tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77418616442465430492024-03-05T17:08:30.563-08:00skidmore's island"Wales funniest columnist" (Daily Post)
"Hard act to follow" (Wales on Sunday)
"Great eccentric" (Western Mail)
"Hilarious lectures,sensitive interviews" (Anthony Hose, director Buxton,Beaumaris,Llandudno Festivals)
"Witty and erudite speaker" (Joe D Hendry,President The Library Association)
"Witty and engaging" (Tony Lewis Wales Tourist Board)
"One of that rare breed of radio men to have that old BBC asset,realcharm on air, (Peter Florence,Director Hay Festival )ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.comBlogger341125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-63938604695592836002013-08-21T12:01:00.002-07:002013-08-21T12:24:52.748-07:00BEGONE DULL CARE<br />
Me and Voltaire have just won the most important argument in our lives. It took him the thick end of three hundred years but my new great grand-daughter managed it in six weeks.<br />
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We all thought the answer was prettily summed up by Voltaire: "Everything is for the best in the best of of all possible worlds."<br />
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"What about death?" sneered Most of The Rest of the World. "The end of everything", "All Great Love Affairs End in Death", "The Dying of the Light". Most compelling was the insistence of Christopher Hitchens, the mind I admire most in all the world: "Religion is Rubbish, indeed a Force of Evil."<br />
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All of which is true. Then Upspoke The Tiny Presence, fittingly by Internet, more often Evil's most obvious manifestation.<br />
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Everything they say about death is true. There is no arguing IT has legs. But they can be knocked from under it with, ironically, its most often used medium, the Internet. Witness a recent exchange of emails with a grandson:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">Have been trying this morning since 7 am</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;"> to send you £30 quid by alternatively pay pal and various vouchers and gifts for the Bean to mark her first six weeks of life. I have had responses varying from £30 to £60 from both. As you know, I have only 12 months left to get it right. This is just to let you know I am trying.....</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">He replied:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.666666984558105px;">hey! please don't worry about doing all that, you don't need to get me anything - an email is more than enough. (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">hey grandad, I re-sent the emails. I hope you manage to do with them what you wanted!! you're far more tech savvy than me! wouldn't know where to start with a blog and not even on Facebook anymore so don't lose hope in your online skills) lots of love to you and granny xxx</span><br />
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the emails from yesterday and today's picture of Ellie (plus a little extra one from right now) lots of love! Alex<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16px;">I'd like to say thanks to my old chum Neil Marr who I met as a near child reporter and and have come to know over half a century as the online beggeter of every good quality. Certainly the only publisher I have ever met who would write to his former </span><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px; line-height: 16px;">partner, who let him down badly, in defence of his cherished authors:</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16px;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 16px;">"BeWrite Books’ unpaid authors, editors and I have now utterly lost patience with you and all confidence in your repeatedly broken promises of full royalty payments to everyone. Also some authors are having great difficulty in placing their work elsewhere because, contrary to agreement, you have allowed BeWrite Books titles to remain displayed at some retail outlets, including Google Books (in their entirety), and stray paperback copies at other sales websites.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">"To avoid swift and serious legal action, matters must be put to rights IMMEDIATELY......."<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Thanks, too, to Dewi Smith, my radio producer and friend of friends who discovered me, nurtured me and put up with my Rabelaisian ways, making with me a series of programmes including "Radio Brynsiencyn" which had so many loyal listeners. It was certainly the only programme from Radio Wales to have a fan club with its own ties and jerseys in both Oxford and Yale Universities.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">We created this little bit of rollicking heaven and the people who took part gave their roles a vivid life of their own. Especially Rose Roberts who became a frightening Attila the Hoover.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Everyone thinks I am taking death lightly. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">I am glad this isn't TV. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">As well as the star of the show, Rose was our housekeeper on Anglesey. She nursed my mother on her death bed and treated my wife and me like unruly kids. I have known RSMs who were lambs in comparison. She became a radio star of comet size. She in turn introduced us to Goronwy, an old sweetheart, who joined Radio Brynsiencyn as the man who, we claimed, powered the radio station by bicycle pedalling. We called him Goronwy Generator</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Rose and Goronwy used to go off of together on trips to theatres in the West End. Rose had a voice twice as famous as Bryn Terfel. Think I am kidding? Once in the queue at the Palladium she gave it full throttle. From far up the queue came: "Bluddy hell, it's Rose Attila the Hoover. Where's Goronwy Generator?</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">A couple of y</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">ears ago the Welsh Language Radio station Radio Cymru asked her to recall her memories of Welsh island life. She was so good she was picked up by Welsh TV and, at 85,went on to become the star of a TV comedy show. At nearly 88, she is still a regular weekly guest. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px; line-height: 16px;">I have just taken a call from her.</span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.666666984558105px; line-height: 16px;">She still calls me Mr Skidmore.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px; line-height: 16px;">"I just come back from bliddy Liverpool," she said. "That specialist says if I have the operation I am too old and I might bloody die. I told him to bugger off. I am having a good life and I am going to enjoy what's left. He might cut the bloody cancer out and next week I have a heart attack."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14.666666984558105px; line-height: 16px;">I have just had a good skreik for both of us and that is the last bliddy one. BUGGER 'EM.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The only woman I have been in love with longer is my wife Celia who has allowed herself in to be known to radio millions round the world as the Head Ferret. She is the summing up of all the qualities after which loyalty was named. I love her utterly, irrevocably, passionately and have done from the moment we met 44 years ago on a bridge over a Welsh mountain river. She is clever, glamorous and stylish. She wrote award- winning books about the cats, whom she resembles, and she walks like Winnie the Pooh - it's the merry bounce that does it. For nearly half a century she has been my best friend. And with not even a single conviction of casual waywardness by either party.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">My kids? I cannot think what I love mostly about them. The eldest, Gay Heather, was named after a racehorse which cost me a packet at the Grand National. She has forgiven me for giving her a forename that no longer means the qualities of happy laughter and debonair manner it was intended to convey and has a heart big enough to make a race course.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">Her sister Lynn Charmain, the next in line, was so named because she is. She was Campaigning Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards and for years ran, with her husband, a hugely successful Crisis Management Consultancy for NHS Hospital Trusts. As a reporter she covered Royal Tours, flew with RAF jets and righted more social wrongs than a battalion of Don Quixotes. She is m</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">odest with it. As I typed this she came into my study to remind me: "I am a touch typist, sixty words a minute, so I could type that for you....faster."</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Happily they all married spouses of whom I approve. And even better,bred well. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">My son, Nicholas St John, I named after the only other St Nick in the calendar who earned his nickname. And incidentally, casually, almost in his spare time, he became an award-winning writer, top TV foreign editor and senior producer of Granada TV, whose boss flew to Italy to recruit him because it was the only way he could get him. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">We have all had a lovely, stormy time together. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Choked with admiration of ourselves and each other. With Gay, I fought a losing battle to prevent her from becoming an artist, which is probably why she finished her career as a department head at an Art College, a sort of stormy Mrs Chips who was sent round the world recruiting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Mostly I love them all because they are all so lovable - and the women are superb cooks. Since I declared Wakes Season the girls have arrived with fabulous frozen dishes of homemade food and have produced banquets for our delight. Particularly brave in Lynn's case as she herself is following a strict diet and is confined to a disgusting menu.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Begone dull care? I am having such a magic life it would be too ungracious not to enjoy it in such company down to the last heavenly Malt. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;">Thanks, everyone, for the memories. Sorry you can't all be at the various wakes. As I said before, glad I will be.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;">P.S.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;">THIS IS THE LONGEST ISLAND I HAVE WALKED BUT NOT THE LAST. JUST THE LAST ON THIS SUBJECT. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;">One last writer's joke. Literally the moment I finished typing this long essay I got an error message on this infernal machine which has been behaving so perversely in recent weeks.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;">"There has been an error. Please type this again."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 11pt;">Must He always have the Last Word?</span></div>
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nian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-70038136491528659202013-08-15T12:19:00.001-07:002013-08-20T08:19:36.373-07:00ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-21313587797196638792013-08-15T12:12:00.001-07:002013-08-15T12:12:29.673-07:0019186959tazian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-6473160501885397872013-08-15T02:00:00.001-07:002013-08-15T12:12:59.394-07:00ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-44842165463179108552013-08-02T10:56:00.001-07:002013-08-02T10:56:37.253-07:00skidmore's island: I am one with Socrates. When the time comes for my...<a href="http://skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-am-one-with-socrates.html?spref=bl">skidmore's island: I am one with Socrates. When the time comes for my...</a>: I am one with Socrates. When the time comes for my Wake I want to be there. After all it's the last party I am going to throw and I will...ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-45225995596491451222013-08-02T08:30:00.000-07:002013-08-02T08:30:50.215-07:00I am one with Socrates. When the time comes for my Wake I want to be there. After all it's the last party I am going to throw and I will be paying the waiter. I don't want to be the only one without a drink in my hand. I have established the precedent. When we were married I had a Best Woman, the lovely Lady Langford, and, the bride apart, she was the best looker in the room.<br />
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After all, Socrates did it, though the guests at my going away will not be offered hemlock. I am offering single malts and, thanks to my generous American friend Jerry Jasper, I will die an authority on the subject. My mouth mewed with delight this morning when the postman arrived with a collection of tastings of the finest malts and most noble blends from "Master of Malts". Let them roll off your tongues:<br />
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Ardbeg Uigeadail, Glenfiddich 18 Year Old, Ballantines 17 Year Old, Old Pulteney 21 Year Old, Highland Park 18 Year Old, Johnnie Walker Black Label 12 Year Old, Auchentoshan 20 Year Old, Chivas Regal 18 Year Old (3cl 53.20%).<br />
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Americans are legendary for their generosity. I know of only one Englishman who approached them.<br />
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Freddy Brabin was a wealthy chemist with a shop on a prime site at The Cross in Chester. It was his misfortune to look like Freddy Frinton, the comedian who pretended to be a drunk. Freddy wasn’t pretending. When it came to being a drunk, Freddy was very serious indeed.<br />
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He was tiny but drove an enormous Cadillac. When it ran out of petrol he left it where it was and went home by taxi. But not always. Once he was so far gone in the little club we used that I had to drive him home, where he plied me with so much drink he had to get out his Cadillac and drive me back to Chester. But for timely intervention by a third party we might still have been going to and fro.<br />
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He was a kindly man. He told me one day how worried he was about the starving children in Africa. He said he had been reading about something called War on Want where people gave public dinners and wondered if I could fill him in with the specifics.<br />
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I explained you invited all your friends to dinner, gave them dry bread and water and sent the money a good dinner would have cost to the starving children.<br />
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He said, “You must have got it wrong.” He wouldn’t dream, he said, of asking his friends, or for that matter any enemies he might have, to drink water when it was his round. “Besides,” he said, “I thought I would have it at the Country Club and I have never seen bread and water on the menu there.”<br />
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So I suggested a compromise. “Give them a decent meal,” I said, “and, whatever it costs, give the equivalent to War on Want.”<br />
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Accordingly, about 40 of us sat down to a four course dinner, which followed a champagne reception and ended with vintage port. After the meal Freddie spent a few hours and about a thousand quid downstairs in the Casino.<br />
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He didn’t fancy driving home because he kept falling over, so he stayed the night.<br />
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The next morning he woke up around six o'clock with a mouth like the floor of a budgie’s cage. In his nightshirt, he wandered down to the kitchens where the early morning chef was still scratching himself and said, “Make us a cup o tea.”<br />
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The chef said he didn’t start work, not till seven, so Freddy could …… off.<br />
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At seven o’clock Dennis Ewan, the manager, came in and the chef complained to him about drunken guests invading his kitchen. “Just a minute,” said Dennis, “can you smell burning?”<br />
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They rushed to the dining room where they saw a crescent made of blazing dining chairs. In the centre stood Freddy, haloed in flames. “Now will you make us a bloody cup of tea?“ he said.<br />
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He was quite proud of the fact that he was the only member barred from the Chester Country Club the night after he had spent around two grand there. But, good as gold, he sent the starving kids a cheque for the same amount.<br />
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FROM JOHN JULIUS’ S CHRISTMAS CRACKER<br />
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From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “In 1867 Rossetti decided to put Swinburne (the shy flagellating poet) in the hands of “some sensible young woman who would make a man of him”. He solicited the aid of Adah Isaacs Menken, a stage performer, to seduce him. Needless to say, the attempt failed, and Miss Menken returned the £10 fee to Rossetti as unearned. “I can’t make him understand,” she explained, “that biting’s no use!”<br />
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ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-31935212905077435542013-07-27T08:09:00.000-07:002014-10-17T05:57:08.092-07:00PASS THE B LACK CAP <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.66px;">Jury back. Guilty advanced lung, bone and re-run of bowel cancer. Retrial on kidneys. Suspended sentence 12 months.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.66px;">But the good news is that I can have a drink and am about to pour a single malt which I raise to you, my friends, with thanks for your support and all those years of friendship.</span><br />
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I don't recognise the NHS I have been enjoying recently in the lurid stories I am reading. Our hospital in Peterborough offers one-person luxury wards with TV and a bigger bathroom than we had in the Ritz. Tested for everything bar Fowl Pest. Indeed I have to go back for an examination of the kidneys. I think they are entering me for a competition. Cosseted by a succession of nurses and jolly doctors. All Free.<br />
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Meanwhile the dog, who saw that for once I was getting more attention than he was, threw a sickie. Vet seized the opportunity to test for every sickness known to science, plus a night in a dog's dormitory. Bill £700 and there is nothing wrong with him.<br />
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I was an expert on being poor. When I came out of the army I took a job with a news agency, got married and was sacked the week after we returned from honeymoon.<br />
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The only work I could get was a casual Saturday shift on the News of the World, which paid £4 and 10 shillings in real money. My rent for two rooms in a very smart house was £2. I had married a Jewish princess who knew nothing about laundry, even if we had hot water. So we had to pay 2/6 a week to get the washing done. Didn’t cost a lot because I only had two shirts. We could do what we liked with the remaining £2 7s. 6d. which meant we ate every other day.<br />
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I had to keep half a crown back to buy myself into a lunchtime drinking school every Thursday at the Waldorf in Cooper Street, Manchester, where John Milligan, the News of the World editor, drank with the news editor, Graham Haslam.<br />
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At some time during the hour that followed the news editor would say: “Doin’ anyting on Saturday, Skiddy?” “Don’t think so, Graham. Why?” “Wonder if you would do the late shift for us?”<br />
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It meant a ten mile round walk to the News of the World but for a year that was our only income.<br />
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We were in the house one day sharing a cigarette we had made from the week’s collected dimps. The front door bell rang. I was wearing my good suit and my one clean shirt ready to go to the Waldorf, so I went down. There was a tramp at the door.<br />
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He said he had just come out of prison and did I have the price of a cup of tea. I said I was broke, and saw him look at the smart house in which I lived, the well cut navy suit and polished shoes I was wearing and then he looked back down the long drive to the road.<br />
<br />
The look he gave me, utterly defeated and totally disbelieving, went straight to the heart. Halfway back upstairs I remembered the half crown I had put on one side to buy my way into the round. I ran after him. He looked terribly guilty but I pressed the half crown into his hand and returned home rejoicing.<br />
My wife asked, while I was at the front door, why didn’t I pick up the washing from the front step?<br />
<br />
I went back. No wonder the tramp had looked guilty. He had stolen it. For the next six months I had to sit in my vest whilst my shirt was washed under a cold tap so I could go to the Waldorf and get my Saturday shift.<br />
<br />
Things gradually got better as the years staggered by. I was once a Chevalier de la Chaine des Rotisseurs or, to use plain English, a Knight of the Brotherhood of the Chain of the Turning Spit, a gourmet club which did things in fine style. Once we hired a dining coach to be put on the end of the Crewe to Bournemouth express on an occasion when we were eating away from home. My friend, the 9th Baron Langford, who was our Baillie and was kindly contributing several bottles of ’47 port, insisted the pair of us interview the station master at Crewe to ensure all was hunky dory. Station masters love a lord and this one donned morning dress and a topper to meet us. At the baron’s request, he introduced us to “our” engine driver.<br />
<br />
“My grandfather,” confided the baron to the startled driver, “always maintained there was no greater pleasure than making love in a sleeping car as the train went over a set of points.” (The Brotherhood was very strong on such niceties. One elderly brewer assured me that no kisses were more erotically charged than when the girl had been drinking yellow chartreuse and the man green. An estate agent called Ramos declined a dessert that was served in a cocoon of spun sugar on the grounds that it would be like eating the pubic hairs of a fairy.)<br />
<br />
“However,” the 9th Baron told the engine driver, “what might be an aid to lovemaking is very bad for port. So I would be grateful if you would slow down as you approach any set of points on our journey.”<br />
<br />
The extraordinary thing was that the engine driver did.<br />
<br />
On another occasion we had been to a Normandy banquet at the Piccadilly Plaza in Manchester where our guests had been Louis Edwards, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, and Sonny, the then Marquis of Milford Haven. After the meal, Geoffrey Langford and I took them to the champagne bar where Edwards ordered a tankard of Moet, the 9th Baron, Mumms, and Sonny, Louis Roederer.<br />
<br />
To this day I do not know why, when it came to my turn, I asked for a chip butty. The waitress took the order without demur and soon returned with the champagne, followed by a waiter bearing the finest chip butty I have ever seen. The bread was home made, the butter runny and the golden chips had hard crusts protecting inner potato, soft as a baby’s cheek. The silver platter on which they were served also carried salt, pepper and vinegar. Interspersed ‘twixt chip and plate was a neatly cut, and probably ironed, square of newspaper.<br />
<br />
“By God,” said the 9th Baron, “that looks good. Bring me one!” “And me,“ said the Marquis of Milford Haven. “And me,” said the Lord Mayor of Manchester.<br />
<br />
I have achieved little in life but I did introduce the aristocracy to the chip butty. Which, on a point of information, goes very well with champagne and is as good a way as any to shuffle off this mortal coil.<br />
<br />
Other members included restauranteurs who took it in turns to host our banquets. One, Roland Genty, had come to Manchester during the war to train as a parachutist to be dropped in occupied France. Roland was frighteningly tough. Quiche Lorraine was his signature dish. Naturally it featured on the menu when he hosted. Alas, there was a delay which seemed endless in the serving of his Quiche. He went to the kitchen to remonstrate. He returned and addressed us gravely:<br />
<br />
"My Lord and messieurs, I fear there will be a delay. Unfortunately the waiter dropped a tray of the Quiche...and, naturellement, the chef has stabbed him."<br />
<br />
Alas, my appetite has diminished but happy memories remain. My favourite chippie was the Sea Waves fish and chip emporium in Menai Bridge on Anglesey. We usually had a table in the window, in the spotless tiled restaurant bar, furnished in bright white and yellow plastic. Rashid, the Turkish chef-owner, came to Menai Bridge via the Piccadilly Hilton and the Gleneagles Hotel. Much was expected and we were never disappointed. <br />
<br />
Rashid was a consummate artiste whose fish and chips went through purifying fires of very high temperature to emerge with the lightest of sun tans, crisp and mouth watering. His haddock was so fresh I swear it was singing sea shanties. Rashid his skill with the mushy pea was legendary. He scorned to mush to viscosity, as lesser fish fryers do. His peas, though pliant to the palate, retained their traditional shape and texture.<br />
<br />
A happy substitute has, I'm glad to say, been found in Dave, of Snappers in March, from where the dog also enjoys a tasty sausage. Oh, for the appetite of yesteryear...<br />
<br />
<br />ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-89142678277999594912013-07-19T06:34:00.000-07:002013-07-19T06:34:24.644-07:00NEARER TO GOD IN A GARDEN IS NOT NESSARILY A GOOD THING........ And God spoke unto Adam and He said, "Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"<br />
<br />
Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden? Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early..."<br />
<br />
God said: "The angel is Security and outside my remit. But there has obviously been a mistake.<br />
He shouldn't be there till apple picking... "<br />
<br />
"I wanted Dobermans,” He continued, “but Finance estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive. It's something they picked up from the Competition.<br />
<br />
“We are working on garden staffing levels. Research and Development were going to let you invent the plough, then we planned electricity, which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to<br />
create Faraday."<br />
<br />
Adam said: "Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the plough?”<br />
<br />
God said: "R and D have come up with this new concept. Run it up the tree trunk and see if it flaps."<br />
<br />
Adam said: "God, sometimes you say things which are a mystery to me..."<br />
<br />
God said: "Goes with the territory. But about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it's an<br />
entertainment concept and does home nursing.<br />
<br />
“R and D are working on a modem called sex which completely does away with the spare rib method I originally planned. It will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it the Ten Commandments."<br />
<br />
Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"<br />
<br />
God said: "What's in a name, as Shakespeare is going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong vibes, consumerwise. So what we finally came up with was Woman. What takes the Woe out of Man - Woman. Neat,eh?<br />
Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per cent penetration of A and AB markets."<br />
<br />
Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this woman machine will never be programmed to take executive decisions..."<br />
<br />
And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? I have to go. I have two days' creating before my rest day..."<br />
<br />
And He rang off. It was only later when Eve harvested the apples and there was this leak from<br />
Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had been given no guarantees about negative parity for the woman machine. And Adam was sore afraid........<br />
<br />
P.S<br />
Always enjoyed medical humour.<br />
<br />
On Anglesey the doctor sat behind a curtain in the village hall and patients went behind for confidential chats. He said he heard some very odd things like: "Ello Mrs Williams, you didn't come to surgery last week." "No Mrs Jones, I wasn't well enough."<br />
<br />
Tricky sort of chap is God. I think those Commandments had a bad effect on Him. Go to any lengths to get me to do as I am told. You may have noticed the way he hired a very iffy bunch of unemployed angels to dominate the tele this week, coughing in the most unhygienic way and bullying folk into having an early tip off on lung cancer. I fell for it even though I have had some very unpleasant experiences on being scanned. The first rectal scan I had was ruined by musak in the clinic. I suppose He thought it was funny to play the Beach Boys singing 'Good Vibrations'. The nurse said I was lucky: last week it was 'I'll be glad when you are dead, you rascal you'.<br />
<br />
The next visit was even worse. Tipping the scales at 21 stone, I couldn't fit in the tunnel. They suggested in all seriousness ringing round the zoos which have tunnels big enough to test elephants. I declined with icy politeness.<br />
<br />
The hospital rang to ask how I felt about putting on a doughnut. I thought they were having me on but it turned out to be a giant hoop. You lie on a bed and this circle passes up and down your body. I said my old mate Whimsical Walker used to do that years ago in Billy Smart's Circus to great acclaim.<br />
<br />
When I went for my blood test this week a battalion of nurses asked me how I was. I said: "That's why I am here, so you can tell me how I am." I seem to have spent a life time in Dracula's pantry.Yesterday they had difficulty finding an arm that still had blood in it. I suggested they tried the throat. It always worked for Vincent Price. They obviously have his blood lust.<br />
<br />
I had not been home five minutes when I was recalled to the hospital because my blood was abnormal. Worst half hour in my life followed and I cannot even pronounce the name of the test. The upshot was I have got lung cancer and will not bother making plans beyond next summer. I could easily drop off the twig next year.<br />
<br />
I say nothing of the sheer unfairness of loading me with lung cancer when I haven't had a fag for a quarter of a century. Pick me up time won't be the same. It used to be G and T and malt whisky. Now it's paracetamol and a morphine mixture that tastes of bananas.<br />
<br />
Busy time for St Peter. My good friend the Marquess of Anglesey died on the day I got the Black Spot. He gave me a home when I was having a bad time, got me a pension when the Welsh Establishment was giving me a kicking and did lots of kindnesses. He was 90. I lost another friend, Elaine Morgan, on the same day. Elaine, who died age 92, was a<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: medium;"> leading Welsh writer who was named Columnist of the Year at last year’s Regional Press Awards. Until earlier this year she was still writing for the </span><a href="http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/tag/western-mail/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;" target="_blank" title="Western Mail">Western Mail</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: medium;">. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: medium;">She wrote her final column for the paper in January and decided to retire after suffering a stroke. She was a good pal and a terrific broadcaster but that is the first peaceful thing she has ever done.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;">
How do I feel about joining them? Rather like Damon Runyon when he got a similar diagnosis. He wrote a very moving column on the subject of "Why me?" The last words were "Why Not?"</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large;">
<br /></div>
<br />ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-45148212277385393932013-07-12T10:36:00.000-07:002013-07-12T10:43:23.567-07:00They didn't believe me........<img height="200" src="https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=023a23bae5&view=att&th=13fbef17f8bea53d&attid=0.1&disp=inline&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P8dVmgBaSrBrD0GyTXNGQGB&sadet=1373304582669&sads=vVbwz-1Kamg4AHeHyL7QbwF5AqM" width="198" /><br />
<br />
<br />
Thanks to Jimmy Lovelock's lady for finding this proof of anecdote. That it still exists is a tiny miracle.<br />
<br />
We used to live in<br />
LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWYLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH. Living in a Welsh village, the name of which you cannot pronounce, plays havoc with your social life. Pub crawls are
impossible. Imagine ringing for a cab at closing time and trying
to tell the driver where to take you. I have had trouble in
the past with Oswestry; and Llanuwchllyn is out of the question. Dwygyfylchi is worse but it is shorter. It reminds me of the
English writer at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival where I interviewed Rowan Williams, then bishop of |Monmouth and later Archbishop of Canterbury. It had as its Green Room an infants’ schoolroom in which all drawers were labelled in Welsh.
“Is that where they keep the vowels?” the writer asked, with
persuasive innocence. A great place to live but a constant
humiliation.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
I used to know a colourful line in archbishops but my favourite is Dr Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, who relieves stress by baking unbelievably rich cream gateaux. I met him just before my Hay appearance and told him I was interviewing Williams on the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales and I hadn't the faintest idea what that was.<br />
<br />
"Don't worry," he said. " That has never bothered you in the past. Anyway, I am meeting him at the Synod. Tell him if he is rude to you it's Croziers at Dawn."<br />
<br />
Another old chum was the Bishop of Hereford, the only non-royal with the power vested, in the time of medieval Welsh rebellions, to raise an army and to nail the skin of any Welshman he found in the city after dark to the door of Hereford Cathedral.<br />
<br />
When I lived in Wales I used to do a weekly broadcast on Australian radio
and always signed off<br />
“...good night from
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll.............”<br />
<br />
Every week without fail after the broadcast went out, an expatriate Taff would ring me in
a rage from Brisbane: “If yer caint pronounce the name why don’t
you move to f......... Rhyl?”<br />
<br />
He was lucky to get through.
An Australian fan tried to write to me for nearly a year
but his letters all came back from the Australian post office
marked “No Such Place”. I know about this because
he rang his sister in Derby to check with a friend in Mold if he
had the address right and she rang me to find out.<br />
<br />
It is not
just the Australians who had trouble. The vicar of the parish
church in Upton Scudamore in Wiltshire sought a contribution to
the restoration of my ancestors’ tombs. He sent the letter
to the Isle of Anglesey - by air mail. It came by road
from Manchester airport across one of the two bridges which linked us to the mainland.<br />
<br />
For some time the Post Office in Chester refused even to put Isle of Anglesey on its database. Whenever I asked for a Welsh number a Query Page flashed up. “Do you mean Wales, Yeovil,” it asked, “or Wales,
Sheffield?”<br />
<br />
I used to drink for Wales so I was well known there. Bit surprising then that at a computer shop in Wrexham my
application to buy a PC on the drip was turned down. The
manager was surprised too. He rang his finance office in
Leeds. They said: “It’s the address. There is no such
place." The manager said: “There must be. He's
just come from there.”<br />
<br />
The trick is to make up a name. My credit card statement from the Royal Bank of Scotland was always
addressed to me at Virgin and Childs Cottage at Brymsitmoy, which,
so far as I know, is the<br />
Welsh Brigadoon because it does not
exist. But the bill arrived every month.<br />
<br />
The whole Llanfair etc., etc. name is a con. I do not know a Welshman
who couldn’t give Machiavelli six blacks and still beat him off
the table. They invented almost their entire
history. Outsiders are not told the Great Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr was a
general in the English army, married to an Englishwoman, or that
his half-Welsh legitimate children married into the English
aristocracy. Only his nine bastards married Welsh people. Edward I invaded Wales with an army of 15,000, of which
11,000 were English. Even the Welsh 'Not' is not. Though the English
Not is widespread.<br />
<br />
Our village was for centuries called
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll. A lovely name which means the
“Marychurch by the white hazel pool”. When Stevenson brought
the railway to Anglesey there<br />
were no plans to build a station here. But no station would have meant the lucrative tourist trade passing us by and we weren’t having that. A
local cobbler added a description to the name and wrote it on slips
of paper which he then put in plain brown envelopes and sold as a cure
for lock-jaw. We became overnight and irrevocably the village with
the longest name in the
world:<br />
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwryndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. The
addition means “near the fierce whirlpool with the church of St
Tysilio by the red cave.”<br />
<br />
As a result we became so famous our local
draper’s shop was - and still is - the size of a bus depot, visited by coachloads
of visitors from all over the world. So much so the shop has a sign post which shows the distance from Llanfairpwll to the
North Pole and cities the world over, including New York and
Tokyo, all the homes of customers.<br />
<br />
I just wonder how Japanese
coach drivers cope when they got lost. I suspect a lot of our
oriental business ends up as day trips to Bangor.<br />
<br />
When I said Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch English listeners found my command of language impressive. Welsh speaking listeners shuddered. That was my problem. I lived in a place I could not pronounce.<br />
<br />
The Welsh can do things with their curious assemblies of letters that in other cultures can only be achieved by musical notation. Welsh is not just a language: it is performance art. "Becod" is pity carried almost to the point of tears and no girl, surely, can resist the sweet blandishment of "cariad", against which sweetheart sounds like a lump of toffee.<br />
<br />
In Wales pronunciation is the key to acceptance. It is phonetic freemasonry and it is planetary.<br />
As I said, I used to broadcast every week to Australia a newsletter about life in Britain. I was a sort of Alistair Coookaburra.<br />
<br />
Because - as it sometimes seems - the entire population of Australia is either Welsh or from Liverpool, which is much the same thing, my producer insisted that I call it "A Letter from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch". I tried not to because of the previously mentioned irate Welsh Australian who telephoned me from Brisbane to complain. His telephone bill must have been longer than my address. Not only can I not PRONOUNCE Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogh; nor even act it. I cannot write it down except with great difficulty. Mail order purchase, the mad lottery of the glossy magazine bargain offer, was forever closed to me. There was never room on the coupon for my address.<br />
<br />
To live in a fictional island in a village you cannot pronounce is to know despair. Though to be strictly ecumenical I have had some pretty bizarre postal experiences in England. When we lived on the City Walls in Chester I worked under the window in the sitting room (I will write in a future column about bitter injustice and how whenever we move my wife gets a study and I write on the corner of a table). Through the window I could watch the postman coming, a mixed blessing when you owe as much as I did in those halcyon days of determined debauchery. Mostly I watched the advance of the daily sheaf of bills. One day a month I looked forward to his visits. That was the day he brought my selection from Records With Pleasure, recordings of potted versions of Shakespearean plays put out by the Daily Express. On this occasion I hurried to the door to take the precious recording from his hands. Too late. He had already folded it neatly in half and posted it through the box.<br />
<br />
There was a certain cachet in having the only crescent-shaped production of Macbeth on record, but playing was not easy. No sooner had the warrior tones of Macbeth boomed questions at the three witches than Birnam wood was galloping to high Dunsinane hill as the needle slipped down the inner slope of the crescent like a demented skier.<br />
<br />
The man the Post Office sent to process my complaint was dressed to intimidate.Why else should a man who arrived on a red bicycle wear a crash helmet and black leather gauntlet gloves? He clearly did not believe my story. Indeed he seemed convinced I was the Mr Big of an international ring of record benders. Finally he conceded my complaint. But he was not done. As he left he uttered a sentence that has lodged itself in my mind: "Do not dispose of the record without permission," he warned. "It is now the property of the Post Office and we may need to call it in."<br />
<br />
For God's sake, tell me. Does the Post Office run to crescent-shaped gramophones?.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-42841907985429451722013-07-04T06:44:00.000-07:002013-07-04T06:44:12.570-07:00A GARDEN IS A BOTHERSOME THINGI have had a tip off from the doctor. There is a shadow on my lung. Provokingly he won't say which lung, nor even describe it so that I can take the necessary action. Is it a Bogart shadow, all trilby hat, upturned Burberry collar, a wisp of cigarette smoke and the tell tale pocket bulge of a Luger, or worse a Gluck. Or is it one of those merry shadows of a rabbit, a giraffe or a crouching lion which you can create on a sheet by manipulating your fingers. I would prefer that on the whole. I could never tell what Bogart was twitching.<br />
I do hope its not one of those formless clouds so beloved of ghost stories. If they are formless how do you know what they are? Do they have a beginning and where do they end ? It would be nice if they were Siamese Temple Dancers one can operate by sticks of Balsa wood.<br />
I do not see how it can effect me. How curtail my life? I don't have a life outside "Lewis" and endless repeats of "Morse" and "Midsomer Murders." Something in the way of a web would be fetching. Bad call. Just back from the doctors. Its Bogart. More tests than Botham. Hope it doesn't end with a jar full of ashes.............................<br />
<br />
THE GARDEN IS BEING PARTICULARLY LOVESOME<br />
<br />
My garden is my favourite thing although I am not, and never was, an obsessive gardener. When I lived at Tattenhall on the Welsh border I had to remonstrate with an enthusiastic neighbour whose<br />
flower seeds blew over the fence and choked my weeds. At a subsequent flat on the Rows in Watergate Street, Chester, the single window box was tended by a firm of jobbing gardeners which was also responsible for the hyacinth bowl.They were also charged with maintaining the level of sugar and water in my pet spider's food bowl.<br />
<br />
So there is no need to warn me that lawn mowing brings on heart attacks. More active gardeners may wish to know that it is the first cut of the season that is the unkindest cut of all and does the damage.<br />
Doctors call it 'lawnmower angina' and I can take a hint. When my doctor said I was so overweight the slightest exertion could kill me, I acted at once. I gave up exertion.<br />
<br />
Now I leave the garden to Paul. At our property on the Isle of Anglesey I was proud of my traditional<br />
cottage garden. You would have loved it. Right in the middle of my land I grew this traditional cottage; the rest was nature, red in tooth and claw. I am sure Conan Doyle had my bindweed in mind when he wrote "The Speckled Band". I wouldn't go out after dark in case it had me by the throat and dragged me off to its lair in the ivy that was gradually dismembering the garden wall.<br />
<br />
The dog wouldn't go near the place. After the summer she was so covered in burrs she was four times propositioned by kerb-crawling hedgehogs. And the cat was mugged by a robin. I had convolvuli that could bring down a running rabbit in its own length and dandelions that were bred from real lions.<br />
When you pulled my nettles they pulled back. I had nettle-strengthened soil so vitamin choked you could plant a seedling in the garden and by the time you reached the back door it was six foot tall and waving at you. Tendrils from my peas plucked passing pigeons out of the sky.<br />
<br />
The real trouble with gardening is that whatever you grow you always have two hundred over.<br />
Especially lettuce. Breed like triffids and there is no sight in nature more terrifying than a lettuce gone to seed.<br />
<br />
Mind you, I love gardens. Other people's, where someone else does the weeding and you can<br />
stretch out on a lawn without that nagging worry that it is growing so fast you are levitating and if you don't rush in for the mower you are going to have an angry giant fee-fi-fo-fuming at you. Also you don't have to buy packets of seed which cost you more than the Indians were paid for Long Island.<br />
Can you understand it? Every year you weed away annuals that have sown themselves. Every marigold has enough seeds on its stem for the deposit on a house. Yet when you buy a packet the only variety you get is King's Ransom because that is what it cost.<br />
<br />
And now we have something else to worry about. Killer tomatoes from outer space. American schoolchildren projected 12.5 million tomato seeds into space. After six years they came back and no sooner had they been planted in schools across America than NASA warned that their exposure to cosmic radiation meant they could be toxic. Lethal tomato butties. On top of which I do not understand why grown men want to float around on their backs doing unmentionable things into plastic bags just to get to the Moon. I would almost rather go to the Costa Brava.<br />
<br />
All this recent TV talk of pigeons reminds me that my chum William Cross has been delving further into the colourful life of Evan, Viscount Tredegar, who, you may remember, was court martialled for disclosing the secrets of the Army Pigeon loft he commanded to two ladies who came to tea. Cross has discovered the diaries of the late Robin Bryans, who at the age of sixteen became one of the Viscount's army of male lovers, which included our former prime minister Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill's brother Peter. In fairness, Cross insists that readers must make up their own minds about the veracity of Bryans' extraordinary account of the Viscount's hidden world. The book is entitled "Not Behind Lace Curtains". It is worth saying that the stories in it are backed up by a considerable catalogue of sources. I found it fascinating.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-28082727434232514702013-06-29T03:53:00.002-07:002013-06-29T03:53:22.631-07:00LAND OF NOTHING IS FREEFirst an apology. I now find everyone but McQueen did get the blog. Sorry. Here in recompense is a letter from Peter Reece:<br />
<br />
<span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Of course we</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">received</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"></span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">the blog last week</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">…</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">.McQueen was obviously pissed. Loved the piece on Harrap</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">,</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"></span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">but particularly the memory of Bill Marshal</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">l</span></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"></span><span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">.</span></span><br />
<span lang="en-us" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<span lang="en-us"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Back in the early sixties I was wandering through the backstreets of Istanbul (don</span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">’</span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">t ask why) when I came across an old Land Rover with UK plates. In a nearby tea shop I found its owner, a very handsome</span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"></span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">English</span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">lady, somewhat old</span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">er</span></span><span lang="en-us"></span><span lang="en-us"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"> then myself, but very desirable. I knew I was in luck when she asked me to escort her to Southern Iran where she was a nurse at an oil refinery somewhere across the</span></span><span lang="en-us"> Shatt al-Arab river. It’s a bloody long way through Turkey, the Lebanon, Syria and across the desert pipeline route through Iran (or was it still Persia then?) but a single woman had no chance of driving alone through Moslem countries.</span><br />
<span lang="en-us"><br /></span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<span lang="en-us">Well anyway, we were somewhere near Damascus when the lady enquired if I actually had a job.</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<span lang="en-us"><br /></span>
<span lang="en-us">“Journalist,” said I proudly, having just been fired from the Sandbach Chronicle for landing a fantastic exclusive about Jodrell Bank without telling the editor first. He claimed I wasn’t qualified to find such a great story, and certainly not senior enough to write it. </span><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">“Fuck!” said the lady at my side, which obviously left me wondering why she harbored a deep distrust of our species. </span><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">“I was married to Bill Marshall,” she admitted with very obvious regret.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">That would be Kathy, his first wife who threw terrific parties, from which her husband was barred</span></div>
<br />
THIS WEEK'S BLOG<br />
<br />
I spent my childhood nights in an air raid shelter whilst Nazi bombers did their best to shorten my childhood. We were a nation of Burrowers, in turn cowering and exuding relief in pits covered with corrugated iron as bombs exploded. Yet every night we listened eagerly to the Berlin Radio from whence a phony Englishman we called Lord Haw Haw warned us that Hitler was going to annihilate us. We thought it hilarious.<br />
<br />
The Ministry of Information plastered the walls with posters warning us that spies were listening to our every unguarded word. Wisely the Ministry had them drawn by a talented cartoonist called Fougasse. We thought them hilarious too.<br />
<br />
In his book on Stalingrad Anthony Beevor writes: "When a winter-campaign medal was issued the following year, it quickly became known as the ‘Order of the Frozen Flesh’. There were more serious cases of disaffection. Field Marshal von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, exploded in rage just before Christmas on finding the following examples of graffiti on the buildings allotted for his headquarters: ‘We want to return to Germany’; ‘We’ve had enough of this’; ‘We are dirty and have lice and want to go home.'<br />
<br />
"In Berlin, a city all but flattened by our reciprocal bombs, the humour was typically more dark and gothic than ours. 'Buy a useful present this Christmas," their comics advised. 'A coffin'."<br />
<br />
Hardly a joke that would make it to ITMA, our weekly radio laugh-in. The programme was produced in Bangor by a man called Worsley whose son was to become a broadcasting chum of mine. He came home from school one day demonstrating a schoolboy jape. If you talked into the rim of a glass you could deepen your voice. His father was delighted. There was a new character in the show that week. It was a German spy called Funf who spoke into a glass darkly. It swept the nation.<br />
<br />
If you look at any photographs taken in the Fifties everyone is smiling yet in contemporary photographs there isn't a happy tooth to be seen. Our media resembles nothing so much as the Fat Boy in the Pickwick Papers 'who wants to make yer flesh creep.'<br />
<br />
This week we have reacted with horror to the news that the Government is reading our emails. It came as no surprise to me.When I was suspected of being a Welsh terrorist, Special Branch detectives showed me album after album of processions and demonstrations taken by Plod Photographers.<br />
Today most of my email consists of bewildering pictures of naked women, sent to me by friends old enough to know better, and jokes so venerable one wonders they make the journey unaided. I feel sorry for any luckless terror-taker who has to read them every morning.<br />
<br />
There is admittedly diminishing cause for glee. Although we are among the 'rich' nations we are closing libraries and lavatories, the roads are a disgrace, respectable people are queuing at soup kitchens and the disabled are being evicted because they cannot afford to pay an iniquitous bedroom tax. The cream of our warriors are being taken from the front line to be thrown on the scrapheap. In the past century our Leaders have launched 165 wars in which 180 million have given their lives at the cost of 350 million dollars. The Ministry of Health plans to strip 135,000 elderly and disabled survivors of basic care such as help with washing and dressing, yet despite protests they do not need it, we continue to hurl gold coins at the heads of Africans, Chinese and Indians who are much richer than we are.<br />
<br />
Rather than cheer us up the Government is intent on wiping the smile off our collective faces. They have set up a watchdog, the Efficiency and Reform Group, to house keep. It costs £72 million a year to run but it apparently hasn't noticed £500 million spent sending the children of senior officers and diplomats to public schools. Members of the Civil Service, which complains of cuts, get two and a half privilege days off a year, £75 evening dress allowance, loans to buy bicycles, as well as £912,000 a year subsidized flying lessons, diving lessons and trips to Barbados. Members of Parliament, of course, are preoccupied negotiating a massive pay rise for themselves. No wonder we cannot take life as light heartedly as when we were only being bombed.We are living in a world where in two years we are likely to be plunged into darkness. We are tied into a Europe which is going bust, country by country, where one in four young people cannot find a job. I wish it were yesterday.<br />
<br />
When my good friend Jimmy Lovelock died few believed it. Death must have had quite a struggle because Jim was the stuff that old boots are made from.<br />
<br />
Editor of a weekly newspaper in his twenties, he was crippled with polio as a child yet nevertheless became a mountaineer, a pot-holer and a member of the expedition which climbed Nuptse, Everest’s younger sister. Working for the Daily Mail, he once scaled the south face of the building and climbed through the window into the editor’s office.<br />
<br />
He was also my boss for a day and a half when he was proprietor of Stockport News Service.<br />
<br />
Jim was a remarkable man who collected oddities. The rest of the staff of Stockport News Service was an odd little chap called Mickey. We had to find him to be introduced - and that was never easy. A year after his arrival, no one knew Mickey’s surname and I don’t think anyone ever found out where he lived.<br />
<br />
He was invariably respectful and called Jimmy 'Master'. He had a single purpose in life: to discover how millionaires made their first thousand pounds. Their memoirs, said Mickey who had read them all, always included the phrase, 'with my first thousand pounds I bought…' but never explained where the thousand pounds had come from.<br />
<br />
He thought they had nicked it; but scorning that as being too easy, he tried dealing. He only really mastered the art of acquiring: disposal escaped him. To Jimmy’s puzzled chagrin, he used the Agency’s office as his warehouse. There were racks of clothes of improbable sizes; a job lot of stringless violins, picked up for a song, inevitably tuneless; twenty gross of heavily tinselled cards wishing 'A Happy Xmas for 1948' which he bought in 1951; and other less saleable items. You could never find a pen there, or even a typewriter; but anyone in need of a stringless violin was easily accommodated.<br />
<br />
Next he tried gambling, a curious reversal. This time, disposing was child’s play: acquiring, he never quite mastered.<br />
<br />
He had one suit he wore to the office, except on the days when he wore a mackintosh in the hope that 'Master' would not notice he was wearing only a shirt, tie and underpants beneath, having pawned the suit. The gartered socks were a give-away.<br />
<br />
By the time I arrived, Jimmy had taken to paying him by the day. The second day there I got an out of town job - I was, after all, the only member of staff who could be relied on to turn up in a suit. Wilmslow Magistrates Court, which in those days could be reached from Stockport by train, was hardly outer space but Mickey anxiously took me for a couple of pints to stiffen the sinews. One pint led to another and by the time I got on the train I was exhausted, fell into a deep sleep and woke up in Crewe. I had seen enough Hollywood newspaper films to know what to do. I rang the office on a transfer charge call and asked Jimmy to wire me my fare back to Stockport. I was touched that he went further: he drove all the way to Crewe to collect me. I see now that the reason was that it gave him a greater opportunity for an in-depth character assessment, but at the time I thought it a charming gesture.<br />
<br />
We were nearing Stockport when he ended his assessment. “Skiddy,” he said, “we have two alternatives. Either I employ you or we stay friends.” Again I was very touched: it was my friendship he valued.<br />
<br />
He generously paid me for a day and a half, but despite the joint urgings of Mickey and myself, refused to add the one and a half hours’ holiday money to which we felt I was entitled. After over sixty years the debt remains unpaid, though I have over the years mentioned it many times, even sent bills to his retirement home in Spain. He always copped me a deaf ‘un.<br />
<br />
In the fullness of time he came to work for me, doing shifts when I ran the night desk on the Sunday Pictorial. I tried to have my holiday money docked from his shift money, but the linage department was obdurate. No honorable amendment, not even when he made a fortune doing night shifts for six nationals, on one occasion sleeping in his car outside the vicarage in Cheshire in case his prey, the naughty Vicar of Woodford, sneaked back from his love-nest in the South of France.<br />
<br />
In fairness, he did bring me a Kukri back from Nepal when he climbed Nuptse and I treasure it to this day.<br />
<br />
I was especially touched because he would have had every right to be cross. George Harrap, the picture editor, and I had sent him a telegram as soon as the news broke of his successful attempt. “Is there froth on the top?” it read, rather cleverly, we thought. We didn’t know that it would take the Sherpa who delivered it three days to climb the mountain.<br />
<br />
Mickey? No idea. The last time we met we were having lunch with Lord (Tony) Moynihan when his wife’s breast fell out. She was a tassle dancer and was very kindly demonstrating that antique art. Somehow, in the excitement of that, I never got round to finding out whether Mickey made his first thousand, but I was pleased to see he was not wearing his Mac.<br />
<br />
My American chum Jerry Jasper brought a smile to my face with this:<br />
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.33332633972168px; line-height: 19.187488555908203px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.4em;">
"The <b>Skidmore Fountain </b>was dedicated September 22, 1888, in memory of Stephen G. Skidmore, a wealthy Portland druggist who died in 1883,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-katauskas_1-0" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skidmore_Fountain#cite_note-katauskas-1" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a></sup> and partly financed by his will<a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_(law)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Will (law)">l</a>. It is styled after fountains Skidmore viewed at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Versailles" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Palace of Versailles">Versailles</a> on his visit to the 1878 Paris <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Universelle_(1878)" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Exposition Universelle (1878)">Exposition</a> and intended for "horses, men and dogs" to drink from. Henry Weinhard offered to pump <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Beer">beer</a> into the fountain at the dedication.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-katauskas_1-2" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skidmore_Fountain#cite_note-katauskas-1" style="background-image: none; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a></sup></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.33332633972168px; line-height: 19.187488555908203px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.4em;">
The open area around the fountain attracts street performers and entertained spectators. The fountain also serves as a gathering point for several Portland events, such as SantaCon.,Plunderathon and the Zombiewalk and several protest/activist gatherings."</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.33332633972168px; line-height: 19.187488555908203px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.4em;">
You see, our idea of fun is to walk like Zombies. Come back Henry Weinhard we need you badly.</div>
ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-69854142736180359372013-06-20T07:29:00.000-07:002013-06-28T06:42:31.580-07:00GEORGE WAS THE DRAGONA great week for fecundity. I went today for a test of my foolish heart, foolishly.<br />
<br />
"What are you going to do?" I asked nervously.<br />
<br />
"It's the test we give pregnant ladies," the nurse told me.<br />
<br />
Now I know the Good Lord has in his lack of wisdom designed me on circular lines but this was altogether too much. Over the near century I cannot tell you the number of clumsy jokes I have suffered. Not only jokes. The last time I went to the dentist I was required to fill in a form denying I was pregnant.<br />
<br />
The nurse reassured me. All she was going to do was rub cooling ointment on me and send exciting little charges coursing through my eager body.<br />
<br />
"I won't bring the wife, then?"<br />
<br />
"Oh bring her," insisted the nurse,"she will be interested."<br />
<br />
By the time we arrived the little heart was pounding. The wife was reserving her options. Reassuring myself that there were no three-king-carrying camels in the car park, I hurried to begin what sounded like a merry meeting. It wasn't. The nurse just took pictures which came up on a screen which I couldn't see because my face was turned to the wall. The nurse was right, though. My wife WAS interested. But my tale of fecundity was not done.<br />
<br />
<br />
PAGE ONE RUSH RUSH<br />
First Great Grand-daughter. Now I have full set!!!<br />
<br />
<img alt="IMG_20130618_152621.jpg" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=023a23bae5&view=att&th=13f5cc9dd84bc228&attid=0.1&disp=thd&realattid=1438280606792054787-local0&zw" /><br />
<br />
<br />
Not all meetings have been so trouble free:<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh519tpWghVlZuOy8ky9sQWxWcwZ3ZrV2XkzNpgCbVh4T8_yrApM4PosUz364MQq2ilPa3_ca8Yzz-AyBTiAV_RsdbW177Lv6UZV8XdBaPSWApEhxijKN_iA4bcYKYpJIk893ar9nZwBceP/s1600/harrap+caricature.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh519tpWghVlZuOy8ky9sQWxWcwZ3ZrV2XkzNpgCbVh4T8_yrApM4PosUz364MQq2ilPa3_ca8Yzz-AyBTiAV_RsdbW177Lv6UZV8XdBaPSWApEhxijKN_iA4bcYKYpJIk893ar9nZwBceP/s1600/harrap+caricature.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
Harrop by Ed Rawlinson<br />
<br />
When Oscar Levant was conscripted, the recruiting sergeant asked him if he would be able to kill the enemy. Levant replied: ‘The enemy? No. A friend? Yes.’<br />
<br />
His friends felt much the same about George Harrop.<br />
<br />
George was Night Picture Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester when I ran the night news desk, a job I would have held much longer had someone else run the picture desk. A former cinema manager, wartime Chindit and PR man, he had the fastest tongue in the West - and also the loosest. Predictably so, since he incessantly lubricated it with whisky. He was even shaped like a Dimple Haigh bottle.<br />
<br />
The telephone was his straight man, and his conversations with it were endless. On one occasion, the Sports Editor Peter Thomas tweaked his phone line out of its socket. George went on talking for a full five minutes.<br />
<br />
His tongue frequently got him into trouble, but it feared no man. Not even an editor, a wartime Commando major whose nickname was ‘Strangler’ and who had once held a junior executive by his ankles out of a fourth floor window.<br />
<br />
"George, get off the bloody phone," he raged one night.<br />
<br />
"Have to go,’ said George, in a voice everybody in the room heard, "the editor wants permission to change a crosshead."<br />
<br />
A photographer who fell foul of him was ‘a panchromatic Judas Iscariot’. Describing the foremen’s Christmas lunch at a smart hotel, he said: "They rushed through the swing doors in their suede clogs shouting, 'Where is the foremen’s lavatory?”’<br />
<br />
Once, returning home, he could not find his front gate. He hacked a great hole in the hedge, assuming he was back in the Chindits. It would be dishonourable to him to call him predictable.<br />
<br />
I was not the only man to suffer from his friendship. Another martyr, the Night News Editor of the Daily Express, was on his way to a Christmas party when he discovered George asleep in the back of his car. Something which quite often happened to many of us.<br />
<br />
Good sense dictated dumping him at the earliest - or nearest – convenience, but foolishly he took him to the party. In quite a short time, the host was so keen that my friend should take George home that he gave him the keys of his car.<br />
<br />
The years have not diminished the horror of that drive. Distracted by George’s seamless monologue down some imagined phone, my friend drove over the bumpy flowerbeds of a roundabout. This startled George who demanded to know where he was and how he could open the steamed-up passenger window. A few moments later, my friend felt a breeze and assumed George had opened the window. But his seat was empty and in the rear mirror my friend saw a bundle of rags rolling down the road. George had opened the door and fallen out.<br />
<br />
Numb with fright, my friend knelt in the road beside the rags, fearing the worst. To his relief, George`s head emerged. He got to his feet, dusted himself down and insisted on being taken to a pub 500 yards down the road. The pub was in darkness but George hammered on the door until the bedroom lights went on and the landlady appeared in her dressing gown and curlers.<br />
<br />
"Madam," said George at his most courtly, "I am sorry to have awakened you but there has been a terrible accident. The victim is in shock: a large medicinal brandy would help."<br />
<br />
Still half asleep, she only began screaming for the police when George explained that he was the victim and that he preferred his brandy without ice or soda…<br />
<br />
My friend eventually shook George off, which was never easy, and got home on Boxing Day to find his wife had left him. The party host subsequently attacked him with his crutch when my friend told him he could not remember where he had left his car.<br />
<br />
Alas, George has long ago gone to the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky. Somehow R.I.P seems inappropriate.<br />
<img src="https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/s403x403/253223_534756499903410_1833994125_n.jpg" />ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-18501295402726412242013-06-14T11:59:00.000-07:002013-06-14T11:59:03.938-07:00STARDUST AND TINSELThe civilised world may be tumbling round our ears, World War 3 may be sharing our Christmas, the Government may be alone in not realising that Britain is broke. There remains one crumb of comfort. Stephen Fry, nibbling at his aspirin butty, perennially peddling his gobbets of knowledge, is not equipped to breed with Mary Portas, of whom I cannot catch a sight without every quality of mercy dropping like a gentle monsoon from heaven and gurgling down the plug hole of consciousness.<br />
<br />
It is her boast that she decided to crusade for shopkeepers when she read that shops were closing at the rate of 100 a week. Judging by the advice I heard her giving on a dire Channel 4 show, she has easily improved on that figure. She told a charity shop that it would improve its sales if it increased its prices. In less prosperous days I bought my clothes at charity shops BECAUSE THEY WERE CHEAPER. At twenty stone and five foot eight, I had achieved dimensions at which people were dropping like flies so there was no shortage of gentlemen's light and casual.<br />
<br />
I put my permanent poverty down to a friend I made early in my career. Search hard enough and there is always one word which exactly describes a person. In the case of Bill Marshall that word was 'outrageous'. I did not know what trouble was until I met Marshall, the Daily Mirror district man in Liverpool. He was a library of opposites. Lanky without being tall; a Lincolnshire lad with an American accent; immaculate blazer worn with stained trousers; cowboy boots without socks; wild hair and an occasional beard.<br />
<br />
That was the picture I had when I saw him for the first time in the Liverpool Press Club a week after I joined the Daily Dispatch. Though we kept in touch until the weeks before his death and I loved him like a brother, we did not see each other for 30 years. Which may explain why I was able to have a successful career as an author and broadcaster. Had Bill still been around there would not have been time and I could well have been in prison.<br />
<br />
I should have been warned when his wife invited me to a party at his flat at Formby and said, “Don’t bring Bill.” Getting barred from your own house takes dedication and a lot of effort.<br />
<br />
There was the time he sold my passport and used the money to buy drugs for re-sale. But he wanted to be sure they were genuine. In those days Bert Balmer was Head of the CID in Liverpool and his deputy was a man called Jimmy Morris. They were both members of the Press Club. This night he passed me the drugs and said, “Go and ask Bert what it is.” So in his thrall was I that I went to the head of CID and said, “Bert, what are these?” passing him some curled-up leaves.<br />
<br />
“Bill sent you?” asked that excellent man, and then passed them to Jimmy. “What do you think, Jimmy? Rhododendron or Azalea?”<br />
<br />
"Azalea," said Jimmy as he handed them back to me. "But tell your mate Bill they'll never grow. He'll need seed for that, not shredded leaves."<br />
<br />
There was the time he bought a roulette wheel and made me go out and buy a black shirt and white tie and be the croupier. I thought they looked silly with a sports jacket but I always did what he said. Even when he got me to shave off half the beard of News Chronicle reporter Jackie Yeadon as he slept drunkenly on the club sofa and then prop him up still asleep on a parapet whilst Bill shouted: “Roll up and see the midget with half a beard!" at the Saturday shoppers below in Lime Street. Yeadon was small - and majestic with it. During the war he had got extra meat by telling the butcher he was the captain of a midget submarine.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I stood behind the wheel of a game I did not understand in the Press Club annexe and lost £45 in ten minutes - and that was in 1953 when I was paid £15 a week.<br />
<br />
He made up stories for the Mirror that nowadays would have got him an overnight declaration in the Booker Prize. Like the one about the girl who couldn’t afford the cruise her doctor ordered so she bought (or, to be more truthful, Bill did) 45 round-trip tickets on the New Brighton ferry.<br />
<br />
Then there was the dog he tied to the railings of the Bridewell with a note attached to its collar which read: “My daddy says he is going to shoot my dog when he comes home because we cannot afford to feed him, though I have given him my tea every night. Please give him a home.” The story he wrote produced so many offers of a home the Daily Mirror phones were blocked for three hours.<br />
<br />
It was catching. Even Balmer, the Head of CID, caught it. Every Saturday he would make up a story for us so we could claim a shift from the Sunday papers in our group. My favourite was a spin off from a fashion among criminals who had been in prison to have a swallow tattooed on the joint between thumb and forefinger. Bert told us the CID was worried the fad was being copied by juveniles. Having a sparrow tattoo (the juvenile version of the swallow) showed that they had been to reformatories, Bert claimed, and all our offices fell for it.<br />
<br />
Marshall struck when you weren’t watching. Years later when I lived in Chester he rang me from Liverpool to say another of his many wives would be coming through Chester. Would I meet her off the train and give her dinner? “She is pretty upset,” he confided.<br />
<br />
I met her and we had a jolly meal. Over coffee she admitted she needed cheering up and I said, “Yes, that’s why Bill suggested I meet you.”<br />
<br />
I thought she was going to explode. “Do you know why I am upset?” she said. “We were divorced this morning and that ******* turned up in his oldest clothes, pleaded poverty and I have got peanuts for maintenance.”<br />
<br />
When I heard some days later that Bill had turned left at a level crossing and driven several miles along the Liverpool-Formby railway line I felt a pang of regret he hadn’t shared the experience with an oncoming express. But the feeling didn’t last. You could only dislike him for about five minutes.<br />
<br />
There was this time when I was sleeping on the newspaper files in the Daily Dispatch office, where I worked, because I had no money for digs. He rang to tell me that Hoagy Carmichael was in town and we should go and pay him homage at the Adelphi, where Hoagy (who for some reason he called Hoagland) had a suite.<br />
<br />
Hoagy could not have been kinder. He invited us in and although it was a little after 10am poured us both giant Scotches. Inevitably Bill asked him to play the piano. Characteristically, this very nice man agreed: but he wouldn’t play his signature tune “Stardust”. He said he couldn’t stand the damn thing and HE wrote it. So for an hour or so he plied us with Scotch and entertained us on the piano with tunes for which, he said, he had not been able to find a publisher.<br />
<br />
A yelp from Bill brought the performance to an abrupt end. He had remembered that he should have been across the city covering an Assize trial.<br />
<br />
“Anything I can do?” asked Hoagy, before I had a chance to warn him.<br />
<br />
Bill said, yes, there was. He knew Hoagy didn’t like Stardust but he asked could he ring his news editor Roly Watkins and when he came to the phone, hold the instrument over the piano keyboard while Hoagy played a few bars of “Stardust” and say: “Hello Roly, this is Hoagy Carmichael. I am afraid I have detained your reporter Bill Marshall.”<br />
<br />
Good as gold, Hoagy did as Bill told him. He played the opening bars down the phone and said his piece. There was a pause and then a suddenly angry Hoagy said: “No, this is not Bill Marshall, I am not pissed at half past eleven in the morning and I have no idea what is on at the Assizes.”<br />
<br />
After the show that night, one of only two he did in Britain, he came over to the Press Club and once again at Bill’s command (by his time Bill saw him as his property) he played for the members.<br />
<br />
After an hour or so he wanted to stop but Bill commanded him to play on. “Look Bill,” he said, “I get a thousand pounds for a concert.” ”Oh, it’s money you want?” sneered Bill, and promptly wrote a cheque for £1,000, which Hoagy pocketed and then played on.<br />
<br />
The next morning there was another call from Bill who wanted to know if he had cashed any cheques because one had gone from his book and his bank manager had warned him if he cashed any more cheques he would close his account.<br />
<br />
I said: “Only the thousand pounds you paid Hoagy,” and enjoyed the panic I could feel down the phone. “We have to get it back,” he said, and off we went to the Adelphi.<br />
<br />
Hoagy was full of apologies. “I cashed it with the hotel half an hour ago,” he said. In the minutes that followed I was repaid for all the indignities Marshall had heaped on me. And then Hoagy relented. “I haven’t cashed it,” he said, “but you cannot have it back. I am going to have it framed and put in my den to remind me of a great night.”<br />
<br />
Bill knew how poor I was. I was getting fifteen quid a week and sending ten of it back to my family in Doncaster. The fiver I had left paid for my digs. But if I wanted to eat as well I had to play poker.<br />
<br />
Fair play, he was always very worried about my poverty and constantly thought of ways of making us both rich. Like the roulette game he set up in the Club. I had taken a few quid off John Edwards, who was working – but not very often - at the Daily Post at the time. Marshall allowed me to put most of my winnings in the bank. He even left me enough to buy the black shirt and white tie he said I would need for my part as the croupier.<br />
<br />
I realised why when at the first spin of the wheel we lost £75. Most of it to Les Clare who was not famous for benignity. Which is probably why we couldn’t find Marshall anywhere.<br />
<br />
My favourite memory of Liverpool concerns the minesweeper the Admiralty forgot. It seemed to be welded to the dock wall. The crew had honorary membership of the Press Club and we enjoyed membership of the Ward Room.<br />
<br />
I was there one day when a messenger came on board from the office. He said: “Mr Wigglesworth says not to hurry with your copy. The paper has been bought by the Mirror and closed down.”<br />
<br />
I must have paled because the skipper asked: “Bad news from home?” in the In-Which-We-Serve voice used by naval officers.<br />
<br />
“My paper has closed down,” I said.<br />
<br />
“Is this the first you’ve heard?”<br />
<br />
“Yes.”<br />
<br />
“If their Lordships of the Admiralty had taken a ship of mine out of commission in such an ill mannered way I would send them a pretty snotty signal.”<br />
<br />
“And if I knew Lord Kemsley’s telephone number I would give him a piece of my mind,” I retorted.<br />
<br />
At this point Hugh Medlicott from the Daily Mail (Harry Slime or the Turd Man, as he was known to Les Clare) broke in: “It’s Mayfair 1111.,”<br />
<br />
“If I was near a telephone…"<br />
<br />
“Use our ship to shore,” the skipper offered.<br />
<br />
Several large gins later I plucked up the courage, rang the number and, thank God, a footman told me his Lordship was out but he would be glad take a message.<br />
<br />
Brave now, I gave him a very abusive message indeed. When I finished the skipper begged to be allowed to come on the phone.<br />
<br />
“And that goes for Her Majesty’s Royal Navy,” he told the footman.<br />
<br />
The footman seemed very pleased.<br />
<br />
Predictably Wiggie, who was the news editor of the Daily Dispatch and a man with favourites, had left me off the list of those transferring the Mirror. The Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp heard the story and insisted I should be employed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-2810917071325766832013-06-07T08:21:00.000-07:002013-06-07T08:21:03.491-07:00FAREWELL TO HIPKINThe great joy in our lives is our old gardener Hipkin. Alas, after fifty years with the family he retired this week, leaving us one of his fleet of lawn mowers (he is far richer than we are) as a memorial. He is the quintessential Fenman and a keen observer of his neighbours. This week he excelled himself. I wish you could hear his brogue, which, alas, is dying in the Fen towns in favour of Estuary English.<br />
<br />
“Now,” he said, “Ahm goin to tell e somthin. This woman what I work for she sez to me, she says, 'Ahm gooin on oliday tomorrer and I dunno know weer to hide me money.' And er usband, he says, 'Ah'll bury it in't gardin an I'll stick a twig in so we'll know weer it is.' So that's what they do and they goes away.<br />
<br />
“And what happened next day is along comes their son with his rotavator and rotavates the whole garden. And his machine chews up the stick. Took em a week to find the tin.”<br />
<br />
Hipkin is 83 and seriously rich yet until recently he delivered papers every morning and on two afternoons. He still tends twenty gardens, making no charge for many of them. We pay him but he refuses to take more than £8 for a shift that lasts at least four hours. His great joy is to take his partner Miss Beart to “Skeggie” (Skegness) where he plays bingo and always wins. And he always takes his sagacious terrier Bailey, who can count, with him. “I says to 'im in the mornings, how many sausages d'you want for your breakfast and he goos 'Wuff, wuff, wuff'.”<br />
<br />
Bailey has three meals a day of whatever Hipkin is eating. When they are going to Skeggie he gets very excited the night before because somehow he knows.<br />
<br />
Miss Beart has seven rabbits which she keeps in seven hutches because she don't want no baby rabbits and Bailey likes nothing better than to go to their shed where he sits for hours looking at them adoringly. Hipkin adores Miss Beart who is 19 carat all through. He came one morning with a stone dog ornament which he wanted us to give a home. He explained: “Miss Beart cannot abear to look out of the window and see it sitting there in the cold.”<br />
<br />
.............................................<br />
<br />
Many of you have asked to meet some more of the friends of my youth. Enter stage left....Kenneth Graham, my colleague on The People, who had a head apparently whittled from balsa wood. Superficially craggy but wont to crumble under pressure.<br />
<br />
Graham was always under pressure. His supreme creative act was throwing the “future features” box through the news room window and into the Manchester Ship Canal. He survived that to be sent to expose a massage parlour. He was instructed to accept the ministrations to a certain point and then to sit up and say: “I am from the People and this is a disgusting exhibition” , at which point a photograph would be taken by People photographer Dennis Hutchinson, unkindly known as "the Poison Dwarf ".<br />
Three times he struggled from a recumbent posture, only to fall back under the mesmeric fingers of the masseuse for a moment more of pleasure.<br />
<br />
At last he struggled to a sitting position, cried “Bugger the People” and abandoned himself to hedonism.<br />
<br />
He was The Great Complainer. He stopped going to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous when a fellow alcoholic failed to buy his round of lemonade. When I organised trips to Sweden for a pal who was a director of Tor Line, Graham was my first choice. His reaction to any given siuation was always a joyful surprise.<br />
<br />
At Immingham we were shown in to a board room, handed G and Ts the size of crystal fire buckets and invited to make free of a lavish buffet. “It should have been my day off today,” Graham said mournfully.<br />
<br />
In his hotel room in Gothenburg he took an apple from a fruit bowl that was doing its best to be a Harvest Festival. An hour later when he returned to the room he rang reception to complain it had not been replaced.<br />
<br />
On the voyage home the ship’s chef assembled a smorgasbord which had the Swedish passengers gasping with joy. I watched Graham shovelling away at the dishes on offer in a Lucullan buffet like an under nourished JCB. As he staggered back to our table under the weight of his plate I said to the girl with whom I was lunching: “Bet you when he comes back his first words are a complaint.” She said: “He couldn’t. That is a Christmas Smorgasbord. It has everything.”<br />
<br />
Graham did not disappoint. “Trouble with these meals,” he told the table aggrievedly, “you are spoilt for bloody choice.”<br />
<br />
I must not give the wrong impression. It was impossible not to be fond of him. He had a terrible time living up to his craggy face and a voice that rasped with a thousand Woodbines. Underneath his bluster, he was a gentle drunk and I would not have been at all surprised to find him talking to a six foot rabbit that only he could see.<br />
<br />
A person so innocent was a natural butt for our news editor Mike Gabbert. Gabbert was to complex practical jokes what Cecil B. de Mille was to Hollywood spectaculars. His hoaxes had casts of thousands and we were all, at one time or another, grist to his malevolent mill.<br />
<br />
Like the day he put Ken Graham down in the diary for a wholly mythical parachute jump.<br />
Graham went white when he read the entry but did his best not to show it. Not even when a man from accounts rang and asked if his insurance was up to date and did it cover him for sudden death on the job. Because, if not, the paper would insure him for £50,000.<br />
<br />
An Air Ministry PRO was the next one to call. He wanted to know if Graham enjoyed good health and sound limbs. Especially, he added darkly, limbs.<br />
<br />
I thought Graham took it well. He was less successful when the picture desk rang from London to say they were putting a special helmet in the Manchester despatch box. The helmet had a camera in the front and a cable which went into the mouth. Graham was to grip it and jerk his head when he left the aircraft, and continue to do so during the fall, so that the paper would have a sequence of thrilling photographs.<br />
<br />
I for one thought he was bound to break when Neville Stack, who was news editing our sister paper the Daily Herald, rang and said he had heard Graham was going to do a parachute jump. Stack said he wouldn’t do anything like that, not for a gold clock. But, he said, the daily was anxious to commemorate the event, so would it be OK if they photographed Graham as he landed? Graham said in a very small voice that it would.<br />
<br />
“There is just one thing,” said Stack. “I gather you are jumping in a stick. How will we know which one is you?” Graham said helpfully that he would wave, but Stack said he wouldn’t advise that. Graham would need both hands to pull on the parachute harness or he would break his leg in landing.<br />
“I’ll tell you what," said Stack. “We will strap a loud hailer to your chest and just as you are about to land you can shout through it ' I am Ken Graham from The People.'<br />
<br />
“And if you could add 'Over Here' it would be helpful,” Stack concluded.<br />
<br />
At this point I think Graham’s nerve must have broken. He said to Mike was it alright if he took an early break. It was only 11 am but he was over the road, breasting the bar in the Chicken Grill, before Mike had time to answer.<br />
<br />
I have always thought the ex-paratrooper at the bar was a plant by Gabbert. Like the transvestite lorry driver he introduced to Mike Kiddey, without telling him about the transvestite bit, thus causing Kiddey to make a very embarrassing discovery on a bomb site at the back of the office. Anyway, this “paratroop” got into conversation and when Graham told him about the parachute jump he pursed his lips and made the sucking sound that workmen make when you show them work done by any other workmen.<br />
<br />
“Have you practised landing?” he asked, and when Graham admitted he had not the “paratroop” said: “We had to practise for a fortnight rolling off the back of a lorry. Absolutely vital.”<br />
<br />
“But the jump is tomorrow,” wailed Graham.<br />
<br />
“Well, try falling and rolling here,” the “paratroop” suggested.<br />
<br />
I would have thought the joke had gone far enough with Graham falling and rolling on the floor of the Chicken Inn. Not so. By the time we got over, Graham was jumping off a table, bending his knees and rolling along the floor.<br />
<br />
It was at that point Mike Gabbert said: “Oh by the way, Ken, the jump is off. The Air Ministry won’t wear it."<br />
<br />
“Oh Hell,” said Graham with a lack of conviction that fooled no one, “I was looking forward to it.”<br />
<br />
My fall was simpler. I was happily night news editing the Sunday Mirror at the time and resisted Gabbert’s repeated urgings to move over to the People desk. In the end I agreed to a contest. I would join the People if he could out-drink me.<br />
<br />
The day I joined the People he presented me with a brass plaque which still stands on my desk. It reads: “In hazy memory of March 20 1963 when Ian Skidmore and Michael Gabbert drank 12 and a half bottles of Chianti and a bottle of brandy at the Chicken Inn, Manchester. Because they were very thirsty.”<br />
<br />
Looking back, I think he cheated. I have never left half a bottle of anything in my life and that night I was in sparkling mid-season form. Driving home to Chester I stopped off at the Farmers Arms in Huxley and had four pints of bitter with Curly Beard.ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-41924335861381834062013-06-02T02:28:00.001-07:002013-06-02T02:28:21.257-07:00skidmore's island: A MOTLEY CREW<a href="http://skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-motley-crew.html?spref=bl">skidmore's island: A MOTLEY CREW</a>: Jack Paterson , the Northern Night Editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester in the Fifties, was the archetypal newspaper man. He wore red br...ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-55220767264871714572013-05-24T03:38:00.001-07:002013-05-24T03:38:53.002-07:00MAKING AMENDS<br />
I wish to right a wrong. No one dismisses, as I did last week, Joe Minogue in a paragraph.<br />
<br />
Joe Minogue was a giant cloth cap, a cigarette and a pronounced Manchester accent. It was possible to know him for several weeks before realising that beneath the cap lived a face like an angry nut and the body of an apprehensive leprechaun.<br />
<br />
He had been a tank driver on D.Day and possibly the only tank driver to be wounded in the backside, that part of the body covered by the tank. He had dark suspicions the bullet had come from inside the tank, but nothing was proved. After the war he was translated from being a penny-a-line municipal correspondent at Manchester Town Hall to foreign editor of the Manchester Guardian. He said there was little difference in the two jobs, except that as foreign editor he was much bothered by coups in parts of the world you had to look up in an atlas. Though he said the politics in Manchester Town Hall were often much bloodier. When he was appointed, the cap toured the world visiting the Guardian's distinguished foreign correspondents. Alistair Cooke - which he pronounced with three ‘o’s, as he did coups - was particularly fond of him.<br />
<br />
I worked for him for nearly three weeks in the Fifties before he was forced to sack me. He didn't like to tell me, so he gave me a letter for my wife asking her to tell me but to be sure to add there was nothing personal in it.<br />
<br />
He did feel a little out of place in the rarefied Oxbridge atmosphere of the Manchester Guardian (never the Guardian despite what the masthead said). He was surprised when he took office to find his telephone was kept on the floor near the door. He never moved it in case it was a tradition. If you went to his office, the desk would, like as not, be unoccupied but you would find him curled up on the floor, settling a coup on the telephone.<br />
<br />
<br />
Ever subversive, Minogue formed an Anti-Culture group at the paper which he invited me to join when I was a very senior reporter on the Mirror. Alas, the editor Alastair Hetherington refused to have me anywhere near the paper when he learned I hunted foxes although I had a pretty impressive cuttings book.<br />
<br />
It must be admitted that Joe and I were among Nature’s subversives. When we could not work together we set out to undermine the industry with a series of improbable “Letters to the Editor” in which his boss, the news editor Harry Whewell, joined. I have written about how I wrote to the editor of the Manchester Evening News recalling how, as a boy, I had hunted my uncle’s pack of Rochdale Flock Hounds over the Lancashire moors and wondered what had happened to the breed.<br />
<br />
Minogue responded by saying that although he remembered the breed well he was never convinced they had the true nose which one only found in the Doffcocker Dandy Dinmont, though for tongue he had always preferred the Chowbent terrier.<br />
<br />
What was very odd was the spirited correspondence this produced from other readers until we began to believe in the breed we thought we had invented.<br />
<br />
Tiring of this subject into which others had introduced an acrimonious note, Whewell wrote to the Oldham Chronicle to enquire whether there were any photographs of his uncle, a Sioux chieftain who had come to the town in the mid 19th century as part of a delegation of American Indians to examine the cotton industry.<br />
<br />
I wrote to say that I couldn’t help with a photograph but I did have a fragment of a war bonnet picked up in the eighties in Ashton under Lyne market by a relative of mine. Though it was a much treasured relic in our family, I offered to pass it on if the writer could give some proof of ownership.<br />
<br />
Watching a TV broadcast of the “Antiques Road Show” some time later, I learned Lancashire was afloat with Indian chiefs in the mid 19th century and my daughter Gay, who looked after me this weekend, tells me that many districts in Lancashire have their own strain of dogs, such as the Ormskirk terrier. So Oscar Wilde had it right. Nature does imitate art.<br />
<br />
Readers' Letters once ruined an editorial power lunch. Hugh Cudlipp, who ruined the Mirror, was in my view a foul-mouthed bully of little talent who did irreparable harm to the paper. From time to time he would descend on Manchester and inflict lunch on his executives. The better to enjoy tearing them apart, he always invited two reporters. It was not a pretty sight. The Mirror also owned the Glasgow- based Daily Record so when Cudlipp invited his executives for ideas to increase circulation the executive who suggested we do more Scottish stories was unwise. “Isn’t that a bit like Mr Marks out-voting Mr Spencer?” rasped Cudlipp.<br />
<br />
Gerry McGee, the sports editor, was not falling in any traps. When Cudlipp said, “I now call on Mr McGee to give a short address”, he replied, “21 Washaway Road, Sale.”<br />
<br />
It was not original but, by God, it was brave.<br />
<br />
Cudlipp was bested only once and that was by my friend Bill Barton, who sadly has since gone on his lunch break in the sky. (For Bill, a lunch break that only lasts for eternity will seem sadly curtailed).<br />
<br />
Besting executives was what Bill did best.<br />
<br />
Cudlipp had been saying that everything in the Mirror was true. “Nay, nay, Mr Cudlipp,” roared Bill, whose “nay, nay” had the illuminating force of the Edison Light, “what about readers’ letters?”<br />
<br />
“The readers’ letters are genuine despatches from the good people who buy our great newspapers,” answered Cudlipp.<br />
<br />
“Nay, nay, Mr Cudlipp,” said Bill, “I had to write three before I could come here this morning.”ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-40776910846827326932013-05-09T08:56:00.000-07:002013-05-09T08:56:30.714-07:00CRY GOD FOR HARRY<br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">On the gorblimey trousers and the dustman's hat history is silent but Harry Whewell's Old Man was certainly, if improbably, a dustman. . . As a child on Friday nights Harry sat round the kitchen table with the family sorting through the likely rubbish brought home by his father searching for valuables.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Later in life from his mansion flat he toured the great universities, as news editor, then editor, of <i>The Manchester Guardian</i>, searching for literary talent. Michael Frayn, Jonathan Steele, Benedict Nightingale and Simon Hoggart were among the many he discovered. He was part of the Team of Immortals: Alastair Cooke, Neville Cardus, Howard Spring among others which made The Guardian </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">by a mile the world's greatest newspaper. Last week he died at the age of 91 which came as a surprise to those of us who believed him to be immortal. During the war he was a navigator with Bomber Command, surprisingly, since he could get lost in an office corridor. Training at "Hell's Mouth" in North Wales he met, married and loved Esther Rose, the daughter of a celebrated journalistic dynasty who worked on a weekly paper to fund his student years. She was one of the pioneer writers who launched <i>Coronation Street</i> and until her tragic death led its creative team. They have a son, Tim, an outstanding foreign correspondent on <i>Newsnight</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Harry was small, saturnine, with an impish grin like a devil on holiday and he could ruin a suit by standing next to it. His cap was his badge of office and he had a genius for conversation. Google lists only seven Harry Whewells in Britain. Personally I don't believe in six of them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Oddity in Harry was brought to a fine art. Respected and enjoyed, he could only have found a home in <i>The Manchester Guardian</i>, which for him never became <i>The Guardian</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He was discovered and encouraged by the empire building Alastair Hetherington,an unlikely pairing. Although the great universities were his talent pool his net went wider . His choice of a foreign editor, Joe Minogue, he plucked from the small, irascible group who reported on Manchester municipal matters, with whom he had worked as a reporter. It proved a brilliant choice, though international coups never achieved a venom like to the municipal intensity. Minogue formed an anti-cultural group[in the newsroom.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Harry was amiable and curiously domestic in his ways. Though obdurate. Hetherington's, grand ideas were achieved round him, rather than through him.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">His <i>Guardian</i> did not encourage change. He refused to have telephones in the newsroom because they disrupted his writers' thoughts and he was overheard telling a correspondent: "<i>The ManchesterGuardian</i> does not take murders over the telephone."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>The Guardian</i> was the only paper he could have worked for. Impossible to think of him working anywhere else than the little rabbit warren of offices, sheltered by its milch cow <i>The Manchester Evening News</i>, in a court off Cross Street in central Manchester. For years I have been telling the story of <i>The Guardian</i> news editor who counselled me never to learn shorthand if I wished to succeed as a newspaper reporter. Harry's death frees me of the obligation. It was he who gave me that gem of advice which flew in the face of received wisdom. Harry was right, of course. He said news editors needed reporters who wrote shorthand to cover courts, councils, and all the dross that made up an edition. Others would be chosen for those chores until I, without a Pitman's stroke to my name, was the only one in the office. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"And that," said Harry, "is when the plane will crash."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A year later when I was working on <i>The Yorkshire Evening News</i> a jet fighter crashed at RAF Finningley. I was the only reporter in the office so I was sent on the story and got my first byline.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In the early days of our friendship we competed in sending fantasy letters to weekly newspapers. My winner was a query about the Rochdale Flock Hound, a mythical beast, which nonetheless brought letters from readers claiming to have bred them. Harry's was to wonder whether pictures existed of the Sioux Indian chief photographed on a Bury tram in full ceremonials during a visit by American Indians to the town. We were amazed at the number of readers who claimed to have seen the photograph.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Harry reached his apogee in the Battle of the News Editor's Desk. To Harry's horror Hetherington announced <i>The Guardian</i> was moving to new offices in Deansgate, sharing with <i>The Daily Mail</i>. This was across town from the Bodega bar and Sam's Chop House where Harry held daily court about fifty paces from his desk.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He refused to move. They showed him his new state-of-the-art office. He was unimpressed. They offered him suites of executive furniture. He spurned them. He insisted his desk would be too large for the new office and abandoning it would be unthinkable. He pointed out that the great C.P.Scott had sat at his desk. We could all see the point. Harry's desk was bigger than some sporting estates. It had drawers that had remained unopened for years and candle sconces like the old pianos. It was more than wood. It was history. And Harry was adamant. Britain had conquered the world with smaller gunboats. Some of the drawer fronts, it was said, were gun ports behind which cannons stood. The impasse continued for weeks. Both sides came to see the desk as a symbol of everything <i>The Manchester Guardian </i>represented. To the management it was clumsy, fusty and out of date. To Harry it was A Noble Tradition. Our money was on Harry.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Finally management caved in. They agreed to move the desk. When it arrived at its destination, doors had to be widened but by this time management's nerve had been shattered.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Harry pronounced himself pleased and went back to the old building to collect the canary in its cage, his office companion over many years. We formed a guard of honour for its progress from Cross Street to Deansgate, to admiring glances from shoppers. There may even have been cheers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Every holiday he took the bird home with him so that it would not be lonely. Seeing him with it one Christmas, a printer asked: "Where you going with that?" </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"I am taking it home for Christmas," said Harry. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">"Are you?" said the printer. "We're having turkey."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Writer Colin Dunne recalls going for an interview with Harry who offered a different view on shorthand:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">He sat me down across the desk before asking me exactly the questions I had been dreading.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">How did I feel about American imperialism and their war-mongering in the Far East? Oh Gawd. I sort of shrugged and said I didn't know much about it and didn't - pathetically, no doubt - have any strong feelings about it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Where did I stand on women's rights and the women's movement in general? Oh Gawd, again. I pulled a face and said it was all a bit of a mystery me and I'd rather leave the whole thing to women.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Which university did I attend? Gawd. None. I left school at 16. I did an A-level at Bradford Tech, if that helped.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Could I do shorthand? At last - my moment. Yes, I assured him, I could do reasonable shorthand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">"Thank God," he said, reaching over to shake my hand. "I have these buggers from university coming in here for interviews, they sit where you are and put their feet - in suede shoes - on my desk. All they want to write about is the wicked Americans in the third world and the worldwide fight for justice for women. And not one of them can ever do shorthand. When can you start?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sadly I wasn't able to take the job. He was a funny, clever man. He used to pin up a list of slightly unusual words in the news room and invite the reporters to try to get them into their copy. The idea was to raise the level of the language in the paper: it worked too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Revel Barker recalls a typical Whewellism:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">He was interviewing a girl from <i>The Northern Echo</i> Newcastle office for a reporter's job on <i>The Guardian</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">It was going very well and he asked her whether there was anything about the paper she didn't like, or might like to see changed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Well, she said, she thought there might be a greater use of pictures (this was in the late sixites).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Ah yes, said Harry. Well of course they had thought about that, but they had come to the conclusion that ..."in the space it would take to display a decent size picture we could place... oh, I don't know... maybe a thousand words."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">We shall not see his like again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT FROM A CLEVER FRIEND</span><br />
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<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">"My college flat mate Loren Needles, who is 71, pointed out to me that by<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">reaching 68 I am only 1.50% older than I was last year!<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">In your case you’ll only be 1.21% older than you were on your last birthday…"<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“Venus was sculpted by
man,
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">But the far more
attractive woman, Margaret Thatcher,
</span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Was sculpted by Allah.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">My heart raced when I saw
her face to face.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Her skin was smooth as
ivory,
</span></div>
<div lang="en-GB" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Her cheeks as rosy as an
English rose,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">And her eyes as lovely as
a mare’s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Her figure is more
attractive than the figure of any cherished wife</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Or coveted concubine.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en-GB">Ode taken from </span><span lang="en-GB"><i>A
Christmas Carol</i></span><span lang="en-GB">, being a commonplace
selection by John Julius Norwich, 1984.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en-GB">Written by court
poet of Fahd of Saudi Arabia, it appeared in the 1</span><sup><span lang="en-GB">st</span></sup><span lang="en-GB">
edition of <i>The Sunday Times</i> but mysteriously not in the second.</span></span>
</div>
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ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-59071288017767475292013-05-03T03:26:00.002-07:002013-05-03T03:26:56.406-07:00I KIND WORD FOR LADY TOK I can take a hint. Very flattered in fact and grateful for your kind wishes. Going for tests for my foolish heart........Alas wandering leg has signed up for Rio Olympics but look on the bright side. Soggy lung is showing a fine crop of watercress.<br />
So its back to business............<br />
<br />
I really did know a Tory Grandee called Lady Guinevere who was given the fairy tale role of turning a grocer's daughter called Thatcher into a lady.<br />
Another pal, John Julius, the Earl of Norwich, corroborates..His mother the bewitching Lady Diana Cooper was brought up as the daughter of the Duke of Rutland. The truth was she was fathered by the Hon Harry Cust, a neighbour in Lincolnshire who it might be said put the rut in Rutland.In my forthcoming book "Lusty Ladies"I list the other aristocrats Cust cuckolded.<br />
Ever ecumenical he also bedded Margaret Thatcher's maternal grandmother, one of his servants. As JJ cheerfully admitted to me in an interview. "That would make us first cousins"<br />
I couldn't resist a secret smile when I was told of Guinevere's role.<br />
I am surprised that in the recent acreage surrounding her name so little was made of her defining bloodline. Her father the small town grocer was also an Alderman, which meant he was qualified to stand in as God.Her father if he deigned to think of it all would assume superiority.<br />
You had to work as a reporter on a North country newspaper to appreciate the power wielded by that frightening creation of our Saxon past. The myth was that councillors became aldermen after many years in that lowly role but that was not always the case. Many were the sons and grandsons of aldermen. Some were honourable and wise men who cared for the people they had represented for a lifetime. Some were venal, Droite de Seigneur was alive and well in the Northen towns in which I worked. They signed off budgets of many millions, the decided where factories and housing estates were built, which land could be made available for purchase and what could be built on it.<br />
One I knew in Chester began life as the chief clerk in a Territorial Army office. He retired the owner of enviable suits, breathtaking cars and a home to dream on. Somehow he became part of the army, a Lt Colonel in the army without once having heard a shot fired in anger, though he frequently shot pheasants with the Duke of Westminster. The City owed him much. In fairness the regeneration of Chester was down to him. He called in the planners,fixed the finance and fired the population, The architect who took on the work told me a year later that the Carloginian ceilings which wre Chetser's pride were at the point of no return. The last I heard from the alderman from his reurement retireentvilla. " You never did catch me," he said.<br />
The power those monoliths wielded was breathtaking. The St Leger racing classic<br />
s is civic owned.The race, the course, the staff, even the boookys pitches ,finances were controlled by a diminutive railway boiler cleaner, Alderman Albert Cammidge, chairmanof the Racecourse Committee. Every year he hosted a dinner for the great and the good of racing at the Guidhall, an 18th century gem.<br />
One year the guest of honour was the Queen. Alderman Cammidge took her into dinner , settled her into her chair.<br />
As the waitresses brought the main course round the Alderman prffered a serving bowl with the words; " Have some cabbage Queen, it'll settle thi' stomach after all that bussin about "ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-1107304669992292992013-04-26T11:38:00.002-07:002013-04-27T06:30:28.792-07:00some people missed this<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">or over half a century I have sat at the top of more columns than Simeon the Stylite, so many, indeed, that I am known in my inky trade as The Parthenon Kid. I have been throwing down handfuls of words since VE Day on the green baize of printers' 'stones'.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I was Chiel Amang Ye Gathering Notes in the 'Hairdressers, Wigmakers and Perfumers Gazette'; Man About Town in the 'Drapers Record'; Yorkshireman in the 'Yorkshire Evening News';Thea Paige on the Showbiz page of the 'Manchester City News'; Mr Midnight in the 'Sunday Pictorial'; and I have thrown my chamois bag of glittering words at the heads of more editors than you could throw a stick at.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I just wish there had been time left over to learn how to write shorthand, spell, understand about commas and laying out columns. The truth is that even from my office desk I used to phone my copy to the copy takers at the other end of the newsroom. My radio and TV work meant I only had to speak, never to write down.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Alas, I have gone too far. I apologise to my readers for the Holy Mess I made of last week's blog. The truth is I have had a lot on my mind. I am tended a team of doctors who have nothing better to do than to make up improbable diseases. Wandering leg syndrome was one, you may recall. Failing heart was something of a relief . But Soggy Lung Syndrome? Too much by far.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Fortunately help is at hand. One of my oldest chums - in every sense of the words - and former publisher Neil Marr rang. Paraphrasing one of the great men of our trade, he offered: "I will attend to the format and the spelling errors. You confine yourself to the word artistry."</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I have just returned from the Pier's Head of Skidmore's Island where I have been welcoming him to the main shores of Skidlandia. What a stirring figure he made as, preceded by his hereditary piper and dressed in full Highland Regalia, he has inspected the Island Yeomen.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I have hurried home to pour the Glenfiddich for his arrival. Yet stay. I fancy I hear the tread of him iambic feet</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The happy mood in which this was written was made of fools gold. Neill tried manfully but I have made such a mess of blogger technicalities I cannot survive.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">So iyts good bte and thanks lovely people. I have fallen foul of wandering leg, soggy liver,and all those perils my unhappy flesh is heir to and the Giftie has taven back the gifts he gie us.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is my last weekly blog. There will be more but not as otfte. Thanks for listening you lovely people</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-44227683053232054242013-04-26T11:27:00.001-07:002013-04-26T11:27:32.235-07:00skidmore's island: They are a weede awa<a href="http://skidmoresisland.blogspot.com/2013/04/they-are-weede-awa.html?spref=bl">skidmore's island: They are a weede awa</a>: For over half a century I have sat at the top of more columns than Simeon the Stylite, so many, indeed, that I am known in my inky trade ...ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-69140719098562593062013-04-26T04:45:00.002-07:002013-04-26T04:56:00.651-07:00THE LAST POST <br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">The day my son arrived in Milan terrorists blew up the railway station. My daughter and son inn law, fitness fanatics arrived in Boston in the wake of the Marathom massacre.When I changed trains in Milan to go to Paris some oaf put me on the wrong train and I finished upin the Hook of Holland but the romantic trip my producer went on was a major disaster,</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">So far the greatest advert for ilidays at home was the nightmare of my old producer,sHe has kindly recalled th detail</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"> of his mini-cruise to Bilbao, intending to visit the Guggenheim museum</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">Having invited 'a lady' along for the trip [a discounted last minute bargain four- day P&O mini-cruise from Portsmouth] we disembarked at Bilbao with some 6 hours ashore before needing to return to the ship. Caught the train running from the dockyard and were soon enjoying the delights of the city. Friends had asked if I could get them some rolling tobacco so whenever I saw a 'Tabac' I popped in and stocked up. What with various other diversions we realised that time had flown and so without getting as far as the Guggenheim we had to hurriedly jump on the train back to the docks. Walking from the station around the corner we sensed that the pavement seemed to be moving under our feet but then realised that the massive 7 decked ferry was slowly moving away from the quayside . . . with our luggage + passports on board!</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">The dockside booking office [having previously rehearsed with others in the same predicament I'm sure] offered to speak with their contacts in the Brittany Ferries office in Santander who kindly reserved a cabin for us but at the full going rate, which was multiples of the cost of the original passage. The only way to get from Bilbao to Santander in the short time we had to catch the boat was by taxi which by fat chance was parked just outside the office! After a hair raising journey and a jaw dropping taxi fare we just about made it, literally minutes before they drew up the gangway. The customs man wasn't impressed at the 9 kilos of contraband baccy in my holdall but he did allow us to board. </span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">Without even a toothbrush between us, 'the lady' went in search of necessities whilst I made for the bar and as soon as the steward drew up the portcullis, pleaded for a stiff G&T. "Ohh!, I really needed that" I said, "What time do we get back to Portsmouth?" After a long blank stare he replied "It's Plymouth were bound for,sir." "But my car is in ......" He didn't think it likely the captain would change course.</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">At passport control in Plymouth two HM Customs officers without warning suddenly jumped out from behind a screen and took us into a room. They'd been tipped off by their friends in Santander; after long inquisition and my insistence that we were committed smokers [neither of us were!], they eventually relented and with a stiff reprimand we were allowed to go. A couple of weeks later a letter arrived from HM Customs & Excise saying that my details had been recorded and if I ever did that again . . .etc., etc.</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">The journey by train to Portsmouth was long and again expensive. I've never been out of Wales since.</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">(The only trips I have enjoyed have been on the Flying Scotsman. One when I ran away from home to Edinburgh on a platform ticker. The second was when thje. Flying Scotsman was bought by a millionaire businessman.....? He went bust and no wonder. He used it to give splendid parties.None better that the Fest to celebrate the 150 th anniversary of the Blenau Festiniogg Railway..Pre- train champagne buffet and free drinks all the way to Blenau Festiniog when I gought my first drimk. At Victorian prices.</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">ROLF HARRIS GUILTY OF SEX CRIME</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">Of course he isn't but sixyty amiable years he has devoted to making us happy, his great talent as a painter and his all round reuptation as a good bloke might never have happened. The hint of pedearasty will cling to him like an offensive smellt</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">Why? To give newspapers an extra patagraph to titilate their readers.</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 7.5pt;">I am not sure if he has been charged,he certainly has not appeared in court, no ev idene has been brought against him, nor any given to disprove the worst c harge a man could face. Nor has any sentence been passed. I have never thought much of British Justice nor could I agree withose people who thought our policemen were wonderful. I grew up in a police family who coulve wandered unchallenged into Ali Baba's thier jars</span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-45877401380903473162013-04-26T04:24:00.000-07:002013-04-26T04:26:37.986-07:00They are a weede awa<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">For over half a century I have sat at the top of more columns than Simeon the Stylite, so many, indeed, that I am known in my inky trade as The Parthenon Kid. I have been throwing down handfuls of words since VE Day on the green baize of printers' 'stones'.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I was Chiel Amang Ye Gathering Notes in the 'Hairdressers, Wigmakers and Perfumers Gazette'; Man About Town in the 'Drapers Record'; Yorkshireman in the 'Yorkshire Evening News';Thea Paige on the Showbiz page of the 'Manchester City News'; Mr Midnight in the 'Sunday Pictorial'; and I have thrown my chamois bag of glittering words at the heads of more editors than you could throw a stick at.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I just wish there had been time left over to learn how to write shorthand, spell, understand about commas and laying out columns. The truth is that even from my office desk I used to phone my copy to the copy takers at the other end of the newsroom. My radio and TV work meant I only had to speak, never to write down.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Alas, I have gone too far. I apologise to my readers for the Holy Mess I made of last week's blog. The truth is I have had a lot on my mind. I am tended a team of doctors who have nothing better to do than to make up improbable diseases. Wandering leg syndrome was one, you may recall. Failing heart was something of a relief . But Soggy Lung Syndrome? Too much by far.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Fortunately help is at hand. One of my oldest chums - in every sense of the words - and former publisher Neil Marr rang. Paraphrasing one of the great men of our trade, he offered: "I will attend to the format and the spelling errors. You confine yourself to the word artistry."</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I have just returned from the Pier's Head of Skidmore's Island where I have been welcoming him to the main shores of Skidlandia. What a stirring figure he made as, preceded by his hereditary piper and dressed in full Highland Regalia, he has inspected the Island Yeomen.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I have hurried home to pour the Glenfiddich for his arrival. Yet stay. I fancy I hear the tread of him iambic feet</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The happy mood in which this was written was made of fools gold. Neill tried manfully but I have made such a mess of blogger technicalities I cannot survive.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">So iyts good bte and thanks lovely people. I have fallen foul of wandering leg, soggy liver,and all those perils my unhappy flesh is heir to and the Giftie has taven back the gifts he gie us.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is my last weekly blog. There will be more but not as otfte. Thanks for listening you lovely people</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-71435646225170334202013-04-18T04:13:00.003-07:002013-04-18T04:19:55.441-07:00OH T0 BE IN ENGLAND- OR ANYWHERE-NOW THAT SPRING IS .....<br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: small;">In a rose bed by our front door there is an under-planting of celandine which at this time of the year is a Milky Way of </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS;">golden</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: small;"> stars. Beyond, in all the borders, spendthrift daffodils are hurling their gold at the unseeing heads of passers-by. In the Japanese garden the camellias are shyly budding and the bonsai cherry blossom is adding its tiny treasure to the garden. Any day now its big sisters by the Buddha pond will add their flowers.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12.0000pt; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12.0000pt; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Now I wonder whether I will see them next year or if this is my last spring. It is a poignant thought which only comes with the spring when the natural world flaunts its immortality.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12.0000pt; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12.0000pt; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">So it was very reassuring when a not unattractive neighbour told me how young I was looking. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12pt;">The reason I do not look 84 is because my body is my temple and the subject of a strict regimen. Every Monday morning I watch my gardener working, sometimes for as long as an hour.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: small;">The single malt counter is at the far end of the </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS;">supermarket. N</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-size: small;">evertheless, I insist on getting there by myself to see what offers they may have. And I limit myself to a three Martini lunch - each one vigorously stirred by hand - and a couple of nourishing drams at bedtime. I have locked away my digital watches and every night I spend a vigorous two minutes winding my own pocket watch. Sadly I can no longer prune my bonsai trees because of height issues.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12.0000pt; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 12.0000pt; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Y</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">ears ago in Chester I was one of a group of young bloods who had a wager that a </span>coal man<span style="font-size: small;"> called "Cloggie" couldn't run round the racecourse with a bag of coal on his back. He could, and did. Recently it struck me that I have been carrying his weight plus coal for upwards of twenty years. No wonder I am so fit.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">None of this takes into consideration my Wandering Leg Syndrome. You may recall that the moment I go to sleep my leg leaps out of bed with a glad cry and heads for the open road. How many miles it travels in the night watches I know not but the calorie reduction must be considerable.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">You may also recall that the rest of me had been retired for some years. That is no longer true. I have become a full time seeker after an owner's manual for an Acer tablet computer. This form of intense exercise continues apace. This morning I rang back the company's customer support. The last time I rang I was told that no such manual exists. According to Google, it not only exists: it has gone forth and multiplied. This time, having been informed it exists, I was told how to download one.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I downloaded one and sure enough it appeared on my tablet. What also appeared was a notice saying the file could not be opened. Happily by this time I knew the customer support number by heart. I had also committed to memory the 11 digit SYM number without possession </span>of which<span style="font-size: small;"> the operators are unable to speak. So I was quickly able to reconnect with Acer. This time the operator told me I had been given the wrong number. I should have rung their software assistance department. I did and was told I could not be helped because I did not have a contract with them. It was going to cost me £80 to discover how to open the file. I pointed out that I <i>did</i> have a three month warranty on the refurbished machine I bought on April Fool's Day. In that case, they said, I should ring back the original number and tell them I had been given the wrong number...</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">At this<span style="font-size: small;"> point my nerve broke...In desperation I </span>appealed<span style="font-size: small;"> for help on the Acer Community Board. Within minutes a guide book appeared. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Tiring of criticism of my grammar, I downloaded Grammarly.com, a programme which corrects grammar in a trice. Naturally I could not understand a word of it so at 11.30 pm I emailed a plea for explanation. The answer, plus an owner's manual, was emailed in return by midnight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">MOST OF THE NEWS IS UNFIT TO PRINT</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I was listening with mounting impatience to a debate on the importance of news by a group of Mouths for Hire on R4. News is not important except for the people who make it. In truth, as an evil it breasts the tapes with religion and television. Without it there would be no acts of terror like the Boston Bombing. Insulting the dead would be pointless if no one else could see the demo. There would be no point in exploding a bomb if no </span>one<span style="font-size: small;"> could hear it. It took a week for news of the great battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo to reach the British public. To circumvent the law Dr Johnson wrote wholly fictional accounts of parliamentary debates for the newspapers of the eighteenth century and the little I have read of them is a mile ahead of Prime Minister's Question Time. I doubt if the public felt inconvenienced. Stuff happens. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">The massive film and TV empires began life as magic lantern shows. Even the industrial revolution is not what it was. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The railways bought up the canal system and the canals fell into disuse; the road replaced the railways which were Beechinged. But we are coming to realise the canal system was cheaper and more efficient as a method of transport.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I used to live in a Gothic nightmare of a house, Picton Hall, which was so deep in the countryside no newsagent would deliver and I had to get my newspapers delivered by post which took days to </span>arrive<span style="font-size: small;">. In those happy days rural postman were primarily poachers who only delivered mail on days when there was no game about. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The consequence was when I got to hear about a crisis it was over. My circle of friends were from the rainbow world of racing. The Cuban crisis clashed with Woore races. I was taking wine with a chum Natty Davidson who had begun his career as a tic-tac man at Blaydon Races.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Oh Natty," I said. "Do you think there will be a war?"</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Oh aye, bonny lad," he said, "but the going will be very soft. I walked the course the other day and it was a sea of mud."</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">BBC IN HOT WATER</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 14pt;">BBC staff have won a victory after they were banned from making their own toast - but they are still barred from picking up hot sausages. A new contractor, BBC Club, had changed the rules at the corporation's canteen at the Media Centre at White City in west London, sparking complaints from staff. It has now installed a special toaster at a "remote point" of the cafe. One BBC worker told the Mirror: "I resent the fact that someone in a pinny can tell me I can't take care of myself. I'm perfectly capable of making a meal at home, so can easily manage a bit of self-service." The BBC told the Telegraph that the changes were due to "space limitations and not any health and safety rules". Trust the BBC to make a meal of it. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">WHY BOTHER?</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 16pt;">MEMO TO PANORAMA</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 16pt;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 16pt;">"</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 16pt;">I have been a reporter on radio, TV and newspapers of all kinds for sixty-five years and this is the first time I have felt ashamed of my trade. A so-called reporter gets his wife, who organises student tours, to create a fake programme in North Korea. Of course the students agreed. The young think they are fireproof. Those kids could be in a Gulag now. And the result. He could have made that programme in Archives. We learned very little new; he took no risks; discovered nothing. Then he appeared on that Sunday news programme, talked over and argued with the presenter. Doesn't the BBC give its reporters any training anymore? I took over John Ebden's archive programme. I was there when the new controller issued the fatwah that news programmes should "get rid of all those northern newspapermen and employ graduates". Thought at the time that was a load of bollocks which would have prevented the recruitment of non graduate John Humphrys. It was much worse. It unleashed Sweeney."</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 16pt;">The reply came: </span><span style="color: navy; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold;">Thank you for e-mailing Panorama. Because of the number of e-mails we receive we are unable to reply to all of them, although they are all r</span><span style="color: navy; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; font-weight: bold;">ead.</span></div>
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ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-76757879190272857332013-04-12T03:32:00.001-07:002013-04-12T03:32:17.985-07:00A PRICKLY SUBJECT<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Schopenhauer
and Freud have been putting it about that I am suffering from
Hedgehog's Dilemma, according to an American reader.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">He explains that<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en"> </span></span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en">hedgehogs</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en"> want to get close to one another in order to share heat during
cold weather. They must remain apart, however, as they cannot avoid
hurting one another with their sharp </span></span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spine_(zoology)" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en">spines</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en">.
Though they all share the intention of a close reciprocal
relationship, this may not occur for reasons they cannot avoid.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span lang="en"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #222222;"> <span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span lang="en">The
hedgehog's dilemma suggests that despite goodwill, human intimacy
cannot occur without substantial mutual harm, and what results is
cautious behavior and weak relationships.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span lang="en">Now I have nothing against hedgehogs but I have enough
to worry about with Wandering Leg Syndrome. I cannot start worrying about prickle pelts.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span lang="en"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">It's
all very well you sitting on your ivory clouds, strumming your harps
and bad mouthing people you have never even met. You don't know what
I have to put up with. No wonder the prickles are out. Here is <span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Duncan
Smith boasting he could live on £53 a week. In the late fifties with
two children my weekly income was £4.50, the fee for a Saturday
shift on the News of the World at a time when the average wage was
three times that. I still carry the marks.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Anyone can live a week on very little. Hell is having to do it week after
week, year after year.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Why
should our poor have to struggle, even if some are playing the system? In the last century there were 165 wars in which 180 million people were
killed. That spectacular massacre did not come cheap. It cost 350
billion dollars. If our governments are happy to spend that amount of
money to kill perfect strangers, why should we be loath to spend a
fraction of that to keep our own people alive?</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">The
experience of poverty turned me into a spendthrift. I have owned
hunters, a race horse, bloodhounds, flash cars, and lived in a succession of manor
houses enjoying the best of food and wine. Looking back, it was all a
compensation for the lean years when I only ate three times a week on
the days when we lunched on Liverpool liners interviewing the
passengers. Nowadays I live off tablets. Dell, Samsung, Chrome,
Apple, Nexus and now Acer. I mainline computers. They don't stay
because I can never make them work.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">This
week I have tried a Samsung Chrome and an Acer 500 conia tab.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I
was sad to see the Samsung go for a refund but I had already spent the
money on the Acer. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 22pt;">For
an anxious morning not only could I not get the Acer to work, I
couldn't even open it and I couldn't find the instructions. Nowadays
they don't bother to enclose them. You get them online, which is fine
until you try it. I made phone call after phone call, chased down a
tangled net of networks. The offers proliferated. I have forgotten how
many times my computer has been compulsorily cleaned. Time and again
I was randomly chosen to compete for an Ipad or Smart phone
free. The last things I wanted. Blindly I had surveys pushed at me by the
bushel. Invariably being told the prize was within my grasp. Only three more questions and then the message that the results
had been sent to your mobile phone. I do not have a mobile phone,
God be praised.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 22pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 22pt;">Salvation
came through new friends on Facebook. One gave me the email number
of free downloads of manuals; another suggested ringing a </span><span style="font-size: 29px;">knowledgeable</span><span style="font-size: 22pt;"> friend. The knowledgeable friend told me that if I wanted it to
work </span></span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I
had to c</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 22pt;">harge the battery.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 22pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Looking
back over that stable of costly cars reminded me that the only
totally reliable car I</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">have
ever owned was a Lada. The Lada forbye was the butt of a million
jokes. At the time, although I am not a conspiracy theorist, it was obvious that rival car manufacturers had
hired a scriptwriter to flood the market with anti-Lada jokes.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I
believe the same thing happened with Lady Thatcher. Nothing she did
was as disastrous as Brown's destruction of the economy or Blair's introduction of new legislation every quarter of an hour, but she
became a cheap vehicle for cruel jokes. Presumably that is why the
feral young who weren't even alive in her day, fired by the media, held parties to celebrate her death.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">I
was not a fan. To be a fan of a politician argues a feeble mind. The Channel Tunnel was an idea born in a late night carousing on the Paris Embassy's whisky;</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: 22pt;"> the
Falklands were a clumsy error; the Poll tax was designed to be a vote
killer; and she typified a certain type of Tory Lady, all blue rinse
and hats that were artificial orchards. But let the dead lie in peace.</span></div>
ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7741861644246543049.post-47346928691163062892013-04-03T10:31:00.000-07:002013-04-05T04:10:47.318-07:00BEFORE WE GANG AWA'Single malt bottles are guarded in all manner of secret ways in our local supermarket but the Ferret treats them with contempt because she is a closet whisky hater.<br />
<br />
It was in a moment of rare tolerance she agreed to get my weekly bottle of 'The Balvenie'. When she came home I could see she was in the nearest she ever gets to a 'pet'. On such occasions she prefaces her remarks with the word 'horrors', the nearest she ever gets to swearing. When she is really mad I can always tell because then she allows herself 'Multiple Horrors'. This was clearly a multiple horrors day.<br />
<br />
"It's getting so noisy in Sainsbury's," she complained. "I thought the place was on fire. The ringing bells nearly deafened me."<br />
<br />
When I took the bottle out of its rather smart barrel I discovered why. Ordinary blended whiskies have a burglar alarm round the neck. The rarer malts have a second alarm on the lid of the barrel because the Scot has a reputation for bawbee preservation.<br />
That had been removed but the inner alarm was still clinging to the bottle neck. I could see in a moment it was my fault but I had more pressing worries working out how I was going to get at the amber nectar without provoking the alarm.<br />
<br />
My son-in-law who is from Blackpool and calls a spade a spade was in favour of ripping it off because my wife had wisely kept the bill. A cautious woman she has shopping bills going back centuries. If we removed the alarm goodness knows what crimes would be laid at our door by irate Highland Maltmasters. So I got my son-in-law to rip it off. He has just been made redundant after 35 years and had little else to do. A spell in durance vile would give him the opportunity for studying his future and I had already done my share.<br />
Sportingly he agreed and we shared a friendly dram. Then the Ferret spoiled things because how was she going to explain the broken alarm, she wanted to know, when she took it back to the shop? She didn't want to get the cashier sacked.<br />
<br />
At the death I had to ring the shop manager, a nice chap called Alan. I said that before I told him what I was ringing about he would have to promise not to sack the cashier. Alan said he hardly ever sacked anyone so I told him and he said, "Bless you, there's no need to worry. Bring it back to the shop. We have machines for removing the alarm." I said, "I've got one, it's called a son-in-law." And Alan said to just bring the alarm and the receipt and everything would be tickety boo. And that is when the Ferret looked at the receipt and discovered she had not paid for it either.<br />
<br />
HIMS ANCIENT<br />
<br />
"Wherefore to some, when being abed they betake themselves to sleep, presently in the arms and legs a leaping and contraction on the tendons and so great a restlessness and tossing of other members ensue, that the diseased are no more able to sleep than if they were in a place of the greatest torture."<br />
<br />
Thus Sir Thomas Willis, the founder of clinical neuroscience, writing in 1672, describing his discovery of restless leg syndrome, about which, readers will recall, I have also written. When on April 1st I brought these observations to the attention of the Ferret she ungraciously insisted it was an April Fool joke. Hold your foot up, lass. The information comes from an American reader and chum Jerry Jasper, who points out that one of the authors in 2009 in the Journal of Neurosurgery writing of "Bilateral restless legs affecting a phantom limb" was one F.M.Skidmore. Curious because the prime authority in the 18th century on gout was also called Skidmore. I was alarmed to see that Skidmore, F.M., has also studied "Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder", from which I haven't suffered for far too long but never thought of it as disorderly.<br />
<br />
Curiously, Mr Jasper also sent a pamphlet of suggested cures for Restless Leg, including this: "Orgasm is by far one of the best treatments for restless legs. Odd but true. It releases all sorts of happy chemicals into the brain. Another remedy if you cannot achieve orgasm for what ever reason (asking for help is always a favourite for my husband) a hot bath with Epsom salts is helpful."<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, this suggestion provoked an immediate response from readers. "If I have a bout in the middle of the night, I immediately get up and do some housework or leg exercises. I am a single Christian woman so the orgasm remedy is not currently an option."<br />
<br />
Under the circumstances so described, one male reader suggested "putting an unwrapped bar of Ivory soap underneath your bottom bed sheet. I have not had such a wonderful sleep since my early twenties..."<br />
<br />
.......................................................................<br />
<br />
You thought Easter was exhausting. My chum Katyann writes:<br />
<br />
"<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.63636302947998px;">Hope you spent a happy Easter. In </span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.63636302947998px;"></u><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.63636302947998px;">Trinidad</span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.63636302947998px;"></u><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.63636302947998px;"> we celebrated Easter, spiritual Baptist Liberation Day and phagwa or holi, a Hindu festival, all in one weekend.."</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />ian skidmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12197767688092213495noreply@blogger.com0