The Full and Unexpurgated History of England* to the Best of My Knowledge (part two)

The Magna Carta having cured all social issues and resolved all inequalities within our society, England ploughed on along the path of peace and tranquillity towards prosperity…

1346 A.D. – The Black Death. Bubonic plague reduced the population of Europe by more than fifty percent and may have killed up to 200 million people worldwide replacing the price of turnips as the most discussed subject in the pub. This plague should not be confused with the Great Plague of London (1665) which was actually exactly the same thing, but three hundred years later.

1455 A.D – The War of the Roses. A series of civil wars fought between two branches of the same family for the control of the country following a feud dating back to the death of Edward III over who got the candlesticks. These wars lasted for thirty years and differed only from the kind of ructions that emanate from most family funerals in the number of deaths it precipitated and the pronounced paucity of mushroom vol au vents afterwards.

1605 A.D. – The Gunpowder Plot. A failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament as a prelude to restoring a Catholic monarchy in the country which was led by Robert Catesby. Guy Fawkes was just one of a number of conspirators, but he was the one who was unlucky enough to have been left in charge of the gunpowder and, subsequently, the one who has had fireworks stuffed up his arse on the fifth of November every year since. The other plotters – those who survived a gun battle and a fire caused (ironically) by their own gunpowder – plus a couple who joined in the party posthumously (having been exhumed especially for the event) were castrated, hung, drawn and quartered, but at least they don’t have to be reminded of it every bloody year.

1642 A.D. – The English Civil War: a series of battles between ‘Roundheads’ and ‘Cavaliers’ to determine the supremacy of parliament over monarch. Oliver Cromwell led the Roundheads to victory and became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland after beheading King Charles I. He was a kind and benevolent leader and in no way a complete megalomaniac arse, so beloved by his happy and joyful subjects that as soon as they could, following his death in 1658, they opted to have the Monarchy restored, as it was a far less authoritarian option. Charles II dissolved the Parliament at his earliest convenience and assumed total control of the kingdom until his death in 1685 by which time he had at least twelve illegitimate children from his many mistresses (including Nell Gwynne, Moll Flanders and Joan Collins) and a dopey-looking spaniel named after him.

1665 A.D – The Great Plague of London (one of many re-emergences of The Black Death) killed about twenty five percent of the city’s population and, like most of the bad things the capital has to offer, eventually spread out to the whole country. Ships travelling into London from infected ports were forced into quarantine before being allowed to dock and the wealthier members of society (including Charles II and his entourage) fled the city. Things did not seem quite so bad when only the poor were dying. Eventually a cure was found when a negligent baker managed to burn down most of the city the following year. The efficacy of this fiery cure is attested to in the second verse of the Plague Nursery Rhyme, ‘Ring-a-Roses’ which goes ‘Ashes on the water, Ashes on the sea, We all jump up with a one, two, three’ – although it now appears to have been ‘modernised’ to ‘Fishes in the water, Fishes in the sea’ in order to make no sense at all.

1707 A.D. – The Act of Union between England and Scotland was passed in both parliaments, leading to the formation of Great Britain. The Union was so popular in Scotland that martial law had to be imposed and pub landlords began the long-held tradition of charging English Tourists extra for allowing them to put ice in the whisky.

N.B. I can only apologise if my interpretation of events is at odds with your own. Loathe though I am to admit it, I do occasionally get things wrong.

*This is not The History of Britain because I have no desire to thoroughly piss off the people of three other nations.

You can find part one here and part three here.

The Full and Unexpurgated History of England* to the Best of My Knowledge (part one)

A short note for regular readers: I had these three items ‘stacked up’, so now seems the right time to use them. I think I should be back to ‘usual’ next week.

I have mentioned before, I am sure (I am not one for hiding my shame under a bushel) my complete negligence in attempting to get to grips with the rudimentary research required to tackle History at ‘A’ level and my subsequent abject failure to attain a standard that the examination board could even be bothered to grade. I am not proud of this – there is little in my schooldays that I can be proud of – but it has prompted me to investigate just how far my historical knowledge (at least of my own country) does spread. Curiously, I discover that it does cover quite a lot – albeit breathtakingly thinly…

500,000 B.C. – Boxgrove man stumbled into Sussex only to find that all the sunbeds had already been taken by Boxgrove German.

2,000 B.C. – In an attempt to make the game more media-friendly, a group of druid football fans invented a round pitch featuring 5 goals with a convenient slab in the centre on which to sacrifice the referee if he refused to overrule VAR. Stonehenge (later known as the Plumbing4U Arena) was carefully orientated so that the sun was always in the opposition goalie’s eyes during the second half.

43 A.D. – The Roman’s conquered England (despite Julius Caesar having claimed to have done so in 55 B.C. – ‘I’m sorry J.C., but standing on the beach saying Veni, Vidi, Vici does not constitute conquest, even in Kent’) and introduced straight roads, coinage, apples and pears (much later adopted by Cockneys in order to get up to the first floor), regular bathing (much, much later adopted by Cockneys) extravagant hand gestures and swearing. Most of England and Wales did not actually succumb to military take-over but merely adopted Roman habits and laws in exchange for toilet facilities. This was not the way in Scotland where the natives – particularly the strange and heavily bearded women – refused to stop deep-frying the pizza and fortifying the wine with Irn Bru, and eventually (122 A.D.) the Romans erected a huge wall that ran from Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway to mark the northernmost extent of their empire and the southernmost reach of the bagpipes (although they did later expand further and built a new wall between the Firths of Forth and Clyde which was abandoned only eight years after completion when the Roman Empire retreated back to Hadrain’s Wall and both Celtic and Rangers claimed the victory).

1066 A.D. – The Norman Invasion and the defeat of the English King Harold by William, Duke of Normandy. The Normans gave us castles, churches and monasteries, and a deep-seated distrust of all things French. Harold was famously killed by an arrow through the eye, but contemporary accounts state that he was also attacked with swords as he lay dying – perhaps he asked for gravy with his snails.

1086 A.D. – The Domesday Book: an early Norman census that detailed all of the property pinched from the English by the French and provided a guide to how much tax could be raised from all of those who could not possibly afford it.

1215 A.D. – The Magna Carta: a royal charter of rights decreed by King John to a group of 25 barons who, it transpired, were twenty-five times as bad as a single king for most of the country’s population. The charter listed a number of civil rights and the people who could trample on them. Legal precedents were created, such as Habeus Corpus, and civil liberties were enshrined into English Law – although not so enshrined that 99% of the population would ever have the faintest idea about it. The charter was modified and reissued in 1216,1217, 1225 and 1297 on each occasion signing away a little more of the monarch’s divine right in exchange for hard cash. The Magna Carta also provided the blueprint for the American Constitution which is equally effective at protecting the poor and the disenfranchised.

N.B. I can only apologise if my interpretation of events is at odds with your own. Loathe though I am to admit it, I do get things wrong.

*This is not The History of Britain because I have no desire to thoroughly piss off the people of three other nations.

You can find part two here and part three here.

Idle Speculation

It’s all part of a normal cycle for me: a few weeks ago, fresh back from the Aegean sunshine, my carefully curated backlog exhausted, I was writing my posts on the hoof and fretting constantly over what to do when inspiration did not come to call. Today, I sit with a pile of essays in front of me, wondering if I should start to publish every day in order to get rid of them.

I won’t, of course, because I know that the days of nothing to report are just around the corner. It is, as I say, just part of the normal ebb and flow for me: sometimes I can write this hodgepodge in abundance – it just oozes out of me – whilst on others I can spend an evening staring at a semi-colon, trying to decide whether I can do without it. I am consistent only in my inconsistency. I think that the knowledge that there is ‘work’ in hand gives my head the latitude it needs to wander off in all the wrong directions. Torpor sets in and the cardigan comes out.

It is, for reasons I have not yet managed to identify, a quiet day on the building site behind me. All work appears to have halted and silence prevails. I swear I can hear birdsong. I am sure that if I were to half close my eyes, I would be able to see soldiers playing football in the mud and the puddles. I wonder, should the work actually stop today, how long would it take nature to reclaim the land: to subsume the proto-roads and infrastructures, to re-establish homes, not for humans, but for beasties of all types and sizes?

Idle speculation of course because, even now, I see herds of hi-viz approaching me from the left and a lorry (presumably a Brobdignagian tea-urn) disappearing to the right. A casual glance from the window finds me staring into the jaw of a giant digger.

Half a century, or more, ago I read a story in what well could have been ‘Amazing Tales’ or ‘Astounding Stories’ which, unusually, did not centre on the Aliens living, undetected, next door. It supposed that the Solar System was a molecule, each planet an atom, a tiny fragment of a reality that was infinitely bigger than our own – the Universe as a coffee table – and I can’t shake off the image of all the giant machinery around me as vast insects, themselves part of some huge colony, simultaneously building and pillaging.

At which point, doubt kicks in: do I mean pillaging? Wasn’t that a Viking thing alongside names like Bloodaxe and helmets with horns on? Always makes me wonder how primitive we English were back then that the Vikings could be regarded as civilising. We had plenty of Vikings around these parts and the influence still persists. I know that the suffix ‘by’ simply meant ‘village’ (hence Ingleby – the English village – and Normanby – the Norman village) and that Thorp(e) meant a village of lesser importance e.g. Thorpe-on-the-Hill, Thorpe-le-Fallows, Thorpe-near-the-Bus Stop and Thorpe-where-the-old-village-pub-is-now-an-Old Tyre Dump.

What I’m hoping, of course, is that they might dig up Viking remains behind me, a Viking village perhaps, fatefully named Colinby or Thorpe-on-the-Back Field, accompanied by pots of gold and enough ancient artefacts to keep Baldrick* happy for months – just long enough for a Preservation Order to be slapped on the whole shebang.

Fanciful? I guess so, but the thought has kept me occupied for a while – even if it does mean that another day has gone by with nothing for me to say…

*A hugely popular character from Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Blackadder’, played by Tony Robinson, who later hosted ‘Time Team’ in which all manner of things were dug up by a team of people with whom you would love to spend an evening in the pub, but probably, all things considered, would not want living next door.

First and Last

I hang onto first sentences. I hoard them about my person, on my office notice board and, more often than not, on torn pieces of paper crumpled in the midst of snotty tissue, conker shells and secreted Daim wrappers in the darkest recesses of my trouser pockets. They are normally scrawled, semi-legibly on to whatever paper is immediately available, with whatever writing implement comes to hand and, by the time they are dredged from the lint-lined depths, have lost all relevance to whatever train of thought they were intended to precipitate. I like to think that this is a good thing. I somehow write a post that follows on from this disembodied little nosegay and, more often than not, like yourselves, have no idea of where it is likely to take me. I hope that it’s exciting, but I fear it is merely confusing, like mistaking episode three for episode two, when you fell asleep half way through episode one of what turned out to be a completely different series which actually followed on from series two, most of which you missed altogether. Like Blade Runner, The Matrix and ice hockey…

Over my time on this platform I have fielded more questions than I would like to admit about my writing process. The general consensus appears to be that I have a theme to work to and various bullet-points that I meet on my way to the conclusion. Sadly I do not.

Generally I am aware of my theme only after I have finished writing and I only know what the conclusion is because it comes at the end. Bullet points would only provide me with something to miss along the way. The ‘grand idea’ almost always comes after the writing is finished and I know the ending only after I have reached it. It is a ridiculously amateurish way of writing, I know, but it is all that I have. It is like knitting a blanket and deciding that it’s a pullover only after you discover it has sleeves. Most of my time is taken up in trying to get the sleeve out of the neck-hole and the pattern running in the right direction.

On the rare occasions that I have a point to make, I have forgotten it long before I have worked out how to punctuate the first sentence. The content of my brain generally just overflows onto the paper – the basis of my conviction that shit floats – and such concentration as I can muster goes into making some sense of it all. It is seldom the sense that I intended.

It works like this: I pick one of my paper scraps and write whatever it says at the top of a blank sheet of paper. I stare at it for a while. I write a second sentence to stop the first one getting lonely and stare at that for a while. I decide not to worry and I allow my mind to wander about for a few hundred words. I stop. I attempt to conjure up a final sentence that has some connection, however vague, to the first. I transcribe the whole thing onto the laptop, convinced that the right font and line spacing will sort it all out. I read it through and realise why I have worked in a shop all my life. In a panic, I attempt to add some jokes, but quickly realise that putting a red nose on a pallbearer doesn’t stop him delivering the coffin.

I despair. I eat chocolate. I stare at the first sentence. I formulate a plan to hang on to last sentences too…

An Apology

I have some posts scheduled for the next few days so I will let them run, but I won’t be around to read posts or to reply to comments for the next few days. Sorry.

I will be back soon.

A Very British Affair

I have always considered this little potpourri (lit. ‘bowl of dried-up, odourless husks’) of mine to be a particularly British affair in subject matter, points of reference and use of language, particularly colloquialisms (try saying that with a face full of Mars Bar – or spelling it with a head full of cotton wool) and idioms. It has therefore always come as something of a surprise to me to find that my resident English readers are far from dominant. Australia, New Zealand and Canada I kind of understand – old colonial ties and extended families could mean that my turns of phrase might be slightly more familiar to the ear; that my use of extended metaphor might not sound quite so much like a message from Alpha Centauri – and to some extent I get (and am certainly very grateful for) the welcoming hands across the ocean from USA: we are separated by a common language, but I think we get one another most of the time. (With the exception of almost every word ever uttered by Donald Trump or Mickey Rourke, I can personally understand almost 90% of the American version of my language – most of which appears to involve dropping perfectly good letters from words and turning trollies into jockeys – providing it is not spoken by Joey out of Friends.) In India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa a very satisfactory number of people manage to make a little space in the day to spend a moment of time with me. I am thrilled to find that I have readers all over the world, although I cannot help but wonder what some of you make of it all – please let me know – and am particularly bemused by my popularity in Romania, where, I think I might be becoming a bit of a cult (although I am not quite certain that I have translated that correctly). To my one reader in the Philippines, I would just like you to know that I have my suitcase packed – please send the address. I appear to have lost my Russian and Chinese readers recently and I am really sorry about that – we all need to talk to understand – and I presume that my single French reader peruses my weekly output with an ironic Gallic glint in the eye and the kind of shrug of the shoulders that assures me, however low my opinion of myself, I am completely right to hold it.

Now, I am sure that you are wondering what has brought this to the fleeting attention of my restless and febrile brain. Well, for as long as I can remember – depending on whether I have just entered, or left the room – I have toyed with the idea of writing a detective yarn with, should anybody have the slightest recollection of it, just the faintest hint of Adam Adamant* about it, (No! Not Adam Ant. That would just be silly.) although I’m not 100% certain I don’t mean Hadleigh*. The concept is not a difficult one – if you haven’t done so before, I can only recommend that you read Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ books** to enjoy the sly, and very clever humour that runs through them – my problem is that for as long as I have been mulling over this particular enterprise, I have had but a single name in mind for my hero: Armitage Shanks. It makes me smile every time I think of it, and then I wonder, would you get the joke wherever you may live? Would I have to employ a translator simply to work on a nation-by-nation version of the hero’s name? It worried me for a long time. It stopped me properly setting my mind to the task, but now I realise, that if my very good friends from Poland, Ecuador and Taiwan can get their heads around this little junket, then a man named after a toilet should be a doddle for them.

*Come on, you’re educated people, I’m sure you can always Google it.

**Gerald Harper himself, by the way, would have made a particularly fine Holmes.

Trick or Treat – Frankie & Benny #5

“So Frankie, shall we do yours or mine on Monday?”
“We’ll do yours Benny. Your door sponges down easier than mine.”
“So you say. Ok, well you’ll have to help me block the letterbox again and make sure we’ve got plenty of food in.”
“Yes, it took us a full week to get out last year after the little buggers superglued the lock.”
“My lock.”
“Yes, well, we made the mistake of letting them know we were in there.”
“‘Trick or Treat?’, ‘Trick or Treat?’… If I’m honest, yes, I’d like a treat thank you. How about I could afford to turn my heating on? How about I don’t have to sit under a blanket at night to keep warm?”
“Ah, but we like the blankets don’t we.”
“Well yes, ok, at night with the telly on.”
“A cup of tea and a Yo-Yo.”
“Legs all tucked in.”
“And you with that bloody rubber Frankenstein hand again no doubt.”
“There should be a good film on the telly mind.”
“It’ll be a horror won’t it, being Halloween.”
“I suppose so. What was it last year? The Exorcist wasn’t it?”
“Yes, and you pee’d your pants.”
“I spilled my tea. It made me jump.”
“It made you put a cushion on your crotch for the rest of the evening.”
“You know, I don’t remember Halloween even existing when we were kids.”
“No. It was an American thing wasn’t it.”
“Yes, I think that bloody alien brought it over.”
“Alien?”
“Yes. In that film. Little green thing. Long finger. Sat on the front of a bike while all the kids wandered about with sheets over their heads.”
“E.T.?”
“Probably. We didn’t have it till then did we: Halloween? Bloody Trick or Treat: extortion I call it. Robbery in a white sheet and grandma’s make-up.”
“Well, they don’t bother much with the fancy dress around here do they – unless you count a black balaclava and a baseball bat. Never mind a pumpkin in your window to show that you’re Trick or Treat friendly. I reckon you’d need a gun emplacement in the foyer to keep the little sods away.”
“Not so little most of them.”
“No. So big these days aren’t they? One day a toddler and the next a full-grown mugger.”
“They were taking credit cards last year.”
“For payment?”
“No, they were actually taking credit cards and buying stuff from the corner shop.”
“Blimey, they must have had to buy a lot of sweets: don’t they have a minimum £5 spend on a card?”
“They don’t do Haribo these days apparently, kids, they do Johnnie Walker and Benson & Hedges.”
“It was all about Bonfire Night when we were kids wasn’t it?”
“Penny for the Guy.”
“Dignified begging. At least there was some effort went into making those Guys.”
“Unless you could nick one off the smaller kids.”
“Of course, but it was all much more innocent then, wasn’t it?”
“November the fifth, a box of Brock’s in the back garden, a mug of Bovril and a blackened potato out of the bonfire.”
“Disappointing rockets and Catherine Wheels that fell off the pin and scorched your dad’s begonias.”
“Roman Candles that threw sparks into your bobble hat and burned great patches out of your hair.”
“Tying a Jumping Jack to your sister’s coat.”
“And bonfire toffee, do you remember that?”
“I do, Francis my friend. I do. Rock hard shite. It was like chewing a sweetened paving slab.”
“And Mischief Night the night before.”
“Oh yes, knock and run…”
“…Dog shit on the door handle…”
“…Bangers through the letterbox…”
“… So, we lock the door, block the letterbox, turn off the lights and pretend we’re not in until after Bonfire Night.”
“Shall we have a Halloween themed meal?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know… Egg and chips?”
“Egg and chips? How’s that Halloween themed?”
“Well, it’s what we always have. Have you got a better suggestion?”
“Well, let me think now… What about Ghoulash? Stake and chips? Maybe something with loads of garlic in it.”
“Why garlic?”
“It wards off the vampires.”
“It wards off everything when you’ve eaten it.”
“Mm, it doesn’t sit well with me does it?”
“It oozes out of you. Sharing a room with you is like being locked in a dustbin with a French corpse. I have to wash my clothes when I’ve been in the lift with you.”
“No garlic then?”
“Not unless you want it with egg and chips.”
“Shouldn’t we have pumpkin?”
“Pumpkin what?”
“Pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin and chips. I don’t know, I’ve never eaten pumpkin.”
“I don’t think anybody eats pumpkin. It’s like turnip: it’s a straight out of the bag and into the bin thing.”
“So what then?”
“I’ve told you, egg and chips, a fresh cream éclair and a cup of tea.”
“A few tinnies with the film afterwards. Champion. Just like always… except we’ll be in the dark.”
“Oh God, yes. I suppose I’ll be chiselling egg yolk off the settee again.”
“You leave them too runny.”
“Too runny? Who wants a solid egg yolk? You can’t dip your chips in a solid egg yolk.”
“You can when you’ve cooked ‘em! Last time they were still frozen.”
“I was trying to save gas.”
“Well it didn’t work did it? I had to thaw mine out one at a time in front of the fire.”
“You’re very quick to criticise. You’re no Egon Ronay yourself you know. The biggest leap forward in your cookery skills came when you took the batteries out of the smoke alarm. And anyway, we’re not having the fire on this time. We’ve got blankets and hot water bottles. We’ll just sit the week out. It’ll be like the blitz. Especially if you’ve had garlic.”
“It’ll keep the kids away from the door.”
“It’ll definitely put them off their Smarties.”
“…Do kids still eat Smarties?”
“I’m sure they do. I’ve seen them sharing them out. Only the blue ones mind.”
“Are you sure they’re Smarties?”
“What do you mean, M&M’s?”
“No, I don’t think they’re M&M’s either.”
“What then?”
“I think they’re probably pills.”
“Viagra?”
“No Benny, not Viagra.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, randy little buggers.”
“I think they’re probably amphetamines my friend?”
“What?”
“Amphetamines. Bennies, Benny. Speed, whiz, whip…”
“Bloody hell, you sound like a script for Batman. What do they do with those then?”
“Well they keep them awake. It’s why they’re down in the front there firing rockets at the fire brigade at three o’clock in the morning. It’s why they’re setting fire to your bin at midnight. It’s why they’re asleep all day. It’s probably why they keep mistaking your door for a lavatory…”
“…Do you remember those little brown tablets we used to take as kids Frankie? Really perked you up they did.”
“I think you’re talking about Fisherman’s Friends old chum.”
“Am I?”
“They certainly cleared the sinuses, I must admit.”
“Maybe I’ll get a bag of those for the Trick or Treaters.”
“It might not be wise my friend.”
“No, I suppose you’re right. We’ll keep the door shut and the lights out. If anyone knocks we’ll pretend we’ve had a stroke.”
“…Shall we eat the Haribo now then?”
“Yes, let’s do it…”

I feel as though some explanation may be required for those of you reading this outside the UK.
Yo-Yo – a foil wrapped, mint cream topped, chocolate biscuit delight.
Haribo – jelly sweets made almost exclusively from cow knuckle and sherbert.
Bonfire Night – November the Fifth. A ‘celebration’ of a failed attempt to blow up the British parliament in 1605, in which an effigy of one of the plotters, Guy Fawkes, is burned on a bonfire. In the past, the effigy was often taken from house to house asking the householders to give ‘a penny for the Guy’. This was not begging, it was tradition. November Fifth, back then, was the only night on which, whatever the weather, fireworks were lit and as tradition dictated, damply fizzled out. The traditional Fireworks Night now runs from mid-September to Christmas.
Mischief Night – November the Fourth. The night on which all of those who did not stump up the ‘penny for the Guy’ learned the error of their ways.
Smarties – Like M&M’s, but less so.
Fisherman’s Friends – A small brown throat lozenge, also useful for removing the non-stick coating from Teflon pans.

The Flu Jab

It could have been Tesco, but I was waiting in Sainsbury’s for the pharmacist to administer my annual flu’ vaccine when it suddenly occurred to me that in my youth, when the National Health Service was an aspiration for the rest of the world, the very idea that a vital element of its armoury would one day be dispensed by a very pleasant lady in a startling polyester uniform within a major Supermarket chain by would probably have had Aneurin Bevan corkscrewing his way towards an early grave. The absence of starched linen was striking. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, but not the merest hint of carbolic assaulted my epithelium. I presume – although I am by no means certain – that such outsourcing of services, to all of our supermarket giants, is not undertaken on a non-profit basis, but is a symptom, rather, of a health service unable to cope with the volume of need and the sad realisation that you do not need to boil the towels before you stick a needle in somebody’s arm. It bothered me…

Back in my youth, in the halcyon days of easy access to NHS G.P., Dentist and Accident & Emergency Services (I presume that this is not just my rose-tinted memory playing tricks again) I would have been surprised to ever find myself in the very middle-class environment of a Sainsbury’s store at all. To the best of my knowledge (e.g. very little) the whole of this rural county of ours was a Sainsbury’s-Free Zone. It was one of those shops, like Harrods, Biba and The Soho Sin-a-Rama, that you had to take a train journey ‘down south’ to visit.

When I was a child, I remember the excitement when our estate had two former local shops knocked together in what we could charitably call an extremely rudimentary manner – the dividing wall was knocked through where the fireplaces used to be, lending a singular, if slightly alarming, tilt to the roof – and rebranded as Greenway’s Mace. Mr Greenway – the only man to my memory on the estate that wore his brown overall over a shirt and tie – was the owner of the shop (not to mention a moustache stolen directly from the face of Jimmy Edwards) and Mace was a franchised brand of local supermarket, usually squeezed into the premises of former corner grocers by knocking through the downstairs bathroom and putting a corrugated asbestos roof over the back yard to store the perishables. It did not have everything that Sainsbury’s had, but it did have a deli-counter that sold Luncheon Meat and Gala Pie by the slice, cream cheese and potted meat by the spoonful and a freezer filled with own-brand fish fingers and a lard-like ice cream that you stuck between two wafers and dropped on your shoe. It had three different brands of baked beans! It had a ‘bargain box’ full of tins that the labels had fallen off, a thousand different kinds of cigarette and if it sold alcohol at all, it was definitely under the counter with the prophylactics.

By the time I was married the day-to-day trip to Mace for the day’s shopping was a thing of the past. Now was the time of the big shop: weekly or monthly depending on how you got paid, and it heralded the dawn of the domination of the massive supermarket chains of the day Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, except if you lived around our neck of the woods, where it heralded the weekly trip to Hillards (no apostrophe), which was situated in an old sack factory on the very edge of the estate. It was very much a supermarket of its time with shelves packed willy nilly, stacked with tins and boxes and bottles and nothing that went off too quickly. If it could be dehydrated, Hillards stocked it. It seemed huge and it was a place of fascination and delight. Treats were few back then, but I did generally manage to lay my hands on four cans of Norseman lager once a month – which had the both the strength and the taste of what it forced you to do the morning after – to accompany the weekly ‘Chinese’ takeaway treat of a shared spring roll with chips and sweet & sour sauce. It had more brands of baked beans than you could shake a stick at…

If you Google ‘Hillards’ now, all you can really find out is that it was a small supermarket chain from the North of England bought out in a hostile takeover by Tesco in May 1987 and that, if I’m honest, is why I had my vaccination at Sainsbury’s – they, to the best of my knowledge, have never been hostile to my memories…

A Long Time in Politics (Confused? You Will Be…)

I honestly don’t know when, or even if, I will publish this. I keep thinking that I ought to wait for a conclusion to it all, or at least an end to series #1, but I fear that all I’m actually going to get is never-ending repeats, so I thought that it was important that I wrote it all down while I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have a clue what on earth was going on…

This has been a period of unprecedented political upheaval in the UK and, if you’ve noticed anything at all about my recent output, it will have been that so far I have steadfastly managed to totally ignore it. By and large, my mind is just not closed enough to ‘do’ politics and I don’t want, even now, to waste too many words on it, they being somewhat more durable than Prime Ministers it would seem, and I wouldn’t want too many of my most ill-informed examples kicking about the internet forever.

As it stands today (Sunday 23rd) my understanding is this:

On the 7^th July this year, the former Prime Minister resigned as, despite giving him a vote of confidence, his fellow MP’s belatedly decided that ‘confidence’ is in reality almost as fragile as a freak electoral landslide and thus that they no longer felt that they could actually either trust or back him (except into a corner), and the process of electing a new party leader (and thus Prime Minister) began.
After the MP’s had whittled the ballot down to two people, the ‘final word’ was given to Conservative party members – most of whom, it would appear, did not want the former blonde bombshell incumbent to go in the first place.
As the clear leader amongst the MP’s was considered by many of the party members to have been partly responsible for the resignation for the former PM, they decided to vote for the other candidate.
The other candidate was the most inept and totally unsuitable choice possible and was thus selected to be the new Prime Minister.
The new PM passed a raft of measures that the clear leader had warned would be a financial disaster.
They were a financial disaster.
The new PM, having plunged country into something that very closely resembled an abyss, resigned some 44 days after she took office (during which time she was actually only allowed 34 days to fully screw things up due to 10 days of official mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II).
A new new leader must now be elected.

As I write, the candidates are:

The former PM with whom (having persuaded him to quit only weeks ago) I presume few fellow MP’s are happy to work (unless, of course, they actually are a bunch of amoral bastards who will do anything to keep themselves in power).
The clear leader from the previous election, who was summarily dismissed by the party members for being complicit in the political demise of the Former PM – apparently ignoring the fact that, given a six-shooter, he had shot himself in both feet at least a dozen times.
The person who came a distant third in the previous ballot of MP’s.

The person who formerly was a distant third is currently a distant third – although ‘reliable sources’ claim that she is about to ‘do a deal’ with the former PM who knows that if he can force himself into a ballot of party members, there is a very good chance that he will win. The clear leader who is again very much ahead in the MP’s vote knows that if it goes to a vote amongst the party members, he will lose. It could be a long week ahead.

All clear? Now read on…

Well, whaddya know? Monday evening (24^th) and it’s all done and dusted. The Former PM decided not to stand because he felt it was inappropriate for him to do so in the circumstances and not at all because, in reality, he did not have the required backing of 100 fellow MP’s. The distant third decided not to stand, for the good of party unity and not at all because, in reality, she did not have the required backing of 100 fellow MP’s. The clear leader thus became the New New Prime Minister by default – fully aware, I imagine, that if he had been forced to take the vote to the party members, they almost certainly would have selected Kermit the Frog – or even Liz Truss – ahead of him. Somehow we must all deserve one another, but I’ve no idea how…

So, anyway, I hope that has cleared everything up for you all – now, if somebody could just arrange for the last six weeks to go away…

I hope you will forgive me for dropping this in amongst the normal run of baloney but, you know by now, if it’s rattling around between my ears, you’re going to know about it sooner or later…

A Different World – The Same Old Darkness

As I write this piece – in preparation for fallow days ahead – as usual some way ahead of publishing, we are living in a world punctuated by Postal Strikes, Rail Strikes and, slightly less problematically – particularly if you are wanting to post a letter – Barrister Strikes (Don’t panic! I am talking of those who ply their trade in legal proceedings and not those who dyslexically concoct your daily fix of overpriced caffeine. The world has not gone that mad.) and the threat of winter power cuts, precipitated not by industrial action, but by that nice Russian megalomaniac with a totally rational fear of personal freedom. I find myself unusually sanguine about the prospect: I am 63 years of age, a veteran of The Three Day Week and I remember how we coped back then…

We lived, of course, in different times: we did not expect to be warm in the winter: we all wore our woollies, we all wore our string vests, we all had candles (some of us from the nose) and, perhaps more importantly matches, in a drawer, somewhere… We ate a lot of toast back then, browned to a ‘T’ on a long fork in front of the gas fire which was lit by the coloured wooden spills kept in a little brass cylinder (a war time memento – the one that nearly got grandad) on the fireplace. We cooked on a gas hob lit by those same spills. Baked beans on toast in front of a roaring candle was a rota’d treat. As a teenager, unable to do homework by the feeble flickering light, I could not wait for the blackness to fall.

Today we have an electric fire to accompany the electric hob, the electric oven, microwave and air-fryer. We have a gas boiler, but it refuses to spark into life without electricity. We dare not open the fridge for fear of letting the cold out. We cannot open the freezer for a comforting ice cream as – one needs to keep perspective – it might melt the ice cubes. We, in short, have little to make these hours of darkness bearable save a tartan Slanket and a mobile phone with a five minute battery life. I will have to go into the attic to rescue the Pop-O-Matic. I will have to bring down the chess set. I will have to read the rules… And of course we could try to read books, but I fear that the kind of megawattage required to make the printed word legible to our fading night-vision would mean a candle of such size it might well precipitate a nationwide wax shortage.

We do, of course, like everyone else have a number of ‘lanterns’ in our possession, each one of them with the batteries welded to the little spring thingies by a thick layer of immovable green goo, and a torch with a doody little button for sending morse code messages, providing you can send them in the five seconds before the bulb dies. We are just as prepared as everybody else and equally aware that, nationwide, there are no matches, batteries or tea-lights to be had on supermarket shelves. Camping stoves are in critically short supply.

I’m sure that, if it happens, I will attempt to embrace the excitement of it all – I love resetting clocks – I will regale the grandkids with stories of my own blacked out youth and, if I’m any judge, I will spend the hours of darkness confirming that drinking wine does not require any energy at all…