Valedictions

So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehn. Gooodbye. No, I’m not taking leave of the world or my senses or the blog. But I have noticed that a phrase I thought was a North-Eastern one, traceable to the South Shields area in particular, is in fact a great deal more endemic than I thought. And it is going to become even more widespread.

I first noticed it when I was in Sunderland last year, when every other person, as I left their vicinity (vicinity – not a word one hears much outside the police station and the courts), or came to the end of a phone call, seemed to say, not Goodbye or Adios or Ciao or On your bike but ‘See you later’, sometimes in a formal fashion, as in ‘I’ll see you later’. A little while later, I caught my brother saying it at the end of a phone call – but then it says Sunderland on his birth certificate too (until last week, I had never actually seen my birth certificate, the long version, when it dropped out of my father’s papers).

But I see now that, as you leave Morrison’s, the Northern supermarket chain which has now spread right across the south by gobbling up Safeway and other enterprises (they have nobbled, thank goodness, the local Somerfield), there is a big sign at the exit, as there doubtless is at every exit from Morrison’s. It says ‘See you later!’ So it has now become, or is on the way to becoming, a national phrase. Some said it on a phone-in the other day, and they were Northern: but perhaps it’s come from somewhere else. (I know Bill Haley and many others sang ‘See you later, alligator’, but they didn’t mean ‘Goodbye’.)

And I can add to that, that the phrase used in the North-East for ‘All right’, which is a bit of an old chestnut, but one back in vogue, if an old chestnut can be in vogue without seeming to be a mixed metaphor, which is ‘Hoaky-coaky’, is also becoming a national pandemic.

See you later.

The videos

Ah, the videos. Ten crates of them. Do I really want to transport them to the North-East, just to stick them in a loft? Am I ever going to watch their contents again?

This is a really hard one, because there was a period in my teaching life when I rose early – this was in the days when the paper was delivered, long a thing of the past – to read the TV schedules before going to work, because there was nearly always some useful snippet on in the afternoon that would fit a lesson that was brewing in my head. Some of my best nuggets came from afternoon TV, as recorded when I was out, including Oprah’s interview with six of the twelve men who’d walked on the moon.

Among the gems I have – I see I have mentioned this before – is the first episode (1955) of ‘Double Your Money’. Hughie Green – the Michael Barrymore of his day, I suppose you might say – was on top form, but the interesting people were the contestants. There were six – one man, one ‘oldest married couple in the audience’, one woman, and one ‘most recently married couple in the audience’. The man and the young couple declined to give their first names: none of that matey malarkey we have now. The couple were Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, and she was a former Miss Thompson. The (single) woman, who was a physiotherapist (cue round of applause) admitted to being Polly (possibly Holly) Matthews, but looked fantastically uncertain about being asked to stand next to Green. He eventually stuck an arm out and edged her closer, but she didn’t feel any more comfortable.

Hughie in early action

The elderly couple were, by back-counting, born in the 1880s, and married in 1910, after meeting in the Mile End Road (their name – the sound recording is none too good) was something like Whalley. They were tiny, a really remarkable example of the way average height has grown. Oddly enough, Mr. Whalley was the only one who was anything like a modern participant, in that he alone acknowledged the audience and waved to it. He was helped up to £4 (the third question) by Green assisting him. He picked music-hall as his subject, and was asked who the great escape artist of the early part of the century was, and came up with an H, but nothing more, even when given the -ou to follow it. Green wasn’t allowed to give him £8. He let them off with £6, which would have bought several pints – possibly a hundred - in those days. Let’s say, on this poor excuse for a calculation, that he won about £250 in today’s terms. That would be a cause of mass depression on almost all game-shows now.

Yes, I have transferred it to DVD, and watched it, and thrown out the videotape, which looks increasingly ridiculous. Expect more tales of salvage in the days to come.

Will I watch it again? That’s the thousand-pound question.

Music reports

I suspect I’ve said this somewhere, but my parents had to pay extra for me to learn the piano when I was eight (nine, ten, eleven, twelve), because it was an ‘extra’. I did not understand this at the time, and was discovered sobbing one day by both of them. They presumably thought I was still upset that Gaitskell wasn’t prime minister.

‘What’s the problem?’

Sniff. ‘I want to learn the piano, but it’s an EXTRA.’

‘Oh for crying out loud!’ (Very apposite.)

What I had forgotten was that the music teacher (already commended in this blog) was obliged to write reports on those who were opted in, some return for the extra cash presumably being sought. I was just chucking out another box-full this afternoon, when – for no reason – out popped my music reports, carefully labelled by my father, as ever, but somehow mixed in with some material for a creative writing evening class. They paint a picture of a long-suffering man, struggling with an idiot.

Easter 1961: ‘His playing of notes is entirely separate in action and thought.’

Summer 1961: ‘His hands are becoming able to do as they ought.’

Christmas 1961: ‘He tends to be careless in looking after his music books… Previously I did not know he could sing so well.’

Easter 1962: ‘He is beginning to be able to coordinate his hand and his hearing.’

Summer 1962: ‘He is an enthusiast in general but not for piano practice.’

Winter 1962: ‘Many of the difficulties in his playing are self-imposed.’

Easter 1963: ‘His playing has begun to grow in confidence.’

Summer 1963: ‘He loves his music amd has put some polish on his playing.’

Christmas 1963: ‘Musical expression is hard for him at the keyboard where his fingers and feet are apt to get in the way. He is very keen.’

Spring 1964: ‘His playing is still a little too much based on guesswork.’

Summer 1964: ‘His music-making remains regrettably mechanical.’

Autumn 1964 (a different hand here): ‘He is interested in all kind of music but should remember that the best pleasure comes from playing the finest music really well.’

Spring 1965 (another new hand): ‘He is very keen on “popular” music and this does not help him to develop sensitive playing.’

Summer 1965 (same as Spring 1965): ‘In his own slapdash way he has learnt a good deal about the grammar of music … he particularly enjoys “folk music” played in the popular manner.’

Winter 1965 (final comment from the original teacher): ‘His technique is very limited and too cramped and rigid. In addition his appreciation of music is somewhat primitive …’

These tragic excerpts (for the poor men were obliged to write much more) do not reveal that, in the five years, I never actually reached the stage where it was considered even remotely sensible to enter me for Grade 1 in piano. Is this a record?

Still, they spotted my musical tastes.

Nick Griffin and Question Time

Well, I did watch it, although I hate the Question Time format, and the slightly unctuous David Dimbleby approach to audience participation. Give me Kilroy! (Only joking.)

Nick Griffin, so the panel insisted, was ‘exposed’. He was certainly jeered (I would have jeered him), but I am not convinced his supporters, who are sufficient to have garnered the BNP two members of the European parliament, will have been unimpressed. The BNP will probably rise in the polls. Enoch Powell was mentioned, and it is worth remembering that, despite his expulsion from the shadow cabinet, he continued to be elected, first as a Conservative, and later as a member of the UUP in Northern Ireland, on hefty majorities (he was asked to leave the Tory Party because he suggested that people vote Labour rather than Conservative, not because of his racist views). There will always be Nick Griffins on the margin. It’s a waste of enrgy thinking about him too much, though: he should just be allowed to say what he thinks, and prosecuted if he breaks the law.

What I think would be really good would be if there was an edition of the genealogical programme Who Do You Think You Are?, in which Griffin was found to have a variety of strains in his ancestry (and it would be odd if he didn’t). He talked about the English, Irish, Scots and Welsh have lived here for 17000 years, since ‘time immemorial’, in fact. His education is a bit lacking.

But still. perhaps the Daily Mail will run some history lesssons about the way we are essentially of European stock, and that many of us should be repatriated to Norway, Denmark, Germany and France.

Mr. Griffin is dangerous. But his organisation at least allows us to see where the dangerous people live, and to hear them confess their prejudices in public. That is, I think, quite useful.

Library books

Sifting through my hoard – actually horde seems the appropriate spelling just now – of books, I come occasionally across a library book, and have a momentary pang of guilt, until I realise that it was an ex-library book which I acquired at a jumble/ boot/ tabletop sale somewhere, and not one that I have nicked. (The phrase ‘tabletop sale’ seems to have almost replaced ‘jumble sale’, the latter being insufficiently genteel, I suppose.)

But I do have a problem with libraries, or rather, they have a problem with me. I am very forgetful about returning books, and I suffer from a syndrome which I suspect, actually rather hope because I don’t want to be the only one, is familiar to many. There is a critical stage in the process of forgetfulness, at which point the realisation dawns that there is going to be a whopping fine. It would have been amusing until last year to add ‘practically the size of the National Debt’ here, but since that is now so large that even God would have a job reaching into the folds of his designer robes to pay, it isn’t worth risking the gag. (Note the sound of having and eating cake.)

Fines at libraries are very stiff, and rise incrementally until they more or less double the price of buying the book. But at the thought of actually going to the library, and actually returning them, something switches itself off in the head. The very thought of the shame of handing over late books to a librarian actually delays the process of returning them still longer. The fines mount. The pressure dogs the brain and body. And in the end you ask someone else in your household to take them back for you.

Why is that?

More moving stories

It is a curious thing, but the more I prepare for my move, and I’ve just been told that I will need 186 boxes by the removal company responsible – 186! 186! help! and that’s after the cull - the more the chaos in this normally reprehensibly untidy house mounts. Everything is going somewhere – upstairs, downstairs – but nothing is actually arriving. Everything is in transit throughout the property. It might be easier to hire a dustcart and use that for the move, but I don’t want to upset my new neighbours before I have had a chance to get to know them.

Most poignant of all in this book-strewn disaster area (‘Have you read all of them?’ – that’s what everyone who comes here says. ‘Nearly all,’ I say, in an alternately calamitous or pompous tone) is the way that, wedged upside down in the bathroom, where it has slipped, apparently, from the edge of the sink, is ‘Feng Shui – 100 ways to declutter your home’, a book of estimable value which is now probably the most cluttersome item of all.

Feng Shui is what Mrs. G. aspires to. I have my doubts. It is probably true that if your pathway is clear, then you will have a happy home. But I have long been resigned to a bit of emotional blockage.

When you say to South-Westerners that you are moving to the North-East, their response is much as if you have announced that you will be on the next train to the gulag. It is hard work having to explain that it feels as if I am coming to the end of my sentence, and being allowed to go home. It also turns out that 99% of those who live in the South-West have formerly lived in the North-East. I had to go and see someone I couldn’t spell the other day – an endocrinologist; low calcium, possible treatment, do nothing or maybe top up on Vitamin D, there’s a bit of a debate about it – and he suddenly beamed and recalled having spent late nights on a weekend in the Bigg Market in Newcastle. His friend wouldn’t go, because his friend was from Sunderland, and feared his accent would be spotted. I think it will take a while before my accent returns in any way, shape or form.

But maybe I’m a bit old for the Bigg Market, anyway.

Postal Strikes, Victoria Coren

I think I may be falling for Victoria Coren in a bigger way than I thought. Her article in The Observer about the impending postal strike was completely on the money: Click here to read it. At about the same time, I was culling my pile of New Statesmans, in readiness for The Big Move (you can’t take 32 years’ worth of back numbers with you: sad but true), and I came across this cover from 1979:

Nothing changes, does it ...

Invigilation

The Armstrong and Miller show – Alan Armstrong, Ben Miller – has finally been given some seriously top space on TV – the 9.30 slot on Friday night. I watched it last week, the first time I’d switched the machine on for a fortnight, having left myself a reminder. So obviously I am keen. I’m not sure who their target audience is, apart from me. It is hard to believe that parodies of Flanders and Swann (‘The Gnu Song’ etc.), for instance, would appeal to anyone younger than me.

But they must appeal to teachers of a certain age, and  either they have scriptwriters who have been teachers, or one or both have dabbled – because they always include sketches which pick up on some of the absurder aspects of working in education (‘at the chalkface’, oh how I hate that tired old phrase). In this case – and I suspect this will be a running gag – it was invigilation. A very bored teacher was shown watching a group of examinees with their heads down – could I just digress and say how much I also hate the faddish phrase for ‘an early warning’, much in use, which is ‘a heads-up’, it’s horrible.

Anyway. Invigilation is one of the most soul-destroying experiences, unless you are a teacher who doesn’t like teaching, for whom it may be an addictive respite. You have to stare at up to 400 people, with special responsibility for say 50, and – well, and what? Fetch them paper. It could be that something serious would go wrong, so you have to be there, and of course, they might cheat. The person next to me in Politics O-level cheated: he had his text-books with him, and read them brazenly. He is probably now a senior civil servant. But I never saw anything of concern or alarm. My only difficult moment came when invigilating a Maths exam, and discovered that there was a student from the Far East, whose parents had not realised the cultural implications of his first name – his surname was Ho, but his first name was Ivan. It was unworthy of me, but I had to work hard not to laugh, which you can’t do during invigilation, which has the same etiquette as a church, only, without the service or the church.

The Armstrong and Miller gag had the invigilator go to the back of the hall, and, after a bit of thought, suddenly do things like turning cartwheels. As the show went on, this built up to nine teachers standing on each other’s shoulders. Very clever observation of what tedium can make you do.

The Sunderland beach ball

Things are getting desperate at Sunderland for the long-suffering and depression-addicted fans like myself. First we nearly beat Manchester United, and are pegged back to a draw after a last-minute face-saver from them. And now, would you believe it, we have beaten Liverpool, or rather Liverpool have beaten themselves at Sunderland’s home, the grandly – and naffly – named ‘Stadium Of Light’.

One of Liverpool fans was apparently keen on a visit to Sunderland’s seaside resorts (Whitburn, Seaburn and Roker), and brought a beach ball with him to the ground. In a fit of enthusiasm, he punched it on to the pitch, where it bobbled about near the goal (and was actually in the goal a few minutes before the incident). Up bobbed our current star striker, Darren Bent, who hit the ball towards the goal. Sunderland plyers often do this, in the hope it will go in, but we who follow them know better – that it will hit a cross-bar, or go over, or rebound from the goalkeeper, or miss by miles.

But no. It hit the beach ball, took a slight diversion, foxed the goalkeeper, who tried to save the beach ball as well as the match-ball, and result? Sunderland 1, Liverpool 0, and it stayed that way. This is an incident that will live on in Sunderland folk-lore for many a day (there is only a limited amount of folk-lore to go round in Sunderland).

Our manager, Steve Bruce, has wisely remarked that only a ’saddo’ would know that there is a rule which says that if a ball strikes a foreign body on the pitch, and goes into goal, the goal should not stand, and there should be a drop-ball at the site of the incident. How right he is, especially as Liverpool’s keeper didn’t look to me like he would have saved the shot anyway.

Here it is:

Poor Liverpool lad who brought it. Nothing to play with at the beach. My father once asked a riveter at the shipyard where he was manager where the riveter was going on holiday. ‘The Burns Country,’ said the riveter, rather surprising my father as he didn’t think the riveter looked the haggis type.

‘Whit-Burn, Sea-Burn…’ the riveter continued.

The Poseidon Adventure again

“You are doing WHAT?” asked my brother-in-law, when he rang the other night. I was watching the end of The Poseidon Adventure. It is one the greats of the naff disaster movie era kicked off by The Towering Inferno. It is guaranteed brain draining. But I think we all need a bit of formulaic nonsense in our lives. I must have seen The Poseidon Adventure once from start to finish, and in snippets ever since.

The formula is as old as the hills. Take x number of people, and make sure that the number has been reduced to y within 25 minutes. And then chip away at the numbers, and see if you can outwit the audience. The Poseidon Adventure isn’t quite so bold as The Towering Inferno, which sensationally kills off Robert Wagner before half an hour is up (at which point, you know they mean business), but it has got that pleasingly upside-down set, and it does have Gene Hackman with an impossibly bad haircut and a truly terrible roll-neck sweater. It takes genius (which Hackman has, of course) to take on such a desperately badly written part, and still hold the screen.

Hackman lectures the survivors

My favourite bit in the film occurs when Hackman decides to swim underwater with a rope, to reach the far end of the hull. Shelley Winters, who has until this point been reduced to having to be the butt of various fattist and Jewish momma jokes, suddenly announces ‘I was the underwater swimming champ of New York two years running’ – and flashes a medal to prove it. One of the best nick-of-time moments ever.

Perhaps the most curious role is that of “Nonnie”, the singer who happens to be wearing hot-pants and boots at the time the liner is turned upside down. The actress, Carol Lynley, was, I’d assumed, never seen again, but in fact she seems to have been working constantly from the age of sixteen in 1958 to this day, although mainly in TV shows (no  shame). According to ImDb, the internet movie database, she owned the said boots, and complained that water caused them damage. This is such an unlikely story that I suspect it of being true.

Maybe they can’t make films like this any more because Ernest Borgnine is no more. His I-will-lamp-you-at-the-slightest-provocation look was one of the delights of schlock like The Poseidon Adventure (which was based, I had not realised till now, on a novel by Paul Gallico – a name one seldom hears of any more, but very famous in his day).