Good morning all and welcome to my third week as Pope Adrian the Munificent. Judging from last week's scoring, it now looks as if the Holy Orders are working!
For me, the 'Swinging Sixties' was an important decade. I left school before my sixteenth birthday and joined an international bank in the City, making the daily commute by train. The trainees would start in the Post Room, learning the general routine of the bank and deliver Bankers Payments and Exchange Contracts to other banks in the City, through rain or shine. After some months, having walked nearly every street and back alley in the Square Mile until one knew it like the back of one's hand, we would be transferred into various departments until ready to specialise in a particular area of banking. Naturally computers hadn't been introduced at that time -- only accounting machines. Everything had to be written in large ledgers with fountain pens (seldom seen nowadays) and most documents and all letters would be prepared on manual typewriters. I also had to attend evening classes in order to gain the required banking qualifications.
Spare evenings would be spent at the youth club or in the local pubs, going to dances at weekends, with local bands playing. One such group became The Small Faces when Rod Stewart joined them. I would race around the local towns on my motor bike, until one evening a car driver decided to hit me which resulted in six months with my leg in plaster and nine months off work, though luckily the bank kept me on the payroll.