Guilty

I have a confession to make. It is one of my guilty secrets. Admittedly, there are others but they will remain unspoken for the foreseeable  future.

Anyway, here goes (he gulps hard). Please don't ridicule me but I like to watch two early evening quiz programmes on I.T.V. - namely "Tipping Point" and "The Chase". At least it's not an addiction to cigarettes or heroin. Surely, it's pretty harmless.

Because I have an enormous reservoir of general knowledge and interesting trivia, I like to pit my wits against the question setters.

Hosted by the genial Ben Shephard, "Tipping Point" is the slower moving of the two quiz shows. It reminds me of  visits to seaside amusement arcades - dropping 2p coins into tipping machines. I have never been able to resist them. 

"The Chase" is hosted by cheeky chappie Bradley Walsh - a very familiar face on British television. Contestants are chased down by one of the five chasers - Paul Sinha, Jenny Ryan, Ann Hegarty, Shaun Wallace or Mark Labett (aka "The Beast").  I like the fast pace of this show and the large number of questions that are posed in each episode. There's little hanging about.

So there you have it. My guilty secret is out. One or two of you out there in the blogosphere may have imagined that I am an intellectual giant who struts around reciting lines from "Hamlet" or contemplating my own navel but such suppositions are misguided. I am just TV quiz show fodder, hooked like a rainbow trout in a Scottish river or a plastic duck at a fairground.

Do you have any guilty secrets you are prepared to share? 

Chain

Until we opened the box, we didn't know. There were two mugs. One for Shirley and one for me. She removed the white tissue from hers first and then I noticed she was blubbering. Why? Then I got the tissue off mine and straightaway I knew why. We are going to be grandparents if Nature takes her proper course. 

Everybody knows now so why not share the good news with blog friends? Baby Pudding should arrive after Christmas - perhaps on the day of the next Haxey Hood on The Isle of Axholme - January 6th. It's early days yet and common sense says that a proportion of pregnancies end in tears but in spite of this we cannot help being ridiculously excited. The chain of life continues - connecting us all to the past and future.

Here are the parents-to-be yesterday afternoon - under Stanage Edge with the big smiley millstone. Maybe one day I will take my little grandson or granddaughter there. I hope so.

Vera

Vera Lynn died on Thursday and with her something of England died too. She was 103 years old. Significantly, her name, Vera, meant truth. 

She was just a singer but her voice was the very soundtrack of Britain's fightback in World War II. She sang for the troops and even flew over to Burma to provide a much needed lift for military personnel sent there to push back against the Japanese.

At my mother's funeral service at The East Riding Crematorium in September 2007, the last sound we heard was Vera Lynn singing "The White Cliffs of Dover". It was a special song for my mother and father for they were both in The Royal Air Force during World War II and the "bluebirds" referred to in the song anticipated returning aircraft when the war was finally over. 

I remember sitting there in the crematorium, looking up at a beautiful stained glass window through which sunlight streamed and listening in silence to:-

There'll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of Dover

Tomorrow

Just you wait and see

Mum and Vera. They were of the same generation and many times I recall my mother singing that very song as she beat the Yorkshire pudding mixture in our kitchen  or ironed her sons' shirts. For her it would have brought back memories of fliers she knew who had died and of a terrible war that wracked the entire planet like a coronavirus pandemic.

Vera was an ordinary girl from an ordinary home in East London. Her father was a plumber and her mother was a dressmaker. That was part of her appeal and to some extent explains her ability to communicate with ordinary men and women caught up in a war that was not of their making.

It is funny that when old people die, what we mostly remember is how they looked just before they arrived at death's dark door. I think it would often be far more appropriate to remember those people as they were in their prime. See Vera Lynn's signed postcard image at the top of this post. No doubt she signed it in the very middle of that terrible war when she was the nation's sweetheart.

And so we bid farewell Vera. As your song says, "Peace ever after". Let's hope so.

Parenting

Frances and Ian on holiday in France in 1997

No sense of anticipation can ever match the feelings connected with a desired pregnacy. I knew it four times but two of those possible children were ectopic - affixing themselves within my wife's two fallopian tubes a few years apart. And then they were gone - almost as soon as they had announced their presence. They were unnamed and unseen and therefore their passing remains harder to mourn. They had little substance - it was really just the idea of human lives that had departed.

Fortunately, we had two normal children - whatever "normal" night mean. They were not disabled in any way. Their development was "normal" and they both  had happy childhoods in a loving family, growing into happy citizens with minds of their own and a keen sense of right and wrong. 

It was a privilege to watch them grow, to tick off the passing months and years, to witness them becoming fully fledged adult human beings. There were no problems to speak of - no problems with mental or physical health - no problems with schooling, the police, drugs or angry behaviour in the home. We were blessed and we still are.

But now I get to the main point of this post. I want to spare a thought for all those parents who find themselves raising children who have serious challenges to face. We hear about these kids all the time.

Children who are mentally impaired - who cannot speak and will never develop beyond the level of a two year old. Children who cannot walk. Children who have suffered amputations because of meningitis. Deaf, dumb and blind children. Children with cystic fibrosis. Children with severe epilepsy. Children who will never leave home to live independently.

I raise my hat to the parents of these children. Mothers and fathers who discover inner resources that they never imagined they possessed. Parents who fight for their children in spite of their disabilities and their prospects. Parents with patience and huge hearts who keep battling to beat the obstacles they meet even though the son or daughter they continue to support is unlike the child they had dreamt of.

There are so many special parents like that and to me they are absolute heroes. I am not confident that if I had been in their shoes I would have been able to do likewise. Perhaps one of those special parents is reading this blogpost. Kudos to you my friend. You deserve our respect and our admiration.

Haxey

Haxey St Nicholas Church - seen across The Hood Field

Haxey is a large village in the middle of The Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire. Clint whisked me over there yesterday morning to meet up with my old friend Tony for a long country walk. Tony lives in my homeland - The East Riding of Yorkshire.

As it happens, The Isle of Axholme is where my lovely wife grew up. It isn't really an island but prior to the seventeenth century it was a very watery world bounded by rivers with a few villages situated on higher ground. Villages like Epworth, Belton, Crowle, High Burnham and Haxey. By the way if there are any Methodists reading this, The Isle of Axholme was the cradle of your religion. John and Charles Wesley were born and raised in Epworth.

With boots on, we left the car park attached to St Nicholas's Church in Haxey and set off along an old railway bed to Epworth. We ate sandwiches in the delightful grounds of the main methodist church and considered the course of Britain's response to the pandemic. We agreed that our current prime minister has done nothing to dispel the conclusion that he is an egotistical buffoon. Someone who wanted the spotlight but is weak on detail and judgement. During these critical times, we needed a better-informed, wiser political leader. Plenty of glaring and indeed fatal mistakes have been made since the British lockdown began.

The best picture I took yesterday - road to Epworth Turbary

Anyway, after lunch we wandered west from Epworth to discover a new word - "turbary". It is contained in the names Epworth Turbary and Haxey Turbary. These locations were just two miles apart. One dictionary says this "turbary - the ground where turf or peat may be dug especially for fuel". The word relates to ancient land rights that were largely ignored when The Isle of Axholme was tamed by Dutch drainage experts.three hundred and fifty years ago.

Rising ground brought us through a field of maize seedlings to Westwoodside. You could see for miles. Then we passed the field where the famous "Haxey Hood" is played out each January - with teams of men from different pubs battling to bring the "hood" home. To learn more go here.

It was good to meet up with Tony. He walks at the same pace as me - in more ways than one. Weather permitting we plan to reconvene for another walk next week. However, as I sit here typing out this account, my right foot is giving me so much gyp that I had to limp downstairs this morning. Funny that. When the walk finished I felt no discomfort whatsoever. Hope it's back to normal by next week. After all, Clint loves to spend quality downtime with Tony's female car - Elsie!

Skyers Farm near Haxey

Cabaret

Life is a Cabaret

(by John Kander & Fred Ebb)

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come, hear the music play.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret.
Put down that knitting, the book and the broom;
Time for a holiday.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret.

Come taste the wine. Come hear the band.
Come blow your horn, start celebrating,
Right this way, your table's waiting.
No use permitting some prophet of doom to
Wipe every smile away.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
So come to the cabaret!

I used to have this girl friend known as Elsie
With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea.
She wasn't what you'd call a blushing flower
As a matter of fact she rented by the hour.
The day she died the neighbours came to snicker
Well, that's what comes of too much pills and liquor.
But when I saw her laid out like a queen
She was the happiest corpse I'd ever seen.
I think of Elsie to this very day.
I remember how she'd turn to me and say:

"What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a cabaret, old chum.
Come to the cabaret.
And as for me, ha!
And as for me,
I made my mind up back in Chelsea
When I goooooooooooooooo,
I'm going like Elsie.

Start by admitting from cradle to tomb
There isn't that long a stay
Life is a Cabaret, old chum
It's only a Cabaret old chum
And I love a Cabaret!

Heroism

Two black British heroes have emerged in the past week - during a time when many old questions about racism are being revisited. After all, black lives really do matter.

In the picture above you can see Patrick Hutchinson carrying an injured white demonstrator away from trouble at a heated political demonstration in London on Saturday. Naturally, Mr Hutchinson is a supporter of "Black Lives Matter" but the fellow he was rescuing is a right wing counter-demonstrator who was in Parliament Square to turn up the heat with like-minded thugs who confronted the police with violent intent.

Mr Hutchinson said, “His life was under threat so I just scooped him up on to my shoulders and started marching towards the police with him. It was scary. But you don’t think about it at the time, you do what you’ve got to do.”

Even more of a hero to me is 22 year old Marcus Rashford - the Manchester United and England footballer. It would be so easy for a young fellow like that to pull down the shutters on the world outside his window, to check his bulging bank account and investments, order a new Italian sports car on a whim and forget where he came from.

But he hasn't done that. He has remembered his origins - growing up in a deprived district of Manchester in a one parent family, often not knowing where the next meal was coming from.

Even before yesterday he had raised £20,000,000 during the pandemic to support food banks and address child poverty. He is a shy, quietly-spoken young man but yesterday he graced our TV screens to urge the government to continue its food voucher scheme for poor families throughout the school summer holidays and this morning he has tweeted these challenges for everyone to read:-

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1. When you wake up this morning and run your shower, take a second to think about parents who have had their water turned off during lockdown. 

2. When you turn on your kettle to make a cup of tea or coffee think of those parents who have had to default on electricity bill payments just to make ends meet having lost their jobs during the pandemic.

3. And when you head to the fridge to grab the milk, stop and recognise that parents of at least 200,000 children across the country this morning are waking up to empty shelving 

4. Recognise children around the country are this morning innocently questioning ‘why?’ 9 out of 30 children in any given classroom are today asking ‘why?’ ‘Why does our future not matter?’ 

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Marcus's pleas for a U-turn on government policy will be debated in The House of Commons today. Kudos to him for sticking his head above the parapet in the cause of social justice in order to simply put food in children's bellies. He isn't carrying  a  right wing demonstrator away from a good kicking, he is doing something much more important and arguably more brave than that. After all of her struggles, his mother must be so very proud of him this morning.