'Urry up 'Arry



A thing of beauty

The other week I was having lunch in a pub with some work colleagues, when the landlady came over to check that the music wasn’t too loud and that it wasn’t interfering with our conversation.  It wasn’t; indeed I had barely registered that any music was playing at all, but I was nevertheless impressed that she was thoughtful enough to check.  I’d never been asked this before, although I am sufficiently stroppy to have asked in restaurants for music to be turned down.

It got me thinking about pubs generally.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time in them over the years, although my visits are now much less frequent, partly because of pub prices and partly because, frankly, I’ve become something of a couch potato.  I'm usually to be found of an evening in my living room with a glass of wine in my hand, the laptop on my knee and the TV on in the corner.  Ironically I thought I would go to the pub more often since the smoking ban but I haven’t.  Like most ex-smokers I am disgustingly self righteous about the evil weed (except for the odd very drunken occasion when I crave a quick drag), and yet I have hypocritically fond memories of cosy smoke filled pubs.  I’m sure this can be traced to a moment in my very early childhood when I was sent into the bar of a bowling club to fetch a neighbour.  I mentioned it in an earlier blog post Linky Linky

Pubs don’t seem to have juke boxes any more; well I certainly haven’t noticed any in the pubs I occasionally visit.  I suppose they’re quite an expensive way to enjoy a song when you’re already spending over £3 for a pint, and in any case ‘real’ juke boxes rely on vinyl.  In my youth, putting money in a juke box in an unfamiliar pub could have unpleasant consequences.  When I was at university in Leicester I knew of a student who just about escaped with his life when one drunken December evening he selected ‘White Christmas’; this was in a pub packed to the rafters with Rastafarians, although knowing him I'm certain it was in no way intended maliciously.

Perhaps another reason juke boxes have all but disappeared is that we are awash with music nowadays, what with MTV, MP3, greater choice of radio stations and so on, so to pay to hear a single record in a pub must seem ludicrous (although maybe not as ludicrous as ‘Dial-a-Disc’ on the telephone if any of you can remember that!)

Another rarely seen thing in pubs nowadays is the quiz machine. These were all the rage in the 80s and 90s and a useful source of income for me.  The earlier machines had a fairly limited range of multiple choice questions.  They weren’t that difficult in the first place but it didn’t take long for a small group of us to memorise most of the correct answers.  Then it was just a question of emptying the machine before moving on to an identical machine in a pub up the road.  It was never going to make us millionaires but it was enough to buy a few pints and a kebab.

Quiz machines have been replaced by quiz nights.  I like them because they give me a chance to dredge up all the completely useless information I carry about with me.  I once used to ‘play’ for my local pub in a quiz league.  It was a fun way to spend a Sunday evening and gave me an excuse, not that I really needed one, to go to pubs I’d never been in before.  Quizzes can be horribly competitive at the best of times, but the quiz league took this to another level.  There is something quite unsavoury about two middle aged men nearly coming to blows over the spelling of an obscure TV ‘soap’ actor’s name.

All this talk of pubs has made me quite nostalgic. And thirsty. Fancy a pint? We should just about make last orders.

"Put another dime in the jukebox baby ..."

Tying the knot

There was a time in my 20s when I seemed to be forever going to weddings.  I suppose that’s pretty standard for many of us.  At that age one or other of your friends is always getting hitched.  After that you hit a spate of christenings, and without wanting to be morose I dare say the next thing will be attending funerals, but, as the government keeps telling us, we’re all living longer these days so there’s still plenty of time!

I always liked going to weddings back then.  I don’t mean for sentimental reasons, and certainly not through any interest in what the bride was wearing.  I just liked the whole ritual of meeting up with your mates and their families, catching up on their news (I’m talking pre-interweb here), and necking a couple of stiff G&Ts before the service (pints of beer are far too bladder filling; I still associate drinking gin with weddings).  I even liked the singing in church, not through any love of hymns but because out of tune singing always makes me laugh.  Most of all I enjoyed the wedding reception.

For many of us, when we were in our 20s and still single or without kids, the reception was the mother of all piss ups.   With the occasional free bar and perhaps an undercurrent of inter-family rivalry, there was also untold opportunity for a memorable or embarrassing incident.  I once saw a very posh, rotund Hyacinth Bouquet-like character who, having enjoyed several glasses of champagne, was being sick on the dance floor.  I know there should be nothing in the least bit funny about that, but I nearly wet myself to see her on her hands and knees in a voluminous floral frock and an enormous hat hanging from the back of her head, coughing and retching  like a dog.  I bet I’m not the only guest who remembers that particular day for no other reason.  Similarly, when my old school friend Francis married Billie, I remember the occasion not for the quaintness of the church, nor for the splendour of the bridal gown, but for the speech given by the bride’s father.

You may have seen an old sketch in which Rowan Atkinson stands up at a reception and assassinates the character of his new son in law.  Francis’s new father in law did something similar.  The cutting sarcasm was not quite in Atkinson’s league, but from an entertainment perspective this had the advantage of being totally authentic, and what’s more the guy was completely sober, so it was a deliberate, pre-meditated act.

Obviously I’m paraphrasing here after so many years, but he started off with a lengthy summary of Billie’s academic achievements, telling us how gifted a musician she was and about their lofty expectations for her future, before saying “So you can imagine our disappointment when she announced she was going to marry Francis”.  Up to this point most people had adopted the traditional approach of pretending to listen to the speech but allowing their minds to wander towards eying up the bridesmaids or whatever, but now everyone sat up and took notice. “We had hoped she would marry a man with a proper profession, someone who could at least hold down a job.  Not a teacher who is giving up his employment, apparently to start some sort of farm.  How does he intend to support her?  The whole thing is doomed to failure.  Well, don’t expect me to put my hand in my pocket”.

Francis had indeed just left his teaching job and bought a plot of land with a vague idea of starting a smallholding.  To be fair, we who knew him well were also pretty certain it was doomed to failure, but that’s not really the point.  Francis attempted to defend himself when his turn came to speak, but it just turned into the presentation of a fairly lame business plan, even less convincing than the ones which feature on ‘The Apprentice’.  This all rather diverted attention from his father in law’s spectacular lack of manners and finesse.  The happy couple got divorced a couple of years later.  I don’t think the reception speech had anything to do with it, although it can’t have helped much.  No doubt her father will have felt justified.

My own wedding 24 years ago went pretty much without a hitch, although I did quite literally shout my own speech through sheer nerves.  My only regret is that shortly before the big day I had allowed myself to be talked into getting the world’s worst haircut.  This fact can be forgiven but never forgotten; it haunts me to this day, and all those wedding photos are a constant reminder.  Still, I suppose it could have been worse.  I could have been married in the 1970s which would presumably have involved disastrous permed hair as well as flared trousers, huge jacket lapels and shirt collars, and possibly quite a lot of beige.  I must learn to count my blessings.

Me on my wedding day. If you think the hair wasn't so very bad, trust me it really really was.

What's in a name?

Today, much of the world is sniggering about the Beckhams naming their baby daughter Harper Seven.  I’m not terribly surprised.  The inflicting of such horrible pretentious names on innocent children has long been a source of irritation to me.  I know it’s really none of my business what other people call their kids, but sometimes it just gets my back up.  It’s not only the Beckhams who do this of course, and there have been plenty of column inches dedicated to the subject.  If you want to see some of the more bizarre ones, just check out this 2007 article from The Times: Linky Linky

However, whether it’s my business or not, it still exasperates me.  There seems to be an element of celebrities throwing their pretentious twaddle in your face, and you can’t help wonder how much of it is driven by a constant desire for publicity.  I get annoyed partly because they’re basically saying “We’re too special to give our child a normal name like you mere mortals”, but mostly I loathe their complete absence of forethought.  I mean, if you call your child Blue Angel, as U2’s ‘The Edge’ did (and of course his stage name isn’t in the least bit pretentious), what on earth is that child going to have to put up with, not just in their youth but all through their adult life?  And what may now seem a sweet, whimsical name becomes even more ridiculous with the passing of time.  How is Paula Yates’s daughter Fifi Trixibelle going to sound when she’s someone’s wrinkly old granny?  About as ridiculous as her three grey haired sisters Peaches, Pixie and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily I suppose.

I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to names.  They come and go in fashion like everything else, but there’s always a pool of good solid names.  Nobody nowadays seems to call their kids Herbert or Arthur or Cedric and maybe that’s not a bad thing, although I can’t quite imagine someone called Herbert ever doing anything very wicked!  I dare say these names will return when their time comes again, like flared trousers or floral wallpaper.  This tendency for some names to drift in and out of fashion can occasionally give you a clue about someone’s age.  A Deirdre in my experience is likely to be at least middle aged, and there are loads of Darrens in their mid 30s to early 40s, but not so many under the age of 20.  Some names of course defy fashionable trends: David and Michael will probably be around forever.

As for myself I was christened Andrew Nicholas, but I’ve never used the former except when completing official forms, so when I’m being called in the doctor’s waiting room I don’t immediately realise it’s me they want.  This wasn’t my choice; my older brothers refused to call me Andrew from the moment I was born.  They insisted I looked like a Nicky, so Nicky I was called until one day I demanded that it was to be shortened to Nick, having decided that the suffix made me sound too babyish.

Some names (though not mine) run in families.  My grandfather and father were both Tom, my oldest brother’s second name was Tom, and my own son is Tom.  I wonder whether Frank Zappa’s kids Moon Unit, Dweezil and Diva Muffin have continued in a similar vein with their children?

A right Herbert ...

Out of the frying pan

Choose your weapon ...

I do most of the cooking in our house but I’m not complaining.  For starters (see what I did there?) I like doing it, and on a more practical level I nearly always get in from work before my wife, which means either I do the cooking or else we have to wait until late in the evening before we can eat.  Since I walk around like a bear with a sore head if I’m the slightest bit hungry, the decision is easy.

I have a shelf full of cookery books written by all the usual suspects: Nigella, Jamie, Delia (notice how we know them by their first names?), but while I have been known to follow one or two of their recipes to the letter, what puts me off is that they invariably call for some crucial ingredient like lemon grass or Mongolian yak’s blood which I haven’t got in stock.  Even so, I like to look at their books and drool over the pictures; I’m drawn in much the same way to cookery programmes on TV.  I know I shouldn’t watch them quite so avidly and that this sort of thing is what’s killing off ‘proper’ television, but I’m a pseudo-foodie who can’t help himself.

Despite all the reading and TV watching my repertoire in the kitchen is remarkably and depressingly limited.  A lot of my dishes for example involve just a variation on the same sauce.  So the tomato sauce that is the basis for my spaghetti bolognese is not a million miles away from the one I use for curry, chilli, lasagne and occasionally shepherd’s pie.  It’s just a question of adjusting the flavour by adding or removing different herbs and spices.  I do a pretty good paella (it’s not exactly how I’ve had it in Spain, but if I can be immodest for a minute I do prefer mine), a passable stir fry (heavy on the ginger and soy sauce) and a half decent Sunday roast. The rest is often just convenience food.

I have my favourite pans and my favourite kitchen knives, and if they get scratched or damaged a day of national mourning is declared.  I’ve been known when out shopping to leer at woks and garlic crushers.  I almost cried with joy when my wife brought home some egg poaching pods which work brilliantly and have solved my own singular incompetence at poaching an egg.  They now stay in one piece with a lovely runny yolk.

On the down side I’m a bit rubbish at cooking any fish other than the most basic, like salmon fillets.  Actually I can cook it OK, but it’s all the preparation that trips me up.  I’ve tried gutting, cleaning and filleting mackerel, etc., but the result was not pretty.  I know a fishmonger would do it for me but I really ought to master these things for myself.  I never make puddings and pastries or bake cakes; I probably could but I’ve never really tried.  For all my love of food, I don’t really get excited about puddings.  I like them well enough and I’ll eat them if they’re put in front of me, but apart from pancakes I’ve never felt the urge to make one.

After all that bragging about my prowess, you may be wondering what we had for dinner tonight.  The answer is egg, chips and peas with white bread and butter and a cup of tea.  I bet Nigella likes a chip buttie now and then.

Can you imagine a world without chip butties?

Between the covers

Untold wealth

You can’t beat a good book. Well you can, but as far as life’s more gentle pleasures are concerned, there is something very satisfying about losing yourself in a really good book.

And for me, it generally has to be a novel. My favourite reading is fiction, although I do read factual stuff too.  I’m happy to read a biography if the subject is interesting to me, and books on social history are usually welcome, but for relaxation, perhaps something to read by the pool or more likely while tucked up in bed, a good meaty novel is my escape route of choice.

Short stories are OK, but I tend to avoid them nowadays. The problem with the short story is that it’s either badly written, in which case it appears to be a fudge job in which the author apparently started off with an idea and just gave up, or else it is so well written that you enjoy it but feel short changed, as if the author should have kept going and made a ‘proper’ novel out of it.  I can’t off the top of my head think of a single short story which didn’t roll one way or the other, not one which made me think “great story, I’m so glad it ended just when it did”.

Of course, hypocritically, if I ever tried to write something to be published by, you know, an actual publisher in actual book form, I would almost certainly go for the short story, because I’m too bone idle to put the physical and mental effort into writing anything more epic.  And I could guarantee that my short story attempts would fall woefully short of anything worth reading.

So, a novel it is.  I love Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, Austen, Eliot and others of that ilk. It’s partly the way you get a sense of social history from reading them, especially Dickens who gives you a real feeling of what made people laugh, what they ate, how they dressed and so on.  I don’t pretend it’s an entirely accurate portrayal of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  This is particularly so if you read someone like Austen who never dips below those of the ‘gentleman’ class when choosing her protagonists, but even so, her observations on social etiquette alone are worth reading.

There is a whole mountain of genres I have no interest in reading. I’ve never enjoyed Sci-Fi for example, and I tend not to ‘travel’ too far.  I don’t know why, but books set outside Europe usually leave me cold, with a few notable exceptions (such as John Le Carré’s ‘The Constant Gardener), so I tend to avoid them.  I’m fully aware that this is a ridiculous prejudice and that I’m probably missing out on a wealth of brain food, but I can’t help it.  And besides, I like to re-read the novels I have enjoyed many times over a period of years.  My wife will ask me why I’m reading ‘Pickwick Papers’ for the umpteenth time, and it’s simply because I like it.  To me it’s only like digging out a record you haven’t heard for a while and having the pleasure of getting to know the songs again.

At least I’ve cured myself of one thing. I was probably well into my 30s before I realised that the world will not end if I don't finish reading something. There was a time when I forced myself to read books I wasn’t enjoying right to the bitter end. Not anymore; why waste time when there are better things to read?  It’s not like I’m going to take an exam or anything.

And that reminds me; in my English A level exam I answered a question on Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’ without having actually read the book. The exam was a disaster; I have no idea what possessed me to do something so arrogant.  About 10 years later I decided to read ‘Bleak House’, just to see what I’d missed out on.  I absolutely adored it. Perhaps we do get a bit wiser as time passes after all.

Mr Pickwick; one of Dickens' earliest - and best - creations.

Sticks and Stones

When I was a small boy, if I had been more exasperating than usual, my father would either call me a “daft ape’rth” or a “blithering idiot”, depending on the severity of the offence.  On rare occasions the offence was severe enough to render him speechless.  Once I tried to find out if the electric fire was on by putting my finger through the bars; that gave us both a shock I can tell you, painfully so in my case.

 The “daft ape’rth” insult was generally mobilised for cases of minor irritation.  For many years I assumed I was being likened to an ape (well that’s what it sounded like), until one day the penny, or rather the halfpenny, dropped. I was actually being called a “daft halfpenny worth”.  I’m not sure what I was a halfpenny worth of, but I don’t suppose so small an amount of money would have gone very far, not even in the 1960s.  A couple of ‘Fruit Salads’, half a Penny Arrow, or one sixth of a thru’pny ‘Lucky Bag’, sweets being about the only reference point I had back then when it came to assessing the true value of hard cash.

 The phrase “blithering idiot” used to make me imagine some poor feeble minded soul, lying on the floor in a foetal position, twitching away like the inmate of a Victorian lunatic asylum.  Its definition according my online dictionary is “an extremely stupid person”.  I’d rather guessed that’s what my father meant by it, but I can find no definition in the same dictionary for the verb “to blither”.  “Blithe” meaning happy or carefree comes close, but it’s far more likely that I simply misheard him, and he was actually saying “You blathering idiot”.  To “blather” means “to talk for a long time in a silly or annoying way”, and if I’m honest that does sound a bit familiar.

So, I was either happily stupid, or talkatively stupid.  To be frank, and especially looking back at some of my earlier blog posts, my money's on it being both!

He aint heavy ...

L-R: Me, my brothers Dave and Steve. The monkey is not a sibling.

I’ve been debating whether or not to write about this for some time. I generally like my blog posts to be fairly light hearted, but sometimes in life shit just happens, and right at this moment I feel like talking about it. 

One Saturday in October 1979 I went home for the weekend from university in Leicester. I’d only just started there, but I was a late entrant and needed to go home for the rest of my belongings.  I‘d joined Leicester late in the day because I‘d been kicked out of a different university during the Summer (more of which some other time), and the process of finding another college that would take me on and getting the funding from the Local Education Authority (no tuition fees or student loans in those days) had meant I’d gone there in a bit of a rush. 

I’d spent the Friday night with my girlfriend in Birmingham and so I had a bit of a spring in my step as I emerged from Shrewsbury railway station.  I was surprised to see my parents outside waiting for me; I hadn’t told them what time my train was due but I suppose they’d found out from the girl’s parents.  Anyway, they looked very upset and came straight to the point.  My oldest brother Steve had that day been killed in a motorcycle accident. There were no other vehicles involved; he’d come off on a bend on a country road just outside the town.  He was 24 years old. 

I’d heard about people going into shock, but I’d never experienced anything quite like it.  I was literally numb. I had no bodily sensation whatsoever and could barely talk until we got home.  The next few days were all a bit hazy.  My mother went from denial and disbelief through to an unfounded suspicion that he may have done it on purpose, before a police officer helped her accept that it really had been an accident.  He told her something about the accelerator cable on Steve’s motorbike not shutting off.  I have no idea if that was true; I rather suspect he made it up out of kindness to a distraught woman. I had a strange reaction too – a vivid dream that first night in which Steve came into my room and told me “It’s OK, I’m not really dead”, which I suppose was just my subconscious hoping against hope. 

Over the next few days a succession of friends and neighbours came making their condolences.  They were all so upset, we seemed to spend our time comforting them and not the other way around. The local newspaper sent a very embarrassed journalist to get a few words.  “Welfare Chief’s Son In Fatal Accident” was the headline, my father being Director of Social Services at the time. 

Every evening my parents visited Steve at the undertakers (by coincidence a firm owned by his girlfriend’s grandfather).  They always asked me to go along, but I always refused. I wasn’t frightened of seeing a dead body, but I was frightened of seeing him.  I was scared that if I saw him dead in a coffin, that one image would erase every other memory of him.  To this day I can not be sure I made the right decision, but if it was wrong I have forgiven myself.  I was 19 and not in the clearest frame of mind. 

Somehow through all this my parents managed to organise a funeral, not much helped by me making stupid jokes about having tickets to keep out the gatecrashers, but I suppose it made them smile for the first time in days. 

The funeral took place at the crematorium. The place was packed; far more friends than family, which was a reflection of Steve’s popularity I suppose.  I don’t recall very much about the service other than struggling to keep it together for my parents’ sake as much as my own.  My mother inscribed a wreath with a quote from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: “We are such stuff as dream are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”.  Afterwards it was back to the house and an afternoon spent passing round the sausage rolls and making endless pots of tea. 

I find it hard to remember a great deal about Steve now, mostly just random memories; I can’t even recall exactly what his voice sounded like.  I felt guilty for a few years about that, as if I’d betrayed him, but not any longer; I think it must be quite normal not to remember every little detail about someone you haven’t seen or spoken to in over 3 decades. So for me his passing has become easier with time, and to a lesser extent for my parents too I think. 

Steve was 24 years old to my 19.  I’m now 50, yet in my mind he’s still my big brother.  I don’t sanctify his memory like my mother still does.  In truth he did a lot of stupid things, getting involved with drugs and joy riding and so on. Indeed the post mortem revealed he was marginally over the alcohol limit when he died (“Fatal Crash Rider Had Been Drinking”).  But to me he was always decent and kind, and I loved him.

Steve on holiday in France, August 1979

"And all the friends lay down the flowers
Sit on the banks and drink for hours
Talk of the way they saw him last
Local boy in the photograph."
(The Stereophonics)