Leeds to follow

The trains today all worked so smoothly, without any heated exchanges with revenue protection officers or fights with automatic barriers, that we had the impression something must be wrong. On my own journey, I was interested to hear how three young Yorkshire lads, talking broad Barnsley, could talk continuously, with great excitement and passion, all the way from Birmingham to Leeds (a journey time just shy of two hours) about a single game of football. The detail was flabbergasting – who should have been substitute at the 38^th minute with a fully argued case about all the options, the geometry of somebody’s pass to somebody else, such-and-such a player’s ligament problems - and on and on it went. I couldn’t help but think that brains with that sort of retentive and analytic capacity could be put to better use…

Anyway, we were all on time – and met at the station entrance (no pigeons, but no gracious deep red brickwork either, see Nottingham last week). We bundled into a taxi and arrived fresh and ready for our 1130 start. The taxi back was a slightly different story, as the driver was determined to listen to Jeremy Vine interviewing Director of Public Prosecutions Kier Starmer on Radio 2 at about a hundred and twenty decibels. This did not fill us with joy: a professional colleague has been known to claim that this particular interviewer makes ridiculously inflaming statements and puts deliberately stupid questions with the intention of having a negative and destructive influence on his devoted listeners. So through gritted teeth, with admirable restraint and due assertiveness, one of our number told him to turn the bloody thing down (paraphrased), so we could hear ourselves think, and get on with our usual debriefing. With strangely speedy obedience, he did so. We then had a good old argument between us about which BBC radio station is best - but for me, it has never been the same since John Peel died a few years ago, several decades too early.

The Leeds Managed Clinical Network is renowned for the way it started ‘doing PD’ about three years before the national programme started – and by that time had a considerable array of service users, senior managers and commissioners on board and keen. It was interesting to be told that they still live and work in rented accommodation in several areas of the city – and don’t have anywhere they can call home. Today’s meeting was in Unity Court, which must be in an up-and-coming part of town (about two miles north of the city centre), as only a few months ago Waitrose had opened up an upmarket supermarket there. It is where the network’s offices are, and where there is a large training room for meetings, in which we had half a dozen plates of biscuits and onion bhajees laid out for the service users and a circle of about twenty-five bright purple chairs laid out for all of us. Interestingly, we were being watched by as many pairs of eyes staring out from the framed portraits which almost filled one wall – all dressed in smart suits and with gold chains and impressive-looking seals of office dangling from them. When I expressed my curiosity about all these severe people looking at us, one of the locals explained that ‘it was a northern thing’. Apparently the building belonged to the ‘Oddfellows’ (which does include a few women in the photos, similarly attired). With minimal Google effort, I learned (mostly from the local paper) several interesting things about the Oddfellows of Leeds, and elsewhere:

• It is a 'thriving social organisation' whose roots can be traced back to Roman times 
• Its roots can be found in the Middle Ages as a workers' counter to powerful masters' trade guilds.
• The society's ritualistic symbols are seen in a plaque which presented to freed slaves by Titus Caesar.
• They provided their members with support in times of illness or hardship.
• The organisation's official title is The Independent Order of Odd Fellows Manchester Unity Friendly Society, and it was founded formally 200 years ago. It had its former headquarters in Leeds.
• Long before that, it survived an attempt by Henry VIII to wipe it out. 
• Their earliest recorded lodge in Leeds, the Loyal Mechanic, was founded 1826, and still has regular meetings. 
• In Victorian times, the organisations became friendly societies and they flourished across Britain.
• It has 2,500 members in the city of Leeds.  In 1844 Leeds had 95 Lodges with 7,434 members.

So it's hard to work out whether it really is 'a northern thing' - their website mentions groups as far flung as Ipswich and Truro, London and Hartlepool. But at least we now know who all those people, staring from their frames in all their finery, were (and are).

Then there was the question of our own photo – which also proved to be a bit more difficult than expected, due the fact that this home of the Oddfellows wasn’t a place that any of the service users knew. It therefore held no memories of anything for them, nor any special meaning. A few suggestions were made, such as the ‘agenda’ for the Diverse Pathways weekly programme – but the only thing that everybody could agree on was the staff. And the ‘real staff’ – not ‘just those who sat in offices’. This idea soon evolved into more than just a simple photo, but a web of staff photos connected by network lines. At this point the hi-tech nature of the request, and the waiting taxi driver listening to his Radio 2, defeated the visiting team. So in true KUF and PD therapy style, we handed the responsibility back to the group: one service user and one staff member will arrange for a suitable photo (or photos) to be sent in to us. And as soon as we get it, it will appear here; until then, you can have a picture of us!