the ride was a quick one in order to get the next shift of miners underground as quickly as possible.
The solution to that was an easy one, the winchman just took the brake off and the cage plummetted into the bowels of the earth, in freefall.
I suppose it was the forerunner of a bungee jump..totally free falling trying to avoid looking at the shaft wall  whizzing by a few feet away as we went hurtling downwards.. and then the brakes were slowly applied to bring you gently to a stop at your drift level.
I made that ride hundreds of times and never ever got to like it  and I would rather chew my foot off than take a bungee jump.
The point of this little anecdote!!...
There is nowhere on earth quite as dark as a deep shaft coal mine when the lights are switched off, and I don't mean the lights that are every twenty yards or so  along the drift walkway which give off a very dim glow because the glass is covered in years of accumulated coal dust, I mean the darkness after you go through an airlock door into a worked out seam and find somewhere reasonably comfortable to sit, then you switch off your helmet lamp..That sort of darkness...  Total Darkness.

A a young man working down a coal mine was one of the few options available in my part of the United Kingdom, it was either that or being unemployed..no choice...my family needed the money.
My problem was that I had no real desire to be a miner....that's where the switching off the lamp comes into it.
As a school child I was an avaricious reader, I devoured every book that entered the local childrens library, every book on every subject in our poorly equipeed school library, and the hunger for knowledge,about everything, never left me, it also cursed me with an unbelievable imagination.

I wanted to travel, to be on the Hispaniola as it sailed across  the Atlantic to find treasure Island, to be with Christopher columbus when he made landfall in America, to fly a Spitfire.. what I did not want to do was dig out coal from a mine several hundred feet underground.....do you get the drift?

So it  was that the switching off the miners lamp and being in complete darkness  actually illuminated another world.....the one in my mind

I would sit and listen to the drip of water seeping through the cracked stone of the roof, the distant crump of explosives blasting another seam of coal and turn them into something else....Another world

I emerged from my mining days realising I wanted four things in life 1.Travel  2.Money  3. Meeting lots of girls  4. Adventures.
This wild ambition led me to becoming a Director of Photography and latterly a writer along with my partner Mary Lou Clarke

Two of our novels The Sandrunners  and The Stack are available on www.amazon.co.uk


So three out of four  ambitions ain't bad, the other one is a work in progress.

Come back to the site and I will let you know how I got on.