PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH

 

People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather

CHRISTMAS is joy. It is also a cracker that does not crack containing a plastic toy without purpose; cheap wine in the dignity of a decanter; mistletoe over a doorway that waits in vain; the wrong tie in a bright package; a wrong word spoken in jest. Christmas is a comma in the long run of life. It is for families. Families are love. They are also tension: violin wires tight drawn upon which nerves squeek and scrape.

My mind is a jumble of Christmases, and some of the people who inhabit the recesses of recollection are misted by time, wraiths, possibly not a part of Christmas past at all, though they are congealed to the memories of Christmas. There was a man who visited my grandmother and who possessed such delicacy of behaviour that he never took a slice of bread by hand, but speared it with his fork. I imagine he thought the gentry did that. There was a fellow who never took his leave of us. He always "made tracks". He did not comprehend things. He "twigged" them. There was another who made every anecdote interminable. Talking about a tradesman coming to repair a leak, he would act out the performance. At the point in the story where the tradesman knocked at the door, he would arise himself, walk to the fireplace, knock ponderously, then survey us in silence before continuing. Every normal act was, therefore, a drama to him.

Christmas dinner bore testimony to the fruitfulness of the family: white blur of faces stretched endlessly along white table, grandmother presiding, back rigid as an icicle, pounding the table vigourously with her fist whenever any humour came her way which gained her approval. We used to get out her old gramophone, which had a huge horn speaker and a cylinder for records. Each recording began, "This is an Edison Beeeeeell record." Voices sounded as if their owners were in a far cellar being slowly strangled. She had George Formby - not the lad, who died, but the father. Silver Threads Among the Gold, I remember. And one about a drunk breaking his neck which gave me nightmares. I imagine I was given a teaspoonful of gin in cinder tea to cure those. Until antibiotics, doctors knew no other remedy for anything.

The women all tried each others' hats in the parlour and I averted th eyes when Auntie Florrie was feeding her babies. She always seemed to have a new one. Uncle Bob was a tall chap and used to pick up his diminutive wife and use her as a ball, throwing her to the ceiling and catching her, a pastime which amused him, alarmed her, and nonplussed us. The worst thing he ever said was "Fine morning." It was his form of blasphemy. I once saw him crack his head so hard on the old mantelpiece that I was sure the appendage would drop off. All he said was, "Fine morning", but he put a deal of feeling into it.

We were sometimes overcrowded. On one occasion he had to share a bed with Uncle Harry. The water bottle burst and they were swamped. Uncle Harry abandoned ship. Uncle Bob stuck his legs high in the air, his expression unchanged, observing, grandly, that he had been washed out of his bunk thousands of times -a reference to service in the Marines. A cyclist collided with him eventually and he died. It was a sad end, I thought, for a chap washed out of his bunk thousands of times.

From school we got a bag full of junk described as toys and Billy Metcalfe- a man of some note locally -gave us each a new penny. Mr. Snape was Father Christmas, as I recall, and one shouted up the chimney for presents.
Odd, I always thought, that Mr. Snape should be up there in dead of night.

A lot of faces are gone with the reaping of the generations. My grandmother and the long table. My grandfather, together with his pipes which were in hinged cases with velvet linings. The Edison Bell records. The oil painting of a relative who fought at Waterloo -done in profile because the militant gentleman had lost an eye in what, I always imagined, was a terribly fierce encounter. The bed with brass knobs that unscrewed.

But all are, in precious ways, what Christmas is about. Small voices singing, "Hark, the herald angels sing" , still sum up Christmas, the essence of it, the continuing family thread of it, where faces come and go at long tables, first young with awe, then mature with knowledge, then old with hard memory, but always topped by paper cap.
Warm and wretched time. Joyful and joyless time. In memory, the coal fire flares in the black-leaded grate while sounds from the kitchen herald the arrival of hot mince pies. While there is memory the kitchen does not grow cold, the sounds are still heard; and I do not know whether that is good or bad.

And the other side of it.....

The approach to Christmas is necessarily painful. Out of the nooks and crannies of our half-civilised nation come the hordes who are trained in barbarism. The little old lady is among the paratroops of this army. Unlike the sequences of Biblical lore, she does not ascend, but descends from hell with her trolley, her sharp elbows, her apparent inability to see anything around her. She has a highly-developed ability to put you in hospital while affecting innocence.

The little old lady was invented by the devil and the trolley was his implement of torture. It can be aimed, slid sideways into your path, used as a missile, or to block your way. Accompanied by elbows, it is the equivalent of an assault platoon. A group of a dozen old ladies in Fallujah would clear it of insurgents in five minutes. The rebels would be hopping about nursing their ribs or their shins and could be trussed up as they fought their agonies.

The little old lady boards trains. Seasoned travellers knowing the precise moment when to arise from their seats to be at the door first at their destination are frustrated by these dark, rocking little creatures who stumble ahead of them, and then wait at the door until the train has been stopped for a full three minutes before calling for assistance to alight. Those already on the platform scatter in all directions as the trolley is produced.

In stores, the little old lady will pretend that she did not see the queue. She will go to the head of it and push in. If challenged, she will apply an expression of bewilderment. Where is she? Who is she? The look expresses it all. The expression of others in the queue is rather different: Why is she? Men have never been known to win against little old ladies. Little old men are shoved aside like wheat. Which is why you find the little old ladies foraging in men's departments, dragging jackets from racks and leaving them strewn on the floor, or feeling the quality of socks they have no intention of buying.

Once at a till, legitimately or not, the little old lady will wait until told the price of whatever she is buying before producing her purse. She will then delve interminably in that purse seeking this and that coin before declaring that she will have to give a note. She gets her change and counts it slowly before placing it, piece by piece, in her purse.

Once outside, she will open her brolly and poke people's eyes out.

A friend says no woman under 6ft 6ins should be allowed to use a brolly.

Another says men were meant to keep out of shops, hence the invention of Eve. He could be right. Come to think of it, he is.

Manchester, 12 December, 2008 - The Daily Express Christmas

"Oh look," I said, standing on tiptoe and peering through the gloom of a pub window at dead beer pumps, "Arthur Hook's place. Closed." We were within 200 yards of the Daily Express in Manchester and everything in sight seemed either closed, garishly open, or petrified at thoughts of its future. Not the best end of town. "Where's Mr Theo's Cypriana Restaurant?" I said to my Express lawyer friend, peering in all directions in search of a familiar point. "Here," he said, staring at a building that had impudently taken over Mr Theo's space. "Never!" I said.

Mr Theo was a splendid man who provided the best egg on beans on toast around and he had a woeful expression, having, I suspect, lost half of Cyprus to the Turks at some stage. My eating companion of the time was known to his large waitress as Mr Big because he had been boasting about some part of him that he had no reason to boast about. "What is it today, Mr Big?" she would shout.

Alas, he went to the big blue yonder. "Hey," I said, "where's Davidson's jewellers?" Gone. We completed the last 200 yards. There it stood: the biggest greenhouse in the North. The Express building still looks splendid and confident and black, and it shines in sunlight as if to say: I am here forever. But it is apartments now, I believe, and you can't just walk in, as I wanted to.

The city newspaper headlines were all about a £7,000 a month pad that someone had negotiated: £84,000 a year before you buy a bag of chips? I should cocoa, if that is the right expression.

We made the plunge eventually, one minute before the appointed time of one o' clock, and entered the Crown and Kettle. A bit of trouble here wondering what Bollington's was, but it turned out to be rather good beer. The waitress sent us to a back room, about the size of a modest lounge, and this was the venue for the survivors of Ancoats Street 1986 or thereabouts. The Few. A cubby-hole for a newspaper that produced more than a million copies a day, right here, in this vehicle-choked street, and employed more than 1,000 people. Premises sold. People dispersed. Amen.

A few survivors were already in residence, Mr Stanley Blenkinsop, retired news editor, to the fore. He used to start work early and answered the phone with the words, "World's Greatest Newspaper."

One of our number had died during the year - Harry Pugh, reporter, a man of mischief and talent who left Wales to its own devices while he created mayhem in England. "That's his son," said a reveller. Lad was twice the size of dad and he joined us. "I remember your father most of all," I said, "for a farewell we had in this very pub. He was alone, the place empty, surrounded by food, waiting for it all to happen. His head was down as if he was communing with druids. "Oh," said someone just arriving, "come nine o' clock, he'll burst into life." I waited for nine o' clock with interest. Sure enough, Harry's head was jerked erect and he reached for a cabbage that lay conveniently close. This he threw high into the air. The party had begun.

One of the people listening to all this was Bill Freeman, who left Express for Mirror and made a considerable reputation for himself as news editor before retiring and rejoining Express celebrations. "It was my farewell at the Express," he said. "It was a cabbage. I thought it was a melon."

We had grown to 14 or 15 by this time and they included at least three from London, one of whom had paid £50 return. I told him I could find him a place in Chorley and the fare would be under a fiver.

A lot of missing faces, I found: the north-eastern contingent was elsewhere, though Phil Aris, once of Newcastle, manfully trekked from the Smoke. Phil Finn, who visited from America wearing the jazziest bow tie ever made, missing. Probably playing golf in Florida. Peter Whittle, missing. He has a habit of walking, yearly, towards me, hand outstretched, announcing - "Peter Whittle!" And I keep saying, "I KNOW you are Peter Whittle." I was going to tell him I am Peter Whittle this year. Ah well. It will wait.

Peter Welbourne over there. And Jim Mossop, still writing, I think, his splendidly crafted words about sport. A friend of Jack Charlton, you know, but I won't reveal the stories... Too lurid for the innocence of this audience. Jeff McGowan (and wife) recalling (well, I was) the time he walked the editorial floor towing a pet brick on a lead. I could also have mentioned a day when he repeatedly flicked the venetian blinds of a small building opposite the main Express pile and, when asked what he was doing, replied, "Signalling the mother ship."

John Wardhaugh, photographer, a bit late. Colin Gower, Bill Hunter, And other good people too luminous to mention. The lawyer and me decided to slide out quietly at 3.15 just as the potato pie arrived with red cabbage. Free, too! We stole a dumpling each and that was lunch.

In the gathering gloom, we walked to Piccadilly Station and I noted that people are like streams, they flow round obstacles and form pools of humanity. New, broad rivers form in strange places and in a way, that is a reflection of what happened to newspapers and to us.

It is a retreating industry and we had the best of it. In came television and huge circulations began to dip. Now television itself is old-hat, a bit boring, and moaning about itself, and the emphasis has shifted to my kind of thing - blog sites and web sites. I suppose that if I wished to, I could turn out a paper from the little room I sit in now. The technology is there. Cheap. No need for those glass palaces and the confident roar of presses in the long bright night.

Remarkable to think that the industrial revolution hereabouts moved people from their homes to factories, and for many, the system is now reversed - factories to homes, and computers.

So where next? No-one knows until the new streams form, and feed into future rivers of what we like to think of as progress.

And how cosmopolitan this city is becoming! Every nation on earth represented as we walked packed pavements. On the train earlier, we sat, for the 25-mile journey, opposite a young couple, Chinese or Burmese. The girl shoved her feet forward so that they ended under my seat. So I planted my shoes firmly against hers and struck back for what we know as The Indigenous Population. Her feet retreated hurriedly.

If only Afghanistan were that easy.

That was the 12th. The inglorious 12th, tucked away by the splendid organiser Mr Tony Brooks for another year. God bless it, and him.

Christmas 2008

Ranting drivers, snappy dogs, charging trolleys, silly blogs. How's Aunt Mabel? Died last year? Sent a card. Oh dear, oh dear.

Do you tip the bin men much? Nobody does? We're out of touch. Give it to the paper lad – a little slow but he's not so bad.

Got the turkey? Got the stuffing? On to the next, all panting, puffing. Bread. We always forget bread; garlic slices will do instead.

No, he can not have a bike. He can be like me and bloody hike. These are hard times tell 'r' Ted. If he gets a bike he could end up dead.

Christine wants high heels, you say? Over my dead body; nay, she's only eight and going on nine. She'll get a book. Harry Potter? Fine.

What do you want? You don't yet know? And here am I all set to go. Mine's a camera. Old one's lost. Let me know about the cost.

How many coming? Eight you say? They'll drink us dry and I will pay. Once they've eaten, made a fuss, off to the pub, and without us.

Holly and mistletoe, tinsel and snow; then the January sales will flow. That will put us in the red. Merry Christmas. I'm off to bed.

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Mather © 2004

25 December, 2008