Saturday, 15 September 2007
Sunday, 9 September 2007
DEATH WHERE IS THY SING
As an aspiring Buddhist I live in the world of Perpetual Present. There is no death in my world, so the news of Pavarotti’s demise has not saddened me. Indeed, thanks to technology, immortality is available at the turn of a switch. Whilst his body lay in state in Modena Cathedral I was able to watch, and more importantly hear, his 1993 concert in Central Park, New York, on my TV set. Not that the watching was unimportant. I was able to see on his face the enjoyment he was getting from the act of singing and the tears of joy running down the face of a woman in the audience, briefly immortalised by the camera.
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius described life as a river, the past flowing away and unclaimable, the future yet to come. Only the river at your feet is real.
Not any more.
In truth, there is in this wonder full (literally) world, six realities: the record, video, DVD and cassette cabinets, the library and the photo album. Memory is drawn up in ranks, awaiting the order to parade.
There is a dark side to this glittering, golden coinage. In earlier times the Sin Eater, though a pariah, was one of the most important people in the parish. It was his job to eat bread from the bare chests of corpses because in doing so he took on the sins of the dearly departed.
Nowadays we have the media. No longer pariahs, but frequently ennobled.
Reporting the death of Pavarotti the Daily Mail described him thus:
“..six feet tall, weighing 25 stone, by nature a clown, a sadist, venal, petulant, often a pain in the backside to fellow performers.”
Though some are slim, the same words could be usefully employed to describe every proprietor and most editors I have worked for over the past sixty years.
The Mail quoted Pavarotti as saying: “I do not sing for love, I sing for lira.”
This was manifestly untrue of the Central Park concert and many other performances by that gifted voice. But again I cannot think of a fellow practitioner of this inky trade who does not endorse Dr Johnson’s view that no one but a blockhead writes except for money. I believe the Editor of the Mail is paid a million pounds a year.
The same is true of sexual congress. High talent in art, commerce and politics is very often accompanied by a high sex drive. It was said of Julius Caesar that he was every woman’s husband and every man’s wife; Napoleon all but conquered the world but is remembered by “Not tonight, Josephine”; American presidents impregnated their slaves but created a country which was, until recently, the envy of the world; Clinton did more good than either Bush;as did Kennedy. But one is remembred for a casual act of oral sex and Kennedy for saying, “I will do for sex what Eisenhower did for golf”; Gladstone pursued prostitutes. According to his son Randolph, Winston Churchill, who was involved in a homosexual scandal whilst a young cavalryman, from which he was extricated by his wondrous mother (who herself, according to George Moore, had 200 publicly acknowledged lovers), slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle and described the experience as “musical”.
Lloyd George won World War One and was the founder of the welfare state but is better known for sexual athleticism.
Not by my granny, I hasten to add. That famous “Welshman” was born round the corner from our house in Moss Side in Manchester. I passed it every day as a small child accompanying my granny to the shops to change her wireless accumulator. As we approached it, she bade me remove my cap in respect. “That is the man who gave me my old age pension,” she explained.
Ernest Hemingway, of all unlikely people, put it best in a letter to Robert Cantwell in 1950. He wrote: “Please do not repeat, do not put anything about how many times I have been shot at. I asked both Cape and Scribners not to use any publicity about my military service and it is distasteful to me to mention it and destroys any pride I have in it. I want to run as a writer, not as a man who had been to the wars, nor a bar room fighter, nor a shooter; nor a horse-player, nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such…
“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little out house surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog, Black Dog?
“The question is can you write?”
Or sing, or paint, or write music, or decorate a room, plumb a house, mend a TV?
I have been touched by greatness. I was in the audience at the Llangollen Music Festival which acclaimed the choir from Modena. It was the first experience of international public acclaim for a schoolboy called Luciano Pavarotti and it decided him to become a professional singer.
I was Moura Lympany's house guest at her festival in Rasiguere in the South of France, Victoria los Angeles ws a great chum, after I interviewed her at the Beaumaris Festival on the Isle of Anglesey.
I employed Aled Jones as a junior reporter and felt my hair stand on end whenever he sang.
I am glad Pavarotti enjoyed sex. Most of us do. I once asked a chum of mine, the baritone Sir Geraint Evans, how it was always the tenors who got the girl.
“Not when I am in the cast, they don’t,” he told me.
Ends
A FRIGHTENING FRIEND CAN STRIKE YOU DUMB
When my friend Andre Auckland was married in Maidstone the speeches from the bride’s side were gloomy in the extreme. The most optimistic began: “I suppose they might be happy…”
At length a small man of military appearance stood up and said, “I have known Andre for five years and have always found him friendly, co-operative and a social asset.”
His defender proved to be the Governor of Maidstone Prison and Andre’s host for half a decade.
Like many of the legends that hung from Andre’s ample belt, this may be apocryphal. Though why anybody made up stories about this benevolent Belgian is beyond me. The reality was terrifying enough.
Andre was my minder on the Sunday Mirror and without him at my side I would have got into far less trouble than I did. How he got to Eccles,Lancs, where he ran, amongst other more nefarious things, a taxi service, he never disclosed. But he did reminisce about his days in a unit of the Belgian Resistance in Brussels, which met regularly in the café which was the local of the Gestapo. As he explained: “It was the last place they would have looked for us.”
He was introduced to the Sunday Mirror by the news editor Harry Ashbrook at whose side corkscrews miraculously appeared rapier straight. Andre was ecumenical in friendship: confidence tricksters like Ashbrook, who sold Jack Stoneley, one of his reporters, a car without wheels; out and out gangsters, prominent businessmen and two hangmen, were all members of Andre’s fan club.
I met one of them, Harry Allen, the deputy hangman, who said, when he learned I lived in Chester: “Let’s see… that’s Shrewsbury nick. Don’t get much work down there. But the very next time I’ll break the journey at Chester and we’ll make a night of it.”
If you were a friend of Andre’s………..
We were doing a job in Leeds when I foolishly remarked that it was Race Week in Doncaster where I used to work on the Evening News. Indeed the St Leger was being run that weekend.
“We’ll go,” said Andre, and instructed me what to tell the desk and to be sure they wired £50 to Doncaster post office. There was never any doubt who was in charge when I worked with Andre.
We had a great time in Doncaster. We lost most of the fifty on the course, but all my friends loved him. One of them, a very attractive lady, vigorously in the back of his car. It was midnight on the first night before I had the chance to point out to him that we had nowhere to sleep and that every hotel bed in Doncaster was booked weeks before the Leger.
Nothing to a man who was almost certainly on the Gestapo darts team in that pub in Brussels. He hammered on the door of the Wellington in the Market Square. When the landlord opened it, he explained in broken English that we were from “Paris Match” and had been diverted at the last minute from Morocco to cover the St Leger. We had not slept for two nights and were exhausted.
The landlord was very sympathetic. He said he didn’t do B & B but he did have a single bed in a spare room that one of us could have and the other could sleep on the settle in the snug. You will not be surprised to learn who got the settle, but when the landlord asked me, “Are you sure you will be comfortable?” Andre broke in to explain, “Alas, my friend does not speak English.”
Alas, his friend did not speak French either, apart from four remembered words “Sur Le Pont d’Avignon” which do not go very far in conversations in a Yorkshire pub, even when orchestrated with what I hoped were Gallic shrugs and a vocabulary of grunts.
So for two days I could not say a word, which for a gabby guy like me is not easy. I only remember fragments of the last night but the next morning is etched on my soul. My stomach seethed, my mouth was as rough as a tram driver’s glove, my left lobe was not speaking to my right lobe and my eyes felt like hot raspberry jam.
An aged crone was polishing glasses behind the bar.
“Pour us a white label Worthington, love,” I gasped.
“By ‘eck,”she said, “not taken you long to pick up the language.”
Ends
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius described life as a river, the past flowing away and unclaimable, the future yet to come. Only the river at your feet is real.
Not any more.
In truth, there is in this wonder full (literally) world, six realities: the record, video, DVD and cassette cabinets, the library and the photo album. Memory is drawn up in ranks, awaiting the order to parade.
There is a dark side to this glittering, golden coinage. In earlier times the Sin Eater, though a pariah, was one of the most important people in the parish. It was his job to eat bread from the bare chests of corpses because in doing so he took on the sins of the dearly departed.
Nowadays we have the media. No longer pariahs, but frequently ennobled.
Reporting the death of Pavarotti the Daily Mail described him thus:
“..six feet tall, weighing 25 stone, by nature a clown, a sadist, venal, petulant, often a pain in the backside to fellow performers.”
Though some are slim, the same words could be usefully employed to describe every proprietor and most editors I have worked for over the past sixty years.
The Mail quoted Pavarotti as saying: “I do not sing for love, I sing for lira.”
This was manifestly untrue of the Central Park concert and many other performances by that gifted voice. But again I cannot think of a fellow practitioner of this inky trade who does not endorse Dr Johnson’s view that no one but a blockhead writes except for money. I believe the Editor of the Mail is paid a million pounds a year.
The same is true of sexual congress. High talent in art, commerce and politics is very often accompanied by a high sex drive. It was said of Julius Caesar that he was every woman’s husband and every man’s wife; Napoleon all but conquered the world but is remembered by “Not tonight, Josephine”; American presidents impregnated their slaves but created a country which was, until recently, the envy of the world; Clinton did more good than either Bush;as did Kennedy. But one is remembred for a casual act of oral sex and Kennedy for saying, “I will do for sex what Eisenhower did for golf”; Gladstone pursued prostitutes. According to his son Randolph, Winston Churchill, who was involved in a homosexual scandal whilst a young cavalryman, from which he was extricated by his wondrous mother (who herself, according to George Moore, had 200 publicly acknowledged lovers), slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle and described the experience as “musical”.
Lloyd George won World War One and was the founder of the welfare state but is better known for sexual athleticism.
Not by my granny, I hasten to add. That famous “Welshman” was born round the corner from our house in Moss Side in Manchester. I passed it every day as a small child accompanying my granny to the shops to change her wireless accumulator. As we approached it, she bade me remove my cap in respect. “That is the man who gave me my old age pension,” she explained.
Ernest Hemingway, of all unlikely people, put it best in a letter to Robert Cantwell in 1950. He wrote: “Please do not repeat, do not put anything about how many times I have been shot at. I asked both Cape and Scribners not to use any publicity about my military service and it is distasteful to me to mention it and destroys any pride I have in it. I want to run as a writer, not as a man who had been to the wars, nor a bar room fighter, nor a shooter; nor a horse-player, nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such…
“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little out house surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog, Black Dog?
“The question is can you write?”
Or sing, or paint, or write music, or decorate a room, plumb a house, mend a TV?
I have been touched by greatness. I was in the audience at the Llangollen Music Festival which acclaimed the choir from Modena. It was the first experience of international public acclaim for a schoolboy called Luciano Pavarotti and it decided him to become a professional singer.
I was Moura Lympany's house guest at her festival in Rasiguere in the South of France, Victoria los Angeles ws a great chum, after I interviewed her at the Beaumaris Festival on the Isle of Anglesey.
I employed Aled Jones as a junior reporter and felt my hair stand on end whenever he sang.
I am glad Pavarotti enjoyed sex. Most of us do. I once asked a chum of mine, the baritone Sir Geraint Evans, how it was always the tenors who got the girl.
“Not when I am in the cast, they don’t,” he told me.
Ends
A FRIGHTENING FRIEND CAN STRIKE YOU DUMB
When my friend Andre Auckland was married in Maidstone the speeches from the bride’s side were gloomy in the extreme. The most optimistic began: “I suppose they might be happy…”
At length a small man of military appearance stood up and said, “I have known Andre for five years and have always found him friendly, co-operative and a social asset.”
His defender proved to be the Governor of Maidstone Prison and Andre’s host for half a decade.
Like many of the legends that hung from Andre’s ample belt, this may be apocryphal. Though why anybody made up stories about this benevolent Belgian is beyond me. The reality was terrifying enough.
Andre was my minder on the Sunday Mirror and without him at my side I would have got into far less trouble than I did. How he got to Eccles,Lancs, where he ran, amongst other more nefarious things, a taxi service, he never disclosed. But he did reminisce about his days in a unit of the Belgian Resistance in Brussels, which met regularly in the café which was the local of the Gestapo. As he explained: “It was the last place they would have looked for us.”
He was introduced to the Sunday Mirror by the news editor Harry Ashbrook at whose side corkscrews miraculously appeared rapier straight. Andre was ecumenical in friendship: confidence tricksters like Ashbrook, who sold Jack Stoneley, one of his reporters, a car without wheels; out and out gangsters, prominent businessmen and two hangmen, were all members of Andre’s fan club.
I met one of them, Harry Allen, the deputy hangman, who said, when he learned I lived in Chester: “Let’s see… that’s Shrewsbury nick. Don’t get much work down there. But the very next time I’ll break the journey at Chester and we’ll make a night of it.”
If you were a friend of Andre’s………..
We were doing a job in Leeds when I foolishly remarked that it was Race Week in Doncaster where I used to work on the Evening News. Indeed the St Leger was being run that weekend.
“We’ll go,” said Andre, and instructed me what to tell the desk and to be sure they wired £50 to Doncaster post office. There was never any doubt who was in charge when I worked with Andre.
We had a great time in Doncaster. We lost most of the fifty on the course, but all my friends loved him. One of them, a very attractive lady, vigorously in the back of his car. It was midnight on the first night before I had the chance to point out to him that we had nowhere to sleep and that every hotel bed in Doncaster was booked weeks before the Leger.
Nothing to a man who was almost certainly on the Gestapo darts team in that pub in Brussels. He hammered on the door of the Wellington in the Market Square. When the landlord opened it, he explained in broken English that we were from “Paris Match” and had been diverted at the last minute from Morocco to cover the St Leger. We had not slept for two nights and were exhausted.
The landlord was very sympathetic. He said he didn’t do B & B but he did have a single bed in a spare room that one of us could have and the other could sleep on the settle in the snug. You will not be surprised to learn who got the settle, but when the landlord asked me, “Are you sure you will be comfortable?” Andre broke in to explain, “Alas, my friend does not speak English.”
Alas, his friend did not speak French either, apart from four remembered words “Sur Le Pont d’Avignon” which do not go very far in conversations in a Yorkshire pub, even when orchestrated with what I hoped were Gallic shrugs and a vocabulary of grunts.
So for two days I could not say a word, which for a gabby guy like me is not easy. I only remember fragments of the last night but the next morning is etched on my soul. My stomach seethed, my mouth was as rough as a tram driver’s glove, my left lobe was not speaking to my right lobe and my eyes felt like hot raspberry jam.
An aged crone was polishing glasses behind the bar.
“Pour us a white label Worthington, love,” I gasped.
“By ‘eck,”she said, “not taken you long to pick up the language.”
Ends
Monday, 3 September 2007
On Hearing Our Troops are quitting Basra
Geographers are jumping up and down with joy at the discovery of ruined houses and enclosures under the sea round our coasts.
So what else is new?
My friends in the Marine Science faculty at the University of Wales in Bangor have been examining evidence of buried kingdoms under the sea off the coast of Wales for thirty years to my knowledge.
There is evidence of drowned settlements miles out to sea off the coast of Rhyl. Cardigan Bay, according to the Celtic stories which may not be myths, was once a kingdom called The Bottom Hundred. It was a vast tract of level land, stretching along that part of the sea coast which now belongs to the counties of Merioneth and Cardigan. According to the old story tellers, it contained sixteen fortified towns and was known to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians who came to its Port of Gwyddno, the name of its king, to trade for metal. It was also one of the Three Privileged Ports of the Island of Britain.
No doubt there were soothsayers at the time who blamed climate change on the pollution caused by dragon breath and the carbon footprints of chariot wheels, when in fact in the multi- million-year history of the world there have only been 25,000 when our planet has been able to sustain life.
Climate happens.
By the same token, I doubt if there were research grants available for soothsayers in the way gold coins are being hurled at the heads of our scientific community.
In the Bottom Hundred, the drowned kingdom beyond Aberystwyth, they blamed a drunk.
Not just any old falling-down, mead-dribbling, rude-song-singing sot. This one, quite literally, was a prince among men.
The old Celtic Bards invented the Top of the Pops Lists in all sorts of alarming categories,including “The Immortal Drunkards of Britain”. Chief among them was Prince Seithenyn, the Hereditary Keeper of the High Embankment which prevented the sea from washing over the Kingdom of the Bottom Hundred.
Except that he didn’t. He abandoned his post to sneak into a feast which was being held to honour visiting ambassadors, found a quiet corner, ordered an oryx horn of mead all round and proceeded to get legless. Completely forgot to close the flood gates so that, come high tide, the Bottom Hundred became the Bottom of the Sea Hundred and he was much blamed in song and story. Which you have to admit is a lot more creative than blaming budget airlines.
I have my own list of Immortal Drunkards. Toper topping it is Mr Jorrocks, the fox hunting grocer who was created by a North country squire and novelist in the 19th century, R.S. Surtees. His deservedly immortal cry as he disappeared under the table at banquets was: "Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
Another favourite drunkard was an 11th century Chinese poet call Su Tung Po, who was exiled for criticising the Emperor.
How many of us drunks have suffered the same fate for lampooning our employers? Years ago, as he passed me slumped into my typewriter in the Daily Mirror News room, my editor Ted Fenna observed, “Pissed again, Skidmore?" “Don’t worry Ted,” I reassured him, “so am I.”
Su didn’t mind criticism either. He passed the years of exile building himself towers to sit in and admire the view whilst putting away large quantities of wine.
He wrote:
“How much have I drunk to-day? Ah! I feel I can escape now from the fetters of mortality. I fling away my staff. Away with all your worries and troubles, you lads. I gaze at the Western Hills - so close they seem, and long to raise my dress and join the leaping monkeys on the overhanging cliffs.”
I have a tendresse to for W.C.Fields who said, “A woman drove me to drink and I forgot to thank her.” But my favourite piece of philosophy came from that other Great Drunkard, Dean Martin (who I refuse to believe was a teetotaller off-stage), who answered a rebuke from Sinatra, “ Be serious? I tried being serious and all I could get was road building. Would you like a hernia for 50 dollars a week?”
I try desperately not to be serious, even when I reflect that every international ineptitude stems from our so called statesmen. The Council of Vienna, Versailles, dubbed 'the peace that passeth all understanding', Yalta, and all the endless summits our leaders love have made their contribution to the mess we are in.
Versailles was the worst. It was from that unhappy gathering, that peace to end all peace, that our present troubles stem. I have been reading James Barr’s definitive work “Setting the Desert on Fire”, the story of the secret war in Arabia 1916-18.
Until we financed it, there was no such thing as Arab nationalism. It was created by American Quaker missionaries at a Literary Society they founded in Beirut in the 19th century.
A British diplomat, sent to Mesopotamia in 1916, could only find sixteen nationalists. The movement we financed to fight the Turks stemmed from the ambition of two men, Ibn Saud, who created Saudi Arabia with the aid of a murderous religious sect, the Wahabi, and Husein ibn Ali, the Keeper of Mecca, who became King of the Hijaz with Allied money.
He did not know that, despite promises of an Arab homeland, Britain and France had privately split Arabia between them.
Francis Stirling, an Intelligence Officer with Lawrence of Arabia, wrote to his sister in 1916: “The situation bristles with difficulties. We have fanned the flames of the Arab revolt with money and men in the Sharif’s attempt to form a free Arab nation. Up to now the Arabs have a blind confidence in all the Englishmen who have been in contact with them. They almost literally eat out of our hands. The Arab cause has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of anybody. That is just the trouble. Mark Sykes, MP, never probably believing that the Arab Revolt would ever really reach further north than Aqaba, formed a compact with the French known as the Sykes Picot Agreement, whereby Beirut and the entire littoral northward of there should be under French administration and that Damascus, Horns, Haena and Aleppo should be allowed to fall to the Arabs (if they can get there) but should be under French influence…..But the Arab won’t have the French at any price. The Americans in Beirut are saying that we have sold the Arabs to the French. The results will be as follows: If we keep our part with the French the Arabs will rightly say we have sold them, that we have raised them up only to cast them down. News of that will spread through the Mohammedan world and do us unutterable harm.”
At Versailles Lawrence warned that an Iraqi nation was an oxymoron and advised the land be split between Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurds.
He was ignored and Feisal crowned King of Iraq. After 12 years that unhappy monarch reflected in 1933:
“There is still and I say this with a heart of sorrow – no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.”
And he proved it when later in the same year he was assassinated.
Ah well………On with the motley.
THE NIGHT A CAR ENTERED THE GRAND NATIONAL
The worst thing one can say about a man is that he would have the shirt off your back. Mike Gabbert, my news editor on the People, is the only man I know of whom that was literally true. He stole mine. It was handmade, silk and I was very proud of it. I had taken it off to preserve it, before offering violence to a person in Llangollen, for reasons long since forgotten. Gabbert offered to hold it and never gave it back.
No-one who knew him would insult his memory by claiming he was honest, which made his obsession all the more peculiar. So deeply in thrall was he to Simenon’s Detective Inspector Maigret that he bought and imported an ex-Paris police Renault motor car.
It arrived in Manchester on the eve of the Grand National meeting at Aintree. To christen it, Gabbert offered to take a select party to see the great race. I did not attend because I couldn’t afford to lose any more shirts.
Whether the party, metaphorically or indeed literally, lost their shirts at the races I cannot say. I can say that a good time was had by all.
So much so that on the return journey the car went over, rather than round a roundabout on the East Lancs Road. (This was pre motorway).
My informant was full of praise for the car. He said it was jumping like a stag and would undoubtedly have set up a course and distance record for roundabout jumping.
It was only prevented, in his opinion, by the police car it hit on landing.
He said, to be fair, the policeman leaped out of the car, covered the distance to the right hand side of the car, yanked the front door open and pulled the occupant out from his seat, all in one smooth motion. My informant said it put him in mind of Red Rum in sparkling, mid season form.
The policeman said, “Have you been drinking?”
“Have I been drinking….have I……..? Course I’ve been drinking,” said your man, a touch testily. “Why d’you think I m holding on to this door.?”
“How much have you had?” asked the policeman, taking out a notebook and moistening his pencil expectantly.
“Ah,” said your man, "Before I answer that, you answer me a question. Is it legal to drink BEFORE time?”
The policeman said it wasn’t, but on this occasion he was minded to overlook it.
“Only I don’t want to get Eileen in trouble,” your man explained. “She is the landlady of the Grove in Withy Grove and she always opens at 9.30 on Grand National morning, so we can all gather before setting off. ……But, as you are taking such a sporting view, I don’t mind admitting we had four pints apiece. Then that was us off to the races,” he said.
“We didn’t stop on the way, so by the time we got to the Press Club in Liverpool my mouth felt like a budgie’s sandpit. So I called for G and Ts for the six of us.”
“Then you went to the races…?”
“Did we hell as like. There were five of them still had to buy their round. THEN we went to the races.”
The policeman was scribbling furiously in his notebook.
“And who did we meet when we got into the champagne bar? Noel Whitcomb,” your man said. "Have you come across him?”
The bobby said he hadn’t.
“Lovely fellow,” said your man, “you would like him. Well anyway, every year he brings a couple of readers to the National and gives them a good time. Champagne and everything. But the trouble this year was the readers were TT. Terrible shock for Noel. Well, we couldn’t see him taking the champagne back to London. So we drank it for him. Couple of cases, as I remember. But I wouldn’t swear to it.
“The trouble is,” your man confided, “mixing champagne and gin always has a terrible effect on my stomach. So I had to have a couple of port and brandies to settle it. And I missed the last race.”
“Then you came home?” the policeman said, preparing to close his notebook which was getting pretty full.
“Good God, no," your man said, “and miss the winning owner’s party at the Adelphi? You must be joking. Have you ever been to one?”
The bobby said he hadn’t.
“I thought not,” said your man, “or you wouldn’t have asked."
He said, “They make this chocolate horse and jockey, the chefs do. Then when the winner of the National is announced they dress the jockey in coloured marzipan, in the owner’s colours. This time it was a Mr Bigg. A butcher from Norwich, I believe, and he owns Oxo. Quite amusing, we thought.”
But the policeman didn’t think so.
He said, "Never mind the bloody horse. Did you have anymore to drink?"
“Course we did. It's traditional. They serve Black Velvet in pint tankards, half champagne and half Guinness. Been doin’ it for hundreds of years.
“Mind you,” your man confided, "I think there was more Guinness than champagne in mine, though of course I said nowt.
“Then we left and if you hadn’t parked just where we were landing we’d be back in the Grove now.”
“You’ve swilled all that booze," the policeman said, “d’you think you are fit to drive?”
“Drive?” said your man, “I’m the passenger. It’s a left hand drive…………..”
end
So what else is new?
My friends in the Marine Science faculty at the University of Wales in Bangor have been examining evidence of buried kingdoms under the sea off the coast of Wales for thirty years to my knowledge.
There is evidence of drowned settlements miles out to sea off the coast of Rhyl. Cardigan Bay, according to the Celtic stories which may not be myths, was once a kingdom called The Bottom Hundred. It was a vast tract of level land, stretching along that part of the sea coast which now belongs to the counties of Merioneth and Cardigan. According to the old story tellers, it contained sixteen fortified towns and was known to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians who came to its Port of Gwyddno, the name of its king, to trade for metal. It was also one of the Three Privileged Ports of the Island of Britain.
No doubt there were soothsayers at the time who blamed climate change on the pollution caused by dragon breath and the carbon footprints of chariot wheels, when in fact in the multi- million-year history of the world there have only been 25,000 when our planet has been able to sustain life.
Climate happens.
By the same token, I doubt if there were research grants available for soothsayers in the way gold coins are being hurled at the heads of our scientific community.
In the Bottom Hundred, the drowned kingdom beyond Aberystwyth, they blamed a drunk.
Not just any old falling-down, mead-dribbling, rude-song-singing sot. This one, quite literally, was a prince among men.
The old Celtic Bards invented the Top of the Pops Lists in all sorts of alarming categories,including “The Immortal Drunkards of Britain”. Chief among them was Prince Seithenyn, the Hereditary Keeper of the High Embankment which prevented the sea from washing over the Kingdom of the Bottom Hundred.
Except that he didn’t. He abandoned his post to sneak into a feast which was being held to honour visiting ambassadors, found a quiet corner, ordered an oryx horn of mead all round and proceeded to get legless. Completely forgot to close the flood gates so that, come high tide, the Bottom Hundred became the Bottom of the Sea Hundred and he was much blamed in song and story. Which you have to admit is a lot more creative than blaming budget airlines.
I have my own list of Immortal Drunkards. Toper topping it is Mr Jorrocks, the fox hunting grocer who was created by a North country squire and novelist in the 19th century, R.S. Surtees. His deservedly immortal cry as he disappeared under the table at banquets was: "Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
Another favourite drunkard was an 11th century Chinese poet call Su Tung Po, who was exiled for criticising the Emperor.
How many of us drunks have suffered the same fate for lampooning our employers? Years ago, as he passed me slumped into my typewriter in the Daily Mirror News room, my editor Ted Fenna observed, “Pissed again, Skidmore?" “Don’t worry Ted,” I reassured him, “so am I.”
Su didn’t mind criticism either. He passed the years of exile building himself towers to sit in and admire the view whilst putting away large quantities of wine.
He wrote:
“How much have I drunk to-day? Ah! I feel I can escape now from the fetters of mortality. I fling away my staff. Away with all your worries and troubles, you lads. I gaze at the Western Hills - so close they seem, and long to raise my dress and join the leaping monkeys on the overhanging cliffs.”
I have a tendresse to for W.C.Fields who said, “A woman drove me to drink and I forgot to thank her.” But my favourite piece of philosophy came from that other Great Drunkard, Dean Martin (who I refuse to believe was a teetotaller off-stage), who answered a rebuke from Sinatra, “ Be serious? I tried being serious and all I could get was road building. Would you like a hernia for 50 dollars a week?”
I try desperately not to be serious, even when I reflect that every international ineptitude stems from our so called statesmen. The Council of Vienna, Versailles, dubbed 'the peace that passeth all understanding', Yalta, and all the endless summits our leaders love have made their contribution to the mess we are in.
Versailles was the worst. It was from that unhappy gathering, that peace to end all peace, that our present troubles stem. I have been reading James Barr’s definitive work “Setting the Desert on Fire”, the story of the secret war in Arabia 1916-18.
Until we financed it, there was no such thing as Arab nationalism. It was created by American Quaker missionaries at a Literary Society they founded in Beirut in the 19th century.
A British diplomat, sent to Mesopotamia in 1916, could only find sixteen nationalists. The movement we financed to fight the Turks stemmed from the ambition of two men, Ibn Saud, who created Saudi Arabia with the aid of a murderous religious sect, the Wahabi, and Husein ibn Ali, the Keeper of Mecca, who became King of the Hijaz with Allied money.
He did not know that, despite promises of an Arab homeland, Britain and France had privately split Arabia between them.
Francis Stirling, an Intelligence Officer with Lawrence of Arabia, wrote to his sister in 1916: “The situation bristles with difficulties. We have fanned the flames of the Arab revolt with money and men in the Sharif’s attempt to form a free Arab nation. Up to now the Arabs have a blind confidence in all the Englishmen who have been in contact with them. They almost literally eat out of our hands. The Arab cause has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of anybody. That is just the trouble. Mark Sykes, MP, never probably believing that the Arab Revolt would ever really reach further north than Aqaba, formed a compact with the French known as the Sykes Picot Agreement, whereby Beirut and the entire littoral northward of there should be under French administration and that Damascus, Horns, Haena and Aleppo should be allowed to fall to the Arabs (if they can get there) but should be under French influence…..But the Arab won’t have the French at any price. The Americans in Beirut are saying that we have sold the Arabs to the French. The results will be as follows: If we keep our part with the French the Arabs will rightly say we have sold them, that we have raised them up only to cast them down. News of that will spread through the Mohammedan world and do us unutterable harm.”
At Versailles Lawrence warned that an Iraqi nation was an oxymoron and advised the land be split between Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurds.
He was ignored and Feisal crowned King of Iraq. After 12 years that unhappy monarch reflected in 1933:
“There is still and I say this with a heart of sorrow – no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.”
And he proved it when later in the same year he was assassinated.
Ah well………On with the motley.
THE NIGHT A CAR ENTERED THE GRAND NATIONAL
The worst thing one can say about a man is that he would have the shirt off your back. Mike Gabbert, my news editor on the People, is the only man I know of whom that was literally true. He stole mine. It was handmade, silk and I was very proud of it. I had taken it off to preserve it, before offering violence to a person in Llangollen, for reasons long since forgotten. Gabbert offered to hold it and never gave it back.
No-one who knew him would insult his memory by claiming he was honest, which made his obsession all the more peculiar. So deeply in thrall was he to Simenon’s Detective Inspector Maigret that he bought and imported an ex-Paris police Renault motor car.
It arrived in Manchester on the eve of the Grand National meeting at Aintree. To christen it, Gabbert offered to take a select party to see the great race. I did not attend because I couldn’t afford to lose any more shirts.
Whether the party, metaphorically or indeed literally, lost their shirts at the races I cannot say. I can say that a good time was had by all.
So much so that on the return journey the car went over, rather than round a roundabout on the East Lancs Road. (This was pre motorway).
My informant was full of praise for the car. He said it was jumping like a stag and would undoubtedly have set up a course and distance record for roundabout jumping.
It was only prevented, in his opinion, by the police car it hit on landing.
He said, to be fair, the policeman leaped out of the car, covered the distance to the right hand side of the car, yanked the front door open and pulled the occupant out from his seat, all in one smooth motion. My informant said it put him in mind of Red Rum in sparkling, mid season form.
The policeman said, “Have you been drinking?”
“Have I been drinking….have I……..? Course I’ve been drinking,” said your man, a touch testily. “Why d’you think I m holding on to this door.?”
“How much have you had?” asked the policeman, taking out a notebook and moistening his pencil expectantly.
“Ah,” said your man, "Before I answer that, you answer me a question. Is it legal to drink BEFORE time?”
The policeman said it wasn’t, but on this occasion he was minded to overlook it.
“Only I don’t want to get Eileen in trouble,” your man explained. “She is the landlady of the Grove in Withy Grove and she always opens at 9.30 on Grand National morning, so we can all gather before setting off. ……But, as you are taking such a sporting view, I don’t mind admitting we had four pints apiece. Then that was us off to the races,” he said.
“We didn’t stop on the way, so by the time we got to the Press Club in Liverpool my mouth felt like a budgie’s sandpit. So I called for G and Ts for the six of us.”
“Then you went to the races…?”
“Did we hell as like. There were five of them still had to buy their round. THEN we went to the races.”
The policeman was scribbling furiously in his notebook.
“And who did we meet when we got into the champagne bar? Noel Whitcomb,” your man said. "Have you come across him?”
The bobby said he hadn’t.
“Lovely fellow,” said your man, “you would like him. Well anyway, every year he brings a couple of readers to the National and gives them a good time. Champagne and everything. But the trouble this year was the readers were TT. Terrible shock for Noel. Well, we couldn’t see him taking the champagne back to London. So we drank it for him. Couple of cases, as I remember. But I wouldn’t swear to it.
“The trouble is,” your man confided, “mixing champagne and gin always has a terrible effect on my stomach. So I had to have a couple of port and brandies to settle it. And I missed the last race.”
“Then you came home?” the policeman said, preparing to close his notebook which was getting pretty full.
“Good God, no," your man said, “and miss the winning owner’s party at the Adelphi? You must be joking. Have you ever been to one?”
The bobby said he hadn’t.
“I thought not,” said your man, “or you wouldn’t have asked."
He said, “They make this chocolate horse and jockey, the chefs do. Then when the winner of the National is announced they dress the jockey in coloured marzipan, in the owner’s colours. This time it was a Mr Bigg. A butcher from Norwich, I believe, and he owns Oxo. Quite amusing, we thought.”
But the policeman didn’t think so.
He said, "Never mind the bloody horse. Did you have anymore to drink?"
“Course we did. It's traditional. They serve Black Velvet in pint tankards, half champagne and half Guinness. Been doin’ it for hundreds of years.
“Mind you,” your man confided, "I think there was more Guinness than champagne in mine, though of course I said nowt.
“Then we left and if you hadn’t parked just where we were landing we’d be back in the Grove now.”
“You’ve swilled all that booze," the policeman said, “d’you think you are fit to drive?”
“Drive?” said your man, “I’m the passenger. It’s a left hand drive…………..”
end
Wednesday, 29 August 2007
FORGIVE US OUR PRESS PASSES
Ken Graham, my colleague on The People had a head apparently whittled from balsa wood. Superficially craggy but wont to crumble under pressure.
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” which would be photographed by Dennis Hutchinson, unkindly known as "the Poison Dwarf ".
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.
At last he struggled to a sitting position, cried “ Bugger the People” and abandoned himself to hedonism.
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
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 to-day” Graham said mournfully.
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.
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 lucullun 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”
Graham did not disappoint.
“Trouble with these meals,” he told the table aggrievedly “You are spoilt for bloody choice”
I must not give the wrong impression. It ws 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.
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.
Like the day he put Ken Graham down in the diary for a wholly mythical parachute jump
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.
An Air Minstry PRO was the next one to call . He wanted to know if Graham enjoyed good health and sound limbs. Especially, he added darkly, limbs.
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.
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..
“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.
“ 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.' ”
Stack said “If you could add 'Over Here' it would be helpful”
At this point I think Graham’s nerve must have broke. He said to Mike was it alright if he took an early break . It ws only 11 am but he was over the road ,breasting the bar in the Chicken Grill, before Mike had time to answer.
I have always thought the ex-paratrooper at the bar was a plant by Gabbert.
Like the transvestite lorry driver he introduced to Mike Kiddy, without telling Kiddy about the transvestite bit. Causing Kiddy 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
“ 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” the “paratroop” said
“But the jump is to-morrow” wailed Graham
“Well try falling and rolling here,” the “paratroop” suggested. 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.
It was at that point Mike Gabbert said “Oh by the way Ken, the jump is off. The Air Ministry won’t wear it “
“ Oh Hell,” said Graham with a lack of conviction that fooled no-one “ I was looking forward to it”
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.
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”
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.
ends
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” which would be photographed by Dennis Hutchinson, unkindly known as "the Poison Dwarf ".
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.
At last he struggled to a sitting position, cried “ Bugger the People” and abandoned himself to hedonism.
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
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 to-day” Graham said mournfully.
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.
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 lucullun 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”
Graham did not disappoint.
“Trouble with these meals,” he told the table aggrievedly “You are spoilt for bloody choice”
I must not give the wrong impression. It ws 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.
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.
Like the day he put Ken Graham down in the diary for a wholly mythical parachute jump
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.
An Air Minstry PRO was the next one to call . He wanted to know if Graham enjoyed good health and sound limbs. Especially, he added darkly, limbs.
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.
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..
“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.
“ 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.' ”
Stack said “If you could add 'Over Here' it would be helpful”
At this point I think Graham’s nerve must have broke. He said to Mike was it alright if he took an early break . It ws only 11 am but he was over the road ,breasting the bar in the Chicken Grill, before Mike had time to answer.
I have always thought the ex-paratrooper at the bar was a plant by Gabbert.
Like the transvestite lorry driver he introduced to Mike Kiddy, without telling Kiddy about the transvestite bit. Causing Kiddy 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
“ 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” the “paratroop” said
“But the jump is to-morrow” wailed Graham
“Well try falling and rolling here,” the “paratroop” suggested. 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.
It was at that point Mike Gabbert said “Oh by the way Ken, the jump is off. The Air Ministry won’t wear it “
“ Oh Hell,” said Graham with a lack of conviction that fooled no-one “ I was looking forward to it”
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.
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”
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.
ends
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
Birds, bees and wayward blackcurrant bushes
Broadly speaking I am in favour of sex education. Things were managed differently when I was a lad. I was told I had come off a blackcurrant bush.
Not very nice going through life thinking you were adopted and your real mother was a shrub.
No whittling wood on the doorsteps of my childhood. I might have been cutting up a cousin. As autumn approached each year I waited in dread for my hair to turn gold and fall at my feet. In the gardens of my youth pruning time was an agony.
In the same way no-one has been able to convince me there are no fairies, so I have never been able to shed - if you will forgive the arboreal expression - a feeling that I am part twig, though I reject with vigour allegations that I am a chip off the old block.
When I got older I was introduced to the more conventional forms of procreation but to be frank with you I think there is more gravitas in the blackcurrant method. I had been conditioned by my horticulturally obsessed mother to accept
the most bizarre explanations. No-one warned me that in real life the position was absurd and the method improbable. Not only did that it not always work. Though in all honesty it worked more often than blackberrying,an activity which had very sinister connotations in my childhood. I was always surprised when two people went out to pick soft fruit, three did not come back.
My own efforts to provide myself with a brother were a gloomy failure. I would select this fine bouncing bud and place it in a matchbox lined with cotton wool. But alas, nothing came of it.
It was a pity. When the conventional method was used the end product was never as well designed.
If a human being was a house, it would never get planning permission. The waste disposal arrangements are at best rudimentary. Look where the nose is. Right over the mouth. Would you buy a house where the drainpipe is above the front door?.
And would it have been so difficult to make the arms retractable? Have you ever met anyone who knows what to do with his hands when not in use?. True,in Western dress there are pockets, or you can stick them out of the way by clasping hands behind your back. But have you noticed? If they don't hold tight to one another they come sneaking round the front again, first chance they get.
And the feet. I ask you Is there anything in the whole of nature that looks as silly as a foot? With toes hanging on the end like a fringe? And another thing. They only bend one way. Sheer waste. If you could turn them over you could
walk twice as far on them.
Only think how much easier sleep would be if you could stack your arms and legs under the bed. Entwining bedclothes would be a thing of the past.
Why legs at all? Wheels would have been much more convenient.
As to other functions I will only say the blackcurrant bush has much to commend it. No mouth, therefore no toothache. Eats through the feet and the leaves. None of those tiring strolls to work up an appetite for lunch.
Some of us I regret are built even more oddly than most. I was, until a recent enforced diet, literally an all round reporter. I was as broad as I was long. The last TV series I made was a source of great embarrassment. Not to beat about
the bush - and how that phrase strikes at the heart- where other people go in at the waist, I went out for quite a distance.
One of the things that made me take up my present rigid diet was the way people doubted the reality of my body.
On radio you get used to the size phenomenon. The way listeners invariably tell you in a disappointed tone;" You are much taller on the radio". But what am I to do about the lady who came up, patted me familiarly on the belt buckle
and asked; " Is that real or are you just wearing it on tele?".
END.
Not very nice going through life thinking you were adopted and your real mother was a shrub.
No whittling wood on the doorsteps of my childhood. I might have been cutting up a cousin. As autumn approached each year I waited in dread for my hair to turn gold and fall at my feet. In the gardens of my youth pruning time was an agony.
In the same way no-one has been able to convince me there are no fairies, so I have never been able to shed - if you will forgive the arboreal expression - a feeling that I am part twig, though I reject with vigour allegations that I am a chip off the old block.
When I got older I was introduced to the more conventional forms of procreation but to be frank with you I think there is more gravitas in the blackcurrant method. I had been conditioned by my horticulturally obsessed mother to accept
the most bizarre explanations. No-one warned me that in real life the position was absurd and the method improbable. Not only did that it not always work. Though in all honesty it worked more often than blackberrying,an activity which had very sinister connotations in my childhood. I was always surprised when two people went out to pick soft fruit, three did not come back.
My own efforts to provide myself with a brother were a gloomy failure. I would select this fine bouncing bud and place it in a matchbox lined with cotton wool. But alas, nothing came of it.
It was a pity. When the conventional method was used the end product was never as well designed.
If a human being was a house, it would never get planning permission. The waste disposal arrangements are at best rudimentary. Look where the nose is. Right over the mouth. Would you buy a house where the drainpipe is above the front door?.
And would it have been so difficult to make the arms retractable? Have you ever met anyone who knows what to do with his hands when not in use?. True,in Western dress there are pockets, or you can stick them out of the way by clasping hands behind your back. But have you noticed? If they don't hold tight to one another they come sneaking round the front again, first chance they get.
And the feet. I ask you Is there anything in the whole of nature that looks as silly as a foot? With toes hanging on the end like a fringe? And another thing. They only bend one way. Sheer waste. If you could turn them over you could
walk twice as far on them.
Only think how much easier sleep would be if you could stack your arms and legs under the bed. Entwining bedclothes would be a thing of the past.
Why legs at all? Wheels would have been much more convenient.
As to other functions I will only say the blackcurrant bush has much to commend it. No mouth, therefore no toothache. Eats through the feet and the leaves. None of those tiring strolls to work up an appetite for lunch.
Some of us I regret are built even more oddly than most. I was, until a recent enforced diet, literally an all round reporter. I was as broad as I was long. The last TV series I made was a source of great embarrassment. Not to beat about
the bush - and how that phrase strikes at the heart- where other people go in at the waist, I went out for quite a distance.
One of the things that made me take up my present rigid diet was the way people doubted the reality of my body.
On radio you get used to the size phenomenon. The way listeners invariably tell you in a disappointed tone;" You are much taller on the radio". But what am I to do about the lady who came up, patted me familiarly on the belt buckle
and asked; " Is that real or are you just wearing it on tele?".
END.
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
Thursday, 16 August 2007
CLASS WELFARE
None of us is middle class. That ended when the peasants took over the universities. Until then the essential qualifications were public school and university, an income of a thousand a year which enabled you to keep a maid, lunch in the middle of the day, tennis on your own court, preferring animals and referring to “one” rather than “I”.
I am an authority on class. My ancestors include St David and the Welsh Princes, a Norman knight, two Tudor courtiers, an ambassador to Paris and according to a Welsh genealogy Jesus’ auntie. My name is the Welsh form of Scudamore ,my ancestors owned most of Herefordshire and starred in the most celebrated divorce case in the 18th century.
My father was a police constable and the descendant of three hundred years of ever diminishing landowners who became both bottle blowers and even more enthusiastic emptiers.
I have spent my life clawing my way back upmarket by consistently marrying above myself. There have been humiliations. My first wife was a rich Jewess to whose mother I was “ council house scum”. Despite her wealth she was not middle class. She pronounced cognac with a hard g.
I was once publicly derided in the Kingston Rowing Club for pronouncing bath with a short “a”. An otherwise delightful chum, a general’s son, was horrified by the way I held my knife.
I discovered the middle class when I was briefly an officer cadet and found I got on much better with the aristocracy. They had nothing to gain by erecting barriers, I had nothing to lose and they shared my obsession with girls
There were limits, as a cavalry officer once explained;
“One would go to one’s troopers’ weddings, but not necessarily invite them to one's”
Now that I have married into the Upper Middle class, things are much easier. I know not to wear a matching tie and silk handkerchief, indeed not to wear a silk handkerchief at all with a business suit. At dinner parties I talk to the partner on my left side during the first course, turn to the partner on my right during the second course and only talk across the table after pudding has been served. My wife puts out napkins even when we eat “a deux” in the kitchen. Probably does when she is on her own. Baths a lot and is always recognised by her own kind. I come as a surprise, but they don’t show it
It was unnerving at first when she trooped me round her family like a tattered colour. At the Bath manor house of a knighted uncle my place at luncheon was decorated with so much table silver it looked like Mappin and Webb's window. Fortunately I knew the rules –work from the outside in.
One occurrence during that hair raising lunch no book of etiquette warned about.
Uncle Sydney’s pet pigeon had the freedom of the house, which it exercised by sitting on my head and crapping down my neck as I raised a fork –always work from the outside in.
“Must be alright if the bird likes you,” he said and we were close friends until his death.
That night as I prepared for bed he pulled me on one side.
"You know how in Wodehouse books the guest always hunts in vain for a drink in the night?
Well in this house its kept in that cupboard under the stairs"
I have just taken part in a family genetic “trace” and discovered I am entitled to a crest; “ a unicorn’s head erased sable plate “ and a blazon of arms “Gules, three stirrups, leathers and buckles or”.
I wonder what my late mother in law and the Kingston Rowing Club would make of that. But I do know it would have looked great on the door of my Lada. I am almost sorry I no longer drive
Ends
I am an authority on class. My ancestors include St David and the Welsh Princes, a Norman knight, two Tudor courtiers, an ambassador to Paris and according to a Welsh genealogy Jesus’ auntie. My name is the Welsh form of Scudamore ,my ancestors owned most of Herefordshire and starred in the most celebrated divorce case in the 18th century.
My father was a police constable and the descendant of three hundred years of ever diminishing landowners who became both bottle blowers and even more enthusiastic emptiers.
I have spent my life clawing my way back upmarket by consistently marrying above myself. There have been humiliations. My first wife was a rich Jewess to whose mother I was “ council house scum”. Despite her wealth she was not middle class. She pronounced cognac with a hard g.
I was once publicly derided in the Kingston Rowing Club for pronouncing bath with a short “a”. An otherwise delightful chum, a general’s son, was horrified by the way I held my knife.
I discovered the middle class when I was briefly an officer cadet and found I got on much better with the aristocracy. They had nothing to gain by erecting barriers, I had nothing to lose and they shared my obsession with girls
There were limits, as a cavalry officer once explained;
“One would go to one’s troopers’ weddings, but not necessarily invite them to one's”
Now that I have married into the Upper Middle class, things are much easier. I know not to wear a matching tie and silk handkerchief, indeed not to wear a silk handkerchief at all with a business suit. At dinner parties I talk to the partner on my left side during the first course, turn to the partner on my right during the second course and only talk across the table after pudding has been served. My wife puts out napkins even when we eat “a deux” in the kitchen. Probably does when she is on her own. Baths a lot and is always recognised by her own kind. I come as a surprise, but they don’t show it
It was unnerving at first when she trooped me round her family like a tattered colour. At the Bath manor house of a knighted uncle my place at luncheon was decorated with so much table silver it looked like Mappin and Webb's window. Fortunately I knew the rules –work from the outside in.
One occurrence during that hair raising lunch no book of etiquette warned about.
Uncle Sydney’s pet pigeon had the freedom of the house, which it exercised by sitting on my head and crapping down my neck as I raised a fork –always work from the outside in.
“Must be alright if the bird likes you,” he said and we were close friends until his death.
That night as I prepared for bed he pulled me on one side.
"You know how in Wodehouse books the guest always hunts in vain for a drink in the night?
Well in this house its kept in that cupboard under the stairs"
I have just taken part in a family genetic “trace” and discovered I am entitled to a crest; “ a unicorn’s head erased sable plate “ and a blazon of arms “Gules, three stirrups, leathers and buckles or”.
I wonder what my late mother in law and the Kingston Rowing Club would make of that. But I do know it would have looked great on the door of my Lada. I am almost sorry I no longer drive
Ends
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