| Sur le Twinkle d'Umpty (or Pardon my French)
“Sur le pont d’Avignon . . .”
The tune was ringing in my head as I visited Colchester this afternoon looking for any visual evidence of the ‘twinning’ of The UK’s oldest recorded town with France’s famous Papal residence. “Well, it is mentioned on the road signs as you enter the town,” the lady in the Tourist Information Centre told  me, “and we have a garden dedicated to Wetzlar, our German twin town, if you‘re interested.”
Wetzlar. Yes, that rang a bell. It was famous before the second world war as the home of the Leitz company, makers of Leica cameras. I have a pre-war Leica, as it happens, with the excellent Elmar lens and my current camera, a digital Panasonic Lumix, has a Leica Elmarit lens. But I digress!
I didn't come here today to talk about cameras, so I continued my walk in search of souvenirs d’Avignon and by chance was introduced to another French folk song, "Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman" set to a melody by Mozart which was immediately recognizable as that adopted for the English nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.
 I was standing in West Stockwell Street, outside Nos 11 & 12, which bear a plaque marking the one-time home of Jane and Ann Taylor, authors of children’s rhymes, including “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” published in 1806, which was remembered in a bicentenary celebration last year in the Castle grounds. Colchester was also the supposed inspiration for another nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty was a giant Royalist cannon atop St Mary at Wall Church during the English Civil War and “had a big fall” when hit by Parliamentarian cannon fire. The rhyme appears in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”.
Lovers of the Alice books may also recall the parody, “Twinkle twinkle little bat,” sung at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland.
Phew! That was a bit of a ramble. It's amazing what can crop up when you let your mind wander as well as your feet, isn’t it?
The Spice of Life?
I have never been a great fan of ‘Variety’ shows. Old time music halls, yes, because they could be superficial, funny and cheerful at the same time, but hordes of ‘nearly‘ entertainers straining to give their all, have not inspired me to become a regular variety show visitor.
My disenchantment began when I was dragged by my parents to so many shows at the old Brighton Hippodrome, that popular cultural venue on the south coast in the years preceding and following World War II.
I could never understand why the audience, sycophants to the last, applauded every act as if it were the greatest entertainment ever. They had paid their half-a-crown (12.5 pence in today’s money) to enjoy themselves, and enjoy themselves they jolly well would, come what may. Good or bad, every act was applauded at maximum volume, which may have encouraged the has-beens and never-will-bes, but seemed a little unkind to those who really were the best.
I recall the excitement of some performers, however, including Max Miller, because he was ’dirty’ and I a grubby adolescent. Delightful too, was the great Max Wall, with his funny walk, but top of the crop, for me, were the hilarious antics of Wilson, Kepple and Betty, those stone-faced exponents of the Egyptian ‘sand dance‘.
Better things were to follow: Brighton, at the mid-point of the twentieth century, was the testing ground for shows destined to become smash hits in the West End and I found myself in a privileged position, as a raw junior on the Brighton and Hove Herald, having virtual carte blanche to visit backstage at all of the Brighton entertainment houses.
As well as the Hippodrome there were the Grand, the Theatre Royal and the New Theatre, all attracting national stars. My first attempt at theatrical front-of-house photography was for Michael Hall’s production of ‘Toad of Toad Hall’ at the Theatre Royal in the early ’fifties, while over at the Hippodrome a new musical, ‘Carousel’ was enjoying huge success, with Edmund Hockeridge in the lead role of Billy Bigelow.
On the last night of Carousel’s Brighton run, some of the cast and production team went back to a flat on the sea front for drinkies. I don’t know if I was invited but in showbiz circles such niceties don’t really matter. I was there, anyway, and clearly remember that little basement dwelling, with its small paved courtyard at the back, half-roofed over with glass. A couple of days later, by coincidence, I was sent by my paper to see the actress, Dora Bryan, who lived next door.
A few years ago, some 40 years after the event, my youngest son telephoned me at my then London home to say that he had taken a job in Brighton and had moved into a flat on the sea front. He described it, and I asked him if it has a glass-roofed back yard. No, he told me, but it might have had, at one time, because there were some metal brackets high up on the wall. “And did a now-famous actress once live there?” I wanted to know. She did, and she still owns the house, he was able to confirm.
But I digress. This did not start out as a name-dropping exercise (‘why not?’, you may ask) but to gather my thoughts on the subject of popular entertainment. My own views, and they're probably not shared by all, but it’s a free world (allegedly) and I am permitted my say. I do feel a tinge of sadness, though, when I scroll through the showbiz obituaries of the last half century and see the names of so many people with whom I once shared a joke or a drink. Names, some of them unknown or forgotten today, some more recently departed; names such as Max Wall, Arthur Askey, Bob Monkhouse, A E Matthews, Jessie Matthews, Eric Portman, Yehudi Menhuin. A few press cuttings are all I have left of them - and, of course, my memories.
My theatrical connections ended many years ago and I am out of touch (and out of step) with the more recent entertainers, but I strongly suspect that they don‘t make ‘em like that any more.
A Christmas Cruel
The approach of Christmas does two things to me: it makes me want to shut myself away and await the 'All Clear' and also reminds me of my old Auntie Alice.
Auntie Alice was the kind of person many would call 'The salt of the earth.' If any member of the family was in need of anything, she'd be there with a smile and a helping hand; if a shoulder was needed to cry on, they could have one of hers. She was also a born diplomat and whenever hackles were raised it was her hand that would soothe the savage beast.
Life in the poorer areas of London in the 1930s was not easy, and was particularly hard for mothers struggling to feed and clothe a family on the meagre pittance brought home by their husbands - the honest ones, that is, and there were many of them, even in an area with a reputation for housing some of London's worst.
My mother was one of those women who scrimped and scraped and always managed to have food on the table, even if it was sometimes only a slice of bread and dripping from the Sunday roast. We nearly always had beef on Sunday because it was cheap. Only the wealthy could afford the luxury of chicken, except at Christmas, when a nice plump bird would become affordable if you were lucky enough to get one being sold off at half price when the meat market was about to close late on Christmas Eve.
Christmas always meant a full house at our home, or my grandparents' home, which alternated as venue for the feast of the year and as a only child I learned the meaning of the saying 'alone in a crowd'. There were three main rules of behaviour to be obeyed: 'Children should be seen and not heard', 'Mother knows best' and 'Don't argue!' Any question or request was placed firmly in the arguing category.
At Christmas I was permitted to mingle with the grown-ups for a while, to stand on a chair and show the assembled company the new clothes my mother had lovingly knitted or sewn for me as a Christmas present, before changing into my 'play clothes' and retiring to the corner where I could play with my other presents: a tin whistle, perhaps, from Uncle Bill, a drum from Uncle Hubert and Auntie Floss, a pea-shooter from Uncle Albert, a pop-gun which shot a cork attached to a piece of string, and a 'young smokers' kit consisting of sugar cigarettes and sometimes a liquorice pipe or a chocolate cigar. They certainly knew how to prepare children for adult life in those days. The musical instruments and weapons were confiscated as soon as the guests left the house, but the introduction to the manly pastime of smoking was encouraged.
But I digress, and must bring Auntie Alice back into the story.
We were all - about 12 of us - packed one Christmas around a table which would comfortably have seated half that number, with Auntie Alice sitting on my immediate right. Mother and Grandma had finished bustling to and from the kitchen and had taken their seats after placing food-laden plates in front of everybody. Everybody, that is, except one. In the confusion (perhaps mayhem would be a better word) of that overloaded table I had been overlooked.
I quietly nudged Auntie Alice to attract her attention and the dear lady in her usual diplomatic fashion, instead of pointing out my mother's error, turned to me and asked, loudly, 'What is it, love? Do you want me to pass the salt?' Mother glanced across, noticed her omission and quickly produced my plate.
The story was repeated ad nauseam on subsequent family occasions to demonstrate how well I had been brought up: it was to become the legend of a little boy who asked for the salt, rather than cause a fuss.
Mother could never tolerate anything less than perfection. She worked hard for her family and any perceived shortcoming was seen as a serious personal criticism . The arrival of the gravy or custard at the table was often a dramatic event on family occasions as Mother approached the table with a jug in one hand, a spoon in the other and a worried expression on her face.
'Oh dear, it's got lumps in it; that's never happened before,' she would announce, to the amusement of all present.
One fateful Christmas the family could hide their amusement no longer when she asked Uncle Hubert, her much loved elder brother, 'Do you want some gravy?' and he jokingly replied, 'Just two lumps please, Sis.' Others around the table smilingly muttered, 'Lumps? That's never happened before!' but the joke was lost on Mother, who felt critically wounded and retired to bed with a headache.
Family Christmases were something to be remembered, if only for the wrong reasons. I'll pretend Christmas isn't going to happen this year. What if somebody asks me to pass the salt, and the memories come flooding back, and dear Auntie Alice, the salt of the earth, is no longer there to comfort me? I might, as the saying goes, end up with custard on my face - like it or lump it.
Imprinted on my Mind
Memories of the time when hot metal ruled the world of print
I hope I will be forgiven if my memories sound like a lecture ... just blame my age!
Sitting here at my laptop, thoroughly enjoying it, appreciating how easy it is to
use - and how versatile - my mind still dwells on the way computers consigned
so much heavy machinery (and so many jobs!) to the scrap heap in the
newspaper industry in the early 1980s.
‘Spike it!’ the chief sub-editor cries.
‘Ouch!’ says a colleague, sucking at the trickle of blood that comes from the
ball of his thumb as he follows this instruction and impales another unwanted
freelance submission on the 'spike' - a sharpened six-inch length of stiff wire
mounted on a wooden block on his desk.
Another reporter’s typewritten copy (’copy’ means ’original’, by the way) is
blessed with the sub’s attention. His/her pencil flashes busily across the paper,
pausing occasionally to reach for the Concise Oxford Dictionary or Roget's
Thesaurus, or perhaps Hart's Rules to check on spelling, punctuation and style,
sometimes walking across the room to consult one of the 24 volumes of
the complete Oxford Dictionary - too heavy to carry back to the subs’ table.
‘Set left x2, 8/10 Roman, P4’ - or something similar, is scribbled at top left of
the page. The compositors will know that this piece of text is to be set in
Roman typeface (the normal style, not italic, bold or underlined unless marked
with a pencilled code under selected words or lines, or in the margins). It is
to be set in 8-point type, on a 10-pt slug (don‘t ask!), 2 columns wide, flush
with the left hand edge of the column and is to go on page 4.
Precise instructions had to be written by hand on every piece of copy before
being handed to a messenger, who would take them to the composing room -
called ‘case room’ by the old hands because that’s where the cases of individual
metal type were stored and used. But by the 1980s, the operation had been
almost entirely automatic for generations. Great lumbering machines (Linotypes
and Intertypes) noisily cast each line of type (‘line-o-type’ - geddit?) at the
touch of expert fingers on a multi-ranked keyboard, and the world learned two
new words: 'etaoin' and ’shrdlu’
Everybody today is familiar with the acronym QWERTY - the top row of the
typewriter keyboard - but may not know that etaoin and shrdlu were the lines of type produced when the operator ran two fingers down the left hand edge of the keyboard to check that all was working properly (brass dies in place and the molten metal running freely) before starting work. Sometimes these slugs (metal lines of type) were accidentally left in, and appeared on the printed page.
Each galley (tray of cast type) would then be proofed and sent to the proof-readers, who always worked in pairs. One would hold the ‘copy’ (that’s the original, remember) and the other would read the proof and mark any errorsfor correction. At the same time, another galley proof would go to the sub-editors in case any further alterations (editor’s revisions) were required.
Because of the mechanical nature of typesetting a single typographical error
(called a 'literal' by British printers and a 'typo' by the Americans) the whole line -
and frequently the whole paragraph - would have to be re-set. There was no
on-screen 'WYSIWYG' then, in fact no screen at all; it was all done
with chunks of metal!
From there to ‘the stone‘ - a heavy steel bench on which the type would be
assembled into a page. ‘Stone’ is the English translation of the Greek, lithos,
and lithography was an early form of printing, the name subsequently
resurrected for the method most commonly used in the 21st century.
The ‘stone sub’ (who might be the original sub or another sub-editor) would
supervise the make-up of the page, which would then go to the proof-puller,
and after a few more stages the completed ‘forme’ (a complete page of type
and pictures) would be wheeled on a sturdy trolley to the foundry to be cast
into a single metal plate or cylinder, ready for the press, but first a mould, or
matrix, had to be made by compressing it against a damp sheet of specially
prepared sheet of papier-mâché (known as 'flong') which would then be shaped
into a half-cylinder and baked to receive the molten type metal.
On its journey from the reporter to the plate-making stage a story would pass
through anything from 6 to 10 pairs of hands (including messengers). It was
extremely labour-intensive and costly. Wouldn’t it have saved time if some of
these stages could be cut out?
Many of them have been, now.
Modernisation of the industry, with its potential to put everything in the
hands of a single operator (although in practice still divided between various
departments) has been a life-saver for the printing industry but at great human
cost in terms of massive job losses, widespread distress and riots in the
street (Wapping, east London) before it could be fully implemented.
As one who left the industry during the early 1980s revolution I still hanker for
the ‘good old days’, the evocative sounds of the clattering linotypes and the
constant smell of poisonous fumes from the molten alloy of lead, tin and antimony (hence the term 'hot-metal' printing) but I am fortunate to have such comprehensive editong and typesettingfacilities at my fingertips now and - unheard of in my day - the ability to send words, pictures and even whole pages instantaneously and simultaneously to every corner of the world.
I could go on for ages. Perhaps some readers will think I already have - but this
is only the tip of the iceberg that was an immense historic entity: ‘The Print’,
with its chapels (union branches) and fathers-of-the-chapel (shop stewards), the names reminding us that printing began in the monasteries, all speaking the language of ‘ens’ and ‘ems’, ‘pica’, ‘nonpareil’, and sans-serif, not forgetting
that pretty little type called ’ruby’ and such customs as ’banging-out’ . . . I may
write some more about it one day.
I still have my ‘casting-off book‘, from which the exact space required on the
printed page could be calculated from the number of words, size of type and
width of column in infinite variety, and my old ‘style book’ - a publisher’s
in-house editorial guide to preferred spelling, punctuation, forms of address, etc.
It's easier now: buy a computer, take it out if the box and produce a ewspaper or magazine without help of all those highly-trained time-served operatives, what of the result?
The style book is probably all that survives in today’s automated world, but not even that, one suspects, on some of the free newspapers which have sprung up in almost every town in the last couple of decades, some of them produced largely by part-time staff with good typing skills but no experience of layout or publishing. Not all, I hasten to add, because there are a some splendid exceptions, but I sometimes wonder where we will go from here if print technology 'progresses' any further.
Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, and is unlikely go away, but even the dinosaurs remain a talking point millennia after they became extinct, so why should that not also be true of hot metal printing, which made such an important contribution to the world of knowledge and employment?
'Can I try that dress on in the window?'
. . . 'Certainly madam, unless you'd prefer to use the changing room.'
Working as a volunteer helper in a charity shop can be fun and provides an opportunity to meet and chat with friendly people from all backgrounds and in all walks of life. Although it was once frowned upon to wear second-hand clothes, even the 'best people' can now be seen sorting through the racks in these treasure-houses which turn recycling into a multi-million pound fund-raising enterprise for good causes. The clothing on sale is, with very few exceptions, of excellent quality, in good condition and unsoiled.
Not only clothing but also household goods and leisure and hobby items pass through these shops. Things such as cooking pots and pans and everyday tableware are in plentiful supply, as well as occasional surprises such as good quality collectable china, glass and silverware. Then there are books, toys, electronic games, video tapes, compact discs, camping gear and sports goods . . . you name it, and you'll find it somewhere in a charity shop in many of our main shopping streets.
Health and safety legislation governs the sale of certain items such as electrical goods, noxious liquids, knives or anything else which might be used as a weapon or cause accidental injury, and some surprising items sometimes confront the unwary helper opening a bag or box of donated items, such as the pack of playing cards I found this week, clearly marked 'For Adults Only' which on inspection were found to be definitely 'not for the children!' Sad to say, we also find black bags left on our doorstep containing unwashed clothing, damaged crockery and broken plastic toys, which we have to pay the council to take away as 'trade waste'.
Pricing items for sale can be problematical and some mistakes are made: over-pricing means that the item will not find a buyer, and under-pricing is immediately evident when an item is snapped up as soon as it hits the shelves.
Single tea cups rarely find a customer, even at a very modest price, because nobody ever buys a cup without a matching saucer . . . until a customer comes in looking for a particular piece to complete a valuable set no longer on the market or only available on special order at a premium rate. It does happen occasionally.
It is very much a guessing game, like those TV shows so popular nowadays, with renowned experts in all areas of antiques offering advice and valuations to the uninitiated and finding their estimates to be either absolutely correct or wrong by a very large factor when the item comes up for auction.
Charity begins at home, it is said, and the junk taking up space in one home is often just what another person needs, wants or will buy on impulse, and the true value of anything is what someone is prepared to pay on the day.
But Once a Year - but is it once too many?
‘Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly;
Fill the glass and don’t say “when”.’
Tom Lehrer, the American humorist, song-writer and Harvard professor summed it up pretty well, I think.
For anyone who may be unfamiliar with Lehrer’s prodigious output of uplifting hymns and ballads for the modern age, perhaps I should explain that he was also responsible for the jolly apocalyptic anthem, ‘We will all go together when we go’, written and recorded in the coldest days of the cold war when the relentless countdown of the nuclear clock appeared unstoppable. He also wrote and recorded that charming ballad about the innocent Sunday pastime of ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’.
His seasonal lines, ‘Angels singing from on high tell us to come out and buy,’ and ‘God rest ye Merry Merchants may ye make the Yuletide pay’ remind us of the true meaning of the festive season in the modern age.
When I hear the church bells ringing to call the faithful to Mass at midnight on the 24th of December each year I get that same cold feeling in my stomach as I imagine I would have felt had they tolled in the dark days of WW2, when their use in Britain was reserved specifically to announce that the predicted invasion of our homeland had begun. Fortunately that did not happen, and we didn’t hear the bells until 1945, when it was all over, but the world has still to see the peace and human understanding for which so many fought and gave their lives.
The merchants are still making yuletide pay, as tradition urges us to buy more greetings cards than ever before, and expensive but useless gifts to hasten the depletion of the world’s material resources and add to the planet’s ever-growing garbage tips
Merchants of death still profit from massive arms sales at Christmas, just as at any other time of the year, as lives continue to be lost needlessly, whether in the name of politics and religion or as a consequence of those over-filled glasses.
For each note struck by those Christmas bells, how many more lives will be lost in drunken brawls? How many children will be orphaned or parents greeted by a uniformed police officer at their door informing them of a drink-driving fatality? And how many will receive a note of condolence from the commanding officer of a loved one sent to fight someone else’s war?
What have they to celebrate? How many families will see an empty chair at the festive table?
One of those empty dining chairs will be mine because I’ll be curled up in a favourite arm-chair, reading again Charles Dickens’ enduring story, ‘A Christmas Carol’, and I will still be moved by the closing line from Tiny Tim, which seems a good place for me to close, too.
God bless us, every one.
©Arthur Loosley, 2006
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Plus ça change - but the coffee's better now
I enjoyed an excellent cup of cappuccino today in an unexpected place - the Naafi at a UK military base.
This was not the Naafi I remember from my two-year stint of national service in the RAF, but that was more than 50 years ago and many things have changed since then. No longer a wooden shuttered hatch with a tea urn, a plate of iced buns and a few curled-up sandwiches; this was 21st century cafeteria style, as good as any found in the smart coffee shops which have sprung up in so many of our high streets in recent years.
Getting into the base was easier than I expected in these high security days, although the man in the guardroom had to struggle to assert his superiority over the new digital security system before it could be persuaded to issue me with a temporary photo ID card, but it was easier than my attempt to get into a USAF base where a court martial was being held in the early days of the cold war.
‘What’s in your bag?’ the fearsome looking guy at the guardhouse asked me.
‘Oh, just a camera,’ I replied.
Within minutes I had been ushered inside, ‘processed’, relieved of my camera and the contents of my pockets and invited to wait in a cell while the officer of the day was summoned.
He was a very pleasant fellow, and listened with polite amusement when I explained that as US bases in the UK are subject to American law, and that law permits photography in courtrooms, I felt sure I would be welcome.
It was a feeble attempt, but a hungry freelance will try anything.
I spent the rest of the day under open arrest in the custody of the padre, who gave me tour of the base, bought me a good lunch and taught me to play shuffleboard. He even allowed me a brief glimpse through the glass windowed entrance of the room where the court martial was in progress. I think that was just to tease me!
I was quite sorry when he received the message that the case was over and no longer a target for my prying eyes, and I could be escorted back to the guardhouse to sign for the return of ‘prisoners property’ before being deported to England, just outside the gate.
It had been an entertaining day, even though my original mission had to be aborted.
Today’s adventure was very different. It was at the invitation of a Falklands veteran who has been helping us at Felixstowe museum by providing photographs, documents and other artefacts for an exhibition to mark the 25th anniversary of that war, in which many local service personnel were involved.
He had served with the Parachute Regiment and brought back a soldier‘s eye view of the conflict in an album of more than 100 photographs taken not by the press corps but by men who were there to fight and die. Some of them I wished I had not seen, but I accepted the opportunity to digitise the entire album to preserve the historic images at the museum for future historians to rediscover and perhaps, one day, learn something from them . . . Perhaps!
Our business done, a short tour of the base brought back more memories, but the war machines were different. Not the jet fighters, primitive by modern standards, on which I worked half a century ago, but state-of-the-art attack helicopters.
There were not many people about, because most of the troops normally based there are in Iraq or Afghanistan; those I did meet looked very young. Come to think of it, so did I when I was in uniform! It was a long time ago.
Back in the NAAFI after the tour, we relaxed and swapped tales of military life in two different eras over a cup of coffee. The coffee was different too: it was Starbucks!
Notwithstanding my reservations about the coffee giant's business ethics, which have driven down the price paid to the native producers while enhancing its own profits, I was happy to see how well the British Army boys are looked after at their home base, even if the nation can't afford to equip them adequately when serving on the front line.
I came away with mixed emotions - memories of the past and the realization of how little has changed.
Ó2006 Arthur Loosley
A Nothing kind of Day - Life can be boring if you try hard enough
I had nothing planned for today, so I went out for a walk to see if anything interesting was happening, but nothing was. Had I really achieved the impossible and found a day so boring that I would have nothing to write about? Surely not, but it was worth trying!
Instead of my usual walk by the River Deben near my home I used my old age pensioners bus pass to go into the county town of Ipswich, and from there got another bus across the River Orwell for the journey down the Shotley peninsula to the mouth of the Stour where it meets the Orwell in Harwich harbour. Nothing worth writing about because there was nothing to see on the way except green fields bordering a tree-lined river with white-sailed yachts reflecting in the water and gulls soaring overhead against a deep blue sky with powder-puff clouds.
At high tide in Harwich harbour there was not a ripple on the water. Six swans sat motionless in line-astern formation about 50 metres from the shore, watched by a lone cormorant perched on the top of a tall mooring post. They made an excellent subject for a picture, but as I reached for my camera in my shoulder bag they suddenly took off and flew over my head, in line-abreast formation this time, reminding me of a squadron of Spitfires scrambling for action in the Battle of Britain.
Having missed this photo opportunity I decided to drown my sorrows in 'The Shipwreck' club house at the yacht marina, and cheered up somewhat when I found that they served 'Spitfire' real ale - my favourite - brewed in Kent, where the real Spitfires saw action during the Battle of Britain, of which I was a spectator from my parents' garden. Kentish ale is not widely available outside its home county, so I was lucky to find it here.
I had the privilege of serving at the famous Kent fighter station at Biggin Hill shortly after the war. Much to my dismay the Spitfires took off for the last time on the day I arrived there, and I spent my National Service working with those new-fangled flying machines, Meteor jet fighters. Now, even they are history.
Shotley is in Suffolk, just across the water from Essex, and Kent is still further south, across the Thames. It's all rivers on the east coast and I love it here. Perhaps I'm easily satisfied, however boring it may be.
After finishing my drink and watching two more giant Chinese container ships coming into the Port of Felixstowe, with goods that would once have been made in the now-closed mills and factories of the industrial north of England, I had an hour's walk along the river bank before getting back to the bus stop for my journey home, stopping off in Ipswich on the way for a late lunch.
I finally arrived home at dusk, pleasantly tired after my walk but happy with my time out in the fresh air and sunshine on a bright November day when nothing happened.
And that is why I will not be writing a column today.
Life can be boring if you try hard enough, can't it? I sometimes wonder , if I try REALLY hard, will it cure me of this urge to write?
I doubt it, but I'll keep trying anyway.
November 12, 2006: A bump on the head but the vases survived
Satsuma Gold
As I write this my mind is wandering, as usual.
My attention is drawn to the display cabinet in the corner of the room which holds my modest collection of treasures and memorabilia. The two Satsuma vases are not valuable in monetary terms although they do qualify as antiques, having been made in the earely decades of the 20th century.
I have known them all my life. They have shared my life. They were a wedding present to my parents from my father’s employers. Mr and Mrs Feitelsohn, who must have been happy with his work, to give him such precious artefacts emblazoned with pictures of the Japanese emperor and empress, richly enamelled and gold-leafed. The design has been copied widely, produced in many forms and sold in Woolworths and on market stalls, but these two vases are special. To me, at least.
Dad worked as a sales assistant at the Feitelsohns’ clock and jewellery emporium in East Ham, London. He cycled the 10 miles to work every day from the family bungalow in Essex. Mum took me on the bus one day to visit him at work and I was amazed at the opulence of the place.
It was a large shop on the High Street, with three enormous display windows and two glass entrance doors. Inside, behind polished glass-topped mahogany counters stood the staff, all dressed alike in black jackets, white celluloid collars and black ties, pin-striped trousers and ‘patent leather’ shoes, polished so brightly that you could almost see your face in them.
I was introduced to Dad’s fellow workers. None of them had names, just single initials. Dad was ‘Mr E’, the initial of his given name. His surname began with ‘L‘, but that was already taken by a fellow employee. The only people with names were Mr and Mrs Feitelsohn, who came out to greet us and ushered us into a back room.
Mrs Feitelsohn leant down to shake my hand. ‘You’re a nice young man,’ she said, in her deep Austrian growl, ‘Do you like pussy-cats?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, meekly.
My mother gave me a sly dig in the back. ‘Say “please”,’ she whispered.
Why, I wondered. It was a question wasn’t it, not an offer.
I was wrong. The old lady handed me a cardboard box. ‘Open it, why don’t you,’ she coaxed.
Nervously, I lifted the lid. Inside was a small wooden clock, hand-painted with the head of a cat. Its eyes were made of glass and, as I was to discover later, moved from side to side with every tick and tock of the pendulum.
My mother’s knuckles were pressing into my back again. ‘Say “Thank You”,’ she ordered, and then I realized that it was indeed a gift. I would be five next week and these kindly folk again wanted to show their appreciation of Dad‘s services.
That was the first ‘useful’ thing I ever owned. I treasured it and thought that I would keep it for ever. But that was before the bomb.
Oh, but I haven’t explained about the bomb, have I?
It was in November 1941. The French windows of our living room were heavily curtained because of the blackout and a meagre coal fire burned in the grate. I was sitting on the floor, under the overhanging keyboard of the upright piano, playing with a toy aeroplane - a bomber - and the two Satsumas stood in pride of place on top. I remember putting the plane into a steep dive to release an imaginary bomb, when the blackout curtains billowed inwards. There was no sound that I can remember, but the room was suddenly full of broken glass and ceiling plaster.
Protected by the piano I was unhurt until my mother, in a gallant rescue bid, dragged me into the next room and threw me under the bed, gashing my forehead on its iron frame. Well, that’s war, I suppose. I still smile when I think about how I received my only war injury.
I don’t remember a lot about what happened next, except that there was a lot of yelling and some screaming and air raid wardens in the street shouting ‘Put that light out.’ Despite the fact that most of the houses now had no doors or windows, some had no roofs and a few had been reduced to rubble, the blackout regulations had to be obeyed.
What I do remember, though, is the scene at daybreak, with my mother crying over a pock-marked piano and bending down to pick up the two vases from the debris-strewn carpet. They were completely unharmed.
The gold decoration still shines as brightly today as it did then, exactly 65 years ago. I never saw the pussy-cat clock again, though.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
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November 5, 2006: A trip to the coast on a bright November day.
Of Birds and Fishes
The sun was shining brightly this morning and the leaves outside my window were still, after the blustery conditions of recent days. Such a day in November was too good to waste, so a trip to the coast was called for.
There is always something to enjoy at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast. I had not been there recently, so that seemed a good place to spend my day.
The sea front, though not as crowded as at the height of the tourist season, was well attended. Families sat on the low flood wall separating the shingle from the promenade, while a little further along the coast a few sea anglers were casting their lines.
In contrast to the usual cold wind from the North Sea, the breeze today was light and mild and the surface of the sea was as flat as yesterday’s beer.
No such complaint at The Cross Keys, though, where I enjoyed a glass of Suffolk’s best, brewed by Adnam’s at Southwold, just a few miles along the coast.
For a light lunch I had a plate heavily loaded with whitebait, served with freshly baked crusty whole-grain bread, while out on the beach the gulls enjoyed their regular daily feast donated by or stolen from the visitors who sat with their paper-wrapped fish and chips for which the town is famous.
The increasing health risk posed by the birds has prompted the local council to issue a warning that if the visitors do not stop feeding them voluntarily they may have to be shot. A somewhat ambiguous message. I hope they don’t mean the birds.
But the fate of the gulls is not the only controversy raging in Aldeburgh, so after lunch I strolled along the beach to the isolated stretch of shingle where Suffolk sculptor Maggi Hambling’s 12-ft high stainless steel Scallop Shell stands in memory of the composer Benjamin Britten who lived in the town and was the moving force behind the creation of the concert hall at Snape Maltings, a few miles away.
Around the edge of the shell is the pierced inscription, ‘I hear those voices which will not be drowned’ - a line from Britten’s 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, which recreates the 200-year old story by Aldeburgh poet George Crabbe, of a local fisherman from the now lost village of Slaughden.
Suffolk has always attracted artists of all kinds, including such famous painters as John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough, but the location chosen for the scallop shell, well out of sight of a few local residents who felt that modern art had no place in such an historic place, has attracted mindless spray-can graffiti artists, who have worked unseen many times since it was erected on November 8, 2003.
Today though, just a few days short of its third anniversary, the shell is clean. The voices of the destructive yobs, if not drowned, seem to have been stilled - for the moment, at least.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
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Early One Morning
“The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.”
The opening lines from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier conjure up an image of north country working life in the not-so-distant past, reminiscent of those busily peopled scenes depicted on canvas by L S Lowry. Nostalgia can blur reality, but the human mind is susceptible to moods generated by sights and sounds, and the sounds we hear in our waking moments can set the mood for the day ahead.
In common with many of my fellow countrymen and women I have for many years woken each morning to the strains of a medley of traditional music from the four constituent parts of the British Isles, with the ‘drunken sailor’ ditty thrown in for good measure to remind us of our maritime heritage, all woven into a BBC Radio Four anthem which some may consider to rival the official national anthem. Now the BBC in its wisdom has decided to drop it, in spite of protests in Parliament and elsewhere from many who regret the abandonment of something so rich in ’British-ness’ - not in a political, racist or triumphal sense but as a pleasant and inoffensive reminder of the people and countryside of our islands.
I am fortunate, after a life spent mainly in the increasing congestion and pollution of London, to have retired to where I can appreciate the joys of the countryside - something denied to the vast majority of the population of the UK. I can now enjoy for real, every day, what others may only imagine or remember. Under the expansive Suffolk sky, close to open tracts unchanged since John Constable painted his bucolic masterpieces, and the sea which inspired Benjamin Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes, I feel privileged to walk, whenever I wish, on the banks of the River Orwell, largely unspoilt save for the distant view of the science-fiction metal monsters towering menacingly over the container port of Felixstowe, and the millionaire-playground yachting marinas, and am reminded of these further words by George Orwell (real name, Eric Blair) who took his pen-name from the river, perhaps while walking on the same ground that I traversed today while composing my thoughts:
“ In spite of hard trying, man has not yet succeeded in doing his dirt everywhere . . . Perhaps if you looked for them, you might even find streams with live fish in them instead of salmon tins”.
But of course, those words were written before the days of plastic bottles, supermarket trolleys, oil slicks and other products of the effluent society inherited from the Industrial Revolution in which those Wigan clog girls played their part.
It’s always a good thing to remember the good things, to mask some of the pain of modern living, and it seems a pity that the BBC now prefers to forget them although I, for one, am thankful that there are still some places not completely defiled by the advances (or degeneration?) of civilisation, but for how much longer?
©2006, Arthur Loosley
The Full English Breakfast
We Brits love our English breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato, baked beans, mushrooms and hash browns (but aren't they an American introduction?) with toast or fried bread, and a cup of tea.
In recent years, since we have tended to eat out more often, catering establishments of all kinds have been offering the 'All-Day Breakfast'. Many pubs now serve this meal, as do some chain store and supermarket cafeteria. Prices vary, some of which seem less than the cost of the raw ingredients, while others would not be out of place on a cordon bleu menu.
In common with most other trades, the price of the meal almost invaribly ends with 99p. That penny change has always irritated me. There’s not much you can do with a penny these days and our pockets and purses soon become weighed down with a mass of metal - if we still choose to pay with real money, that is.
Few places, if any, have escaped the all-day breakfast revolution, as I found on a nostalgic visit a couple of years ago to the little market own of Ware, in Hertfordshire, which I last knew in the dark days of world war 2. So much had changed since then that the place was almost unrecognisable and it came as a shock to see that some oriental eateries had arrived in this quintessentially English rural town.
One of them, a Thai establishment with an up-market appearance and invitingly
down-to-earth prices was offering real English breakfast and it seemed too good to miss.
It was! It was the genuine article: Full English, the whole works, with sausages, bacon and egg and all the extras, beautifully cooked and presented meticulously as only the orientals know how. There was even a little vase of exotic flowers on the table. They were Siamese, if you please, but their English breakfast pleased me more than many such meals I have had in our native restaurants. The cost? A mere £3.50. I even received in change a useful 50p coin instead of the humble penny.
Two elderly women sat at the next table to mine and studied the menu.
'The full English looks nice,' one of them observed.
'Yes, that’s what I was thinking,' replied her companion, 'but I don’t like
baked beans.'
Oh, I love them,' said the other, 'It’s sausages I can’t stand. I wonder if
they’ll serve us without the sausages if we ask the girl.'
'And without beans, don’t forget.'
There was some further discussion and then, 'Well, that's what we'll have then: two breakfasts with no sausages and no beans. That should make it easier for her.'
At this point my mind flashed back to the days of rationing, when we eagerly accepted everything we were offered, whether we liked it or not, and shared with our neighbours. It seemed an unnecessarily noble gesture for each of them to sacrifice one item they would have enjoyed, just 'to make it easier for her' and I wondered why they couldn’t swap the unwanted items. But that's not etiquette now, in these days of plenty, is it?
The order was duly taken and the customers' requirements carefully noted and when the food arrived one of the women looked at the plate in alarm and said she didn’t know it came with hash browns.
'Here, slide them on to my plate then,' her companion suggested. That having been agreed and accepted, the meal proceeded without further mishap.
I am still wondering why they didn’t think of doing the same with the sausages although I have to agree that transferring a mess of beans in all that sauce would have been less appealing..
© 2003,2006 Arthur Loosley
A Town that Time Forgot
“When the end of the world comes, I hope to be in Frinton, which will still be twenty years behind the times.”
Those words come from a local residents’ newsletter in what might well be described as the most boring seaside town in England. I have just returned from a refreshing weekend there and am not complaining about the lack of facilities because that is the charm of Frinton-on-Sea, a small cliff-top town on the Essex coast overlooking the North Sea, which tries hard to pretend that it is still in the Edwardian era.
Unlike so many other coastal resorts, Frinton is not a place to visit for ‘seaside fun’ such as amusement arcades or dodg’em cars, and there is no chance of a concert on the pier, because there isn’t one! Nor are there any ice-cream kiosks or hot dog stands on the promenade or anywhere else in the town, or deck chairs for hire on the beach.
There is however one pub, which got its licence only five years ago when the local council overturned an ancient city ordinance prohibiting such establishments and allowed a Kent brewery (Essex breweries presumably wouldn’t dare to ask!) to open ‘The Lock and Barrel’ as a pub-restaurant in a former locksmith’s premises on the single shopping street, which genteel Frinton calls an avenue . . . so much nicer than ‘street‘, don’t you think?
The town developed in the late 1800s with the coming of the railway and the line became popular in the days before car ownership, carrying holiday-makers and day trippers in their thousands to nearby Clacton, which today is a noisy bustling town with amusement arcades in its main shopping streets near the sea-front and a pier which makes a massive contribution to global warming with its blazing lights and over-amplified music pumped out from high-powered loudspeakers masking the sound of £1 coins being pushed at a frantic rate into seemingly endless rows of slot machines.
Frinton has always appealed to a different clientele: in the 1920s and 1930s liveried waiters from the Grand Hotel could be seen carrying tea and cakes on silver trays, across the wide green sward and down the cliffside steps to their customers enjoying the sea air from their beach huts on the promenade. The beach huts are still there but their erstwhile guests, said to have included such latter-day celebrities as famous actors and artists of the day, are not. It is known that a number of works by Picasso were found when clearing the home of a former resident, reputed to have been a friend of the artist, who may have stayed and even worked there, and there was also small sculpture by another friend, Rodin which fetched a considerable sum at auction.
It seems that the residents and city fathers have never courted publicity but valued their isolation, protected from outsiders on one side by the sea and on the other by the railway which is still served by a manned level crossing, seen by today’s residents see as their last line of defence. The words ‘inside the gates‘ are in everyday use to describe the original Frinton, to differentiate it from the sprawling modern housing estate which has sprung up on the other side of the track.
A paragraph in the April edition of the residents’ newsletter mentions without enthusiasm a mooted plan to replace the gates with an automatic barrier, and this raises memories of the resolute British determination inspired by Winston Churchill’s wartime words, “We will fight them on the beaches”, when every man, woman and child was prepared to take up arms to defend their homeland and way of life from the anticipated invasion. A visitor might be forgiven for asking whether the wartime pill-box, built over 60 years ago and still occupying a commanding position with gun slots facing the level crossing, might yet be called into action.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
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This Must be the Plaice - a brief encounter at the chip shop
It was not going to be a cordon-bleu meal, but after exploring the hills all morning I was ready for something to eat, and while waiting for my meal to arrive at the table (plaice and chips, mushy peas and a mug of tea - all for £3.50) I took stock of my surroundings. The fish-and-chip café was convenient, and fitted the popular tourist advice to ‘eat where the locals eat’, so I decided to give it a try.
About half a dozen women, outnumbered by small children, were huddled in the smoke-filled section of the dining area but the non-smoking end where I sat was almost empty. Outside, across the small market square, a crowd of men, glasses in hand, stood at the doorstep of the White Swan, a pub bedecked with the flag of St George and a banner proclaiming ‘Live Football Here.’ Possibly the husbands/fathers of the cafe customers, I thought.
This was Bolsover in the heart of the once thriving North Derbyshire coalfields. The last time I was here, in the 1950s, it was the centre of a bustling community. Not so since the local pit closed, together with most of the UK coal industry, in the wake of the disastrous miners’ strike of the 1980s. It was a human tragedy and, many agree, a serious mistake, both by the unions and the Government of the day, which led to our current fuel crisis, almost entirely dependent on imported gas and oil.
My reverie was interrupted by a female voice, very close. ‘Is anyone sitting here?’ it asked. It was a rhetorical question, to which I replied ‘Be my guest.’
The voice belonged to a presentable woman in her middle years, and while she was at the counter ordering her meal I was thinking about that accent. Derbyshire, certainly, but somewhat mellowed. Perhaps she, like I, lived elsewhere now but was on a nostalgic return visit here today. Perhaps we might have a conversation. Perhaps she could add to my memories.
Returning to the table she took her seat and gave me a quizzical look. ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ she asked.
I smiled, somewhat bemused by the question. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.
‘I’m a people-watcher,’ she confided. ‘Did it as part of my PGCE’. It was said with an air of confidence which seemed to assume that I would know that she was referring to the Post Graduate Certificate in Education.
‘So you’re a teacher, are you?’ I returned, quite happy to play the question-and-answer game with this total stranger who had chosen to sit at my table although there were other seats available.’
‘No,’ she replied, are you?
‘I’ve been retired for some years now,’ was all I said in reply, deciding that she was not going to get too much information out of me without working for it.
It became clear that she wanted to talk, to relieve some pent-up cares, and seemed comfortable using a stranger as a confidante. She had grown up near here, she told me, but moved away in her early 'teens, married and raised a family, and was now on a brief return visit to see her sick mother who was in a nursing home and had a limited life expectancy. I was happy to lend her my ear, and chipped in with a few comments of my own. It was like talking to an old friend; we each had a ready response to counter the other’s remarks.
She told me tales of her childhood visits with her father to the castle on the hill, and other incidents in her life, some of them quite personal, almost as if feeding me with material for an article. ‘I knew you were a writer as soon as I walked in,’ she said, quite suddenly. ‘Books or newspapers?’
I hadn’t answered her initial question, so why did she assume?
‘Yes’, I replied, determined to maintain the enigma. She went on to say that her late husband was a writer. 'He died a little over a year ago. I recognized the expression on your face as soon as I walked in.’
If this was a chat-up line it had a compelling tone of innocence about it. It was true that I had already started writing this article in my head before she walked in, but could it have been so obvious? Perhaps, to a ‘people-watcher’, it was.
More was to follow. ‘He was a keen photographer too,’ she told me, and he just loved photographing steam trains‘.
This was getting eerie. Too close for comfort. She had just described another of my interests, and when the conversation turned to genealogy, and her current use of the Internet to trace her ancestors, bells started ringing in my tiny brain. Everything she had said could have been gleaned from notes posted on several websites and discussion groups. My photograph also appears in several places. Had she recognised me and was that what prompted her to play this delightful game. For a split second I felt like voicing my suspicion, but it was more enjoyable to play it this way.
We talked for an hour and a half and then, as if hearing a ghostly colliery hooter announcing the end of shift, we rose simultaneously from the table, smiled and said in unison ‘It’s been nice meeting you’ and walked off in opposite directions, both smiling. Two strangers who shared an unplanned meal and exchanged confidences and will, I know, both treasure the memory of this brief encounter.
I’ll also remember the meal: the fish was a thin, tasteless, frozen fillet. I have enjoyed an abundance of fresh fish since living near the coast, and forgot that this café was about as far away from the sea as is possible in England. But the mushy peas were a real treat and brought back memories of a different time.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
Making a Drama out of a Crisis
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts,.” So wrote the Bard of Avon, and so say all of us.
Of many theatrical encounters in the course of my career I particularly remember the experiences of the early 1950s when I was working for a press agency in a large Midlands town and moonlighting (perhaps I should say footlighting or limelighting) as a front-of-house photographer for highly acclaimed repertory company. My photographs were taken each week during the final dress rehearsal, and I soon became immersed in the ambience of the thespian world, making a number of friends among the actors and production team and meeting them socially in local coffee bars. This was before the days of Starbucks and the other ‘smart’ places where it is impossible nowadays to order a cup of coffee without an interpreter to help choose from a list of exotic names in a hybrid language at exotic prices. We had the choice of the ubiquitous Joe Lyons, ABC, or the slightly up-market Kardomah. We chose the latter.
About a year into this new lifestyle some of my non-thespian friends began to detect that my conversation was becoming a little ‘precious’ in parts. Perhaps that was what catapulted me into my next dramatic experience. Live theatre had not, in those far-off days, been seriously damaged by the exodus to television, and in addition to the repertory theatre in our town there were several thriving am-dram groups. I visited some of them during rehearsals and found that they varied widely, some straining to emulate the professionals and others just in it for their own enjoyment and to entertain their friends. At one of these rehearsals an actor had great difficulty with one line.
I can’t remember the name of the play, but the line was delivered as, “matter matter matter what does matter.” I have omitted any punctuation because there was none as delivered. The actor mouthing these words was not happy with them. She turned to the producer and complained that she was made to sound like a machine gun, and asked if the words could be changed. The producer, who had watched the rehearsal in silence, following the lines with a forefinger running slowly across the script, assured her that she had delivered exactly what was written there, and the rehearsal continued.
On the way out, chatting with the actor in question and a few others I was asked for my unbiased opinion, as a stranger with no allegiance to the producer but an apparent interest in matters theatrical. I opined, tentatively, that it might sound better if delivered as a crescendo, thus: “Matter? . . . Matter? . . . MATTER? (pause) . . . What DOES matter?” I received an impromptu round of applause for my unpractised delivery and was invited to come back next week and hear it in context.
As luck (or fate) should have it, when we arrived the following week at the unheated Co-op Hall on a cold winter’s evening, we were told that the producer had called in sick, and guess who was asked to help out for one night only. All I was expected to do was to hold the script and help anyone who forgot their lines. I thought that was the hob of the prompt, not the producer, but as it required no skill or knowledge other than the ability to read I agreed - but not without a cautious ’caveat emptor’ in case things got out of hand.
The evening went surprisingly well, and with only three more weeks of rehearsal before the performance date I was asked if I could help them again if the producer was unable to return in time. I politely declined, and for this perceived snub I was not invited back again.
My opportunity to strut and fret my hour upon the stage came much later when, having left Fleet Street during the industrial crisis of the early 1980s, my career changed direction and I spent the final ten years of my working life as a college lecturer. Trying to teach a room full of lively 16-to-19-year-olds requires a massive range of performing arts skills and crisis management. There are so many things for young people to do today which are far more interesting than studying for a career, that holding their attention for more than the first 40 seconds of a 40-minute lesson requires the dexterity of a juggler, the nerve of a tightrope walker, the thick skin of an Indian fakir, the compassion of Mother Theresa and a constant change of speed, mood and intensity to keep one step ahead of them. Every teacher knows that each time he or she enters the classroom, this performance might well prove to be the swan-song of promising career.
I felt drained by the end of each lesson, having exhausted every emotion available to the human psyche. At least, that’s how I saw it, although the students, might have preferred the infamous words of American humorist Dorothy Parker, who once cruelly described a performance by the late great Katharine Hepburn as running “the whole gamut of emotions from A to B”.
I hope not.
Arthur Loosley. January 2006.
Hurrah for the MTGGs!
I have fond childhood memories of dear old Dobbin, the Co-op milkman’s horse, enjoying his oats from a nosebag at the kerbside every morning while the milkman enjoyed a leisurely cuppa with Mrs Wotsit, the lonely lady living at No 21. So patient, those old gee-gees, ever willing to get back to work when the master returned with
a new spring in his step to continue the workaday round.
They seemed to operate on auto-pilot, needing only an occasional whispered ‘giddy up’ or ‘whoah’, and were efficient recycling machines too: food entering at one end emerged at the other partially processed into fertilizer for the roses and delivered right outside the customer’s door, where a young child with a bucket and shovel would be eagerly watching and waiting to collect it. Sometimes there would be a
bit of a tussle as two youngsters decided who had the rightful claim to the coveted substance, but it was all part of the pleasure of living in suburbia.
Those were the days when the greengrocer, the baker, the coalman and all the
other tradesmen also plied their wares from horse-drawn carts, ambling along at
a leisurely pace, keeping Mums happy and their children fed and warm. No fumes,
no damage to the environment and no parking problems then, when the sight of a motor vehicle was something of a rarity and we kids could happily play marbles in
the gutter all the way to school.
I am reminded of those days by the name of one of my favourite economy eating places - the ‘Hungry Horse’ pub restaurant chain, famous for such exciting delicacies as The Meatiest Ever Cow Pie Ever (They used to call it ‘Desperate Dan Cow’ Pie but have now dropped the 'Dandy' comic reference) served on a 17” plate and, by way of contrast, a confection for afters modestly described as ‘probably the smallest dessert in the world’ which I can confirm is no exaggeration.
Man or beast, we all have to refill our empty stomachs, and a bit of humour with our food can aid digestion. The prices are laughable too, and the over-60s can choose two courses for £3.99 inclusive from a menu which includes prawn cocktail, bangers and mash, sticky chocolate pudding and ice cream - with tea and coffee at no extra charge. Not cordon bleu but ‘cor blimey', at that price, so bring on the empty gee-gees and let them bring a little joy into our hearts and stomachs at the same time.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
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PLAGIARISE - AND LET NOBODY'S WORK EVADE YOUR EYES!
(Tom Lehrer, Harvard professor of mathematics, singer-songwriter and humorist.)
It is frequently said that there's no such thing as a new idea. If you hit upon an idea that is new to you, it will not be long before you find that somebody else has already thought of it. Start up a business with a clever, brand new name, and within weeks or perhaps even days, you will see the same name over other people's shop fronts, on their letterheads and adapted as dot.com addresses.
I am not suggesting that this is deliberate plagiarism, although I know the copycat syndrome is rife. It sometimes occurs quite innocently - subliminally - because we have actually seen or heard it before although we may be genuinely unaware of the fact. Subliminal advertising was tried I remember on TV in the1960s by inserting a single frame of a brand name several times during a normal programme. Viewers were unaware of its presence but it found its way into their subconscious and sales of that product increased because when they saw the name, they were instinctively attracted to it. It is akin to hypnotism: a conditioned reflex which the subject (victim?) does not understand and therefore cannot control. Another name for it is brain-washing.
Subliminal advertising is banned now, but still widely used in many forms.
Advertisements which appear perfectly innocuous sometimes display, when viewed from certain angles, what appears to be an image of am erotic nature, which may be difficult to ignore, but the perpetrators will claim that it was unintended. Are such instances accidental? Or just over-active imagination? They are neither, according to extensive research published on Poleshift.com which suggests that subliminal advertising in all its guises is alive and well and affecting us all.
Advertisers will go to great lengths to get their products noticed, and none is more effective or 'innocent' than product placing - the simple act of having, say a packet of breakfast cereal or a can of lager in full view of the camera in shows such as sit-coms, 'soaps', etc. The very word 'soap' used in this context came from the early US sit-coms sponsored by the makers of laundry products, which earned the name, 'soap operas'.
I remember a time when UK television channels, in an attempt to avoid being seen as providing free advertising, used to obliterate product names with black tape. This of course only attracted attention to them, viewers easily recognised the shape and design of the packaging and spend the rest of the show thinking about it, and product sales soared.
Authors, artists and musicians have long suspected and accused others, sometimes with justification, of stealing their ideas, and many have gone to court to seek damages, but it is often difficult, if not impossible, to prove that a piece of work bearing a striking resemblance to another was copied from it, either deliberately or by accident, as demonstrated by the recent court battle over the alleged plagiarism of The DaVinci Code. Author Dan Brown was sued by the publisher of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in the High Court, but the judge could find no proof that he had copied the work, and declared him innocent of the charge and left the complainant with a massive bill in a case estimated to have cost £1.3 million.
Now back to my original statement about copycat business names and a personal experience many years ago when a friend who was planning to open a shop dealing in unique hand-crafted dolls and accessories told me that she had thought long and hard about what to call it. She wanted it to be something special.
"Sounds good to me," I said. A blank expression came over her face. "What sounds good?" she asked. I had misunderstood what she said and thought that "Something Special" was her chosen name. It wasn't, but through that simple misunderstanding, that’s what it became.
The business was an instant success and received some welcome press publicity, but we soon noticed that other shops and services including hair salons, poodle parlours, gift shops, photographic studios and others were using the same name - and later discovered that some of them had existed for years! We had suspected that 'our' clever name had been plagiarised but in truth, we were just as likely to have been accused of stealing it from them.
I have had a look on Google since I started writing this piece, to see if the name is still popular. Well, my search returned 16,400,000 references, so that's pretty conclusive, but who copied whom is something we are unlikely ever to discover. One thing we can be certain about, however: There's no such thing as a new idea!
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
Sometimes I sit and think . . .
Life in today’s hurly-burly must-get-there-faster world leaves little time to sit and enjoy what is there for the taking. Too busy earning a living, looking after the kids or climbing the property ladder, life passes many of us by until we reach the harbour of retirement - if we haven’t completely burnt-out by that time.
The little old man sitting on a bench on Felixstowe sea-front yesterday looked as if he had seen life. His face was what might be described as ‘lived-in’ and his general demeanour, as he sat slumped on that bench, wrapped in a heavy coat and wearing a Russian fur hat to afford some protection from the icy blast coming ashore from the North Sea, was of someone perhaps to be pitied but at the same time envied for his detachment from the cares of a cruel world..
There was plenty of room on the bench so I gave him a cheery ‘Good afternoon’ and took my place beside him.
‘It is,’ he replied, not for one second diverting his gaze from the distant horizon. He was clearly in no mood for conversation, and why should he want to talk to a complete stranger anyway?
The day was bright and sunny but that icy blast could not be ignored so I kept my hands in my pockets for warmth but my mind could not relax in the presence of all that was happening before my eyes.
The sea lapped incessantly, like a dog snapping at the postman‘s trousers, at the breakwaters on the beach. I noticed that another section had gone since my last visit, but that was nothing compared with the devastation further up the coast where the sea has waged a relentless war of attrition for centuries, little deterred by the millions of tons of rock being constantly deposited on the foreshore by puny human effort in an unequal struggle against nature.
A few hundred metres off-shore the lumbering great shape of a container ship plodded slowly across the near horizon. High tide was approaching and the busy container port of Felixstowe, one of the largest in Europe, would be accepting traffic now. What goodies were on their way to our hungry consumer market this time, I wondered, remembering that just a few weeks ago the port was brought to a standstill, over-filled with millions of brassieres and other textiles from China which had exceeded their import quota while the mills of northern England stood silent and derelict.
Every few minutes another shipment arrived in a solemn funeral-like procession. Perhaps that choice of words is not entirely inappropriate.
A sudden flurry of excitement as the seagulls mob a young woman and two small children throwing bread to them, delighting in their acrobatic antics as they catch the food in mid-air. Wonderful creatures, birds, but sadly now feared as the bringers of doom, likely at any moment to cause a great plague forecast by ‘those who know’ to affect a quarter of the human population of the planet
But whatever might be in the near future, something happening here and now requires immediate attention: a man walking his dog on the narrow strip of green sward is embarrassed when his pet ‘does a whoopsie’. He reaches into his pocket and produces a plastic bag which he puts on his hand like a glove and removes the offending material to one of many bins placed strategically by a thoughtful local authority.
Now the seaward scene has changed: there is still the procession of leviathans heading right-to-left towards the container port but now there is the futuristic shape of a giant catamaran passenger ferry surging through the waves in the opposite direction, out of the Harwich international terminal, bound for who-knows-where. What dreams are held among the passengers on board? Who are they? What are they thinking about as they leave our shores for adventures new?
I glance casually to my left: the old man is still sitting motionless, staring at the horizon, but out of the corner of his eye he notices that I am looking at him.
‘A penny for them,’ he says.
‘Pardon?’ I reply.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he explains, ‘You see, I live on my own but all the world’s right here for me to see, and every evening when I get home I write up my day’s experiences in my journal. There’s never a shortage of anything to record.’ A short pause, and then, ‘You will be in it tonight.’
‘What a lovely thought,’ I reply.
I’ll remember that little old man (I didn’t even ask his name!) the next time I hear anybody say, ‘Life is boring because nothing ever happens to me.’
I might even start a journal.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
Where Are All The People?
I was the only passenger on the eight-mile bus ride into town. It was free because the Government in its wisdom has given bus passes to old age pensioners all over the country, bringing them in line with the benefit enjoyed by Londoners for many years.
At a time when the world faces increasing pollution and the depletion of natural resources it seemed somewhat profligate for one retired person, who no longer contributes to the economy, to inflict further damage on the planet for the sake of a shopping trip, but the bus was timetabled and would have run anyway, even if empty, so that did something to assuage my guilt.
The town centre was as busy as ever and the pedestrianized main shopping street could barely contain the seething mass of humanity. Where once narrow pavements on each side of the road could easily accommodate all comers, the entire width is now paved and jam-packed with people. The county town of Ipswich is growing fast and massive new developments are under construction to provide homes and work places to meet the demands of an unprecedented population explosion.
Why, I wondered, were national leaders meeting in Prague to discuss new incentives to increase population? More people inevitably means more mouths to feed, more buildings to house them, more medical and support services and more fuel to keep them warm. Isn’t there a mis-match somewhere?
Advances in health care have increased our ability to survive longer into old age, placing increasing demands on the taxes paid by those still at work, so more younger workers are needed urgently. It is a vicious spiral which could have drastic consequences if not addressed, and as I sat with a cool drink at a pavement table in the small public square in the centre of town I couldn’t help thinking of the solution posed in the horrific 1973 science-fiction film, Soylent Green, set in the year 2022 - mass euthanasia of those the planet could no longer support. Nor could I escape the fact that 2022 is getting closer and I am growing older.
By late afternoon the crowd is thinning as people finish their shopping and set off for home, but there is still plenty of human life to observe. Some young men and women of middle-eastern appearance have set up an amplifier in the centre of the square and a dozen or so people of various nationalities are dancing to exotic music with arms linked and inviting others to join in. I decline their invitation but enjoy watching them. It is a happy scene, and a reminder of the influx of foreign nationals who are becoming an increasingly important part of the workforce in this country. They have to live somewhere too, and require food and public services, many of which they themselves now work to provide. Hospitals, the catering industry, transport and other basic essentials of modern life would collapse without them.
A young man walks past, pushing a bicycle with his right hand and holding a cell-phone against his ear with the left. He is not alone: many of his generation have the things clamped to their ears, and it is they who most enthusiastically accept the night-club invitations being handed out by a young man with shabby jeans, expensive ‘trainers’ and a face heavily pierced and studded with gold. No financial problems for him, then.
A Royal Mail van stops opposite where I am sitting. The driver gets out and walks off, carrying an empty mail bag, and returns a few minutes later with the bag apparently half-full. The square is almost empty now, the music has stopped, the sound equipment has been driven away in an ancient Volvo and a white van inscribed with the name of a local building contractor has taken its place. Tools are unloaded and carried into one of the offices surrounding the square and one of the crew spends several minutes trying to undo the screw clamp securing an aluminium ladder to the roof rack before abandoning the task and sitting on a bench for a smoke. A second mail van arrives and its driver walks off in the direction opposite to the one taken by his colleague. He is gone for fifteen minutes before returning with a small bundle of envelopes in his hand and I wonder why it took two postmen two journeys to achieve so little, but at least it keeps them in employment, in spite of the Royal Mail’s savage on-going reduction of its workforce and public boasts of increasing efficiency.
I have had an instructive afternoon, sitting in idleness in this public place, watching a little bit of the world go by and allowing my thoughts to roam, and as I make my way back to the bus stop I am wondering how anyone can complain of being bored, when there is so much going on around them. I also wonder whether the will exists to address the paradox of high unemployment and a shortage of workers.
On my journey home the bus is again nearly empty and I ask myself, ‘Where are all the people, and who is paying my fare?’
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
I’ve been thinking.
I know it’s an extreme sport and can come up with some unexpected and sometimes unwelcome results but we all have to live dangerously at times.
‘I think, therefore I am‘; ‘Who do you think you are?’ - we’ve heard them all before, but then I came upon this: ‘A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.’ (Quoted in A. Andrews: Quotations for Speakers and Writers.)
That sounds about right, and it got me thinking. We all have our prejudices and idiosyncrasies, and there is something of the rebel built into the human psyche, so what is urgently needed is a mantra for the modern age.
So I had my llittle think, and thought of this:
Philosophy, schmilosophy, something to think about
But nothing really to make a big stink about
Except among the chattering classes
Whose wisdom issues from their asterisks!
Be gone dull care, abandon thought;
Forget all you were ever taught
And this above all, to thine own self be true
And do unto others before they do it to you.
That should do it, I think.
© 2006 Arthur Loosley
Do You Like |Sugar?
Arthur recalls his grandmother’s jam-making during the war.
It cannot be denied that the taste of sugar has a certain something that most people find irresistible. It certainly works, whether in its pure form or in various drinks or confectionery, to pacify a screaming child (who may, however in later years be screaming with tooth-ache as a result) and the taste once acquired is carried into adult life.
I am not a sugar addict though. I rarely eat cake or puddings except on those occasions when it would be impolite to refuse, and the last time I had a spoonful of sugar in my tea was at approximately 8.30 am on September 3, 1939.
I can be certain about the time and date because about three hours later, after listening in doleful silence to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announcing on the ‘wireless’ that we were at war with Germany, my grandmother issued the solemn ukase, ‘No sugar in our tea from now on.’
‘Why not, Grandma?’ I whined.
‘Because it comes from over the seas and Hitler is going to send a submarine to sink all the ships, and you don't want them sailors getting drownded just so you can have sugar in your tea, do you?'
Put that way, it seemed a reasonable enough proposition, but her next statement was somewhat puzzling: ‘There’s always plenty of fruit on our trees and we can’t afford to waste anything so we’ll save our sugar ration to make jam instead.’
Visions formed my eight-year-old mind, of gallant seamen going to their watery graves thinking, ‘Oh, that's all right then!’.
Whether my subsequent dislike of sugar was formed because of or in spite of that conversation I shall never know, but I have memories of Grandma's jam-making marathon every summer during the war, when she would collect sugar and empty jars from neighbours and members of the family and produce masses of plum jam which gained a reputation in the neighbourhood as the best anyone had ever tasted.
It had a very special texture, with nice chewy bits, and it was not until the closing year of the war that we discovered the secret when Granddad carefully examined one of these little additives. It was a wasp! Further investigation revealed many more of the creatures, who had presumably climbed in for a sugar rush while the jam was cooling, and drowned. Nobody would eat the stuff after that except Granddad, who used it up over the next few months for the sandwiches he took to work every day for his lunch. 'Doodle-Bug jam,’ as he called it, spread thickly on unbuttered bread, because butter was rationed too.
Why 'Doodle-Bug'? Because that was the period when the V-1 flying bombs were raining down on London and were popularly called ‘Doodle-Bugs’ by the natives - not that the bombs themselves were at all popular though.
I remember the chilling feeling whenever I heard the throb-throb-throb of their pulse-jet engines approaching and we all sat in stunned silence, holding our breath and hoping that the sound would not stop before the weapon passed overhead and continued on its way to find some other wretched victims. Whenever we did hear one splutter into silence, we knew that the evil contraption with its high-explosive warhead was plummeting down to earth. One fell close enough for us to hear the rush of air as it fell. Our house suffered minor damage from the ensuing explosion; some neighbours unfortunate enough to be a little closer did not live to tell the tale. It was not a happy time for anybody.
Oh, and about that plum jam: I was drafted in to help pick the fruit, with the stark warning, ‘Don't eat too many of them or you will be very ill’. I did, and I was - and in a house without indoor sanitation, that was not a very happy time for the rest of the family, either!
Memories can be so sweet . . . sometimes.
© 2003,2006 Arthur Loosley
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