Video Saturday – The Temptations

Nothing more to say on this quite excellent video/song except to say that when I dance like that at the company christmas “do”, I get laughed at, hilariously.

Plagues, Universities and soot

A bit more info on the mystery of the plague cemetery, the University and the soot merchant.

For a reference picture please click here.

OK, so now you can see or have seen the picture ? Thats Leeds University circa 1960, the road that I was queueing on the other day is the one that runs along the bottom of that photo and the old reservoir is the field right at the bottom.

All of the white buildings from there up to the tower at top right are the Leeds University as it existed in 1960 and the road that runs diagonally across the picture is the main Otley Road where our bus ran from the city centre to our posh new home in the suburbs.

Unrelated questions, lacking answers

An extraordinary list of unrelated items…

So I’m driving back to the office yesterday morning alongside Clarendon Road where it passes the edge of the University, they are digging the road up there and so unusually there are no parked cars to the left hand side, just traffic cones and barriers.

And because there are no parked cars and because of the road works there is a much longer queue of traffic waiting at the junction with Woodhouse Lane,  I find myself stationary alongside an old iron gate in the long and very tall stone wall that runs all the way down that side of the street.

So I glance through the gate and for the first time I wonder what lies beyond, why have the University not bought the empty plot of land in the same way that they seem to have bought up the whole of the rest of the city ?

Through the gate its obviously an enclosed city block of land, overgrown, slight hill in the middle and for some reason I think “old reservoir”, don’t know why it just sprung to mind, as did the words “plague cemetery” but those words are dismissed as I recall that the old middle ages plague cemetery was dug up in the 1960’s for the University expansion.

So I check the photographs at Leodis and surprisingly the old plot of land is a disused reservoir, but I’m still thinking “cemetery” and so I search for “old plague cemetery” and draw a blank on the Leeds Uni plague cemetery but instead turn up the Becketts Street Cemetery opposite St James’ Infirmary, a place of final internment for 150 or so years where the wealthy burghers of the city were buried alongside paupers, although with much bigger headstones.

And while I’m reading an article on Beckett St my eye is caught by mention of a grave belonging to a “soot merchant” and I start to wonder what the hell is a soot merchant ?

Yes I know what soot is and I know what a merchant does, but why on earth would any Victorian want to buy soot ? What purpose did old soot have in the Victorian economy ?

Seemingly some very useful and economically viable purpose for the soot merchant was buried in a “wealthy” area of the cemetery and had a headstone, which is more than 80% of his fellow intern-ees had, so this chap made a good living out of selling soot – why ?

And thats where I’ve drawn a blank, the t’interweb tells me nothing more on the subject.

You’ve been reading ten minutes worth of what goes on inside my head of a morning whilst eating my crunchy nut cornflakes, you’re welcome.

Shaving

You see, only men understand, nay, enjoy a proper shave.

I’m given to understand (although I find it hard to believe), that women are given to shaving things like legs, with cheap disposable razors – so thats what they are for, I often wondered which fools bought those things, how on earth can a proper razor cost so little as to be purchased in bags of twenty at a time for a few pence ?

No, women cannot possible appreciate the art of a good shave nor the deep sense of satisfaction that one gets from applying a deadly weapon to one’s most vulnerable regions, the neck, leaving it as smooth as a baby’s bum, so smooth that you want to stroke it several times, chin pointing skywards, whilst admiring your shave in the mirror.

Me and Ice Hockey

I’ve been to two competitive ice hockey games in my life, one was in Las Vegas in 1974 and was my introduction to an all-American blood and guts excuse for the crowd to shout a lot, listen to someone learning to play the Bontempi organ during the intervals, and watch grown men in lots of padding fight whilst standing on ice.

I was 16 years old, of course I loved it.

The one about the Chevette

Around 1980 and I’m travelling backwards and forwards to Newcastle, back to Leeds most weekends with a pile of dirty washing and a weekend of wondering which pub to go to next, we were young free and single and very, very fortunate with it, we just didn’t know it at the time.

My dad had just taken on a business partner and had given him the rackety old Vauxhall Chevette car that had somehow found its way into the business, it was an awful car, built by morons from scrap metal and bits of old toys, or thats what it felt like when you sat in it – driving it required you to lodge your last will and testament with your solicitor and write down which funeral director you’d like your relatives to use.

Smoking

I start with the insistence that I have never smoked a cigarette in my thus far short life, nor do I ever intend to, I therefore write this from the standpoint of someone with an air of superiority over the filthy habit.

Having said that I have smoked the odd cigar in my youth, excessive drink had a lot to do with it and it only happened a few times, not enough for lung cancer to set in anyway, so thats alright then.

And having said that as well, there is always a time during a round of golf that I would love to smoke a cigar, I don’t understand the reasoning behind that but I used to actually love the wandering aimlessly around several fields following a small white ball and would often find myself wishing that in true Howard Clark stylee I had a big cigar on the go – strange I know, and if plans laid last night come to fruition I may, this very week, be taking up my golf clubs in anger once more (three years since they were last flung to the darkest recesses of the garage).

Video Saturday – Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich

1979, so I’d come back to the Queens Hotel in Whitley Bay at the end of another hard day of measuring things and drinking coffee and as was the norm had dashed to the residents lounge to bag a place in front of the T set and get the choice of what everyone else was to watch that night – yes these were the days before hotels thought that putting a TV set in each room would be a jolly good idea – the residents got to share one and fight over the channels all night long.

Most nights I’d be sat in there on my own, certainly there would hardly ever be anyone in there before 7pm but on the night in question there was already at least five men in there already. Fortunately they hadn’t snaffled my favourite chair by the fire place so a I nodded a “Good evening” to the nearest and took up my seat to watch the end of “Blue Peter” a programme that they were already watching avidly.

In that very British way we totally ignored each other with no sense of feeling uncomfortable in silence at all but after a while one or two of them started to speak to each other and shortly it was fairly obvious that they were in fact all together as one group, still engrossed in Blue Peter not much was said and it was around this time that I suddenly became aware that I might know one of them.

The one sat in the middle of the settee, Im sure I’d seen him somewhere before, and by pretending to watch the TV but actually using a technique of glancing quickly to the left and then back to the front again as if you’d done nothing (I saw Roger Moore do it in The Saint), the name “Dave Dee” sprung to mind, yes thats it, the bloke in the middle of the settee looked exactly like Dave Dee, of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich former fame.

With more surreptitious observation I realised that indeed the one sat at the far end of the settee looked just like Tich of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick and Tich former fame, and the more that my eyes swiveled craftily in their sockets (they never suspected that they were under observation from a masterspy), I came to the conclusion that I was sharing my residents TV lounge with those stars of 1960’s popular music tv shows, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – how curious.

They left the room shortly afterwards, in fact as soon as Blue Peter had finished, and I never saw them again.

But then, a week later, and I came back to The Queens Hotel from a hard days measuring things and drinking coffee to find the residents TV lounge once again full of slightly middle aged men all watching Blue Peter, Brian Poole and The Tremeloes as I live and breath.

No, I never touched drugs at all, it really was them.

My hair

I used to have lovely hair.
Before that I had hair but a horrible hair cut.
Then came a halcyon period of long hair, shaggy cut and all spikey on top.

Now its all gone.

Ripon

So yesterday was another Wednesday day off in a desperate bid to expend my remaining 15 days holiday before the end of the year, the end of the year has crept up on me unannounced and I now realise that I haven’t taken any days off, well, for  ever, so its a four day week for me from now until the New Year.

So seeking for further amusement we went to Ripon, small market town in North Yorkshire, a place that I’ve driven through literally hundreds of times but never stopped the car.

Ripon was on my shortcut from our house to the A1 in North Yorkshire when I was Newcastle bound in the days when I did the trip twice a week, so it was either very early on Monday morning or very late on Friday night when I would spend all of two minutes driving through the place.