The Tragic Death Podcast

Podcast number two and this time its away with the melancholy and in with the dead singers - singers who died in tragic circumstances, air crash, car crash or shooting.

Playlist...
Eddie Cochrane - Blue Suede Shoes
Harry Chapin - WOLD
John Lennon - #9 Dream
Lynard Skynard - Freebird
Marc Bolan - Hot Love
John Denver - I Guess he'd Rather be in Colorado
Jim Croce - You don't Mess Around with Jim
Marvin Gaye - What's Goin On ?
Intro & Outro - Count Basie Band - One o'Clock Jump

Department Stores

Remember how department stores used to be ?
Long before Debenhams and House of Frazer tarted them up.
The days when you didn't know what to expect on the next counter ?
When Menswear and Womens wear were on different floors and ne'er the twain shall meet ?

I went to such a Department store yesterday.
Sunwin House in Bradford.

I suspect that it only survives because Bradford Council think it was demolished a decade ago and so don't bother to collect Council Tax on the place, but in fact the jewel in the crown of the former Bradford Co-operative Society is still open for business albeit under the name of TJ Hughes now.

I don't know the history of how TJ Hughes came to be installed into the building but just two minutes perusal in the place yesterday gave me a damn good idea of how it happened - the Co-op wanted rid of the building, a trading company with a line of supply of unsellable crap gets interested in what is one of the biggest and most traditional of retail stores in Bradford city centre, they promise to employ the Co-op staff enabling the Co-op to walk away without any excessive closedown and redundancy costs, they may even have bought the old stock off the Co-op and held the door open as the directors left for the last time - thats how I reckon it happened, it was "hey you want rid of this record loss making endeavour, we'll take it off your hands if you walk away and don't come back".

You spend 30 seconds in the entrance to the store and you realise that TJ Hughes aren't interested in selling you a shopping experience, but they are interested in cramming all of their cheap stock in there and selling it to you at prices so low as to defy logic.

So in an area that is still all shelved up and signed up as "Gentlemens Suits" you find handbags and perfume, a "lingerie" stand is displaying a 32" lcd tv at a price that suggests that even Eric down the pub couldn't lay his hands one that cheap - TJ Hughes didn't even bother to remove the Co-op signs and shelf edge notices, so you ignore them and learn to look at the merchandise instead and revel in this new method of shopping where you haven't a clue what will appear on the next display cabinet for there is no logic, a dvd recorder and tv combination sits happily on the same display as a load of perfume and why not buy your tv and perfume together, it makes perfect sense when you think of it - doesn't it ?

We shopped in there for perfume for the two offspring, we felt dirty, we should have been paying £30 and £40 for a bottle of the latest Paris Hilton or Victoria Beckham perfumes but instead we handed over five hard earned pounds for the boxed sets and then had the cheek to get 50% knocked off the cheapest item "buy one get one half price" as if they weren't cheap enough already.

It was hard to spend £50 in there, to spend £50 you need a long line of sherpa's to carry all of the goods to the till, I don't think that anyone has spent £50 and walked out of there without need of a truck since it opened, but thats what we spent and our girls will open their presents on xmas day and think that we must have spent at least a grand on them, and of course, we will let them think that too.


TJ Hughes in Bradford city centre, you'll feel dirty about yourself, but by god you'll save some money.

The Magic Razor Comb of Death

See that photo of those two kids ?
Ignore the monkeys, they are nothing to do with this discussion.
Although why we were posing with monkeys in Scarborough is probably a topic worthy of its own post.

Thats me and Ned that is.
Me on the right.
The monkeys are the smaller mammals in the photo
Time has erased their names from memory so I cannot give them an acknowledgement.

The year ?
I'm guessing around 1964, I'm about eight, Ned about six, the monkeys, unknown, it doesn't matter about the monkeys, I keep saying.

Yes, the monkeys are wearing woollen coats, yes it is Scarborough in August, the monkeys were probably cold ok, coming from an equatorial climate like they would have done straight into a northeast coast holiday resort in the height of a British summer can't have been easy for them, even the promise of a glamorous lifestyle as a catwalk monkey model, a monkey supermodel, a fortune in peanuts awaits you, even that cannot have prepared them for the sea breeze that blew unhindered all the way from Norway every day of our holiday, anyway, forget the friggin monkeys, its not their story.

The real story is those haircuts.
And how we came to have them.

The clue is in my fringe -see how straight it is ?
Thats not a fringe that has been cut by any barber worth his salt is it ?
Thats a fringe thats been cut by a father that is.
A father who won't pay out for barbers
A father who bought a Magic Razor Comb from a classified advert.

It came through the post in a small box wrapped in plain brown paper and tied up with string, the Magic Razor Comb of Death, the first and only time our dad had ever sent for anything from a newspaper advert, a newspaper advert that promised him that he'd never have to pay for haircuts for his two boys again, promised him that cutting his two boys hair would be as simple as combing it, promised him that we wouldn't even know he was cutting our hair, so quick and painless it would be, in fact correct that last statement, the advert for the Magic Razor Comb of Death never even mentioned pain.

It should have done.
The Magic Razor Comb of Death was an implement of excrutiating torture.

A flat, square, beige plastic object, palm sized with a comb on two of its sides the Magic Razor Comb of Death held within its plastic comb teeth a razor blade, which to the best of my knowledge was never changed by our dad, he being of the belief that when the newspaper advert ad said "you will never spend another penny on haircuts again" then that meant that he would literally never spend another penny on haircuts again and that things like replacement razorblades were un-necessary and a vexation to his wallet.

Our hair was checked by him every Sunday night.
Every Sunday night we had a bath, yes thats right, in the 1960's people did not bathe every day, in the UK we had not heard of the marvellous continental fashion of showering, we bathed once a week and had a "sink job" for the other six days, but thats another story.

After our Sunday night bath we would be led into the living room, the only warm room in the house, where our dad would inspect our hair for length and tidyness, and once every four weeks or so he would simply command us to bring a stool in from the kitchen and sit in front of the fire whilst he rummaged in the sideboard drawer for the Magic Razor Comb of Death.

Newspaper spread on the floor to prevent bloodstaining the carpet, Ned would be first on the Stool of Torture, the Magic Razor Comb of Death never cut a single hair on our heads, its simply wrenched each hair out by its roots, often in clumps of hair, often with the scalp attached, and from the Stool of Torture it made a noise like tearing paper as it went about its work, the worst part being when it often snagged in your hair and you'd be wrenched all over the place while our dad tugged and pulled to free it and liberate another clump of knotted hair from your scalp.

It was pain beyond description and I would have admitted to any indescretion during the torture in order to make it stop, pain not only from the tearing out of our hair but pain from the slaps around the back of the head to stop us screaming out in pain, pain to stop pain, I suppose there is a theory in there somewhere but I'm buggered if I can work out what it is.

{scraaaaa-aape} would go the Magic Razor Comb of Death
"Aye -eeeeeiiii" would scream our Ned
{slap} and "Shutup" would come the reply
"Ouch" would cry our Ned

{scraaaaa-aape} would go the Magic Razor Comb of Death
"Aye -eeeeeiiii" would scream our Ned
{slap} and "Shutup" would come the reply
"Ouch" would cry our Ned

{scraaaaa-aape} would go the Magic Razor Comb of Death
"Aye -eeeeeiiii" would scream our Ned
{slap} and "Shutup" would come the reply
"Ouch" would cry our Ned

And when it was finished the newspaper on the floor would be covered with whole pieces of hair, complete with roots, blood and flesh, the result of which can clearly be seen in the monkey picture (above), the only saving grace being that we weren't the only ones who's dad was a cheapskate and had been lured by the promise of never having to pay for another haircut, ever.

We all had shit haircuts, all of our friends, we were the shit haircut gang.
Thanks to the Magic Razor Comb of Death.

The monkeys had nice haircuts though.

We wanted a haircut, not scalping

Its 1967, the summer of love, Scott McKenzie was urging us all to go to San Francisco, The Beatles were imploring that all we needed was love, Procul Harem assured us that there really was a whiter shade of pale and as a ten year old you just wanted a square neck instead of a short back and sides.

It was important.
A short back and sides was so square, unlike a square neck, which was cool.
Hair that is.

In 1967 there were only two hair styles for boys, the choice of everyone's mother was a short back and sides, a traditional very short hair cut for boys, the haircut for boys since they stopped shaving heads for lice in the 1800's, if you were a boy you had a short back and sides once a month and you put up with it and when you went to school after having one you put up with the piss taking until it was someone elses turn to have a short back and sides.

The short back and sides haircut was cut short on top and then shaved at the back and sides, its sounds trendy to today's ears, but it was far from trendy believe me, a boy today would still recoil from a short back and sides.

There was a trendy 1960's alternative though.
The square neck.

The square neck was still cut short on top but instead of being shaved at the back and sides it was cut short and shaped around the ears leaving pretend sideburns, and the back was short but shaped and cut "square" at the bottom being almost collar length - it was the haircut of choice for boys, but many mothers would not allow it and most barbers did not know of it for barbers were still very traditional places and anything other than shaving the back and sides would be greeted with a glare as if the boy had just asked for a perm and some highlights.

The day in question was another one of those long, hot summer days that we all recall from our school summer holidays, in practice not many days were long, hot or sunny but thats how we all remember them.

Our gang was ten strong and by some remarkable coincidence we had all arrived at the point in the summer holidays where all of our mothers were threatening us with a visit to the barbers for "a nice haircut" to go back to school with, we all knew that if our mothers took us to the barbers then it would be a short back and sides and no questions asked, and so we all conspired to tell our mothers that one of the other mothers had offered to take us and could we have the money for a haircut.

Of course there was no actual "other mother" to take us and if we'd been really smart we'd have taken the haircut money and spent it all on something else, but we must have been honest because we all planned to go together to a barber's in Horsforth who was fabled to know of this "square neck" hairstyle, ten of us would hit the shop all at the same time and he wouldn't be able to refuse our trendy requests, would he ?

Corquerhan the barber's name was, "Corker" for short and he was rumoured to be a right bastard, being a bit savage with the electric clippers around the ear of any boy who fidgeted in the chair and according to rumour had actually taken a chunk out of and drawn blood from a kid in the year below us, if we'd really thought this through properly we would have instinctively known that this old bastard could not possibly know of the "square neck" that we all coveted, but the rumour was that he did them all day long, so we went to Corkers barber shop, all of us clutching our half crown haircut money.

The barber shop was empty when we arrived, ten strong, Corker looked up from reading his newspaper, a large rotund man with a grey Hitler moustache his head almost bald except for a long strand down the middle of his head which was firmly laquered into place, as a barber he did not believe in displaying his barbering skills on his own head.

Upon seeing all of us shoving the others in the door he stood, folded his newspaper and stood by his chair and regarded us with a stern expression, "Stop messing about, who's for the haircut then ?" he demanded.

"All of us" we replied, his expression changed, ten customers all at once, he must have thought it was christmas.

The electric clippers were already running as Stuart Ackroyd took to the seat and had the big dirty blue sheet wrapped around his neck and tucked in the back of his collar, his cry of "A square neck please Corker" was lost as the clippers bit into the first chunk of hair and whined their way up the back of his head leaving just bare scalp and a little pinch of blood where Corker had hit the flesh a bit too hard.

The nine of us seated in a row behind the chair stared at each other in horror, this was no square neck, this was, this was, a ......short back and sides.

We mouthed the phrase to each other, one of us shouted out the confirmation "He wants a square neck..." but it was to no avail and Corker simply turned his head slightly and shouted back "You what ?" over the noise of the oldest electric hair clippers in the district, Stuart Ackroyd now had half a short back and in the reflection in the mirror he could see us signalling to him that it was all going wrong and we wanted out.

We wanted out so badly that it only took one of us, and history has not recorded which one it was, to shout the magical word reserved for boyhood emergencies..."RUN !!!" and run we did, including Stuart Ackroyd who leapt from the chair with the back of his head only half shaved, dirty blue sheet still wrapped tightly around his neck, we ran and we ran down Horsforth Town Street with Corker persuing us for his dirty blue sheet back until Stuart Ackroyd managed to untangle himself from it and let it fly in the wind leaving Corker to pick it up from the road and shake a fist full of combs and scissors at our rapidly fleeing backs.

However, the worst haircut awaited us back at home and the "magic razor", but thats for another time...

Change it, keep on changing...

One damn fine read of a morning is The Law West of Ealing Broadway which is written by an erstwhile anonymous magistrate and which, every now and again slips in a moan about Government cost cutting and interference in the court system and the criminal justice system as a whole - and long live his right to moan about Government fook-ups.

I have a couple of friends who are life-long civil servants in the court system, nice lads, old friends, I've known them for forty years, I've room shared with them both even accidently slept with one of them once but we'll gloss over that bit...

...the point is that they both hold senior civil service positions in the courts and whenever we gather in a pub somewhere then they both inevitably huddle together and speak of cost cutting, reorganisation, missives from on high, and horror of horrors - threats to the one thing that is held dear to the hearts of all civil servants, their final salary pension scheme - "its the only reason we do the job" they argue, unconvincingly.

I myself have seen this desire for the Civil Service to morph itself into something different, although not necessarily something better, every two or three years.

Around ten years ago we negotiated a deal with the Employment Service to provide some of our equipment to all of the job centres in Yorkshire, and there were a lot of them, word of this spread to other areas of the country and we ended up with a decent sized contract supplying up to two hundred of the job centres, a very nice little earner as we like to say.

At the time the job centres and benefits offices were two completely seperate domains and HM Government carried the double-bubble overheads of having two offices in each town, one for unemployment benefit dispersal, one for employment seekers, who just happened to be the same people.

It made sense to amalgamate the two and a couple of years later they did just that, not actually saving any civil service expense on the way as they didn't actually make anyone redundant or lose office space overhead, they just moved two offices into another one that was double the size in each town, but it meant even more work for us so why did we care, it was only our money that they were spending after all.

Eventually they stopped using our equipment when some bright spark in their IT department suggested that they could do exactly the same function from each persons desktop pc, there were glaring security issues for not doing that at all, but it was a percieved cost saving so they dropped us, we now handle just a handfull of the job centres, the ones with the enlightened managers who realise that they can't rely on the glorified spreadsheet that alll the other offices use mainly because anyone can enter anything on screen and make it look like they are entitled to overtime and or flexi-leave (usually both).

And because we still deal with them and because we have dealt with them for over ten years we are well used to the annual merry-go-round of their accounts office being re-organised - they used to pay all of their suppliers via their local office, then it moved to a regional office in Leeds, then it moved to another regional office in Sheffield, then it moved to a national office in Cardiff, then it moved back to another regional office not in Leeds or Sheffield, this year its back to the local office, but sometimes its also Cardiff - its confusing for us, it must be a right ball-ache for them.

And thats the crux of all of this rant - Government expenditure on administration and their constant quest to do it differnetly depending on which crazy methodology this years consultants have come up with, methodology which often reverts back to the way they did things five years ago.

It must "do your head in" if you have to work inside the system.

Don't worry though, its only our money you're spending.

The Maroo

During my residence in Whitley Bay in the late 1970's I had perchance to venture up the street from the previously mentioned Per Mar Guest House to another salubrious residence that went by the name of "The Maroo".

The Maroo was of exactly the same design as the Per Mar being that they were in the same street of terraced houses - think "Blackpool Guest House" and you'll get the picture, and I only ventured there for a change and because I'd heard that the food was a few steps up the excellence ladder to the rat pie at the Per Mar.

In fact the food at The Maroo was of an excellent standard, the owner was/had been a very good chef somewhere and the kitchen and tiny dining room was his domain which left his wife to run the rest of a the guest house, and arrangement that worked very well for the "Vacancies" sign at The Maroo was rarely displayed, they had a very loyal clientele among the contractors-working-away who brought their £4 a night expenses to Whitley Bay in the 1970's.

I set fire to the place one night.

But whilst the husband/wife team worked very well...

"Wait a minute" I hear you all yell, "whats all this about setting fire to the place ?"

Well I did, but you'll have to read to the end of the story ...

So the husband and wife team worked very well, until their paths crossed, for when their paths crossed, and especially when their paths crossed in the kitchen at tea time then world war three broke out - every night - for they hated each other with a terrible, vicious, black hearted hatred, I doubt whether they are still alive for they hated each other so much that they have surely killed each other by now.

Like I nearly did when I set fire to their hotel one night...

You'd sit in the tiny dining room with some glorious smells coming from the open doored kitchen in front of you and the wife would walk in with a menu, they actually had a menu to pick from, for £4 a night you got a choice of food, unheard of, just unheard of.

You placed your order and she'd go into the kitchen and two seconds later you'd hear him shout "How does he want his meat ?" and she'd admit that she'd never asked so he'd call her a fucking stupid cow and tell her to get back out there and ask him, and you'd sit there and think, "oh heck" and slide down in your chair a little while she shouted back that she wasn't a fucking stupid cow but he was a fucking idiot and should shut his fucking foul mouth, and he'd shout back, and she'd shout back, and it was off and running and the row would go on all night until the guests quietly slipped out of the dining room and went for a takeaway instead...

(this is the bit where I set the hotel on fire)

And one cold winters night I retired to my room early, it was the first real cold night of the year and the hotel did not have any heating of any description outside of the residents sitting room coal fire, but each room did have a huge gas wall heater operated by means of a coin operated meter under the sink - I had noticed the facility when I first checked in but did not have need to make use of it until the first cold night...

So I popped out to the shops and bought myself a box of matches for lighting the pilot light on the gas fire and I made sure that I got a five pence in my change for that is what the meter took.

I retired early and crawled under the sink to drop the five pence in the meter and turn the knob on it, gas flowed freely from the wall heater as the previous resident had left the heater switched on. Not bothering to switch the heater off before I lit it I fumbled with a match for a short while and got one alite, but the little hatch where the pilot light was supposed to be was really fiddly and quite impossible to hold open while trying to poke a match through without burning your fingers and I struggled, kneeling in front of the contraption for a while before deciding that if I held the hatch open with my right hand instead then maybe...

I grasped the pilot light hatch with my right hand and lifted, and thats when the whole of the gas heater fell off the wall.

I kid not when I say the whole of the gas heater fell off the wall, and it was a big gas heater, it fell off the two screws that had been holding it to the wall and hit the floor with a loud thump and lay there, totally useless as a heating implement now as it had disconnected itself from the gas supply pipe as it fell......

and there was the gas pipe, still fastened to the wall, still gushing forth with five pence worth of the finest North Sea Gas......

...and I sat there on the floor for what seemed like hours, but in fact was a matter of milliseconds, sat there staring at the pipe puking out copious amounts of exteremely flamable gas while in my other hand I held the still lighted match, not even one foot away from the gas pipe.

I looked again at the gas pipe, then back to the match, and again at the gas pipe, and again at the still lighted match, and then just as a message arrived from my brain telling me to shut the gas off at the meter you fookin idiot the invisible cloud of gas reached the lighted match in my hand and with a huge "WHOOSH" a nine foot high wall of flame shot up the wall and started across the ceiling.

I was impressed.
And instantly I was very warm.
This was an impressive way to heat your formally cold room.
Although not strictly safe.

Like a rabbit caught in a car headlight I sat there on the floor, one foot away from what was now resembling an oil refinery burn-off valve, if I left it much longer the Maroo landlord would need to be ringing for Red Adair to put this one out, but still, it was warm now.

In slow motion I sw my hand reach for the gas meter and turn the valve off and sadly my new-found wall of flame disappeared leaving just small shards of wallpaper smouldering where loose bits had caught fire, I used the Maroo's towels to smother the flames, picked up the wall heater and hooked it back onto its two small screws.

I checked out the next morning, never told them and never went back.

Kewley was better than this

Remember the post about Kewley the drummer in our class at school ?

Well Kewley thought this bloke was fairly good - thats Buddy Rich, not Animal.

Animal was actually modelled on Kewley, the resemblence is remarkable.

Kewley thought Buddy Rich was fairly good although not as good as Kewley himself was, but like Kewley, Buddy Rich demonstrates at the start of the video the demonic possesion that resides inside all drummers which represents itself in the need to needlessly drum anything and everything, for just like Buddy Rich, Kewley was never seen in public without drumming something or someone's head.

It was bloody annoying I can tell you, especially in the 5th form common room when you're all supposed to be revising your O levels and I can't swear to it but I bet he drummed through his exams too, come to think of it what the hell must a drumming exam sound like at music college with a room full of Kewley's lined up at drum sets in an exam room stylee, the exam paper face down in front of them, each one nervously tapping their feet, eager to get started, and then at the command "You may turn over your paper, and no copying", armegeddon breaks loose and the examiners flee the building.


PS - a completely random thought whilst reviewing this post - how wrong is the sight of lady drummers on a scale of 1-10 ?

Think Karen Carpenter at the drum kit, think her from The Honeycombs at the drum kit or her from The Bangles, its just wrong, so wrong.

Its almost as bad as trying to watch a man operate a washing machine.

The Melancholy Podcast...

Ha!

If you read this post earlier then ignore all the guff that went before, the genius that is yer man at Allthatcomeswithit has provided me with a lovely pink MP3 player to embed (see, I even know the techy words now) so now to play my blather you should only have to click the play button - and wait for a short while for it to load of course.

I've left the link to the actual file in the title so you can also download the file from there, sad but true.

The only question now is how will Easyspace take to the fact that I've knicked a load of space off them and you are all going to be hitting my bandwidth, whatever that means, time will tell.

For those with a smidgen of interest this is the playlist (inbetween me blathering on)

1. Emmy Lou Harris - Boulder to Birmingham
2. Cat Stevens - How Can I Tell You
3. Jim Croce - Dreamin Again
4. Aretha Franklin - Angel
5. Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philidelphia
6. Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin
7. Bob Seger - The Famous Final Scene
Intro & Outro - Count Basie

Tis good that the truth is out...

Alistair Darling, forelorne chancellor of these isles has finally confessed to exactly what it is that he has done to those 25 million missing bank account details - full story here

Somethings missing

So I've sat on my hands and watched the country panic as news broke and was then expanded as we discovered that some fekkwit at the Dept of Information or whatever they call the old Social Services Dept now, decided to send 25 million child benefit recipients details in the post, and lost them.

Its a great news story, its a good time to stir up a non-story from an event that hasn't happened yet, its a great time to be the pundit that was paid to be interviewed on BBC News this morning clamouring for HM Government to pay for us all to receive monthy Experian credit checks for the next several years - bugger off you freeloading panic-meister you, if you want a monthy Experian credit check then pay your fekking £5 a month like I do for the priviledge.

Lets get this straight - the Audit Commision in London, those publicly funded pen pushers who drool over insignificant data for the whole of their working lives asked the Benefits Agency in Newcastle (the other end of the country) for a list of recipients of Child Benefit - a benefit that is automatically paid to everyone who has a child under 18 years of age, so thats 25 million of us then.

The Benefits Agency told them that they couldn't just have that information, they'd have to have lots of other information with it because they couldn't seperate the data properly without paying someone a lot of money to do it, thus revealing that their IT people are full of shit and sitting on their hands waiting for their final salary pension to come around.

So they sent much more data than the Audit Commission wanted, names, addresses, bank details, loads of good stuff, burned ontoa couple of CD's and given to a courier company who have the contract to transport HM Governments internal mail, although not for much longer we suspect.

And somewhere between Newcastle and London it disappeared.
And thats where the real story ends.
Its lost in transit.

If its anything like the mobile phone I once ordered that turned up as an empty package then the CD's will never be found - which isn't the same thing as saying that even now some mastermind criminal with genius for cracking bank software codes will be typing in my account details, pretending to be me and then shouting at the PC screen in the same manner that I do every day when I check my account, something on the lines of "Where's all the fekking money gone then, the bastard".

You see, I have nothing to fear, I could display my bank account details here and now, with their PIN number, right here, I could invite you to visit my bank account and see if you could wreak any more havoc in there than my wife and two teenage daughters already do, full with the confidence that you could not achieve such a thing, indeed full with the confidence that if I told my wife and two teenage daughters what I'd done and that they should not access that particular bank account again it would actually work out cheaper in the long run to expose my banking details to the internet at large rather than let them continue to drain it - if you visited my account today you'd see there was nothing that you could do to it to make it worse than it already is, maybe you'd actually donate some money into it.

If I start to get statements from a credit card company that I don't deal with from a clone who is not me I'll asses their spending patterns first before deciding whether or not to inform Gordan Brown, it might be cheaper to stick with the cloned me.

Holiday camp football...part two

So we were stood in two lines on the football pitch one morning singing "God Save The Queen" awaiting the arrival of Her Scouse Majesty again before kicking off the 1965 FA Cup Final for the tenth succesive day when three young men turned up and stood on the other side of the chain link fence to watch with bemusement.

Having shaken The Queens hand again and having been introduced as "the crap Gary Sprake", again, our dad noticed the three young men watching us and invited them through the gap in the chainlink fence to join us.

They were German, three lads in their late teens who were stupid enough to visit a 1970 France where everyone still hated the Germans, the fact that they hadn't been born until five years after the war had ended was irrelevant and our dad was the first person who had spoken to them since they had arrived.

The 1965 FA Cup Final was quickly abandoned in favour of a rematch of England vs West Germany, our dads favouring the 1966 World Cup Final version of England vs West Germany (4-2 to England) whereas the German lads favoured the recent 1970 World Cup quarter final (3-2 to West Germany) - as it was three Germans against dozens of English I was nominated to play in goals for West Germany, Gary Sprake again behind Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Muller and several other well known (although not to me) West German players of the era.

The West German team that I played in for the rest of that holiday were invincible, England couldn't get anywhere near my goalmouth so I spent long hot afternoons playing in the dirt watching Franz Beckenbauer knock goals in for fun at the other end of the pitch all of which earned me a slap around the head "for winning" from our dad.

And as was traditional we all retired to Bernards Bar in the evening for a drunken night of world war two songs and in the spirit of multi-culturism that was sweeping across the brave new Europe of 1970 our dad invited the German lads to join us in the fun.

Bernard wasn't very happy.

The Germans sat with us for a while but when it was their turn for a round they came back from the bar to explain "zat ve are very sorry but ve haff to go now", when asked they revealed that they had been ignored at the bar and then told to leave by mine host Bernard.

A British deputation headed by our dad and the scouse dads went to the bar to mediate and explain that they had invited the Germans and if the Brits could forgive them for bombing our cities 25 year earlier then surely the French could, after all, they'd just let the Germans walk straight into their country hadn't they ?

Bernard was insistent "Zose feelthy Bosch {spit} weel not be served at ma bar {spit}" he explained and then wiped up after himself, and despite protracted negotiations he would not be moved from his principle that all Germans were to blame for the loss of four years worth of turnover at his bar, 1940-1944, regardless of when they were born.

But us British are not world reknown for our diplomacy skills for nothing, oh no, our dad spotted a fatal flaw in Bernards principles, the Germans would not be served at the bar if they did not need to go to the bar, and they wouldn't need to go to the bar if they gave our dad the money to go to the bar for them - so thats what happened and within half an hour everyone was well-oiled, including Bernard and they were all singing war songs again, especially Bernard who introduced a few new ones sung in the French language and although we could not understand what the words meant we had a good idea judging by the gestures made towards our German guests.

Holiday camp football...part one

When your dad is the sort of dad who puts his hand up to volunteer for everything at your annual holiday camp holiday, when your dad is the sort of dad who is first on stage when they ask for volunteers to enter the talent contest on your annual holiday camp holiday, and when your dad is the sort of dad who speaks to anyone and everyone without being spoken to first, then you get used to being the family at the centre of everything that happens during your annual holiday camp holiday.



Even if you'd rather hide under a rock until it was all over.

In the first eleven years of my life we went to Cayton Bay Holiday Camp near Scarborough where our dad was nearly as well known as the compere who's job it was to organise everything that happened to us happy campers during the week, sometimes the compere just left it to our dad to organise everything, especially the afternoons playing cricket on the top field when 100 or more souls would turn up and we'd play fifty a side cricket for eight hours until it was dark, ending in scores like "all out for 2", it being impossible to score any runs when you have 50 fielders stood a few feet away from you.

But in 1970 we got adventurous, in 1970 no-one went abroad for their holidays, air travel was used by only 30 or so people in the whole of the UK and only the ones who's dads had been Monty of the Desert Rats would dare to take a car to France, when the British Amry left France in 1945 none of us Brits went back there until 1970, then we went and forged the way for millions of holidaymakers like us ever since.

Nine of us went in two cars to a small campsite near Dinard in Brittany, as an expedition it only went about 10 miles from the ferry port but it was deepest France to us and no-one spoke English so we shopped on what we could pick up from market stalls without having to ask questions, my mother became adept at buying ham, we ate ham for three weeks because she could point to that and make a convincing noise like a pig.

Also staying on the campsite were three families of scousers (for non-UK residents, the people of Liverpool are known as "scousers", think The Beatles before they talked posh, think The Beatles when they first appeared on the Johnny Carson Show and you couldn't understand them), and as everyone knows, if you come from Liverpool you are a football supporter, its the law.

So we played football, next door to the campsite was a football ground that belonged to a nearby school which was closed for the summer holidays, it had posts and nets and everything but it was enclosed by a chainlink fence, but scousers have never had problems with chain link fences and soon there was a hole large enough for several people to walk through and we played football on a professional quality pitch, all day long.

And of course you don't play football with scousers unless there is some element of reality to it, so every day when we played football we replayed the 1965 FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Leeds Utd, it was serious stuff, our dad had never forgiven the scousers for beating Leeds in the FA Cup final and he played to kill, as did the scousers.

I of course couldn't be arsed, never have been in the slightest bit interested in sporting competition as it all seems like a waste of energy to me, so I played in goals.

Liverpool won nearly every day mainly because I sat inside the goals and played in the dirt for most of the game, only stopping to pick the ball out of the back of the net and kick it back to my infuriated dad who would stride over to my goalmouth and crack me one around the back of the head every time I let a goal in, I finished most of the games with a headache.

The games were so serious that by the second week we were even re-enacting the whole of the Wembley FA Cup Final experience with both teams walking out through the hole in the chainlink fence side-by-side and lining up to be presented to "The Queen" (who just happened to be one of the scousers wives) prior to singing the national anthem and a rousing chorus of "Abide with Me".

"The Queen" would laugh when our dad (who was always Billy Bremner) introduced me as Gary Sprake the famous and most useless of Leeds Utd goalkeepers and she'd nod her head when my dad added "yes ma'am, this Gary Sprake is useless too" and the Queen would agree, having seen me play all week and then we'd kick off and I'd play in the dirt all afternoon and Liverpool would win 56-0 again.

And in the evening we'd all stroll up a lane to spend the night in a small bar by the name of "Bernards Bar", owned and run co-incidently by a man named Bernard, a frenchman who spoke approximately twelve words of English, most of which were to explain how much he hated the Germans.

He loved English people though and he welcomed our dad, Ralph and the scouser dads as if they were long lost pals, especially when they spent one long boozy session explaining what they all did during the war - Bernard himself had fled his native Brittany when "ze bosch" (spits on floor of his own bar then wipes it with his foot) invaded and had joined De Gaule's underground resistance in London where they spent three years sitting in other peoples bars and spitting on other peoples floor every time someone mentioned "ze bosch" - he was then parachuted back into France on D-Day before making his way back to run his bar, welcome Englishmen like long lost brothers, and spit on his own floor everytime someone mentioned "ze bosch".

And as every day was spent playing football then every night was spent in Bernards bar with our dad leading the singing of wartime songs, everyone linking arms and singing at the tops of their voices about how they'd all meet again don't know where dont know when, and all that jazz, until it was time for us to carry our drunken parents home to sleep on the floor of our tent and start the whole thing over again the next day...

...and then the Germans arrived.




To be continued.

If it wasn't for you he wouldn't be dead now...

Ten years ago I did something that I'd never done before and have never done since.

I employed a sales rep.

Not just any old sales rep though, oh no, this was Maurice the super sales rep from our biggest rivals, a much bigger company who employed twenty sales reps nationwide - and Maurice was consistently their best sales rep, year after year - the other sales reps all had Fords and Vauxhalls, Maurice had a BMW, thats how well they thought of him, worst still Maurice was based in Hull and often murdered us on enquiries.

But the year that I employed him something dramatic happened in his life - he reached the age of sixty - nothing too dramatic there then I hear you say, except for the fact that the company that employed him had a policy to retire everyone at the age of sixty, thats everyone, even your best ever sales rep, the one with the BMW, even him.

He approached me and asked if I needed a sales rep, I told him that I do all the sales, me, the one who has never had any sales training in his life, I do it all me, he suggested that I might be better employed managing the rest of the company while he did the selling, told me that he would easily pay his overhead cost in the first six months, I believed him and employed him, leased a Ford Mondeo for him and everything.

He was right, he was shit-hot as a rep, he could sell anything and even starting with a completely new product range he covered his overheads from month one onwards.

I once went with him to demonstrate some software to a potential client, spent an hour going through everything (fairly normal for a "proper" demonstration), answered all the questions, got a vague promise that they'd order it at some unspecified point in the future, I was happy, it had gone well, we left the building and I asked Maurice, who hadn't said a word for the last hour, what he thought of my selling technique,

"You take too long" he said
"How long would you have taken ?" I asked, intrigued
"If I hadn't sold it within fifteen minutes I'd have been out of there" he answered, "you've just wasted the rest of the morning waffling on in there"
"It takes an hour to show them everything" I argued
"Don't show them then" he replied, "just tell them it does everything and ask for an order"
"Never mind" I replied, a little subdued now, "I think they'll order"
"You shouldn't have left without the order" he replied "at the very least you should come back tomorrow and ask for it"

So he went back the next day and asked them for an order, and they gave him one, he was shit-hot as a rep, much better than me, I gave him a laptop to demonstrate the software on, he never even opened it, he sold off leaflets, bluff and nerve.

He'd came to us in the February and on the first week in August I was getting ready to fly to Menorca for a holiday when I took a phone call from his Icelandic partner to tell me that he was in hospital - he'd been taking his two dogs for a walk the previous night and the small terrier had spotted something in the dark and set off running while still on the lead, pulling Maurice over and breaking his thigh bone.

I visited him in hospital that afternoon where he'd had an operation to set the bone, he was extremely apologetic, I told him not to worry, we'd sort something out when I got back from Spain, he could work from home and do telesales, whatever, we'd work something out.

After two weeks holiday I came back to be told that Maurice had died a few days earlier, I laughed,

"No" I said, "Maurice just broke his leg, you don't die from a broken leg"
"Maurice did" they insisted, "he died Thursday, its his funeral tomorrow"
"Fook me" I thought out loud, "I leased his car for two years - bollax"

So I went to his funeral and because it was in Hull I took along Dennis, the tourettes service engineer, remember Dennis here and here ?

And after the funeral we were invited back to Maurices house where his Icelandic widow had done a buffet and served cups of tea and suchlike and we stood around in Maurices dining room and made polite conversation in mumbled tones so as not to upset the widow, after all it had all been a big shock for her, he takes the dogs out for a walk, falls over and ten days later he's dead.

With a bit of delicate questioning I found out that Maurice had always had high blood pressure and a heart condition and the explanation from the hospital was that the blood circulation to his broken leg wasn't that good after the operation and two days before he died he'd had to have the leg amputated and had died from blood poisoning, all of this was explained to me very quietly by a family friend while Dennis the tourettes service engineer wandered around the room looking at the cards that had been sent from well-wishers which ranged from "Get Well Soon you Daft Old Sod" from the first news of his fall through "Sorry to Hear of the Loss of your Leg" and finally on to "In Deepest Sympathy".

Dennis wandered the room reading them all out loud to me, shouting out the well-wishing messages across the room, I did my best to "shush" him but inevitably he reached the "Sorry about the Amputation" card that the surgeon had sent and Dennis stopped and re-read loudly it several times just in case anyone in the neighbourhood had not heard the news, finishing with a loud "I didn't - hupfuck - know he'd - hoopwhoo- had his -fffffuck- leg chopped off, did you ?"

It was time to leave before Dennis upset the Icelandic widow anymore and I grabbed him by the sleeve and led him to the door, "Are we - hmmphfuck - leaving ?" he asked.

The Icelandic widow waited at the front door to bid us farewell, tears brimming in her crystal clear cyan eyes, I professed my deep sorrow and put on my best sorrowful face whilst wondering what the hell I was going to do with the Ford Mondeo for another eighteen months and made to drag Dennis out of the house before he could upset her even more, but he insisted on professing his sorrow too inbetween "hmphfuck" and "harrumphfuck", which sort of detracted from the "sorrow" part of his message somewhat, but just as I thought he'd managed to pull it off without too much damage the little terrier dog wandered into the hall and brushed up against his leg, he kicked it away somewhat brusquely, then looking down on the small dog that had been treated almost as a son by Maurice and his Icelandic wife he siad the imortal words...

"Just think, -huppfuck - if it wasn't for you he wouldn't be dead now..."

The Icelandic widow stared down at the terrier and the truth of what Dennis had said slowly registered in her eyes as saucepan-like tears started to fall from her cheeks, it was time to leave quickly and I dragged Dennis down the garden path by the scruff of his neck,

"What did you say that for ?" I shouted
"Well, - hupppmmm - its true isn't it ?"

There was a childlike simplicity to Dennis's brain that surpassed all understanding.

Two weeks after Maurice's demise, Harry another of my service engineers died, (we went through a whole series of demises within that twelve months) I didn't take Dennis to Harry's funeral though.

Nearly thawed out

Its 6pm and I'm nearly all thawed out after watching my eldest nephew play in an under 9's rugby tournement in Wakefield today, nearly four hours from 9am this morning I stood out in the cold and occasional cold rain with bits of ice mixed in, nearly four hours and when we finally went back to the car the temperature readout said "one".

His team played three twenty minute games with lots of standing around the fields waiting for other teams to play their twenty minute games so that you could play your next twenty minute game, lots of stamping feet, blowing of hands and shivering inside five or six layers of cotton and fleece while the 9 year old lads ran around in shorts and playing shirts seemingly unaware that today has been the coldest day of winter so far.

Coach #1 gave the team talk before the first game, it went something like "I want you all to enjoy today boys, and you won't enjoy it if you're cold, so if you're not playing then put your training gear on, keep warm and just enjoy yourself, but keep warm..."

Coach #2 waited until Coach #1 had gone for a warming cup of coffee then gathered all the lads again, "Look I don't care what he said {points to coach #1 disappearing into clubhouse}, today is a Yorkshire Cup game, sod "enjoying yourself", you get out there and smash them all over the park, keep warm but bloody well win, first and foremost - we win today, ok ?" {loud cheers from the parents who all wished they'd stayed in bed as it starts to rain ice}

Its great to watch nine year olds play rugby, they've just started to tackle this year and their technique is getting more refined with every game although at least two of them in each game have to helped off the pitch crying and rubbing their shoulders or heads where they mistimed a tackle, and one kid got a busted nose, no tears though, just tip water over his face (christ that must have been cold), stuff cotton wool up his nose and shove him back on - they wouldn't do that in soccer, especially the nancy-boy grown-ups who play in the Premier League.

Rugby is just this much {holds arms as far apart as he can} a more honest game than soccer.

So in the second game I notice Benny my nephew get substituted and he comes over to me shivering and not looking very happy - our Ned is refereeing so I get Benny's sweatshirt out and put it on him, then his coat and he stands there in his shorts and boots and looks really cold and miserable.

I ask him why he came off, he rubs his stomach and says he doesn't feel very well, he's shivering a lot now so I tell him to take his boots off and we go into the clubhouse where its a tad warmer and I go to the hatch where the ladies ofthe club are selling hot drinks but they don't have any hot chocolate left, so I buy myself a coffee and tell Benny to stand near the radiator to warm up.

Then he spots someone eating a plate of chips (thats "french fries" USA), and he asks for a plate too, I remind him that he supposed to be feeling not very well in the tummy department but he says they'll warm him up so Igo and stand inline for chips and while I'm there he follows me and asks if he can have two sausages as well, I laugh and tell him that he's not feeling very well at all then and he tells me that he's feeling a bit better now.

So he has his plate of sausage and chips and we sit near a radiator for while and he must be feeling better now as he asks if they have any more hot food - for medicinal purposes of course.

I ask if he wants another plate of sausage and chips and he is sorely tempted to say yes, he struggles with his answer though in case I send him back out to play rugby, having discovered is ploy to get out of the cold, so he just asks for one of the huge muffins that they are selling on another stall which is then stuffed down his face in double quick time.

By this time the tournement is over and his team have come second and qualified for the next round so both coaches are happy and the team all troop into the clubhouse and join Benny where they are all given a token to claim a free meal from the serving hatch and I spot Benny five minutes later in the queue clutching his meal ticket for some more sausage and chips.

Our Ned isn't too pleased when I tell him that the "poorly tummy" really equated to "I'm cold and wet and don't want to play anymore" but I find myself defending the kid because I was cold and wet too and didn't want to watch anymore either so it all worked out well in the end.

Despite being frozen to death all morning, despite having to get up early on a Sunday and drive to Wakefield, I really enjoyed today, there were six teams in the tournement today, nearly 100 nine year olds playing with a hell of a lot of enthusiasm and some damn fine organisation from the clubs involved - the English Rugby Union really know how important it is to support junior rugby and no expense is spared, especially in the sausage and chips department.

More video inspired recollections...

The video is just an excuse today simply because its inspired a couple of thoughts and memories, its a Bradford band called "Smokie" by the way, we used to come across them a lot drinking in pubs in that awful dirty city circa 1974 and whenever one of them walked into a pub then someone would put one of their records on the jukebox, maybe someone who was paid by the band to do just that, anyhoo...

Sad memory #1 - the lead guitarist nearest the camera on the long shots - I had hair just like his. That was my first thought immediately I saw this video, "I had hair just like his" I thought straightaway, same length same stylee, bloody hell, what happened to it - it fell out is the answer, it fell out and left me having to shave it every few weeks to make it look as if I intend to have that shaven headed look, I don't, I'd like my 1970's hair back please.

Sad memory #2 - the bass guitarist furthest away from the camera on the long shots, the one with the curly mop-haired look - he is the spitting image of an old schoolfriend of mine, Dave Maud, we would take the piss out of Dave Maud when Smokie were all the rage because he looked like the bass guitarist, which was all the more annying because Dave Maud was actually a drummer, and quite a good one.

We had two drummers in our year at school and unfortunately Dave Maud was alwasy destined to be the lesser of the two simply because the other one was John Kewley, a drumming maniac. Kewley would drum things all day long, I'm sure he had St Vitus Dance because I never saw him without he'd be tapping something, fidgeting, drumming his fingers on the desktop, "borrowing" rulers and lining up things in front of him to drum on, he'd drum on your head as you walked past him, Kewley was a drumming genius albeit a manic genius and according to his entry in "Friends Reunited" he is a professional drummer and has been for the past 30 years, so no suprises there then.

Which left Dave Maud as the second best drummer in our class, its no shame to be second best to Kewley the manic drumming genius and Maudy was good and played in several local pub bands for most of his life, a nice lad , modest, with not a breath of badness about him, I last saw his name mentioned three years ago on one of the extremely rare occasions when I had bought an evening newspaper (I never buy newspapers, fate made me buy this one this night) and read of the "tragic death" of a person of my age called Dave Maud.

It was too much of a coincidence, there aren't many Mauds in the Leeds phone directory and here was one of the same name as my old chum and the correct age to be him, I rang around a few friends and a few days later one of them found the story buried in the back of another edition of the same paper, the coroners report found that he had died from alcohol poisoning, probably self induced while suffering from depression after the breakdown of his marriage, such a waste and a shame, he might have grown up to be a right twat, I really don't know, but I'll always remember him as one of lifes nice blokes, someone who, if I'd seen him in a pub in later years, I would have walked over and reaquainted myself with, and there are many who I can't say that for.

So there you are, all of that just because I clicked on a Smokie video on YouTube, isn't memory good ?

Video Saturday - The Searchers

Video Saturday again, how quick they come around, and this week its the turn of The Searchers.

Why ?

Simply because Smooth Radio (simply the ace-ist station on DAB) had an interview this week with Bill Kenwright, one-time actor, producer and now theatre impressario, and in his opinion The Searchers were exponents of the true "Mersey Sound" of the 1960's, even more so than The Beatles, and Bill Kenwright should know as he went to school in Liverpool with John Lennon.

So, "Needles and Pins" then, from 1963, guitar band, smart suits, songs you can whistle to, hard to imagine that the sight of these pleasant young lads would inspire outrage in the heaving busoms of suburbia back in the early sixties, I mean look at those haircuts, they want to get a bloody haircut most of 1960's middle class British suburbia would cry, National Service wouldn't do them any harm they'd moan, didn't do me any harm they'd whine, yes dear their wives would add, apart from losing your leg in Korea that is, yes dear, apart from losing my leg in Korea they'd admit, apart from that though...

The Searchers had several hits in the 1960's, managed by the rascal record producer Tony Hatch who presented them with several hit songs to record, written by a man called Freddie Nightingale, Hatch creamed his producers share off the top whilst omitting to mention to the band that the writers royalties paid to Freddie Nightingale were actually finding their way to a bank account in the name of Tony Hatch, being that he and Freddie Nightingale were the same person.

Like many popular beat combos of the sixties The Searchers struggled to change with the music, just five years after this song their smart suits and ties were a million miles away from the loon pants, kaftans and Beatles inspired psycodelia and they were consigned to being just another "former popular" band doing the nightclub cabaret-with-chicken-in-a-basket circuit and they still play there today albeit in two configurations, a fate shared by many "former popular" groups of the sixties and seventies - perhaps The Beatles were right to disolve their partnership in 1970, I just can't see "Paul McCartney's Beatles" playing Batley Frontier Club to an audience of twenty fans and 400 bored punters waiting for the bingo to start.

The one about our wedding...

So, our wedding then.
Seghill Church Northumberland (left)
17th September 1983
My birthday.

Main points already covered here.

But what I didn't mention is the bit part that I had, the groom bit part.

You see, nobody knew who I was.

I was still the stranger in town, well more the stranger in the pit village actually, a small community where everyone knew everyone else's business, where everyone had lived in each other's pockets for the whole of their lives, and I'd only lived there for two years, I was a nobody.

You can tell that is the case by the shot on the video as me and Ned arrive at the church and walk down the path, the video man stands halfway down the path and films us walking towards him - in front of us is walking one of Suzannes uncles who is helping an old witch on her way to curse and phlegh at the vicar, the old witch being one of Suzannes miriad of elder relatives, a wittering, bitching old hag who never had a good word to say about anyone ... anyway, as we walked past them towards the video she is clearly heard to say to Suzannes uncle "Whee's 'ee then ?" (translation "Who is he then") to which Suzannes uncle replies "He's the groom, he's the one getting married to wor Suzanne" to which she doesn't look at all impressed - she'd actually gone to the trouble of getting all dressed up and hobbling all the way to the church to attend a wedding where she didn't even know who the groom was.

The video camera was a new innovation and involved lugging around a portable version of the Ferguson Videostar tape recorder hung on your shoulder while on your opposite shoulder you supported a camera the size of a small wardrobe, the whole kit costing several thousand pounds and producing shaky out of focus uneditable films which now resemble the Laurel and Hardy film just below this post.

The only reason that we could afford the video man is because he was for free, he was the son of the photographer-man who in turn was a bloke who worked at the same place as Suzanne did and who fancied himself as a bit of an amateur wedding photographer, very amateur as it turned out as I, the groom, the second most important person in the wedding party, do not feature in any of his photographs - the compulsory photo of their wedding day, the one with the bride and groom stood on the steps of the church - that one, that everyone has hanging on the wall of their house shows my new wife and her father standing on the steps of the church - I repeat, the amateur photographer who took the photographs and videoed our wedding didn't bother to take any photographs of me.

Have I mentioned that I was an outsider in the village ?
Am I also giving the impression that our wedding was done on the cheap ?
Good.

So we got married by a fire and brimstone stylee vicar who terrified all of the old ladies in the congregation (I knew none of them) by shouting and pointing at them and condemning their souls all to hell before pausing, smiling ingenuously, holding his hands together and sweetly saying, "...and now we come to the wedding of Suzanne of this village and, erm, this other person here..."

And afterwards the video shows us exiting the church together, arm in arm, and pausing for the traditional photograph on the church steps to find the photographer still inside the church picking up his gadget bag which had dropped gadgets all over the floor when he tried to pick it up earlier, the video man was there though so we have at least video evidence that I was actually present on the day, for there I am stood on the church steps for a few precious seconds until the surge of guests from inside the church shoves us down the steps and I disappear from the video evidence for ever.

What follows is the bumbling photographer trying to remember which order he has to take the photographs in and managing in the process to get a photograph of the bride with every combination of every person present, except me of course, I get the job of shepherding people to and from the church steps for the photographs, the job that the photographers assistant should have been doing, had he not been lugging the video equipment around.

You can tell from our video that it was the first time that he had used the video camera, you can tell that by the way that he doesn't know where the "off" switch is so we get a half hour of constant uneditable filming of everything that he was looking at through the viewfinder. The fact that he was just a young kid inexperienced in the art of shoving your way to the front of a wedding crowd also means that he spent most of the time filming from the back of the crowd, and at village weddings like ours you get the whole village turning out to the church, not because they like you but because they try and sneak into your reception for free food and beer.

So our wedding video consists of long shots of the back of the heads of the crowd with occasional glimpses of the bride stood on the steps having her photograph taken with yet another random villager, and of course all you can hear is the voices of the two people stood in front of the videoman, stuff like "...wheee, whee's tha blerk then ?" (translation "Well who is the groom then ?") replied with "..ah divvent kna pet, haven't seen him, he's a stranger apparently"

There is a classic bit in the video that I love to show to visitors where the videoman realises that he is not getting very good shots from the back of the crowd so he goes for a wander around to see if he can get a better view elsewhere, but of course he doesn't know how to switch the camera off and its bloody heavy on his shoulder so he lets it swing from his arms and we get to see the footpath, grass and some gravestones as he hunts around for a new vantage point until he lifts it back to his shoulder again and we get to see...

...two of my uncles stood some distance away behind a large gravestone, smiling and waving with one hand.

I asked them later what they were doing stood together behind the gravestone, they looked sheepish and suprised that someone had spotted them, then horror-struck when I told then I'd seen them on the video.

They'd got tired of standing around for photographs and so had gone for a piss behind the large gravestone, both stood there waving one-handed at the camera whilst slashing up against the grave of someone of the village who probably didn't deserve to be pissed all over - my uncle Ralph told me it was actually a family grave and he'd got so enthralled at reading the list of people buried beneath his feet that he'd accidently pissed all over his Hush Puppies.

These were my people, sophisticated.
A posh wedding would have been wasted on them.

Fame at last part 2

So there is the Woman magazine photo then, starring in the main, yours truly.

What do you mean you can't see me ?

See the bloke on the far left with the grey suit on ?
Thats one of my cousins that is, brother of the groom.
Now move slightly right and slightly up and there's someone in a white shirt and a Newcastle Utd stylee tie.
Yours truly.
Fame,
I'm going to live forever, etc.

Now come down to the four blue balloons in front.
Move to the right a tad and slightly up.
Theres someone in a long pink jacket.
Thats #2 daughter that is
#1 daughter is stood to the left and slightly behind her.
Current wife is stood to the left of #1 daughter
But you can't see her very well because Jackie Brambles hand is in the way - tee-hee.

Bottom right hand corner, young boy
Thats my nephew and godson that is.

Fame,
It won't go to my head
Not yet anyway.

Tomorrow - the one about our wedding...

Tell me that again...

We use that line a lot in the office, me and Ned, whenever one of us has an idea, a really good idea, we let the other one go through a whole long explanation, then sit back, pause and in Olliver Hardy stylee say "Tell me that again..." and then the other one has to tell the scheme again, but all mixed up this time ending with "...and the profits go to the fish"

We laugh, every time.

That's all folks...

Fame at last...

You simply must dash out tomorrow and buy this (left) latest edition of the magazine that is loved by old women the nation over - Woman magazine.

Why ? I hear you ask...

Why ? I respond incredulously. Why ?

Why - because I'm in it this week of course.

Fame at last.

If you have a magnifying glass to the power of, lets say, ten or more times magnification, then you'll spot me on the "here are the guests releasing balloons in celebration" photo, to the left, near the back, thats me, yes, its me, no really I am that handsome in real life too.

And if you know who you're looking for you'll see my wife, she's the one with her mouth open as if nagging me to release my balloon (waste of a good balloon) and you'd be right, she was nagging.

You'll also see Jodie on that photo, we're all famous, the whole family, I'm sat by my front door right now awaiting the hordes of autograph hunters who will surely be descending on the house any time now...

Famous, in Woman magazine, who would-a-thunk-it eh ?

I bet I can't walk past any old peoples homes tomorrow.

Get me out of here...

And so it starts...

Another year, another series of "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here".

But this year, announced a breathless Ant and Dec, this year its going to be different, this year we will be splitting the camp into two teams, so, erm, thats different then...."

So they took the two teams and they flew them out into the middle of the wildest jungle in Australia, that'll be the wildest jungle where there is a hotel just right in the middle of it, that'll be the wildest jungle in Australia where all of the really dangerous wild animals and reptiles have been ethnically cleansed for Health and Safety Executive reasons, Ant and Dec being at pains to point out last night that the camp named "Croc Creek" has had all its crocs removed, for that would be un-natural and dangerous wouldn't it ?

So they took them all out into the middle of this wild, ethnically cleansed jungle in the garden of a hotel on this big new adventure that we haven't already seen four times before and they flew them there by helicopter and we all shouted at the TV set "Bunjee jump out of the helicopter" and the "celebrities" (only one of whom I have ever heard of) sat in the helicopter and mumbled to each other "do you think they'll get us to bungee jump out of the heleicopter" and the more scared of them screamed back "Oh my god I hope not I hate heights, oh my god I hate helicopters, oh my god I hate bungee jumping, oh my god I don't know why I'm here..." and we all screamed back at the TV set "Its because you want to be in panto this year..."

And sure enough, very soon the bungee rope appeared and four of them were thrown out of the helicopter, sobbing and wailing and screaming on the way down - just like last year, and the year before...

And while four celebs sobbed and wailed and screamed on the end of a rubber band the other team had a bit of a row around in a canoe in a crocodile infested lake that had been ethnically cleansed of crocodiles for the purposes of the show because of Health and Safety Executive reasons and the fat bird in the back of the canoe (who no-one knows nor cares why they do not know her) sat and sobbed and wailed and screamed that they were sinking whereas in fact they weren't sinking because the Health and Safety Executive had tested the canoe on the lake, after they had ethnically cleansed it of crocodiles, with four even fatter birds several times before and none of them had sunk the thing and anyway, the lake was full of scuba divers waiting to fish the fat bird out if she happened to capsize the vessel, which she nearly did, but not quite, which was a shame because that would have been funny, seeing four scuba divers trying to hold her fat head above the water while the big daddy crocodile of the lake who had hidden whilst his family was being ethnically cleansed came sniffing around for dinner.

I watched an hour of it, got to the hour point then realised that being the first episode it was actually on for an hour and a half, I couldn't face any more of it and so turned it off.

And so for the next god-knows-how-many-weeks we (the ones who are still brain dead enough to leave ITV tuned on their TV sets) will watch the celebrity who confesses to all that they have a phobia of spiders be voted by the viewers who are even more brain dead than the ones who simply watch, for they are the ones who watch and then ring the premium phone line to vote the spider-fearing "celebrity" to put their hands into boxes full of spiders - repeat the following night with the snake-fearing "celebrity", repeat the following night with the rat-fearing "celebrity", repeat the following night with the fish-fearing "celebrity" (yes there is always one who fears fish) coupled with sneaky, slightly out of focus shots of the totty in the camp bathing in a white bikini in the now crocodile-less lagoon.

I shall watch from time to time purely for research purposes...

Coopers sweet shop

When I was 11 years old something remarkable happened shortly after I'd started at high school.

One of the boys in my class came to me one day and asked me where I lived, when I told him he mentioned that he was moving to my neighbourhood the following week and did I know of Cooper's sweet shop.

Of course I knew of Coopers sweet shop, it was the centre of our universe.

"Oh" he said, "well thats where we're going to be living, my dad's bought the shop"

He imediately became my new best friend.

Imagine having a best friend who's dad owned a sweet shop.

He never had to call for us, we always called for him, for when we called for him his mother would stuff our pockets full of free sweets, we stopped stealing sweets like we had done from the previous proprietor because where was the fun in stealing when the owner just gave you the sweets ?

That didn't stop other kids from stealing though.

We were sat in his living room one sunday afternoon, the living premises were at the back of the shop, as was the garage and storeroom, when his dad came through from the shop and stood at the window which overlooked the garage, he waited for a while, then suddenly flung open the window and started yelling at someone or something to bugger off and never come back.

It was two young kids who he had suspected for a while of bamboozling him - they were frequent visitors to the shop returning pop bottles for the threepence deposit on the bottle - nothing wrong there you may think, except for the fact that they had discovered that my mates dad stored the empty pop bottles around the back of the house until the popman collected them, the two kids would take the bottles from the back of the shop around to the front of the shop, take the money on the bottles then wait for my mates dad to put the bottles out the back again before repeating the process several more times - ingenious.

One day during the long hot school summer holidays we were minding the shop for his dad who had maybe gone for a pony and trap for ten minutes or so when a young boy walked in the shop and asked for a quarter of aniseed balls.

This being the olden days all of the sweets were sold loose, weighed out then put into paper bags, my mate indicated to me that I should serve him, I put down the Mars bar that I was chomping on at the time (hey if his dad was daft enough to leave us to look after the sweet shop then it would be criminal not to help ourselves to some chocolate) and took down the jar of aniseed balls from the shelf.

I weighed out a quarter of the small round balls, took a paper bag, poured the aniseed balls into it then stood there holding both sides of the open bit of the bag.

I'd seen his dad whiz the paper bags around in an arc to wrap the open corners together and seal the paper bag, it seemed simple enough, you just hold both open corners and with a flick of the wrist twirl it around in a 360 degree arc to complete the wrap, what could possibly go wrong ?

The wrap started well enough, the bag climbed upwards in the first 90 degrees of turn but when it reached the perpendicular, ie with the open end now facing downwards, it seemed to stop, hanging there in mid air, seemingly suspended there, time stood still as I regarded the now upside down non-wrapped bag, there was nothing I could do to effect a completion of the wrapping cycle, the bag was stuck, upside down, open.

The aniseed balls fell out onto the floor, a hundred or so bouncing pellets so beloved of small boys and dogs, bouncing all over the floor at our side of the counter.

My mate and I looked at each other horror-struck, the young kid who wanted to buy them looked at us horror-struck, I asked my mate "what do we do now ?"

He replied with the only possible answer.

"Run"

So we did, we beat it out of the shop and didn't stop running until we were well down the street.

The kid took all of the blame, for months afterwards my mates dad would tell us the story time and again about the young kid who came into the shop when no-one was around and tipped a whole jar of aniseed balls all over the floor and earned a bloody good clip around the ear'ole for his troubles.

Oh how we laughed.

Its his birthday today

Apart from the obvious Rememberance Day today, today is or would have been, the birthday of my dad, had he not died in 1998 of course.

So a few words for him.
Because I never got to say a few words to him when he was alive.

We just never did, it wasn't done for men to talk openly and express soppy things like love and respect to each other, so we didn't.

In his later years after he had retired to live in Benidorm I used to get feedback from my auntie, his sister, to whom he would go to for his sunday dinners when he was back in the UK for a few months every summer, she'd ring me and tell me that he'd mentioned again how proud he was of what I was doing with his old business, and then the next day he'd come down to the office and spend an hour criticising everything we'd done and telling me how we'd be going bust if I didn't pull my socks up - eventually he was nearly right.

But thats good enough as an expression of love and respect for me, caring criticism is fine, it shows that he cared and of course I knew what he really thought thanks to my auntie Doris.

He had inherited the business from his father in 1946 when he returned from a war spent in Africa and India with an attitude born of experience that all foreigners were lazy and stupid and Italians could not cook to save their lives, for the rest of his life he banned "foreign" food from the house, me and our Ned had to sit on the doorstep to eat the takeaways that we brought home from the pub after a night out, he wouldn't even allow you to put the empty cartons in the kitchen waste bin, you had to taint his bin outside with the smell - even when he moved to Spain and mixed with a crowd of Spanish showbiz people he would order "English" sounding food off the menus in the restaurants that they took him to and spoke his own English version of Spanish, refusing to adopt an accent at all.

He ran the small clock business for a short while but my grandad had not worked in it for a couple of years while he died a long, painful and lingering death from lung cancer and it wasn't really viable anymore so sometime in the late 1940's he closed the shop and took up a job with a national company selling and servicing time recorders ("clocking on" clocks) - he became their Northern office.

When he left that company in 1978 there was no-one more suprised than me, he had risen to be their manager for the whole of the north of England, in charge of four sales offices, a nice company car changed every couple of years, a nice bungalow in a "good" area of the city, and a good salary although his Yorkshire thrift prevented him from throwing it around too much we always had good holidays, were the first people I knew to holiday abroad despite his loathing of foreigners, and were inundated at christmas and birthdays, in short we were "comfortable".

But he had plans to do the same job for himself and keep the cash rather than send it to a head office somewhere, and thats exactly what he did building a business that still dominates our trade in the North East of this country, despite my best efforts to ruin it later.

When I joined him in 1983 there was no doubt that I was his pension scheme and within five years he had announced his retirement and told me exactly how much I would be paying him every month until he died in order to buy the business off him - fait acomplis sucker.

But even when he'd retired he did not retire, he'd come and work full days in the workshop for free just because he wouldn't sit at home and retire like all retirees should do, maybe he would have done if he'd known that within two years of him retiring my mother would die of the breast cancer that she'd fought against without a word of complaint for seven years, I always had the feeling that they both expected to spend their retirement years "sometime later", putting off the day when they'd sit at home and behave like proper grandparents until it was too late - its a lesson that has not passed me by, I'm out of here as soon as I can afford to and I'll live a disgracefully long, lazy retirement painting and wearing out a chair in front of a tv set.

His life became aimless after my mother died, until then they had been visiting Benidorm for increasingly longer periods several times a year but he wouldn't go there on his own even though we all knew that that is where his heart lay, the centre of Europe where all retirees go to die and be royally entertained while they do so.

Eventually he paired up with an old friend Brian, the salesman who was the big name on the Northern club circuit and they rented and shared an apartment in the Spanish quarter in Benidorm, "The Odd Couple" as their friends out there called them after the Jack Lemmon/Walter Mathou partnership in the film of the same name, for eight years they lived out there travelling home for two months each summer with our dad driving his uninsured, untaxed Renault all the way there and back, Brian navigating all the way with an A4 sized map of the whole of Spain that he'd ripped out of a page in The Sun one day, as Brian often said, he'd navigated a British Army tank all over Korea in the 1950's so Leeds to Benidorm was a piece of piss, oh how we laughed the year that he navigated them off the main Madrid/Alicante motorway into a quarry and had to get a man on a moped to guide them back to the road.

Our dad loved those days in Benidorm, living the life of a single man, albeit a single man in his 70's, out every night drinking and singing and telling jokes in his favourite bars, they populated one bar in particular so often that the visiting holidaymakers thought that he and Brian owned the place, a belief compounded when they heard the two of them speaking their own version of Spanish, "Beni-Spanish" as Brian explained, to the real bar owner who acted with servitude to them both as if they really did own his bar, I'm convinced that the bar owner came to believe that he was just an employee in the end.

When he came home unexpectedly in December 1998 complaining of pains in his lower back I knew secretly that it was far more serious than he was intimating and yet still we did not speak like father and son, our relationship had been forged by the business and so our chats were stilted with silences when neither of us could speak our true feelings, I knew he had liver cancer, he knew he had liver cancer, the fekking consultant who charged a royal fee for private consultations (for our dad wanted to get back to Benidorm for christmas) dragged his heels with a diagnosis then fucked off on holiday with still not a word on what those expensive CAT scans had revealed, three days later in the week before christmas our dad was admitted to the LGI as the pain had become acute and it was left to a young Chinese doctor to explain to me in a small office that my father would not last more than a few more days as his liver had stopped functioning some time ago - you'll be glad to know that despite petering us for the money we did not pay the consultants bill from the estate and after a while even his level of care-nought bastard-ness gave up trying to extract the money.

In the week that he spent on a ward for the dying in the LGI he was doped up on morphine so that he slept most of the time, waking only for a few minutes and muttering incoherent things to whoever was sat by the bed. I didn't go to the hospital very much and when I did it was only for a few minutes, it just seemed such a waste of time to me and I admire those people (ie my wife at the bedside of both her parents when they died) who can sit for days and weeks on end at the bedside of a dying relative, its not something that I could do, and so I didn't.

On Christmas Day I even unplugged the phone for a couple of hours so that our christmas lunch with some members of our family would not be disturbed byt he hospital ringing, the day before our Ned had been sat at his bedside when he'd opened his eyes and told him "I'm going ashore tomorrow" we hadn't a clue what he meant by this as he had never been a one for sailing but we took it to mean that he was on his way - I visited him on Christmas Eve,stood at the end of the bed for a few minutes until he opened one eye and said his last words to me, "Are you still here ?" is what he said, then closed his eyes and went to sleep again - I took that as my prompt to fekk off, so I did.

I found out later that our Ned had spent the afternoon sat at his bedside and he obviously thought that I was him, we look very much the same to someone in a semi-coma.

The call from the hospital came on Boxing Day morning and that was that, 75 years of laughing, singing, trading (sometimes even declaring the income for tax) came to a close.

I don't miss him because I talk to him most days, on the day this year when we sold the business the people who had bought the majority of shares shook my hand and asked if I was at all sad that I'd just sold the family business, my answer was no, not at all - I didn't tell them that that was also my fathers opinion because they'd think I was mad if they knew I'd been talking to him about it for months beforehand.

About a week after his funeral I had a dream, it was a dream that seemed to last all night long and I never wanted it to end and when I awoke I cannot explain the feeling of relief and happiness that I felt, in the dream I visited him in Benidorm and we walked and talked, and talked and walked, up and down the two mile long promenade of that resort town, I don't know what we talked about, I didn't hear the words but we walked and talked all night and the feeling that I had in the morning was that we'd said everything that should have been said years ago, I wish I could have that dream again.

George Harrison

Video Saturday for no other reason that I love this song.

I revised my O levels at home to this song in 1973, sat in the house all day trying to force feed maths and french and physics and geography and all that jazz into a brain that didn't want to play at doing exams and all the while George Harrison, the massively under-rated Beatle sang this song on the radio, "give me hope, help me cope with this heavy load", this and Lou Reed's "Walk on the wild side" were the songs that carried me through those revision months and all to no avail, I was crap at schoolwork but we had some great sounds to revise to in those days...