Paraguay has been my home now for nearly twenty years. Before that England was where I call home.
More precisely the town of Dunstable. There I grew up, went to school and then to work.
Dunstable is an average sized market town in Southern England. It is located in the county of Bedfordshire. The population is approximately 35,000 and lies about 35 miles north of London.
Little is special about it. Other than a few historical claims. It is though a pleasant enough place and no too bad a place to be growing up.
These days though sadly much of what was there in the 80s and 90s has now closed down. What remains is a dormitory town on a busy cross roads.
In my time there I lived in a few different places.
First of all in a house at the bottom of the quiet cul de sac Calcutt Close. That was in Eastern Dunstable. A nice little house with a big garden. Also just a very short walk from my first school.
Unfortunately it was built on an angled plot so difficult to extend. It became cramped for three growing boys all needing their own bit of space.
At least being the oldest I did get my own room. A little box room looking out of the front of the house. A small room without much room for anything.
From there in order to give everyone a bit more space the family moved just a few streets away to Millers Ley. There a four bedroom house gave everyone a room of their own. And not moving far no one had to do anything complicated like changing schools.
However the larger house came with a much smaller garden. Just about room to kick a ball around. The houses there abouts were more closely packed and ours overlooked an electric substation and the back of the local church.
It was though only just round the corner from the neighbourhood row of shops. That was convenient. Good for little purchases and take away food.
There I stayed for the rest of my school life and until I had been working for several years and could buy a place of my own.
That place was just a starter property. A little flat in a small block called Meadway Court on the western edge of town.
From there it was only a five minute walk to the green hills that surround the town and little more than twice that into the town center and work.
That was where I lived for several years before coming to Paraguay.
Of course there was more to Dunstable than just houses. There were also for example schools.
Back in the mid 70s where I started school Bedfordshire had a system of two junior schools, one middle and then an upper school. So there was plenty of changing of schools to be done.
My first school was St Christopher’s. Being opposite the bottom of Calcutt Close it was no distance at all to walk.
After a couple of years I then moved up to Highfields. An old school house a the top of the neighbouring street. So still not far to walk. The playground there had very little grass, just a couple of small lawns at either end and just concrete to play on.
Old fashioned as it was it did not remain open many years after I had passed though. I has long since been pulled down and replaced by a small housing estate.
After that the middle school was Millvale. The move to Millers Ley halved the walk to it.
It had previously been an upper school and so had a large playing field a blocks to hold classrooms for different subjects.
Four years there were tolerable. Even if by then I was quite bored with the whole education thing.
Once that was done there was just upper school to get through. Those were much larger with just three servicing the whole town.
It was the first time I had gone to school with people who did not live within walking distance of my house. The upper schools took children from all the towns middle schools as well as the surrounding villages.
My upper school was called Manshead and stood on a large piece of ground at the very southern end of town.
No more walking just a few blocks to school. Instead now it was a daily bus ride there and back. I could be reached just as quickly by walking over the hills, but that was discouraged. Anyway the bus was simpler and everyone was on the bus.
At Manshead I did my final three years of school. I did go back for a few months for the sixth form but as soon as I found a job I was out of there.
That job after I had written to every bank and accountant in town came at Lloyds Bank.
It was 1985 when I started there and thing were a lot more labour intensive and required thinking about rather than just doing.
The first job for all the new recruits was sorting all the cheques that customers had written into alphabetical order. Without doing that the ones that were not going to be paid could not be found and sent back where they had come from.
Computers were then only starting to arrive. All that there were were the newly arrived tills which were really litlte more than glorified adding machines.
Everything else was still done manually. Either on great printed sheets of paper or on cards all carefully filed away.
To check a balance the daily print out from head office had to be consulted and to pay items like standing orders the days cards had to be pulled from the draw and recorded. Vital then that everything was filed back in the right place.
More importantly though than the computers not yet doing the maths was that they were also not as yet being asked to make decisions.
Every decision to lend or not to lend was taken by someone in the office. That was a part of the job I enjoyed. Having to think rather than just do.
Inevitably over the years the computers got better and more and more was passed over to them. Ideal for ensuring that the same verdict would be reached in every branch. But rather depressing for someone who,liked their work to be a bit of a challenge and something to think about.
By the mid 90s I had gotten out of personal banking and into business banking were so intelligence was still required.
A few good years there but inevitably even there thinking was sacrificed for conformity of brand. Little could be agreed without the computers authority.
What I and other like me who liked to do the thinking rather than the meeting people and selling things had left to do became less and less.
In the end there was not really any true back office work left. So as banks don’t sack people unless they really have to various business banking teams were folded together into support teams.
The term was a little misleading. What they really were was just a second tier of telephone center for customers who had phoned the national call centers to get though.
I suffered that for a while soon began looking for ways out.
There was nothing that appealed in the UK. After 16 years as a bank clerk there was not much else I was qualified to do.
So my eyes turned further afield. First thoughts were to go travelling for a year. Maybe something would come along while I was doing that.
Then I saw a little advert for a teaching project in Paraguay.
From there packing everything up in the UK was easy and I was soon heading to Paraguay to begin my new life here.
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