About Me

Name: Neil Oldfield White

DOB: 8th May 1970

Favourite colour(s): Black, and natural rustic ones.

Favorite band(s): Pearl Jam, Rush, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Frank Zappa

Favourite food(s): Madras Curries. Poached Eggs on a bed of green herb salad on granary toast that's been spread thinly with Marmite.

Biography

Bradford Born

Manningham Mills - once a world famous building and now a derelict hazard Bradford was a wealthy city in Victorian times, famous across the world for the wool from its mills. But that's a long gone time. The mills are mostly derelict, even the huge, magnificent Manningham Mills, shown here with its famous landscape dominating chimney.

Back then, in the bustle of the 19th Century, textiles were at the heart of the industrial revolution, and wool, along with cotton, was the raw material used to spin the best cloth for the best suits for those with the new money in all the major cities of the suddenly shrinking world. Lancashire mostly went the cotton route, but Yorkshire took the wool, and Bradford the lion's share.

Set high up in the Yorkshire Pennines, the well fed rivers around Bradford provided ready energy for the water wheels that drove the wool mill machinery, and a network of canals and railways provided the transport necessary to get coal in for ever increasing energy needs, and the goods out as production from the throbbing, soot spewing factories burgeoned to millionaire making proportions.

Where I grew up, in Tyersal, one of these mill factories remained, stood at the top of the road. A huge, empty, broken building, I had no clue about it's history. I did not know that its black stones stood as a monument, a tombstone over the long dead industry of Bradford. In fact few of the mills remain standing at all. Most of the places where they stood had long turned to wasteland expanses of rubble and litter by the time I came into the world.

Bradford City Hall is a maginificent building But there are still signs around the city of that wealth long gone - the grand, old stone houses, the imposing long terraces, the mill and homes of Saltaire village. The Italian inspired City Hall is an incredibly detailed building, with a tall clock tower and dozens of statues recessed in the intricately carved stonework, speaking boldly of a time when Bradfordians were proud, ambitious and optimistic. All that is gone now. Walking the inner city particularly there is a tangible feeling of poverty, of struggle, and even of desperation.

The Sutton Estate in Tyersal was an early 20th Century housing estate with small box houses arranged into an ugly grid that had been some planner's idea of a dream housing layout. Make no mistake, it was tough there. The people who lived there were all poor working class, and in the UK in the 1970s that meant socialist and angry. The kids were tough and boisterous, their parents grim and tired. In this harsh world, being an unhealthy, pasty, asthmatic kid with dreadful summer hayfever who couldn't run, play football or fight, I really didn't stand a chance. I had a miserable, miserable time of it.

Railway Track

Disused railway lines At the bottom of the street where we lived a disused railway line ran. It had steep embankments on either side as it was set down in a sort of man-made trough. Though it was heavily fenced off, it was of course irresistible for all the children of the area. That even included me - though only in the off hayfever season.

The track seemed to run on forever whichever direction you looked. Following it, you looked up at either side to see houses that perched by the sides, filled with the lives of people you didn't know. You could see their curtains, the colours of their rooms, and it was like having a literal window on their lives. I grew to recognise each house, and felt a strange sense of relationship with them.

If you followed the track far enough you came to the remains of a torn down Victorian railway station. There were still strange leftovers, like cast iron gas street lamps standing like anachronous black and rust trees, and the curved iron frames of benches from waiting rooms, though the wood seat and the waiting rooms themselves had gone.

Tall fronds of grass grew all around, through the grey wooden sleepers and over the red metal of the tracks, catching blown litter and gathering it with leaves in piles in corners where an old wall or platform still stood as some eddy for the air flow. Animals gathered there, cats and dogs, hedgehogs, and sometimes foxes. You'd have to sit quiet for a long time to see a fox though.

I often went there, watching the butterflies making their home of it, listening to the birds chattering from the bare, spindly trees on the embankments. Further on, tracks led in to the woods, and further still the tracks joined the still working Leeds to Bradford train line where you could watch the trains roar past so close that you felt them take the air from your lungs. I didn't go there too often, though, because the hard kids went there to play chicken on the tracks.

That track has been completely removed now, and the valley has been filled in. It's become housing, of course. I wonder if they know.

Words & Music

Guitar I discovered the guitar when I was 7 years old. I had this red plastic guitar with four strings that I think had been a Christmas present. I had no idea about guitars, so I took it along to a school guitar class, and was laughed out of the room. The teacher, Mr Moyes, had to explain to me that it wasn't a real guitar, and that I would have to get one if I was going to learn to play one.

I cried my eyes out. Completely humiliated yet again, I told my mother. She wasn't incredibly sympathetic, but she did at least buy me a guitar for my next birthday... some six months later. Well, I took that guitar back to the class, and began to learn how to play basic chords and basic songs. Turns out I had talent, and I really put in the work when it came to practising at home. Within a year I was performing regularly in front of the school at morning assemblies, alone, singing songs like "Country Roads" and "Streets of London" like some trainee busker at a skin hardening conference. I have no idea why that happened to me, whose idea it was, or how they convinced me to do it. But I did it.

In the end I was playing lead guitar parts in school productions of "Oliver", "Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat", "Jesus Christ Superstar" and Christmas carol concerts. I loved it. Once, when I'd had a serious asthma attack that had resulted in me being hospitalised, I managed to get allowed home so that I could get back to the school to play in the concert that night. At the end of the concert, the school's headmaster, Mr Dunderdale, announced what I'd done as part of his spiel about the dedication of the kids in putting the show on. I got a standing ovation.

An avid reader, I was also trying my hand at writing at this age. I first wrote a serious short story when I was eight, called "The Firebird", about a boy and his pet phoenix. I can't remember a thing about it, really, but one of my teachers submitted it to a children's story anthology and it was accepted. I've never seen it in print though.

I also wrote a story called "An Outer Space Adventure" in which a desperate space mission to find new energy for the earth encountered an evil alien race who were trading nasty space coal. The good humans kicked their bad alien butt, and then stole the nasty space coal, but what choice did they have?

Another story was called "The Return of the Sabre Tooth Tiger" in which an oil drilling team in the Arctic found a sabre-tooth tiger frozen in a glacier. When it was freed, it was still alive - and more than that, it was a pregnant female. Brought to the mainland, its children were raised by scientists. All was well, until they one day escaped and went on a rampage in the local town leaving a trail of death and destruction. Only one tiger survived the army's retribution... Now, I was nine years old when I wrote that in 1979. When did Crichton write Jurassic Park? That's what I want to know.

When I was 10 we moved to Buttershaw because my mum got a job as a warden of a sheltered housing scheme for the elderly. I'd decided that I was going to be tough at the new school, and not allow myself to become the target of bullys and general classroom derision as the goody-two-shoes bright kid who's a bit poor and lame. So, I went in hard.

Yeah, great, I ended up in fights, year head's offices, and even once the headmaster's office. I was not keen on this new attitude, and slowly reverted to type.

But, the saving grace was that I discovered drums. It was in music class with Mr Sutcliffe, and he was doing some rhythmic exercises with the class. He seemed to notice that I was finding the exercises, which were simple combined rhythms with hands, very easy. So, after class, he sat me down with a makeshift "kit" of bits and pieces, and got me to try a few drum rhythms. I was a natural. I mean it. I was way ahead. Every thought turned into the right noise, the right beat. I could hardly believe it myself. But it wasn't about feeling confident, I just did what was natural. I'll never forget it.

Delighted, Mr Sutcliffe bought the school a drum kit, and installed me in the school orchestra. I learned to play with the band, and we did a number of concerts where once again I was singled out for the audience as having given the band "a dimension that it had never had before." When we played the theme tune to Hawaii 5-0 a specially purchased spotlight was shone on me and the Pearl Export shell effect drum kit.

I was beginning to realise that life was a very strange thing indeed.

By the age of 14 I was playing in bands, at first in the school hall, and later in pubs, clubs, halls and festivals. Yes, long hair, starvation and years in the backs of vans were just some of the pleasures I enjoyed in the search for rock stardom. I played to a hell of a lot of people, I've been on radio and TV, and I've played many styles. But, I never got the stardom, so in the end, I didn't so much gracefully bow out as clumsily fall out of the scene, and began instead to rediscover my other great interest in life, computers.

I Compute Therefore I Am?

Sinclair ZX Spectrum I got a Sinclair ZX81 when I was 12, which I found the most fascinating thing in the world. Those who don't know about them, they had a Z80 CPU which ran at about 2 Megahertz and had 1 Kilobyte of RAM - literally laughable by today's Giga measured standards. There was no hard drive for it, either, so everything was saved and loaded to and from cassette tapes, a long, tiresome and noisy procedure that was a very long way from reliable. Yet, believe it or not, you could get games for it that not only worked but were also amazingly addictive, and the bottom line is that it was a revolutionary machine for the time.

Clearly, though, Kb was just too limiting, so I got a RAM expansion pack for it, which was like a gold bar and added all of... 16 kilobytes! But, I learned to program Sinclair BASIC and Z80 machine code on it. Later, I was ecstatic when I got my hands on the now legendary Sinclair 48k ZX Spectrum Sure I played on it, but I learned on it too, and I even got a game I wrote for it called "Jogger" listed in Sinclair User magazine. Height of fame, huh?

Once again, it was something that I found incredibly natural. I enjoyed it, and was genuinely good at it. But, life had been preparing something for me in my late teens, something that knocked me way off course and crashed me so badly that some things were irreparably damaged and everything was irrevocably changed. It was linked to the first major depression of my life, a life I lead now taking drugs to help the management of my bipolar disorder II condition. As a consequence, for about 10 years I never even looked at a computer.

In that period I had some really very bad times including homelessness and periods of terrible alcohol abuse. In between I managed to get various jobs that I couldn't hold down, my first two daughters were born, and I played in a number of bands. Yes I'm breezing over these ten years, but there's two good reasons for that. One, they're not a time I want to remember, and two, they're not a time that I really can remember anyway for a whole host of pretty obvious reasons.

When I started to try and get a hold of my life at the end of that 10 years, it turns out that those very ten years had seen a few developments on the IT front. I mean, for crying out loud, anyone who was competent at computing as an 18 year old in 1988 should have made a million by 1998! The Internet was the really big boat that somehow I managed to completely miss as it sailed from the shore. So, when I came back to computers, I found that I'd not kept up perhaps as well as I might.

So I got stuck in, and took an HND in Software Engineering at Bradford College. I got a Distinction, and immediately it finished I began teaching there on the subjects of C, C++, object oriented programming, database development and web design.

Now, things have really not been smooth since then at all. I still struggle seriously with my mental health. It's very much time that the Whites were able to afford holidays, fix up the house and maintain the car without it hurting every month. This is a process that is not going smoothly, but I'm trying. I'm trying to separate the future from the past. If I do it right, maybe that spotlight will be shone on me again, and the audience will, if not give a standing ovation, at least a little appreciation.