Toy

In most homes, where people of a certain age reside, it would be possible for forensic teams to uncover secret caches of photo negatives and long forgotten colour slides. The Pudding household is no exception. Such items belong to older imaging technology. With computers and digital photography now widely used, the old stuff is often and quite understandably overlooked. After all, what can you do with it?

Well I got a toy this Christmas - from my younger brother - Simon. It's a "5MP Slide and Film Scanner" that connects to our computer via a USB port. It's really quite simple to use. So far I've only been scanning old colour slides. You click your mouse and the image is saved as a jpeg in your "My Pictures" folder. It's really very easy. Here's the little scanner I've been using:-

And here's a scan derived from a colour slide I created at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 on the morning after that amazing musical festival had finished. I took it with a camera I had just found hanging in the men's rather primitive open air lavatories. It was a Pentax Spotmatic and I had absolutely no idea how to use it. I didn't even know if there was a film in the camera. I just snapped. A light drizzle was falling as the couple under the polythene got ready to leave the festival site:-

And this is me at nineteen years old way back in 1973. I'm half standing in the dugout canoe that my friend Majito - who was also nineteen - had created with his own hands. It was on the island of Rotuma- halfway between what were then the Ellice Islands and Fiji. I believe the Ellice Islands were renamed Tuvalu after independence. Not too proud of that hairstyle. I seem to recall that my laundry girl, Maria, created it with a pair of kitchen scissors and a lot of laughter:-

I swear I'm not being sponsored by Maplin Electrics Ltd but if you want to give new life to old slides and negatives, I suggest you treat yourself to a film and slide scanner. Hopefully, you'll rediscover pictures that are not even half as embarrassing as that picture of me and the outrigger canoe!

Awards

...And so ladies and gentlemen, another successful year in the blogging industry draws to a close. It has been a year in which we have seen consolidation married with innovation. Some formerly effective members of the blogging community have suffered from "burn out" - withdrawing to various rehabilitation centres to recuperate. Fortunately, the gaps left by their absences have been purposefully filled by an new cohort of up and coming graduates from the international blogger training programme.

Now we come to the main business of this evening's gathering, here in the marble grandeur of Pudding Towers - the presentation of our industry's much-coveted Yorkshire Pudding Laughing Horse Awards for 2010. These prestigious awards entitle winners to copy and paste the award widget (shown at the head and end of this post) into their own blogs. As in previous years, this year's widget is a unique designer artefact that will be admired for years to come. I repeat that only registered winners are allowed to copy and paste it as it is subject to stringent copyright regulations.

In no particular order, here are this year's winners...

Australian Blogger of the Year - Helen at "Helsie's Happenings"

Award for the Advancement of Art Through Blogging - Katherine at "The Last Visible Dog"

Best Blogger in Sloughhouse, California - Jan at "Cosumne Girl"

Best Blogger in his street in Canton, Georgia - Robert at "Rhymes With Plague"

Best Blogger in The State of Ohio - Sam at "The Golden Hill"

Second Best Yorkshire Blogger - Daphne at "My Dad's A Communist"

Nicest and Most Polite Blogger - Jenny at "Demob Happy Teacher"

Award for the Advancement of History Through Blogging - Elizabeth at "Well This Isn't Gettin T'Ens Fed"

Foremost and Funniest Welsh Blog - John Gray at "Going Gently"

Best Blogger on the Island of Westray, Orkney - Malc at "Edge of Nowhere"

Best Mancunian Blog and Best Designed Blog - Ian at "Shooting Parrots"

Award for the Advancement of Photography Through Blogging - Michael at "In Sydney With an Old Leica"

After much deliberation by our team of knowledgeable judges, it has been decided that the overall Blogger of the Year for 2010 is..... (drum roll and ad break)... is Mr John Gray at "Going Gently" whose self-deprecating blog entries make hearty entertainment from the mundanity of everyday life in Trelawnyd, North Wales. His affection for his dogs and various fowl is matched only by his abject and incomprehensible hatred of starlings!

Editor- "Cue theme music. Roll credits!"

Mimicry

Recently I gave permission for the "Emmerdale" actress Catherine Tyldesley to imitate that famous scene from "American Beauty" where Mena Suvari lies on a bed of red roses. Miss Tyldesley was raising money for a charity which seeks to conquer muscular dystrophy. Her take on the "American Beauty" scene was to lie - not amidst roses - but in a bed of Yorkshire puddings!

Here's Miss Suvari:-

And here's Miss Tyldesley:-

I hope you will agree that the second picture is much sexier. I mean, what's going to turn a red-blooded man on the most? A dolly bird on a bed of roses or the same on a bed of Yorkshire puddings? No contest! The only thing missing from Miss Tyldesley's picture is lashings of onion gravy. Old Robbie Burns had it wrong when he wrote:-

Oh my love is like a red, red rose

That's newly sprung in June;

My love is like the melodie

That's sweetly played in tune.

It surely should have read:-

Oh my love is like a Yorkshire Pudding

That's newly risen in the pan

My love is like the Christmas jumper

That was knitted by my nan.

Next time Miss Tyldesley wishes to do a photoshoot, I will propose that she lies in bed with just one Yorkshire Pudding - that's if I can fit her in to my busy schedule!

Television

The Royle Family Xmas 2010

No more gathering round a burning Yule log on Christmas night. In most Yorkshire homes, families crash out on their DFS sofas, bloated to bursting point with roast turkey, pigs in blankets, parsnips, chestnut stuffing, cranberry sauce, brussel sprouts and Christmas pudding. The television is switched on and conversation dwindles.

On our new flatscreen Samsung LED TV, we watched two comedy shows - "The Royle Family" followed by "Come Fly With Me" devised by David Walliams and Matt Lucas of "Little Britain" fame.

All of us laughed along with "The Royle Family" which always seems to hit the spot. I still think it's quite brilliant how the writers of this show wring out humour from a most unlikely circumstance - a working class family just sitting around in their living room dominated by Jim, a lazy, farting but ultimately kind-hearted Homer Simpson type figure. In some hands, the show might have simply caricatured and mocked such an unexceptional family but Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash endow their characters with an underlying decency that wins our affection alongside our tears of laughter.

This Christmas special focused on Joe Carroll, the Royles' next door neighbour, and his continuing all-consuming grief for the loss of his wife Mary whose ashes he brings to the party in an urn. At one point Joe, played by Hull-born actor Peter Martin, sings - rather beautifully "An Irish Lullaby" in memory of his beloved Mary. Everyone listens and when Joe has finished, Jim says simply, "Nice that Joe...Nice that".

Of course later Jim manages to knock the urn off the table, scattering Mary's precious ashes all over the carpet but have no fear - Barbara's got a new Dyson vacuum cleaner to save the day.

In contrast, "Come Fly With Me" with its brilliant costumery and make-up was a huge let-down. It took the format of the documentary series "Airport" and attempted to create a spoof version. Frankly, it was cringeworthy and all of my family had the sense that Walliams and Lucas were simply proving that their once popular brand of off-the-wall humour had pretty much reached the end of its tether. Some of the characters they created were offensive racial stereotypes and sadly the large financial investment made in this show's visual effects was not matched by the writing. We were so unmoved by it that we had to switch over with ten minutes to go. Its failure was in stark contrast to the success of "The Royle Family".

On Boxing Day Night, Shirley and I watched the Football League Show with highlights of the match we'd seen at Bramall Lane earlier in the day. It was a game filled with high drama and a last minute decider scored by Jimmy Bullard to leave us cheering the final score:- Sheffield United 2 Hull City 3! What a brilliant late Christmas present and what a great first football match for Ian's lovely girlfriend Ruby to experience. We were on the back row at the visitors' end.... "Bramall Lane is falling down, falling down, falling down. Bramall Lane is falling down - it's a s---hole!" and "They're ere they're there they're every f---ing where. Empty seats! Empty seats!" Pure poetry.

Jimmy Bullard scores the last minute winner for Hull City

Greetings

Another Christmas. Another winter solstice just gone. The turkey's in the oven waiting for morning. Presents are under the tree. We have so much to be grateful for. But see the picture in my Christmas card. It was taken from "The Island" rural cemetery in the middle of County Clare, Ireland on June 30th. It's where the body of my oldest brother, Paul, lies beneath the sod, snug against that rough limestone wall. I spoke with him every Christmas Day but not this year. And yet, and yet... I still hear his fiddle sawing out jigs and reels and the pints of Guinness on the bar in Vaughan's and his impatience, his strings of jokes, the frenetic way in which he finished phone calls with a staccato "Bye-bye-bye-bye-bye" like a machine gun and I remember his big heart, his love of people and his disregard for status high or low. Everyone was his equal and he loved life with a passion. Dear, dear Paul, I miss you. Happy Christmas bro! Happy Christmas everybody!

Babysitting

Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I earned quite a lot of pocket money through babysitting. Mostly I went to two homes on nearby Barley Gate - a small private housing estate that had been built on fields adjacent to our house in the mid-sixties.

In one of the homes I went to, there was a little boy called Neil. Often, after his parents had driven off, he'd get up and tiptoe downstairs to get me to read him a story. He'd sit on my knee and when the story was done, I'd take him back upstairs and tuck him in. Twenty years later, I met him again in a pub in Beverley. He came over and hugged me - though at first I didn't recognise him. He was now a strapping, handsome soldier - as tall as me and so obviously delighted to reconnect with a character he remembered warmly from his happy childhood.

At the other home I went to, there were two little girls. One was called Dawn but I can't remember the younger girl's name. Their mother, Pat, always made me up a supper tray which I'd look forward to after a spell of A level homework. The little girls nearly always slept soundly. I would look in on them occasionally to check that they were okay. Once Dawn woke up - she had a bad cold - and I brought her into the warm sitting room where I made up a story about fairies in the garden before carrying her back to her bed.

When we moved from the Crookes region of Sheffield here to Banner Cross, our Frances was only ten months old. A schoolboy called Jamie - who was seventeen at the time - called round every Friday to collect payment for the week's milk deliveries. He was an affable young man and after a few weeks we decided to ask him if he'd like to make a bit more pocket money by babysitting for us. He jumped at the chance and so for a few months we had the services of a trustworthy babysitter.

Jamie is now in his late thirties and a manager at the nearby suburban restaurant where Frances worked as a silver service waitress from the age of fourteen. Jamie kindly offered her a few shifts through the Christmas period. On her first night back, he announced to some of the new waitresses that this was Frances and that he used to babysit for her when she was literally a baby. One of the new girls said something like this - "You mean her parents trusted you to babysit? A teenage lad looking after a little girl?" The essence of her remark clearly being that young men cannot be trusted when it comes to child-minding for they are all potential perverts or paedophiles.

Living across the road from us now, there's a lovely little family, including two delightful small girls called Sophie and Helen. I know them far better than Shirley does simply because - since my "retirement" - I've seen a lot more of them. The dad, Chris, has a job which often takes him out of the country so his wife frequently has to operate as if she's heading a one parent family. I talked it over with Shirley and offered our babysitting services. Interestingly, they have made the automatic assumption that it will be Shirley doing the babysitting and not me. Between the lines, I can sniff that same widespread notion that you just cannot trust men any more when it come to babysitting.

It is both sad and maddening. Jamie and I are like the vast majority of men everywhere. The idea of sexual contact with children is repulsive to us. Our instinct to protect children and brighten their days is as strong in us as it is in the majority of women. Why should we as "normal" right-minded men have to suffer unspoken suspicions nurtured by the gutter press and inflammatory television programmes? Small children have the right to learn that daddy is not the only good guy and that nearly every man they encounter will mean them no harm whatsoever.

Creatures

As I write this, it is currently -6 degrees centigrade. The earth is frozen as solid as the twelve pound Christmas turkey I bought from "Iceland" at lunchtime. Afterwards, I drove up the hill out of Woodseats to Graves Park, donned my trusty boots and went for a wander. This is what I saw:-

A Kerry Hill Sheep at the door of her designer dwelling

On Frozen Pond - desperate ducks

A Middle White pig called Robert outside his comfy hut

Highland cattle clustering together

The domestic animals are being properly cared for. I saw two farm workers using a butane blowtorch to melt away thick surface ice in the cattle's water trough. The pigs and the sheep had fresh straw and friends to cuddle up with in the children's petting farm. But like all wild birds just now, the ducks are having a hell of a time of it. They can survive short cold snaps quite tenaciously but if sub-zero days turn to weeks, the cold will claim many casualties.