Hooptedoodle #324 - Schlimm's Big Idea - Part 1 of an occasional series

The Grand Duke sat slumped in his chair, glowering at the papers on his desk. His breakfast tray had been pushed to one side, where a silver egg-cup caught the reflection of the small fire in the grate. He scratched his ear absent-mindedly, clearing his throat, and then re-tied the sash on his silk dressing gown.

There was a tap at the door of the study - the Grand Duke uttered a deep, meaningless grunt, and the door opened to admit a nervous-looking, thin young man, with round spectacles à la Schubert, and unruly, thinning hair. He carried a pile of workbooks and folders; he walked around to stand in front of the desk, blinking.

The Grand Duke growled at him.

"These accounts - I've read them through. We can't let anyone see these - there must be mistakes here? According to your figures," the word 'your' was stressed, "we are bankrupt. If the Hörwitzes or the Von Schiels get a whiff of this they'll be jumping up and down, not to mention queuing up here to pinch our furniture and the Grande-Ma'am's jewels to repay the loans!"

"Er - well, Highness, I would not use the word bankrupt. There is what I would term a temporary dip in liquidity. The Grand Duchy still has plenty of wealth, but it is in places where we cannot use it readily to fund our debts, or..."

He paused.

"Or buy things, or pay the workers," the Grand Duke finished off, helpfully. "Yes, I read that a great deal of our resources are concentrated in the new Deer Park project, for example - when will that be finished, by the way? - and the Duchess is going to have to cut down on her hunting lodges; at least some of them could manage without a full staff for part of the year?"

He shook his head slowly.

"What do we do now? I am required to issue a statement of the Duchy's financial situation by St Boniface's Day, as always - which gives us three weeks. If this gets out there will be riots - we already owe the tin miners six months' wages. What can we do? - you're supposed to be the ideas man, Schlimm - what can we do? I am told by the Burgermeister of Pronkendorf that there are women with babies, begging in the streets - he has had to make donations of bread and soup to the families of the men who were laid off when we closed down the Ducal Wurst factory. They will cut my head off."

"Highness - we have been through that again and again - it is far cheaper to have the sausages made in Bangladesh - the figures are in my report..."

The Grand Duke raised his right hand, and the accountant trailed off into silence.

"We have a problem, Schlimm - in fact, you have a problem. The sausage makers used to buy their bread from the state's bakers, and buy their work clothes from our state-owned suppliers, so they are feeling the pinch as well - you didn't tell me about that. What shall we do?"

Schlimm seemed unwilling to speak; he fidgeted with the collar of his jacket. Eventually he stood up a little straighter, and half closed his eyes.

"Well, Highness, we could lie a little - creative presentation, so to speak."

"Creative presentation? - what kind of presentation will mask the fact that we have a complete generation of young people with no prospect of ever working or making any money? Three hundred and fifty thousand of them, to be exact, it says here."

"Ah - yes - I was going to get to that. Let us reclassify things a little, so that most of our young people are described as 'full-time students', and we'll remove them from the totals."

"But they aren't students - we have no colleges for them to study at, for one thing, and we have no-one qualified to teach them. Anyway, we couldn't afford to do this."

"No - we aren't really going to teach them anything - we are going to pretend."

"Go on..."

"We will create a complete network of centres of education. There is already the University of Drossel, of course - we could make a great many people long-distance pupils of the university.  We don't have to teach them anything, just get them to sign a piece of paper. It gets better - we could charge them a very large amount of money to enroll. There's not just the old University, we could rope in the seminary colleges, anyone who runs some kind of vague apprenticeship, every half-baked evening class for flower arrangement or embroidery - they will all be students - they will embrace their new universities, and they will be happy to pay for the privilege. And you, Highness, will have a new industry - education - which will employ a great many people, who will sing your praises and the National Hymn, and will pay taxes and yet more taxes, and they will aspire to send their own children to the new universities."

"You can't offer a university degree course in flower-arranging, can you?"

"Why not? People would rather be fake university students than unemployed dead-beats. They can study anything  they like - who cares? - they won't be required to use their skills on anything. All we need is to balance the books over the next few years."

"I have to say that balancing the books is just the problem I was thinking about - no-one has any money to pay for such an education, to join up for such courses."

"We shall lend them the money. We shall lend it at a very high interest rate. We'll get a lot of it back straight away in the state university fees, and then we can set up accommodation in the university towns, require students to live on-campus and charge high rents. That should catch most of the rest of it"

"Let me get this straight - we will lend the unemployed money so that they can pay exorbitant fees to enroll for worthless further education courses, most of this money will come back to us directly through fees and accommodation, and we will charge interest on what we have lent them? And we can delete these people from our unemployed lists, thus boosting our economic outlook?"

"Correct - and we'll create a whole industry of educators and cleaners and transport drivers and caterers and administrators, who will all pay taxes too. The people in the industry don't need to be skilled or anything - no-one is going to be able to tell the difference anyway - the universities themselves will carry out the assessment of the results. All you need to get this started is to get back to old Hörwitz and see if he can lend you some money - rather a lot of money, in fact - I've prepared some figures so you can see how this will work, and a prospectus for our investors..."

"Good God - I'll look at the numbers later. I underestimated you, Schlimm - I certainly underestimated you. But tell me - in the longer term, this cannot possibly work out - how do we pay back the capital, if no-one gets any actual skills or earnings expectation out of the education system?"

"I have prepared another document here, Highness - the plan is that within 10 years you will have disappeared - you will be living under an assumed name, on a very large private wine-making estate in Tuscany. I have some brochures here, to give an idea, and some rough estimates."

The Grand Duke sat back in his chair and waved his hand again, his head spinning.

"I see - good God. Well, Schlimm, you may leave me now - we must talk about this again. You are sure it will work?"

"Absolutely - that nice Russian chap assured me it could not fail."

Hooptedoodle #323 - Mugs' Game - yes, I do tacky as well

Yesterday's unexpected digression onto the topic of coffee reminded me that I have forgotten to show off my new Napoleonic mugs. I got these a few weeks ago from Amazon - I was looking for something completely unconnected, and came across them. Too good an opportunity to miss, I'm sure you will agree!

Those of you who have come to take for granted my ubercool, cosmic sophistication and exemplary good taste may be a little shaken by this picture. I thought they were fun, and crass enough to appeal to the inverted snob in my soul, so I ordered four of them (which involves a pleasing but baseless implication that I have some friends who might join me for coffee). Here they are - eat your heart out. The world of novelty mugs is a source of unbounded surprises - I did also, briefly, consider a mug bearing a political poster for Mussolini, but I decided against it. I'll maybe get the set of espresso cups with that design. Hmmm.

Interesting footnote to this purchase: I ordered 4 designs, but because I couldn't get them all from the same Amazon Marketplace supplier I spread the order over two suppliers. The spirit of competition is alive and well, even in the world of online shopping - or maybe not. The four mugs arrived in a single parcel, with a single set of documentation. The two suppliers are in fact one and the same, merely trading under two different names. Oh well.   

Hooptedoodle #322 - Where Are Heroes When You Need Them?

I have lived through the twitterings and the pantomime protocols of our useless, deluded Parliament for too long. A room full of over-inflated, would-be celebrities, who confuse loyalty to their pals and their wretched, outmoded political parties with the job they were elected to do.

They could not run a bath.

I am ashamed - of course I'm angry, but I'm also embarrassed to think how pathetic we must appear to other nations. This, mark you, is the very same Mother of Parliaments we are determined to keep sacrosanct, to protect from the influence of evil foreigners. The bus to Beachy Head is now warmed up, and there are seats for all. We have not yet decided whether the window blinds will be open or closed for the final descent - we'll have a vote on that next Tuesday, after the Bingo.

Hooptedoodle #321 - Paint Pots and Pies

Today I went into Edinburgh to visit a family member who is in hospital - he's had a long spell in there thus far, and it is likely to continue for a while. I took the train in (which means they were running today, obviously) and, since I was a bit early for 2pm visiting, I decided to go via the Tollcross area, and visit the Wonderland model shop. It was a decent sort of day, if a bit cold, so I walked fairly briskly from Waverley Station to Tollcross. Better and better. Makes it feel a bit less self-indulgent.

I enjoyed my visit to Wonderland, of course, though I didn't buy anything while I was there. I am rather annoyed to admit that I couldn't remember what it was I'd wanted to get! This must be an age thing, I guess - regularly, when I'm painting, I suddenly realise I could do with a pot of such-and-such a colour, and since Wonderland is my only local Vallejo stockist, I add the required shade to my mental shopping list. Well, chaps, the bad news is that mental shopping lists are no longer enough - for the second such visit in the last few months I found myself staring at the Vallejo racks with no recollection of what it was I'd wanted. Yes - agreed - written lists from now on.

On the way up to the hospital (still walking) I decided to get some small offering of biscuits or similar. The relative in question would really not appreciate grapes or anything healthy, in fact he might even throw them at me. So I found myself looking in the window of what I would term a "traditional" baker's shop. There, in the front, they had a tray of individual custard tarts, such as I have neither seen nor thought about in maybe 30 years. I am very partial to all sorts of cakes and buns, I must admit, but my all-time favourites are probably a bit poncey - I'm very fond of religieuses, sachertorte - stuff like that. Custard tarts do not normally feature in my hit parade.

However, there they were. A British Standard custard tart is a pretty solid fellow - egg custard in a soggy shortcrust case - the filling is commonly topped with grated nutmeg (probably to make it taste of something), though this is less popular in Scotland. I must have eaten quite a few in my time, but none of them was great, I think, and they were all a long time ago. Maybe they are still around, and in great demand, but my perception is that cakes from the supermarket these days tend to be packets of individually wrapped brioche buns with chocolate chips, or 5-in-pack "fresh-baked" cookies with embedded white chocolate bits, made with so much cheap sugar and palm oil that your face feels hot and your breathing gets muffled. Something has shifted - the global village does not seem to offer much in the way of a proper custard tart. This must be progress.

I bought a bag of doughnuts and went off for my visit.

It was only on the train later, coming home, that I started thinking about custard tarts. Hmmm....

I never really liked them, and I'm sure I still don't, but I'm going to have to get some just to prove it. You know how these things gnaw at you?

Hooptedoodle #320 - The Unlikely Tale of Malcolm

I've been thinking about sharing the story of Uncle Malcolm for a while. I've been hesitant because it's potentially a little more hazardous than most of the silly yarns you will find here, and also there are some parts of the story of which I wasn't certain. This last point is a recurrent problem with the histories of my mother's family, since the inevitable distortions caused by retelling over the years are supplemented by the entirely deliberate distortions arising from overstating the achievements and importance of various family members, and by misrepresenting a lot of stuff in the interests of the Official Received Family Editions; by mother's family has more skeletons in cupboards than most. Well, of course, I'm guessing here - maybe everyone's family is the same?

Prompted by recent sight of an ancient wedding photo amongst my mum's acccumulated junk (sorry, archives), I decided to have a bash. Now then - Terms & Conditions:

* Some of the family members involved are still alive, and I would not like to upset or libel anyone

* Some of what follows will reflect family traditions and (especially) what I heard from my grandmother, who always preferred embroidered versions in which she emerged blameless and, if possible, martyred yet again

* A lot of this is a matter of public record, though it was a long time ago - if anyone managed to work out, despite the changed names and dates, the historical version of the story, then they would almost certainly be mistaken. If necessary, we may take comfort in the fact that I probably made the whole thing up, to fill a space in my stupid blog.

☐ I have read and accept the Terms & Conditions

Righto - back to some form of beginning. From the mid 1930s on, my maternal grandmother lived in the same house in Liverpool, initially with her four daughters. She and her husband had separated, and the five of them were a close-knit family, one guiding principle of which was the untrustworthy and despicable nature of men. In fact, all the daughters eventually overcame this prejudice long enough to get married, but my Nan and her cat lived on and nurtured their faith. The only one of her sons-in-law that she had any time for at all was Barbara's husband, Les, who had the misfortune (maybe the decency?) to die when he was in his early 40s, and he was thus himself elevated to the role of tragic martyr, for which Nan always had a fondness (having suffered herself, of course).

The youngest of the daughters was Belle (really Anabel). I never really knew her very well - when I was a kiddywink she sometimes used to come to our house to babysit when my parents went to the cinema - she was about 12 years older than me, I think. Her early academic achievements were the pride of the family, and she was certainly a very clever girl, though the factual history, inevitably, was a bit less prestigious than the received version. I subsequently learned that she did not, in fact, win a special scholarship to the best school in Liverpool, though she did sit the exam for it; she eventually left school to go to Art College, and she was expected to become a very successful commercial artist. I rather lost sight of what happened after that, but some years later she was working as an assistant librarian in a Liverpool Council public library, and suddenly there was a huge row (of which I was mostly unaware at the time) and she had to get married in a big hurry to a colleague from work, Malcolm. Which brings us to Malcolm.

Malcolm was a very smart young chap - he was also very tall, and handsome in a slightly beatnik style (big jumpers, longish hair, goatee beard). He and Belle had an impoverished start to their married life - I identify my 11-year-old self in their wedding photo - the next thing I remember is going round to their rather grotty apartment on my bicycle. Malc was always sarcastic and condescending towards me, so mostly I went to visit during my school holidays when he was at work. By this time Belle had one baby and another on the way, and it didn't take long for me to realise that I was a bit of a nuisance, so the visits stopped.

During a short space of time, Malc had a number of jobs - in a later age he would have been seen as possessing ambition and energy, but at the time he was simply regarded as "shiftless" by my Nan - my youthful taste for irony was spiked by the thought that he seemed to do more shifting than most, but no matter.

1. He left the library service, allegedly over some irregularity in the petty cash

2. He worked for a while as a barman in a pub in Liverpool city centre, but left following some (alleged) misunderstanding involving the till receipts.

3. He applied for a job as a news-reader/announcer with Granada TV (Manchester), but did not get the job - his own version of this was that it was felt he was too attractive and charismatic, and this would have impacted upon whether people paid attention to what he was saying. Right.

4. For a little while he did door-to-door selling for a firm who published popular encyclopedias (a period of history commemorated by Nan under the title "Gullible's Travels") - I have no idea why or how this ended.

At this point I lost touch with Belle and Malc, but they appeared to me just once more, when I was home on holiday from university.

Malcolm had taken a bold step. If you were a young man, with decent intelligence but a lack of resolve, and a tad questionable in the honesty department, what would you have tried for, back in the 1960s? Correct - the Diplomatic Service of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Well done - good guess.

Malc sailed the exams, no problems at all, and got a job. To gloat a little, he hired a very large car, bought himself and his family new clothes of a quality such as we very rarely saw in those days, and toured the family members, rubbing our noses in the fact that he was going to work in a glamorous new post in the British Embassy in Brussels. It was, to be fair, quite an exit. I never saw Belle or Malc again. After this time I moved into my own hectic days of professional career and young family, and thoughts of my globetrotting relatives occupied very little of my waking hours. Then, one day, my mum phoned to say that she couldn't say much about it, but Malcolm appeared to be in a lot of trouble, so if any people from the Press contacted me I was to deny all knowledge.

Pardon? The Press?

After some years in Brussels, Malc had been transferred to Khartoum. Apparently the Russians (boo!) had either planted a young female employee in the UK's Khartoum embassy, or else they "acquired" an existing staff member - whatever, this young lady's mission was to get involved with some member of the embassy staff, with a view to blackmail and all that. If they were looking for a vain, senseless prospect as a dupe, it is just possible that Malc may have been visible as far away as Moscow, who knows? It doesn't pay to be sanctimonious - these were real people, and they got themselves into real trouble. It isn't funny - well, maybe a little...

Eventually the sting was made, Malcolm had to meet an intermediary, known as André, in the Blue Nile café in Khartoum [come on - give me a break - if I were making this up I'd have tried a bit harder than that, for goodness' sake. As a side issue, we may discuss how this scene would be filmed, and which actors should play the roles.]

Malc was told that someone would tell his wife and his employers about his indiscretions if he didn't co-operate by handing over some information of strategic value. Next, I imagine, there followed a rather embarrassing conversation, as they came to understand that Malcolm was really a very junior under-secretary, who did not actually know anything very interesting at all. He provided them with some details of the security arrangements in the Brussels office - building access, wiring diagrams, stuff like that, I am told. To make it respectable, they may have paid him some money as well - opinions vary.

Poor old Malcolm fell apart. It seems his wife already knew about his affair, which is a bit humiliating, maybe, and he went to his boss and admitted the whole episode.

Things moved very quickly. He was arrested, and the aforementioned Press made the mistake of knocking on my Nan's door. Barbara was there when the man from the Express turned up: had Nan known that her son-in-law was a communist spy? Before Nan slammed the door in his face, according to Barbara, she suggested that he should go and get himself a decent job, "such as shovelling shit". More seriously, my dad was about 3 years into a senior engineering job with Reactor Group at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (or Ukulele, as they were colloquially known). He was an electrical man, not nuclear, and he worked on power-station projects, not weapons stuff, but his job involved a lot of heavy security anyway. As you might expect, the news of his brother-in-law's adventures went down like the proverbial lead balloon at the Ukulele, and for a while our mooted film project takes on a comedic twist. The Government had his house watched. No - honestly, they did. Presumably this was to see if he received visits from foreign-looking chaps with big furry hats. At first a man (in a trilby hat, with a newspaper) stationed himself nonchalantly on the other side of the street, until he was relieved by another such man. In a quiet suburban street this was ridiculous - the secret service man became a celebrity locally, the kids threw stones and abuse, and at various times mischievous neighbours offered him cups of tea, and on one occasion reported to the police that there was a dodgy-looking character hanging around, obviously up to no good. The surveillance was now switched to pairs of men sitting all day, very conspicuously, in a Ford Zephyr, the only parked car in the street.

Again, it wasn't funny at the time, since my dad could easily have lost his job and his pension. Whatever, the matter was dropped and the surveillance ended (or did it? - maybe they just got better at it - I'll take a peek out of the window now...). Probably a combination of the lack of direct involvement on my dad's part and the obvious ineptitude of the spying effort convinced them to give up.

Malc went to court, and got 10 years in Parkhurst, which was probably the minimum sentence. Typically, he missed out on his last chance for fame, since his trial was pretty cut-and-dried, and there was a much higher-profile and more interesting espionage case on at the time, which pushed Malc's charismatic good looks off the newspapers once and for all. His wife was set up with a good job in London, the kids were placed in a good private boarding school (at the tax payers' expense) and I never really heard any more. My mother lost contact with Belle, which is sad, really, but the problems over my dad's job had damaged things for ever.

Malcolm and Belle have both been dead for some years now - I met up with two of their kids - a son whom I had met when he was a toddler, and a daughter who was born after my time. I met them at Barbara's funeral, in Liverpool, in 2013. My new-found cousins snubbed me pretty severely - there is clearly a lot of heavy baggage there, so I did not persist in establishing any kind of entente. To be fair, Malc and Belle and their children might justifiably have felt that her family did not try very hard to help or stand by them when they really were having desperately bad times. It was nothing to do with me, of course, but maybe that's just another instance of distancing ourselves from a problem. I only have the excuse that I was somewhere else at the time.

Another skeleton in another cupboard, but an unusual one, maybe? As I say, if anyone tracks this story down to its facts then I know nothing about it - my grandmother just told me one of her rambling stories, long ago, and I may even have remembered it imperfectly. 

Hooptedoodle #319 - Nostalgia Trip

Posts have been a bit sparse of late on this blog. No matter. One thing I had been meaning to say something about was a recent visit I made with my wife to Liverpool, my birthplace, at the start of December. We went only for a few days, and we weren't very lucky with the weather, but it was good fun, and I did a few things - mostly rather silly, personal things - that I've been meaning to do for years.

I have only one surviving relative in Liverpool these days - cousin Mark, with whom we met up for dinner one evening while we were there - so normally there are no pressing reasons to visit the place, apart from self-indulgence, and my last visit was in 2012. We stayed at the Campanile, which is very cheap and cheerful, at the Queen's Dock. We visited the cathedrals (on the wettest day I can remember) and trogged around the old city centre, with me trying to recall what old buildings used to be on particular sites in my day. Yes, I know - how pointless is that?

I have to say that the city is far cleaner and more prosperous than I remember it, but it is disturbing how much it has changed - I have a feeling that some of the change has lost a few things as well. Babies and bath-water come to mind.

I went to have a look at the house where I was born - well, all right, I wasn't born there at all, I was born at the Maternity Hospital (in Oxford Street?) like most other people from the South end, but I lived there from ages zero to 10.

6, Belvidere Road - that's Liverpool 8, Toxteth, if you insist, but it is certainly among the posher bits of Toxteth, and I suppose it's more accurate to refer to it as Princes Park. We got the bus from the city centre to Princes Avenue, and walked down to Belvidere, which had changed very little (though the houses look better-maintained, and some charitable soul has replaced the railings and gates, which obviously were not required to be thrown at Hitler after all).

We had a splendid walk through Princes Park to Sefton Park, and then through Sefton Park to my grandmother's old house in Mossley Hill. When I was a kid we used to do this walk (both ways, in fact) most fine Sundays, and I was keen to see it again. It always seemed an enormous distance to walk with small children, but in fact it's not nearly as far as I remembered - probably only a couple of miles each way.  It was a fairly dry day, and everything seemed very fresh and familiar. I haven't walked through Princes Park since the 1960s, I guess, but it hasn't changed much.

From my grandmother's old house we continued up Penny Lane to Smithdown, had a coffee and took the bus back into town. That's another one for the bucket shop list - I'm really pleased I did it, and I don't need to think about it any more!

We also took advantage of our only other dry day to travel by ferry across the Mersey to Seacombe. Then we walked along the riverside promenade past Wallasey as far as New Brighton, on the end of the Wirral Peninsula, complete with the Perch Rock Fort, which Turner painted in some of his wilder sessions, but the old Tower Ballroom, where as a youth I once saw Little Richard, is long gone. New Brighton was definitely looking a bit gone-to-seed - we took the Mersey Railway back under the river to James Street. Great walk - I was impressed by the number of fishermen on the promenade - when I lived in those parts there would have been nothing alive to catch in the Mersey, that's for sure!

On our last evening we went to the Philharmonic Hall in Hope Street, to see the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in action. Marvellous. High spot of the concert for me was Stravinsky's Firebird, which is a great favourite of mine. The previous occasion on which I was in the Phil was probably Speech Day in my final year in the Sixth Form at Quarry Bank School. Hmmm.

Some photos follow - nothing too onerous, I hope.

Over the hills and faraway - travelling south on the M6 over Shap Fell. The Lake District is somewhere over to the right

It still surprises me that Liverpool has become a tourist centre...

Jesse Hartley's old port sometimes doesn't sit well with the new buildings - my father, his two brothers and their dad all worked at Liverpool Docks at various times - I wonder what they'd make of it now

6 Belvidere Road - my first home - we lived in the top flat (which I think is two apartments now). It looks better maintained now than it was back in my infancy. The street is quite elegant, and hasn't changed a lot, but the labyrinth of little terraces around the back - Miles St, Clevedon St, South St, Hawkstone St and so many others - real Toxteth - has been knocked down and replaced many years ago

Let us not speak of the purple dustbins...

Princes Park - scenes of childhood...

...and its lake, which once had rowing boats for hire

Linnet Lane - apart from the lack of my kid sister's pram and a few modern cars, looks about the same

Lark Lane - quite arty these days - leads to Aigburth and my old primary school at St Mick's

The cafe in the middle of Sefton Park - seems to have sprouted some modern wings, but recognisably the same place. I think it was painted cream, and I remember there was a Wall's Ice Cream man selling ices from a pedal-tricycle cart here on Sundays. Note the shadow of the Ghost of Christmas Past

The quiet end of Queen's Drive, Mossley Hill - this is the great ring road which loops around the city to Seaforth and Bootle in the North.

My Nan's old house, on the corner of Briardale Road and Herondale. She was still resident here when she died in 1980 - not much has changed, though someone has roofed over her backyard - how very odd?

Sefton Park's celebrated Palm House, a fabulous old facility which has been rescued from vandalism and general wear and tear numerous times over the years

The Peter Pan statue in Sefton Park - one of my earliest memories from childhood; in fact it has been shifted - it is now located near to the Palm House; as far as I remember, it used to be in the flower garden near the big lake.

This is something - very quirky building - Dovedale Road Baptist Church, where my parents were married in 1945. They had met at the youth club here. The building was completed (I think) in 1903, and by the perversity of history it had closed as a church about 6 weeks before our visit! Right opposite was Dovedale Rd Primary School, which included John Lennon and my cousin Dave among its alumni. Yes, I believe the church may have been designed by a madman.

Absolutely - THAT Penny Lane. Lucky to have kept its name - the city council was planning to change the names of all streets in the city which referred to families who were associated with slavery or slave-supported businesses - the plan was shelved when they realised that Penny Lane was one such, and that there would be a great many disappointed tourists if it had been called Nelson Mandela Street instead.

The Lady Chapel in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. Speak it in whispers, but I was a member of the choir here when I was about 12 - that was until they found out what was wrong with it.

The Royal Iris - the latest of a great many Royal Irises - the ferry for Seacombe (Wallasey) - back in the day, the Seacombe ferry had a white funnel, the Birkenhead ferries had brick-red ones.

Wallasey Town Hall, looming above the River Walk

Nothing else to do now but wish everyone all the very best for the New Year. 2018 has definitely been a duff one for me and my family - we are hoping for rather better in 2019. Once again I regret to observe that I have been overlooked in the New Year Honours List, but I thought I'd share with you my great pleasure that John Redwood has been knighted, presumably for being a pain in the arse for so many years, and for services to xenophobia. How lovely. Gives me a warm feeling in my stomach - possibly dyspepsia?  

***** Late Edit *****

Penny Lane Supplement...

In response to Steve's comment, a couple of old pictures. Penny Lane is an old street in the Allerton area of Liverpool (Liverpool 18, in old money) which runs between Smithdown Place and Greenbank Park. Apart from the fact that it intersects with the road where my Nan used to live(!), it is not all that interesting. On the other hand, "Penny Lane" was the name of the old tram terminus which was at the intersection of Allerton Road, Smithdown Place, Church Road (Wavertree - where the Bluecoat School is), Elm Hall Drive and - well, Penny Lane. The area was known as "Penny Lane", mostly because that was what it said on the front of the trams and buses. As it says in the song, the shelter for the transport terminus is on a roundabout in the middle. That shelter has now been tarted up into a Beatles-themed place. The barber's shop still exists, though back in the 1960s it was owned by Roger Bioletti's granddad (Roger was a year below me at grammar school) - nowadays it, also, lives on the Beatles connection. The main point here is that both the shelter and the barber were, and still are, in Smithdown Place, which is the (sketchy) setting for the song, at the area which has been known for donkeys' years as "Penny Lane", though Penny Lane itself is only one of the streets which runs into that junction.

I may have explained that so brilliantly that even I can't understand it any more. Here are the pictures - all borrowed from elsewhere:

 

Bioletti's barber shop, Smithdown Place, 1960s

The shelter, in 1956 - looking in exactly the opposite direction to previous photo - this time looking along Allerton Road - the barber's shop must be just off the left edge of the picture

Somewhat later view of the shelter - circa 1970? - here we are looking towards Church Road, with Allerton Rd off to the right and Smithdown to the left, and Penny Lane itself directly behind us.

The actual song is a bit of a montage of boyhood memories - some poetic licence in there - the Fire Station is in Mather Avenue - a couple of miles away past Allerton Road, on the way to Garston - on the way, in fact, to McCartney's home at Forthlin Road, which is off Mather Avenue.

All the Beatle-theming and tourist exploitation is probably OK, but ironic to those of us old enough to recall that Liverpool youth in the 1960s was regarded by the local authorities as just as much of a pestilence as you would expect. Visitors today may be directed to the New Cavern in Mathew Street, but they will not see much information about the fact that the council closed the original place down the first real chance they got. Mind you, it was unhygienic and failed every possible H&S test you could think of, but it's nonetheless true that they had regarded it, and places like it, as blots on the official presentation of Liverpool the Commercial City (and former Second City of the Empire, if anyone could remember that). That particular rubber stamp must have been banged down with a lot of satisfaction. How times change. How attitudes are re-engineered to suit.

Slavery and Beat Clubs - choose your viewpoint to fit the times in which you live!

***********************

Hooptedoodle #318 - Unfamiliar Birds

Very quiet day here - grey and overcast. The Contesse and I went for a walk down by the River Tyne (as discussed previously, this is the Scottish Tyne, not the one that goes through Newcastle). Very quiet down there - maybe people are put off by the muddy conditions? We did see a couple of birds which we didn't recognise - since we didn't have a camera with us these are not our photos, but these are definitely what we saw - library photos courtesy of the RSPB, which is where we get our knowledge of birds anyway!

White-Throated Dipper

Goosander - male on the right

We walked along the river to the footbridge next to Hailes Castle, crossed over and back to the village of East Linton by (very quiet) public roads to reclaim our car. Good walk - only about 4 miles, but stimulating on a cold day.

The narrow bridge over the Tyne at the village of East Linton - until 1927 this was part of the A1, main road from Edinburgh to London!

Hailes Castle - another seat of the Hepburn family, I think - can't move for history round here!

Hooptedoodle #317 - Segovia - Not to Be Sneezed At

 I've had a fiddly sort of week, sorting out my accounts, paying bills, tidying up. I also invested a little time in sorting some more of the dreaded lead pile into potential units for painting, and boxing them up in plastic sandwich boxes, labelled with Sharpie pen - "3 bns French lights - no command" and similar. You can see how this might work - if I can find where I have now put the little boxes I can get them painted up - if I can't find them then at least I have lost the lot in a single step, which is efficient in a rather specialised sense.

While I was involved in this scientific and worthwhile activity (which must look uncomfortably like mucking around to the rest of the world), I was listening to BBC Radio 3, as one does (or could do - other stations are available, of course). One of the recordings they played was of the great Spanish maestro of the classical guitar, Andres Segovia, and I was reminded that I am old enough to have seen him in concert - long ago, when the world was young.

Sketch of Segovia in concert in Brussels in 1932 - before my time...

My recollection was that the concert took place at Leith Town Hall (that's sort of Edinburgh to you), but I could hardly believe that such a gig ever took place. So I took time off the sorting and boxing to check online, which, of course, is exactly why these jobs take so long and where the accusations of mucking about probably arise.

The Leith concert did take place - in winter time, in early 1971, when Segovia was a plump-but-sprightly 78, on what was expected to be his final European tour. I got a ticket through my friend Thomas, who was very keen and had recently joined (I may not get this quite right) The Edinburgh Classical Guitar Society - it was they who were putting on the concert, and it must have been something of a coup for them. I went along because I was a fan, and also because I might never have the chance again [digression: I once saw Louis Armstrong at the Liverpool Philharmonic, exactly because my mum thought I should go, since it might be the last chance. If Napoleon comes to your town, you should go to see him, so you can tell the grandchildren, or bore some future generation of blog readers].  

Leith Town Hall in sunnier times - in fact, I'm not convinced the concert was in this part of the building

Thomas and I arrived late, just before the concert started. There were a couple of hundred people in the audience. It was dark in the hall, and pokey, and freezing cold (you could see your breath at the start, and the guests all kept their hats and coats on). We seem to have been seated on folding wooden seats, so it was also creaky and uncomfortable, but the worst thing of the lot was the acoustic ambience of the hall. Church-like echoes, and Segovia himself was almost inaudible - everyone had to keep very quiet throughout, and it all got a bit tense. I am getting ahead of myself...

At the appointed hour, Old Andres came out onto the platform. He didn't speak or smile at any time of the show - I can hardly blame him. He tuned up for a minute or so, and then began his performance - a nice bit of Albeniz or something. After about 30 seconds, someone coughed, Segovia stopped, glared around the hall and started again - from the beginning. Same thing happened during the third or fourth piece - laser-beam stare and start again. Since everyone seemed to have a seasonal cold, the whole thing became very edgy indeed. Everyone in agony in case they sniffed, or their chair creaked. I began to convince myself that I was certain to sneeze. While aware of the privilege of just being there, I spent the rest of the first half just wishing the thing was over.

Came the interval, and I joined Thomas in an adjoining room, where cups of tea (from the municipal urn) were available. I recall that I was still wearing my gloves. Thomas was spotted as a new member, and was buttonholed by the secretary. How were we enjoying the concert? Thomas and I had just been moaning to each other, but Thomas was tactful enough to avoid telling the Hon Sec that it had been one of the most harrowing hours of his life. He did ask why the heating wasn't working, and the question was dismissed out of hand. Warming (wrong word) to his theme, Thomas suggested that if the concert had been at the Edinburgh Usher Hall, or any serious concert venue, some tasteful amplification would have been used to boost the sound to a level where the paying audience could actually hear it. A couple of good condenser mikes and a competent sound man and the music would have been perfectly fine with just a gentle boost. Tasteful - you know how it might be.

The Sec almost had apoplexy, and raved on about how you cannot possibly reproduce the sound of the guitar through a microphone or any type of amplification equipment. Eventually he paused to take a sip of his tea, and presumably to gather his strength for a further onslaught.

For the only time I can ever remember, Thomas got a bit annoyed.

"Tell me," he asked the Sec, "at home, do you have recordings of Segovia?"

"Oh yes, I have just about everything he has recorded, including some very rare pieces which I obtained through a Spanish subscription club of which I am a member - wonderful, wonderful music, much of it from when he was in his prime."

"And you enjoy listening to these recordings?" asked Thomas, innocently.

"Of course - there is nothing finer"

"You do realise," Thomas continued, "that there isn't a little man in your gramophone playing a little guitar? - the sound comes from an electric amplifier, though a loudspeaker, and was captured for purposes of the recording using microphones. You did know that?"

The Sec turned on his heel (quite rightly), went off to rub shoulders with Andres himself. With luck, Segovia might just have bent his ear about the state of the hall, especially the sound, the near-darkness and the bloody temperature, and the fact that, by the way, the tea was crap...

The second half was slightly less stressful - the presence of all those coated bodies must have warmed the place up a bit, but I was still more than a little pleased when it was over, we could move around a bit and I could get rid of the flat area on my backside.

Segovia may have stopped touring, but he was still recording in 1977, when he was 84. He finally died in 1987 - I hope he was warm and comfortable and everyone kept quiet for him. Thomas lives in Northamptonshire now, and is still trying to play classical guitar, bless him.

Me, I live in Scotland and spend time mucking around with toy soldiers. We are - all of us - always just one cup of tea from history.

Hooptedoodle #316 - Things I Learned Living Next Door to Richard

Someone has to do it, I suppose

A very long time ago, I moved to the Morningside area of Edinburgh with my young family. I lived there for a good many years, and throughout that time my neighbours were Richard and his wife, Liz. Two more upstanding members of the local community, or people better equipped to represent its traditional values, it would be impossible to imagine. Richard was flawlessly respectable, always polite and smartly turned-out, and was an elder of the Kirk of Scotland. He was a lawyer by profession, and he was a remarkable individual. He had undoubted gifts, but overlying everything were the personal qualities which placed these gifts into context - he was, to be blunt about it, the most nit-picking, over-fussy, infuriatingly pedantic man I ever met (and I have met a few, take my word for this).

The overwhelming impression of Richard which a stranger would pick up on immediately was disapproval - often straying into actual contempt; nothing was ever good enough for Richard. In a way this was a blessing; it was a blessing to everyone else, because it meant that we could all benefit from his unique abilities (and he certainly worked very hard), and it was a blessing to Richard because it meant that he could get on with his job without losing focus, and without risking his sanity in ways which might have troubled lesser beings.

A couple of examples from our neighbourhood might offer some insight into how this came across socially, and I'll discuss his job in a moment.

(Case Study 1) One winter's afternoon it snowed - briefly but fairly heavily. We lived in a quiet street, on a fairly steep hill, and the pavements were quite narrow, with a pronounced camber. Since the council would make no contribution to the amenity of such a backwater, and since we had a lot of elderly people living in the area, there was always some urgency to get snow cleared up before it froze or became impassable. At this time sons nos 2 and 3 from my first family must have been 6 and 5 years old - when I got home from work that day we put on our mittens and scarves and woolly hats, found the snow scrapers and a couple of brooms, and made pretty short work of the fresh, fluffy snow. We even took the spade down the gutter, and cleared a 9" wide channel next to the kerb, in the approved manner, so that the meltwater would have a clear run. This went so well that my sons wanted to carry on for a while, so I commissioned them to clear the sidewalk in front of Richard's house, with a little gentle supervision. Richard was always home late from work, so it would be a practical and, I suppose, neighbourly thing to do. It didn't take long, and we went inside to warm up and put the winter togs away.

I'd forgotten all about this, about 2 hours later, when the doorbell rang and there was Richard, obviously just arrived home. He was correct and polite enough, of course, but it was clear that he was simmering - he was furious that my little sons had cleared his pathway for him. Why? Was it because he had wanted to do it himself ?- had spent the afternoon, maybe, looking forward to it? No - don't think so.

Was it because he had difficulty, socially, with accepting kindness from others, in some way? No - probably not; elders of the Kirk, of course, are expected to be very strong on kindness.

It was, undoubtedly, because my sons had not done the job properly, as he would have done it. Like me, you might think that this is a possibility, though it would require some work of definition and inspection to put dimensions on it, and you might think that it was a small matter about which to get irritated. In his place, if it had mattered at all, I might have got out my own broom and spent a minute and a half putting things right. But not Richard. Richard was special.

(Case Study 2) For a while, I had the privilege of serving on the neighbourhood Garages Committee, which looked after maintenance and other communal issues connected with the area of lock-ups at the rear of the houses (the area was ancient enough for these lock-ups to have been stables in their day, I guess). I was the secretary. Richard, naturally, was the Chairman. I say naturally because Richard would expect to be Chairman - he would have failed to realise that he was tailor-made for the role of Secretary. He would have made a wonderful secretary, though someone might have killed him after a while.

There were many examples of things not being good enough. At one point we had to get the tarmac area surveyed and some estimates for repair work. I had to draft a letter to get this done. My letter could not be sent out until Richard had checked my spelling and grammar - and you just know that he changed it. I think it had to go back to him twice before it could go out. When the survey report arrived, Richard wanted me to go back to them and get some of the wording changed, since there were ambiguities (or Richard saw some) and it might become important later. After some huffing, the surveyor sent a corrected version, but Richard had thought of more changes he wanted. I refused to chase this any further, and things started moving again, but it confirmed my status as someone who was prepared to settle for imperfection, and my card was duly marked.

Richard, you see, was a lawyer who worked for the Scottish Office. His team (which I think probably meant Richard himself, since he worked such long hours that I can't believe he trusted anyone else to do any part of the job properly) was to prepare Government papers relating to Scottish Law (and this was long before the level of devolution Scotland has now, so we are exclusively talking of Westminster at that time). If someone wanted to introduce new legislation, or amend existing legislation, or put a Bill before Parliament, or a "green paper" (as I think statements of policy or future intent were termed) then Richard had to prepare it. If someone proposed a modest change to the use of ancient footpaths in Scotland (for example) then Richard (and his people, to whatever extent this was relevant) would have to research the existing laws and byelaws, going back to the Middle Ages, check the precedents, check the correctness of the language and legal terminology, the punctuation, the grammar, the cross-references, the footnotes etc etc. When it was right, it might go before Parliament, depending on the business schedules. If it were passed, or rejected, or - worst of all - required amendment, then Richard would get it back and the amount of rework was almost always horrifying. Well, I thought it was horrifying - Richard was confident that he was doing an essential job, and I'm sure he was correct. In matters of law, you have to be exact - I almost wrote "as exact as possible", but I could imagine Richard's face at the mere whiff of oxymoron.

Exact.

So the one important thing that I learned from Richard was that nothing is as straightforward as you think it is going to be. As soon as you get close to the functions of government, especially the legal bits thereof, you are entering a world of mind-numbing complexity, and any change - even the consideration of the possibility of change - is going to require an awful lot of expensive work from a lot of unusual people. Richard and his chums, of course, would know nothing at all about ancient footpaths (or anything else, really), but anyone who came up with some original thought on the matter would have to feed that thought into the legal grinder. That's where the lights grow dim. That's where so many ideas disappear without trace. You may call it bureaucracy - maybe you're right - but Richard would have called it doing the job correctly, and - you know what? - when it comes to the law, he would have been right, too.  

Don't, for goodness sake, get me started on Brexit, but that is what brings this back into the light for me. When we had the Scottish Referendum, any ideas anyone might have had about the attractions (or even the viability) of Scottish independence were dwarfed for me by the vision of the immensity of the amount of work required to accomplish it. This was a lot worse than new tarmac around the garages.

Whole armies of Richards. Immeasurable numbers of hours of checking, researching, getting input from experts and stakeholders, re-punctuating, agreeing, redrafting. I'm exhausted even thinking about it. Given the fact that no-one even had a half-decent idea of what they were voting for, or what would have to be delivered if the YES brigade scraped in, the whole thing becomes a farce. At the time of the Scottish Referendum, even if we had had some understandable vision of what was on the agenda, there just wasn't enough time to do it - and I mean do it properly. To Richard's standards. Given the arguments and the political spin and the uncertainty, it wasn't even worth starting to think about it. As it happens, of course, the Scottish Referendum decided NO, though it was a near thing. Making no change is a doddle - the only jobs needing to be done are clearing up the waste paper and the coffee cups and trying to get all the friends and relatives who fell out over the question to make it up in some way.

Cameron the Weasel, of course, was an unusually slow learner, and after he just about got away with the Scottish Referendum he decided he would push his luck with another Referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. Apart from the fact that we still can't get any agreement on what it was people thought they were voting for, there never was even the slightest chance that all the disentangling and redrafting work could be done in the time available. The whole idea is laughable, in a tragic, unfunny way - Richard could have told them. It can't be done. If your MP pretends it can, then either he is a moron (possible) or else he hopes to get some measure of personal gain out of the attempt (also possible). 

An MP

It seems there is now some concern that it will be impossible to sort out adequate terms for Britain leaving, in time for the scheduled exit date. Now there's a surprise. Good heavens. Let's find someone to blame - that's always a useful distraction, I think.