Jerrychicken - The Diary

So we lived in rows and rows of back-to-back houses, rows and rows of them climbing horizontally across the hill from Burley bottom to Headingley with the occasional street at right angles climbing vertically up the hill dissecting the street ends, and on each of those street ends was a corner shop just like this one in fact.

Lumley Avenue was one such dissecting vertically climbing street and as it ascended the hill it provided at twenty yard intervals a street end shop and as if such a thing had been provided with deliberation, nay even properly planned, none of the street end shops contradicted each other, none competed with the others.

At the end of our street was a general grocer, a miserable bas’tad who sold biscuits from bright steel tubs with glass lids from the front of his counter, always a challenge to young boys if he left the lid off any, and who on bonfire night would provide a sackfull of old and green potatoes for roasting, then when they were all eaten and stomachs threatening trouble for the morning he’d ask for a collection to pay for them, which was quickly counteracted by threats to throw him on the fire - it happened that way every year.

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The area of Leeds that I grew up in from 1956 to 1964 consisted of a huge swath of terraced back-to-back houses colloquially refered to as “Burley”, and was specifically limited to the streets known as “The Lumleys”.

Large areas of our city were constructed using the terraced back-to-back method of building, it was quick, it was cheap and it provided the maximum number of working class dwelling houses per acre.

Imagine a terraced row of brick built houses with no front yard, entrance door opening directly onto the street, we all know what terraced houses look like, we’ve all seen Coronation St, but the houses on Corrie St whilst being terraced are not back-to-back for their residents have the luxury of a back door and a back yard whereas in back-to-back streets the row of terrace houses in the street behind yours uses your back wall as their back wall, in other words you only have a front elevation to your house.

A typical street scene can be found here.

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Another one on eBay today for The Joseph Salmon Trust, I’d love to sell this one too and support the trust and the lads on their epic walk this week (two days to go eh…what a good excuse I had).

As with last week if you place a winning bid on eBay then please add a “note to seller” to mention you saw it here and I’ll include a freebie “lucky dip” watercolour in the sale.

Many thanks for your support.

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The Dales Walk from Dan at All that Comes With It

This July ten friends will be walking the the 78 mile long Dales Way footpath. Yes, 78 miles. In six days. And what’s more it was our own idea. Many are predicting it will be the end of us.

We are doing the walk in aid of The Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity set up by our close friends Neil and Rachel in memorial of their three year old son Joseph who in April of 2005 died suddenly in his sleep.

The Joseph Salmon Trust supports parents who have lost a child by providing financial assistance to those who need it most. This may be to help with funeral costs or to allow the self employed a break from work while they come to terms with their loss. Grieving families have enough to deal with without worries about where they will find the money to say goodbye to their child or pay the next electricity bill. Nothing we can do can make their situation better, but we can do something to stop it getting worse.

All the participants are paying for their own food, accommodation, and equipment, and so any donation goes directly to the charity itself.

Any amount you give, no matter how small, will go towards making a big difference to somebody in the darkest hours of their torment.

In the days of my childhood, childrens TV was just an afterthought, an hour each weekday before the adults started watching The News and nothing at all on a weekend, how times have changed when its now possible to park your kinder in front of their own choice of multiple channels showing a four hour loop of the same crappy cartoons for 24 hours of each and every day, my kids never noticed the four hour loop thing and Jodie can now tell you the script of every episode of several cartoon shows without even knowing that she learned them by osmosis.

Cinema was the only respite for our mothers when ah wor nobbut a lad, an hour and a half every Saturday morning with either three short films of the famous and absolutely woeful Childrens Film Foundation stylee, or an old 1940’s western starring a cowboy who sang to his horse, a horse more intelligent than he for the horse always knew where the baddies were hid, which is more than can be said for the singing cowboy.

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Lunatics to stand for parliament…

The Sunday Times reports that Idiots and Lunatics are to be allowed to stand for parliament if plans to abolish an old law are carried out.

An idiot is defined as “incapable of gaining reason” whilst a lunatic is “only capable of periods of lucidity”.

There’s a really obvious comment to make on this story, so I won’t make it.

Campaigners from mental health organisations have pressed the Justice Minister to repeal the ruling which they say is “discriminatory”, which on the face of it, and having no knowledge whatsoever on the subject, seems to suggest that most laws could be successfully repealed on the grounds that they discriminate against the person who is being controlled by the law.

Still, Members Question time could be interesting being led by people who are incapable of reason and/or only capable of periods of lucidity, thats the sort of TV I’d pay money to watch.

There’s hope for me yet…

Please read the first two paragraphs of this Sunday Time Sports Page report, its a brilliant summary of what went on at Royal Birkdale yesterday and a pointer to what I will be doing for the whole of this afternoon - watching golf on the BBC, and a bit of F1 on ITV.

Yesterday I spent all day long laying a laminate floor in Mandy’s bedroom and the only reason that I stuck at the job until it was finished was that I had the golf on her tv set, in fact thats probably the reason that it took all day.

Golf used to be my way of having a nice four hour walk with friends, I didn’t even keep the score sometimes, I was a shockingly bad player and if I’d been even half serious or even a tad competitive then I’d have given up the game a lot sooner, but yesterday was a day to point at the professionals and say “I can play better than that” as the wind and the course conspired to bring their brilliance down to my sort of levels.

The game of golf was invented by the Scots in exactly the same sort of conditions and unkempt but “natural” courses as Birkdale was yesterday. The British Open is a unique institution in that it sticks rigidly to its tradition of only being played on “links courses”, coastal courses that are built of and from the natural dunes, they are wild places and whilst the fairways and greens might look typically golf-club-ish they are typically and often only 20 or 30 yards wide, stray off course at all and you lose your ball, I’ve played links golf and loved it, I once went into 18 bunkers in one round at Skegness and we’re talking bunkers that are actually sand dunes here, big as a desert and deep as, erm, a very deep thing that you need ladders to climb down into.

I have booked my all-day slot in front of the house TV today, I intend not to move at all.

Ma’am rhymes with Ham

Its that time of year again, the time of year when I start to keep an eye on hotel prices in Edinburgh and to scour the pages of The Scotsman in preparation for my visit to The Fringe Festival, that three week orgy of music, theatre and comedy.

Today The Scotsman carries an article on the Royal Yacht Britannia and how Her Maj’s servants were expected to behave when Betty was aboard, its linked to my upcoming Edinburgh trip because the hotel that I stay at (not yet booked - prices still falling) is directly opposite The Royal Yacht’s exhibition berthing place at Leith.

Betty decided some years ago that the taxpaying public should not have to shell out for her holiday plaything any longer and so she sent it to the Firth of Forth to be used as a museum piece, its there permanently now, attached to a large shopping mall and charging a Queens ransom for guided tours, and for those not of this country who believe the word “yacht” to mean something thats 20 foot long with a sail and room to brew up a cup of tea, then think again, think “small ocean liner”, the Queens yacht is the biggest hobby boat you’ll ever see, she traded it in for an aeroplane of her own (we pay for that too).

It’s 1977, or 78, could be either, they toured both years and I went to see them at the sweatbox that was/still is the Leeds Polytechnic Refectory, ok its called something else now, has a fancy name and all, but its always “The Refectory” for me.

There’s a clip from one of Billy Connolly’s “World Tour” series when he visits Dublin and speaking to camera he’s walking through a graveyard on his way to visit what he describes as “an important grave”. When he gets there he finds that its being attended to by an old lady who is arranging flowers and taking away some dead ones so he and the camera crew stand back for a short while and wait until she is finished.

They speak to the old lady and ask if she comes here often, “Every day” she answers, she is the mother of Phil Lynott and when Connolly asks her what she was saying to the grave when they interrupted her she tells him that she never misses an opportunity to remind her son of what a “very naughty boy” he was, its like a clip from Monty Python, but I agree, it was very naughty of Phil Lynott to drink and drug his way to a painfully early death, talent is wasted on the young.

It was her arse that first attracted me to my future wife, for its was just her arse that I could see the first time I saw her.

I had a small office at the top of the building, when I say small I mean the desk that it held was actually bigger than the office itself, I know that that must shatter every one of Newtons Laws of Something, but thats how it was, the office was small, the desk was very big, it left just enough room for a chair on castors behind it but the castors were redundant for I could not wheel the chair anywhere, trapped as it was between the desk and the back wall of the office.

The office had a door, obviously, which did not close and so was always open, it held a view of the corridor and the main office at the top of the corridor and it was in the main office at the top of the corridor that the old bag who ran the accounts was interviewing a succession of young girls to answer the phone and make coffee for the likes of me all day.

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I know I’ve made the big time when I start to receive emails from people who read this blog and who think that they can improve on my efforts.

All I can say is that the scene looked exactly like that but I Ieft the bungalow, the dog and the mad rabbit out of it by means of “artistic licence”…

Thought I’d post this one to remind Dan from All That Comes With It of the sort of scene he’s likely to be witnessing next week on his herculean Dales Walk - When The Clouds Join You For Breakfast.

The really great thing about this country is the fact that the weather is so unpredictable.

Of course that doesn’t stop people on TV trying to predict the weather, but the weather has a way of changing its mind at the last minute and spoiling the show.

We shouldn’t complain, its what makes our land so green, its what adds atmosphere to our landscape - think of all those holidays on the Med where you throw back the curtains to wall-to-wall blue sky and a promise of 40 degree heat again today, then think of the parched brown landscapes, the withered crops in the fields, the complete lack of any colour in the landscape other than bleached white rock and bleached brown earth - its boring, uninviting and uninspiring.

Now switch to two weeks ago and me driving across the top of Blubberhouse Moor out of Wharfedale and into Nidderdale amongst a hundred shades of green and right across the top of the moor a swathe of mist and cloud occluding the actual hill tops, just sitting there as if they’d come down for a rest - a fine drizzle in the warm air varnishing the plant life and making the colour even more intense - cameras don’t even capture the half of it.

Its what makes this country a great place to be - the weather.

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The Dales Walk from Dan at All that Comes With It

This July ten friends will be walking the the 78 mile long Dales Way footpath. Yes, 78 miles. In six days. And what’s more it was our own idea. Many are predicting it will be the end of us.

We are doing the walk in aid of The Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity set up by our close friends Neil and Rachel in memorial of their three year old son Joseph who in April of 2005 died suddenly in his sleep.

The Joseph Salmon Trust supports parents who have lost a child by providing financial assistance to those who need it most. This may be to help with funeral costs or to allow the self employed a break from work while they come to terms with their loss. Grieving families have enough to deal with without worries about where they will find the money to say goodbye to their child or pay the next electricity bill. Nothing we can do can make their situation better, but we can do something to stop it getting worse.

All the participants are paying for their own food, accommodation, and equipment, and so any donation goes directly to the charity itself.

Any amount you give, no matter how small, will go towards making a big difference to somebody in the darkest hours of their torment.

It was only a matter of time before someone suggested that we take the incredibly embarrassing “Charlies Scout Tent” to the seaside for some camping action, so Bridlington on a Bank Holiday Monday it was then.

Remember this paragraph from Monday ?

“We had a name for our tent, it is not politically, or socially correct to repeat that name in these enlightened times, but in the 1970’s it was commonplace for neighbourhoods to bemoan the arrival of immigrant families into their midst and the arrival of such families into housing estates would often result in the “For Sale” notices appearing in many of the indigenous residents gardens - the effect of such unwanted residents onto housing estates during the 1970’s was the basis of our nickname for the tent, for when we arrived on a camp site and pitched our circus, everyone else left.“

Well, it happened again.

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