Friday

Just back from "The Itchy Pig" where I drank two pints with Alan the CAMRA man. CAMRA stands for Campaign for Real Ale. This is an organisation that celebrates good beers and well-kept hostelries. Recently, Alan has been on his rounds across Yorkshire seeking "the pub of the year". It is a hard job but somebody has got to do it.

This afternoon I was mostly out in the garden trimming hedges and bushes. Our garden is 45 metres long or 49 yards if you prefer.  There's a lot of trimming to do but fortunately on the left-hand side  the boundary hedge is only about twenty metres long. After that we have a fence, borders and the neighbours' garage.

It was hot and sticky out there. I made a dinner of chicken, salad and new potatoes. I had grown the lettuce myself - lollo rosso which is strangely unattractive to slugs that clearly prefer other lettuce varieties.

Later, after more garden work, I came back in the house to watch football on the television. It was the third quarter final of the Women's Euros in Switzerland. The host nation were playing Spain who fluffed two penalties but still manage to win the match by two goals.

It was dramatic but not half as dramatic as England's victory over Sweden on Thursday night. Our lasses won that game after extra time in a penalty shoot-out. Hurray for The Lionesses! They will play Italy in their semi-final next Tuesday night. Come on England!

Midnight is fast approaching. I have got to get this blogpost published by the witching hour. All I need to do now is find an  image I can slap at the top of this hurriedly written blogpost - something relevant to the content would be good.

Neighbours

We have lived on this street for thirty six years. There have been many comings and goings. Generally, it is a quiet, law-abiding street where residents look after their homes and show good manners towards each other. In thirty six years, you get to know people while often maintaining a polite distance.

Immediately next to us there's Joseph and Mary. Now in their eighties, they have been perfect next door neighbours. We attended  the weddings of two of their grown-up children and they came to Frances and Stew's wedding in August 2019. Joseph was an academic in the metallurgy department of The University of Sheffield and Mary was a primary school teacher. The only time we ever really hear them is when Joseph is practising his french horn. He is in a local brass band. As time has passed, Mary has become noticeably less mobile as arthritis claims yet another victim. She and I share the same birthday.

On the other side there's Wally and Dolly and their teenage daughters Molly and Polly. They arrived in 2007 and though I am not fond of them they are generally quiet people - except when he's engaged in one of his D.I.Y projects that always involves a lot of banging. During the main COVID lockdown in 2020, he decided to build a big shed at the bottom of their garden which meant that on many of those lovely warm days I could not sit outside reading. Too much sawing, hammering and drilling. They call that shed their studio but in the past five years they have hardly used it.

Directly opposite us there's Carol and Nigel and their teenage daughters Lucy and Laura. Actually the girls were not conceived with Nigel's kind assistance. Fourteen years ago, their blood father Maurice the laser scientist hooked up with a German work colleague and buggered off to Southampton to live with her. Lucy has special needs and is on the autism spectrum. She is picked up by a taxi driver every morning and brought home by taxi in the late afternoon. Her special school is twenty five miles away. The school fees and the taxi bills are all paid for by cash-strapped Sheffield City Council.

On the other side of Joseph and Mary lives a German woman called Hanna and her teenage son Lukas. His electrician father did a Maurice several years ago - buggering off with his new fancy woman.  Hanna is lovely and when Lukas was little I used to whistle the theme tune to "Postman Pat" when I knew he was playing in his garden. A kind of magic through the hedges. He remembers it to this day.

On the other side of Wally and Dolly there's Gertrude who has lived in the same house for sixty years. She is ninety now and gradually, like Mary, being claimed by the arthritis beast. She has always had an upbeat, cheerful attitude to life but nowadays you can see the pain in her eyes. I hope to god that that nasty creature does not get me or Shirley as more years trundle by. Stay away Arthur Itis! Not wanted here!

Very often when I go to our back door to put vegetable waste or teabags in our compost caddy, I think of Sharon who lived just a few doors away. One evening she was doing the same when she tumbled down her outdoor concrete steps and broke several bones - including her skull. She was never the same again and was dead within three years - at the age of seventy.

There are many more pieces of information I could convey about our neighbours but  I am drawing a line at this point...↓ ↓ ↓

_____________________________________________________________

We never really choose our neighbours do we? People randomly come together - often for years on end. On the whole, I think Shirley and I have been pretty lucky with our neighbours. None of them ever behaved as if they came from Hell though they might not say the same of us!

P.S. In case you had not guessed, for privacy reasons, all actual neighbours' names were replaced in this blogpost.

Novel

 

I gobbled up "God's Own Country" by Ross Raisin in three days. It grabbed me from the first page. Of course "God's Own Country" is a term that is frequently used to describe Yorkshire so that is what probably first caught my eye and indeed the novel is set in Yorkshire - mostly on the North York Moors where there are sheep farms, picture postcard towns and villages and incomers from other parts of the country seeking some sort of rural idyll.

The central character is also the narrator. He is Sam Marsdyke the nineteen year old son of a poor sheep farmer. What should we make of him? He is a fantasist with a big chip on his shoulder. He seems to spend a lot of his spare time brooding alone upon the moors.

Sam is clearly in partial denial about past misdemeanours and his version of events that occur in the novel itself seems unreliable. He is a hard narrator to like or trust. As the novel ends, you wonder what might become of him, suspecting that all will not be well.

In the acknowledgements, Ross Raisin cites "The Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore " by Arnold Kellett which clearly helped to make Sam's narrative voice  sound  authentic.

He reserves a special disdain for country visitors: "Ramblers. Daft sods in pink and green hats. It wasn't even cold. They moved down the field swing-swaying like a line of drunks, addled with the air and the land, and the smell of manure".

And here's Sam observing a school bus as it disgorges pupils from a nearby fee-paying school: "I crouched behind the hedge, spying through the mesh of thorns at the hubbleshoo of small boys spewing out the bus. They were all over the road in an instant, squawking zigzags through the mass to clobber each other round the head with their bags. Next were the little girls, slower, mingled in with the big-belly boys who weren’t so partial on chasing about. And then the older ones. The girls kept separate from the lads, paired up tantling down the road with a snitter of talk kept close between the two as if all they had to say was secrets, meant for the hearing of nobbut themselves."

In this blogpost/review I have tried not to give too much away about the book. The main things I wish to say are that I really enjoyed it and it was quite disturbing too. In America, it was published as "Out Backward". Lord knows what American readers will have thought about all the North Yorkshire dialect words and expressions.

Sentenced

Foreign visitors to this blog who inhabit far flung places like Australia, Ireland, Canada, Tristan da Cunha, Sweden, Germany and Trumplandia (formerly the USA) may be interested to learn what has happened to the two ignorant oiks who in 2023 cut down that iconic sycamore tree near Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland. They were sentenced today - several weeks after they were found guilty of a crime that pricked the conscience of  the British nation.

Daniel Graham (39) and Adam Carruthers (32) were both sentenced to four years and three months in jail. The judge - Mrs Justice Lambert - found them "equally culpable".

This was my original blogpost from back in October 2023 - just after I had heard the news about the cruel felling of the famous sycamore. And here I was in May of this year writing about the trial.

It seems to me that justice has been done in this case. Even though Graham and Carruthers may not serve all their allotted time behind bars, a significant chunk of their freedom has now been taken away. I doubt that they have the wherewithal to ponder upon their offensive crime with true regret - such is their ignorance.

Natural beauty is something to cherish and respect be it a mountain top, a rainbow, a swathe of heather on a moorside, a frog leaping into a pond, swallows winging in the summer air or a lone sycamore tree standing proud in the rolling Northumberland landscape.

Of course there are far worse people than Graham and Carruthers. They didn't kill anybody. They didn't fly an aeroplane into a skyscraper. They didn't detonate a rucksack bomb on a tube train. They didn't abuse a child or rob a bank. But they offended the society of which they are meant to be a part, finding inexplicable pleasure in destroying something that was so beautiful and defenceless and loved by thousands of their fellow citizens.

Throwback

Here in Britain, people of my generation had to endure some pretty ropy children's  television when we were little. Even so, we were enthralled by the limited menu - all in black and white of course. I guess that as children we had a better capacity than most adults  for making allowances for the amateurishness of it all.

This is a "down memory lane" kind of blogpost. I thought that visitors from foreign lands might be interested in getting a taste of what British children lapped up in the late 1950s through to the early sixties.

Here's "Andy Pandy"...

Here are "The Woodentops"...

And here are Bill and Ben  "The Flowerpot Men"...

Of course there was no catch-up TV back then. No videos. And these shows were screened only once a week. If you missed "Andy Pandy" you would have to wait till next week to see another episode.

Looking back, it is easy to deduce that the programmes I have flagged up were crude foundation stones  from which later, much more sophisticated children's television could evolve. Everything has to start somewhere.

Vicariousness

 

When you have children and grandchildren, you do not really need to live your own life. Instead, you can live their lives vicariously. You are with them as they suffer their lows and their disappointments and equally you are with them when they achieve special things - their highs, their moments of joy.

Above, that's a picture of our son Ian, taken this very afternoon. He successfully completed an ultra-marathon, running (and walking)  fifty kilometres from Wantage, Oxfordshire to Avebury in Wiltshire in an event called "Race for The Stones". Most of the way, competitors ran along an ancient track called The Ridgeway.

Shirley and I were quite concerned about this event as it happened to fall upon one of the hottest weekends of the year. However, all was fine. Ian set off at 5am in an early morning mist that hung about till around 7am before being burnt off by hot sunshine. He approached it all sensibly, taking advantage of aid stations along the way and he was buzzing at the end.

In Great Britain, it used to be that graduation ceremonies only happened in universities. However, probably owing to American influence, our secondary and primary schools picked up on the idea of graduation ceremonies for younger students too.

Yesterday, there was even a graduation ceremony at our oldest granddaughter's nursery school. Phoebe has been in attendance there for almost three years but now she only has a handful of weeks left before moving on to the local primary school.

The video of the ceremony made me laugh when I saw Phoebe literally skipping to the stage. That doesn't usually happen at university graduation ceremonies.

Tickets

Ring-ring, ring-ring...

"Hello. Wimbledon Ticket Office. How can we help you?"

"Oh hello there. My name is David Beckham*. I would like to speak to your manager."

"Of course. Just a moment Mr Beckham."

"Hello. Deborah Snodgrass here. I am the ticket office manager . How can we help you Mr Beckham?"

"Well, I would like to see the men's final this year and I was wondering if you had any complimentary tickets left in the royal box for VIPs?"

"Oh, for you Mr Beckham. I am sure we can sort something out. How many tickets do you need?"

"Just two Deborah. For me and my oldest son - Brooklyn."

"No problem Mr Beckham. I will leave two tickets for you at reception. You need to pick them up by three o'clock."

"Thank you for  your help Deborah."

"Bye-bye."

 Ring-ring, ring-ring...

"Hello. Wimbledon Ticket Office. How can we help you?"

"Oh hello. I am just phoning on the off chance that you might have some spare tickets for tomorrow's men's final?"

"Excuse me. Who are you?"

"My name is Grace Honey. I have been a tennis fan all my life but I have never been to Wimbledon."

"Are you a celebrity?"

"No but I am well-known here in Bridlington. I have coached children's tennis for the past thirty years, rain and shine."

"Oh. So you are not a celebrity?"

"No. Not really."

"I am afraid we can't help you then. Bye!"

Ring-ring, ring-ring...

"Hello. Wimbledon Ticket Office. How can we help you?"

"I would love to get a ticket for the men's final tomorrow but I am afraid I don't have any money."

"You must be kidding me! If you are not a bona fide celebrity then there's no way we can give you a complimentary ticket."

"But I am dying of lung disease."

"No way!"

"I am a paraplegic!"

"Nope!"

"I  once saw Roger Federer in a Subway sandwich shop."

"Just a minute. I will have to talk to my manager."

_____________________________________________________________

* - for David Beckham, you may substitute 
the name of any other well-known celebrity.