Cambridge 2018

(from 2018)

So for the fourth year running the Occasional family behaved like superannuated hippies and attended the Cambridge Folk Festival along with 14,000 others. Last year it rained. This year it didn’t. The sun blazed down and we baked, cooked, roasted…

As always the festival for us started with a queue. The gates to the main center and campsite opened at 10 am – we got up at some unearthly hour to be in the queue from around 7 am to get our key spot, somewhere with shade but not too far from the rest rooms... So I sat on my camp chair in the queue for three hours and read my Times newspaper. There was an article on the front page that said that drinking four and half bottles of wine a week (about three times the recommended UK limit) will mean you are less likely to go down with Alzheimer’s disease than if you were teetotal. I read that again. It really did say that. So looking at the necessary provisions my fellow queuees had, it seems they were really taking that to heart, although the weather was more suitable for iced beer than red wine. Of course it could just mean that if you downed four and half bottles of wine each week, you might just die of something else before Alzheimer’s got you. Still it was a thought.

     What do we want?

     Better memory.

     When do we want it?

     Want what?

Or as no doubt I have said many times before; when you get to my age three things start to happen. First your memory starts to go. And the other two I can’t remember…

I always determine when I go away that I am going to catch up on so many things. So I took away a number of volumes that I had started, but not finished.

There was the detailed report of a conference on a religious group in which I have an interest. I assisted two of the authors with their chapters, but my particular interest was in what can only be called the lunatic-fringe. I did read some of that, shook my head slowly, laughed (sort of) before having another beer.

There was the latest biography of Jerome K Jerome. It was rather nice to find myself referenced in it, as I have written on this author on a number of occasions and supplied several chapters for a 150^th anniversary celebration book. (Pause to look smug). One of the first articles I ever wrote on this blog was about a school teacher, Mr V, in what the UK calls the juniors, who tried to read Three Men in a Boat and went red in the face and guffawed most of the time in front of a large class of bemused eight year olds. But that is how I started. There was a special second hand bookshop that I used to visit when returning to London and they put Jerome books away for me. Alas, like so many others, long gone. But I read a little.

What I really planned to do was to complete an article for a history blog on a fascinating character named John Adam Bohnet. He spanned crucial decades of a certain group’s history and whenever they (collectively or through individual members) found themselves in court, he would invariably turn up as a witness. But I lost my notes. When I am home they will turn up no doubt, but they didn’t turn up before we left for Cambridge, so John Adam is going to have to wait a bit longer.

What I did read at length, because it was on my eReader was Lying for Money by Dan Davies, subtitled How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of our World. It was both hilarious and sad in equal measures; from people being sold not-existent land in South America in the 19^th century, to the failed attempt of notorious London gangsters, the Kray Twins, to liquidate their book-keeper, to Ponzi schemes and huge business frauds of recent decades. One highlight was the American fraudster who used huge vats of salad oil as collateral for his wheeling and dealing. He was known as the salad oil king. However, since oil floats on water, the vats were actually full of sea water with about two inches of salad oil on the top. He got away with it for years. News of its crash and exposure was overshadowed by the assassination of John F Kennedy which happened on the same day. The subject matter was to be taken as “A WARNING” - or as a guide for future fraudsters.  Take your pick. I enjoyed it immensely.

Of course we came to listen to music and make music. As always, some was good, some was execrable. Perhaps the worst (and I won’t give a name) was someone who decades ago was a real wild child. More punk than folk, she used to cuss at the audience and spit. When you see the same person as a lady in her seventies with matted white hair, still cussing the audience and spitting – er, as the Sunday papers used to say when exposing “VICE” – we all made our excuses and left.

Of the good guys, we saw Darlingside again, who sing four part harmony with full instruments around just one mike – the technique for getting the balance spot on was amazing. Roseanne Cash (daughter of Johnny Cash) was a revelation. I knew her work because one of her biggest hits in the eighties was Runaway Train, written by John Stewart, although she didn’t include it in her set. But with one accompanying guitarist and harmony singer (her husband of 23 years) she made a fantastic sound. The CD tent was cleared of all her merchandise before I could get there, which tells its own story.

On a personal level I found myself roped in to sing on two different stages with Amy Goddard, and also to do a live interview and sing on Radio Cambridge 105 with her. I don’t know how many people actually tune in to Radio Cambridge, probably miniscule, but the program was to be beamed around the folk world on mix cloud. One weekend I am speaking to thousands in another context, the next weekend I am warbling folk songs into a radio mike. Weird. Positively weird. Ten years ago I would never have dreamed of singing at all. It is what is known as growing old (dis)gracefully.

So then it was “home James, and don’t spare the horses” which in our case was a five hour motorway drive with no air-con in tropical conditions for which the dehydrated Occasionals were just not prepared. Back to work, back to catch-up, and back to nearly keel over. I really must pace myself better. While carefully following the Times’ advice to ward off Alzheimer’s of course.

"Time"

(from 2018)

This is a very potted history of recorded sound, and the efforts made to produce a silk purse from many a sow’s ear. (Do they use that 16^th century British idiom in the States?)

At the start of the recording era, copies were produced from a master that didn’t last too long. So it was not uncommon for popular recordings for the artiste to sing the same tune more than once – and collectors to find tiny variations in different pressings from different masters. When the singer was someone professional like Caruso they could sound identical (or as good as) on every “take”. Things drastically improved when electrical amplification came in around 1925 and the process allowed for copies of masters for disc pressing. So alternative takes generally became out-takes and were unceremoniously dumped.

But moving forward in time some performers who had not been classically trained really struggled to get the finished product together – take after take after take. One tiny mistake would ruin the whole thing. You couldn’t change anything when the voice wobbled or the guitarist hit a bum note, or the percussionist fell over his cymbals. You were stuck with it or dumped it. With some forms of music like jazz it didn’t matter because no-one knew what was going to happen when they started – least of all the musicians - it was going to fly all over the place anyway. But for standard pop tunes, with amateur pretty boys and girls plucked from the street whose delights were purely visual rather than vocal, it must have been a recording engineer’s nightmare. There was a very funny parody of the music business at the end of the 1950s by American Stan Freeberg called The Old Payola Roll Blues, where a kid is plucked from the street, given a song to sing and prodded with a sharp stick at appropriate points to make him sound like Little Richard.

So for aging collectors and completionists, outtakes have surfaced showing the processes that should have been dumped but weren’t. Buddy Holly struggled to record the song Take Your Time. He was tired, he couldn’t see the words properly; he really didn’t want to be doing this. Several duff attempts at the song have survived on the end of other master tapes and released to fans. Then there is Gene Vincent, one of the most exciting performers in his heyday ever. He came to Britain as his career nosedived in the States, was dressed in black leather by Guru Jack Good (later responsible for the cult American pop show Shindig) and limped with a bad leg sustained in a motor cycle accident. He looked and sounded MEAN. I used to do an impersonation of him at parties in my misguided youth guaranteed to offend all the straight-laced parents. Anyhow, there are several songs – I can’t remember which now – where the number of takes ran into the 30s. Vincent used to down copious amounts of spirits each day, which eventually did for him from stomach ulcers at the age of 36, and that affected him in the studio (and on stage towards the end). Someone I studied scripture with (wearing another one of my hats) had been in Vincent’s backing band in “Rock across the Channel” – where a ferry boat went from Britain to France around 1961. It was full of teenagers dressed as Teddy Boys raving it up with Vincent in a full blast performance, then disgracing themselves in some French port and un-cementing Anglo-Franco relations. Vincent’s alcohol intake on that trip was legendary. And thirty odd takes to nail a song – a song that was rubbish anyway –became depressingly common.

So recording sessions could be long as increasingly tired, fractious, and probably drunk performers tried to nail down their latest track.

But then the whiz-kids got in on the act and multi-tracking took over. It meant that American guitarists like Les Paul could sound like an orchestra of sorts. It also meant eventually that you could record all the bits and pieces separately and if something went wrong, you just replaced the one bit. George Martin did this for the Beatles. And it advanced so that now you can just change one word in the middle of a line and no-one outside of the studio will ever know.

Which brings me – finally - to my own recording adventures and the word “Time.”

Now I confess that I am not a singer. But since that has never stopped anyone else, and since I appear under several pseudonyms and keep bits of my life compartmented, I have been emboldened to try. My daughter is a singer and musician and sometimes has this quirk of wanting the Von-Occasional Family Singers in on the act.

So, on her latest venture I was drafted in to drone an odd backing vocal and on one song to do a duet.

The song was written and recorded by John Stewart many years ago. I was a fan of Stewart and used to inflict bootleg cassette tapes of him on my daughter as I drove her to and from school, so I guess I only have myself to blame. 

The song is called Hung on the Heart of a Man Back Home, and is a real stinker to sing – even for a real singer. And over a very long career no tapes have emerged of Stewart singing it live. I wonder why?

It has the usual quirk of folk-style music (although this song is probably more country) of cramming too many syllables into a line. So the verse of the song that I had trouble with goes:

Spent our time mostly just laughing

Not enough time to name the day

ShouldhaveseenhereyeswhenIwasasking….

(gasp for breath)

Ever feel like running away

I had trouble with the word “time” in the first line. I was told it was a diphthong, so I diphthonged it – ti-eme – nah that was wrong. So time, teme, tahme, thyme, oh drat - polystyrene peanuts!.

So on a round trip of around 400 mile I have just re-recorded the one word, TIME, time, time…. Time and time again. The least-worse rendition has been plucked from the iPad, and sent via Dropbox to a whiz recording engineer in Detroit. He, I am told, will plop the word seamlessly into the rest of my line. The results will be amazing. You might even imagine that Occasional could sing.

Hmmm. Just don’t ever ask me to do it live.

Polystyrene Peanuts

(from 2018)

There are certain expressions that have been used by people when they stub their toe, drop a prized possession, or otherwise mess up. Not wishing to use the standard expletives, they find an alternative – devotees of creaky old movies may remember W C Fields and his “Godfrey Daniels” or on a slightly higher cultural level, Sylvester (when losing out to Tweety Pie) “Sufferin’ Succotash…”

Well, the Occasional household have just got their own, their very own - Polystyrene Peanuts.

It has a certain sound to it. And as with most of these things there is a ring of truth in it.

We recently bought some polystyrene peanuts. You might know them as loose fill chippings, void-fill, or something similar. Basically they are made from polystyrene off-cuts, and look like unshelled peanuts. They are used to surround and cushion fragile items when sent in the mail, so that the combined efforts of the postal system – store it upside-down, throw it across the room, crush it with huge weights and generally totally ignore signs like Fragile and Handle with Care – may still allow the contents to reach their destination relatively intact.

I have recently been selling a large collection of 78 rpm shellac recordings. This system took over from cylinders around the start of the 20^th century and lasted until around 1960, when vinyl and 45s and 33s took over. Interestingly, the old 78 revolutions per minute recordings – while they have the nostalgic background sound of bacon frying – have lasted a lot longer than modern electronic data storage systems are expected to last. But that is another story.

My 78 rpm recordings are religious in nature, from the days when an American preacher was regularly recorded and then taken around and played to people on their doorsteps. The message was not flavor of the month for everyone, and after a few acts of violence, there was even a famous American court case Cantwell v. Connecticut about it.

So these recordings are an acquired taste. But some collectors have this taste and who am I to deny them the privilege of paying me silly money to clear box-loads of them.

The problem is as noted above is that they were made using shellac, which cracks and breaks and warps in sunlight and is particularly susceptible to inferior packing. So – at great expense all these records have to be packed between layers of specially cut thick card, covered with bubble wrap and then suspended in a large double-walled cardboard with the aid of our old friend, polystyrene peanuts.

So far, it has worked a treat.

BUT – where do you get polystyrene peanuts from? There is obviously one answer – eBay. I started with small boxes, but they cost the earth and didn’t even fill one large box I was sending. But someone offered bulk supplies and for a ridiculously small figure, I could buy 30 cubic feet of the stuff. I did some rough calculations of volume and made the same mistake as the film Spinal Tap, but in reverse.

Devotes of Spinal Tap may remember the Stonehenge sequence – pronounced Stone’enge by purists. (Americans are usually rubbish at authentic British accents, but this time they got the flat Essex vowels off perfectly). This huge stadium rock number planned to have a huge model of Stonehenge descend from the sky at a given moment. Unfortunately the person who ordered it got his symbols for feet and inches mixed up and a tiny model came down to the stage and the “little children” (actually vertically-challenged adults) then fell over it during the instrumental break. I still laugh every time I see it, and Mrs O looks at me and sighs…

But in reverse, I had the vaguest of ideas as to how large 30 cubic feet were. I was either wrong, or the company just filled the largest bag available without worrying and sent off a removals van to deliver it.

I was out when it arrived. Mrs O was not. She opened the door to be greeted by what appeared at first site to be a scene from the original Steve McQueen film The Blob.

Just getting it into the house was interesting. Squeezing it along the hallway to then fill the downstairs rooms was an art she had unwillingly managed by the time I arrived home. The only thing you could say in the monstrosity’s favor was that the material was very light.

Where we were going to store all this stuff? The only logic place was the attic. Many years ago I built an enlarged trap door for the attic with folding stairs up to it. I know I have told this story before, but I am of an age where repeating myself is a given. Sawing away at ceiling timbers while balancing precariously on a ladder, working on my own in the house (which was both daft and dangerous) I actually brought the ceiling down. I watched in mesmerised horror as a small crack suddenly spread and with a huge thwack 120 years worth of lathe and plaster and accumulated coal dust came thundering down, taking me with it. My daughter came home from school to find her father sitting at the bottom of the stairs, doing an impersonation of Al Jolson, laughing hysterically. She joined me. We sat there rocking back and forth as if we were stark raving mad. Then Mrs O arrived home. She didn’t laugh.  I remember that very clearly. I also remember the grief of several weeks putting our Humpty Dumpty domicile back together again.

Anyhow, enough of past less-than-glorious moments, I now had an enlarged trap door to get through. But it was bad enough getting the stuff up the stairs in the actual house. We decanted huge quantities of polystyrene peanuts into the largest black bags we could find and a jolly time was spent getting them into the attic, snagging them on the folding stair mechanism, and watching as polystyrene peanuts in their millions wafted through the atmosphere to cover every available surface.

You now cannot get in the attic for huge bag loads of these things. Tools and suitcases and old guitars and forgotten books and the ghost of lesson-plans-past are all swamped by the stuff. And every time I sell another batch of records, I have to rescue a bag or two and make my way down the ladder to civilization without another burst bag and polystyrene peanuts everywhere.

The income from eBay is of course compensation. But Mrs O wants me to go back to selling badges – tiny little paper things, again going for amazing prices – but with not a polystyrene peanut in sight. I assure her that the 78s won’t last forever, but there were around two hundred of them to start with, plus multiple sets of some titles. And then there are transcription records which are 16 inches across… No matter how many I unload, at the moment the piles still look about the same. We may even have to send off for another U-Haul’s worth of void filling. But I haven’t dared telling her that… Yet.

Yeah – now wash your mouth out with soap d’y’all hear - polystyrene peanuts!

Josephine Tey

(from 2018)

In 1990 the British Crime Writers’ Association produced a list of the top 100 crime novels of all time. Obviously this was very subjective, and maybe the list would change considerably if revisited today. But top of the list, in their view the best crime novel of all time was one written by Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time. Tey weighed in again at number 11 with The Franchise Affair. A sub-section The Whodunnit placed The Franchise Affair at number 1. And another sub-section, Romantic Suspense, had another Tey offering, Brat Farrar, at number 8.

Quite an achievement for someone who viewed her detective novels as “her knitting,” a hobby for when she was not concentrating on her real work as a dramatist under the masculine name of Gordon Daviot.

There have been several TV dramatizations of her work and at least three films – Hitchcock adapted A Shilling for Candles as Young and Innocent (1937), The Franchise Affair came out as that title in 1951 and Brat Farrar was given the Hammer horror film treatment as Paranoiac in 1963 (but wisely leaving her name off the credits).

But it is her command of language and dialog that makes the books special for me.

There was a biography finally produced for her in 2015 by Jennifer Morag Henderson. Going off onto one of my usual hobby-horses and tangents, the book could have done with some pruning. Inside 500 odd pages was a useful 200 pages struggling to get out. And as someone who has been proof reader for a number of writers over the years, it could have done with more work. You can get away with spelling to some degree today, because modern computers have spell-checks, and grammar and syntax can be very individual. If James Joyce can write Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy in Ulysses with virtually no punctuation, who are we to argue – other than mutter something rude about pretentiousness…  But a proof reader’s art is to spot where a writer defines things they’ve already explained in detail but forgotten. Or where the writer assumes they have covered something and in the final incarnation they haven’t, presenting you with a jigsaw with missing pieces.  A proof reader has to read the complete product from start to finish if they are to spot these problems. Well, the biographer of Tey could have done with a bit more of that. 

However, very much on the positive side, the book did solve several questions about her life. She was born Elizabeth MacKintosh in Scotland and as a young adult went into nursing and teaching, qualifying as a physiotherapist and PE teacher. But she had to give up her career in England to go back to Inverness to nurse her mother until she died, and then spent nearly 30 years caring for her father. As soon as she got her freedom after he died she was struck down with cancer and died within fifteen months herself. But over the decades, she got away to London on the railway twice a year by employing a temporary housekeeper and under the pen-name Gordon Daviot had a huge hit in 1932 with an historical play on the West End stage (Richard of Bordeaux) that made the career of John Gielgud. Three volumes of her collected plays were published after her death.

But then under the pen-name Josephine Tey she wrote a series of detective novels, especially after the Second World War, including the three mentioned at the start of this article. The number one winner of the best crime novel Daughter of Time has her main policeman stuck in a hospital bed totally bored out of his skull, who then starts researching the murder of the Princes in the Tower (c. 1483). Tey, through her detective, “proves” that the usual suspect Richard III was not guilty! The same plot device, detective in hospital solves ancient case, was reused by Colin Dexter with Inspector Morse and The Wench is Dead. Tey died aged 55 and could have written many more classics had she lived.

The biography dispels a myth about her last days. The usual story is that, knowing she was mortally ill, she came to London for one last time. She stayed at her club. She contacted no-one. What did she do? Where did she go? When her death was announced in the newspapers it caught the theater world by surprise.

In fact, the truth was far more mundane. She took a trip south to have an operation in a London hospital. While staying at her “club” sounds a little esoteric, it was an accommodation address for nurses, sharing premises with The Royal College of Nursing, for which she qualified from work during the First World War. The operation showed her to be in the terminal stages of cancer. She went back to her sister’s home in London, where the family nursed her for a short time until she died. That she’d planned to go straight back to Scotland after the operation is indicated by the fact that the water pipes in her home in Inverness all froze up without attention, and when the family eventually made the trip after her death, water had been pouring out of her home for some time and the neighbours apparently didn’t have a contact number. Much in the house was ruined, but fortunately not the manuscript for her last novel The Singing Sands, which was published posthumously. But the other tale with its hints of mystery in the midst of tragedy sounds better. As one of the last lines in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Because she was such a private person who never married there was an aura of mystery about her. A modern novelist has used her as a character in a detective series of her own, and portrays Tey as a lesbian. In reality, correspondence shows Tey rebuffing advances from a famous actress, and like so many she lost a boyfriend in the First World War, and her second love, a poet, died in the 1920s. History created a dearth of men for the 1920s and her situation was by no means unique.

So what was she really like? Half the fun of reading her books today is looking for clues, although different readers will interpret differently. I believe she saw herself as Marion Kane in the Franchise Affair (loosely based on the 1753 Elizabeth Canning case). Her waspish portrayal in the same novel of a predatory teenage girl probably came from her experience as a teacher. Her dialog of theatrical poseurs probably comes from her contacts in the 1930s London theatre world and shows off her skill as a dramatist – which as noted above she believed to be her first calling. But her plays are long out of print and unperformed; whereas all her detective novels have remained consistently available.

What the biography has done is send me back to the original books. One of my favourites, based on the phoniness of the London theatre world of the 1930s and 40s with a bit of cross-dressing thrown in for good measure, is To Love and Be Wise. I think I’ll start again with that.

A Tribute (Mom)

(from 2017)

In Britain she would be Mum, in much of America, Mom, and in Wales, Mam.  Mam also seems to turn up in a bad dose of the Al Jolson’s – down on one knee, black face, and a politically incorrect croon of Mammy…

I come from the UK, so Mum was the standard. My Mum passed away a couple of months ago aged 98, and those in the know made a few nice comments on this blog and back-channel.

So this is a brief review of her life.

She was born in 1919 to older parents. Her father was in his 40s, having risen to become company secretary for a very large Bradford concern. Her mother has nursed a sweetheart for ten years before he died of MS and was well into her 30s. They met during the First World War at a Gilbert and Sullivan choir practice in London, when he was down south on business and where she came from. He’d put on shows at the Bradford Alhambra Theater, and my grandmother came from a theatrical background and was a singer, accustomed to doing most the (cruel) older women parts in G and S. They clicked, they married, and along came a single daughter who was doted on and probably spoiled rotten.

Her world came crashing down when her father died suddenly when she was 13. Her mother got away from Bradford as soon as she could having never been truly accepted as a southerner, and finally settled back in London.  My mother grew up but then went back to the Bradford area by accident when training as nurse during the Second World War. (Nearly seventy years later we took her back again and met school friends she hadn’t seen since a child.)

My grandmother, when not singing became manageress of a large holiday hotel that put on concerts for residents. On a wartime family visit to join her, my mother met the compere and host and resident official comedian. He was a widower, in real life a company secretary like her father, also an entertainer like her father, and more than old enough to be her father.  Just the ticket. On his side he wanted to join a family he really clicked with and the easiest way was to marry the one unattached young female in the party. Remnants of that family still remember him with great affection, which is more than my mother did.

Hence my parents got married, both with totally unrealistic expectations.

As a child I regularly saw my father on the stage – “That’s my Dad” “Shuuush” – and both parents. They did a routine impersonating two well-known singers in the UK, Ann Zeigler and Webster Booth. They would announce that Ann and Webster had been booked, but weren’t able to come – so instead… My father would be in drag as Ann Zeigler and my mother would do a Vesta Tilley routine as Webster Booth. There was an old vaudeville act in the UK for about 50 years called Wilson, Keppel and Betty who did an Egyptian sand dance, and who kept going so long they used to change the girl playing “Betty” every seven years. My parents did a pared-down version of their act with just the two of them – I remember that too. I used to think my father’s act was wonderful (and my mother’s contribution not bad) – only later in time did I discover where he stole all his material from. (Towards the end I did some writing for him, which was probably even worse, but that’s another story).

Not that long after they married my mother embraced a religion that dealt in certainties. She still supported her husband in shows and an annual pantomime at a huge American air base near us, but now drew the line at supporting him in ladies’ night at the Masonic Temple, where he was Grand Master. Keeping up appearances and getting on in business were almost paranoid obsessions of his, and eventually he did a runner.

He used to say his first wife led him a dog’s life – he was a little careful about what he said about my mother to me – but his subsequent third marriage was equally unhappy for him. My mother summed him up as very funny on stage but a right misery off it. I suspect she had a certain prejudice by that time, but there was probably a kernel of truth in it.

Anyhow, this is about my mother. She worked full time for the religion she had adopted for several years and then as the sole breadwinner went back to nursing. She kept on nursing all her working life, ending up working in a nursing home where she was older than most of the residents. She loved her work and was nothing if not determined.

We moved from the suburbs back into London to care for my grandmother when she grew old, and there my mother met her second husband, E. I left home to do voluntary work as soon as I could in my late teens and I think that was an arrangement that suited all of us.

My abiding memory of my mother over the years was the performing. The meetings she attended gave a certain limited scope for theatricals, which she embraced with a gusto that meant you never knew what you were going to get. Quite often it wasn’t even what she’d planned – she had the let’s-drop-the-props-and-bump-into-the-scenery quality about her – but could improvise. When it was her turn on the platform we would settle down and wait for it.

There’s an anecdote I’ve told before on this blog a year or so ago, but it sort of fits here again. One of the religious meetings I attended with her was called a school. People rehearsed before an audience how they might approach different sorts of people with their message in such a way that they might get a hearing ear.

My mother was never contents with just doing it straight. She would dress up for the part. As a little lad I remember she had one special friend who we shall call Eve. They were often put on together. The audience loved it. You never knew what you were going to get. The intent may have been serious, but the results were often Laurel and Hardy.

We had one Hall on the outskirts of London that had formerly been a welfare institute for Railway workers. Using what was already at hand, it had quite a high raised platform at one end, and the backdrop was three large panels. The middle one was brought forward about three feet. It meant that you could enter from the rear, either stage left or stage right, walking around the middle panel.

So picture the scene. My mother appears from rear stage left and sits at a table with her props. She is shelling peas or something similar from that era, wearing an apron and humming a nameless ditty. Everything is lined up for the Oscars. Move over Marlon Brando, this is method acting for all it’s worth.

Eve is supposed to mime knocking on a door so that my mother can rise and greet her, invite her inside to then be disarmed by Eve’s presentation. Perhaps they had some illustration lined up that would fit the scene. Who knows?

So my mother sits there, humming away while fiddling with the vegetables, but starts looking less than pleased as long seconds go by. There are appreciative titters from the audience. They’ve no idea what this is about, but it looks like it will be a lot more interesting than the previous part of the program. My mother frowns, and in the loudest of stage whispers known to the hard of hearing mutters out of the side of her mouth - “Eve....Eve... Come on, come on...”

Nothing happens. My mother scowls. Now she could stop a naughty boy in his tracks at a hundred paces with just a glance. Next, she gets up from her table and with a look like thunder goes to investigate rear stage left.

The split second she disappears rear stage left, Eve bounds into sight from rear stage right, to be faced with a totally empty platform – no partner, and an audience now in hysterics. The look of first surprise and then panic that covered her face has stayed with me down through the years. The presentation never recovered.

The years went by and she and her husband left London and came to live near us. From this era, her granddaughter has a memory of being teamed with her – most unwillingly – in a sketch where an older person helps a young person to reason on certain matters. My mother made a big production of presenting my daughter with a notebook and pen, instructing her to write down the litany then presented. My daughter was of an age where she pretended to write and allowed her mind to wander elsewhere, only to be brought up horribly short by her grandmother demanding she read back what she had written… They used to time these playlets and ring a bell when your time was up. If ever “saved by the bell” was apt, this was it.

The group regularly put on social gatherings where different ones did their party pieces. (Some would be dire, some would be quite good, and as I became older and respectable I generally escaped by being behind a camera.) Well into her mid-80s, now widowed, my mother would recite Stanley Holloway and Moore Marriot monologues that Brits of a certain age would remember. I would be out there in worry-mode, mouthing the lines along with her in case it all went pear-shaped, but she remained word perfect and had the Yorkshire accent off to a T.

Her last years were sad. She lost her mobility, then her sight, then her hearing to a large degree. We fought and won battles with officials who can only tick boxes and watch their own backs to keep her in her own home as she wished as she went from using a motorized wheelchair in supermarkets (running down other shoppers) to a wheelchair we propelled, to permanent bed and carers around the clock, waking up only to be fed.

Everyone in the area knew her. Her very direct old-school proselytizing was well known, and even though neighbours didn’t share her views they would never turn her away and had a huge affection for her, and some attended her memorial service along with the carers.

For me, a history and a lot of memories.

More Vacationeering

(from 2017)

Well, the Occasionals have been away on vacation again. For the last ten years we’ve only been able to go away by arrangement, organising care for my mother while absent. Since she passed away in October, we took off this month for a whole two weeks to North Wales.

Most of our first week was spent at a caravan site called Sea Breezes. I should have taken warning from that. The wind raged across the site, barely protected by an ugly sea wall. Fifteen years ago the area had its own version of the New Orleans disaster, when the existing sea walls were breached and the whole area went underwater. Of course we only found this out when we arrived. Still it was nice to crash out in a caravan – even if buffeted by the wind – and not be on the end of a telephone.

Our second week was a lot better with a flat in the center of Chester.                                       

We’d passed through Chester on vacation a year or two back and wanted to return. It’s a very attractive city with a speciality of old shops on two levels in the main streets, all dating from the Victorian era or earlier. The place goes back to Roman times and the museum has a fine collection of engraved Roman gravestones, which each tell a personal history. Apparently as the city walls fell into disrepair the locals used to steal these stones from the abandoned Roman cemeteries. Then in the 19^th century when the walls were properly restored, many of these stones from the past were retrieved, cleaned up, put on show and told their stories.

The city is very close to the Welsh border and Welsh could be heard in the streets on occasion. Apparently the bad feeling between the Welsh and English meant that several clock towers in Chester have clocks on three faces but the side facing Wales is blank. To coin a phrase, they weren’t going to give them the time of day.

The first thing we did was to behave like the total tourists we were, and took the tour bus. It was actually a much restored London bus from the time of the first World War – open topped and taller than modern vehicles meaning you had to duck to avoid being decapitated under modern Chester Bridges.

The commentary was slick and professional with well-rehearsed jokes and we learned a bit about Roman Chester and its subsequent history. However, there was a lesson for modern writers and commentators. Trundling past an ancient cemetery we were told that here was the grave of the writer of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. That’s Thomas Hughes, and no he wasn’t – he was buried in Brighton. And also the father of postage stamps, Roland Hill, and no, he wasn’t buried there either but in Westminster Abbey.  Also in the same cemetery was supposed to be someone who, with multiple births, gave birth to 33 children. Ouch. I didn’t get a name so didn’t check that one out. But once you find a glaring error of fact in an account, it calls into question everything else you’re told. As someone who writes on history, where the line between facts and opinions is easily blurred, there’s a lesson there.

Twice during our stay we travelled to a Welsh language religious meeting. Originally we planned to go to one in Bangor but that one is always filmed and shared on the internet. The thought of my strangulated Welsh being watched by mystified people in Patagonia did not appeal, so we went to a nearer location. While waiting for their own Hall this group hires a room in a Welsh castle.

It was actually a place Mrs O and I visited more than 20 years ago. I used to organise podiatry seminars and our committee suddenly found we had too much money. We had to spend some before the end of the year, so arranged a weekend committee meeting at this castle, and had a medieval banquet thrown in. That was an experience. We were all given huge bibs to protect our clothes and then set to work with fingers on medieval food using medieval wet-wipes. We were served copious quantities of mead by buxom wenches, and then a Welsh choir came and sang at us. The visit wasn’t QUITE as exciting this time.

We walked around Chester on top of the city walls, which is a two mile circuit and generally quite high. And we went to Chester Zoo.  As Tom Paxton sang: “We’re going to the zoo zoo zoo, how about you you you, you can come too too too” etc.  My daughter was a little girl the last time we visited a conventional zoo. I think we once did a safari park in the interim, where you drive through enclosures and small monkeys leap on your car and scream obscenities, while trying to wrench off your windscreen wipers; but we have been zoo-less for many years.

I have to say it was very impressive, with a huge fanfare given to its programs to breed endangered species. We saw all the usual animals you would expect to see. But there was a lot of walking. And I surprised myself, I got tired. VERY TIRED. As soon as we got back to base we cracked another bottle of Cava and then I was done for. Flat out on the bed, Law and Order on the TV - out like a light… But I don’t remember feeling so tired since the day A LONG TIME AGO when I was single and pedal cycled from Cardiff to Manchester for a special meeting with a typewriter tied to the back of my bike (don’t ask) and then from Manchester to London, 180 miles with a headwind. The latter stage took 18 hours and I collapsed into a hot bath at the end. It was half an hour of sheer bliss. And then I found I was totally seized up and unable to get out… (Compartmented into my personal collection of one hundred worst moments of my life…)

I did a bit of writing and a bit of reading. I was supposed to be preparing some lessons for a seminar I’m helping to take when I get home, but that sort of fell by the wayside. I will just have to be busy with that next week. My main non-fiction reading was a recent biography of Josephine Tey. I did write a number of critical paragraphs on this, but Tey really could do with an essay on her own. But then, since American readers have probably never heard of her, I junked most of it.

To-morrow we leave and I am left with the usual feeling.

I think I need a vacation.

To get over this one.

Backdrop Blues

(from 2017)

A recent speech by British Prime Minister Teresa May had all the hall-marks of farce in recent days. Now I don’t do politics, but I can appreciate a good pratfall, no matter who takes it. As she warmed up a British comedian worked his way to the front and very publicly handed her a P-45 form. For those outside Britain, this is the form you receive when your services are dispensed with by your company. He then ambled over to one of her potential rivals as if the form had come from him. The sleep walking security services finally jumped into action and he was ejected from the Hall. But how he managed to get that near for so long has no doubt prompted some interesting post-conference exchanges.

Mrs May soldiered on – and then her voice went. It became an unsuccessful advertisement for throat sweets. And finally, the coup de grace, as she croaked to a conclusion – two letters from the backdrop very visibly fell off behind her. It was custard pie meets banana skin – a joy for those who savor such moments.

What did she actually say? I doubt that anyone now remembers a word.

It prompted a series of letters in the Times newspaper about other malfunctioning backdrops. One was from someone invited to make the finishing address at a global business competition for young entrepreneurs. The sign behind him proclaimed: “World Young Business Achiever Closing Ceremony.”

Then the C in “Closing” fell off…

The latest today was someone driving through a Surrey suburb who noticed a new Italian restaurant called “E VILLA E TORE”. Then his wife pointed out that this was THE VILLAGE STORE” until a few letters dropped off…

I have this feeling that this anecdote might have a touch of the apocrypha about it. But it’s one of the main reasons why I read this paper.