Outings

Two trips in two weekends - this could be a developing trend? Well, maybe.

Topic 1 - This weekend - Wargame at Stryker's

Because of the indisposition of Count Goya, the planned trip to fight the Battle of Raab was postponed, which left me with a free day and a van loaded with wargame terrain and soldiers. I phoned the Bold Stryker, to see how he was fixed. It seemed to me that it was just as easy for me to unload the van and set up the contents on my dining table, if he would care to trek down here to join me. His alternative suggestion was that I could drive my travelling wargame circus to his house, and we could arrange something there - a very fine and generous idea - it may be related to the fact that I forced him to have lunch in the garden last time he came here...

So that's what we did. I drove gingerly over the Forth Road Bridge (bumpy-bumpy) and up the M90, with a slightly amended cast of hundreds to provide a generic Peninsular War battle. Stryker, of course, has a far more prestigious collection of soldiers than mine, but he has not yet fully unpacked them following his recent house move.

We had a splendid day - once again, my thanks for hospitality, good company and magnificent eats. I forgot my camera [idiot], so took some photos with my phone, but they were so dreadful that I have reproduced only a couple here - mostly just to prove I was there. Ian has published a post on his blog, which has good pictures, so I recommend you have a look there. I shall have to read up on how to take better photos with my phone, but I will have to do so without offering my son the chance to gloat over my stupidity.

17eme Léger spent the afternoon capturing this village and getting driven out
of it again - anyway, here's a snap of them on their holidays in Tayside

Know your enemy - that's him, Old Conky Atty, with his tree. Laconic to a fault.

5th Foot (Northumberland Fusiliers) taking a turn at looking after a village - do
you think that flag is the official shade called "Gosling Green"? - no, me neither.

It was useful to prove that magnetic box-files, bubblewrap and bungee cords make such transport feasible. My soldiers have only ever moved anywhere at all when I moved house, so this is valuable experience. No problems, no casualties. When I got home and put the boys safely back in The Cupboard, I could have sworn I heard a little voice say "...and where have you been?...", and then another little voice said, "Dunno, but it was dark and a bit bumpy, and then later there were dogs...".

Great day out.

Topic 2 - Last weekend - Classic Car Show at Thirlestane Castle, Lauder

The Contesse very kindly obtained some discounted tickets for this show and, since she could hardly be less interested in such things, I went down to Lauder with my friend Jack the Hat. Good show - much better than I expected. My photos are pretty much random - just stuff that appealed to me as I passed; there was a fantastic amount on display.

Classic cars are great things for someone else to own. I loved the 1934 Alvis Silver Eagle, for example, but the owner told me how much it had cost to restore it, what the maintenance costs were, and how few miles a year he gets to drive it. Bear in mind that he has to drive it to shows on a trailer, towed by his Land Rover, and that in terms of modern motoring it will be consistently outdragged at the traffic lights by nuns driving Nissan Micras, and you start to build up a picture of the reality. For me, classic cars are great things for other people to own and cherish, so that I can go and gawp at them, take pictures and ask damn-fool questions.

Any number of MGs - very nice - I don't know much about the pre-war
 ones, but I enjoy looking at them

VW Karmann-Ghia

Jenson? - think so - Ferguson system 4WD and everything

Ugly ugly - 1960s Ford Corsair - when I was at university, my landlord had one of these. 

I know that one - that's a 1954 MG type TF...

Yes, that's the thermometer on the radiator, so you can see when it's boiling - of course,
 when it boils, there will be so much steam you won't be able to see it

Morris 8

1934 Alvis "Silver Eagle" - now you're talking - dicky seat and everything - no,
of course I wouldn't want one - I'm pretty mad, but not as mad as that.

Bristol 401 - classy 1950 sports saloon built by the Bristol aeroplane company - engine
and inspiration ex BMW (the rights to the BMW 327 engine were acquired by the Bristol
company after WW2). These look impressive, and have a sort of cult following, but
were heavy and not very powerful.

Left-hand-drive Jaguar E-Type - present owner imported this one from California, and
now keeps it in Dunbar, on the Scottish North Sea coast - he says the thing just started
to rust like crazy after he got it, and he has to keep it in a ventilated cocoon - don't know
if he gets the air from California.  

Shelby Cobra - complete with racing numbers - right...

Now this is interesting - it's a kit car, but it doesn't look like one, and the build
quality is superb. This is a Royale Sabre, about 10 years old, and the running
gear is all Ford Sierra, which doesn't sound too exciting, but spares are readily
available and it goes nicely. Has the look and the vibe of a 1930s BMW - quite
like this. Not those crass wheels though - if you're going to do this you should
fit proper Borranis, or pierced alloys like the old BMW/Bristol/Frazer Nash
ones. Come to think of it, a set of Borranis might be worth as much as the car...

Hooptedoodle #264 - The Pilgrimage

Here's a cautionary tale about the recent adventures of an old acquaintance of mine.

Colwyn (pronounced "Colin", in case it matters) has now been retired for some years and, one sunny Saturday morning, when his wife was away on a shopping trip, he suddenly took a fancy to make a sort of personal pilgrimage to the village where he had lived as a young child.

Colwyn's parents have been dead for many years, and his surviving brother is in Australia, so his only association with the place comes from old family photos. Quite excited by this unexpected project, he realised that he'd wanted to do this for years, so he collected his camera and his travel pass, bought himself a pack of fruit pastilles and set off the 70 miles on the bus into darkest Northamptonshire to his birthplace.

He was delighted to revisit the village as an anonymous  tourist. It was a beautiful morning, and the obvious first stop was the house where he had lived. He found it easily - walked straight to it - on a corner in a small council housing scheme. He was pleased that the place was nicely painted, and things were pretty much as he remembered, though there were more cars parked in front gardens, and a lot of satellite dishes.

As he stared at the place where he began what has been a long saga, involving a lot of travel and a very full working and family life, he became aware that a little girl in the garden was watching him.

"Hello," said Colwyn, full of sunshine and goodwill, "I used to live here, once upon a time - when I was your age, this was my garden."

The little girl just stared at him, so he smiled and waved cheerio, and took a few photos of the surroundings before he continued his tour. Next stop was the little park where he had first played football (and later, let it be said, he was a very fair amateur player) and where he and his little mates had played complicated games of tag in the long evenings during those forgotten summer holidays from another century. Great. There was now a rather run-down playground encroaching on one end of the traditional football pitch - round about where they used to put sweaters down for the goalposts. More photos. Of course, there was no football now - in fact there was a sign prohibiting ball games of any sort.

Next pilgrim site was his old primary school. This had been modernised extensively, and there was cricket coaching or something going on, so he didn't hang around for long. This time he didn't bother with photographs, since there was very little he recognised. He set off towards the high street, to see if he could get some lunch, and maybe a beer. On the way he was intercepted by a very large, very young police constable, who asked him could he speak to him for a moment.

Colwyn wondered if the young cop was lost, and wanted directions somewhere, so he put his camera away in his shoulder bag. The policeman grabbed the camera from him, and when Colwyn attempted to hang onto it a second policeman appeared from somewhere, and they bundled him into a patrol car. He was more than a little confused, but he was informed that he was being apprehended in terms of some byelaw or other, and would be taken to the police station (in a neighbouring town) to answer some questions.

Of course you have seen this twist coming for a while, but the little girl's mother had telephoned to report a strange old man approaching her daughter, and the police had turned up and quietly followed this obvious pervert around the sort of haunts you would expect - the park, the primary school - there was even a strange tale that he had attempted to climb into the garden of another house.

Since no-one in the area knew him, Colwyn's wife was brought - very distressed, in a police car - to identify him and give some kind of character reference. Then he was taken home, late in the evening, after being given a stern warning that there must be no repeats of this episode. Apology? - no - of course not. Colwyn says that it took some weeks for his wife to forgive him, though for what he is still unsure.

I think there is a lesson here for all of us. If you ever get an urge to go and find your roots, just give yourself a slap, will you? Don't be so bloody stupid - just switch on the TV like a good fellow, and stay at home - save the police time and inconvenience, and don't frighten all those poor mothers, who have enough to worry about. You can still have the fruit pastilles, but don't offer one to anyone else. 

We'll be watching. 

Hooptedoodle #261 - Nellie

This is another farm at another time, but the farm I used to visit had an old
Ferguson tractor - I even drove it a few times. Two gears - one to go along
the road, one to work on the fields. Interestingly, you had to stop to
change gear!

 More ancient history - I last met Nellie nearly 50 years ago (there's a song in there somewhere!), but I was discussing her with the Contesse recently, and thought she might make for an interesting Hooptedoodle - at least I can be confident that I shall enjoy writing it.

Toward the end of my time at university (in Edinburgh) I was "going out" (did we really used to say things like that?) with the young lady who eventually became my first wife. She lived and worked in Edinburgh, but she came from the Borders country - her dad was a farmer. Eventually, as was the protocol in them days, it became necessary for me to visit the Borders to make the acquaintance of her parents, and so a trip on the SMT bus (to Earlston) was undertaken, and I duly presented myself for inspection.

I was completely out of my comfort zone - I was a townie, born and raised - an Englishman, what is more. Her father was nervous about my being from Liverpool - I think he expected me to steal the wheels from his car.

The trip went well enough - everyone was very kind and tolerated my almost total lack of social graces - but it was a real culture shock. The farm was out in the wilds, a few miles from Greenlaw, in Berwickshire - it was so quiet that they had to wake me up for breakfast, or I would have slept through most of each day. The food was a lot better than the Students' Union, as you might imagine, and the Old Man took me to the sheep sales at Kelso Market on the Saturday. Interesting, but all very unfamiliar, for me - like a trip to the moon.

I also had to get the hang of the fact that the locals would consider carefully what they were going to say, and then say it - very slowly. They were, after all, used to weighty matters such as whether it would be dry enough for the harvest in September, whether the shift in market prices suggested that next year there should be less barley and more turnips - that sort of stuff. I, on the other hand, was accustomed to speaking very rapidly, without any thought at all, so communication was something of a problem - I really had to work at it.

In fact, these are the workers' cottages from the farm in my story - I think that
Hector and Beth and Old Nellie lived in the second one along. There was an old
smithy just behind these cottages, but I guess it fell down decades ago.

This reached its most extreme form when I met Nellie, a lady from another age. Nellie lived in one of the farm cottages, with her daughter Beth, and Beth's husband, Hector Small, who was officially the tractor man but pretty much ran the whole farm singlehanded. Nellie was enormous - about 6 feet tall, and built like the proverbial brick outhouse - she must have been in her mid 70s, but she could still lift a sack of barley that I would have struggled with (I saw her in action when I came to help at the harvest). She had hands like millstones, her face was bright red - weatherbeaten, like a trawlerman's - and her teeth were terrifying - she didn't have many, and they were irregularly positioned, but what they lacked in numbers they made up in size - they were enormous - like horse's teeth. If I appear to be painting a deliberately unattractive picture, that's not the case - this is what she looked like. At harvest time, her standard working attire included men's overalls, tied with string below the knee, Nicky Tam style, to keep the mice out, and a man's flat cap, worn backwards. Scary.

This is an 1884 painting of Berwickshire farm workers - I'm sure it is, but
 I understand that the weird sun-bonnet is what is known as an East
Lothian Ugly, so these may be incomers!

Nellie and I really couldn't understand each other at all - not a word - but I didn't see a lot of her. Because of her age she only worked outdoors at busy times of the year; otherwise she helped the farmer's wife in the back kitchen. The house was early Victorian, and the layout was typical for a farmhouse of that period - the back kitchen, the dairy, the passage that led past the room which was called the kitchen (which was really the main living room, but was also where the cooking was done, on a massive range) to the hallway, these were all separate from the family rooms - and had no carpets, no fireplaces. Also the two servants' bedrooms up the back stairs - these houses dated from an age when the womenfolk who worked on the farm would perform manual work when it was the season, but otherwise would do domestic service in the farmhouse. Nellie used to keep out of sight when there were visitors, even wheel-tappers from Liverpool.

Workers near Earlston, Berwickshire, sometime before WW1 - those look more
like the traditional Berwickshire bonnet. Naturally this is long before any
experience of mine, but Nellie must have been a young girl around this time - this
is the culture she came from. We are always about - what? - two handshakes from history?

She spent her entire life working on the land. I'm not sure when the Bondager tradition actually died out in the Border country, but Nellie seemed like the last of a breed (the Bondagers are a worthy subject for a separate book of their own, but you will be relieved to learn that I am not an expert). She had never been to school - she must have spent her childhood moving between farms as the seasonal work dictated. She could not read. She knew everything there was to know about planting cabbages, and how to look after sick lambs, but little else. She used sometimes to travel to Kelso (10 miles away) in Hector's car; she had visited Berwick on Tweed (maybe 20 miles away) a few times, but the last occasion had been years before; she had never been to Edinburgh (40 miles away), though she knew of the place. Every year, when she took her holiday, she packed up an old cardboard suitcase and walked - yes, that's walked - to the village of Gordon, maybe 8 miles, and stayed a week with her unmarried sister.

The wonder of it all is that, in Hector's cottage, there was the first serious colour TV I had ever seen. It seemed enormous (this in the days when TV screens still had round corners), and Nellie was delighted with it. This medieval peasant woman who had never read a newspaper (and could hardly understand the radio) used to sit and watch not only the world news, but also the Martini adverts and the travel programmes, with glimpses of sophisticated living that she must never even have heard of. I still feel giddy when I try to imagine what on earth she thought she was looking at.

The farm was sold off years ago. Nellie must have been dead now for almost half a century; her kind has disappeared. The automation of farming and the better pay and conditions offered by jobs in the textile mills in the Tweeddale towns - all these things changed the economics and the lifestyles of the area. One legacy is the last vestige of a particular housing problem for the local authority; they are dying out, but there are still a good few elderly people who worked all their lives on farms, in tied cottages. When the last family member with a farming job moved off to the town in search of better things, the old folks were often left with nowhere to live. Once they have died off, that will be the end of an age.

Hooptedoodle #260 - The Vaults of Yesteryear

Very pleasant day yesterday - I had to go into Edinburgh to collect some re-glazed spectacles, and my wife agreed to make the trip with me. We had a very quiet, relaxed journey in on the 11:23 train.

The visit to the optician took about 20 minutes, so we decided to get some lunch in town before we made our way back to The Sticks. We went to the All Bar One which stands on the corner of George Street and Hanover Street - one of several places of this name in the city. I'm always a bit wary of big chains/franchises, but in fact we had a terrific lunch, with very acceptable service in very pleasant surroundings. Never been in there before, but one slightly weird aspect of my visit was that this place used to be my bank, once upon a time.

When I first came to Edinburgh as a student, back in the Late Iron Age, I opened an account with the National Commercial Bank of Scotland, entirely because they were the Scottish agents for the old Midland Bank, which was where my family kept their fourteen shillings and elevenpence savings.

The National Commercial didn't last long - they were swallowed by Royal Bank of Scotland around 1969. To prove they once existed, here's one of their old notes:

My account moved (by default) to RBS, but I was not particularly happy with my new bankers - primarily since the word STUDENT appeared in my employment details on their files - in fact it said STUDENT ACTUARY - and thus they refused to allow me an overdraft facility (and quite right too). Thus I moved to the Clydesdale Bank, at the big branch which was conveniently close to my workplace - the building where I had lunch yesterday.

I don't suppose I have been unusually unlucky with banks over the years, but there are certain themes which have followed me in my dealings with them. I left the Clydesdale in a state of high animation around 1978 - I had returned from a fortnight's holiday (in Scarborough, in fact) to receive a registered letter from a firm of solicitors, acting on behalf of John Lewis and Partners, the noted department store. I had, you see, purchased new kitchen furniture for my new house and - as was the way in those days - had signed up to repay the bill over 18 months. A standing order was set up, the paperwork was completed, and money was sent each month to JLP. Alas, the Clydesdale made an honest-but-inconvenient mistake when they cancelled my payment after 6 months instead of 18. Everything was correct apart from the year. The first I knew about it was some 3 months later when I was notified that Lewis's were proposing to take me to court to recover the debt. We sorted it out without too much trouble, and a new series of payments was set up from a brand new bank account at Barclays. Sadly, Barclays were very little use either, but eventually I took my business elsewhere simply because I was generally fed up with them, rather than as a result of some melodrama. In a small way, I guess this was progress.

Anyway, that was all long ago, and is only faintly relevant because yesterday I had a very pleasant steak sandwich and a glass of Guinness in the Clydesdale's old Ledger Hall. Slightly odd, unreal overtones - does this sort of thing lay old ghosts to rest? - not sure.

So, if you're in George Street, Edinburgh, around lunchtime, All Bar One is a very fair choice for a bite to eat. It used to be a bank once, but that is of passing interest only to older residents.

Hooptedoodle #257 - Noddy and the Demon

Yesterday I put on an old sweatshirt - I'm doing some exercise bike sessions to get the old fitness worked up a bit before we start going cycling and hillwalking as the weather improves. I have a silly collection of old teeshirts and sweatshirts, mostly souvenirs of my days touring with jazz bands, which are useful for sweaty workouts. Yesterday's specimen is one of the few surviving long-sleeve jobs - this one from the Riverboat Jazz Festival, Silkeborg, in Denmark's Lake District, from 1994.

That was the trip on which I shared a hotel room with Noddy, the trombonist. Noddy was a gentleman, really - unusually correct for a muso. No trouble at all. He was married to a very loud lady who had been a professional singer of some note (as it were), and he tended to fade into insignificance when she was around. At that time we had some pretty wild drinkers in the band. The jazz festival in Silkeborg was based around a huge marquee venue in the centre of the old town, and there were some very late shows. One night we played a set starting at midnight, by which time a couple of the more seasoned members of the band were already unfit for duty (it's a funny thing, but it was always the supposed professionals who let themselves down in this way...). In particular, Jack Duff, the tenor sax man (an absolute monster of a player, by the way), was staggering drunk - he couldn't stand up but he could still play like an angel - maybe he'd have lived longer if that hadn't been a common situation.

We got through that set by the expedient of lashing Duffo to one of the big tent poles that supported the marquee - he was OK. We released him during the break, and carted him home after we had finished. There were a few characters like that - I found much of this rather unnerving, to be honest.

Anyway, back to Noddy. He was from Kent, originally - he had served as a bandsman in the army, and after that he got a job as a music teacher. I'm not suggesting that there was anything wrong with guys like Noddy, nor with the teaching system at that time, but the entrance criteria for instrument teachers in the schools seemed less rigorously based on academic qualifications than you might expect. I hadn't spent much time with Noddy, so sharing a room with him was a new experience. During off-duty spells we went out for a few trips to local attractions - we went to see Tollund Man (the prehistoric chap they pulled out of a local peat bog), we walked around the big lake, we had some good chats about music and films, and I learned that Noddy was another boozer. Not a raving drunk, like some of them, just a rather sad, quiet alcoholic, who did his drinking in private.

Tollund Man

When we went out for our walks around Silkeborg, Noddy would always excuse himself just as we left the room, claim that he had forgotten something, and go back. When he joined me downstairs, he smelled of whisky.

In his wardrobe he had a secret bottle of Canadian Club. As the week went on there were a series of successors to this bottle. I only knew the whisky was there because his wardrobe door swung open on the first day (by itself!), and there it was. I was fascinated, because Noddy obviously carried a chinagraph (wax) pencil, with which he recorded the level in the bottle each time he took a slug.

I was sorry that he had to keep his drinking a secret, and slightly miffed that he kept a check to make sure that outsiders (such as myself) were not pinching his booze. If he had simply told me that he liked a drink when on tour then I wouldn't have cared - would not have disapproved, and certainly would not have raided his supply. I mentioned this to Fergie, the trumpet player, and he came up with what we considered a great prank. He and I jointly purchased a half-bottle of Canadian Club of our own, which I kept hidden away, and for a few days I used to sneak a bit extra into Noddy's current bottle, so that the level was appreciably above the latest chinagraph mark. We were interested to see what happened - it seemed unlikely that he would accuse me of putting whisky into a bottle of whose existence I was supposed to be unaware. He would, in any case, have to out himself as a secret boozer to do this. We didn't go crazy - there were just a few days when the whisky level definitely went up instead of down.

If Noddy noticed then he didn't say anything. Disappointing, really. When the half bottle ran out I stopped, and presumably he just assumed he had made a mistake with his pencil. Ultimately it wasn't as much of a laugh as we had hoped, but since it would not have been a very kind sort of laugh maybe that's right and proper.

All long ago - Noddy, like so many others in that band, is no longer around. He died, quietly and politely, of early-onset dementia a few years ago. I hasten to add that I was very much a relative youngster in that company!

Hooptedoodle #255 - Goodbye, Johnny B Goode

I would be embarrassed to be seen to offer up another me-too tribute - it's an activity I disapprove of. Private feelings are nicer and somehow more sincere when they remain private.

I am reminded by yesterday's news of the passing of Chuck Berry that - rather to my surprise, in the long run - he was a sort of hero of mine. Someone who made my life a little richer, in the influence he wielded as much as by his own work.

Already the media are wheeling out all sorts of has-beens from show business to make over-inflated utterances about pop music as Great Art, and all that. I really wouldn't know, and would hesitate to attempt an academic assessment.

Berry is especially significant for what he represents. A black man from St Louis, he began recording for Chess Records in the mid 1950s. Chess, bear in mind, were a specialist blues label who published artists like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Bo Diddley - primarily for black audiences - and a worse fit than Berry with the accepted marketed image of the popular music world of the day is hard to imagine. The spending power of the record-buying teenager was a new phenomenon, and major record labels in the US were struggling to push coiffed, sterilised, parent-approved products such as Johnny Tillotson, Fabian and similar - white, acceptable to the church, not overtly masculine. He was surprisingly old, too - if I recall correctly, his first commercial success, Maybelline, was released in 1955, when he was 29. That is positively ancient.

He was not an admirable character, in many ways. He had spells in prison - notably for tax evasion and (once) for statutory rape (a charge which looks a bit like police entrapment, all these years later). He is famous for being difficult to deal with, complicated, devious. I read his autobiography some years ago and was disappointed - it wasn't a great read, overall, and he came across as an unusually self-obsessed character. I suspect that I wouldn't have warmed to the great man's company. I saw him once, live - he was excellent, a consummate showman, but he was accompanied by a disappointing English tour-band which did nothing for him at all.

There is a definite thread of racism through many of the bad breaks which he suffered - especially in the early years, though his combative personality cannot have helped. He came through a hard school. I read that in the dance-halls and the provincial theatres he got into the habit of threading his guitar lead through the handle of his guitar case before plugging into his amplifier - thus making it impossible for anyone to steal the case without the matter coming to his attention. He also would not play until someone put actual cash into his hand. Incongruously, he still insisted on these technical safeguards when he was appearing at the Paris Olympia - a quirk which is not without a certain rough charm.

It would be wrong to claim that his records were history-changers in their own right - famously, he was very fortunate in that his music impressed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the (white) rock bands that swept to power in the 1960s. Without that connection, Berry and a lot of his contemporaries would probably have disappeared without trace decades ago. This has all been much-discussed in the past - however it worked, it worked. I love him because of the unpretentious nature of the music (though he did tend to release thinly-disguised rehashes of his earlier successes), and his cute, street-poet lyrics, which offer an interesting social history of American youth.

This is getting close to a tribute, and I wouldn't want that.

Thanks, Chuck. That's really all I wanted to say.

Hooptedoodle #253 - One for the Film Buffs

I was looking for old pictures of the area where I live, and - quite by chance - I came across this:

[Good grief, Foy, now what? You cancel the Siege of Newcastle, claim force majeur, and now you're fiddling around with... what, exactly?]

Well, actually, I have to explain that this is a photo of Brigitte Bardot (you probably worked that bit out), but it's taken on the beach behind my house - right here on the farm. This is quite a shock - I've grown used to thinking about General Monck and Robert L Stevenson and a few other notables having been around here, and I can cope with having a previously unknown castle within 600 yards of my house, but I never once thought of Brigitte. Well - not in that context.

It seems that in 1966 she was involved in a film titled A Coeur Joie (released in the US as Two Weeks in September), and this film was shot at a variety of places I know well, including Edinburgh Zoo (apparently), Dirleton and (ta-da!) our own Seacliff Beach, as seen here. These pictures also show her co-star, Laurent Terzieff, and blooming cold they look, September or no.

I was gently intrigued. I had a quick look around for reviews of the film, and to see if it is still available (only, you understand, because I wish to see some shots of our beach...), and found that the film is still available in French, without subtitles. There are some Region 1 editions of the English language version, but clips I've seen on YouTube suggest that the dubbing and reshooting with English dialogue is a thing of major embarrassment. So the French version seems a far better bet. However, reviews I've seen also suggest that this may be among the worst films ever made. Thus I am - how do you say? - put off a bit.

This shot shows, in the background, the end of the path by which we walk to our beach.
I never thought of La Bardot sitting there. The slope and the terrain vary from year to
year, depending how much of the beach is left in place by the Spring tides. Obviously
they had a fair amount of sand in 1966, but sometimes it's quite stony. I have to add that
the Contesse Foy's mother fell rather spectacularly at this very spot some years ago; fortunately
she did not injure herself, but we still treasure the memory...

Given a free choice, I would prefer not to watch Brigitte in an embarrassing movie. Not that I am a fan, of course, but because of my love of the art.

Anyone have any views on this minor classic of French cinema? It really doesn't matter - yesterday I didn't even know that a film goddess had once walked among our sandhills, so I can forget all about it quite easily. But, there again...

Hooptedoodle #252 - Hair, or Why I Never Made It in the Movies

This is not me

When I was five I had never thought about my hair. It was curly and a bit lumpy, I guess, but it was just something that my mother fussed over and brushed into shape. Then I went to school and there was a boy in my class named Alan Pashley. Alan had flat, shiny, black hair – it never moved, and you could almost see your reflection in it. This was my introduction to the world of Brylcreem, the world where some men just had it and other men just didn’t.

I wanted hair like Alan’s – more than anything in the world. I was so envious it hurt.

Denis Compton

At five I was not interested in girls, obviously, but even at that age I was sufficiently aware of the power of advertising to know that they would chase you down the street if you put some branded gloop on your hair. From that time on I always wished I could look like someone else – almost anyone else, in fact. I once tried a secret experiment with a blob of my dad’s Brylcreem, but it just produced a greasier version of the same chaotic, lumpy mess, so I then knew for sure that in my case this was not just a matter of grooming, it was simply that the raw material was hopeless.

Robert Beatty

Things were not helped by the fact that my dad devoutly believed that boys should part their hair on the left, same as they buttoned their coats left-over-right, without regard to which direction the hair grew in. It was a manhood thing.

Johnny Haynes

Like everyone else, I spent my youth agonising about my unattractive appearance – things improved very slightly when I was nineteen and I dared to change my hair, and get it parted on the natural (girl’s?) side. I’ve never been a big fan of the way I look, but you sort of get used to it as the years pass, there are other things to fret about, and you probably reach a stage where girls chasing you down the street would be a nuisance. And, of course, eventually the damn stuff starts to fall out, so the problem will be replaced by another…

Good Grief

Time passes.

My youngest son is now fourteen, and he doesn’t like his hair. It makes him miserable. Now there’s a surprise. Nothing is new. He was horrified by a recent photograph of himself, and when we reassured him that it was actually a good photo, and he looked fine in it, he was furious – our naïve approval of his hated appearance was the final straw. There is almost no limit to the things he has to put up with. No-one has ever been this wretched.

Maybe, come to think of it, some things have changed a little. When I was five, or even nineteen, there were very few actual film stars around – the rest of us did not expect to look like that – we all had crooked teeth, dodgy hair, moles, all that. Now the world is run by viral photos on social media – “products” are available to sort out your hair, everyone is expected to have good teeth, wear the right labels, cover themselves in tattoos, circulate hopeful selfies of themselves. If you do not look like a film star, pal, you are not trying. Maybe failure is more absolute, less excusable than it was in my day. Do not be ugly, have a pimple on your nose, etc, because not only will you feel bad about it, but your friends will crucify you on Instagram.

So we are trying to come up with a supportive, workable strategy to help our son. The first, and maybe most obvious idea is that he should get his hair cut rather more frequently, and keep it a little shorter. It might help – at the very least, you would think, he will have less of it to be offended by. He could try to get it re-styled, or set up some heavyweight grooming programme involving gloop and conditioner (and cost, and crap, and frustration, and effort, and wasted time in front of the mirror), but that is unlikely to work out well in the longer run, and merely adds layers of paranoia and hopeless struggle to the existing problem. We need to identify a calm moment, and try to form some sort of plan. Feasible would be good.

I fear that the grooming/gloop approach has become a colossal industry – the default way of life – many and vast are the fortunes made by exploiting personal inadequacy. The world is filled with pictures of kids who miss the point – selfies of 300-pound clones of Paris Hilton abound, daft photos of boys with a poor copy of someone else’s beard stuck on the front – just have a look at your Facebook friends’ friends’ friends…

Prayer for a fine Monday morning: Please send us a little peace. Let us remember that there are people in the world who have far worse problems than untidy hair – let us try to focus, just a little, on things that actually matter. Let us see heartless, exploitational advertising for what it is.