Roots

In the three months since we moved into this new house I have been unable to paint, that is I have been able to paint in watercolour, acrylic and pastel - but its all come out crap.

So I'm starting over again, I've only been doing this for 40 years and I'm having to start from the beginning again.

And what better place to start than your roots ?

When we were very young we lived in the Lumleys, streets and streets of back-to-back terraced houses, a style of house that was almost, but not quite, unique to Leeds where tens of thousands of dwellings were built literaly back-to-back so that your house only had a frontage, the back wall of your house was the back wall of the house on the street behind yours, your house shared all of its walls with another house except its frontage.

Lumley Walk is where my cousins lived and was just around the corner from us on Lumley Road, this watercolour was copied from a photo that I found on the excellent Leeds City archive online at Leodis.net but I'm going to have to wander down there sometime soon with my own camera and take some photos of our actualy house for a larger painting - this one is only nine inches by six and shows just what a parlous state my painting is in since we moved, still its the best I've done in three months so we'll build from here.

Oh I wish I had this much soul...

Richie Havens performing at the Bob Dylan 30th Anninversary Concert, its a fantastic Dylan song anyway, but its fucking fantastic when Richie Havens plays and sings it.

Notice his unique guitar playing, "barre chords" I believe it is called when you just cover all the strings across one fret, I may be talking shit, I know nought, I know this man has soul in abundance though and I wish I did too.

Edinburgh in August

Being that we haven't booked a holiday this year I set off on a t'interweb quest last night to find somewhere "nice" that we (three of us this year instead of four) could travel to for a few days rest and relaxation, or as the two females who will accompany me call it, shopping.

Cottages in Cornwall were investigated, some very expensive hotels in Cornwall were investigated, expensive in that we could have actually gone to the Carribean for less money, and then Cornwall was abandoned for having crap, dull cottages furnished in the "old person" stylee that only holiday cottages and old peoples homes have, and expensive hotels.

And then Edinburgh sprung to mind, I like Edinburgh, I've done Edinburgh on business trips and a stag weekend but I've never taken the females there, they like the idea of it, the search was on for accommodation in Edinburgh in August.

Its not easy - there is a thing called "The Festival" and another even bigger thing called "The Fringe Festival" going on in Edinburgh right through August where well-heeled classical theatre and opera lovers celebrate their passion in the city's posh theatres and the rest of the world celebrate in massive style in the streets and small upstairs rooms in pubs watching all sorts of actors, comedians and weird entertainers do thar funky thang.

I've heard nothing but great things about Edinburgh in august, street performers hindering your progress every ten paces or so, musicians littering the streets, it sounds fun and a great distraction from what the females do as a natural function - spend my money on clothing.

I sold it to the pair of them big style.

So I had to find some accommodation.

Thought I'd found the ideal solution immediately, a massive range of luxury modern apartments, lots to choose from, some in the very centre of the action, some in the suburbs, all from £69 a night - the email went off to the booking agents enquiring about availability.

Got the reply this morning, a long email bestowing the virtues of their luxury apartments, and to be fair they are not over-exaggerating, they really do look nice, and then right down at the bottom of the email the price - £250 a night.

There must be some mistake thought I, t'interweb said £69 a night, double checked and of course t'interweb says "from" £69 a night.

So £250 a night it is then, I do hope that they manage to fit at least one of their luxury apartments up their arses as I suggested.

Today not much work will be done, having sold the Edinburgh break so successfully to the females I cannot now back down, I have to find somewhere luxurious that operates as a charity for cheapskates who will not pay the "Edinburgh in August" premium.

On a duck hunt, may be gone some time...

News that these splendid isles are about to face an invasion of rubber ducks this glorious summer has me reaching for my long stick with a hook on the end.

Especially as there's a reward of £50 for each one.

It could be a wonderful urban myth but I want to believe that in 1992 a container full of 29,000 plastic ducks, frogs and turtles were washed overboard from a freighter in the Pacific just off the coast of China - now for the story to be true we have to imagine that somehow the container broke open when it fell off the container ship, or that maybe all 29,000 plastic ducks, frogs and turtles had been lashed to the deck on an individual basis - still, lets gloss over the facts...

19,000 of the bobbing bathroom buddies bobbed their way south and turned up on beaches in Indonesia and Australia but the rest of them decided to swim north and in the last 15 years oceanographers have been tracking their whereabouts in a unique study of how the worlds ocean currents work - I can't think of a better way to spend government money than by following plastic ducks, frogs and turtles on a 15 year journey, what a thing to put on your CV.

Some of them have turned up on the Western Coast of the USA but some are known to have traveled way up north and are now frozen into pack ice making their way across the arctic at the top of the world, the theory goes that sometime this year they will find themselves thawing out in the North Atlantic and washing up somewhere on the south west coasts of our island.

And these dumb oceanographers who have spent all of their working lives following rubber ducks will give you £50 per duck if you find one.

I'm up for it, anyone else ?

I'm x-rated...

According to this site, then this site is for adults only, no-one under 17 allowed, its rude, very rude.

According to that site the rating is issued due to the use of the words "pussy" (eight times) and "cock" (four times).

What the fucking dumbfuck twats don't realise is that the word "pussy" was used eight times to describe my old history teacher Pussy McNeil (fuck, I've used it again) and the word "cock" was used to describe the cock-bird canaries that Jon-ner gave me.

What a set of fuckwit knobs, its not like I use bad language a lot.

Kennedy Assassination...

Was clearing out the office yesterday, making room for some new servers so that we can be spied upon more thoroughly by our new head office and I came across a pack of five facsimile newspapers from moments in history that we'd bought from one of those annoying book club men who dump things in reception hoping that you're honest enough to buy them rather than take them home,read them and return them before he comes back to collect the money.

Who me ?
Would I do a thing like that ?
{snigger}

Anyhoo, one of the entire old newspapers in the pack is the Daily Express from Saturday Nov 23rd 1963, the day after President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas,and I suddenly realised why I had bought this pack of old newspapers a few years ago.

Its because I remember our mum reading from that very issue.

I was seven years old, Ned was five and as our dad worked on a Saturday we would both go and snuggle up in our parents bed after he'd gone, and I remember that morning as clear as if it were yesterday, my mum sitting up in bed, me and Ned lying alongside her, probably fighting, she's drinking a cup of tea, opens up the newspaper and starts to cry. I ask why she's crying and her only words are, "they've killed him".

Why did she say "they ?".

Even on this side of the atlantic the man was held in great affection and just eighteen years after the end of a war that had brought this country to its knees we still relied heavily upon the USA for financial backing, their problems were our problems, President Kennedy's assassination was received with just as much shock as if it had been our Queen.

And thats all I remember about it.


The rest of the Daily Express is hilarious though.

My dad used to get the paper every day and I all but learned how to read from the Daily Express but I'd forgotten all about those little two inch square adverts, all in black and white of course, that take up most of the advertising pages

Binocular vision spectacles, a must for horse racing and theatre go-ers, two and half times magnification - you know apart from the fact that they make you look like some sort of pervert I can't understand why these never took off.

Womens corsets, dozens of adverts for womens corsets with the genius of criss-cross design, keep a hand on those hips ladies - they look very comfortable too, I can't imagine why they went out of fashion, I'd wear one, my hips are way out of control now.

Raincoats, hundreds of adverts for raincoats, government surplus gaberdine raincoats, American army combat raincoats, Royal Air Force stormcoats, duffle coats, Alpine Samoraks (whatever they were).

Cosijamas, new no cord technology, no riding up no buttons, suitable for women too.

A metal ironing board which was "an ideal xmas present" (I can just imagine Suzannes reaction if I bought her an ironing board for xmas)

Shackletons High Seat chairs, no-one in the UK will need an explanation of what a Shackeltons chair is, but they also made Shackletons High Seat Comodes too, for just £5.12.6 you can have a shit while you watch tv with the family - why are these no longer available ? I may ask Shackletons, they are customers of ours.

Its full of adverts is my Daily Express, some of them so small that you'd need to buy the binocular specs first to be able to read them, I've just seen one line right at the bottom of one of the pages advertising "telescope and stand £4.4.0, free trial" they were a trusting lot in those days weren't they ?


An ironing board as a present for the wife, its got me thinking seriously now.
It would be better than the keyring I bought her one year anyway.

Wanted - 300 cubits of wood

Yesterday it lashed it down all over the country, just as it lashed it down all last week too.

Three people died in the floods in south and east yorkshire and last night thousands of home owners will have spent a sweaty night wondering if they really did renew their home insurance.

We're lucky in that we live on the highest hill in Leeds although just 200 yards or so away, right on top of the hill is a rather large water tower and pumping station with a huge underground reservoir to serve the whole of this end of Leeds, if that ever bursts then our street will soon be at the bottom of the hill, indeed when my pond collapsed a couple of months ago it panicked the neighbours further down the road into climbing onto their roofs and laying out banners on the tiles for the rescue helicopters that read "save us first please".

Leeds is placed right in the middle of the country so the river that runs through our city, the Aire, is not of estuary proportions, not normally its not, last night it was though and the owners of the luxury riverside apartment buildings around the Brewery Wharf will be visiting their underground garages this morning and wondering why there is so much mud around and where is the BMW, in fact where is everyone's BMW ?

Parts of the city centre were evacuated last night and the railway station closed as it too borders the river and all routes south were cut off, there are still no trains to the south of the city this morning.

More importantly my above ground pond is now full to the brim and in my new design calculation I never allowed for the fact that it might be so full. The fish are now able to peek over the top of the rim and call to each other, "look everyone, people, over there, people", I just hope they don't get any crazy ideas about evolving quickly into air breathing creatures as one of their kind did a couple of months ago, he didn't evolve quick enough once out of the water and lasted for about two hours on the lawn before a magpie took him away.

This morning started off sunny and bright but its clouding over again and whilst I'm now in the office, if it starts to rain anymore I may go back to the house on the hill where it will at least be safe from floods until the water tower topples over, then we're all fooked.

History

Today is the 131st anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as the native americans called it, The Battle of the Slippery Grass, those native americans always did need a good marketing man behind their battle names though.

I love reading historical accounts like this, it actually interests me now and I was surprised to read in that account that Errol Flynn doesn't get a mention what with it being well known that he was in fact General Custer, the phrase "They Died With Their Boots On" doesn't appear anywhere in that account either, what a load of rubbish history lessons are.

But history lessons were never more boring than when you had Pussy McNeil as your history teacher.

O Level history in 1973 consisted of a list of kings and queens of england and the dates of their reign - and thats about it.

So for five years of high school education Pussy McNeil took us twice a week for a session of reciting kings names and the dates of their reign, and thats about it.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Pussy McNeil was an entertaining sort of teacher, a teacher who put his heart and soul into his subject, someone who's lessons you looked forward to all week, a mentor who would instill a love of history into each and every boy who appeared before him in his classes, a teacher who could change lives.

He wasn't one of those.

Pussy McNeil was a short fat old man in a shabby suit, balding, a permanent sweating brow, thick black rimmed glasses and a short temper for boys who could not remember the dates of the reign of a particular king or queen of england two minutes after he'd just randomly reeled it off.

He was also increasingly senile.

We would often turn up for one of his classes to find that he didn't turn up and soon realised that if we caused a riot in the classroom then it wouldn't be too long before another teacher came to see what the commotion was all about and send Asquith (who always sat next to the classroom door - we all had to sit in alphabetical order at all times) tot he staff room to remind Pussy McNeil that he had a class to teach. The plane of action quickly turned to "not cause a riot" whenever Pussy McNeil didn't turn up but to sit around, talk, throw paper darts, quietly beat up the class punchbag, do anything but do it quietly and in this manner we often spent whole history lessons not doing histroy, and Pussy McNeil was never any the wiser.

He also sometimes turned up but left halfway through lessons, on several occasions he would be doing his usual walking back and forth in front of the class, droning on, reading from a list of kings and queens reign dates when he would without warning walk straight out of the door and bugger off to the staffroom, leaving us to quietly riot again for the rest of the lesson.

On one occasion when he hadn't turned up we were quietly rioting as per the class rulebook when the stationary cupboard door in the corner of the room opened and out stepped Pussy McNeil having locked himself in there for several hours, the bloke was a nut, a first class old git and a nut.

Completely destroyed any passion that I may have had for history, I failed my O level of course, as we all did.

I love history now though.

Sundays...

Today I am supposed to be repairing and then painting our garage doors and indeed yesterday got one of them all newly clad and ready for paint, this morning was halfway through the second door when the rain started, just a gentle rain but its half the excuse that I need and tools have been downed, coffee brewed and now I sit looking out of the window typing this, listening to Springsteen "Tom Joad" album and imagining that its still raining outside, I think it is, I hope it is, it certainly looks wet-ish, I may get a full days reprieve from joinery work if I'm lucky.

T'wasn't aways so.

In my youth the Sunday routine was well ordered and unaltered for years.

My gang of friends had a football team based at our local pub The Fox, they played in the Leeds Sunday league and so very early, stupid o'clock every Sunday morning they would gather in their cars outside the Co-op on Green Lane and drive off in the rain to their destination municipal playing field to kick shit out of another team for 90 minutes in the game called nancy-ball by us rugby league followers.

Me, I was wiser than they.

Saturday night out entailed an endless cycle of beer, laughter, cigarettes, dirve to another pub, beer laughter, cigarettes, drive to another pub, beer laughter...well you get the idea.

Saturday night culminated in a five mile dash to Otley, a nearby market town where the pubs stayed open a half hour longer than Leeds and we could grab another two rounds, laughter, cigarettes...and a fish and chip supper on the way home.

Yes of course we all drove home drunk, it was safer that way when everyone on the roads was drunk, (including the police), drive sober amongst drunks and you are the danger - its not like that now.

How they all managed to crawl out of their beds at stupid o'clock on a Sunday and play football is beyond me and they all tell tales of several players coughing up last nights beer and fish & chips on the touchline five minutes after kickoff (referee included), but me being the sensible one I could stay in my bed on Sunday morning until the hangover dissapated and noon drew close.

Licensing laws in the 1970's were strict, Sunday opening was from noon to 2pm only, two hours only, and so not a minute was wasted - I would be stood outside the back door to The Fox every Sunday at 11.59am waiting for Norman the landlord to open, served and seated by 12.01pm the football team would arrive hotfoot from the game often still clad in muddy shorts and shirts, football boots abandoned in the porch at the back door, the tap room would fill to bursting by 12.05pm and much beer and revelment would ensue.

I loved those Sunday dinnertime sessions especially on cold wet winter Sundays when the coal fire in the tap room would fill the room with steam from the wet clothing and the volume of conversation and laughter would rise to ear-hurting levels until at 2pm sharp Norman would ring the bell and call last orders.

After several pints within the allotted two hour spell we'd rise from our seats and drive home (for ten minutes at 2pm every Sunday everyone on the roads would be drunk again, the drink-drive rule applied once more, the sober ones were dangerous), drive home to our mothers Sunday dinner.

My dad would arrive home, drunk, from the golf club and my brother would arrive home, drunk, from the pub where he hung out with his friends and the three of us would sit quietly in the front room, steaming, around the dining table waiting for our mum to serve our Sunday dinner, whilst in houses all over the country the same routine was being played out - thus was life on a Sunday in Great Britain.

Our mothers Sunday dinner was always the same, slices of beef, yorkshire puddings (of course) mashed potatoes, two or three veg, thick onion gravy and pan-roasted quartered potatoes that would either be soft or rock hard depending on how late one or all of us menfolk would be in returning from the various pubs, there was only one rule to sunday dinner, it didn't start until all of us were home and the last one in would suffer berating from the others even though the last one in would invariably be the drunkest and care not one jot.

Nothing tasted quite like those Sunday dinners, all with an underlying flavour of Tetleys Bitter - I've tried the Sunday dinners that they serve in pubs these days, served up by professional chefs, but they just don't even come close.

Today I may have a sandwich, or nothing at all, but to para-phrase a line from Steve Goodman's "My Old Man" - I'd give everything I own to eat one of those Sunday dinners again.

Disco Dancing, and its effects on the male...

Disco dancing
Why do I loath thee so ?

I have a motto which lends a little to a disco song that has led (so far) to a fulfiling life, "don't drink, don't smoke, don't dance, I'm gonna live forever".

Ok, so I now partake of alcohol from time to time again, man cannot live by bread alone, but the other two rules have stood steadfast throughout my life and served me well.

Way, way, way back in the late 1960's our year at the all male high school discovered that we had two dancers in our midst and boy did they get bullied, as the natural law of the all male high school dictates.

Paul Platts was an 11 year old ballroom dancing champion when he stupidly confessed his secret to someone in the playground one dinnertime, fortunately he would have been bullied anyway, he had that sort of face that made you want to hit him so he never blamed the ballroom dancing on his ever present bruising, but even if he didn't realise it, ballroom dancing didn't help his case.

Winker Watkins was the other, I know not his first name, no-one ever asked him for the information, suffice to say that he was an Art Garfunkel look-a-likey, even had the voice so was instantly labelled as a puff, but when he mistakedly let slip one dinnertime in the playground that he was also a ballet dancer his fate was sealed. Not one break session elasped without someone punching him hard and long enough to make him pas de deux and often a huge circle would form in the yard with hundreds of boys, and some of the teachers too, clapping and chanting for him to twirl faster and jump higher in a Billy Eliot-esque demonstration of his girlie talent, then someone would trip him up and we'd all give him a good kicking, teachers joining in at the end.

I like to think that he is now a world famous ballet dancer earning millions and looking back on his time at our high school as a rite of passage to future wealth but the truth is that he probably committed suicide early in life.

Such are the dangers of being a dancing male.

Men don't dance, it is written.

The rule is that simple and yet all through my youth the pressure was on to disco dance in order to attract a member of the female species to your side so that you could "walk out" with her, buy her drinks all night, disco dance some more (for females will not end the evening without a disco dance) take her home on the bus, pay her bus fare, walk her home, and then if you were lucky recieve a peck on the cheek, leaving you stood outside her gate, skint, with your a'mour rapidly deflating, wondering what the lads were doing now.

At least disco dancing was easy to do - at first. John Travolta spoiled it all, the bastard, by introducing set moves and pieces that any self respecting male out on a totty hunt had to perform on the dance floor, what an utter bastard.

Before then you could simply pose on the dance floor to a Barry White song, eyelids slightly lowered, feet planted firmly on the dancefloor, only one foot was required to move at any given random time, shuffle it forward a few inches, point the toes, shuffle it back, whilst arms were raised to waist height, elbows pinned to the waist, forearms flapping gently from side to side, fingers clicking in a rough estimation of the beat, all the movement being generated from the twenty degree left to right and back again waist swivel and occasionally to top off the disco dance and impress your lady, a toss of the head to flick your flowing locks from your face in the same way that Peter Gordeno had done that same evening on the Cilla Black show.

All my efforts at disco dancing were wasted for I am made of disparate parts that function perfectly well for doing human things like walking, feeding and blowing of nose, but when instructed to disco dance behave as if the seperate parts had never met each other, the disco beat can be anything, the disco beat is irrelevant when I disco dance for the disparate parts move independant of the music and of me.

Frankly, I dance as if I'm having a seizure and often paramedics are called to put an end to it.

I have never attracted females on the dance floor, many have fled, but none have stepped forward to join in the "fitting dance" as myself and my friends called it.

Disco dancing was, and still is a chore to most males, we prefer to stand around at weddings etc in small manly groups drinking beer, talking football, talking anything to avoid the disco dance floor, we let the females and the homosexual men disco dance with each other all night until the DJ announces that he's locking up and going home in five minutes at which point, drunk and incapable, husbands are dragged from all parts of the room by their wives, and by some of the homosexual men too, to fit and spasm for the last disco dance and the smoochie - its at this point that my life-long rescue plan kicks into place - I go to the toilet for ten minutes leaving Suzanne to find a suitable homosexual male partner to finish the night with a flourish of nylon and nail polish.

It works every time, has done for 30 years.

Another one from the "I like this" bin

Why can't everything be so simple again ?

Why can't us menfolk simply wash our locks of hair, put on a pair of trousers that fasten up somewhere underneath our nipples ("what size chest are those trousers then ?") sling on a black polo neck and go out "birding" to a nightclub where dollybirds will be impressd if you can plant both feet firmly on the dance floor, raise both arms to chest height and sway from side to side (in time to the music not being compulsory), clicking the fingers of both hands as you do so - said dollybird being well impressed with your dance technique.

It was that bastard John Travolta and his daft dancing films that spoilt it for us lads, white suits and disco dancing, pah ! bloody ridiculous.

The Kinks, "lola", 1970.

Halcyon years.

How to grow your own drugs...

If the title of this passage and its labels doesn't get me arrested then I don't know what will, well actually as my friend is a serving police officer, I do, but still...

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, about 1982 actually, I was living in a small flat in a small village in the far north east of this dear country of ours, when I say it was a small flat I mean that I had a double bed that left only one inch of clearance in which to move down the room, and when I erected a christmas tree in the living room at christmas (of course, I am not that stupid), then I couldn't see the tv set around it, I spent the christmas season watching tv through a tree.

Anyhoo, my only ornament in the flat was a big green bottle garden.

Of course you remember bottle gardens, they were de riguer in the 1970's, so de riguer that my mother had bought this one and then passed it on to me when she bored of it, it sat on my fire hearth and grew foreign plants inside its green glass encave until one day they all died, watering may have been the cause, a lack of it of course, and I couldn't be arsed to buy new plants to put in it.

I was being courted by the woman who later tells me that she legally attached herself to my bank account by means of marriage (I remember nought) and as usual she was around at my flat pestering the life out of me one day (twas always thus) when she spotted the empty bottle garden and claimed it for her own mothers house.

Her family lived in the same small mining village, so small was it that everyone knew everyone else, everyone spaketh to each other, everyone was dirt poor in the pit village and proud of it so a bottle green bottle garden was somewhat burgeois and a thing to show off and if I wouldn't plant it then she and her sister would and they'd show it off in their front window.

And they did.

And then their plants died too, well, dandelions will die inside a bottle garden inside a front window, the heat inside the bottle garden must have touched egg-frying proportions some days.

And it was on one day when the bottle garden stood in their mothers bay window, empty and bereft of plants when their uncle walked in the front door - that was another thing about their village, everyone just walked in your house, knocking on the door was snobbish and unheard of,they just walked in, talked endlessly all afternoon, ate your home cooking and then left, such is life in a small pit village.

So Uncle Jon-ner walks in, why they called him Jon-ner I do not know, it was the name that he answered to is the most likely answer, an old uncle who had been invalided out of the pit at a young age and now suffered from dodgy legs and completely knackered lungs, knackered by fumes from an underground fire one day at the pit when one of their machines had gone up in flames and nearly taken him with it.

So he'd been retired for ever, lived alone in a pit cottage that was his rent paid for life as part of his pay-off, he spent his days wandering the village talking to anyone, tending his allotment (his onions and leaks were things of wonder), and as is the want of all pitmen, keeping caged bords (or as the rest of country say, birds).

As he wandered in the house he spotted the empty bottle garden and, as I was also sat in the mother-in-law's living room I actually saw him do this, he dipped his hand in his scruffy jacket pocket, drew forth a handfull of bord seed and threw it in the bottle garden, nothing more was said, he looked not at me and simply wandered off again.

A few weeks later we spotted green shoots emerging from the compost in the bottle garden, the wife-to-be and her sister were delighted, it was their precious tending of the bottle garden they explained, their green fingers that had coaxed life out of the barren bottle garden and they continued to water the fledgling plants until some of them were large and hairy and starting to poke out of the top of the bottle garden and showing no signs of stopping.

That weekend the family were gathered in the mother-in-laws living room gossiping, for that is what everyone in the village was good at, and the gathered throng included Jon-ner who, like myself, sat there and said nought for our opinions were worthless in the room full of women.

Until the wife-to-be and her sister happened to mention their beautiful bottle garden and its collection of wierd plants that even now were thrusting through the bottle lid towards the ceiling, spreading a strange musty smell around the room as they did so - everyone in the room admired them.

Except Jon-ner, he just laughed.

The women folk turned on him and asked of why he was laughing so heartily and challenged him to produce such beautiful and strange plants on his allotment with the same level of success that the wife-to-be and her sister had.

He admitted that he wouldn't be able to acheive the same level of success on his allotment as hemp plants needed heat and light to grow to such good proportions - I started laughing then.

Still the womenfolk were bemused and requested of me why my laughter.

"Cannabis" I answered, "you and your sister are growing cannabis in your mothers living room"

Jon-ner confirmed that indeed it was a well known fact that his bord seed contained hemp and in the corner of the room grew a wonderful example of the plant, the mother-in-law-to-be, the wife-to-be and her sister went absolutely ape-shit and somewhow I got to take some of the flak, maybe because I couldn't stop laughing at their panic especially when they tried to burn one of the plants on the open coal fire and Jon-ner pulled up his seat and asked if he could have a roll-up from the debris.


And it was Jon-ner who got me into trouble again on another occasion.

We purchased, for the better elegance of my flat, a large and old chinese bamboo bird, sorry, bord cage from a junk shop, hung it in my living room and stuck a plant inside it, very Jasper Conran.

As it was soon my birthday (or borthday) and as Jon-ner was permenantly skint for the National Coal Board were not reknown for generous pensions, he walked into my flat one day, unannounced as usual, walked over to the bordcage, put something inside it then walked out again, wishing me a happy borthday on the way out.

I took a look inside the bordcage, and found the pitmans friend - a canary.

It drove us fucking mental for months.

It was a beautiful canary its true, pure yellow, a vivid, brilliant yellow and as it was a cock bord it sang for a mate.

It sang from sun-up to sun-down.

It sang with the shrill-est voice you have ever heard, shrill enough to hurt your ears, up and down the scales it trilled for hour after hour, singing, singing, singing until you started to hallucinate, the singing was so loud that we couldn't talk in the flat and had to stand out on the balcony to converse until we realised that the balcony was the best place for the canary and I took to hanging his cage out there at 6am every morning bringing it back in around midnight - it just made the situation worse because now the canary could see other bords in the trees and just sung harder for their future affections.

We threw things at the cage and he'd stop for 30 seconds then when he thought the coast was clear he'd start again, neighbours came around to complain and I had to stop leaving him on the balcony, we'd cover the cage up with a blanket to fool him into thinking it was night-time but he'd always find a crack of light creeping through a creas somewhere and he'd stick his beak through that and sing again, we stopped feeding him but he wouldn't die, I didn't think that something so small and insignificant as a tiny little songbird could set your nerves so close to the edge that you considered suicide, but believe me, it can.

Jon-ner was consulted at length and he decided that a female canary would stop the singing and so one day and without prior arrangement Jon-ner arrived, walked in the flat, opened the cage, took something from his pocket , placed it in the cage and walked out without sayong anything this time.

The singing stopped.

The two bords spent the next two weeks staring at each other from opposite ends of the cage, just staring.

And then one evening as we sat watching The Rockford Files on tv world war three broke out in our antique chinese bamboo cage.

It lasted but a few seconds, a few seconds of fury and yellow feathers galore and when it went silent again two dead canaries lay in the bottom of the cage.

We later consulted Jon-ner who removed the bodies for a post mortem at his allotment with his pitman friends and he returned and confirmed that the second canary was also a cock bord and if theres one thing that cock bord canaries hate more than anything its another fooking cock bord canary trying to mount them one night.

We told him that we required no more canaries thank you so in future he only brought onions and leaks around to the flat.

A connected stream of thought, on circus's

This is how it works when you're stood in front of the mirror every morning shaving the face that you've been looking at for the last fifty years and a chain of previously unrelated thoughts spews forth from your brain leaving you chuckling at yourself like an imbecile.

Or at least it does for me.

It started earlier when a piece of journalism on Radio Leeds spaketh of Pablo Fanques, they were a bit late as I'd covered Mr Fanques and his connection to Leeds some weeks ago, so if the researcher who works on the Breakfast Show will put their hand up then I'll start giving them free previews.

A little later I'm stood in front of the shaving mirror and I'm remembering the story that my dad used to tell me when I was a kid about how every year when Billy Smarts Circus came to Leeds he had to visit them to set their time clock, yes even Billy Smarts employees had to "clock on".

On one occasion he was met at the gate by the man who looked after the elephants and per chance he just happened to have an elephant walking obediently behind him.

As my dad bent down to pick his toolbox up the man told him to leave it and instructed the elephant to pick it up, it did so with its trunk and my dad had a new apprentice, it followed him one pace behind swinging the heavy toolbox from one side to the other and then placing it ever so gently on the ground behind my dad when they reached the clock. While the toolbox was open the elephant amused itself by picking up various hammers and screwdrivers until it was time for my dad to leave and they bid a tearful farewell at the gate and I often wondered if the elephant repaired the clock from that point on.

And before that stream of thought had disappeared another one popped up - Charlie Carolli.

Everyone of a certain age will remember Charlie Carolli the blackpool clown who was never off the tv in the 1960's and 70's together with his tall, skinny, gormless fall guy who would simply stand there with a "not at home" open mouthed blank look on his face while Charlie poured wallpaper paste down inside his trousers, but it wasn't Charlie Carolli or his gormless fall guy who caused the memory sidetrack but the ring master.

It was always the same ringmaster in the Charlie Carolli TV shows and he was always struggling to stop Charlie from making a mess or getting him to finish the wallpapering job that he'd instructed him to carry out week after week, but when Charlie Carolli had left the ring the ring master brought out his star act - the performing budgies.

Yes we used to watch this crap every week.

And while my mind wandered off towards the performing budgies I recalled that the ring master had recently appeared on a tv chat show, aged about 105 and still working with his fekking performing budgies, thats one hell of a CV -

"What do you do then ?"
"I work with performing budgies"
"Oh"

And then in one final leap of memory flashbacks the budgies linked me to Billy Butlin.

Billy Butlin, the father of the British holiday camp, the man who rather obviously gave his name to "Butlins" started off his working life on a fairground hoop-la stall, but the 16 year old Billy Butlin soon realised that the other fairground folk were defrauding the public by making the hoops too small to go over the prize blocks so that no-one would ever win anything - the legend goes that Butlin made his blocks smaller so that folk could win and despite ostracise-ation from the fairground folk his stall, unsuprisingly, became ultra-popular.

A few months later after being evicted from the traveling fair for being fair, Butlin set up a hoop-la stall outside a circus tent giving away goldfish as prizes until one day his normal pet shop supplier of goldfish had run out - so he bought a load of budgies instead.

Its nothing of a story really but as I finished my morning ablutions I was left with this image of two or three hundred people sat in a circus tent all holding their arms at chest height, index finger extended, with a budgie sitting on each one, cursing the moment that they decided to have a go at the hoop-la while waiting to go into the circus, all it would take is a backfire from the clowns car to have two hundred budgies take to the air in fright inside the big top and the rest of the evening be spent in chaos as people clambered all over the back of the seating waving cuttlefish and millet in the air trying to get their particular budgie back, maybe eventually sending the tightrope walker up into the eaves to bring down the most scared of the small but colourful australian caged birds.

Ho-hum, I bet Tony Blair thinks of far more important things when he's shaving every morning.
Or maybe not.

The biggest scaredy-dog in the world

We were promised thunderstorms in the north yesterday and around 10pm we got a few rumbles but nothing much.

These few rumbles however were enough to have Jake the scared-iest Golden Retriever in the world running upstairs for our bedroom - he is not allowed upstairs, has never been allowed upstairs in the house and knows it, will not put one paw on the bottom step under normal circumstances - thunder and bonfire night cancel out all of those good intentions though.

We dragged him back downstairs and the thunder went away.

Then at 3am this morning we had the mother of all thunderstorms, bright as daylight outside with constant lightning and some hellish cracks of thunder for about half an hour.

I heard a scuffle on my side of the bed and there was Jake trying to crawl underneath it, shivering and a-shaking in fear he was, poor lad - we left him there until this morning.

On a positive note its his abject fear of bangs that brought him to us eight years ago, we were looking for a soft dog after having had a bad experience with our second German Shepherd (she was a nut) and in the local newspaper I spotted an advert for a small litter of Golden Retrievers, rang them and found that they weren't so local after all but in fact lived way up in North Yorkshire.

Traveled up there with the two girls the next day and searched around on a moorside for a long time until we found the gamekeepers cottage on a large country estate where the twelve week old Jake and three of his sisters lived, the rest of the pups having been taken already for training.

The guy who had bred them was a genuine gamekeeper on the estate and bred his Labradors and Retrievers for gun work, he showed us Jakes pedigree and its pretty impressive, there is not one generation in his family that hasn't been a champion gun dog including his father who lived in the local village, what a disappointment Jake must have been to them as a young pup when all of the ten strong litter were taken out into the field behind their house and a gun fired in the air to see how they'd react - Jake was back in his kennel before the "g" in "bang".

The only inbred characteristic that he has for being a gun dog is his universal refusal to bark, several barking gun dogs are absolutely no use to a gamekeeper when he is out on the moors searching for game birds and so the bloodline is kept tightly controlled and the barking gene is weak, Jake can bark but only does so once or twice a year and he scares the hell out of us when he does so - it usually means he's seen food and we've ignored his pleas for a couple of hours, he's a very patient dog.

So we have a very friendly (he smiled at our burglar and didn't bother to bark a few years ago) but also scaredy-dog in the family, completely useless at anything except for providing complete, unrelenting and unconditional love, although I suspect that he'd do the same to any other family who would feed him.

Holiday Insurance

As well as providing most of the spending money (read booze) for my 18 year old daughters Ibiza holiday I seem to have been conned into paying for her holiday insurance too.


And, come to think of it, her boyfriends holiday insurance as well.

Once again on t'interweb last night to find out how much insurance would cost for two 18 year olds who will be sleeping all day and boozing all night in the holiday hell-hole that is San Antonio (hell for me, heaven for them) and from there its just a short step from "where's your credit card dad can you buy it for us"

Or rather it wasn't her it was Suzanne with "she's not leaving this country without insurance" and despite my protestations that it was all a worthless piece of paper and they never pay out anyway, I had to do it.

So for £10.50 we got £10million pounds worth of health insurance and numerous other fictional benefits which will all have tiny small print attached to them so that if you do claim they will easily decline the opportunity to hand £10million across the counter to you by simply pointing to a clause that you hadn't noticed.

Sounds like I have experience of this doesn't it ?

You'd be right.

12 or so years ago my dad was living in Benidorm and bombarding us with requests to fly out there with his two small grand-daughters for a holiday, we resisted up until the point where he paid for the flights and accomodation but with two weeks to departure the dodgy but cheap airline that he'd booked us on went out of business.

Not to worry he says, I purchased some travel insurance and the airline was a member of ABTA, we'll get our money back and book you onto another flight in a few weeks time.

Wrong.

Actually he was correct, he had purchased insurance and the airline was a member of ABTA and according to all the guff they give you in the travel agents "your money is safe with us", it was safe with them, so safe that they didn't want to let it go.

A Swiss company was handling the liquidation of the airline for some strange reason and so all correspondence (no email in those days) was via air mail with seemingly a several week delay - their first correspondence with us started off with the warning that we only had three months in which to register our claim and that there was no automatic payout of insurance or refunds on tickets until they were satisfied that we had been a customer.

Very easy to prove thought I, we had the airline tickets in our hands as they had arrived on the same day that they went bust and as everyone knows, you never get the airline tickets until you're fully paid up and ready to go.

Not good enough the Swiss company said several weeks later, you need to prove that you paid for those tickets, and by the way, you now have only eight weeks in which to submit your claim.

OK thought I, still quite easy, we'll get my dads credit card statement, rang him in Benidorm, he posted the statement and we forwarded it on.

Not good enough the Swiss company said several weeks later, you need to prove that your travel agent actually forwarded on the money to the airline, and by the way, you now have only five weeks in which to submit your claim.

OK thought I, not quite so easy, so I went to the travel agents and asked for proof that they'd accepted my dads credit card and then paid the airline with his money, suprisingly they gave me a copy of their bank statement to show that they had done precisely that.

Not good enough the Swiss company said several weeks later, because, erm, we'll think of a reason later, and by the way, you now have just seven days to submit your claim.

Time for an arse kicking letter thought I, time to threaten them, I love writing threatening letters, I should have been a kidnapper. I wrote my letter, told them what a load of shits they were, told them to shove their self-imposed deadline up their arse and probably reminded them that they were too chicken to get involved in the war just for good measure.

They paid up a week later with no further explanation, it was probably the reference to the war that did it, it works every time with foreigners.

Proper holidays

Its the time of year when thoughts turn to the summer holidays and whether or not our decision, made some time ago, that we weren't going to take one this year, was wise or not.

Eldest daughter is going to Ibiza with her boyfriend next week and so I'm been milked of £300 this morning for some spending money for her, no, I don't know what the fekk her holiday has to do with me anymore but apparently it is incumbent on me to foot the bill for her seven days worth of cheap booze.

And so the remaining daughter and the one who swears that I did betroth myself to her (I remember nought) have started the nagging campaign for us to go somewhere in August, me, I'm not bothered.

Last year, as with several previous years before it, we went to Menorca and spent in excess of £5000 in two weeks for the pleasure of doing so, this year the budget is lower, much lower.

So I started browsing t'interweb and as we have some elderly ex-neighbours who now live in Cornwall and who Suzanne still treats as if they were her own parents I thought it would be nice to pay a visit to the county of my childhood holidays.

Actually spent some considerable time on t'interweb this weekend and tracked down two excellent looking small hotels, neither of which had availability in August of course, for sensible people will be booking their 2008 holidays by now, but I went ahead anyway and pretended that they had just to see how much it would cost the three of us.

£1050 is the answer for two double rooms for a week and I didn't bother to check the single room supplement so you could probably add another 50% onto that figure - that gets us bed and breakfast in a small hotel, its a very nice small hotel admittedly but I dread to think what my father would have said all those years ago when he was booking our family holidays in Cornwall if they'd asked for a grand off him - his house didn't cost much more than that.

The hotel in question has a "green" policy and they encourage guests to travel by train to Penzance, it cleverly disguises the fact that they have 14 bedrooms and only three parking spaces, but still, we should all do our bit, and so with heart in mouth I visited the Network Rail web site for train fares to Penzance in August.

Last year I discovered just how much of a secret rail travel is in this country and how the train companies don't really like telling you whether or not they run services to your destination on your chosen dates, or indeed any dates at all and if you do manage to extract such information out of them then getting them to tell you how much it will cost is like pulling teeth.

I typed in a fictitious date in august, not that I made it up or anything, the date was genuine, its just that we wouldn't actually be traveling on that date as the hotel had no availability, but you know what I mean - on the date chosen Network Rail found trains that would eventually get me to Penzance from Leeds even though here were no direct ones (yes I know it was a bit optimistic expecting one to go all the way without stopping).

The likeliest train left Leeds at 9.10am and with only one change to make, arrived in Penzance at 17.20pm, an eight hour journey. The last time that I ventured as far south as nearly into Cornwall was when I drove to Plymouth three years ago and that trip took me five hours including two stops for tea and a wee, so curious I was as to why the high speed inter city express would take eight hours to make a just a bit further journey I clicked on the booking form to see how long the change of trains in the middle was.

Stupid me, they wouldn't tell me, they wouldn't even tell me where the change was to be made, after all what business was it of mine, the customer.

Click on I thought, and check the price - a snip at £175 each, each way.

Well thats not exactly true, there were fifteen different prices to choose from, starting at £22 each and rising to £175 with no apparent reason why, they were all on the same train on the same journey but they all had different names and different rules as to when to pay and how to pay and whether or not you had a seat or had to stand in the guards van or even follow the main train behind on one of those open wagon things where two of you pump a lever up and down to make it go.

Booking trains was as complicated as I remembered it to be and after ten minutes and a shopping basket of £1050 I abandoned the idea, a grands worth of diesel for the car would get me a lot further than Penzance and back, its not very green I know but I'd rather drive and then buy a tree to save the world.

Finally, and just for a laugh I looked at the hotel where I'd really like to stay and priced up a week in august in a sea front suite for the three of us, that will be just £2800 please sir they said.

My dad would have had a fit.

Excuse me, I must groom...

Its this article that got me remembering...

I had the piss taken out of me at the recent wedding in Lincolnshire of Andy the vulnerable ex-bachelor, piss taken by my closest male friends, because my wife mentioned in passing, whilst we were all intoxicated in a pub, that I used Nivea for Men after shave balm.

I don't use it that often, in fact its a very small bottle and I've had it for about three years now so its effects (if it ever had any) are probably negligable by now, but still I freely admit to owning some Nivea for Men and I had taken it to the wedding, if only to impress the room maid in the hotel, and yes, I did rub some on on the wedding day.

Result was my closest male friends approaching me all day, brushing my jawline with the backs of their hands and declaring that my skin was silky smooth darling and how did I get that marvellous baby's bottom complexion after shaving ?

"Nivea for Men" I would tell them, "Its wonderful" and I would give them a dazzling Colgates smile and tell them to piss off and annoy someone else.

So why are men so bashfull about their grooming habits, why would I have to wear one of those joke spectacles/false nos/false moustache Groucho Marx stylee masks if I dared to venture anywhere near a salon that did mens treatments (if I could find one), why do I always feel furtive when browsing the miniscule mens grooming products shelf (singular shelf) in Debenhams ?

Having very little hair to speak of, ok having no hair to speak of, and that which I speak of usually being cropped right down to 1mm, I have no need for shampoo, conditioner, or any other chemical assistance in order to make the top of my head look good, I stick it under the shower every morning and don't even have to bother drying it - ladies all over the land are reading this now and feeling insanely jealous, its why I am usually ready to go out four hours and twenty minutes before any female in my house.

But having decided to forego the luxury of hair on the top of my head, my brain decided some time ago that it would be a good idea to grow hair elsewhere by way of compensation, yes ladies I'm talking ears and back now.

My uncle has the hairiest ears in the western world, in fact he no longer has ears, he just has two furry lumps at the side of his head rather like Buster the Bear, its unbelieveable that he hasn't noticed by now, its rather less unbelieveable that he is nearly deaf, theres nothing wrong with his ears its just that he listens to you from behind a fur blanket.

I live in fear of having furry ears like my Uncle Ken and so I shave them every day during my normal chin shaving regime and using a "proper" blade razor I sometimes cut them too as blade razors weren't really designed for ear shaving, you can sometimes see people staring at your ears and wondering "how did he cut his ear like that ?" but let them wonder, its that or the Buster the Bear look, I reckon it would take about three weeks for me to match up to my Uncle Ken if i didn't shave them.

Eyebrows get shaved every seven days or so I go blind otherwise, I don't mean that they get shaved off but they have to be trimmed when I can see them in my peripheral view, and by the way, I have been told by women since childhood that I have eyelashes to die for darling but thankfully they need no grooming care.

Nose hair is another thing, if left I would have an impressive ZZ Top stylee beard by now, all of it eminating from my nose, so every fourteen days or so the stuff is harvested by means of grabbing and wrenching, so much more satisfying than trimming with poncy nasal scissors, real men wrnech their hair out and theres no better feeling than howking a really long one out by its root, especially if its white, for some reason lots of my nasal hairs are now white, its weird.

And finally, if left unattended I would not be in need of a winter coat this year thanks to the prolific growth of hair on my back and arms, silver back gorillas in zoos have been known to step down from their tyres-on-a-rope and come to the front of their cage to stare in admiration at my testosterone fuelled coat of natural man-wool but I admit to shaving where I can reach every three months or so and then getting the woman who informs that she was betrothed to me in 1983 via an act of trickery ( I rememer nought) to finsh off the hard to reach bits and when she refuses I simply wear it in a mohican stylee down my back until she relents - I did once try to wax but people in the far North of Scotland wrote to me in complaint at the high pitched screaming noise that issued forth for most of the rest of the day and dogs in Egypt were said to cock their heads to one side listening intently for the next instruction.

So what do I need male grooming products for ?

The Times article mentioned seems to think that I have a fair sized wad of cash ready and willing to pour forth into bottles and tubes of nonsense that will make me somehow more attractive to the female species, well, I have two main issues with that objective.

One is that I have no desire to be more attractive to the female species, I already have three females in my house, two of whom may leave the premises in the next ten years or so but the older one tells me she's here to stay and that I must continue to keep her in the manner in which she has become accustomed until the day I fall off my perch and the insurance policy (which I have to pay for) takes over.

The other is that it is just, well, just, erm, lets not dilly-dally here, lets not shilly-shally with words here, purchasing and then applying magic balms and potions for your average male is just so...gay.

Yes I know I admitted to owning some Nivea for Men right at the start of this and yes, maybe I've just admitted to being a little fey but I assure you that my wrist is not very limp when I apply it to the chin parts.

Yes I like the smell of it and yes I did read The Times article and wonder which potions I should purchase next and yes I've found somewhere where you can buy them online and yes I might just do that, so yes, I may just be "on the turn" - but I do not want to turn out like that man on the Grecian 2000 advert, I like my silver hair, its distinguished and when shaven close to the head looks blonde, looks like I've had highlights done, I like the effect - and I certainly do not want to turn out loking like David Guest who resembles something made on a production line with a shift change inbetween and no proper handover instructions left for the incoming assembly workers.

So I don't want jet black hair, I do not need anything at all with regards hair, I do not want rid of wrinkles for on men they are stately, I do not want fuller lips, or prominent cheekbones, do not require anything engorging or reducing, don't require smoother skin for courseness on men is a given, and have no problem with dry skin or water retention for that is what beer in pint jars and toilets are for.

All I really desire is a small manly-looking teak case with brass hinged lid and an engraved "HIM" on the lid, sitting on the dresing table next to all of Suzannes junk, just to remind her that the next time she goes online to Liz Earle then I'll be shopping for more man-potions as well.

A deluge of biblical proportions

Standing barefoot on a cold wood floor,
and looking out the window of my back door,
if it keeps on raining, I think the whole damn house is gonna float away.
Easy's getting harder every day
Iris Dement

Yesterday it lashed it down for 24 hours.
And brought the country to a halt.

Local roads were flooded everywhere railways were closed, our local station was closed because the innocent looking beck (Yorkshire for stream) that flows alongside it was a raging torrent that had claimed the railway track, and people everywhere got thoroughly damp but had plenty to talk about with neighbours.

It didn't stop our house moving endeavours though, no not our house move, a friends house move (see yesterdays post), a pair of friends who have divorced and were going their seperate ways after 30 years of friendship/marriage.

A twelve hour shift of carrying boxes and furniture in and out of vans later I was knackered, wet, tired and I slept the sleep of the dead last night, these fifty year old muscles and bones did the whole shift yesterday unlike the big gang of 16 year old lads who turned up to help, friends of my friends son.

And as we sat on the tailgate of the truck drinking coffee, waiting for the keys to the new house to materialise, my friend and I watched them all and we both voiced the same thoughts - how good it is to observe a team of young lads bonded in friendship like that, just like we were inextricably bonded when we were their age, and we wondered how many of them would be old friends when they reached our age.

Its different now, when we were sixteen we had been to the same schools, we played football together most nights of the year, at sixteen we were starting to go to pubs together on a weekend and already the friendship was strong enough that if one was refused bar service then we all walked out.

Later in life we left school and took local jobs, most of us anyway, we dated girls together, we married locally (me excepted) and we raised our family's locally, most of our gang of lads still live and work in the same local community that we were raised in.

Yesterdays gang of 16 year olds have a different outlook.

For a start they will all expect to go to university, speaking to one of them yesterday that is indeed his ambition and if he doesn't get the grades then he will go to a further education college instead and take a vocational course - we had no such expectations or ambitions at 16, only three of our gang of twenty went to university in the summer of '75.

University will of course break them up, their gang will be spread thinly across the hundreds of UK university towns, it seems like almost every town in the country has university status now and the one massive social change that you can point to in the 34 years since we were 16 years old is the fact that education does not stop at 16 now, you are not thrown uncermoniously out of the school gates at that age and told to go get a job, you are not interviewed by the deputy headmaster (as I was) and told "you are a waster, go get a job" because you expressed a desire to stay on in the sixth form (even though my reasoning was flawed, he was right, I was an idle bas'tad who didn't want to work).

Their friendships may not survive three years of higher education in seperate parts of the country, they may not return to their home towns again, they may take up positions in their chosen careers wherever those positions are offered - todays labour market is of a transitory nature and if you specialise in specific careers then you expect to relocate, on the contrary only a handfull of my childhood friends live more than a 20 minute drive from here.

Then we finished our coffee and got on with heavy box lifting and taking the piss out of the sixteen year olds.

Hoo-ray, hoo-ray, its a 'olly, 'olly-day

I'm taking a day off today.
Thats unusual.
I would never have done that when I owned the company
Now that someone else does I'm taking full advantage of their generous paid leave allowance.

So what to do, where to go ?

Moving house, thats what.

Again ? I hear you all cry, why it was only March 8th that you last moved house.
But its not me this time

A pair of very old friends are splitting up today, they've only known each other for nearly thirty years, only been married for over twenty years, only raised two children to teenage-hood, and now they have decided that they cannot live together any more and two months ago got a quick divorce.

They are part of, indeed founder members of our gang of friends who have known each other since childhood so its impossible to take sides and indeed we won't, so a big gang of us lads are helping him to move to his new house and a big gang of the girls are helping her move to her new house and if we meet in the hallway on the way out with a sofa on our backs we'll each trip the other party up, then point and laugh.

Its a sad day and yet they are both extremely happy of their parting - I can't help but think that there will be tears before bedtime though.

I hope he has beer for when we've emptied the van at his new pad, beer, chairs and a roaring fire in the chimenea outside in the yard and we'll be there all night.

Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full - a review

Disclaimer - The author freely admits to not having been a great fan of Mr McCartney's music since he left The Beatles, Mr McCartney that is, not the author.

Revision to Disclaimer - The author freely admits that he thought that the albums "Band on the Run", "Venus and Mars" and "Speed of Sound" were quite good, everything else has been poor to shite.

With the release of Paul McCartney's new album "Memory Almost Full" being plugged on tv every three or four minutes and with its groundbreaking (for him) simultaneous release on Napster, I was last night able to play it in almost its entirety (see end of review) and for your delight and delectation, review it track by track in the stylee of the new Musical Express all those years ago when it and I were young and I hung on its every word.
So,

Track 1. Dance Tonight - this is the track you hear on the tv advert, you hear what you get, a pop song pretending to have folk or cajun roots. Its palateble but only just, Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band do cajun properly and I could listen to them all night.

Track 2. Ever Present Past - I heard this one three minutes ago and I've forgotten it already, a fairly typical experience for me with McCartney songs, bland and unoriginal

Track 3. See Your Sunshine - the chorus goes "she makes me feel glad, I want her so bad..." I guess he wasn't talking about the lovely Heather, another pop tune, you could advertise stuff like lemonade to this one - forgotten already.

Track 4. Only Mama Knows - Tries to be heavier, tries to be rockier, tries to be Kaiser Chiefs, Loz my young hobbit friend would like this one, which tells me all I need to know.

Track 5. You Tell Me - Another slow one sung in a silly high voice, if you read the lyrics on their own you would probably be sick in the same way that you would be if you had just eaten 47 gross of cadbury creme eggs.

Track 6. Mr Bellamy - Its not Craig and its not David, its a song that reminds me of a rock opera song but this time it would be a soundtrack to a Tim Burton cartoon, in other words its cr@p

Track 7. Gratitude - I'm so grateful for everything you've given me starts this song, I'm so grateful that we're halfway through this, this is poor, this smells like something that was made up at 3.32am one morning when there was nothing on the telly and everyone was stoned but by now the drugs don't work in the same way as they did in 1967, this time they make you bland.

Track 8. Vintage Clothes - Write a song with "vintage clothes" in the title someone said, so he did even though he really wanted to make a political comment about the Iraq war, the fact that he merged the two subjects together should tell you how daft this song is, its very daft.

Track 9. That Was Me - Paul McCartney tries to write his biography in a song that lasts 2 mins 38 secs - and fails miserably to the tune of a strumming guitar.

Track 10. Feet in the Clouds - Its playing as I type and its so bland and the lyrics are so ridiculous that I can't even listen to it even though its in the earplugs and they are turned up full I find I can quite happily ignore this and carry out other tasks, one of the poorer tracks so far.

Track 11. House of Wax - Theres a theme building here, the tracks are getting blander as we near the end, this one is as bland as eating wax fruit instead of the real stuff, I hope McCartney didn't pay too much for the studio time and the CD pressing costs, he'll need all he's got to compensate that young daughter of his as she grows up.

Track 12. The End of the Road - and thank christ for that, McCartney and piano, the budget must have been running out by now, he speaks of dying and I'm not one for wishing that on anyone but if he said he was going to record another one of these albums then I'd be happy if this song fulfilled its prophecy.

Track 13. Nod Your Head - Just plain appalling, when the shop assistant asks if you are sure that you want to buy this album do not do what this song title suggests, instead do the opposite. There - I've just sat through the worst album of this year so far so that you don't have to - Napster has some bonus tracks and an interview with the man but I can't bring myself to listen to them.

Paul McCartney has just confirmed what I've known for 30 years, his output of crap is prestigious and he relies on the fact that for every 100 tons of plain and boring coal you shovel you may just find one small diamond - there are no diamonds in this pile, there have been no diamonds for many years now.

Reality or "Reality" ?

Last night, as is my want, I took myself upstairs to watch a TV channel of my own choice rather than the one chosen by the females downstairs.

I chose a reality TV programme.

"Children Fighting Cancer" on BBC1 at 10.35pm is about as real as it gets.

A documentary that does exactly what it says on the title the programme followed two 15 year old teenagers who were undergoing treatment for leukaemia, Charlotte with a rare form of the ailment had had two years of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment to no avail and had reached the final option, a bone marrow transplant.

Andrew, a young, fit, scottish hockey player had had his life brought to a screeching halt with the discovery of his leukaemia and was just starting the first of his chemotherapy treatments with high hopes that he would be among the majority of children cured by the advanced methods used now and that he would be back playing hockey by the end of the season.

Both young people were extremely frank about their illnesses and the way that they had affected their young lives, both were incredibly optomistic about their prognosis - although interviewing Andrew after six days of hospitalisation during his chemo treatment he had a quiet moment in which he confided to the camera whilst his parents were elsewhere that he was keeping upbeat for their sakes and that he had thought a lot about what might happen to him, after all he said "you don't want to die when you're fifteen do you ?"

He died six days later through infection caused by his treatment.

It was devastating TV to watch, especially when you are the same age as the parents and your children are the same age as those on screen, and you sit and watch those parents try to explain what happened on the day he died and when his father breaks down you find water running out of your face as well, not that you're crying because you are a bloke and blokes don't do that, but theres water leaking out of your face and it hurts to watch this but you do because this is reality and bad things happen sometimes to good people and life's not fair.

Charlotte had her bone marrow transplant and had to stay in isolation for weeks upon weeks while they waited for the donor marrow to kick start her healthy red blood cell manufacture, for 21 days nothing happened and it was looking like her last throw of the dice might fail when suddenly the blood count started to rise and after 26 days she was declared fit to leave her isolation room and to all intents and purposes was "cured" although she will live with continuous assessments for the rest of her life and the knowledge that the treatment has left her infertile.

A harrowing 45 minutes but when it was finished you felt privileged to have watched and once again the BBC's method of commissioning non-commercially viable TV programmes had produced a compelling documentary.


And afterwards I went back downstairs to find the family watching Big Brother.

Big fookin Brother, the "reality" TV programme that takes a couple of dozen no-marks with a desire to have three minutes of fame, get into nightclubs for free, and have their pictures splashed across the numerous shite-mags that fill the newsagents shelves these days, the programme where nothing happens 24 hours a day and yet fookin gormless, dateless idiots sit and watch and then pretend that it was spellbinding when discussing it with work colleagues tomorrow - it was on live this morning on one of our TV sets and the camera showed everyone asleep in their bedroom, gripping TV and I just don't understand why I think its crap and why Channel 4 shouldn't lose their licence for foisting this junk on the screens for several months of the year.

School Bully...

September 1968 and the 11 year old Jerrychicken starts his prestigious senior school career, nearly 40 years later they still speak of me now at that learning establishment, they say "who ?" when you mention my name.

A class of 30 adolescent boys, seated in five rows of six desks in alphabetical order, all attendees garnered via the 11 plus exam from schools all over Leeds and randomly placed into four such classrooms, what are the chances that four school bully's could end up sitting in four adjacent desks at the back right hand corner of our classroom ?

Believe it or not, thats what happened, four individuals who had made a good living from bullying at their former separate junior schools found themselves neighbours in our class and it didn't take too long for their nefarious ways to surface in the form of a very lucrative protection racket where beatings were postponed for monetary exchange and sweets that had earlier been stolen in huge quantities from the dateless old biddy who ran the post office down the road were sold for cash - the Corleone family had nothing on these guys.

I realised very early in my senior school career that life certainly favours those who know people in high places - the bully ring leader's dad played snooker with my dad at their club and this link meant that I had a no-bully embargo placed on my head, other boys weren't so lucky though and the surreptitious beatings continued right through the first year until in the summer term someone cracked and told their parent, who in turn informed the school.

What happened next has always impressed me as the perfect and final solution to school bully's, its probably the only thing that I respected our headmaster, Cheesy Holland (see what we did there, cheese, Holland, no ? ), for.

Seated in class one lazy, hot summers afternoon, each boy dozing gently off to sleep while some random master droned on at the front about some random subject that only he was interested in, the door burst open and Cheesy Holland strode at full speed into the room, his black master gown flowing in the breeze and almost getting trapped in the rebounding door.

He had a small box with him, the box that chalk was delivered in, and several sheets of paper which he proceeded to tear into strips whilst informing us that he was well aware that a mafiosa stylee protection racket was operating in the class and that we were about to partake in a secret ballot to name and shame them, the ballot papers were handed out, filled in then collected back in the box and in a grand moment of high drama Cheesy stood at the front and read the same four names off 26 strips of paper, strangely enough finding four pieces of paper that were blank.

It was a unanimous ballot, the four miscreants were ousted and were paraded in front of a whole assembly of the school the following morning so that the 500 older boys in the school could have their opportunity to offer counselling to them in the form of daily beatings and muggings, Cheesy more or less allowed carte blanche at "re-educating the bullies" as he made it clear that had he not been banned from corporal punishment the previous year then he would have caned them on stage at that assembly, instead the punishment decisions were passed down the ranks to the older boys, and were duly administered.

It worked, they never bullied again.

One of them even works as a psychiatric nurse now, so maybe he still gets his kicks there.

It wasn't all good news thought - our cheap sweeties supply dried up pretty quickly.

Full Jerrychicken's School Days story here.

Life on the road...

You see, I've always wanted a motorhome.
Always.

Even back in the days when I seemed to be driving all day long for a living, back in the late 1970's when the UK's idea of a mobile home was to put a box on top of a Ford Transit chassis and furnish it with stuff that you'd already thrown out of your own house, even back then I wanted a home that I could drive.

Its the most common search phrase that I use on eBay is "motorhome" and it always throws up things like the one in the photograph, huge fifty foot long american imported megoliths that are furnished like a tarts boudoir and seldom sell for anything less than £100,000 - thats the sort of thing I'd love to pack up and take off for our three week long summer holiday.

My family would hate it though.

We'd barely reach the motorway before someone would ask "how much further" or "the telly's broken" or "the toilet won't flush" and the whole holiday would descend into farce as they grew to hate my mobile extravaganza more and more by each second of our epic journey which would in fact turn into a journey that barely reached outside of Yorkshire before I would have to return to prevent permanent hearing damage from their constant whining and whinging.

My family hate travel unless it consists of a jetplane adventure to a foreign destination.

To go off on my own in my motorhome would be the only solution.

So I've checked eBay's motorhome section again today.

And it seems to have been invaded by people who are taking the piss.

"Camper Van" one of the adverts reads, buy it now price is £850, sounds like a bargain.
113,000 miles, starts first time apparently, "runs sweet" apparently, the three seats in front fold down to make a table allegedly, "has a rattel on front when u hit a pot hole dont fink its anyfing to worry about" it reliably informs, "check stap on rear door not working" whatever that means, "could do with new handal on side door still works" is a mystery, "cash on pickup" is a given and its finally reassuring to know that it has "sercurity locks on rear doors".

How can I resist for £850 ?

Its a fooking Ford Transit van, an empty, bog standard "S reg" Ford Transit van that has had its arse flogged to death on some building site somewhere, and now has the carpet from the builders mums back bedroom on its ridged floor and a bench running down one side, it doesn't even have windows in it.

Sounds like its just the job for me then, thats my holidays sorted.

Possibly the best thing that Gerry Rafferty ever did/has done although the pool of choice is fairly limited, and yes its one of those annoying videos where someone posts a series of pictures to the music but it could be worse, it could be a moving image of Mr Rafferty who has never been entirely photogenic.

I bought his "City to City" album when it was released in 1978 and for that summer it was anthemic, turn on a rado anywhere at any time and you'd hear "Baker Street", the albums huge hit single, so much so that by the end of the year we were all bored to tears with it and in any case, I'd worn out the cassette tape that I played in the van on my endless trips to and from Newcastle.

"Don't Speak of my Heart" comes from another, less well known album "On a Wing and a Prayer" and because its less well known I know nothing about it except for the fact that this track is one of the finer examples of the genre of music that goes under the heading "good love gone bad".

And in other news...

Gerry Rafferty was of course a significant member of the band "Stealers Wheel" but the other significant part of that band, Joe Egan, has by far the better singing voice and in 1979 released an album of his own "Back on the Road" - it is fooking brilliant and is probably not available in a record shop near you, I have it on a cassette tape which is barely audible now and it is my lifes ambition to find it in a junk shop somewhere on CD so that I may preserve its memory, Joe Egan faded from the pop scene with no solo record sales to speak of, save the one that I bought, and his talent was never exploited again.

In the middle of that string of still photos above there are some very nice paintings, by someone of whom I know nought, maybe I should find out but I suspect that it may be the same person who painted the iconic album sleeves for Mr Rafferty, a chap who goes by the name (I am reliably informed) of John Byrne.

And finally,

The appearance of Billy Connolly towards the end of the sequence of photos relates to the fact that he and Rafferty were once in a band called "the Humblebums", based in Glasgow they had a limited success outside of that city and did not record anything of note, in the words of my showbiz cousin, "they were big in their dreams and publicity".

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the end of this Gerry Rafferty news bulliten.

I wish I knew where my Joe Egan cassette was, I wish we'd filed things away when we moved instead of just throwing the boxes in to the garage, where they remain to this day.

The best cinema in the world,ever.

Its 1978 and I've been living in contractors digs in Jesmond, Newcastle for a year now, living in squalor most of the time although at the time I and my fellow bed and breakfast squatters barely seemed to notice, maybe because the cause of the squalor was mainly ourselves.

For want of nothing else to do one night and with a power cut promised for 10pm (these were highly militant days and electricity was rationed) - (sounds like a third world country doesn't it, Britain in the late 70's was just that), I went out for a wander and a stroll on a winters night when the fog hung heavy in the streets so that you breathed in more water than air and you navigated simply from one dimly lit lamp post to the next, hoping that you'd follow them back in the same order that you followed them out.

Out of the thick vapour blanket loomed a light slightly brighter than the streetlights, just one solitary light on its own and as, moth-like, I closed in on it I could just about make out the words above the entrance canopy, "Jesmond Cinema", quite remarkable, I'd lodged in Jesmond for a year and never knew that the place had a cinema all of its own but to tell the truth it hardly had one even though I was stood in front of it, so dilapidated was the frontage.

An old glass-cased poster outside advertised a double bill, Sam Peckinpah's blood-fest "Straw Dogs" and the slaughter of the Indians blood-fest "Soldier Blue".

The poster confirmed my feelings about the disheveled nature of the building - it must have closed down a long time ago, both films had been around in 1971-ish and would have long since gone to video if video had been invented then, no cinema in the country would dare to show eight year old films and still maintain some air of reality.

But the Jesmond Cinema did - maybe the film companies had forgotten to collect the reels back in 1971, but the management at the Jesmond Cinema was giving them another outing and they weren't bad films the first time around so searching in my pocket for some loose change I leaned on the doorway to see if the place really was functional and open for business, it was.

I found myself in a tiny vestibule, no more than ten feet square, facing me opposite the doorway which had swung closed behind me, trapping both me and a healthy dose of fog in the timber panelled entrance hall, was a glass fronted ticket booth, only just wide enough to allow a little old lady to squeeze inside with her knitting and a roll of tickets, she put down her knitting, smiled, peered through the internal fog at the apparition which must have been me all of ten feet away and asked in her Tyneside accent, "Whey hello bonny la-ad, are yea-s wanting a ticket then, like".

Looking at the copperplate lettering on the glass panel in front of her I noticed that the cheapest seats were in the stalls rather than the balcony and so I asked for one of those.

"Whey tha stalls is closed bonny la-ad, ye-all hev to sit oopstai-yers", and so I did.

She pushed the single ticket out through a slot in the glass and pointed with a crooked, knitters crippled, finger to my left where a dimly lit oak panneled staircase leaned against the wall in an unconvincing way, this was the route to take to the luxury balcony seating.

I trod carefully up the staircase, the wooden treads creaking with even slight pressure, the filthy threadbare, once maroon carpet skidding beneath your feet as you lifted each shoe off the treads, until eventually I found myself on a small landing in front of the door on tthe balcony seating, I pushed it open expecting to be greeted with the normal dim cinema auditorium lighting...

Instead I was blinded by a brilliant white light that totally dominated all of my senses, overwhelmed I staggered backwards through the door holding a hand to my eyes to shield them from further damage when from out of the light stepped forward a shadow...

"Whey hello bonny la-ed, have ye-as got yo'wre ticket then like"

I peeked through interlocked fingers, peeked closer, stared harder, eyes now growing accustomed to the blinding, dazzling, pure white light, it was the ticket booth woman again, how the hell did she do that, she was still in the ticket booth downstairs, wasn't she, how did she get past me on the stairway.

Startled and bemused I simply handed her the ticket that she'd handed to me just 30 seconds previously and was at once bedazzled again by another, slightly less intense light - she'd switched her torch on and shone it accidently in my face - a torch, the most un-necessary object in this temple of white light was now pointed at the floor indicating the steps down the balcony seating area, the little old ticket booth woman was now walking backwards down the balcony steps and indicating that I follow her to my seat.

Still holding one arm across my eyes I meekly obliged and trod carefully down the steps until, just before she fell backwards over the edge of the balcony, she indicated that I sit on a empty row two from the front, I sat, senses still assailed by the light but growing more used to it as the seconds passed until eventually I noticed that, unlike all other cinemas I had been in up until that point, the inside of the Jesmond Cinema was not illuminated by chandeliers and gentle flame-effect light bulbs, but by ten, eight foot flourescent light fittings which dangled ominously on chains until they were only just above balcony seating head height, the lighting level inside the cinema was approaching that of a city centre advertising hoarding or standing two feet in front of a magnesium distress flare.

I turned around to view the ticket booth woman disappearing through the door at the back of the balcony, presumably to serve some other poor sap who'd wandered in out of the fog to watch an ancient double bill of blood letting, and while doing so noticed that the whole of the balcony area only contained three other patrons, each of whom were staring directly at the still be-curtained cinema screen, and afterwards I realised that at no point had anyone arose to attend the toilet during the three and a half hour feast of violence, nor had I heard any signs of life such as the unwrapping of sweetie papers etc, when I eventually left the cinema just before the 10pm power cut my cinema compatriots were not there, I was the only person to leave the place at the end.

While sitting there I couldn't help but notice the several huge chunks of plaster that were missing from the ceiling and a glance down into the stalls indicated where they had fallen and why the stalls were closed, maybe the severe rattling that the cinema received from the Metro line trains which ran just one foot away from the back wall had something to do with the fragile plasterwork. Suddenly and without warning the flourescent lights were switched off, not dimmed and faded out, just switched off, leaving me blinded once again and thankfull that I hadn't gone to the toilet and been halfway down the balcony steps when this happened or I'd have been over the front of the balcony without a doubt.

The two films were as violent and blood thirsty as promised and remembered and I sat there bursting for a piss for three and a half hours not daring to get out of my seat for fear that they'd stop the film and switch the lights on until I came back - when the first film Straw dogs had finished the same ticket booth woman carried a tray of ancient ice cream tubs and long forgotten chocolate brands to the front of the balcony and stood there without doing any business until the flourescents were switched off again without warning and Soldier Blue started.

When I exited the cinema at a shade after 10pm the streets were still fogbound but were now in darkness as the power-off curfew had descended on the city and as I groped my way down the street I turned to catch my last glimpse of the Jesmond Cinema which, unusually, was still only slightly illuminated by its solitary light bulb outside, the only lightbulb to be still illuminated after the curfew.

I never went back, in fact I never found the cinema again.


All of this is true and un-exagerated - I swear.