Ken Barlow

About Ken Barlow

Ken Barlow (who predates the more illustrious Coronation Street TV character by some ten years) is now reaching a mellower time of life. He is married with two grown up daughters and a grandson, Callum, who is surely destined to play football for England (or Scotland) and Wigan Athletic.

On leaving school in Wigan, Ken embarked upon an ill fated career in the paper production industry shortly followed by brief sojourns in the enlightening fields of floor sweeping at Woolworths, and bar-keeping in Whitley Bay discos.

After an even briefer period in HM Royal Navy Ken woke up one day to find himself in a Tyneside psychiatric hospital. This proved to be the beginning of a career lasting for over thirty years in mental health nursing.

Ken Barlow has worked in various mental health services in Northern England and Scotland, mainly in community mental health settings and has somehow emerged with a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters degree.

Although he still occasionally kicks a ball around an increasingly large 6-a-side football pitch, Ken also enjoys more age appropriate pastimes such as coarse fishing, walking, reading and spending time brainwashing his grandson about all matters Wigan Athletic.

As readers may surmise ‘Mild & Bitter Were The Days’ is Ken’s first venture into the non-academic world of publishing.

“Sometimes I have to remind myself that when we play Man Utd or Arsenal we do so on almost equal terms. We are no longer the little minnows taking on the big boys. And yet if I am utterly truthful, I still yearn for those magical days of being the underdogs, of being an up-and-coming club always looking ahead to the next stage of progression. Sometimes it is better to have unfulfilled dreams, the Champions League maybe?”

 

“Whilst the Tufty Club played Tamla Motown music almost exclusively, my musical tastes couldn’t have been further removed. Blood, Sweat and Tears, John Mayall, Taste, Jethro Tull, and the new boys on the block Led Zeppelin, were all much more to my suiting. Led Zeppelin were once famously and mistakenly renamed by the headmaster at Wigan Grammar School as ‘Fred’ Zeppelin, midst hoots of derision, his search for ‘street cred’ was sunk beyond redemption.”