A daily delivery of sayings, thoughts, findings and happenings from rambles in life's byways. If anything at all links what follows, it is this, from Puck, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!', joined with that great Lancashire expression of incredulity, 'Well, I'll Go To The Foot Of Our Stairs!'
November 30
We have all proved particularly susceptible to handsome outlaws, even the English with their lengthy, admirable and occasionally wobbly regard for the rule of law. And they have provided a fine selection, best exemplified by such as Robin Hood and Francis Drake (still known to large parts of the Spanish-speaking world as El Pirata Drake). So strong, indeed, seems the call and need for this that the fascination will often fix on less worthy objects: the likes of Dick Turpin, Ronnie Biggs and, heaven help us, the Krays.
Especially admired is law-breaking done with dash and panache, wit and style. The acme of this was reached with the Highwaymen, or Gentlemen of the Road. That latter was no accidental euphemism: gentlemanliness was what they aspired to, and how they were very often regarded, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
And Jack Rann, who on this date in 1774 danced the Tyburn jig, as public hanging was more delicately known, stands and really delivers. Jack was an early celeb, a working-class handsome sensation: when he appeared at Barnet Races wearing a satin blue waistcoat trimmed with silver, hundreds of gawpers trailed after him.
He was a dandy highwayman, a former groom who had taken to the Road to achieve the life, and most especially the style, of his masters. He lived the part, and dressed for it: the sixteen strings were the eight coloured ribbons he wore at the knees of his breeches.
He was, of course, very much a ladies’ man: one of his fancies, the fair Letitia Smith of Covent Garden, went on to be the mistress of the Duke of York and to marry Sir John Lade, the racing dandy, spendthrift rake and friend of the Prince Regent. Far from being intimidated by her ascent, Letitia refused to take the Eliza Doolittle path to acceptability. ‘He swears like Letty Lade’ was a common saying of the time.
Jack, for his part, and true to his calling, was very clear that his status should be regarded as that of a gentleman; he was most affronted when he was not treated as one, whether by sheriff’s officers arresting him or at fashionable London spots, including Vauxhall Gardens, where he paid for some acquittal celebrations by lifting two watches and three purses. Dr Johnson knew Jack Rann:”Yes, Sir, Sixteen-String Jack towered above the common mark.’
It doesn’t matter that Jack wasn’t a very good highwayman (he kept taking watches, for example, which provided the proof for his downfall); the important thing is that he understood exactly what was expected from one, even to the extent of announcing himself to all and sundry: ‘I am Sixteen-String Jack, the famous highwayman.’ Despite this interesting approach to evading justice, six cases were dismissed against him for lack of identification before he was damned by the watch taken from the chaplain to one of George III’s daughters near Brentford.
Awaiting the gallows in Newgate, Jack entertained seven lady friends to dinner. For his farewell appearance at Tyburn he wore a coat and waistcoat of pea-green cloth, new buckskin breeches tricked out with the famous strings, and he carried a large nosegay. After exchanging pleasantries with the hangman, he danced a little jig for his public before dancing the longer one. He was just 24.
November 29
C S Lewis was born this day in 1898. You will know all about him, the God thing, the Oxford Don thing, the mother complex, the wardrobe and all that, so I'll confine myself to the matter of his first name: Clive (Staples). Was there ever a more unlikely Clive? No wonder he insisted upon being called Jack at the age of four. More complex was the reason: he wanted to be called after his pet dog, who had died. Make of that what you will, and of the effect of the death of his mother four years later, which has led to the suggestion that the wardrobe is a metaphor for the most direct route back to her womb. I am more intrigued by the dog's death: it was run over by a car. In 1902. In Ulster. How. unlucky was that?
Died today, in 1987: the remarkable Irene Handl, daughter of an Austrian banker, gifted actress, lender of a delightfullly winning eccentricity to countless comic supporting roles, novelist, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, President of the Elvis Presley Fan Club (Lewisham Branch), and committed Chihuahua fancier.
She was a Presley purist, insisting on the early rocker, the, as she put it, 'Pre-Parkerised' Elvis, before the castigated Colonel (real name Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk) directed the King's career into all those ballads and such. She didn't make her London stage debut until she was 36. Her first novel, 'The Sioux', was published when she was 64.
'The Sioux' is about as far removed from the cuddly Cockney char character she so often played as is her aristocratic European background or her Presley passion. It, and its sequel, which came eight years later, 'The Gold Top Pfizer,' are dense, inventive, Gothicky marvels of a family saga set in France and New Orleans, all 'plumey gloomy' rich hot decay and decadence, where flowers are 'coated with a candy of flies' and characters have eyes like 'black fried eggs' and are 'deliciously ready for the mortician.'
The books make Tennessee Williams seem rather New Hampshire Williams.
Should you require any more rounding to the marvel that was Miss Handl, I would take you to her splendid response to a young director attempting to explain her motivation: ‘Sorry, darling, I’m afraid you’re confusing me with one of those actresses who gives a toss.”
Next!
November 28
Friedrich Engels was born this day in 1820. Not as totemic, or even familiar as he was, Engels; it tends to be forgotten now that he was half of a double act which inspired one of the most influential political movements the world has seen, the one begun in fine theory, high ideals and an implicit belief in the goodness of humankind that now, where it survives, bears little if any resemblance to any of that. Engels, Marx, Communism, Disillusionment.
Britain's role in it is also less remarked than it was, although Marx developed his grand idea, that which had such baleful consequences for so many, in our great libraries, the British Library in London and Chetham's in Manchester. He was assisted theoretically and practically by Engels, who, in best revolutionary style, financed the enterprise through the family cotton firm, Ermin and Engels, where he worked, in Weaste, Salford.
Righteously and rightfully appalled by the conditions of the Manchester workers, he nevertheless misjudged both their readiness to rise and Manchester's famous radicalism, more libertarian than egalitarian.
But he is an attractive figure, as flawed, in a charming way, as his theories. These are his responses in a question-and-answer session with Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, in 1869:
Favourite virtue: Jollity
Chief characteristic: Knowing everything by halves
Idea of happiness: Château Margaux 1848
Idea of misery: To go to the dentist
The vice you excuse most: Excess of any kind
The vice you detest most: Cant
Your aversion: Affected, stuck-up women
Your favourite occupation: Chaffing and being chaffed
Favourite dish: Cold: salad. Hot: Irish stew
Favourite maxim: Not to have any
Motto: Take it easy
Take it easy! And how splendid that what inspired him most about 1848, the famous year of revolution, was the Château Margaux.
Next!
November 27
It's Lancashire Day! Celebrating November 27, 1295, when our finest county first sent representatives to Parliament. Finest but not necessarily so recognised: we have ever taken a more modest approach to greatness than, say, to take an entirely random example, our neighbours to the East, who, as you might have noticed, do tend to go on a bit.
Such an estimable approach - to let our qualities and achievements speak for themselves - has its disadvantages in the noisy modern world. Which is why I have made it part of my eclectic mission to trumpet the Red Rose's extraordinary claims to fame, just a very few of which will follow.
But first, thanks to another modern malady, the urge to fiddle with things that do not require it, I must explain that I have come to praise the County Palatine, which survived the tradition-deaf nationwide administrative reforms of 1974, and includes not only Liverpool and Manchester but the lands up to Lake Windermere as well.
So, contemplate these slightest of skinny dips into the ocean of influences and achievement, and wonder:
1) The Beatles, William Gladstone, Kenneth Dodd, Robert Peel, Eric Morecambe, Emmeline Pankhurst, L S Lowry, Stan Laurel, John Bright, Les Dawson and Mystic Meg.
2) Carl Jung dreamt that Liverpool was 'The Pool of Life'; Sigmund Freud visited Blackpool twice and was clearly impressed by the Tower.
3) Napoleon III was inspired to build the grand boulevards of Paris by his stay during exile on Lord Street in Southport.
4) William Shakespeare spent his 'lost years' (1587-92) in service in Lancashire; its influence is pervasive: think only of 'For the rain it raineth every day.'
5) Charlotte Bronte began writing 'Jane Eyre' in the waiting room of a doctor's surgery in Manchester, JK Rowling got the idea for Harry Potter on a Manchester train, and Jane Austen had a distant cousin in Wigan.
Take that, think on and then go immediately to my Books page and 'Lancashire, Where Women Die of Love'!
November 26
Today marks the New York premiere in 1942 of the American movie non pareil, 'Casablanca', a captivating combination of everything fine about that exasperating country, its love of high romance, its unabashed taste for sentimentality about lofty ideals while examining them with snappy cynicism; and, most of all, that most excellent sense of humour, multicultural product of migration, hope and pain.
And so a Hungarian director with a limited command of English and three fellow Jewish writers plus a Mormon who still hadn't completed the script by the last scene somehow created something which almost uniquely for Hollywood stands out from its time.
They were helped by the brilliance of a cast also brought together mostly haphazardly in the movie way: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, of course; but also an unrivalled selection of supports, from two more Hungarian Jews, Peter Lorre, in top needy, snivelling form, and S Z Sakall, as Carl the heroic but cuddly waiter, to Sidney Greenstreet of Kent as the smoothly sinister rival bar owner, Signor Ferrari, and Claude Rains of Clapham as Captain Renault, Chief of Police, venially venal, ultimately moral before evil, impossible to dislike, and about as French as steak and kidney pie.
The sense of Europeanness as America reluctantly faced the threat over there is another vital part; even the crucial casting of Bogart, perfectly embodying all of that, was insisted on by the gifted producer, Hal Wallis, son of more Jewish immigrants. But the way the film stressed the darkness of all Europe, not just the terrible fate of its Jews, is the final brilliance, a briliance exhibiting the trademark touch of realism and subtlety honed over two thousand years.
Enough, though, with the theorising. Here, taking the most favourite lines as read, are my favourite quotes from a film which I have watched with delight a, ahem, few times:
1) Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
2) Ilsa: I wasn't sure you were the same. Let's see, the last time we met...
3) Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he's just another blundering American.
Captain Renault: We musn't underestimate "American blundering". I was with them when they "blundered" into Berlin in 1918.
4) Rick: [scoffs] You understand how I feel. How long was it we had, honey?
5) And finally and most favourite, not least for its easy application to so many entirely predictable outcomes in our public realm today:
Next, kid!
November 25
Ah, joy, the Christmas restaurant outing is almost upon us. Fine to remember so many of them over the years: the forced bonhomie; the undignified scramble to sit next to the senior executive or not to that chap who excels in minute descriptions of so many things, and then moves on to who doesn't understand him at work or at home, including his wife, and you, until, finally the tears; the undignified scramble not to sit next to the senior executive and to the more attractive staff members; the forced bonhomie evolving into the artificially stimulated bonhomie as noise levels rise and rise, the things you will regret...
And also the business with the menu and the food choices, always complicated and inevitably confused in execution. I still cherish the moment in the west country pub when the waitress, a robust woman, broke into the slowly relaxing initial awkwardness of the gathering to ask brusquely, 'Who's having the prawn cocktails?' Five members of the party raised their hands in acknowledgement. 'But I have six,' said the waitress. 'Somebody must be lying.'
Have a good one!
November 24
Oops! I have just realised that, rather appropriately, I forgot National Flossing Day on Friday. To make up for this characteristic failing, I am now bringing you my acclaimed list of famous dentists:
1) Paul Revere. This hero of the American Revolution also specialised in making false teeth. I know what you're wondering: did he make George Washington's famous wooden false teeth? Surprisingly, no. The President's sets were made by Dr John Baker, Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur and Dr John Greenwood. And, contrary to popular belief, they were not made of wood, but of, inter alia, hippopotamus ivory.
2) Ian Anthony Hamilton-Smith, 3rd Baron Colwyn. Lord Colwyn, besides being a highly regarded dentist and the last Baron, was also a dance band leader, first of The Autocrats, then The 3B Band (after the Third Baron), and The Lord Colwyn Band. His was an eclectic offering, including a selection from 'The Jungle Book', and often featuring his imitation of Louis Armstrong's gravel voice.
3) Miles Davis's dad. Interestingly, another jazz connection. Many will recall the legend of how, after a recording session for The Tube at the Tyne-Tees studios, Miles was prevailed upon to visit the pub across the road. When he entered, as ever carrying his trumpet, the landlord looked over and said, 'He's not playing that in here.'
4) Doc Holliday. John Holliday had a thriving dental practice in Georgia. After contracting tuberculosis, he moved west for his health and into history alongside his friend Wyatt Earp, with whom he took part in the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral. Rather incongruously, you might think, he continued to practice his profession sporadically while engaging in all manner of mayhem involving gambling and guns. The tuberculosis, rather than a bullet, eventually killed him. As his biographer, fellow dentist Frank Heynick, put it, 'he knew how to drill a man in more ways than one.'
5) Dr Alban-Alban Uzoma Nwapa, originally from Nigeria, studied dentistry in Sweden, and became a famous Eurodance DJ and producer in the 1990s, spreading the message of good oral health through his music, as in his song, 'Go to the dentist'.
Finally, I may not get another chance to mention the dental patient who turned down painkilling injections because he was pursuing the path of enlightenment offered by eastern religion and wanted to transcend dental medication.
Next, quickly!
November 23
Some more thoughts on us:
1) Aristotle defined the difference between Humanity and other species as laughter and the use of hands.
2) 'Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once and now I know it.' The epitaph John Gay suggested for himself.
3) 'Life is a lot like jazz...it's best when you improvise.' George Gershwin.
4) 'Life well spent is long.' Leonardo da Vinci maintaining his reputation for telling ambiguity.
5) 'Pull yourself together, Arthur, you've got over worse than this.' Death notice, Liverpool Echo.
On!
November 22
Yes, stand by, today: Great Movie Taglines (you know, the line on the poster that teases, tickles and lures...
1) Attila the Hun. Ivan the Terrible. Al Capone. They were all seven once.' Problem Child (1990)
2) 'Escape or die frying,' Chicken Run (2000).
3) 'And remember, the next scream you hear may be your own.' The Birds (1963)
4) 'Nothing says goodbye like a bullet,' The Long Goodbye (1973)
5 'When he pours, he reigns.' Cocktail (1986)
Next!
November 21
Time for some more from the Old News Divison of Nevin's Unusual Trivia Selection (NUTS)! And today we dip into my vintage Incompetent Offender section:
1) 2011: Cody Wilkins, of Washington DC, was arrested after leaving his phone on charge in the house he had robbed.
2) 2005: A man has been arrested in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, after Police there followed his footprints in the snow back to his home from the auto-repair shop he had robbed a block away.
3) 1994: Robber Rudolf Schmidt fired at a garage cashier in Zurich but died when the bullet bounced off a window and hit him in the head.
4) 1994: French farmer Gilles Sellier robbed a bank but was caught making his getaway on a tractor.
5) 2005 and still holding the Palme Pour Elevating Les Yeux: The man who tried to rob a bank in Florida, shouting, 'Ok, mother stickers, this is a fuck up!'
More NUTS very soon!
November 20
Thoughts for the Day:
It was, of course, R E Shay who remarked: "Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit." You should make what you will of my failure to discover anything more about R E Shay.
I am also much taken with Stanislaw Lec, the part-Jewish Polish baron and poet who survived a German concentration camp to receive a state funeral in Warsaw in 1966. This was just one of the many pertinent questions he posed: ‘If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?’
Next!
November 19
Hello. I note that in 2010 research based on findings by UK vets predicted that 50 per cent of the UK's cats would be too fat to fit through a standard cat flap in 2020. How's that going?
You will, of course, be aware that the cat flap is a British invention, courtesy of no less a figure than Sir Isaac Newton.
The great scientist cut a hole in the door to rooms at Cambridge to allow his cat to come and go without interrupting the Newtonian cogitations.
Interestingly, and this merits some pondering, he then cut a smaller hole for the cat's kittens.
Some doubt the story, but there are later reports of two stopped-up holes in the door, which has since been lost.
More 'Those Wacky Scientists, eh?' very soon!
November 18
I know: time for, yes, Some Old Thespian Stories (SOTS)!
1) AE Matthews, splendid character actor, adorner and enlivener of such as 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' and 'Around the World in 80 Days', answered the phone on stage, and couldn't remember his line; completely unflustered, he turned to his companion and said, 'It's for you'.
2) Tallulah Bankhead, larger than most lives put together, enough to make flamboyance blush, (in)famously 'more of an act than an actress', having attended a screening of the adaptation of 'Orpheus Descending' by Tennessee Williams, told him, 'Darling, they've absolutely ruined your perfectly dreadful play.'
3) Noël Coward took Laurence Olivier to a mountaintop near his beloved Jamaica home, Firefly, to see his favourite view. Surveying the magnificent terraces spread beneath him to the azure sea, Sir Laurence commented, 'It looks like rows and rows of empty seats'.
4) Did you know Walter Matthau got his break understudying Rex Harrison as Henry VIII in 'Anne of The Thousand Days?' I should have paid a great deal to see it.
5) Isamu Noguchi’s increasingly threadbare costumes for Sir John Gielgud’s Lear in George Devine's production provoked some concern: 'I’m terribly worried about this, George, I look like a gruyere cheese.'
Next!
November 17
Another determined delve into the beguiling bran tub that is Funny Old Things comes up with this:
Well, well: it seems that Goering never made the famous remark about reaching for his revolver at the mention of culture. The only recorded source approximating it is in a now much mercifully forgotten play by the Nazi, Hanns Johst, where a stormtrooper remarks: 'When I hear the word culture, I cock my Browning.' Remarkable: Did you know the Nazis were into panto?
(After the war, in an excellent example of condign bathos, the only outlet Johst could find was writing poems under a pseudonym for a supermarket magazine. And while we're here, consider whether this was more bold in 1967 than it would be now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPXHRX8Q2hs)
And, in the event that you might like to be cheered up even more in these troubling times, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZIjtt5V3Es&t=14s
Next!
November 16
Today is the anniversary of death by hanging of Jack Sheppard in 1724, a great blast from the roaring past that was early eighteenth-century London.
Unusually for a villain of the time, Jack doesn’t appear to have killed anybody, which might explain his immense popularity, or not. Jack was an averagely gifted thief, but an escape artist of quite stunning brilliance, ensuring his fame by making each successive break-out more spectacular than the last. As is usual, he was young (dead at 22), fatherless, and fell away from an honest apprenticeship as a carpenter into bad company, a couple of doxies at the Black Lion in St Giles. You might judge their charms from their nicknames, Edgworth Bess and Maggott.
Jack started robbing from the homes and businesses he was working in, and fencing the stuff through Bess and Maggott. Arrest came soon, and his first escape, through a roof. Although it never took long to capture Jack again, holding on to him was another matter. His next escape was from the New Prison, Clerkenwell, with Bess, sawing through an iron bar, descending 25 feet on a rope made out of a blanket, a sheet and Bess’s gown and petticoat, and then scaling a 22-ft high perimeter wall.
His return to custody the next time was accelerated by making an enemy out of Jonathan Wild, the Mr Big of London organised crime. So organised, in fact, that Wild had semi-official status as a thief-taker and receiver of lost property (whose loss he had arranged in the first place). Those who refused to work for him found themselves arrested by Wild, who would then claim the reward.
Jack’s refusal to share his profits with Wild argues either extreme foolhardiness or supreme confidence in his powers of escapology. He was arrested, tried and sentenced to hang. Four days before his appointment at Tyburn, he escaped from Newgate disguised as a woman. London, which has always liked a Jack the Lad, was agog with it.
Recaptured yet again, he was put into solitary confinement in Newgate’s equivalent of a high-security block, four floors up, The Castle. Jack freed himself from his handcuffs, broke his fetters, climbed up the chimney into the room above and then cracked open six locked, bolted and barred doors on his way up onto the roof, sixty feet up. And then went all the way back again to get his blanket before returning to lower himself with it onto the house next door, climbing into the garrett window and making his way downstairs and out through the front door to freedom.
How could Jack possibly follow that? Only one way, really. The next days were spent thumbing his nose at his fate. He mingled with crowds listening to ballads about his escape, had himself driven in a carriage past Newgate, robbed a pawnbroker’s, dressed finely, dined with the doxies, sent for his mother, promised he would flee the country, got more drunk, became incapable and was arrested in a brandy shop in Drury Lane.
People flocked to Newgate to see him, paying the turnkeys for the privilege. His route to Tyburn was lined by weeping girls throwing posies at his open cart. He stopped, as was customary, for a final mug of ale at the Bowl Inn in St Giles, and a pint of sack (wine) in Oxford Street. There were said to be 200,000, a third of London’s population, out for the hanging. At Tyburn, his autobiograpy was on sale, which must make the event a unique book launch.
Jack was a small, slight man and death by hanging was then a matter of slow strangulation rather than the later device of a sharp neck-breaking drop; the crowd spared him by rushing forward to pull down on his legs to hasten his end.
Jack was said to have told a visiting clergyman in Newgate that one file was worth all the bibles in the world. This didn't prevent another exhorting his flock to follow the example of this alternative Shepherd and ‘open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance, burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts, and mount the chimney of hope to the roof leads of divine meditation’.
Excerpt from The Book of Jacks (see Books page)
On!
November 15
Getting a touch older? Worried that you're a little what we used to call 'off the pace' and 'out of the swing'? Relax, or, rather, key word, 'chill': simply follow these handy tips and people won't think of you as old at all!
1) While walking around, play imaginary but vigorous tennis shots (a rush to the imaginary net to return a drop shot is particularly effective, I find).
2) Not hearing quite as sharply as you did, just a little Mutt and Jeff? Develop a cool, enigmatic smile and if in doubt, use one of my all-purpose replies, such as, ‘Whatever,’ 'You wish', 'Tell me about it!' (but definitely not 'I should cocoa!').
3) Ostentatiously bite into discreetly prepared apples.
4) Never, on any account, run (except for the last chocolate digestive, force majeure, obviously). Complete giveaway, even without the grimace. Instead channel your inner Bill Nighy and cultivate an insouciant (but wary) saunter, much kinder on the knees.
5) Instantly convert that sad sigh whenever you sit down into an urgent relevant rap.
6) Do not attempt a pleasantry with anyone under 30 (you must have noticed the dead look that comes into their eyes and, if you’re lucky, the automatic age-tolerant smile).
7) Even more importantly, never, in any circumstances whatsoever, attempt a joke, as that requires them to concentrate and unsettles their understanding of dementia.
9) No hesitation, half-proffered hand, that sort of thing: get your hug in first, and squeeze!
10) What do you mean there's no 8?
Going off for a nice lie-down now.
November 14
Welcome once again to another riproaring selection of my Oddly Fascinating Facts (OFF):
1) The longest name on record in Britain is Major Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache (1884-1917).
2) The floor in the dance to 'I'll Be Hard to Handle' in the Astaire & Rogers musical, 'Roberta', was the only wooden floor in all of the their films. They both loved working on it because they could tap and actually make the sounds of the taps. In the other musicals, their taps were dubbed over, as they were too quiet.
3) Mrs Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, mastered only four words in Chinese during her extensive time and travels in China and Hong Kong: 'Boy, pass the champagne!'.
4) Weight for weight, the Brussels sprout contains three times the level of vitamin C of an orange.
5) Male deep-sea squid mate indiscriminately with members of either sex because they can't see properly in the dark.
More from OFF as I have it!
November 13
Today, I note, is World Kindness Day. Ever eager to assist, might I suggest some random acts of kindness that will warm cockles, lighten the step and provoke one of those smiles where the eyes shine, the head goes to one side and a warm voice with a hint of a catch in it confides, 'Bless':
1) Why not approach a stranger (who, after all, is only a friend you haven't made yet) and say, 'Cheer up, it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile!'
2) Travelling on public transport? Whistling helps people with their day. I find that, out of my extensive repertoire, 'Colonel Bogey' and the 'Star Wars' theme go down best. Tne ones with the earbuds in never look happy, do they? Mime is the answer here, particularly anything involving a virtual sheet of glass.
3) Pack your items very slowly at the check-out so as to give the hard-pressed operative a bit of a break.
4) Drink an extra glass of water to help the hard-pressed shareholders in your struggling water company.
5) Send that nice Mr Musk some hand cream, as his poor fingers must be worn to the bone posting all those helpful and rigorously researched posts on his platform.
6) If you're in London, why not go and talk to one of the mounted cavalrymen at Horse Guards? It gets very boring for them, and they like nothing better than a chat about the political situation while you tickle the horse under its chin.
7) When using roundabouts, ignore that bare minimum requirement to give way to the right and opt for the far kinder approach of waving everyone through irrespective. I can hear the appreciative honks already!
8) Send poor Mr Farage a stick of Clacton rock as an aide memoire.
9) Don't forget that people really enjoy a detailed description of television programmes you've been watching,
10) And always remember that if in the unlikely event you have any enemies, kindness can be really irritating!
More Happiness tips very soon!
November 12
As the firm smack of authority seems increasingly popular currently, I thought I would supply my working list of overworked words, inelegant constructions and stale phrases that should be banned forthwith from public discourse and discussion, with penalties ranging from being forced to write them out 100 times or listening 200 times to comments and analyses prior to and following sporting contests; repeat offenders will be examined at length on the declarations and writings of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or Fred Sirieix.
There are, of course, some offences which are so endemic that rooting them out would prove prohibitively expensive, such as 'At the end of the day', 'level playing field', 'So...', 'like', or 'I'm glad you asked me that'. Others are a touch niche, and possibly pedantic: 'fulsome' to mean 'great' when it actually means 'insincerely flattering', or 'enormity' for enormous when it actually means 'enormously bad'. These are not hills to die on.
Others, though, be warned:
1) Unnecessarily inelegant images, what my distinguished former editor JWM Thompson used to describe as 'infelicitous': 'Suck it up,' 'Nailed it', 'Smashed it,' 'Grilled', 'Call out,' 'Hold his/her feet to the fire,' 'Firm smack'.
2) The lazy abandonment of accuracy and imagination displacing the original and useful meaning. Prime example: 'They' for his or her, whether it agrees with the verb or not. No one is arguing about the need; but please invent a new word. Please.
3) Prepositional abuse in the mistaken belief that it makes for more vivid language: 'Around' for 'About'; 'Ahead of' and 'In advance of' for 'Before'; 'Off of,' 'Back in the day'. And while we're on 'immediacy,' 'relevancy; and 'accessibility', the new historic present, where nothing happened, it's all happening now: 'Henry is born,' 'It is very much an age...' Grrrr!
4) Old images: 'Drawing Board', 'Blue Print,' 'Letting off steam'; Alien images: 'Stepping up to the plate,' a baseball expression when we have 'Stepping up the crease'. And what about 'Stepping up to the oche?' Of course!
5) And just because: 'Niche,' 'Not the hill to die on,' 'It is what it is,' 'The right thing to do,' 'remains to be seen,' 'The rest, as they say, is History,' 'You know, there's an ancient Chinese curse,"May you live in interesting times,' 'iteration,' 'cusp,' 'holistic,' 'existential,' 'surreal,' 'storied,' 'interrogate,' 'curate,' 'inhabit','tick the box,' 'Everything ok for you, Guys?'. And how many more people, do you think, are going to go on a journey?
My goodness, that's better! You should try it!
Next!
November 11
Remembering all who have been engaged by war, by choice or by order, and all shades between; heroes and cowards, and all shades between; fallen or survivors, and all shades between.
Represented by:
1) Jack Harrison, a thrilling rugby player of the great game, Rugby League, symbol and cypher for all the pride, wit, skill, belligerence and bloody-mindedness of the North of England.
Jack's searing speed, grace and sudden swerve had already gained him 90 tries in three seasons when he scored the winner for Hull FC against Wakefield Trinity in the 1914 Challenge Cup Final. The next year, he volunteered for France, and was commissioned temporary Second Lieutenant in the 11th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment.
In March 1917 he was awarded the Military Medal for conspicuous gallantry. One month later, he took off on the run of his life, across no-man’s-land, towards the German machine gun pinning down his men. He is reported as moving at speed, swerving between barbed wire, dodging shell holes, through enemy fire.
Then Hull’s Hero went down, never to be seen again, not there, or at the Boulevard, or Fartown, or Belle Vue, or Knowsley Road, or at any of the other great rugby league grounds, flying down his wing to the roar of the crowd, not guns. But he was carrying a grenade and the gun was destroyed; it was Jack’s last try, for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross.
He was a man of imagination, a schoolteacher: who knows what thoughts, what comparisons, went through his head on that final lung-bursting swerving, sprinting run; who knows what the Germans made of this lone figure racing for their line out of the dark with the guile and balance and bravery learnt on Yorkshire mud. He was 26. The one complaint about Jack as a rugby player was that he was a touch timid. ‘Before the beginning of next season,’ wrote a reporter in the Hull Daily Mail in 1914, ‘I am more than confident that the East Hull lad will be found in a more fearless mood.’ Indeed. And his son, also Jack, a Captain in the Duke of Wellington's Regiment, was killed at Dunkirk in 1940.
2) Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter, of the 2nd Parachute Batallion, who could be seen during the height of the Battle of Arnhem carrying an umbrella. This was because, as he explained, he could never remember passwords and the brolly would make it perfectly clear that he was British. He also used it on one occasion to disable a German armoured car by thrusting it through a slit and poking the driver in the eye.
When German tanks began to cross the Bridge (Too Far), Tatham-Warter led a bayonet charge against them with his pistol in one hand, swinging his umbrella above his head with the other and wearing a bowler hat.
He was injured, but escaped, made contact with the Dutch resistance, survived any number of encounters with the Germans, including helping them get a staff car out of a ditch, and organised the escape of around 140 stranded Parachute Regiment soldiers, 10 British and US pilots, two Russians and 15 Dutch across the Rhine.
After the War he ran safaris in Kenya. Also present at Arnhem was Father Bernard Egan, chaplain to the Battalion, who was taking shelter from mortar fire when the major came to help him cross the street; Father Egan mentioned the mortars: the major replied, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got an umbrella.'
3) Jack Nevin. They also served; afterwards, some cope with it in silence, and some by making light of it. My father's account of service life between 1939 and 1945 was not a routine one, despite an unswerving admiration for Churchill and ‘Monty’, and distinguished service in Egypt and Europe. After they had died, I found a letter from him to my mother which describes being under German shell fire in France shortly after D Day. He never mentioned it; the only shot of any significance he claimed to have fired, for example, seemed to have gone through a wall at the Rose and Crown, Colchester, nearly killing an American officer in the next bedroom.
Otherwise, by his account, he managed to rise quite peaceably from private to major in the Royal Army Service Corps (Run Away Someone’s Coming, as he loved to put it) because his superiors decided, rightly as it turned out, that a Lancashire grocer would be rather better at supplying the Eighth Army than any of their regular chaps. The high-ups, he said, seemed to think a Lancashire accent the outward sign of an inward trustworthiness. This belief proved particularly useful during their visits to his depots, which tended to involve groups of men moving the same stock to different points on the inspection route to disguise irregularities (not of his making, I stress). And he never did get to go back to the Western Desert to find all that sugar they had stored there, under the sand, away from Rommel, and which, he claimed, seeing as it was uncontaminated by Hiroshima, would now be worth a bloody fortune, if he could remember where he put it.
His memories of all this, including the Indian Army CO sitting down to lunch in a tent in the middle of the desert and sending the plates back because they hadn’t been warmed, would more often than not lead to the set piece of his war time: the embarkation from North Africa of 500 Italian prisoners of war followed by their immediate disembarkation and re-embarkation when he mistakenly counted only 499.
I can see him now, hugging his small but generously sized self over this, feet up, whisky in hand, and hear his chuckling exclamation at the daftness of it all: ‘Oooh, bloody hell!’, or, as he elided it, ‘Oooh, bloody’ell!”
Thank you, all, that there is a: Next!
November 10
Today, an exclusive sample from the News Division of Nevin's Unusual Trivia Selection (NUTS)! :
1) April,1999: Sophia Hadi drove all the way from Leeds to Washington, County Durham, after a friend there reported hearing a rare song thrush, only to find it was, in fact, the noise made by a forklift truck reversing at the local Asda.
2) June, 2013: A German bank clerk who fell asleep in mid transfer of 62.40 euros while his finger was on the "2" key ended up transferring 222,222,222.22 euros instead.
3) October, 2013: In Cornwall, Ontario, Donald Johnson, a lawyer, discovered the burglar in his home was a man he was representing on a burglary charge.
4) November, 2010: Matthew Nieveen (no relation) of Nebraska tested positive on his way home from a fancy dress party dressed as a breathalyser.
5) January, 2011: Andreas Mueller, 39, of Sachsen Anhalt won a Mini in a radio show contest by having the word "Mini" tattooed on to his penis.
More from NUTS very soon!
November 9
At the end of a challenging week, I have some quotations to aid your pensive ruminations on Life and Stuff:
1) 'Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.' AJ Balfour, UK Prime Minister, 1848-1930.
2) 'I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6/5 against.' Damon Runyon, 1880-1946, writer of fine stories and creator of such as Sky Masterson, Nathan Detroit, Nicely Nicely Johnson and Harry the Horse.
3) An admirer who spent the afternoon with Lord Tennyson in his garden reported only three remarks: 'Coals are very dear'; 'I get all my meat from London'; and 'It's those cursed rabbits!'
4) 'Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of Man.' Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900.
5) 'I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly,' Peter Cook, satirist, 1937-1995.
November 8
A crank of the miscellany handle, and we come up with...Towards More Colourful English!
And today, a few Lancashire phrases with which to enrich your already sparkling repartee:
1) 'I'm drawn to you. It's like magnetism. I'm a little nail and you're a big lump of iron.' (Lancashire is the county of romance.)
2) 'Give him a chance? I wouldn't give him the steam off my tea.'
3) 'Ooh, look what next door's cat's dragged in.' (A typically warm Lancastrian welcome.)
4) 'I've seen more meat on a butcher's apron.' ('You're very slim, aren't you?')
5)'They say the midwife who delivered him is still looking for the scissors.' ('He may be untrustworthy')'
6) 'He'd skin a flea then sell it a vest.' ('He is mean and untrustworthy.')
7) 'I can do owt except wheel myself in a barrow.'
8) 'I thought you had more oil in your can than that.'
9) 'Who's pissed on your chips?'
10) And finally, for a far superior euphemism to 'passed away', or, heaven forfend, 'passed', I would suggest this typical example of local delicacy and sensitivity: 'He/She has popped his/her clogs'.
Next!
November 7
Leonard Cohen, the Troubadour of the Age, died on this day in 2016. Poet, composer of plaint and anthem, lover of women, admirer of religions, blessed with an unique gift of echoing melancholy, the killer line, and self-wry wit.
Some of the things he sang and said:
1) 'I wish I could say everything in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.'
2) 'It's been a long time since I've stood on a stage in London. Was about I 4 or 15 years ago. I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I've taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Ritalin, Focalin. I've also studied deeply in the philosophies and religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.'
3) My page was too white, My ink was too thin, the day wouldn't write what the night pencilled in.'
4) 'Everybody know the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied.'
5) 'Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he'll never need to deal another. He was just some Joseph looking for manger.'
6) 'I was born with this gift of a golden voice.'
7) Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost.'
8). 'Follow me, said the wise man, but he walked behind.
9) 'A million candles burning for the help that never came'.
10) That last came from the song released to mark his 82nd birthday, earlier in 2016, and written amid the ascent or Donald Trump, 'You want it darker'. Worth a listen in these newly dark days:
November 6
Aarrgghh! The people have indeed spoken. And here are some other famous mistakes history:
1) Croesus, the rich one, King of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi if he should attack Persia. 'Cross the river Halys and a great nation will be destroyed,' intoned the Oracle. So Croesus did, and did: his own.
2) Macbeth, who, you will remember, had a bit of a research error over the exact circumstances of Macduff's birth.
3) Richard the Lionheart stopped to applaud the shot that killed him at the siege of Chalus.
4) Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden (1594-1632) refused to wear body armour at the Battle of Lutzen, declaring, 'God is my armour!'. Yes, the Battle of Lutzen was indeed in 1632.
5) Lord Chelmsford, who opined before the Zulu Wars that the only worry was whether the Zulus would fight. Rorke's Drift, Isandlwana, enough said.
6) Peter Crawford's self-defence in a New York court suffered a little when he asked a key witness in cross-examination: 'Did you get a good look at my face when I snatched your bag?'
7) Rommel decided Normandy was so quiet in June 1944 that he could afford to go home and celebrate his wife's birthday.
8) The chap who left Canada to escape the threat of nuclear war and settled in the Falkland Islands.
9) The Toronto lawyer demonstrating the safety of the windows in his office with his shoulder who plunged 24 floors to his death.
10) Those who use the expression 'shot themselves in the foot' are shooting themselves in the foot, as it derives from the First World War and was a deliberate method of escaping the trenches.
What a happy post!
Next four years, quickly!
November 5
Presidential elections, commemoration of potentially explosive high treason, exciting Conservative shadow ministerial appointments: today, prompted by the 113th anniversary of the birth of Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, we celebrate the real star of his act: his horse of course: Trigger!
Trigger (real name, Golden Cloud) got his big break playing Maid Marian's horse in that splendid swash, buckle and bow extravaganza, 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' (1938), also starring Errol Flynn and the incomparable Claude Rains (did you know he was born in Camberwell?). He (Trigger, not Claude) was snapped up in 1943 by Roy (whom, shallow fellow that I am, I might have been rather less impressed by in my youth if I'd known his real name was Len Slye. Ditto, for another random example, the alluring Cyd Charisse, real name, Tula Ellice Finkel. Diana Dors' real name, Fluck, would probably have worked today; then, not. A friend of mine remembers his father confiding to the family over Sunday lunch that Diana's real name was Clunt.)
But, Trigger: some horse. He could walk 50 feet on his hind legs, sit on a chair, and sign his name (admittedly only an x). He toured extensively, including in Britain, where in 1954 he was presented with a kilt in Dress Stewart Tartan on stage at the Glasgow Empire. (As you ask, it was Roy/Len's proudest boast that he had house-trained Trigger.) After his sad demise in 1965 at the venerable age of 31, Roy had him stuffed, and he can still be seen at the headquarters of the Cowboy Channel in Fort Worth, Texas.
Trigger was, of course, just one of many famous horses in television and film, including the Lone Ranger's Silver, Gene Autry's Champion the Wonder Horse, and possibly the most distinctive, Mr Ed, who talked. Legends about them abound, not least the often repeated claim that Mr Ed was, in fact, a disguised zebra. Allow me to settle the matter with this official statement from the programme's makers: 'A zebra was briefly used in several scenes in the series when Ed was unable to do some difficult stunts, but there's no truth to to the myth that a zebra was used the whole time. Ed was definitely a horse!' So there.
Coming soon: The real truth about Lassie.
And finally, a quote that might help the loser in the big election cope with his disappointment. It comes from Dick Tuck after he failed to be elected to the California Senate in 1966: 'The people have spoken, the bastards.'
Until tomorrow?
November 4
Writers! Struggling with the old creativity? Staring at the blank page? Pencils all sharpened? Wordle all done? Not staring out of the window so you will have something to do this afternoon? Here is some advice, and consolation, from the experience of others.
1) Victor Hugo used to take off all his clothes, using the cold and discomfort as a motivation to just get on with it so he could put them back on as soon as possible.
2) Virgil wrote one line a day.
3) When Edmund Gibbon presented the second volume of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' to The Duke of Gloucester, George III's brother, his grace graciously responded, 'Another damn'd thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?'
4) Publishers? Schmublishers! You must remember the one who told F Scott Fitzgerald 'You'd have a decent book if you got rid of that Gatsby character.'
5) 'Dubliners', James Joyce's wizard-like book of short stories, was rejected 22 times and then only sold 379 copies in its first year, 120 of which were purchased by James Joyce.
6) George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was rejected by TS Eliot at Faber & Faber.
7) Rejection letter to Marcel Proust (translated): 'My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but, rack my brains as I may, I can't see why a chap needs 30 pages to describe how he turns his head in bed. I clutched my head.'
8) Proust and Beatrix Potter (not a coupling you will often come across) were forced to self-publish.
9) Chill. It is a fact universally acknowledged that no book will be universally acknowledged. This, for example, is Mark Twain on Jane Austen in a letter to a friend: 'I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so much that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice', I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.'
10) Or, indeed, JRR Tolkien. Another reading from an early draft of 'The Lord of the Rings' to his literary group, The Inklings, was greeted by one of a fellow member thus: 'Oh no, not another fucking elf.'
Next!
November 3
Today, I have some useful advice should you encounter parents who are wont to elaborate extensively on the brilliance of their offspring. It is the 1,622nd anniversary of St Rumbold of Buckingham, who, as soon as he was born, declared, 'I am a Christian' three times, and the next day preached a sermon on Christian virtues and the Trinity.
Next!
November 2
Today, some of my favourite, if overworked, lines from the movies:
1) 'It's a long shot, but it might just work.'
2) 'You'll never get away with this, you know.'
3) 'All right, I'll tell you. What harm can it do? You're going to die anyway.'
4) 'I think I've heard just about enough.'
5) 'Cover me and I'll circle around behind them'
6) 'It seems we had old Jim figured all wrong.'
7) 'Guards!'
8) 'Now try and get some rest.'
9) 'Listen! ...'No, you listen!'
10) 'I'll see myself out.'
Watching my first Bond movie in a long time recently, I also much enjoyed it when, after they had survived any number of explosions, bullets, crashes and general mayhem, the girl greeted our hero's latest plan with, 'No, James, it's too risky!'
More great movie quotes very soon!
November 1
LS Lowry was born this day in 1887. Keith Waterhouse, the much-missed novelist, playwright, columnist and slight curmudgeon - he was from Hunslet - told this: 'Many years ago, the late L S L had an exhibition, which most unusually for this master of crowded street scenes, was dominated by single figures, including the famous one of a man lying on a wall with a bowler hat on his chest. The critics made much of this development, and saw the artist homing in on the essential loneliness of his characters.
'At the opening night party, Lowry provided me with his own interpretation: 'Y'see, Keith, I had a ten by eight to do for Merthyr Tydfil Corporation, but at the same time I'd this exhibition coming up and I'd promised them at least half a dozen new pictures. But with this big job on, the best I could do was dash off some of what I call me ones.'
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