I can’t believe what I heard on Friday night
The high respect that I once bore for my old friends of the past forty-something years has been dashed, dashed to a million splinters on the rocky shore of gay-ness.
And I suspect that at least one of my cousins may also be implicated
I am bereft
I cannot look them in the eye again, not in the same way, I may the only true male around these parts after last Friday.
1914, war in Europe, hundreds of thousands of volunteers required to fight for the King in the fields of France and Belgium in order to stop his cousin over-running those countries, in very simple terms the country made the call for patriots to stand forward to engage an enemy in a way that has. fortunately, been made largely redundant by modern weaponry.
Blind patriotism and a young mans desire to shake himself free of the shackles of domestic life in 1914 would attract a fair number to the cause but in a wonderful marketing coup the 17th Earl of Derby came up with the concept of “The Pals” battalions.
Old guitarists just get better and better.
Our Ray should be quite good by now.
OK then, to round off the week of History For Those Who Didn’t Listen Too Well In School we will examine the life and times of a person for whom the word “complicated” was invented in the English language, for Mary, Queen of Scots, led one of the most convoluted and complicated lives ever recorded unto history, if this woman had only just stopped to think about her life and how decisions that she made had affected her then this passage would not be worth writing, as it is, she didn’t and in doing so managed to completely firkup her whole existence on this planet.
It wasn’t a good start.
Born 1542, the only legitimate child of King James V of Scotland she was only five days old when her father died “of a nervous collapse” following yet another Scottish Army defeat at the hands of the English on the borders near Carlisle, not wanting to appear too desperate for a new head of state the Scots left the coronation until she was nine months old, making her Mary I of Scotland.
…so the plot was set, the gunpowder in place, enough gunpowder to obliterate half of London, all hidden in a storage room right underneath the House of Lords debating chamber, the intention to kill King James I and replace him with a catholic sympathiser, either of King Arabella (it would never have worked) or James’ own nine year old daughter Elizabeth.
The recruitment of Guido Fawkes, the mercenary soldier with gunpowder contacts had proved to be very successful, too successful for at least one of the conspirators who, having learned of the amount of explosives used realised that everyone in the building would surely perish, including those secret catholic sympathisers who had been earmarked to form the replacement parliament after they’d got rid of the King – this is known as shooting yourself in the foot, or on Tyneside as “shitting in your own nest”.
Its understandable that colonials will not understand the meaning of the term “Mischief Night”, but they may be surprised to learn that most British people outside of Yorkshire will not understand the meaning of the word “Mischief Night” either, it certainly still surprises me.
When I roamed the streets as a young boy Mischief Night was almost as big as Bonfire Night (which is tomorrow) and involved roaming gangs of young boys wandering around in the dark smearing treacle to car door handles, tying dustbins to front door handles and if you were really mischievous, “egging” someones house or car.
Indeed, the “egging” problem grew to be so serious in recent years that shops banned the sale of eggs to under 18’s in the same way as they do alcohol – “Have you got ID for those eggs ?” a checkout operator will ask in supermarkets today and regard the young person with as much suspicion as if they’d tried to buy twenty Rothmans and a litre of vodka, “Me mum wants to do some baking” the youngster will plead, in vain.
We’re going to a wedding on Saturday, well a wedding night time “do” anyway, and once again I will drive my brother and his wife and once again he will get very drunk and disgrace himself while I sit and drink orange juice and try and stop him doing stupid things.
Jon, who may be reading this, is marrying for the second time, he has learned a lesson from his first marriage and the evening “do” that he invited us to that time, for once again I drove and our Ned get very drunk.
And he cost Jon a small fortune…
Its hard to get all emotional about a road, even when that road is 50 years old today, but we’ll mention it in passing anyway, the M1, Britains first motorway to be completed, is 50 years old today.
I still recall my first trip on the M1, yes really, it was a big deal to a 10 year old kid to be taken by his father onto the newly opened final section of three lane motorway from Leeds to Wakefield, we were visiting an old friend of his in Pontefract when he decided to take the five mile link from Leeds to Wakey in his new, green, Vauxhall Viva.
I was sat in the front, seat belts unused in those days as they always were (if indeed they were fitted), perched on the front edge of the seat, leaning forward, clinging to the dashboard, urging more and more speed out of the sleek new car, its speedometer showing a futuristic sliding scale rather than the old fashioned “clock”, and the red pointer slid further and further to the right hand side and the mythical 100 mph that all cars had marked, rather optimistically, on the dial, indeed you were ranked in order of importance at school by what your dads car speedometer had as its top speed regardless of the fact of whether the car could do that speed or not – Shaun Dowgill I recall was the highest rated kid in the school with his dads Sumbeam Rapier 130mph speedo.
Stop laughing, these things were vitally important to a ten year old.
So I sat there, clinging to the dashboard, avidly watching the speedo until, vibrating alarmingly, the Viva reached the mythical 60mph, “A mile a minute” I told my dad and he grimly nodded his head in agreement, little beads of sweat appearing as he clung grimly to the hard plastic steering wheel, concentrating fully on keeping the car in a straight line, in those long distant days of crap car design the three lanes had the primary purpose of providing plenty of space for your average family saloon that had been designed to pootle along at 30mph and not vibrate and shudder itself almost to death at incredible speeds that could otherwise only ever be obtained inside a Dan Dare strip cartoon.
Imagine the kudos I had at school on the Monday morning, “I went on the M1 on Saturday” I told my gathered compatriots, “How fast ?” they all gasped, “60mph” I proudly boasted, 60mph, no other kid in the school had ever travelled at such a speed in their dads car before, kids pointed at me in the playground for weeks after, “60mph” is all they would whisper in admiration, “60mph”.
click it, it gets bigger
Scene of an infamous murder three years ago, well not really, scene of an infamous manslaughter when the estranged husband of the licensee set fire to one of the doors outside the pub on Good Friday 2006, his wife being overcome by smoke in one of the bedrooms upstairs, eight years for manslaughter, the 17th century pub changes hands and becomes one of a new breed of restaurant-pubs that seem to be the only way to make money in the licensed trade these days, not that that is a bad thing.
Acrylic on primed canvas. 40cm x 24cm
No, its not my dad, its someone else.
Being thrown out of the house by our daughters last night as they wanted to host something called “a birthday party”, the woman and I debated at length where to go, we don’t do “going out” very much these days and some of the pubs around here can be, how can I put this, shit.
So we went to a local swish hotel, to sit in their Brasserie bar and lose all our money.
It was even swisher than usual last night, as we walked across the car park we could see lots of christmas lights and lots of people milling around in evening dress, and here was me in jeans and a jumper, but the Brasserie bar was empty, completely empty apart from a group of three businessmen sat in a corner, and in that way that you can’t help I found myself listening to their conversation instead of the wife – they were talking about Frank Sinatra.
And then one of them stood up and told the others he’d better go get changed and ten minutes later he arrived in a dinner suit, entered the function suite beyond the bar and started his routine – he was a Frank Sinatra tribute act.
So for our £4.20 for a small glass of wine and £2.70 for an orange juice we got to listen to, if not see, a Sinatra tribute act for an hour or so.
He was ok, you can tell though when you are a secret Sinatra fan by recognising not just the songs but also the phrasing from the songs and which album they are from dependant on the phrasing and the little one-liners that Sinatra would slip into his songs – the tribute act took his repertoire exclusively from the “Live at the Sands” album, how sad am I ?
He wasn’t as good as this bloke, pictured here at Cayton Bay, though…
See the looks of despondency on the faces of the other talent competition contenders ? They sit there thinking, “Oh shit, they’ve let Frank Sinatra enter this year, and here’s me with my Connie Francis act that sounds more like Hilda Baker…”
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