Category: General

Tommy the Egg Man

Posted on by dwells12014


Where I once lived, occasionally I would bump into someone known locally as Tommy the Egg Man. Tommy was mentally handicapped and spent most days walking round and round the town on a set route. You could set your watch by when and where you saw him. People liked him because he was always cheerful and would always say hello. He was called the Egg Man because he had an allotment with chickens from where he would sell eggs. He made me smile and even though I didn’t really know him I was sad when he died recently. At a time when some world leaders disparage the poor and needy it was good to see proof of the fact that nearly all people are worthy and deserve respect. 

Last week I was let into a secret. Tommy didn’t have any chickens. He bought the eggs he sold at Tesco. My smile got even bigger. Tommy went up in my estimation. Entrepreneurship it’s called, I guess. Maybe Tommy wasn’t as simple as he seemed. 

The Final Solution

Posted on by dwells12014

In 1978 Bob Dylan played a concert at the Zeppelinfeld in Nürembergfeld in Germany, the stadium where Adolf Hitler held his rallies. Dylan insisted that the stage was placed at the other end, so that when he performed the audience had its back to where Hitler spoke as they watched and appreciated the much loved, little Jewish guy playing Masters of War.

The Drill Bit Castle

Posted on by dwells12014

I live in a South Northumberland mining town that once had at least four pits. My flat is part of what was originally a Mechanics Institute, a cultural haven for miners. For many years I worked in the town’s High School, which was built on land reclaimed from one of the local pits. The school faced a park formed round a landscaped pit heap. Opposite my flat is a cemetery containing the grave of two miners who, along with 202 others, died in the New Hartley Pit Disaster, 160 years ago, three miles from here.
This week I walked around a nearby nature reserve created on the site of Weetslade colliery. The park has a monument to the mining community, an art installation caled “The Drill Bits”. It reminded me of the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, 30 miles up the coast, which I visited a few days ago. I saw them from a distance, both perched on a hill. The teeth of the drills look like the crenellations of a fort, and the drill bits stand like the turrets of a ruined castle.
Normally, when you think of historic Northumberland, you call to mind its many splendid castles. Weetslade, however, reminds you of another important heritage, a working class one, a heritage happily still being honoured and preserved.

In search of live music

Posted on by dwells12014

26F7CE36-18C8-4DCF-B505-DF1E30061F2A

Marcel Proust was born in the wrong century. For a man who loved listening to music but who for periods of his life was reluctant to leave his bed, let alone his flat in Paris, getting himself to concerts was a chore. He tried two solutions to this problem. In 1911 he became a subscriber to Théâtrophone, a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert and relayed it to people’s homes. Phones then, of course, had sound quality one step up from tin cans joined by a wire. It wasn’t that the reproduction was low-fi rather than hi-fi. It wasn’t even fi. What he really wanted was live music at home. And so it happened that one night in 1916 the French violinist and quartet leader, Gaston Poulet answered the doorbell at 11p.m. to find Marcel Proust on the doorstep. Proust had an unusual proposition. Would Poulet round up the rest of the quartet and come and play Cesar Franck’s String Quartet in D major that night at Proust’s flat? He had a taxi waiting. So that’s what they did. They played the piece in Proust’s candlelit bedroom while Marcel reclined on a green divan. It must have been good. When they finished at 2a.m. Proust asked them to play it again.

Proust was born about 100 years too early. Spotify would have been a godsend. But then again, if he’d lived in the era of video cameras and social media he might not have seen the point of recreating the past in written form. We don’t see the need to go In search of lost time. We carry it around with us.

The most beautiful walk in the world

Posted on by dwells12014

IMG_0905

There is a book, written by John Baxter, called The most beautiful walk in the world. He’s not talking about an Alpine trail or a hike in the Scottish Highlands. He reckons it’s in Paris. And I would tend to agree. I much prefer walking round a town to hiking in the countryside. I don’t think it’s laziness; I did some strenuous fell walking as a young man. I just find more of interest to look at and photograph in the city. I’m impressed by spectacular views in nature but the wonder wears off. So I smiled when I found these quotes:-

“I like a good view, but I prefer to sit with my back to it” (Alice B. Toklas)

“Je suis incapable de m’attendrir sur les végétaux.” (I am incapable of being moved by vegetation) (Charles Baudelaire)

I suppose those words are not surprising coming from the flâneur Baudelaire. You just couldn’t see him with anorak, map and compass. Cognac and cigar, yes. Hiking boots, not really.

The Bash Street Kids

Posted on by dwells12014

8C3F7232-2B0C-4E26-AF4F-4FF4236C2A5C

Leo Baxendale, the creator of the Bash Street Kids, died recently at the age of 86. When I was a paper boy I read every comic in the bag – Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer, Tiger, and more. I loved the names created by Baxendale. In the Bash Street Kids you found Smiffy, Spotty, Toots and, my favourite, Pug. Elsewhere he introduced us to Clever Dick, Grimley Feendish and the amazing Sweeney Toddler.
It’s a lost world and one I have a lot to be grateful for. My granddad Bill taught me to read before I started to go to school by reading comics to me. He used to walk up from work for lunch, sit me on his knee and introduce me to the Bash Street Kids. Thanks Bill, and thanks Leo.

Travelling Light

Posted on by dwells12014

5CD3D0A3-1E0A-4A7F-903E-20ED046C0DAD

I have always thought that there was something wrong with me. Is it right that a person should get more pleasure from planning a holiday than going on it? Why have I got a clip- board containing the detailed plans of at least ten trips abroad that were never embarked on – mileage lists, fuel costings, hotel and campsite bookings (thank goodness for the “free cancellation” option), web searches on restaurants, places of interest. Google street is a godsend for someone like me. I have done so many virtual tours of St Remy in Provence that I feel there is little point in going there since I know it so well. Is it a sickness? And if so, is there a cure? But the more I read the more support I find for this admittedly minority point of view.
Here then, in my defence, are three quotations which give me comfort:-

Logan Pearsall Smith “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading”

Gustave Flaubert “Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory”

Honoré de Balzac “How can one prefer the disasters of your frustrated desires to the sublime faculty of summoning the universe to appear before the mind’s eye”

They say travel broadens the mind. I agree, particularly if you only ever travel in your mind. Travelling light? You can’t travel any lighter than I do.

Skiffle

Posted on by dwells12014

In the summer of 1954 the popular music world was continuing in its usual easy listening way. Doris Day and Perry Como were riding high in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. But, within a two-week period in July two events happened, one in Memphis, the other in London, that lit a fuse which a year later would blow that cosy music world sky high.
On the 5th July a certain unknown singer called Elvis Presley was larking about in Sam Phillips’ Sun recording studio in Memphis, jokily singing a Blues song, when Phillips recognised something he’d been looking for for years, a white guy who could sing black music without losing its sexual energy. Elvis was on his way. Within a matter of weeks, on the 13th July, the Chris Barber Jazz Band was recording an album in London when they realised they were short of material. Their banjo player, Lonnie Donegan, suggested they did some of the skiffle material they sometimes played. One of these songs was Rock Island Line. In 1955 it became the first British debut single to attain gold status and, as a result, skiffle spread throughout the UK. Skiffle was roots music played on cheap basic, sometimes home-made, instruments.
The two events were unconnected but had a combined effect. Young people in the UK saw Elvis as a far-off, unattainable dream. Skiffle gave them a means of at least striving for it. John Lennon in 1950s Liverpool, at the moment he heard Heartbreak Hotel, wanted to be Elvis. Now, with skiffle, he could do something about it. What he did was form the Quarrymen and use his skiffle band to play rock’nroll. And he wasnt the only one. Hundreds, probably thousands, of British teenagers did the same. At exactly the same time as Lennon formed his group I watched my two uncles, only five years older than me, rehearsing in Leeds with cheap acoustic guitars, tea-chest bass and washboard. They progressed to drums and electric guitars, as did Lennon and McCartney, in order to play Chuck Berry and Shadows music. They didn’t make the big time but they enjoyed the ride.
There was an ironic outcome to all this. Skiffle was always small fry compared to Elvis. It was rough, cheap and amateurish. But out of it came the 1960s British music invasion of the US, led by the Beatles, which swept all before it, including Elvis.
I saw it happen, without at first realising what was happening. I went from skiffle to rock’nroll to the Beatles. And I never shed a tear for Doris Day or Perry Como.

New Hartley Pit Disaster

Posted on by dwells12014

51B716AF-8AE3-4358-A10D-3A996270E54E
South Northumberland, where I live is – or was – pit country. Most of the villages had a pit, some 2 or 3. They all had more than one shaft. The reason? Because of legislation relating to the New Hartley Pit Disaster of 1862 when around 200 miners died after being trapped in a one-shaft mine when the 40 tonne cast iron pump beam snapped and collapsed into the mine. The death toll was so high because it happened as the shifts were changing over. When they were found it was clear they had tried to dig themselves out but had finally had to give up. Fathers were found lying side by side with sons. The funeral cortège with the 200 coffins stretched for 4 miles.
There is a church and graveyard opposite where I live in Cramlington – about 5 miles from New Hartley. I was out the other day trying out a new camera, photographing the church and gravestones.. Because they have inscriptions on them it’s a good test of sharpness. Later I enlarged the photos and found one with a very weathered inscription with 2 names on it, Peter Manderson and Peter Nesbit. The rest was illegible apart from one bit which said ” who lost his life by the fatal catastrophe of the engine beam breaking at Hartley pit”. When I checked, the records confirmed that they were among the fatalities. Nesbit was Manderson’s nephew. I guess they were found side by side.
I wasn’t keen on history at school. It only comes alive when you have a link with the past in front of you. I pass that gravestone every day. I’ve known of the New Hartley pit disaster for a while. It means something now..

Ensign Ewart

Posted on by dwells12014

image

Wellington called his army “the scum of the earth”. And that is how they were treated. They either died in battle or returned home to poverty and died in obscurity. This is the story of one soldier in Wellington’s army who avoided all three fates. It was the equivalent of winning the lottery three times.
On the 18th June 1815 Charles Ewart was sitting on his horse on a ridge in Belgium, alongside his fellow dragoons of the Scot’s Greys, about to take part in the battle of Waterloo. Soon after they charged towards the French infantry Ewart spotted a rare and valuable prize – one of Napoleon’s standards which had been specially made with a solid gold eagle’s head on the top. Ewart killed three standard bearers to capture it. He was about to rejoin the battle when he had his first stroke of luck. One of his generals ordered him to take the prize back to the ridge. From there he watched as the charge faltered and many of his brigade lost their lives.
It took several weeks before the army returned home. In that time, through newspaper coverage, Ewart became famous. And so came about his second piece of luck. The army returned to a country in recession and a government who thanked its army by cutting their numbers hugely. Many soldiers, with no jobs to return to, became destitute and took to begging in the streets. Ewart, however, as he sat on the dock at Calais, was spotted and recognised by a friend of the Duke of York. He asked Ewart what he most wanted in life. Ewart replied that if he could become an Ensign in a veteran battalion he could retire on an officer’s pension. On the spot he was given a letter of recommendation which granted Ewart his wishes.
Ewart died in 1846 and was buried in Manchester. Twice in his life he had escaped oblivion. He managed it again even in death. The church where he was buried fell into disuse and the graveyard covered over. He remained without a memorial for 80 years. Then, in the 1920s a historian of the Scot’s Greys spent 12 years trying to find his grave. When he did, he arranged for his remains to be buried at the ancestral home of the Greys – Edinburgh castle. As you walk on the Esplanade towards the castle, high on a ridge above the town, there is now a large memorial to his name. Fitting. From a ridge in Belgium to a ridge in Scotland. Ensign Ewart, the man who cheated fate three times.

M4031M-4208