I Don’t Mind If I Do, HUH!

This is about Children’s television, but, unusually for me, not the 1960s but the early 2000s. 

When my daughter was small, I had the kind of job that allowed me to take her to school a couple of days each week. It was fair enough considering I would have been answering students’ emails at home in the evening, often until the early hours. We watched television until it was time to leave for school, my wife having left earlier. 

Two of my favourite programmes were ChuckleVision and The Basil Brush Show. 

ChuchleVision was a slapstick and visual comedy double act involving the Chuckle Brothers carrying out antics such as moving a piano down a flight of stairs and making a complete mess of everything. “To me. To you. To me. To you.” was a common phrase they used. They were Paul and Barry Elliott from Rotherham, Yorkshire. When other characters were needed, their brothers and other family members took their roles. It was a family franchise. I would have dearly loved to have been in the ChuckleBrothers, but no one else got a look in. 

But it is a sketch from the Basil Brush Show I especially remember. Basil Brush was an animated BBC glove puppet - a red fox - with shows spanning the 1960s to the 2000s. He speaks very correctly, addresses everyone as Mr. or Miss, and laughs at his own jokes before bursting out “Boom Boom!”. I thought the early chat show and guest programme pretty awful, but in the 2000s it took a sitcom format. 

Basil and two children are looked after by Mr. Stephen, a not very bright or successful, usually out of work actor. The children, Dave, who has a flair for business, and Molly, who is very clever, are usually the butt of Stephens jokes. 

The Basil Brush Show

I describe the sketch as I remember it, which misses out a lot and it not entirely accurate. The original covers the first twelve minutes of this episode on YouTube below.   

Stephen lands a part in a series called Cockney Sparrows, a take-off of the daily BBC television soap opera East Enders. Stephen plays “Man With Cap”, and Basil his dog. 

“Fantastic! How many episodes to you have?” ask the children. 

“Not episodes,” they answer.

“Well, that’s still great. How many scenes to you have.”

“Not scenes.”

“Lines?” 

“Not lines”, they say. “Words?” 

“How many?” 

“Six,” says Stephen. “’I don’t mind if I do.’ But I don’t know how I should say them. Should it me ‘I don’t mind if I do’, or ‘I don’t mind if I do’, or ‘I don’t mind if I do’?” 

Stephen rehearses all the different permutations repeatedly for the next few days. 

We next see the recording of the episode, a funeral reception. A regular member of the cast hands around a plate of sandwiches. 

“Poor Nelly, but it’s how she would have wanted to go. I warned her about those eel boned.” 

She speaks to Stephen.

“Sandwich?” 

“I don’t mind if I do,” replies Stephen. 

“Wooff Wooff,” says Basil. 

The producer is not satisfied, and asks for a retake. This occurs numerous times. Eventually he decides that will do, and we see the result. 

“Sandwich?”

“I don’t mind if I do,” Stephen noisily gulps, and snatches the sandwich all in one go. 

We last see the producer asking assistants to  “Get him out of that silly dog suit", as they tear painfully at Basil’s fur. 

I doubt my description does it justice because so much depends on the characters, what they say, and how they say it. You would not believe a fox puppet can be so full of expression. It is the kind of character-based comedy I wish I was able to create myself. 

https://youtu.be/-_bXVGmR37Q 

Disturbingly Different Outcomes

It was a music friend’s funeral recently. He died of lung cancer. There was much in common with my own situation. 

He was very fit, and in early autumn was walking in mountains in Scotland. He retired a year ago from his job as head of English in a secondary school in the Sheffield area, and had just started the second year of a Masters course in Creative Writing. But there the similarities end. 

In October, he noticed a slight shortness of breath when walking up hill and playing his flute. The doctor sent him for an urgent scan (unavailable to me during covid lockdown), and he was diagnosed with lung cancer. An early thought was to offer help with questions from our own personal experiences, seeing that is what I also have, and have had a wide range of tests and treatments. However, a day or two later, we heard he was in hospital after a stroke, and may then have had more. He died fifteen days after diagnosis. Fifteen days! He was 64. 

And I’m still here after three and a half years, struggling, but still here and hoping, with luck, to see 2026.

His cancer was in the plural membrane, not one of the lobes. 

That’s Oldies

(Scheduled post - still struggling with understanding) 

I have been watching UK TV Freeview Channel 840, “That’s Oldies”, which I came across by chance, and had a 1960s music fix. It shows old TV rock and pop music from the 1950, 1960s, and 1970s, non-stop, end-to-end all day. These are not the tired old “Top Of The Pops” BBC programmed, endlessly repeated. 

Watching again now, there are groups I enjoyed enormously, such as Cream and the Animals, and others, at least for me, completely forgotten, such as Thunderclap Newman. 

They seem to play chunks of 1960s British groups, 1970s, and 1950s with American music. Most except for the 1970s are in black and white. Much  of the 1950s music is from American television shows, but not the original hits. 

Needless to say, I enjoyed the 1960s groups most. Many you might expect to see do not feature. There is nothing of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, or The Who. I guess it is a rights issue. So, what you get are rarely-played groups with their lesser-known hits that did not reach the top 3. That’s all right. I have not seen most of them for 60 or 70 years, and found them fascinating. 

What strikes me now is how good they were, and how many new things I missed in them at the time, such as harmonies, counter melodies, and clever solos. There were so many groups I dismissed as not worthy of attention, probably because I have much more musical knowledge and appreciation now, and, hopefully, am a better guitarist. 

It is also surprising how well groomed they all were. They were thought scruffy, but most are wearing suits. 

Quick Health Update

Struggling with responding and commenting. Need another course of steroids, which should sort it out in a few days. 

Peter Hitchens

I am always interested to read what Peter Hitchens has to say in the Mail On Sunday each week. It is supposed to be a pay-to-read column, but because of having to read using text-to-speech, I came upon a way to see it online for free by chance. 

He tends to be seen as someone with views very much to the political right, but actually he is more of a contrarian. Certainly, he is no supporter of the Labour Party, but he is no fan of the Conservatives either, because, he says, they are not conservative. They do not conserve anything and have not done so for 45 years. Indeed, he blames Margaret Thatcher for much of the deterioration in modern Britain as we know it today. 

Thatcher, for example, had the idea of privatising the railways and water companies, both terrible disasters, although carried out later. She removed the sensible old pub licencing laws, creating the drunkenness and violence that blights every city centre every weekend, with bouncers on every pub door for the trouble they know is coming, and the mess and expense of cleaning it up. She allowed the licencing of no-win no-fee lawyers, creating exaggerated health and safety panics that shut down trains and parks, and cost us all dearly in enquiries and speculative legal actions. She failed to save the grammar schools which did so much for equality of opportunity, and tried to cut the navy, and would have been unable to defend the Falklands. These were not conservative acts. 

He has many opinions I disagree with, but at least unlike many of the moaning minions on Blogland, they are well informed and well argued. I think that essentially he liked the Britain he grew up in, and regrets the changes that have taken place. With a number of caveats, he is not alone in that. Unfortunately, he can come across as rather arrogant. 

He has two long standing causes I am completely persuaded by, that he has been writing repeatedly about for years. 

One is the harm caused by cannabis. It is fashionable to call for its legalisation, and argue that it is harmless, but, actually, it causes a great deal of damage to society and its users. Long term use reduces the ability to care about anything. It takes away motivation. 

Nearly all the so-called terrorist attacks and mass stabbings and shootings are extreme cases. The evidence is over whelming, but it is ignored. Only now may a few psychiatrists and police be beginning to wake up to the problems. The Nottingham and Southport murders, and the recent train attack in Huntington, all have the stink of cannabis. They were not the result of terrorism. They are the actions of drug crazed nutters.  

The second cause is that of Lucy Letby. She was found guilty of murdering very ill new-born babies in the hospital where she worked, and has been sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison, but increasing numbers of expert doctors and legal experts are beginning to believe that a massive miscarriage of justice has taken place. The evidence simply does not support her guilt. Indeed, there is no clear evidence that a crime of any kind has taken place at all. It seems that the police and the hospitals decided she was guilty and then looked for reasons to support it. It is beyond appalling that this could happen to someone under British justice today, where there is supposed to be the presumption of innocence unless proved guilty. It could be you or me. Calls for a retrial have so far been dismissed. 

Birthdays

October will soon be over, and we have put the clocks back. That should have brought two more birthdays because my brother (pictured) and I were both born in this month, but, tragically, he only made it to 36. Even his children have now lived longer, and I have been here over twice that, despite what the oncologists keep telling me. 

He would have been 70 this month. There was quite a gap between us. The explanation, according to my mum, was that she had a miscarriage two or three years after I was born. I don’t know whether it makes medical sense or not, or how she knew, but she said it was due to rhesus incompatibility. Mum had an uncommon blood group that sensitized her to mine, which caused future pregnancies of the wrong type to miscarry. 

My dad expanded the story many years later. It happened when we were on holiday in a caravan at Primrose Valley, Filey, on the Yorkshire coast. I don’t know how she dealt with the foetus, but she said she could tell it was a baby girl. I believe she spent a day resting in the caravan and then continued the holiday. No tests, no doctors, no hospitals. 

Self-Doubt, Imposter Syndrome and Hegemonic Masculinity

New Month Old Post: first posted 26th January 2018

A couple of weeks ago, the normally impeccable Hadley Freeman, writing about self-doubt in her Guardian column [in 2018], said:

 “I have yet to meet a man who has worried he’s not good enough for a job he’s been offered, whereas I have yet to meet a woman who hasn’t.”

Well, I don’t know what circles she moves in, but that is simply wrong, as many of the responses to the online article make clear. Imposter syndrome is not just a female thing.

She finds it impossible to imagine a woman who, like certain men she amusingly identifies, is “perennially mediocre, untouchably arrogant, and eternally gifted by opportunity and protection by the establishment”. You only have to look at some of the women in high political office to see the error in this.

As regards men who worry they are not up to jobs they have been offered, there are lots, myself included. When I got good grades at ‘A’ Levels the second time round in my mid-twenties, and then a good degree, I felt that almost anyone could do it, and still do. When that led to jobs in universities, it felt like unmerited good fortune. When I got research papers into academic journals, I wondered why no one had seen the gaping holes they contained.

This is, of course, both blowing and sucking my own trumpet at the same time, but I just want to say that even for those who invented the concept*, hegemonic masculinity was never assumed to be universal.

* Connell and Messerschmidt.
The cartoon is from startupbros.com - click to link to its source.
Here is another relevant article from The Guardian.

Patties

Tates Fish and Chip Shop in Rawcliffe High Street, 2000

I am trying to keep up with blogs and comments. It is becoming somewhat intermittent, but I am still here! 

Last week, Yorkshire Pudding mentioned patties, which are deep-fried battered potato cakes made and sold by fish and chip shops in East Yorkshire, but rarely else where. We had them in Goole, too, which was just over the river in the West Riding. He describes them as: 

“a staple option in most fish and chip shops in the East Riding of Yorkshire. I have never seen them for sale in Sheffield or Leeds. ... A patty is round - about 3.5 inches across and about 1.5 inches thick. It is made from mashed potato seasoned with sage and onion. Then it is dipped in a batter mixture before being deep-fried.” 

For me, it raised a question. A bit more about Georgina Pocklington’s family history is needed to explain. You may remember I wrote in an earlier posts that she had eight children with three different fathers, among them my grandma’s half-sister, Aunty Bina. 

Aunty Bina had ten children herself, i.e. my grandma’s half-cousins. She used to recite their names: 

“... there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. ... They had fish and chip shops all over.”

You could say they had a fish and chip dynasty. It was founded by Aunty Bina’s husband, Tom Tate. Later, their youngest son Jack (born 1919) took it over, and my mother and other relatives helped in the shop when called upon. It still bears its name in Rawcliffe High Street, pictured in 2000. It has quite recently been renovated with a new white UPCV door and shop window, and a new sign in similar style, and has lost all its character. I don’t know whether it remains in the family. Jack Tate was known far and wide for the size of his fish. He used a Swan Vestas match box as a template.

I visited Jack around 2000, when working out that part of our family history. It was a privilege to see him. There were many he turned down. He remembered my mother helping in the shop. 

Many of Tom Tate’s children set up and helped each other open fish and chip shops themselves. So as well as Jack in Rawcliffe, there was one in Goole, one in Snaith, another in Retford, and, surprisingly, the eldest four children had shops in Rotherham. They were born in the 1890s, so had retired before 1970. We audited fish and chip shops when  I worked in accountancy, and you could see what good businesses they could be. 

[ADDED LATER] Tom Tate’s (junior) fish and chip shop in Rotherham is mentioned in Mike Marsh’s ‘Growing up in Goole, Volume 3’, although not by name. Mike Marsh was a childhood friend of Tom’s wife’s aunt, who arranged for them to stay with the Tates in Rotherham to see Donald Bradman and the Australian cricket team play Yorkshire at Sheffield in 1948. The Tates met them at Rotherham railway station, gave them unlimited fish and chips for tea, and took them to the theatre. After returning from Sheffield to Rotherham the following day, Brian’s “ever-generous uncle” bought them a real cricket bat and ball.

The ones in the Goole area certainly sold patties, but if there were once four fish and chip shops in Rotherham, with recipes originating in Rawcliffe, could you also once buy patties there, and can you still?

Uncle Owen

Last week, a man called Geoff came for a chat. He is a little older than me, and we had never previously met, but we have a kind of family link through my late Uncle Owen. 

Owen was my mother’s brother. He appears in my recent post showing the picture taken at the seaside around 1936, which mentions that he died in a military accident in his early twenties, while on National Service.  

One of many sad aspects is that he need not have been there. He was bamboozled into signing up for three years instead of the minimum two because, they said, it would be “good for his trade”. It was during the additional three years that he died. He was a plumber, and had just one year of his apprenticeship left to complete. He would nearly have finished but for that extra year. A plumber in the 1950s: what a lucrative trade that would have been! 

He was in the Air Force, and was hit by an aircraft shell that went off accidentally and exploded in the chest and abdomen. He stood no chance. Many years later, my father told me the injuries were so horrific, the coffin was sealed, and the only part of the body allowed to be seen was the head and face through a hatched window in the coffin lid. The funeral procession stretched beyond the end of the village High Street, and there was a military guard of honour and salute. I was only 3 at the time, but when older, I used to help my grandpa tend the grave. Last time I looked, the small gravestone was broken and collapsed. 

I can just remember him. He was well-known and popular, sang in the church choir (I have his prayer book), and played in the village cricket team. He had been married for 15 months to Aunty R. My grandparents had to intercept her as she returned home to Rawcliffe from work on the bus, to tell her about the awful telegram they had received. 

I liked Aunty R enormously. She was always smiling. She was a skilled invisible mender at the clothing factory. She and Owen had grown up next-door-but-two to each other, childhood sweethearts. They spent their wedding night at our house, while we stayed with my grandparents. 

One of the saddest photographs I have is of Aunty R with family members and friends three months after Owen died. She is in the centre of this picture wearing what we would then have called a costume (she is replaced by my mother in the second version). She puts on a brave face, but there is pain and sadness in her eyes. I am also in the picture, still aged under 4. Later, she came with us on holiday to Filey, and my grandparents took her with them to stay with friends in Scotland.

Aunty R remarried some years later, and moved to Huddersfield, near where we now live. I knew where she was, but did not want to revisit it while her husband was alive. About 5 years ago, after she was widowed a second time, I sent her some photographs, and she was very pleased to see them, and speak on the phone. She was then a surprisingly active 90-year-old, but died 2 years ago after falling.  

To return to Geoff, my visitor: he married Aunty R’s much younger sister. They also lived in the Huddersfield area, but I was not sure where. When I discovered it was only within two miles of me, R’s sister by then had early-onset dementia, and Geoff had cared for her full-time for many years. She died over a year ago. My last memory of her is of a little girl, about 3 years older than me, sitting in the sun on the front doorstep with her mother, eating a packet of potato crisps. There were over 6 blue wraps of salt in the bag. 

Geoff and I had an immediate rapport, with so many shared references and experiences, it was as if we had always known each other. We knew the same people who lived in the High Street where I spent every Saturday, and he was at school with my mother’s second cousin who helped me work out that part of our family tree. He could talk about the village social life, and who was related to whom. 

It wa’n’t long afoo-ere we’wer’ in West Riding Rawcliffe talk.  

I mentioned Uncle Owen was a plumber, and that I remembered him and my grandpa building an outside lavatory in the back yard. Before that, I said, they had an earth closet and an ash midden. You shovelled the lavatory contents through to the ash midden, a brick building with no roof, to be burnt with the household rubbish. Periodically, council workers shovelled the ash midden contents into bins by hand, and carried it to a lorry. He knew exactly what I was talking about. 

“If you don’t pay attention at school”, my mother used to say, “you’ll end up working on t’shit carts”.  

That really got Geoff going: things I’ve mentioned before. “It was so primitive,” he said. “Boiler on first thing Monday morning heating water, then all day washing with a dolly tub and peggy stick, and wringing it out with a hand wringer. Then using the leftover hot water to fill the tin bath, which hung in the yard for the rest of the week, and taking turns in the bath with the same water. Tuesdays were spent drying the heavy wet washing with wooden clothes props over a washing line, and Wednesdays ironing. Unbelievable!” he said. “It was little more than 60 years ago, yet when you tell ’em about the shit carts, they think you are talking about the dark ages.”

He knows I am ill and cannot easily get out now, but said he would like to call again. It would be good if he did.  

As for Uncle Owen, he should have been busy installing indoor upstairs bathrooms, kitchen plumbing, and central heating systems. He could have had his own business, and his younger brother could have served an apprenticeship with him. Who knows, I might even have been a plumber myself. I would have had more cousins, and everything would have been different. 

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

New month old post: first posted 1st October, 2018

Haeckel’s 1874 drawing of stages of development in the embryos of
fish, salamander, turtle, chick, pig, calf, rabbit and human.

Professor Clarke glowed with assured elegance. It was not only the beauty of his layout and lettering, it was his whole demeanour. With just the right proportion of wrist and cuff beyond suit sleeve, he grasped the chalk delicately between forefinger and thumb, and proceeded through the lecture with scholarly sophistication. What a privilege to be taught by someone whose work was so well-known and highly regarded throughout the world. We were rather in awe of him.  

He was talking about pre-natal and neo-natal human development: physical and mental growth before and around birth. He concluded with a short quotation. None of us quite caught it, but we felt too stupid to ask. He said something like: “Antigen capital file genre.”

In those days, students weren’t given all the slides and notes on the internet to learn and parrot back in examinations. We used to read around lectures. We went to the library and made notes from text books and academic journals. We even owned quite a lot of expensive text books ourselves. So before long I worked out that what he had actually said was: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Furthermore, I understood what it meant: a chunk of lecture succinctly summarised in three words.

The point is, as became clear when we later learned about how we acquire the power of speech and language, if we don’t understand something, if we cannot make sense of how the words fit together, we find it difficult to say. Think of the novelty song Mairzy dotes and dozy dotes and liddle lamzy divey.

Twenty-five years later, the children were laughing.

“I bet you can’t say “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppercorns,” said my wife, and recited the full verse, faultlessly. She followed it with “She sells sea shells …” as an encore.

“The British soldiers’ shoulders,” I added, not to be outdone. “The Leith police dismisseth us,” and then out of nowhere, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

Within a few days, our eight-year-old son had got it. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” he would tell anyone who would listen. At school, he was in Mr. Price’s class.

“Hello Mr. Price,” he said. “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

“Aunty Jenny was late for what?” queried Mr. Price.

“It means when a baby grows in its mummy’s tummy, it starts off like a little tadpole, and then looks like a little frog, and then like a little bird, and then a little horse, and then a little monkey, and then a little baby.”

That guy is now a solicitor. 

What a pity that Meckel and Serres’ theory of embryological parallelism, perfectly encapsulated in Ernst Haeckel’s catchy phrase, illustrated by his somewhat dishonest drawing and so urbanely recapitulated by Professor Clarke, has been discredited as biological mythology.

Sex Tub

Last year, our diagonally opposite rear neighbours installed an outdoor hot tub, a bit like this but not as nicely located, fixed to the back of their house, off what we would now call the patio doors. 

Theirs has a solid black roof and sides, electric lighting, and curtains that close around for privacy. Personally, I would much prefer natural light in the room, to be able to look at the garden, see out of the patio doors, and walk out. Each to their own. It does not bother us. There’s nowt s’queer as folk. 

It was clearly not private enough. Recently, after a week of sawing, drilling, and other woodworking noises, they erected this six-foot fence close to the house. It's a super piece of joinery. It even has a gate to access the garden. But, they cannot see much out of their downstairs windows at all now.
 

Why would they want such a hideous thing? Do they think that we, or our neighbours, or their neighbours, sit at our bedroom windows watching them in their hot tub through binoculars? Do they think we take photographs? 

We have now started to refer to them as Mr. and Mrs. Sex Tub. 

They had better not get splinters in their sphincters. 

Sodium, Seizures, and Oedema

My last post showed pictures of the severe oedema I suffer as a side-effect of the targetted therapy that keeps me here. This says more about it and related issues. I’ll then shut up about medical stuff for a while. 

Since this started, I have had three seizures serious enough to put me in an emergency ambulance to hospital. Our GP advises you don’t need to call for help for “ordinary” seizures, just put in the recovery position to sleep it off, but when longer or more severe than usual, you do. The last, about three months ago, was a double one. I remember little about it, but apparently I had one seizure, recovered well enough to get up to bed, and immediately had a second. 

Looking back at blood tests, it turns out that, after each seizure, my blood sodium levels had been low. Doctors call it hyponatraemia. School chemistry reminds me that the symbol for sodium is Na, for Natrium, its old name. 

The normal level is 133-146 mmol/L. Mine are usually just there, or slightly under, but after seizures they have been around 125. Normally, we can cope with that, but my condition alters the threshold and makes me more susceptible. A sodium drip brings them back up very quickly. Last time, they even let me home the following day. 

A hospital doctor said not to drink so much liquid, and to stop the Furosemide water pills used to manage the oedema, as both these things deplete sodium levels. I took this on board, realising that all my seizures have been in the evening after a bottle of beer, or a pint mug of tea, or both. I don’t know how quickly blood sodium can go down, but it could be quite quickly. Hyperventilating seems to be involved, too. 

I don’t think they realised either how much fluid I had been drinking, or how little my salt intake had been. I had been taking in around 6 or 7 pints of liquid a day (say 3 litres). My one-pint mugs of tea were cut to half-pints, and out went the dilute fruit juice and late-afternoon bottle of beer, and other extra water. That is a reduction of at least 3 clearly identifiable pints a day to begin with (say 1.5 litres). As regards salt intake, we have always used minimal salt in cooking (our daughter complains), and when I developed oedema I was told to stop eating crisps and other salty snacks because salt exacerbates it. So, on the one hand, I am not to have much salt, and on the other my blood sodium level is too low! 

The changes were disastrous. The oedema went up massively, and I gained about 12 pounds in weight in three weeks (say 5kg). I was slobbing around like a seal on a sandbank, and could hardly walk up the stairs or garden, or anywhere at times. The breathlessness because of fluid around the lungs is the most difficult part. The inactivity makes you weaker and weaker. 

As I still had some Furosemide left, I began it again as an experiment, not even every day, and lost 8 pounds quite quickly. Our heat waves set me back a bit, but it has been agreed I can have Furosemide again, and, considering how much fluid I had been having, I don’t have to stick too rigidly to the 3 pints per day they said, which was impossible in the heat anyway. I was having headaches and confusion, classic signs of dehydration. The GP was very quick to remove Furosemide from my prescription and it has been difficult to get it back on again. They will not add what the consultant says, but they are all too quick to remove things. Anyway, common sense prevails. It shows the importance of advice from the consultant who knows and trusts you to be sensible, rather than a doctor doing a shift in a hospital. 

The main thing is to keep sodium within near-normal levels. The trouble is, you don’t know what it is without a blood test, and oedema makes those very difficult. They have often not been able to get any. When they have, the level seems to have been all right. I also seem to be making progress with the oedema again. I don’t want another seizure. It could finish me off.  

Oedema

Warning: medical images. 

Struggling. 

30 cycles (two and a half years) of Tepotinib. 

Oedema is a side-effect. 

This was about 10 days ago. 

It makes everything difficult. 

Not much commenting happening, I'm afraid. 

Prophets Of Profit

For UK readers the series is at 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027bnq/episodes/player 

Economics is something I have never studied, so The Prophets of Profit, a series of five 15-minute programmes on BBC Radio 4, was something of a revelation. For me, it gave new insight into what seems to have gone wrong in corporate Britain and America over the past fifty years. I am thinking of disasters such as water companies paying large dividends and bonuses, and borrowing huge sums, while failing to invest in their networks, and the Post Office prosecuting hundreds for theft when they knew full well that their own computer system was at fault. I was aware of much of this, but not in such clear focus. This is my, probably naïve, understanding of what the series said. 

It begins in 1970, when Milton Friedman argued that the purpose of business should be to maximise profit, and nothing else. Employees, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders, were not the concern of business. Nor were social or environmental responsibilities. Those things would look after themselves as greater profits filtered through society. They would create more economic growth and employment. 

Business academics then began to think through what this might mean in practice, and the idea that shareholder value was all that mattered became predominant. Businesses began to do whatever they could to maximise share prices. Chief executives who thought otherwise soon found themselves out of a job, or their companies taken over. 

I thought back to my own experience of the nineteen-seventies, while still working as an accountant. I spent a couple of years with The Burton Group, centred around the clothing retailer. I was in the Property Division, and at that time we were busy selling off our shops and leasing them back. 

Sir Montague Burton, the company founder, had spent a lifetime buying the best retail sites in every town and city in the land. It was said that in the early days he stood counting the numbers of passers by, and bought the sites with the most. Think of almost any Burton branch you can remember, and the chances are it was on the busiest corner plot in town. 

Making and selling men’s suits was profitable business. Apart from work clothes like overalls and boiler suits, men wore little else. The best suit would become the everyday suit, and then that would become the suit for leisure activities. I have photographs of my father and grandfather sitting on the beach at the seaside, wearing suits. 

The Burton Group also owned other businesses. I remember Top Shop, Top Man, Dorothy Perkins, Evans Outsizes, and Ryman the stationer, but there were probably others, all in prime retail locations. You can easily see that selling off these properties and leasing them back would release bucket loads of cash, which could be used to pay large bonuses and dividends, boosting the share price. 

Actually, Burtons were not that bad, but many companies took things to extremes, breaking up their businesses and selling or closing down the least profitable parts, with no regard for the social consequences. Privatisation was part of this ethos, too. It was thought that private ownership would attract more investment in public utilities. 

For a period, this philosophy re-invigorated tired Western economies, but the world as Friedman knew it changed, with unforeseen consequences. He did not anticipate changes in working practices, corporate deregulation, and globalisation. 

Again, thinking back to the nineteen-seventies, we started work and left at the appointed times. We took the specified lunch breaks. Work was social, and we had time to chat with our colleagues. We spent many lunch breaks playing cards in the office. We even played games with elastic bands and paper clips during work time if we could get away with it. Practices such as zero-hours contracts, timed toilet breaks, and the regular ten-hour day, would not have been tolerated. Most were paid enough not to need to juggle multiple jobs. Now, for so many, this is the reality. Another recent radio series, Workplace Britain, explored these changes. There were accounts of helpdesk workers so busy they never exchanged a single word with the person in the desk next to them. These things may generate greater profit and efficiency, but can’t be good for mental or physical well-being. 

As regards globalisation, if company ownership goes overseas, so do the profits. Australian investment bank Macquarie owned Thames Water for ten years to 2017, during which period it took huge bonuses and dividends without investing a penny of its own money. Since privatisation in 1989, water companies have paid £72bn to shareholders, while taking on £60bn of debt. Some privatised companies are even owned by overseas state utilities. One trade unionist said that we seem to have no objection to state ownership, so long as it is not Britain. 

Much worse, some overseas owners have more interest in closing down businesses and moving them to their own shores. Think of Chinese ownership of strategic industries such as steel works and oil refineries. We need oil and steel, so if they take away our ability to produce our own, they can hold us to ransom for theirs. 

The 2008 stock market crash brought home just how badly wrong the shareholder value movement had gone, with a degree of renewed concern for the planet, providing secure jobs, and progressive social change: diversity, equity, and inclusion. But many think this went too far, and putting profit above all else may be returning, especially in American politics. 

Le Tour de Yorkshire

New Month Old Post: first posted 28th April 2017. This event no longer runs, but here is what I wrote about it in 2017.

Improved and original logos

 

In the early nineteen-sixties, I remember going along to Boothferry Bridge to watch The Milk Race pass by – a national cycling event also known as the Tour of Britain, sponsored by the now defunct Milk Marketing Board. Some blokes on racing bikes flashed past amidst the everyday traffic and it was all over in less than a minute. It wasn’t worth the bother. Cycling must be the sport with the biggest disconnect between doing (riding a bike is fun) and watching (tedious). I’ve never been to a cycling event since.

 
So it’s irritating to find the Tour de Yorkshire imposed on us this weekend, with roads closed most of the day bringing maximum disruption to our activities, just to see people on bicycles for a couple of minutes. I’m keeping well away.

And they call it “le Tour de Yorkshire”. What pretentious twaddle! Et le moins dit à propos de la côte de Silsden et de la côte de Wigtwizzle, mieux c'est.*

Surely, if it’s in Yorkshire, shouldn’t it be called t’baiyk race roun’ t ‘roo-ads?

[* The less said about “côte de Silsden” and “côte de Wigtwizzle” the better.] 

Record Box - 5, Jethro Tull

Continuing to examine my old vinyl records before passing them on.

For many years, Jethro Tull was my favourite band by far, as shown by the 18 LPs (albums) in my record box. I was initially attracted in 1969 by the unusual sound of their single ‘Living In The Past’, which I now know was due to the 5/4 (five beats to the bar) time signature, which was and still is unusual in popular music. I went out and bought their LP ‘This Was’ straight away. It did not sound much like the single, having been released a year earlier. 

‘This Was’ had a strong rhythm and blues element, due to the influence of Mick Abrahams who left the band after its release, leaving Ian Anderson as the main creative force. But I liked it enough to buy the second LP, ‘Stand Up’. This was more like the single, with prominent bass, unusual tunes, arrangements and rhythms, and more of an ‘underground’ progressive rock feel. I was also entertained by the band’s unconventional subversive element, and their seventeenth-century rustic appearance (we had learnt at school about the inventor of the seed drill, whose name the band has adopted). One newspaper described them as a mixture of “pop, jazz, and jokery.”

The third LP, ‘Benefit’, hooked me completely. On first hearing the track ‘Play In Time’, I interpreted it as beginning on the beat instead of the up-beat, until it slowly and magically shifted into its correct position. The effect was sensational, but once heard correctly, it was never possible to experience the magic again. 

In Leeds, Roger the PhD student, one of the house sharers, claimed to like only classical music and considered pop and rock to be trivial rubbish. One day in 1972, he came in just as I started to listen to the fifth LP, ‘Thick as A Brick’. He sat down and quietly listened all through, fascinated by the complexities, musical sophistication, variety of themes, time signatures and tempo changes. He declared it to be at last popular music worth listening to. It validated my musical choices because a number of other friends did not like Jethro Tull at all, and thought I had lost my senses. “Ian Anderson sounds like a sheep”, one said. Another friend saw them live and thought ‘Thick as A Brick’ was brilliant, but too difficult for the band to play.  There was a lot in the press about how original they were, but popular classical conductor André Previn dismissed it on a television chat show as nothing not done before. Nowadays ‘Thick as A Brick’ is considered a progressive rock classic. 

Ian Anderson’s lyrics were also clever and original. The BBC radio presenter Alan Freeman was an admirer. I remember him drawing attention to the song ‘Weathercock’ on his Sunday afternoon programme in 1978 when the folk-rock LP ‘Heavy Horses’ came out. Does the weather cock reflect or determine the weather?  

        Good morning weathercock, how’d you fare last night?
        Did the cold wind bite you, did you face up to the fright?
        When the leaves spin from October and whip around your tail
        Did you shake from the blast and did you shiver through the gale?

        And give us direction, the best of goodwill
        Put us in touch with your fair winds
        Sing to us softly, hum evening’s song
        Tell us what the blacksmith has done for you

        Do you simply reflect changes in the patterns of the sky?
        Or is it true to say the weather heeds the twinkle in your eye?
        Do you fight the rush of winter? Do you hold snowflakes at bay?
        Do you lift the dawn sun from the fields and help him on his way?

        Good morning weathercock, make this day bright
        Put us in touch with your fair winds
        Sing to us softly, hum evening’s song
        Point the way to better days, we can share with you

In this YouTube video of a live performance in 2005, Anderson’s flute, the musicianship of the other band members at that time, the way the track builds to the instrumental section at the end, and the overall arrangement, remind us just how good they were. 

I bought just about every vinyl LP for twenty years, and then one on cassette tape. I saw them play live in Berlin in early 1982 when they played new tracks from ‘The Broadsword and the Beast’. I wondered what the Anglo-Saxon runes were on the cover, and spent ages painstakingly decoding them, guided by letter frequency. They spell out the verse of the title song, “I see a dark sail on the horizon, set under a black cloud that hides the sun. Bring me my broadsword and clear understanding. Bring me my cross of gold as a talisman.”

A few years later, around 1990, tied up by work and family, I stopped buying or listening much to music at all. More recently, I bought two DVDs of Jethro Tull performances, and interviews with Ian Anderson and other band members. It dismayed me how Ian Anderson’s subversive humour had been replaced by an entitled pompousness. Perhaps it had already started by 1985 when he recorded the LP ‘A Classic Case’ in which the band played their music with the London Symphony Orchestra. It must be difficult not to let all that success go to your head. 

As well as the LPs, I have the 1971 EP, ‘Life Is A Long Song’, (“But the tune ends too soon for us all”). So true. A funeral tune, perhaps.  

It would be difficult to choose a favourite track, but the title track ‘Heavy Horses’ would be a good contender. I love this nostalgically sentimental video with (after 70 seconds) its images of the beautiful animals that used to work our lands. I also like the less well-known but in some ways similar title track ‘Too Old To Rock And Roll, Too Young To Die’. As for Living In The Past, well I suppose that is what I do most of the time in this blog. 

Streptocarpus Blue Leila

Otherwise known as South African Primrose. 

Split into three in March, and all have survived. I find the trick is not to give them too much water. That kills them off. Let them dry out completely and then water very sparingly and they will give a stunning display. They are not yet anywhere near their best. 

Neither am I, after a pretty desperate week, with a spell in hospital which knocked the stuffing out of me. I feel frightened and depressed at the hopelessness of my situation, and have not been here much at all. I have done a few things today, but it is a struggle to keep positive. A bottle of beer will help; maybe a Newcastle Brown Ale. They said to restrict fluid intake because of my low sodium levels, so maybe half a bottle. 

Hope to have a new post in the next day or so. 

RESPONSE TO COMMENTS: Thank you all for your positive support and comments on this post, and apologies for sounding so down. Things such as the Blue Leia provide interest to keep me going for now, but for the past week I have felt very much in limbo, a bit like in your final year at school when you are waiting to discover what will happen to you regarding jobs or continued education. I have to keep fighting. 

Brain Inflammation

I am in two minds about these health posts, and not everyone wants to read them, depressing subject that it is. On the one hand, I don’t really want to talk about it, but I have found similar posts by others helpful and informative. Doctors talk about symptoms and treatments, but they rarely experience them first-hand. Bloggers have. They share parts of their lives with you, and you are concerned for them. And, like with medical reality programmes on television, I suppose some of us wonder how we would cope in these situations. The supportive comments are therapy in themselves. Thank you everyone. 

It is three years this month since my health disaster kicked off with an unexpected seizure. Until then, I was walking regularly around our lovely local countryside and further afield, riding my bicycle through our quiet local lanes, swimming each week, driving to my favourite shop (Screwfix) for DIY parts, doing jobs around the house, gardening, playing concerts and ceilidhs in a band, and trekking up mountains on holiday in locations such as Scotland and North Wales. We made plans now that the kids are fairly independent. We were going to book holidays and visit friends and relatives around the country. Most of it had to come to an end. 

I now wonder how long I will be able to continue this blog. Some days it poses no difficulties; others seem impossible. The same with commenting and responding. It can sometimes take me ten minutes to make a single comment; there are often things I want to say, but it is too difficult, so I read but do not comment, for which I apologise, but that is how things are.  

The problems are caused by pressure from brain swelling due to inflammation. It causes mental exhaustion, and I have difficulty recognising letters and words, and using numbers. Thoughts don’t flow freely as they should. 

So far, the inflammation has been reduced fairly successfully by Dexamethasone steroids, and I have been a lot better within two or three days. In February when I last wrote about this, when the (then) latest MRI scan indicated changes, I was given a 20-day course of 4 pills a day (8 mg) for 5 days, reducing to 3 for 5 days, then 2, then 1. Two years ago, when things looked really bleak and I was sleeping most of the time and unable to concentrate on anything, I was told to start immediately with 8 pills a day (16 mg). That is a very high dose. That was when the nurse practitioner, who says things she perhaps should not really say, said the MRI scan looked “awful”. I appreciate someone with the confidence to say what they think, rather than giving options without advice. On a previous occasion when it was realise what I had, she said “I would not go down the lung surgery route if I were you”. I would not have sued the NHS if that had been wrong. 

Because Dexamethasone has a tendency to irritate the stomach, it is normally recommended to take Omeprazole beforehand for protection. I don’t get on as well with Lansoprazole which is an alternative. They both reduce the amount of stomach acid secreted. 

As I wrote in February, the scan indicated a blood clot, a new tumour, and increased activity in existing areas. Disheartening, to say the least, but it turned out not quite that bad. When more recently they were able to get a cannula past the oedema and obtain an MRI scan with contrast dye, which gives a clearer image, they concluded that the new “tumour” was in fact associated with the blood clot, and was being re-absorbed. However, less encouragingly, the existing areas were continuing to show signs of activity. This has been going on slowly since the start, although now held in check by the targetted chemotherapy. 

Some days ago I began to struggle with letter recognition again. When I started to write a comment on another blog, I was unable to locate a particular letter on the keyboard. I then forgot which letter I wanted, and then what I was trying to say, and what it was about. The comment was never made. But I usually know what is happening and remember. The comment was that not many yet realise that international trade tariffs will give a massive boost to the BRICS economies, and their eventual divergence from the Dollar. 

With a few Dexys left, I decided to take one a day for 5 days before it got any worse. It seems to have helped. I did not mention it to the doctors because all they would have done is ask me in for more pointless tests, and possibly kept me in all night, and most of the next day until a doctor was available to sign me free to go. It is like a prison in there. 

How many more times will it happen, and how often? Will I eat the tomatoes and runner beans I have sown, see our pears and apples this year, make it to my next birthday, and then Christmas? How long does it go on? 

I looked back through Weaver’s blog. By this time last year, she was posting infrequently after posting brilliantly every day for many years. In July, she announced her final post. In November, we learnt she had passed away. I may be on a similar trajectory, but her condition was different from mine. Some years earlier, her husband’s brain tumour gave him only weeks, rather than months or years, but his condition was also different. 

I can only stay positive and hope. A few patients on the internet say they have been on my particular targetted poison for over five years. There are not enough of us to really know.  

Fixing A Hole

New Month Old Post: first posted 7th February, 2015. A rather contrived piece about how the Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ accompanied my DIY jobs through the years. This piece was published in The Guardian newspaper (second item on the page linked here).

Fixing a Hole by the Beatles 

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in /
And stops my mind from wandering / 
Where it will go”

1968: A-level examinations year. We moved house and I was allowed to decorate my new bedroom as I wanted, and listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on my reel-to-reel tape recorder I covered the flowery wallpaper a responsible dark blue and irresponsibly failed my A-levels. I’m not sure which my mum thought worse, the room colour or the exam results, but after I left for an office job in Leeds, the flowery wallpaper returned.

1970: “Painting the room in a colourful way.”
 
To the tape of Sgt. Pepper, I painted the walls of my rented room an adventurous orange and unadventurously stayed for seven years, ignoring my mum’s frequent hints about the dreadful colour.

1978: A mature student in Hull. With Sgt. Pepper loud in stereo through my Akai tape deck, Leak amplifier and massive Wharfedale speakers, I emulsioned the room an impulsive dark red and unimpulsively got a first, despite living with such a dismal colour my mum said.

1990: “Filling the cracks that ran through the door”

In a good career in Nottingham, I at last meet someone who appreciates my interior design skills. I moved in with my old stereo and tape of Sgt. Pepper and mended the doors and window frames. I like to think my mum would have been impressed too but sadly by then it was too late. We sold the house and moved back to Yorkshire.

1993: Sgt. Pepper is now on a cheap cassette player as we paper our bedroom ceiling using the two chairs relay method. Standing one behind the other, the person nearest the wall sticks one end of the pasted wallpaper to the ceiling and the person behind sticks the next bit. The first person then moves with chair behind the second, and sticks up some more, and so on, right across the room. We both end up slippery and sticky, with more paste on us than on the paper, which slowly detaches itself and drops down.

2015: “Taking my time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday.”

I only hear music in the car these days. Sgt. Pepper comes on and reminds me that now the kids are grown up we need to re-paper the bedroom ceiling which has cracked under the weight of all their junk – and mine – up in the loft. I wonder if the tape deck, amplifier and speakers still work?

Akai 4000 DS Tape Deck, Leak 3200 Tuner Amplifier and Wharfedale Glendale Speakers

Jokes

Some have very good memories for jokes. They can reel them off one after another seemingly for hours. Professional comedians such as Ken Dodd and Bob Monkhouse could keep going all day. 

On the other hand, I have always struggled to remember jokes. But just as with memorable things people have said, as I wrote in the last but one post, I can remember quite clearly when and where I heard the few I do remember, and who told them. Again, I suspect this short list (which contains mild bad language but nothing too unseemly) reveals a lot about me. 

This came from Brenden in the shared house in Leeds, about 1973. 
A man walked into a public lavatory and slipped on a large slick of urine on the floor, and landed on his back in it. 
He stood up soaking wet. 
A second man then came in, slipped in the same way, and also ended up on his back in the pool of urine. 
“I just did that,” the first man said. 
“You dirty bugger,” said the second man. “You should get it cleaned up.”

I like these wordplay transposition jokes. This was from PC, another in the shared house around the same time. 
What is the difference between a prostitute and a bumpy road? 
One knackers your tyres. The other tires your knackers. 
A similar one, from my brother while he was at university, involves a bad marksman and a constipated owl. The bad marksman shoots but can’t hit. 

Here is one from the radio while I was waiting in the car for my wife about 20 years ago. It was told by Clement Freud on the programme ‘Just A Minute’. I consider it a perfect joke, with a surprise punch line, and an inbuilt logic that creates a wonderful image. I never tire of this one. 
How does a blind parachutist know when he is near the ground? 
The dog’s lead goes slack. 

My wife does not have a good memory for jokes, either. I suppose we place more value on our own humour. But here is one she does remember. 
What do you call someone who used to like tractors? 
An extractor fan. 

That, sadly, is the paltry sum total of what I can dredge out of my head at this moment. I won’t be applying to go on Jokers Wild.