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Friday afternoon found us heading up the A1 to a small ex-mining village just north of Newcastle-u-Tyne, 100 miles north of Leeds but a journey that always takes us 70 years back in time.
Seaton Delaval was once a small village, built to house the workers at its own coal mine, owned in its entirety by the pit owner - but why should I relate the history of the place when someone has already done a good enough job, with pictures, right here.
Its where my wifes family are from, its where most of the wider family still are although her numerous brothers and sisters have all moved away now, but her relations still number in the hundreds and her family tree is virtually impossible to draw as within five minutes the lines between the generations start to cross each other with annoying regularity, uncles become cousins, grandparents become uncles and the whole diagram ends up looking like something that a primary school kid has scribbled on his first go with a crayon and paper.
In the last forty years the village has expanded its boundaries, new housing estates have grown and in theory a new generation of young people should have flushed out the old pit village folk, villages like Delaval should by now have morphed into homogeneous commuter residential belts with only the crossroads at the centre showing any vestige of the past.
But Delaval is not like that, despite the village now being several times its original size it still retains its mining village community and identity, and nowhere is the demonstrated better than in the Seaton Terrace Working Mens Club, "The Terrace".
When I moved to Delaval in 1981 The Terrace was still the most important building in the village, along with the Co-op store in the centre ("The Store"), it was the one place where you could always guarantee that you'd meet any single person at least once a day if you were prepared to wait there long enough for them, being a member of The Terrace was simply a requirement if you wanted to exist in Delaval as a bone-fide resident.
And so of course I joined, and being attached to my wifes family, everyone knew me - Suzannes father was one of the committeemen at the Terrace and was a well known figure in the community and so by default and with my connection to their family, everyone knew me too - I knew no-one and spent most of my time talking to people who knew everything about me whilst I couldn't even recall their name.
I never went into The Terrace without it being almost full of the same faces, Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest and on a Saturday if you weren't in the place early (pre-7pm) then you simply wouldn't get in.
Its not like that now.
The consensus of opinion on Friday night amongst those who have known The Terrace all of their lives was "this place is dying" and whilst I don't know the financial details of the place its easy to see how they can draw that conclusion.
We were at one my wifes remaining aunts 70th birthday party which, as tradition dictates, was held in the upstairs concert room with a DJ to provide the predictable blend of records and a buffet meal consisting of sandwiches and home made pies.
Sadly the upstairs concert room, which at a guess could hold three to four hundred souls (and did every saturday night), is now only used for private functions such as the one on Friday, no club-organised saturday night entertainment is held there now, in common with many other working mens clubs the cost of providing a "turn" (or even two) grew prohibitively expensive in the 1990's and now the members use the downstairs lounge simply to buy cheap beer and talk.
The one room in the place which is still well populated is "The Bar".
The Bar is the haven for the menfolk, until legislation prevented its enforcement it was a condition of joining the club that women were not allowed in The Bar and whilst its not now legally possible to prevent them, few women venture in there and the ones who do are liable to verbal abuse or ignorance of their presence, its still a mens domain in there.
And therein lies the only remaining lifeblood of The Terrace, if it wasn't for the influx of young village youth into The Bar in preference for the local pubs of the area then The Terrace would have died on its arse years ago, but the tradition still stands where a man of the village will take his son to The Terrace and "join him" as a member on his 18th birthday and from that date onwards the young man will use The Bar as an extension to his own home.
On Friday evening I sat in isolation with my pint of orange (yes I was the driver) and just observed from the back of the conert room.
On Friday night there were 150 or so souls in there, I recognised many of the faces, I am related by marriage to many of the faces in there but at least half of the faces that I recognised were not the same people that I knew, they are the offspring of those people.
The older folk that I used to drunkenly bump into every weekend are now either dead or locked up in a home somewhere but their spirit lives on in their sons and daughters who have exactly the same routine as their parents had, shop at the Co-op, booze at The Terrace, its un-nerving to see the next generation continuing in exactly the same mode as their parents when all over the country other offspring are eager to break away from their parental influences, its like a living museum, you couldn't control it any better if it was The Truman Show.
And there lies the secret of a real community village - continuity.
Its why New Towns never quite manage to build a real feeling of "being", its why the residents of new housing estates often speak of them as "soul less", its because you could build a whole new replica Seaton Delaval just up the road but if you populated it with new people drafted in from outside then none of them would bring their history with them, non of the younger generation would go the the village club simply because its what their father and grandfather did and its where their father brought them to play snooker or fly pigeons when they were young .
You cannot build tradition, you cannot construct a soul, there is no price that you can pay to create a new settlement that people will instantly feel a connection to even if they are not aware of or do not understand what that connection is, pit villages like Delaval have that commodity, sometimes its the only thing they have, but its priceless none the less.
Heard this christmas's first rendition of "Fairytale of New York" on the radio yesterday, wonderful, sheer wonderfullness.
By coincidence the song is also the subject of an article in this months Uncut magazine (perhaps the best music magazine in the world...ever), in which Shane MacGowan describes the long process of writing a christmas masterpiece - two years from conception to completion and a replacement female vocal along the way.
It started off as a challenge from Elvis Costello to MacGowan for him to write a male/female duet sing and he and the band worked on several ideas before coming up with the idea of a pair of drunken brawling Irish immigrants who find themselves in New York int he 1930's, cash in pocket and drink to spend it on, the original title of "Christmas Eve in the Drunk Tank" describing the whole basis of the song.
It was christmas eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, wont see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
Ive got a feeling
This years for me and you
So happy christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true
Theyve got cars big as bars
Theyve got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
Its no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold christmas eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of new york city
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night
The boys of the nypd choir
Were singing galway bay
And the bells were ringing out
For christmas day
Youre a bum
Youre a punk
Youre an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy christmas your arse
I pray God its our last
I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Cant make it all alone
Ive built my dreams around you
The original duet partner Cait O'Riordan buggered off and married Elvis Costello but two years later record producer Steve Lillywhite was working with The Pogues and suggested that his wife Kirsty MacColl would do a good job of the vocals - it wouldn't be the same without her now.
And christmas wouldn't be the same if I didn't hear this song, and Lennons "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" at least once on the radio, long may they reign.
YouTube link right here good people featuring Matt Dillon as the police officer
And another one (which loads slowly)
While my youngest daughter gets all enthusiastic about going on a school trip to South Africa in 18 months time I sit here and reminisce on the school trips that I partook of in junior school in the 1960's.
The 1967 pompous headmaster trip to the dales was probably the most memorable. Ten years old we all were, 60 of us piled onto two coaches and off to the Yorkshire Dales which was right on the doorstep of our North Leeds primary school, sandwiches and pop packed in a tupperware bowl and a packet of sticky sweets in your (short) trouser pocket, with two shillings to spend if the opportunity arose - hot summers day brewing, and only a few more days until the end of term and the start of the summer holidays - no wonder we were in party mood.
Unusually Mr Holmes the pompous headmaster had joined the two other teachers on this school trip and he was determined to involve education in this day of frivolity, even if we weren't fookin interested in what he had to say, he was determined to show off his knowledge on the geology and customs of the Yorkshire Dales, we hated him.
It didn't start very well for him - half an hour into the journey and we were on the narrow roads near Bolton Abbey when he suddenly stood up in the aisle of the bus and commanded the driver to "stop right here, I need to show the children something", the bus braked to a halt and we could see the driver in his rear view mirror, mouthing something that we kids shouldn't have heard, both buses pulled off the narrow road onto a grass verge, ploughing up the grass and plants therein, forming a new layby thats probably still not grown back to this day.
We all piled off the bus and stood byt he side of the busy but narrow road where motorists and delivery vans struggled to get past both of the huge buses to much tooting of horns and shouting of obscenities - Mr Holmes was oblivious to all of this, he had education to partake on us.
When all 60 of us were gathered around him, playing "slap" or just flicking the back of the ears of the person in front, he pointed out to us the formation of the two hills beyond the field in front of us and how they were linked by a high ridge, he knew all of the fancy names for this sort of glacially formed geology but frankly none of us gave even a small toss for it and our disinterest could not have been greater if we'd tried, small fights started to break out at the back of the crowd.
Holmes was having none of it, a clip around the ear'ole of two miscreants and we all paid attention again and then to our suprise he climbed over the stone wall in front of us and started striding over the field full of sheep that stood between us and the hills.
"come on everyone, follow me" he bellowed
"but Mr Holmes, the sheep" cried one of the other teachers
"nonsense" he called, his voice growing faint as he put distance between us, "come on, we'll climb those hills"
And despite the misgivings of the other two teachers and their warnings that we were in fact trespassing on a farmers field, we all clambered over the wall, knocking some of it down in the process, and ran up the hilly field to join Holmesy.
We'd only got halfway across the field, three adults and sixty kids, when a Land Rover trundled down the hill towards us, stopped a few yards in front of our leading group and out popped the most angry farmer that I have ever seen, his head seemed to be much bigger than his body and it was a bright purple colour.
The farmer expained to Mr Holmes in very colourfull terms that we shouldn't be on his land, we were trespassing, we'd knocked down his stone wall, and most of the sheep in his field were escaping onto the main road and where the fuck did we think we were going anyway.
Holmesy tried to explain the benefits of education but the farmer was having none of it, in even more colourful language involving a liberal use of the word "fuck" he asked us to leave his field. Holmesy tried to ignore him but the farmer was a big bugger and we were unceremoniously marched back down the hill and onto the road again where we could see the farmers sheep disappearing around a corner on the main road, the bus drivers both thought this was hilarious and when we were all seated again our driver asked Holmesy if he'd like him to find a different field while this farmer tried to round his sheep up again.
We eventually found ourselves in Burnsall, a small village which has a proper car park and a proper picnic area by the river so no more trespassing and threats of the police being called then. We all sat and had our picnic by the river Wharfe which flows quite wide and a little deep in the middle and in the carefree way fo the 1960's the three adults in charge of us considered their risk assesments and all health and safety issues, and gave us all permission to remove our shoes and socks and go for a paddle, all 60 of us, while they sunbathed further up the field.
Small fish were collected and placed in pop bottles to take home, small children slipped and fell in, if you went more than three yards out into the river you were up to your waist and in danger of being dragged away to re-appear somewhere in the Humber 50 miles away - but it was great fun and the sun blazed down on our lazy afternoon by the river while our teachers snoozed fifty yards away.
And then Peter Norwood decided to go for a swim.
Not many of us could swim at 10 years old, swimming was not on the curriculum and our school had only just started to take us to swimming lessons once a week, so to have a friend who could already swim was unusual - we dared him to show us how to get across to the other side of the river, and he accepted.
And he made it, fully clothed he reached the opposite bank and climbed up the bank into the farmers field there. Realising that he was soaking wet he took off his t-shirt and shorts and danced around in the field for a while in his underpants to dry off. It was while he was doing this that he attracted the attention of a rather large horse in the field who came across to see if he had anything worth eating, to our amusement and Peter Norwoods consternation.
Finding nothing edible the horse instead took a liking to Peter Norwoods shorts and removed them from the barbed wire fence where they were drying then ran off across the field with them, Peter Norwood in pursuit, us howling with laughter on the opposite bank. The commotion eventually woke Mr Holmes up and he appeared behind us demanding to know what one of his pupils was doing on the opposite side of the river, almost naked, chasing a horse around which had a pair of shorts in its mouth.
There was nothig more to add, he had summed up the situation perfectly, the only unanswered question was how much of a bollocking would Holmesy give Peter Norwood when he eventually got his shorts back and rejoined us, and how much of a bollacking would Holmesy get from the school governors if they found out that one of his pupils had swum unobserved across the raging river Wharfe to have his shorts stolen by a wierd horse.
Peter Norwood never did get his shorts back, the horse ran away and was not seen again, with the shorts in tow. He had to swim back across the river to us and then go sit on the bus in his underpants for the rest of the day while we all had a guilt ridden geography lesson from Holmesy before returning home in disgrace where a pair of shorts was quickly found in the lost property box and Peter Norwood had to swear never to tell his mother where his original shorts had disappeared to or under what circumstances - I'd have loved to have been in his kitchen as his mother asked why he was wearing a different pair of shorts to the ones he had left home in.
Last night turned out to be one of those nights where you think "oh god do I have to go" and then afterwards you're really glad you did.
It was a filthy night and I was glad to get indoors after work only to find that Jodie had a meeting to go to at school about a proposed school trip, she seemed to have forgotten about it so we decided not to remind her and find out about it tomorrow from someone who had been.
About half an hour before it started she got a bloody text message from a friend asking if she was going, I was nominated to take her.
After the disaster of my last visit to school I wasn't looking forward to it but got changed again and out into the wind and rain we ventured.
The school trip is being planned for the summer of 2008 - and they are taking the kids to South Africa.
And it cost £3000.
Each.
We entered the school hall to find a lot of other parents reading the brochure and silently mouthing the words "fuck me" when they reached the bit that said "£3000" but we all staye din the hall anyway (the headmaster was blocking the exit) and sat and watched the presentation from a nice man from a group called "World Challenge"
It was an eye opener, one of those moments when you're glad you made the effort.
The reason that they are planning this now is because the kids who agree to go will commit themselves to eighteen months of studying and fund raising to get there and the brilliant news is that as parents we aren't expected to fund the trip - the kids are.
Yes ok, we'll guarantee the money, and we'll pay in a roundabout way with having the car washed every day for £50, but it will be eighteen months of hilarity watching Jodie trying to think of more inventive ways to screw money out of me.
When they finally leave to go on the trip they will have four weeks of treking and community work in Kwazulu Natal and Swaziland and the organisers promise that they won't lose any kids, will do a head count every few days or so, and will challenge our kids to heights that they've never dreamed of - it sounds fekkin fantastic - especially when the leader explained that the trekking has no itinery and that the kids will organise and research each activity themselves, the leaders are there to follow and make sure they aren't in any danger from lions and stuff - the guy last night explained how one year he had followed a band of 16 year olds on a trek to a mountain range, three days they had walked in exactly the oposite direction to that which they should have been walking but he didn't correct them, when they realised their mistake they just did some different activity in the place that they had found themselves - sounds like my kind of easy come easy go expedition does that.
Jodie thinks so too, she's got five days to think it through and commit herself to eighteen months of hard work and study but I personally hope she does it, Suzanne has lots of mothers doubts, but we'll just over-ride her in the family vote.
Its a far cry from my school trips in the 1960's, and there we will leave the subject until tomorrow...
Following on from yesterdays post about the lucky people of the Cafe of Friendship who avoided a massive lottery win by virtue of the fact that they put a feckless woman in charge of buying their tickets, I have been giving some thought to unlucky people that I have known, and today's nominee is...
Stuart Ackroyd.
When I was very young (7) we moved to Cookridge and Stuart Ackroyd became my first new friend and quickly established himself as "unlucky bas'tad" when the igloo that we were building during a snowy night in the first week of our friendship fell in on top of him and I had to run and get his dad to dig him out.
It was but a mere early indicator.
Shortly afterwards (still aged 7) he fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone and while it was still in a sling recovering he fell out of another tree and broke it again, thats just bad luck.
His problem was that he was not one to sit back and let others do the dares, if you mentioned a dare to him he'd do it, so of course when we, as a gang, were bored we'd dare him to do stupid dangerous things and watch and usually laugh as he hurt himself again.
He broke his weak collarbone with amazing regularity and was eventually banned from playing rugby when we went onto high school after the West Yorkshire Ambulance Service had to made a regular weekly booking during our games lessons.
Denied the pleasures of rugby he took up cricket and became a very good player in the local leagues, but a carefree life fielding on the boundary was not for Stuart Ackroyd, oh no, he took up the wicket keeper gloves and remember - this was in the day when helmets were for motorbike riders and not cricketers.
His junior cricket club banned him from diving for catches that should really have been taken in the slips after he broke his collarbone in one particularly spectacular catch but this still didn't prevent him from stopping many fours and byes with his face, which became flatter by the year.
But the funiest dares involved our hobby of collecting birds eggs (did I just admit to that, jail awaits me) and living in the countryside around the north of Leeds gave us many opportunities to put Stuart Ackroyd into dangerous positions in pursuit of rarer and rarer eggs.
Like the time that we spotted a magpies nest in an orchard right outside the High Farm in Cookridge (now a pub), we spent nearly half an hour sneaking into the orchard which was less than 20 yards away from the front door of the farmhouse, then devised an ingenious plan where Stuart Ackroyd would climb up to the top of the knarled old apple tree and throw down any eggs that he found where we, on the ground, would hold out his anorak and safely catch said magpies eggs, the deal as always was that he could pick the best one when he returned safely to terra firma.
As a plan it worked well, shouting in whispers so as not to disturb the farmer, he managed to chuck down four eggs before he slipped and fell out of the tree, landing in the anorak and brekaing all the eggs, and his collarbone again.
A few months later during our school summer holidays we noticed that the Grey Lag Geese had returned from their arctic homes to spend the summer in Leeds again, and had nested on a local lake that was owned by a fishing club. as we walked around the lake (which was man-made and reputed to be hundreds of feet deep) we noticed in one corner a huge swath of rubbish, stagnant water, dead leaves, slime, and dead fish - irrisistable to a gang of 10 year olds.
Prodding the dead fish with sticks filled in five minutes of entertaining fun, flicking the slime at each other was alright for a few more minutes, but then someone suggested that we fish one of the dead perch out of the gunge and cook it for dinner, it sounded like a fine idea to Stuart Ackroyd and as the surface of the lake was four foot below the wall on which we stood he lay down and asked that we hold onto his jumper as he reached out, further and further for the biggest dead fish.
Of course we let go just as he almost touched the biggest one, and down he went into the stagnant slime and gunge and dead perch, he was under the water for what seemed like a long time and eventually came up covered in black mud with, I swear, a dead fish on his head - we ran away and left him to walk home on his own.
The following week we were back at the lake still in pursuit of geese eggs, Stuart Ackroyd had noticed that the geese were nesting on a small island in the middle of the lake and had concocted an ingenious plan to get across there - he'd knicked the inflatable lilo out of his dads shed and was convinced that he'd be able to scoot across there and bring back mountains of rare eggs, and stake a claim to being the only person ever to set foot on the island.
His plan worked - almost.
He managed to get nearly halfway across to the island before the stopper came out of the lilo and the last we saw of him before we ran away and left him again he was desperately trying to turn the unstable floating plastic platform around to come back, paddling desperately with windmill arms whilst at the same time trying to find the stopper - the craft went down and so did he, oh how we laughed again.
Those were halcyon days in the sun, on summer holidays with your gang and an accident prone kid who couldn't resist a dare...
This here little news story is one of the reasons why, on the occasions that I am tempted to buy a lottery ticket, I always choose the automated random choice of numbers.
There must be nothing worse than picking the same six numbers, your house number, your birthday, your dogs birthday, etc etc, week in, week out, for years and years and then the one week when you tick the wrong box the bloody numbers are drawn.
Thats what happened to a small syndicate in Belgium playing the European Lottery which has some humongous prizes, every week a group of 30 locals check out their entry in the Cafe La Fraternelle (ironically the Flemish word for "friendship") and every week their static numbers were not chosen - except for last week when they suddenly realised that they had the only winning entry in a 27 million Euro prize draw.
Their joy was of course unbounded, coffee and pastries were probably flung in the air as the syndicate spilled out onto the street dancing in celebration, skipping across the street to the owner of the bookshop opposite the cafe where the syndicate organiser ran her small business.
Maybe the bookshop was smashed up, maybe the owner was lynched, but you can only just begin to imagine the level of disappointment whent he bookshop owner admitted that she'd gone for a random draw that week rather than stick to the same old faithfull numbers that they'd always chosen - the same old faithfull numbers that should have ensured that they were richer by almost a million euros each - but weren't.
It would be a nice end to the story to think that they all shrugged their shoulders and muttered "Aw fook" and then went home, but it seems that the bookshop owner is destined for a fairly miserable existence from now on after Christiane Farvacque, owner of the Cafe of Friendship and seemingly spokesperson of the bitterly disappointed group bitterly told a reporter, "We were all bitterly disappointed,you think you are the only winners in Europe, but you end up with nothing." and she made it clear where her new hatred of bookshop owners lay, "Even in 20 years' time, my hair will stand up on end whenever I see her,"
The village is Mouscron, near Brussels, if you are ever passing you really should pop into the bookshop opposite the Cafe of Friendship and ask if they sell euro lottery tickets there.
Sunday Morning, 8am
Its worth getting up early on a Sunday morning to watch the Sky Travel channel's re-runs of Whickers World and particularly the current series of Whicker In India from 1970.
The current programme sees Whicker visiting a tea plantation owned by the sort of englishman that you only find in PG Wodehouse or Agatha Christie novels, the old Etonian who's family own a plantation the size of Wales in some remote area of the empire and who's answer to all and every problem is to get the Purdey down from above the fireplace and give the blighters both barrels.
I've just got a stich from laughing (and woken up everyone else in the house, I think we have a guest in the eldest's bedroom again but I'm not going to look, he's left his shoes on the doormat at least) at the description of an old established Indian method of negotiating labour disputes with your boss.
Apparently, and they have a name for it which I missed through my tears of mirth, its acceptable practice for disputing workers to surround their boss-man to harrangue him without violence for as long as it takes to get him to acquiesce to their demands, in some cases this quaint form of negotiation has taken days to resolve, and always without violence, because its tradition and you don't break tradition by murdering your boss, its just not the British way.
Henry Twistleton-Smythe the old Etonian plantation owner who is the subject of the programme, clad in regulation beige safari suit with pipe clenched between pursed lips, accent cutting glass even more precisely than Whickers, explained how he had once been surrounded by his aggrieved workers whilst out driving the estate in his Land Rover, when Whicker asked him what he had done with no other white man within five hours drive, he replied that he had "wound up the windows, lit a pipe and read The Times for four hours until the blighters gave up on their dispute"
You see, you just don't get stoicism like that amongst Englishmen these days, its little wonder that we no longer have an empire when good solid British stock like Twistleton-Smythe have been allowed to disappear into remote parts of the red-painted atlas where good British breeding females are so thin on the ground, if only we'd kept at least one breeding pair in captivity back in blighty then we wouldn't be in quite the state that we are now.
A revealing interview with Cherie Blair today reveals how christmas with the Blairs works...
Well in reality it reveals very little actually.
It reveals that our Prime Minister gets to help decorate the Downing Street christmas tree - yeah sure he does - he gets to help like I get to help, in other words he's the one who gets the ladder out of the shed and climbs up into the loft to get the tree and the baubles down, then he goes back to watching "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em" on UK Gold.
It reveals that Tony doesn't buy any christmas presents at all except for Cherie's and her mums and that if he got one of his skivvy's to buy the presents for him then "he'd be dead" - well all I can say is that he buys one more present at christmas than I do and if I had a skivvy to go do the job for me then that skivvy would be out there doing it right now - if Cherie thinks that her husband actually gets the bus up the road to Oxford Street and spends an afternoon battling against the crowds in Marks and Spencers to buy her and her mother one of those £20 pendant on a chain presents "Would you like that gift wrapped sir", "What do you think you dozy bitch, do I look like I do wrapping ?" - then she's more of a muppet than I already believe she is.
Speaking of which, the famous Cherie ear-to-ear wide grin which is so reminiscent of Fozzie the bear once convinced me that she was staying in the next apartment to me with a german lover in a hotel in Barbados. I was on one of my famous "working trips" and had been given an apartment on a remote part of the site where ten other rooms shared a swimming pool - the Cherie Blair look-a-like had me looking for several days such was the remarkable resemblence but one evening as I sidled closer to the couple when they were stood at a bar on the complex, I discovered that their conversations and canoodling were in german, so all those photographs of her sunbathing topless and swimming in the pool naked late at night were not required for the News of the World then, not that they'd have refused them anyway if they'd been offered.
But the final incredible revelation in the GMTV interview with Cherie (how fortunate we are that Fiona Phillips is such a wonderful in depth investigative reporter), is that Cherie had the state rooms at Downing Street repainted when they arrived in 1997, from blue to terracotta and that Margaret Thatcher did not approve when she saw them - apart from that being as good a reason as any for doing it in the first place I can't imagine how I've managed to live my life over these past nine years without knowing that fact, I simply can't wait to see the televised interview now, it will be riveting, no really...
Christmas shopping starts this weekend in the Jerrychicken household - its official.
Personally I have done my christmas shopping already and they have both just been delivered today by our postie - two teddy bears from Scotland for the two offspring, I can now sit back and relax in the knowledge that my tradition continues.
Suzanne on the other hand has booked me for a taxi run into Leeds this morning with Jodie to do her christmas shopping, and again tomorrow with Amanda to do her christmas shopping - its what happens when you have teenage female siblings, you have to christmas shop with each one seperatly unless you want civil war to break out in a random shop somewhere at the point where one sibling thinks the other is spending more than her.
They are all welcome to it, I've done mine, I'll be running them into Leeds and then coming home and puting my feet up for the afternoon.
If I had my way all of the family's christmas shopping would be done on eBay and it would be our postie who gets to do the runaround, and of course, secondhand goods are so very good for the environment.
PS - yesterday saw the safe arrival of identical twin boys into the larger family group as Suzannes youngest brother was presented with what must be the best early christmas present ever, best wishes to all of them.
Thats another two bloody presents to sort out then.
Wheres my eBay password ?
There is a very tenuous link to todays story, so lets get it out of the way first...
On that bastion of all that is news and showbiz, GMTV, Lionel Richie mimed nicely to his latest snooze-a-thon song and I was reminded of my showbiz cousin who once booked Lionel for a gig, so I was going to tell that story.
But then i checked and I'd already done it in April, so instead, heres the story of the day my showbiz cousin was nearly garroted and strung from a lamp post after a gig in Leeds...
Tenuous link over...
It was the late 1970's and all over this fine country of ours punk rock was causing all sorts of havoc amongst Members of Parliament and Daily Mail readers, but out on the streets da kids were just havin fun, man, like.
And if you were an aspiring guitar player with pretensions and ambitions to do that job in a professional capacity then punk was where you had to be, man, like.
And so my normally sober, upright, fine, outstanding citizen of a youth, my cousin Ray, formed a punk band with his mates and as most of the punk bands of the time had gone down the Sex Pistols route of being filthy and obnoxious to Daily Mail readers, my showbiz cousin's band decided on a slightly different stage image - they would be arabs.
My Aunti Irene ran up some arab cloaks out of old bedsheets, and arab headresses out of old pillows tied up with rope, they all dyed their faces slightly brown with gravy granules and they spoke to each other in an unintelligible language that no-one, not even themselves understood, it was just made up garbage but it fooled everyone, and more importantly it fooled the music writer for the Yorkshire Evening Post.
The kid who wrote the music column for the Yorkshire Evening Post was an impressionable youth and was granted an interview with The Arabs where, when not laughing behind their ridiculous bedsheet costumes, they explained through their interpreter manager that they had arrived in England determined to make the charts with their next single "The Pigs must die".
The YEP reporter was intrigued as to why they wanted to kill policemen, but they further explained that no, they didn't want to kill policemen, they wanted to kill pigs as pigs were outlawed to those of a muslim faith and should not be tolorated in a free society like ours.
This was good stuff and the YEP reporter nearly wore his pencil out writing it all down, he'd get almost a full column out of this story, just imagine, the YEP might dedicate slightly more than the two column inches a week they normally gave him.
And then The Arabs, or more likely their "manager" dropped the bombshell - they were booked to play a gig at the Warehouse (a trendy nightclub with a reputation for live up and coming new live bands in Leeds) on Saturday night where they would, at the end of their act, slaughter a pig on stage.
It didn't just make the two inch music column in the YEP that night, it made the front page.
And when they went to the Leeds City Council urban farm dressed in their "arab gear" with a YEP photographer to have their photo taken with a huge old pig that was a pet in the childrens part of the farmyard, it hit the headlines again the following night under the banner of "THE PIG DIES ON SATURDAY NIGHT" with all four of them making a throat cutting motion in the photograph.
And on the Friday morning they made the national newspapers and a local councillor who had read the YEP headlines promised the citizens of Leeds that their pet pig was safe at the councils urban farm and that extra security would be employes to ensure that these horrible arab people did not kidnap said animal.
The gig sold out.
And they had a big problem on their hands.
The Warehouse would be full on saturday night, full of punk rock fans, full of punk rock fans who were used to being abused and spat on by the bands that they supported - and they were all expecting a see a pig slaughtered in front of their eyes, and probably have bits of the pig thrown at them in a punk rock stylee.
The Arabs didn't want to do the gig.
But they had a contract and they were forced on stage, almost at gunpoint by the nightclub's manager and security staff - the crowd went crazy in the crazy way that punk rock crowds did in 1978, lots of mayhem and fighting inthe audience while The Arabs went through their set of unintelligible lyrics and unimaginable decibel levels of random and furious guitar strumming.
The crowd had reached fever pitch towards the end of the set but The Arabs played on, unsure of how to finish the gig and leave the building alive without first butchering a pig, it was probably one of the best punk sets played in Leeds that year and it went on and on and on, the band edging their way nearer and nearer to the back of the stage where the firedoor to an alleyway awaited them, it would be every Arab for himself when the last chord died down and the instruments would have to make their own luck as they were abandoned on stage.
Then "the manager" appeared at the back of the stage and slipped something to the drummer, at the end of the next song, which they'd already played twice, the fire door was flung open to reveal "the managers" van with engine running and doors open and the drummer ran to the front of the stage with a toy pig and a stanley knife, slashed its throat open and flung the toy and its stuffing out into the boiling mayhem of the angry crowd - they got out of the building with seconds to spare and lost only the drum kit.
Our showbiz cousin learned a very valuable lesson that week - you can sell any sort of bullshit to a gullible public when you have the press on your side, and he bears that motto in mind every time he rings "Hello" or "OK" magazine with another idea for a £5000 photoshoot.
My copy of the whole output of Will Hay has been ordered, £8 the lot compared to an online price of £49 from Tesco's, no I still don't think its legal but what the hell, I'm ordering the Bilko full set of 149 episodes today for £20 too.
The important question is, compared to so-called comedy genius shows like "Catherine Tate" or "Little Britain", neither of which I find funny, in fact I have watched The Catherine Tate Show twice now and in that hour of viewing have not found anything at all to laugh at - why are 50 and 70 year old comedy shows still so fresh and rich in comedy material ?
The picture above is a scene from the film "Convict 99" in which Moore Marriot (left) plays said convict who has spent the last forty years digging an escape tunnel and two weeks before his release finds that the map that he's been following doesn't take into account that the prison was extended twenty years ago and he emerges inside the governors office to find Graham Moffat (middle) and Will Hay (right) who has just arrived as the new governor.
These three were always the central characters in all of the 1930's Will Hay films and Hay alwasy played the same character, a slightly confused, bumbling, sometimes pompous idiot who was always mistaken for someone else - in Convict 99 he plays Mr Twist, a disgraced headteacher who is given a job by nefarious means at a remote boys school, but on the way is mistaken in a drunken pub scene as the new prison governor - the script hardly changes from film to film but its still a classic British comedy genre and is still fresh 70 years later and after many viewings.
Bilko is twenty years younger and was the late saturday evening programme of choice for me, Ned and our dad in the 1970's after we'd all been out with our seperate groups of friends and returned home worse for the drink, we'd pull our comfy seats and watch an episode of Bilko as our mother ran around organising cups of coffee.
It was Bilko who invented a phrase that needs no further explanation to me, it has entered our family language and both Ned and I know exactly what the other means when we say the words "Dobermans Sister".
The episode in question involved the motor pool being invited to a dance with everyone having a date except Bilko - Doberman was the short, fat, dumb and ugly character that you can see standing just behind Bilko's hat in that picture and was the constant target of Bilkos piss taking - in this episode Doberman promised Bilko that his sister would accompany him to the dance and assured him that unlike Doberman, his sister was beautiful.
Of course she wasn't, in fact Dobermans sister was played by the same actor who played Doberman, in drag, and in other episodes Doberman also played his own mother, the whole family were short, fat and ugly.
Fast forward several years and after our mother had passed away our dad moved himself to Benidorm, that Spanish den of failed British variety acts all seeking work in the thousands of showbars in the Spanish Las Vegas populated entirely by British pensioners.
He shared an apartment with his lifelong friend and Northern Club Compere of the year 1969, Brian Hessian and between them they haunted the showbars 24/7, and there were a lot of showbars to haunt, our dads last seven years on this earth were spent in a whirlwind of booze and entertaining, singing songs for beer in bars and never returning to the apartment until the dawn of the next morning - not for nothing were they known as "The Odd Couple" after the Jack Lemmon and Walter Matheau characters.
On the last occasion that I flew to Benidorm to drive our dads car back to the UK for the summer, he picked me up at Alicante airport mid-morning and on the hour long drive back to Benidorm was in tears of laughter as he described one of Brians "ladies" from the night before. Brian had found himself a rich widow and as he was always skint he was always ready to take advantage of a rich widows purse for a night out.
We arrived at the apartment at around noon just as Brian emerged from his bedroom, a glassed-in area of the balcony as it was really only a one bedroomed apartment, and upon questioning, his description of his date from the night before needed only two words ...
"Dobermans sister"
Catherine Tate, Little Britain et all will never hit those heights.
Once again I am ploughing the depths of eBay looking for xmas pressies for my loved ones, cheapskate that I am.
The two bears for the not-so children, children are bid for, won, paid for and hopefully winging their way from the bear maker in Scotland - I always buy them a hand made teddy bear each at xmas, no I don't know why, but its a tradition that I started when they were young and I will do it until I take my last breath despite my wife thinking I've lost my marbles every xmas, well for most of the year actually but thats her problem - they are now 18 and 14 and open their bear presents every year with a "we know what this is" look but they'll miss them when I'm gone - or put them on eBay more like.
And while browsing last night I glanced upon the dvd section, something that I haven't bothered with for a couple of years since I bought a badly pirated copy of Bruce Springsteen Unplugged, it wasn't so much the fact that it was a bad pirate copy as that fact that it was a bad gig from the late eighties with all of the big hair and "showsuits" that went with it, frankly it woul dhave been a crap purchase even if it had been a genuine copy, especially if it was a genuine copy.
But last night my eye was caught by something that I want - a six dvd set of all of Will Hay's films.
Will Who ?
Will Hay, a British comedy genius of the 1930's, and I can have every film he ever made (about 18 of them) for just £8.
Yes they will be copied, in fact the seller specialises in selling duplicated/copied dvd films, he admits it in his eBay advertising and yet eBay do not strike him off their books - why ?
Because the films that he is selling are all now in the public domain, the copyright has expired and has not been claimed or purchased by anyone else, it is apparently quite legal to sell off any images inthe public domain as if they were your own.
No I'm still not convinced either, but eBay seem to be, so this morning I will order my Will Hay boxed set and I may also be tempted to order the £20 boxed set of every single episode of Bilko that was ever made - its now over 50 years old and again is allegedly in the public domain - thats good enough for me.
So thats two cheap xmas presents for the wife then, as a woman she of course has no sense of humour and so will throw them across the room at me while I plead "its the thought that counts" whilst rubbing my hands with glee at my all too subtle subterfuge (it works every time).
Latest news on the car radio on the short, extremely short, soon to be extremely shorter, drive into the office this morning was that in Adelaide Australia the England cricket team have been beaten in the second of five test matches against, well, Australia of course.
And here in the UK it raises just one comment from 99% of the population - "oh dear" - then we get on with what we were doing before we switched on the radio.
Other populations all over the world wonder why our country's representative teams in any sport are always convincingly beaten whenever they travel anywhere out of the country, to which the answer is, we don't really care to be honest.
Sport is not at all important in this cuontry, its not a measure of our standing in the world, it means nothing to our national image, we couldn't give a flying fook when our cricket, rugby, football, athletic teams get mercilessly pounded to defeat in some other part of the world, it raises only the slightest of eyebrows and an "oh dear" and then we laugh and think "fookin useless bas'tads", and move on.
When Australia lost their cricket series here in the UK last year there was talk of the team not returning to Oz as their lives may be in danger from the distraught population for whom defeat at any sport means that you are finished as a nation, sport is the one thing that the Aussies do well and they cling to the idea that they will one day dominate the world at everything else by being good at hitting a small leather ball with a shaped and well oiled piece of wood.
Likewise the population of New Zealand go into 14 days of mourning when their All Black team is beaten at rugby, especially if they are beaten by Australia, no work is done at all for 14 days and the defeated team members are forced to walk over hot coals and stick pins in their eyes as punishment for the ultimate dishonour to their nation.
We all know just how important it is for the USA to dominate the sporting world, its so important that they have invented sports that only they will play so that no other nation can claim their "World Series" crowns, and its so important to win the most medals at each and every athletics meeting that many of their competitors carry health warnings for innocent citizens not to stand downwind of them when they urinate in public lavatories.
To us Brits it means fookall.
We don't do sports in schools because its not important to win and we don't want our little darlings to be brought up in an atmosphere where "win at all costs" is the motto rather than "its the taking part that matters", finishing last is a fine and noble art and we are good at it.
Those gold medals aren't made of gold anyway and to be honest they look like so many "Jim'll Fix It Badges" - we did Jimmy Savile in the 70's and he's a bit passe now.
This weekend we have been busy - we have sold our house and we have bought a new one, a smaller one, it will save us some money, which my wife can then spend every month, its the way things work.
Or that is we have found someone who has promised to buy our house as long as another person buys their house so that they can then afford to buy our house, and we have promised someone that we will buy their house as long as the person who has promised to buy our house does so, which of course depends on the other person buying their house doing so.
Its how the English system of buying and selling property works.
Yes we know it sounds daft, but at any time right up until almost the day that you move all of your stuff out of one house into the new house, one person could change their mind and the whole thing stops and you go back to the "Start" square on the real life Monopoly board again.
So we sit and wait now and in several weeks time maybe our solicitor will ring and tell us "we're ready for you to sign the contract now, PS, I am charging you plenty for this phone call"
Or maybe not.
We've done this seven times now so we know the ropes and we're not holding our breath until everyone has signed a legally binding contract in a few weeks time, which even then is not as firm as it sounds as they could still pull out of the deal.
But at last I will be rid of our next-door-but-one crazy neighbour and his menagerie of filthy noisy farmyard birds and flying rats (pigeons) - his latest aquisition is a cockerel who so far has woken me up at 4am on Sunday morning with his crowing, and 1am last night with his crowing, the bird is as fucking crazy as its owner, it must be the worlds first nocturnal cockerel, I bet even the chickens are sat there telling it to shut the fuck up and go back to bed, its like a child on christmas morning waking up asking if santa's been yet, except this one keeps the whole neighbourhood awake - if only possesion of guns was legal in this country.
Having seen the back of the dreadfully bland McDonald Brothers from ITV's "The X Factor" leaving behind the desperately untalented 1980's American stadium rock-a-like Ben, and the midget 1950's crooner in a boys body Ray, with only the Whitney-Maria-o-gram Leona having more than an ounce of talent, its time to look at television talent contests that I have liked through the ages.
And I am well qualified.
Living in our house as a child meant a relentless diet of tv talent shows, our dad was a big fan being as he was an amatuer entertainer himself. He would only visit pubs or clubs that had a "turn" on, even just a bloke playing a piano would qualify as a "turn" for him and he was a huge supporter of the CIU, the organisation that supports and publicises the phenominum of "working mens clubs" in the UK as it was in the clubs that he could indulge in his passion of grabbing a microphone at any opportunity to croon in a Sinatra stylee to the hapless audience.
And so every Monday evening at 7pm we'd all sit down with our tea (northern word for "evening meal") on our knees and tune into "Opportunity Knocks", the weekly showcase for talentless no-marks who believed, sincerley believed that they were the next Tom Jones, Engleburt Humperdink, or just a bloke who stands there in front of the nation clad in just a pair of yellow swimming trunks and while they try and eat their tea he flexes various muscles in time to a cha-cha.
Presented by the ever optomistic Hughie Green who never had a bad word for any of his acts, even though a bad word was what most of them really needed to break their bubble head dreams, Opportunity Knocks was open to anyone who could pass their audition and who had at least one friend who would act as their "sponsor" and come and chat with Hughie for two minutes while the stage was prepared for the next act, banal questions such as "when did your friend discover this talent for balancing teaspoons on their nose ?" would inevitably end with Hughie asking a risque question and after receiveing the answer would stare straight into the camera with one eybrow slightly raised, clearing his throat with a "Harumph".
Our dad insisted on watching Opportunity Knocks every week for two reasons - he would often see the semi-professional acts that appeared in his beloved working mens clubs on the TV and would always remind you that he'd seen them last week "in the club", and secondly he believed that he had a knack as a talent spotter that surpassed Hughie Green's and every week would predict who would be the winner to be paraded on next weeks programme.
New Faces was ITV's saturday night premium time slot talent show for semi-pros only, but it still didn't stop the hopeless, hapless and downright zero-talent buffoons from having a go, except that on New Faces you didn't get the all-forgiving Hughie Green to fawn all over you, you got a panel of three bas'tads to tell you how fucking useless you were.
The panel varied from series to series but a couple of long serving members were Tony Hatch, an ugly little runt of a music producer who had written an performed such shite as the theme from the crap tv soap "Crossroads" and a handfull of bland ballads for his blander wife Jackie Trent - the pair of them eventually emigrated to Australia in the 1980's so that they could re-run their moderate musical success of the 1960's as Australians are generally at least 20 years behind the rest of the world in blandness.
Another constant on the New Faces panel was a woman that you would have given up a well paid job not to have worked for, newspaper tv critic Nina Myscow who seemed not to have a good word to say about anyone, ever, and yet the aspiring tv talent queued around the block to appear on the show. New Faces was the reason why so many annual Royal Variety Performances caused the Queen to leave the theatre early with their parade of hopeless, unfunny jerks who thought the whole world lay at their feet after winning one show - and of course our dad had to predict the winners of each round too.
But the king of the tv talent show, the very best of the bad bunch, head and shoulders above anything else previous or since, was the "Sky Search for a Star" competition.
The fledgling Sky tv sattelite empire was only months old when they decided that their new Sky One channel needed a tv talent show to break the monotony of back to back 20 year old episodes of Charlies Angels, and so they commissioned Keith Chegwin to present "Search for a Star" and to put a slightly different edge to the programme it was audition free.
This meant that as long as you knew where the tv studio was you could simply get pissed on a sunday afternoon and turn up to do a turn on the live early evening programme. Not one single act from several series of Search for a Star ever became a star of tv and in that respect their Search for a Star was fruitless, but it was bloody hilarious while it lasted and the only must-see programme of the week.
Keith Chegwin was a perfect foil for the show but a rubbish presenter as most of the time he was unable to speak through choking back the laughter, but it didn't matter, we too were unable to see the tv screen for most of the hour long programme through our tears of mirth and joy.
The most famous of the acts to appear was "Roberts World of Magic", a gangy teenage boy in a bad 1970's tuxedo that he'd obviously borrowed off an uncle, Robert could not perform one single magic act to save his sorry life but that did not prevent his ambition to appear on national tv as a serious magician.
Tommy Cooper had done the same act a decade before of course but he was supposed to get the magic act wrong and he was looking for laughs when he got the magic act wrong - Robert was trying his best to get the magic act to work properly, its just wasn't his fault that he couldn't remember which sleeve the doves came out of or which playing card Chegwin had picked and then placed back in the pack.
The finale of Roberts act was the escapology from a mail sack.
Robert got Chegwin to handcuff his hand together then he disappeared into a large mail sack and asked a member of the audience to tie the sack up with a thick rope. The show's producer had cruelly chosen the biggest bloke in the audience to tie the knot and even as the seven foot bruiser pulled the rope tight as hard as he could all of us watching just knew that this was car crash tv at its best, there was no way that Robert could have escaped from that sack even if he'd not climbed in the sack in the first place.
After ten minutes of struggling, shapeless limbs thumping from inside the sack, all to the background music of a corny sideshow stylee organist, Chegwin decided that he had to intervene to save himself from apoplexy as he hadn't managed to breath through his laughter for the last five minutes, and even he struggled to untie the knot and had to get the burly bruiser back out of the audience to undo it properly - and yet as soon as the rope fell to the floor out popped Robert in a "ta-daaaa" pose, arms outstretched, hair tousled, face flushed bright red with effort and he stepped from the sack as if he'd done the whole escape without any assistance whatsoever.
The next day in a newspaper interview Robert declared that Chegwin had ruined his act by intervening and that he was just about to untie the knots from insde the sack himself, he may have even threatened to sue the show for ruining what was obviously a perfectly good career in showbiz - and he was right, I'd have paid with my own money to watch Roberts World of Magic again.
Wonderful TV.
Maybe next weeks X Factor should make them sing from inside a mail sack while trying to escape from handcuffs ?
The Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko who died from polonium-210 radiation poisoning this week blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin's security forces for the deadly sabotage of his sushi meal after Litvinenko had been a fierce critic of Putin and his regime.
And now the British security service is in a flap, grounding aircraft that may have been used by Litvinenko's spy killers, boarding up hotels and restaurants where they may have visited so that radiation tests can be carried out, and requesting that anyone who visited such places and who now finds that they glow in the dark to contact the NHS Direct where they will find solace from the recorded announcements and royalty free "on hold" music until the glowing stops or they die.
The British media is outraged that secret agents could visit this country in, erm, secret, and then slip a phial of radioactive substance into a fellow counter-spy's meal while they chat to him in a sushi bar, its just not on, its a disgrace, it shouldn't be allowed.
Meantime just around the corner in Leicester Square the first few weeks of the new James Bond movie "Casino Royale" is still doing great business as the world famous spy visits foreign countries to kill foreign insurgents who's political beliefs differ from those of the British government.
Its all good fun and as they say in Hollywood - Thats Entertainment !
.................................................................................
But now to more important news...
Last night in the final of "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here" the winner was...
Matt King.
I have but two questions...
Who the fuck is Matt King ?
and to the programme commissioners ...
Why ?
Yet another report is issued today recommending that the government introduce taxation on road usage as soon as possible as a way to tackle congestion.
This current report seems to blindly follow the mantra that if you charge a lot of money for people to use the roads that they travel on, then they simply won't use them anymore and the roads will be less congested - its primary school economics, nice and simple so that politicians can understand it.
But it fails to address so many issues.
It fails to address the fact that we already have a method of taxation on road usage, its called the road tax, its that little round disc that you find on the front of (most) cars that can cost up to £175 a year - simple solution number one - increase the road tax disc to £500 a year to achieve the same effect as road charging but at a hugely significant lower cost, in fact with no additional cost at all.
It fails to address the fact that the revenue from the road tax disc is swallowed up into the treasury coffers and barely none of it is reinvested back into transport issues, the money raised from road usage or road tax should be ringfenced for a number of years until we have viable alternatives to using your own car quite so often - it won't be though, not with the cost of guided bombs being so ludicrously high and our army firing them off in Iraq and Afghanistan like they've got bottomless pockets.
It fails to address the fact that when this Labour Government was elected it made a commitment to getting people out of their cars and onto public transport and it encouraged many local authorities to invest ratepayers money into planning applications and preparatory work for grandiose public rapid transit systems, at the very least this Labour Government, led by the then Transport Secretary John Prescott , planned to have such a tram or train system in every major city in the UK by now.
Since then they have systematically rejected almost every one of those applications for government funding, shifting the goalposts every time so that the local authority applications wouldn't qualify for central funding for a new inventive reason so that nine years later we are no further forward, there is simply no reliable alternative for most people than to use their cars to go to the places that they want to go to - and there are no plans to make this situation any better in the near future.
We should have known all along that it was too good to be true after the time that John Prescott had a huge press photo-call at a London railway station showing how committed to rail travel he was and how everyone else should follow his example as he travelled north to his constituency. Photos taken, interviews given, the train set off only for Prescott to get off at the next stop where his ministerial car was waiting to take him the rest of his journey - unfortunately for Prescott he didn't realise that some of the press and photographers had got on the train with him and the headlines the next day were hilarious.
Its not enough to simply tax people off the road, you have to provide some alternative to personal transport usage otherwise many local economies will simply collapse - things aren't like they were 30 years ago and many people simply have to travel some distances to work and to shop.
Take Leeds as an example.
Leeds is a city built on a cartwheel design, it just happened that way by accident but the city is almost like a perfect cartwheel with all of the major routes into the city being the cartwheel spokes, the outer ring road around the city being the wheel itself and the inner ring road being the actual wheel hub.
Leeds City Council already have in place some of the expensive equipment that will eventually be used to introduce road charging and we can see that the plan is obviously to introduce road charging on all of the major "spokes" into the city centre and also within the circle of the city centre that is the inner ring road.
What this plan fails to address is that there are numerous other minor routes into the city which people will simply use instead, moving the congestion off the major routes onto housing estate rat runs. It also fails to realise that when travelling from anywhere north of the city to get to the M1 motorway (which is south of the city), you simply have to go through the centre, there is no other way to get there other than a 45 minute trip right around the often single carriageway outer ring road.
The plan also fails to understand that unlike many other major city's Leeds does not have a huge out of town shopping mall but has instead spent millions on regenerating its victorian/edwardian centre to the extent where the city centre shopping experience in Leeds is actually a tourist attraction now and earns the city millions in revenue every weekend - charge for driving into the centre and you lose the attraction when people can simply drive to malls and shop and park for free.
The plan also fails to understand that by far the biggest use of private vehicle usage is for getting to and from work and whilst a lot of people work in the city centre who would benefit from a better public transport system, by far the biggest number of people work outside of the outer ring road on the industrial estates which ring our city - they were placed there to keep industry out of the centre (quite sensibly) but there is no public transport provision that uses the outer ring road route, you cannot use a public bus to take you around the city you have to catch one bus into the centre then another out to your destination - its quite ridiculous.
And finally the plan also fails to take into account shift workers - there is simply no public transport available for early morning, late evening or night shift workers, up to a third of all employees are simply not even thought of by our public transport policies.
There is more to congestion charging than just raising tax to pay for more bombs Gordon.
One web site that I love to dip into now and again is this one, the history of Butlins, the first and best known holiday camp operators in the UK.
Not that we ever went there as kids, oh no, Butlins was a bit too down market for our family, although our dad would have loved the opportunity to take part in the famous Butlins national talent competition where the weekly winners went forward to a grand final at the end of the season, he'd have won the grand final easy with his crooning.
No, instead of going to the Butlins Filey camp we went five miles or so up the road to Wallis's holiday camp , a smaller, privately owned version of Butlins, the full story of our times at Wallis's in the early 1960's can be found here.
But back to Butlins and in particular the full copy of the 1974 entertainment guide to the Filey camp which is itemised page by page here. It gives an extraordinary insight into the life of a holiday camp where each individual day of your seven day stay revolved around the entertainment guide and the clock, including your meal times where you had to arrive at the huge dining hall on time and at the right sitting or you went hungry.
Of course Butlins had its redcoats to ensure that you were kept busy and active right through the day in order that you didn't dwell too much on the fact that you were contained within a barbed wire compound for the whole of your holiday but what they don't tell you in the brochure is that the Filey camp was certainly run on an almost military basis. Our Uncle Ralph owned a caravan on a site right next door to Butlins and the one thing that he regretted was choosing a pitch so close to the Butlins barbed wire fence as they were woken up every morning by the Butlins tannoy announcements informing campers that if they were on the first breakfast sitting then they should be shifting their lazy arses out of bed by now, followed by a song about Gibbs SR toothpaste.
We did once visit the Filey camp on a day pass as our dad knew someone who was staying there at the same time that we were at Wallis's, it must have been around 1963-ish and all I can remember about the visit was the fact that our dad took the piss out of everything there, pointing out how shabby the buildings were and how corny the frequent tannoy announcements were, he may also have goosestepped his way down one of the campsite roads holding the index finger of his right hand horizontally under his nose and his left arm stiffly raised in a nazi salute as we were all shuffled along by a redcoat to the next event on the sports field, its the sort of thing he'd do as he was never shy of making his point of view, especially if he felt superior about something - our host never invited us back to Butlins.
That sort of thing never happened at Wallis's, we did not have tannoy announcements and while there was always plenty of organised shennanigans going on you were never forced to take part like the guards, erm, redcoats did at Butlins, in fact Wallis's only had a small staff and more then likely it would be our dad that would be organising a cricket or football match on the beach or the solitary Wallis's playing field, 130-a-side football with me in goals wishing I was making sand castles on the beach instead of letting in a goal a minute in our 92-0 defeat which would take our dad two days to get over - he could never understand why sport never mattered to me.
I did once stay in the Butlins hotel in Scarborough around 1978 when I was old enough to know better but me and three mates had gone to the resort on the north east coast on a sudden impulse for a weekend pissup and the only place with a vacancy was The Grand Hotel, a run down victorian monster of a place (when built it was the largest hotel in Europe) which had recently been bought by the Butlins organisation and which had so many bedrooms that it would never be filled.
On our weekend I had a room on floor nine, I should have suspected something was slightly amiss when we took the lift to floor eight where my friends were staying, for there was no button for floor nine in the lift.
Eventually we found a narrow door with my room number on it and upon opening it saw a narrow staircase winding its way upwards into darkness - my room was actually in one of the four decorative towers at each corner of the hotel which sounds very romantic but in reality I shared my room with several hot and cold water tanks and their associated pipework and every time someone went to the toilet during the night my room shook and I lay awake until the water tank filled again - having the main hot water tank for that end of the hotel actually in my room with me did mean that I was as warm as toast right through the cold February weekend though.
The whole of that weekend was block booked by dozens of coach party's which meant that the four of us twenty-something year olds were marooned in a hotel full of pensioners who thought that the idea of being shepherded from entertainment room to entertainment room to dingin room and then more entertainment was a superb way to spend three days, £28 all-in. Fortunately we managed to find an escape route through an open emergency exit that the guards dogs had missed so donkey derby's and bingo were forsaken for beer in pubs, disgraceful behaviour that was frowned upon when we returned to Butlins hell.
My children refuse to believe me when I tell them this sort of stuff.
I finally sent my old premium bond away to Blackpool to be surrendered and checked against the list of winners.
The story in the family that I have always followed is that I was born just a few months after Premium Bonds were introduced, as indeed I was, and that my dads billiards partner, Old George Hughes, bought me, the new-born first-born of his young protege, one of the first issues of the Bonds for one whole pound as a christening present.
And so all through my boyhood I always checked the monthly list of premium bond winners in the newspaper, I never remembered the whole number, just the first three, "1AK" it started and without fail I always scanned the lists for a "1AK" - never won a penny.
The bond itself was always kept in the envelope that Old George Hughes bought it in and it was always at the back of a sideboard drawer somewhere but over the years it disappeared and when we cleared our dads bungalow out after he'd died we couldn't find it anywhere, end of story.
But not quite.
We sold the bungalow to a really nice old bloke called Fred and in the course of moving in he'd popped up into the loft where he found the Old George Hughes envelope with the premium bond in it, and he popped it through my letterbox one day.
And here is where the mystery starts.
As I've said, Premium Bonds started in July 1956, I was born in September 1956, it makes sense that it would be a present for me.
But the date stamp on the bond is January 1959, my brother Ned was born in August 1958.
I've had to come to terms with the fact that it might not be my bond after all, it could be his.
But how ?
So anyway, I rang the Premium Bond people in Blackpool seven years ago and asked whether it was possible to check whether the bond had ever been a winner and was told that as the bond was actually in our dads name that we'd have to fill in a long government form and send the death certificate off to redeem the bond for one whole pound, during which time they'd check the list to see if it had ever been lucky.
That was seven years ago - I sent the form off last week.
So what do you reckon - 47 years sitting in a prize draw (up to £1million every month don't forget), thats 564 chances to win something, anything would do, surely after 47 years it must have been drawn at least once ?
I wait in suspense.
If it wins with more than five zero's at the end then the beer is on me.
But no-one, no-one tells Ned, ok ?
Alan "Fluff" Freeman 1927-2006
Fluff's death was announced today, 79 years old, not bad, I'd settle for that, especially if you've made your living from playing music for the whole of your life.
To many people, and to all of the obituaries that will appear today Fluff Freeman was the voice of the chart show "Pick of the Pops" on Sunday nights which he claimed as his own for five years until 1972 and then again on and off in a retro form throughout the 80's and 90's.
But to me Alan Freeman will always be Saturday afternoon with your head under a car dashboard or sanding the filler on a car wing, for that is where I always was right through the 70's with one old car or another, repairing things, fitting radios or cassette players in mates cars, or plastering gallons of plastic filler onto wire mesh then sanding it down when it dried to fill in the multitude of rust holes that were endemic in British cars of the 1970's.
His "Saturday Rock Show" had a huge following through the 70's and played an eclectic range of what is now called, by people of my vintage, "proper rock music" as opposed to the weak immitation "rock" that boy bands mime to nowadays.
And the one thing that springs to my mind when I recall me lying on the pavement underneath my old Austin 1300 Vanden Plas, wet and dry paper in one hand, black and decker drill with a sanding attachment in the other, is Emerson Lake and Palmer - not only did Fluff play a lot of ELP, and I mean everything that they'd ever recorded, but he used clips of their music as jingles during his show, his masters at the BBC must have cringed as the news bullitens were concluded with the piano stanza from "Benny the Bouncer" - or more likely his masters at the BBC would never listen to such output, preferring to pretend that Radio 1 wasn't one of their stations.
This is quite a good biography of the man, although the page isn't updated yet, the home page of the site is.
Do you know what that is in the picture
I know what it is.
I know what it is because I've fitted three of those in the last 18 months.
The latest one on Friday night when I should have been on a pub crawl in Otley.
Its a toilet flush siphon valve assembly.
And they are made by fekkwits in the far east who use the flimsiest of materials so that heavy handed females in the UK will break them when they wrench the toilet flushing lever too hard.
Lets get technical - when its at rest in your toilet cistern that green box thing (ours was clear plastic) is submerged in, and full of water. When you pull the handle to flush the toilet a panel of plastic film inside the green box is pulled up to the top of the box thus forcing all of the water in the box to run up to the top of the green thing there, and then run down the tube into the toilet - pull the handle and let go and only the water in the box will flush the toilet, pull the handle and leave it pressed down and the syphon effect of the water will drag more water down the tube with it until the cistern is empty.
There, its easy isn't it ?
Do you know how I learned all that ?
By being to skinflint to employ a proper plumber and doing all the plumbing in our house myself.
Its a piece of piss is plumbing.
So last week I got the call from the upstairs bathroom from one of the females in the household "dad the toilet won't flush - again" I knew straight away that it was the crap Taiwanese flush valve that was broken again, and I knew straight away that I would be expected to fix it immediately and that my Friday night in the pub would be replaced by me standing at the toilet cistern with my hand down inside it.
Are you bored yet ?
I don't care, I'm still pissed off about ruining my Friday night - to change that valve thing you have to take the whole of the cistern off the wall, disconnect the live feed pipe and the overflow pipe, carry the full cistern over to the bath and empty it - I didn't manage this last bit because I tipped up the wrong end and half of the water came out of the overflow and all over my legs and the bathroom floor, so that didn't help my mood very much then.
I fitted the new one pretty quick, put the cistern back on the wall then connected the water feed pipe back up, turned the local valve to switch the water back one (I've fitted local valves and flexible connections on all of the tap connections - I'm fucking ace at plumbing me) and it pissed water out everywhere.
Problem is you see the flexible connection from mains pressure feed pipe is a chrome connection whereas the input pipe the sticks out of the cistern is plastic - chrome to plastic screw thread, not good.
Oh piss off then if you're that bored, I'm going to finish this anyway.
Wrapped some more PTF tape around the plastic thread and tightened the nut up until I just got one drip every minute, good enough for me, put a bowl underneath it and made a mental note to empty it in the morning.
Got called back immediately by the wife, "that can't stay there" she yelled, pointing at the bowl, "we're supposed to be selling this house"
"They'll understand" I pleaded, "anyway, it usually stops dripping of its own accord after a few days", which is true, it does and I don't know why.
So since friday I've been tweaking the nut just a quarter turn before I go to bed, emptying the bowl then seeing how much water is there in the morning - I've got it down to one drip every five minutes now which is good enough for me but I just know that tonight I'll give it a quarter turn, something will crack and I'll be soaked again - its happened before.
I keep seeing and hearing clips from Michael Ball's new album, "released just in time for christmas folks, buy your grandma a copy", and frankly, I see no point.
He's entitled to his own website, I'll grant him that small luxury but other than that he should not assault my ears and my well being with his flacid and damp renditions of classic songs that other artists have made their own.
The track listing from his new album reads thus ...
One Voice (originally by Barry Mannilow)
Hero (originally by Mariah Carey)
The Living Years (originally by Mike & The Mechanics)
Where Do I Begin (originally by Andy Williams from the film Love Story)
Since You've Been Gone (originally by Rainbow)
I Don't Wanna Talk About It (originally by Rod Stewart)
I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing (originally by Aerosmith)
If You're Not The One (originally by Daniel Beddingfield)
Lyin' Eyes (originally by The Eagles)
Everybody Hurts (originally by R.E.M.)
Home (originally by Michael Boublè)
...please don't trouble yourself to actually have to listen to the album, I'll tell you right now, its as poor as you'd imagine it to be.
I heard him on a random TV programme a couple of weeks ago introducing himself performing that last track on the album "Home" by Michael Bouble. He actually said something like "Michael Bouble did a terrific recording of this song last year so I thought I'd have a go", well Michael, you fooled no-one, your producer and musical director were so lazy that they just used the Michael Bouble arrangement, probably actually scrounged the Michael Bouble backing tape actually, and then got you to sing over the top of it - you used the same phrasing and sang in the same key, in short you brought nothing new to the song and you voice is not as good as the original artist.
So why do you do it ?
Do you really think that I'd like to hear a poorer version of a selection of songs ?
"Michael Ball fooks up all your favourite songs" is that the unique selling point ?
Heres another singer who thinks we desperately need to hear worse versions of classic songs, Andy Abraham
I must warn you that when you click that link you will be treated to the sound of Andy rattling out several short clips of tracks off his new album "Soul Man", don't worry, they will not excite you, but they may encourage you to go and seek the original recordings...
The tunes that Andy would like to ruin for you are ...
1. Still (originally by The Commodores)
2. What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted (originally by David Ruffin)
3. Don’t Leave Me This Way (originally by Harold Melvin)
4. Ain’t No Sunshine (originally by Bill Withers)
5. Just My Imagination (originally by The Temptations)
6. I Can’t Help Myself (originally by The Four Tops)
7. Easy (originally by The Commodores)
8. Tracks Of My Tears (originally by Smokey Robinson)
9. This Ole Heart Of Mine (originally by The Isleys)
10.Too Busy Thinking ‘Bout My Baby (originally by Marvin Gaye)
11. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me (originally by Diana Ross)
12. Heaven Help Us All (originally by Stevie Wonder)
... and fortunately you can hear the clips and decide for yourself whether or not Andy's new album is just a little indulgence on his behalf or whether he really should be allowed to be set loose on these sort of classics, personally I think there should be a law against it.
