What I’ve hung on to longest/ hoarding

The boxes are still stacking up. It is hard to get rid of things at first, and then something goes in a bin by accident, and you think ‘Oh well.’ This happened to my father’s flat cap yesterday, He was taller than me by three inches and you might have thought he would have had a larger head and larger feet: but life’s not like that. He was smaller in the head and foot departments, so why I was hanging on to it, I cannot begin to tell you. Raw sentiment. And now another wet item in the rubbish.

I haven’t really been very surprised at what I have come across. But it has started me thinking about what has been with me for the longest period of time. It could be said to be my baptism certificate, I suppose, which is framed, and which has been around, and visble (why?) for a good bit. But I obviously can’t recall being baptised. And I was refusenik when it came to being comfirmed, much to the spiritual outrage of the various chaplains etc who inhabited my school. It was almost unheard of. Single white Protestant refuses to participate in a religious ceremony! Shock horror. I was sent for a serious chat about my soul.

My explanation was pobably not very convincing, but it was very long-winded. I am perfectly prepared to talk for several hours if my tongue is unleashed, and I talked my way out of – bored my way out of – confirmation. I explained that I was a very very spiritual person (to have revealed that I was already a total atheist would have been a punishable offence, I suspect). To prove this, I talked rather gaily about pictures of St. Veronica which I had once been shown (a bit Roman Catholic for the authorities), and also my particular interest in the works of Leonard Cohen (‘Jesus was a sailor/ And he walked upon the water/ And he spent a look time watching/From his lonely wooden tower’ – Suzanne). A few hours of this kind of ‘I am unorthdox but I am more interested in religion than you’ stuff got me off the hook. I suspect that my parents were informed, and my father – for some absurd reason, one of my godfathers – wouldn’t have cared. He never set foot in a church except for events which were followed by the consumption of much alcohol, and his standard remark about funerals was to comments on the size of ‘the gate’.

My father had a cousin who had no sons but two daughters, and who also owed my father money, which he never repaid. But he (the cousin) did come round one day with all his toys, since he thought they should go to a good home. Ha. They were military things like tanks and planes, and they had the air of having been put together, with skill, by the said uncle (as he was of course known). I had no skill in using Airfix, and I think I treated the toys with due lack of care and attention as a result. I never got the hang of glue and plastic.

I see I haven’t yet said what I have had longest, which was the aim, and I think it must be the cowboy fort I was given when I was six or seven and with which I played on what I can only call a daily basis. It was readymade, as were the plastic figures I also acquired (and I still have them). In defiance of history, I teamed up the Union and Confederate soldiers and the musketeers, and set them against the Indians, who always won. All the battles, which were knockout affairs, came down to an Indian with a large head and a tomahawk, and a man with a battered cowboy hat and a whip (possibly a lasso, originally) who had come out of a packet of Frosties. They – and a donkey – always survived the carnage.

Do you think I will be taking them with me to my new home?

Don’t be silly. It’s got a loft.

Getting things fixed

‘Did you put this together yourself?’ he said. His eyes eyes gave nothing away at all: not a flicker of interest, or disdain, no sign of the complete and utter sense of despair he must have felt, as I showed him the lawnmower. The landscape gardener who lives across the road said that there was no problem with the mower that a service wouldn’t fix, and why not go to the next village?

It went badly. I stopped to ask an elderly lady with too much shopping wher the lawnmower repair shop was. She balanced her various purchases carefully, and said, ‘Don’t ask in there’ – she nodded at the new mini-mart – ‘but they’ll know in the corner shop’. I said thank you very politely, and as he moved, I saw the sign saying GARDENING SUPPLIES behind her head.

‘Do you fix lawnmowers?’ I asked, politely. He looked at me as if to ask whether, looking around the shop, I noticed that it consisted principally of lawnmowers in various states of disrepair.

‘You want your lawmower fixed,’ he replied, monotonously. After a pause, he added ‘Have you got it with you?’ It was true, I looked the sort of idiot who might have failed to bring it. I said Yes. He disappeared through a door and nodded me back through the entrance to the shop. We met in the car park, and he extracted the mower from the back seat. ‘I don’t know how you got it in here,’ he said. Looking at it, neither did I. Especially when the car was full to the gunwales with dead videos on their way to the dump.

This was the point when he asked me whether I had put it together. I stalled him, by saying I couldn’t remember. (Yes I had.) ‘These things her are supposed to be on the outside, not the inside,’ he said, indicating some wing-nuts. Oh. Still, I thought, it has cut the grass a fair few times. It took me back in one horrible flash to the last, the very last time I went camping, in France. It was somewhere south of Paris, I had been driving for two hours looking for a site, and the one I found was about to close. I hurried in and put the tent up. As I did so, a voice from the next camping-space said ‘I think you’ll find that that bit is supposed to be inside, not outside.’ The owner of the voice then stripped my tent down and put it back up, adding ‘No charge.’ Bastard. And the next day, I went to a camping shop after the lantern went kaput, and disgraced myself further by asking ‘Avez-vous un lit?’

Well I think it’s an easy mistake to make.

‘What sort of engine does it have?’ asked the lawnmower man. ‘It says Briggs & Stratton,’ I said helpfully.

‘Oh yes, very good make’ – was it? it was in a B&Q sale ten years ago – ‘but what sort of engine?’ I gave a colossal shrug, and he had a look. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘when you put it in the car, you broke the cable. That’ll take some finding.’ And off he went, sucking his teeth, I bet, only not showing it. Machines. I was not born to own them.

At the disco

I went to a sixtieth birthday party over the weekend, and very enjoyable it was, too. I have now reached the stage where my life is sufficiently settled for me to be going to all the sixtieths of those to whose fiftieths I went.

What is interesting is that the sixtieths are, in essence, almost exact replicas of the fiftieths: buffet, bar and disco. Everyone looks the same because you don’t notice them changing, with the single exception of yourself, the only individual who appears to have aged by ten years since the last one. The same records are playing, more or less: mostly a run of Tamla hits from the 1960s, with a few old stagers like ‘Dancing Queen’, which I would suggest is the most popular piece of music produced in the twentieth century. I once read an exceptionally complex musical analysis of the song, which I didn’t understand in the slightest (something about sophisticated chord changes), but what the song does is to put some slightly ungrammatical or at any rate odd English (‘watch that scene’) to an almost luscious mix of piano strings, and to add in some catchphrases (‘You can dance, having the time of your life’), and a crisis which is lifted from a Mamas and Papas song (‘Dedicated To The One I Love’).

It is a matter of some wonder that people are still dancing to the music of their teenage years, sometimes with something approaching recklessness. Will these records outlive us (we certainly won’t outlive them)? You don’t find anyone dancing to songs from the fifties: Al Martino, who died recently, is not celebrated on the dance floor and neither are Johnny Ray and Alma Cogan and Frankie Laine. It is only about thirty years till recorded popular music has its 1918 moment, and the last people alive who bought an Otis Redding record while he was still with us, perish themselves.

However, I am no longer able to indulge my own dance-floor sensation, which involved dancing (alone – they cleared the floor) to the live version of Santana’s ‘Soul Sacrifice’, the one from Woodstock with the very long drum solo. I have been known to do it in private, but the possible damage to crockery etc at home (where I was indulging) meant I had to pack it in. It’s a pity, really: it is about the one way I might lose all this weight. Other than dieting, of course.

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 ...